Deconstruction

[jbor]

It's one of those much-abused terms which gets stretched out of shape 
depending upon whether the user comes to praise or bury it. As Kai
mentioned, it derives from the post-structuralism of Roland Barthes and
Jacques Derrida (and finds precursors in Nietzsche, Saussure, Heidegger,
Wittgenstein, Foucault, Levi-Strauss -- all the usual suspects). The term
appeared sometime in the mid-60s (pretty much contemporaneously with the
Parisian student movement and the événements of May 1968, interestingly).

Barthes' _S/Z_ (the original and best) is perhaps the seminal text for the
moment when structuralism tips over into post-structuralism. But
"deconstruction" as a reading practice basically stems from Derrida's
refutation of prior critical models which are reliant on the notion of a
"transcendental signified" i.e. a stable and constant "truth". In
deconstructive critiques of texts, and of theories and social and cultural
institutions, the ground upon which meaning has previously been sought and
established is demonstrated as unstable, ultimately undecidable. And, as
such, interpretation is reconceived as an endlessly repetitive act, a
performance:

     The text is not an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations
    with other texts. Its system of language, its grammar, its lexicon, drag
    along numerous bits and pieces ‹ traces ‹ of history so that the text
    resembles a Cultural Salvation Army Outlet with unaccountable
    collections of incompatible ideas, beliefs, and sources. The "genealogy"
    of the text is ... an incomplete network of conscious and unconscious
    borrowed fragments. Manifested, tradition is a mess. Every text is
    intertext. (Vincent B. Leitch, _Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced
    Introduction_, Hutchinson, London, 1983, p. 59)

Deconstructive readings enact what Barthes calls a "break with culture". The
text "imposes a state of loss" upon the reader's apprehension of it, and
this is a sensibility which "discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological
assumptions, the consistencies of his[sic] tastes, values, memories, and
finally brings to a crisis his relation with language." (Barthes, _The
Pleasure of the Text_, Hill & Wang, New York, 1975, p. 14)

Derridean deconstruction became the vogue in American aesthetic criticism in
the 1970s and 80s. Amongst its exponents, the writings of the Yale critics,
particularly Paul de Man and Jonathan Culler, provide the most scholarly
applications. See, for example de Man, 'Semiology and Rhetoric' (1979), in
Davis and Schleifer (eds), _Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and
Cultural Studies_, pp. 250-261; and Jonathan Culler, _On Deconstruction:
Theory and Criticism After Structuralism_, Cornell University, Ithaca, 1982.

If you can imagine it, deconstruction sits on one end of a
post-structuralist spectrum, with reader-response criticism at the/(an-)
other end. This is where less-than-nuanced applications of the term often
occur; unsubtle readers sometimes superimpose their own prior
understandings, knowledge, beliefs, favourite quotations -- usually quite a
limited set -- onto each text they come into contact with, but they assume
that this set of "traces" and attitudes is actually manifest within the
author's text itself. Though a type of solipsism, reader-response pedagogies
are still popular and successful, especially for early literacy learners.

best


----------
>From: "Michael Baum" <michael.baum at nist.gov>
>To: "Pynchon List" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses
>Date: Wed, Dec 13, 2000, 2:53 AM
>

> What does "deconstruction" mean?