-Deconstruction Positions

Deconstruction is one of the several doctrines in contemporary philosophy often

loosely held under the umbrella terms post-structuralism and postmodernism.
Jacques Derrida coined the term in the 1960s, and proved more forthcoming with
negative, rather than a pined-for positive, analyses of the school. Derrida says,
deconstruction is a word whose fortunes have disagreeably surprised me. I little
thought it would be credited with such a central roleit has been of service in a
certain situation, but its never appeared satisfactory to me. It is not a good
word, and not elegant.
According to Derrida, There is not one deconstruction, and deconstruction is
not a single theory or a single method. Because it is used variously to refer to a
philosophical position, a theory of reading, and a political strategy, what it is
has never been clear. Attempts to define deconstruction inevitably presuppose
the very notions that the project of deconstruction has attempted to
problematize, or throw into question- certain, referential meaning and the
disinterested, objective search for knowledge.
Defining deconstruction is an activity that goes against the whole thrust of
Derridas thought. Derrida has said that any statement such as deconstruction
is X or deconstruction is not-X automatically misses the point, which is to say
that they are at least false. Once when he was asked, what is Deconstruction, he
himself was loath to define Deconstruction. What deconstruction is not?
Everything, of course. What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course, this was his
sardonic reply. Not only is the definition and meaning of deconstruction in
dispute between advocates and critics, but also among proponents. Derridas
disclaimers present a major obstacle to any attempt, to encapsulate his
thoughts. He tells that deconstruction is neither an analytical nor a critical tool,
neither a method, nor an operation, nor an act performed on text by a subject;
that is, rather a term that resists both definition and translation. To make matters
worse, he adds that all sentence of the type deconstruction is X or
deconstruction is not X miss the point. Which is to say that they are at least
false.
Deconstruction is a way of understanding how something was created, usually
things like art, books, poems and other writing. Deconstruction is breaking
something down into smaller parts. Deconstruction looks at the smaller parts
that were used to create an object. The smaller parts are usually ideas.
Sometimes deconstruction looks at how an author can imply things he does not
mean. It says that because words are not precise, we can never know what an
author meant.
Sometimes deconstruction looks at the things the author did not say because he
made assumptions.
One thing it pays attention to is how opposites work. (It calls them "binary
oppositions.") It says that two opposites like "good" and "bad" are not really
different things. "Good" only makes sense when someone compares it to "bad,"
and "bad" only makes sense when someone compares it to "good." And so even
when someone talks about "good," they are still talking about "bad." But this is
just one thing it does.

Because of things like this, deconstruction argues that books and poems never
just mean what we think they mean at first. Other meanings are always there
too, and the book or poem works because all of those meanings work together.
The closer we look at the writing, the more we find about how it works, and how
meaning works for all things. If we deconstructed everything, we might never be
able to talk or write at all. But that does not mean deconstruction is useless. If
we deconstruct some things, we can learn more about them and about how
talking and writing work.

"Deconstruction is not synonymous with "destruction", however. It is in fact much

closer to the original meaning of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically
means "to undo" -- a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ...If anything is
destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to
unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive
reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text's critical difference
from itself."
Signs (words) are made up of 'signifiers', or the sounds/spellings, and the
'signified', or the meaning and concepts they are talking about. However, the
meaning of a word is naturally ambiguous; the word in itself and the meaning are
not naturally linked. The word 'band' can refer to an elastic band, a pop music
group, a gathering of brass musicians or a collection of people, each with
separate connotations and mental images. This means it is the reader who will
choose the meanings of words. In a similar way, reading is like trying to hold a
wet fish, because there are a variety of meanings to each word. Jacques Derrida
calls this "slippage along the chain of signifiers."
The chain of signifiers is a long chain of words that are interrelated, for instance
a chain might look like this: "band, brass, copper, police." This chain really has no
end, because each word connects to many others, and the more slippery a word,
the more words it relates to.
Derrida started by stating that "from the moment that there is meaning there are
nothing but signs. We think only in signs." Also, following Ferdinand de Saussure,
he considered language, as a system of signs where words have meaning only
because of contrast-effects with other words. Derrida will term logocentrism the
classical philosophical commitment to pure, unmediated, presence as a source of
self-sufficient meaning. As Rorty contends "words have meaning only because of
contrast-effects with other words...no word can acquire meaning in the way in
which philosophers from Aristotle to Bertrand Russell have hoped it mightby
being the unmediated expression of something non-linguistic (e.g., an emotion, a
sense-datum, a physical object, an idea, a Platonic Form)". If this is so, Derrida
contends, it means that any given concept is constituted in terms of its reciprocal
delimitation, e.g. being/nothing, one/multiple, truth/false, fair/unfair, beauty/ugly,
essence/existence, receptivity/spontaneity, autonomous/heteronomous,
transcendental/empirical, transcendent/immanent, mind/body, normal/abnormal,
sovereign/beast, speech/writing, nature/culture, bachelor/married, etc.
Further, Derrida contends that "in a classical philosophical opposition we are not
dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-a-vis, but rather with a violent
hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.),

or has the upper hand": signified over signifier; intelligible over sensible; speech
over writing; activity over passivity, etc. The first task of deconstruction would be
to find and overturn these oppositions inside a text or a corpus of texts. But the
final objective of deconstruction is not to surpass all oppositions, because it is
assumed they are structurally necessary to produce sense. They simply cannot
be suspended once and for all. The hierarchy of dual oppositions always reestablishes itself. Deconstruction only points to the necessity of an unending
analysis that can make explicit the decisions and arbitrary violence intrinsic to all
texts.
Finally, Derrida argues that it is not enough to expose and deconstruct the way
oppositions work and then stop there in a nihilistic or cynical position, "thereby
preventing any means of intervening in the field effectively". To be effective,
deconstruction needs to create new terms, not to synthesize the concepts in
opposition, but to mark their difference and eternal interplay. This explains why
Derrida always proposes new terms in his deconstruction, not as a free play but
as a pure necessity of analysis, to better mark the intervals. Derrida called
undecidable, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or
semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition:
but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and organizing it,
without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in
the form of speculative dialectics (e.g. diffrance, archi-writing, pharmakon,
supplement, hymen, gram, spacing).