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Often, deconstructionism gets treated as a frighteningly complicated form of analysis that leads to bewilderment, but once a few strange terms and some ideas about language get demystified, the theory gets much easier to grasp. It is actually an incredibly useful tool for better understanding language, texts, and the ideologies at work around us that we may be unaware of. Deconstructionism rises from the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960’s, and the theory is used today by Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists, and other theorists to analyze literature and make arguments because of how well it interrogates a text and the ideologies embedded within.
What is Deconstructionism?
In brief, deconstructionism complicates the idea that language has a fixed meaning determined by real things or ideas. As a result, texts are unstable, contradictory, and unable to produce a final, definite meaning. Deconstructionism uses this ambiguity of language to reveal and interrogate the ideological assumptions at work within a text and the culture that produced it.
To get a good sense of the work theorists are doing with literature through deconstructionism, we’ll see how the theory handles the language we use every day, the ideology written into stories, and the interpretive work necessary to make claims. Note that this is not a prescriptive procedure for how everyone deconstructs a text but rather an illustrative process that will help you understand what deconstructionists do with a text.
Language
To get a good grasp on Deconstructionism, you first have to accept a few ideas about language the theory uses to get work done. Some of these ideas might seem strange at first, but it will become clear why deconstructionists think of language in these ways and how the theory puts these ideas to work in literary interpretation.
Ambiguous
The first idea to accept is that language is not the reliable form of communication we might believe it to be. Despite misunderstandings in day to day conversations, we tend to think of language as fairly useful in getting across exactly what we want to mean to other people. Deconstructionism pushes against this and views language as slippery and more ambiguous than we might realize.
Decentered
Secondly, language does not directly reference any real things or ideas. If you’re scratching your head, let me put it this way: words don’t point to things in real life, they point to more language, and it’s language all the way down.
Ideological
Lastly, language is purely ideological. Your culture and its systems of belief are what inform the language you understand and the ideas underpinning it, and the language you use reflects the ideologies surrounding you.
These ideas will be getting more explanation but having them at the forefront of your mind now will help as you go through the technical mechanics of deconstructionism. To clarify and explain further, we’ll have to take a look at semiotics, the study of signs.
Sign Equals. . .
What is a sign then? To start, it might help to think of a sign as a coin; it has two sides, the signifier and the signified. The signifier is simply a sound, an image, a gesture, or a word, etc. The signified is the idea, concept, object, etc. which that signifier points to.
An example professors have been fond of is a tree. The signifier is that particular group of letters: “tree.” And the signified is the image of a tree that comes to your mind when you read that word or see that drawing. Together, then, they make a sign. Sign = Signifier + Signified.
…+ Signified + Signified + Signified…
Of course, we don’t all have the same tree come into our minds. The trees you grew up around, how you feel about trees, your experience with trees, how your culture feels about trees, and so much more influence the particular tree that comes to your mind, and this is what was meant before about language not pointing to real objects or ideas. The word tree does not point to any real tree, it points to the group of ideas and characteristics that come to your mind when you read the word tree.
With this in mind, we can change our equation for a sign to the following: Sign = Signifier + Signified + Signified… + Signified. Each signified will be an idea that you associate with the signifier “tree.” Tree = bark + brown + leaves + green + roots + branches + cozy picnics + etc. This chain never ends because you will always have more signifiers that you can add on.
Différance
In her explanation of Derrida’s work, theorist Lois Tyson notes that thinking of language as a sign equaling a signifier and a chain of signifieds means two important things about language: one, “its play of signifiers continually defers, or postpones, meaning,” and “the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by which we distinguish one signifier from another.” Combined, these two characteristics denote what Derrida calls différance.
The consequence of approaching language in this decentered way with différance is that it cannot be escaped; everything you understand and believe about the world, yourself, others, etc. does not move beyond the language used to understand and describe it because your language only ever breaks down to more language!
Binary Oppositions
Furthermore, as said before, language for deconstructionism is entirely ideological. The systems of beliefs and values of your culture which constitute its ideology affect that string of signifieds connected to the signifier. The tree example might not make this point very clear, so let’s use another popular example, the word slut.
Baked into the word slut are ideas of women, sexuality, and morality. It’s understood to be bad for a woman to be a slut. This reveals to us a cultural belief about the sexual activities of women, and one way to further press this cultural belief is to see what culture puts in opposition to it. In this case, a man who participates in the same sexual promiscuity associated with a slut is understood differently— he is a stud, or player, or whatever the kids are calling it these days. This is our binary opposition.
This example also shows us Derrida’s idea that binary oppositions always privilege one of the two terms, and there are no points for guessing which one it is in this case. Relating this back to texts then, if we can identify the binary oppositions within a text, and determine which one is privileged, then we, therefore, learn something about the ideology that determines the language used.
The Art of Deconstructing
The calculus of deconstruction can appear very complicated at first, but rest assured that once you have a grasp on how the theory handles language, deconstructing a text becomes easier with practice. As Tyson explains, there are two main reasons for deconstructing a text: one, “to reveal the text’s undecidability” and/or “to reveal the complex operations and limitations of the ideologies of which the text is constructed.”
Finding Binary Oppositions
Naturally, you’ll begin by building an interpretation and finding the binary oppositions within your text of choice. Believe the text, take it at its word, and try to get a good idea of what the text wants you to agree with. Good questions to ask include:
- What qualities are associated with characters the text deems good or positive?
- Who are the antagonists and what are the markers used to identify them?
- Does the narrator make comments about subjects or people where the language assumes you would agree/disagree with them?
- What concepts are put in opposition to what is deemed good/bad in the text?
You must think critically at this stage because it is very easy to create an interpretation that you can just topple over or that the text might not completely agree with. The more textual evidence you can compile, the more sure you can be of your interpretation.
You also want to pull in your interests at this point because the text contains a multitude of interpretations. The text will guide you and lend itself better to certain readings than others, but you can look for binary oppositions dealing with feminist critique, postcolonialism, or whatever you are interested in. This will often lead to surprising new understandings of your favorite texts— just don’t grasp at straws; your interests might just not be there.
Undecidability
After you have your well evidenced interpretation, you will then try to find where the text conflicts with itself. Does it not uphold a binary opposition in certain parts of the text or with certain characters? Does it contradict itself in certain situations? “To reveal a text’s undecidability,” Tyson says, “is to show that the ‘meaning’ of the text is really an indefinite, undecidable plural, conflicting array of possible meanings…”
Finally…
The last step is to attempt to reconcile the conflicts within the text that you have found. Can you produce a single, coherent interpretation or do these conflicts prevent that? Better yet, does attempting to resolve these conflicts lead to additional interpretation that reveals something new and conflicting about the text? On the surface, the text may not appear to recognize its own contradictions or the extra meaning you uncover, but that’s the beauty of deconstructionism. What you pull out of the process can be a valuable argument in and of itself, or it can help you make other arguments, but either way, you will certainly understand the text much more deeply.
As a tool, deconstructionism lets you examine the language in a work of literature to understand a lot more about the culture which produced it than the text might initially appear to want to give up. You can move beyond how a text portrays characters, events, and ideas and towards why they are presented that way and how an author/culture feels about that. Deconstructionism opens up more meaning within the text, and who doesn’t love getting more from their favorite books?
