I don't think posting my weird 452 midterm essay is cheating or anything, as no one who could use this for cheating reads this. Here's hoping. Anyway, this is, in my humble opinion, a pretty good/readable/approachable introduction to deconstruction. Excuse the occasional snarkyness, it was written under time constraints.
In which I die over Derrida
Structuralism depends on having, or searching for, a center or presence. Presence is the grounding, first principle that is the center or base of a system of meanings and values. Structuralists see this center as the truth which allows for a system in the first place. The search for the truth of a system (or in literature, the meaning of a novel; in criticism, the grounding theory etc) is the point of a structuralists’ work. Logocentrism is the system’s attempt to establish the justification of its meanings and values through pointing to its “center” as having an original, preexisting presence. We can see that the search turns into one of continual change. Each new theory about what the “center” of a system is was being replaced over and over by the next theory. Derrida says that this “must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center”(279). This realization calls into question the idea of a “center” at all, which is why “it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center”(280). So, Derrida starts to deal with this issue of no center.
He comes down on Levi-Strauss to illustrate his argument against structuralism. Levi-Strauss does a study on the nature versus culture. The basis of his study is depends on this distinction between human practices. The incest prohibition is a law that is both natural, occurring in all groups and peoples, and cultural, each culture has its own and varying way of dealing with it. This law cuts across the nature/culture binary, a binary that “has always been assumed to be self evident”(283). This cutting across proves that the binary is not only not the original presence that Levi-Strauss says it is, but that it does not exist at all. Derrida goes on to explain what it is that Levi-Strauss does in the face of this. Levi-Strauss’s decision is to go on as if the center was still there, even while having proof that it is not. Doing this is bricolage. Bricolage is to use and “preserve as an instrument something whose value he criticizes”, tools to be used even when there is “no longer an truth value attributed to them”, and a bricoleur is the person who “uses the means at hand”, those tools (285). In this specific case, Levi-Strauss is a bricoleur who continues his work, and in a broader sense, we can see all and “every discourse as a bricoleur”. All studies that function in a system or try to find a center, or work with the assumption of a center, have to use bricolage, inevitably. Though inevitable, this very endeavor is what confines, restricts, “closes off the play” (play - which I hope will be coming right up) (179).
If we see the center as absent, we have the option of filling it in with something if we wish to. The example with Levi-Strauss is when he encounters totalization, well, nontotalization in his study of myths. When comparing myth to speech, Levi-Strauss explains that he would not “feel constrained to accept the arbitrary demand for a total mythological pattern, since, as has been shown, such a requirement has no meaning” (289). It is not that they system’s center is too big to completely understand or fill, but because there is no center at all. We can replace it with a “sign”, we supplement the absent center with a sign. This “movement of the supplementary” is the idea of “play” (289). This idea of “play” leads to what we now call “trace”( I am already so sick of using “quotes”). Trace is how we simultaneously produce and defer meaning by outlining the appearance of meaning by marking the gaps and pointing out differences, and by following the movement of the “centered” signifier pointing to a signifier and so on.
So, Levi-Strauss, and structuralism along with him, is caught in this weird world of tension between “play and presence” (292). For Levi-Strauss we have this rather uncomfortable place of existence where “play is the disruption of presence,” yet “one no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic of presence, and ethic of nostalgia for origins”(292). He does his work with bricolage guiltily, asserting a presence while at the same time proving it isn’t even there. This is one of the two interpretations of interpretation, the more depressing one for sure. The other interpretation being the “Nietzschean affirmation” that “determines the noncenter otherwise than as the loss of center. And it plays without security”, and is the “seminal adventure of the trace”. Here, we are able to live in a world without a center, but still with purpose, the purpose being to create concepts ourselves. These two options are “absolutely irreconcilable”. The Nietzschean one is surely more appealing, “joyous” if you will, but Derrida does not let us end with that. He says that he does “not believe that today there is any question of choosing” between them and that leaves us with a “terrifying form of monstrosity” (293). Well, cool. Now what? Enter deconstructionism.
“Structure, Sign, and Play” is our starting example of deconstruction. Derrida pointed out (or created, or found, or whatever it is that he would let me say here) the binary that was at the “center” of structuralism. He them basically blew it up, proved it was a construct and not a truth. This very action is what deconstruction is, the way that Derrida has decided to get beyond binaries, to show them as binaries to destroy them. I have to say before I further explain deconstruction that I still see it as an assumption on the deconstructionist’s part to even claim that the center is a binary in the first place. The deconstructionist says that a center is created by the system making a hierarchal binary, but that binary is actually in itself a construct of the deconstructionist, not necessarily the system. I feel sometimes like it is like someone making a sandcastle next to me, saying it is mine, then knocking it down, all while I am sitting there just making my own sandcastle. Anyway, deconstruction works by pointing out the hierarchical binaries that is the supposed “center”, then reverses them - often by use of supplementation, which I won’t explain right now as I am most likely already off topic - to disrupt the binary. Then hopefully the deconstructionist inscribes a new and better binary in place of the one he shot down, or at least has successfully pointed out the need to replace the binary with something better. In this case the sandcastle destroyer has successfully reached my sandcastle, shown me its faults, smashed it, and built up a better, stronger one with which to make more friends and control the stretch of beach, or whatever, with. I hope that made sense, as I feel a bit punchy now.
There you have it.
