Deconstruction
Ø Deconstruction is the most prominent poststructuralist theory and it is associated with the work of Jacques Derrida.
Ø Deconstruction is a critique of logocentrism à logos in Greek means “word, speech, reason etc.” but is now understood to mean anything which can act as a center and provide meaning to a structure. The idea is that structures derive meaning from centers that lie outside the structure. For eg:- we have the idea of right and wrong, virtue and sin because we believe that there is God (who by definition is beyond this world) who has dictated that certain actions are virtuous and that certain others are not. Another example is that of the author. The author exists outside the structure of the text. But we understand a text on the basis of its author. If an award winning novelist’s novel seems obscure to us, we assume that the novel must be too complex for us and not that the novel is devoid of any meaning. Simply put, deconstruction is what happens when we begin to question these various ‘centers’ which fixes the meaning of structures..
Ø Center is that which restricts and fixes the meanings of elements within a structure and if one accepts this center, then that attitude is logocentrism. That is, one assumes that there is a logos (or reason) at the center of that structure which provides stable meaning. Deconstructive critics question logocentrism. For instance, if we question the conventional equivalence between the signifier and the signified (which can be said to be center of language) then language has no meaning. It can be understood via the following examples:
1. For if one claims that “phone” no longer needs to be the name of a device for communication and if s/he decides to use the word “phone” to refer to a disease, his speech will make no sense to others.
2. If we question the existence of God, then there is no meaning for religious rituals, the ideas of right and wrong etc.
3. If we question the ‘author’, then a work of literature no longer needs to be understood in the way in which the author intended. That is, the author can no longer be the ‘center’ which limits the meaning of a work. For instance one can speculate that Shakespeare probably understood The Tempest as the story of Prospero, his trials and tribulations and his justifiable revenge on the villains. From that point of view, Prospero imprisoned Caliban because Caliban was a savage and he deserved to be mistreated. But when one sees Caliban as the colonized and Prospero as the colonizer, the reader is accepting that text can have meanings that are outside the author’s control. Shakespeare may have created an allegory of colonialism without intending to do so. Thus readers who understand The Tempest this way have questioned the assumptions of the text (that Prospero is the hero) and have concluded that the text can also indicate a tale of unjust colonization. Such readers have deconstructed The Tempest !
Ø Thus Deconstruction questions the basic assumptions of a text. Consequently, such critics question the binary oppositions present in the text. The idea is that every text develops certain binary oppositions and one of them is privileged. For example in The Tempest, one binary opposition is that of hero/villain ie. Prospero/Caliban. What a deconstructive critic does is to argue that since the center is fictitious, these binary oppositions should be questioned. Thus they reverse the binary opposition and to continue with the example of The Tempest, Prospero becomes the villainous colonizer and Caliban the hero.
[From Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction]
“Deconstruction is most simply defined as a critique of the hierarchical oppositions that have structured Western thought: inside/outside, mind/body, literal/metaphorical, speech/writing, presence/absence,nature/culture, form/meaning. To deconstruct an opposition is to show that it is not natural and inevitable but a construction, produced by discourses that rely on it, and to show that it is a construction in a work of deconstruction that seeks to dismantle it and reinscribe it – that is, not destroy it but give it a different structure and functioning. But as a mode of reading, deconstruction is, in Barbara Johnson’s phrase, a ‘teasing out of warring forces of signification within a text’, an investigation of the tension between modes of signification, as betweenthe performative and constative dimensions of language.”