Deconstruction is a theory and practice of reading which questions and subverts (or undermines) the assumption that the system of language provides adequate grounds to establish the boundaries, the coherence (or unity), and the determinate meanings of a literary text. A deconstructive critic attempts to identify the conflictual elements in a text and to explain how those elements dissipate the definiteness of its structure and meanings into an indefinite array of incompatible possibilities.
The originator of deconstruction was the French thinker Jacques Derrida. His precursors were Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger--German philosophers who questioned such fundamental philosophic concepts as knowledge, truth and identity--as well as Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalysis violated traditional concepts of a coherent individual consciousness and a unitary self. Derrida presented his basic views in three books, all published in 1967: Of Grammatology
, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena.Derrida's writings are complex and elusive, so my summary will only cover his primary ideas. Derrida believes a reader cannot intuit beyond verbal signs to any things-in-themselves that, because they are independent of the system of language, may serve to anchor a determinable meaning. The effort to erect foundations or to establish a philosophy on some self-evident truth or presence outside of discourse is an exercise in futility. What makes it futile is the way language works. The relation between a word (a signifier) and its associative concept (the signified) is arbitrary. The word tree, for example, does not signify necessarily a perennial woody plant with a main trunk and a distinct crown. There are no one-to-one relationships between words and concepts. Furthermore, language functions diacritically, with the meaning of a word emerging from its relationship to all the other words in the system. A phonological example may clarify how words depend on differential sounds. The sound let functions as a meaningful word because it differentiates itself from bet, lot and led. The traces of these other possible sounds in English allow for the articulation of the sound let with the effect that it can function as a signifier for a signified. The same is true for signifieds. We differentiate rice by the language code and not by any inherent, absolute qualities.
From such perspective Derrida evolves his radical claim that the features which serve to establish the meaning of a word are never present to us in their own positive identity, since both the features and their significations are nothing other than a network of differences. On the other hand, the features are not entirely absent. We simply are not aware of them. The seeming meaning is the result of a trace of all the differences from other elements in the linguistic system that invest a word with an effect. The consequence, according to Derrida, is that we can never, in any instance of speech or writing, have a demonstrably fixed and decidable meaning. The differential play of language may produce the effects of decidable meanings in an utterance or text, but they are merely effects and lack grounds that justify certainty in interpretation.
Several of Derrida's skeptical procedures have been influential in literary criticism. One is to subvert the innumerable binary oppositions (speech/writing, nature/culture, truth/falsity, male/female, et cetera) which are essential structural elements in logocentric (Western) languages. Derrida shows that such oppositions constitute a tacit hierarchy in which the first term functions as privileged and superior and the second term as derivative and inferior. Derrida's procedure is to invert the hierarchy, showing that the secondary term is a derivative from or a special case of the primary term, and to destabilize both hierarchies, leaving them in a condition of indeterminacy. One such demonstration is to take the standard hierarchical opposition of literature/criticism, to invert it so as to make criticism primary and literature secondary, and to present, as an indefinite set of oppositions, the assertions that criticism is a species of literature and literature is a species of criticism.
The second influential operation in literary criticism is the analysis of rhetorical figures and figurative language in all uses of language, including in what philosophers have claimed to be the strictly literal and logical arguments of philosophy. Derrida, for example, emphasizes the indispensable reliance in all modes of discourse on metaphors that we assume to be convenient substitutes for literal or proper meanings. He explains that metaphors--sunshine, for example--cannot be reduced to literal meanings--love--and literal terms are themselves metaphors whose metaphoric natures have been forgotten.
Derrida did not propose deconstruction as a mode of literary criticism but as a way to read all kinds of texts in order to reveal and subvert the tacit metaphysical presuppositions of Western thought. Derrida's views and procedures have been adopted by literary critics, especially in the United States, who have adapted his critical methods to the type of close reading of particular literary texts that earlier had been the familiar procedure of New Criticism. The end results of the two kinds of close readings are completely diverse. New Critical explications of texts show that literary works, in the internal relations of their figurative and paradoxical meanings, constitute freestanding, bounded and organic entities of multiplex yet determinate meanings. Deconstructive close readings, however, show that literary works lack complete boundaries that make them unifiable, organic entities. As a result, they have indefinite ranges of self-conflicting significations. The claim is made by some deconstructive critics that literary texts are superior to nonliterary texts because, by their self-references, they show themselves to be more aware of the features all texts inescapably share: fictionality, instability, and rhetorical and figurative language. Those features, according to deconstructive critics, make any correct reading of a text impossible.
