Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Poststructuralism and deconstruction radicalize structuralism by denying that language offers stable, self-present meaning, treating texts as fields of unstable and self-undermining signification.
Definition
A range of post-1960s theoretical approaches that extend and contest structuralism by emphasizing the instability of meaning, the play of differences in language, and the impossibility of fully determinate interpretation.
Scope
This area covers the body of thought, associated above all with Derrida, that turns the structuralist insight that meaning is differential against the idea of a fixed structure or transcendental ground. It treats deconstructive reading practices, the critique of authorial intention and the autonomous text, the notions of difference, trace, and intertextuality, and the wider poststructuralist questioning of the subject and of stable meaning. It describes these approaches rather than asserting their conclusions as settled.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- If meaning is purely differential, can any interpretation ever be fixed?
- How do texts undermine the very oppositions and hierarchies they appear to assert?
- What becomes of the author and of authorial intention as guarantors of meaning?
- What is the relation of a text to the other texts and codes it presupposes?
Key theories
- Differance and the critique of presence
- Derrida's argument that meaning is produced through difference and endless deferral, undermining the 'metaphysics of presence' that assumes a self-present origin or ground of meaning.
- Deconstructive reading
- A practice of close reading that locates the points at which a text's own language subverts its apparent claims, exposing the rhetorical and figural operations that make stable meaning impossible.
- The dissolution of the author
- Barthes's claim that the author is not the origin of a text's meaning but an effect of writing, so that the text is a tissue of citations whose unity lies in the reader rather than the author.
History
Poststructuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s, marked by Derrida's 1967 works and the events of 1968, as a reaction against the scientific ambitions of structuralism. In the 1970s and 1980s deconstruction was institutionalized in North American literary studies, notably through the Yale School (de Man, Hartman, Hillis Miller), before its influence was qualified by historicist and political turns in theory.
Debates
- Does deconstruction entail relativism or nihilism?
- Critics charge that denying determinate meaning leaves no basis for interpretation or value, while defenders argue deconstruction is a rigorous reading practice attentive to how meaning is produced, not a denial that texts mean anything.
Key figures
- Jacques Derrida
- Roland Barthes
- Paul de Man
- Julia Kristeva
Related topics
Seminal works
- derrida1967
- barthes1967
- demanblindness1971
Frequently asked questions
- Is deconstruction the same as destruction?
- No; deconstruction is a mode of close analysis that shows how a text's meanings depend on, yet undermine, the oppositions it relies upon, not an attempt to destroy texts or deny that they communicate.
- How does poststructuralism relate to structuralism?
- It accepts the structuralist premise that meaning is differential and produced within systems, but rejects the idea of stable, closed structures and of any fixed centre or ground guaranteeing meaning.