Here's a montage(bricolage?) of sorts of some of my notes and observations on "deconstruction."

Stephan

Deconstruction (Flores)
Rather than striving to show that a text’s ambiguities can be resolved to cohere in a unified whole (e.g., New Criticism), or to presume that all discursive meaning accords with an existing, determinable system of terms/relations/rules (structuralism), deconstruction attends to contradictions that threaten to undermine such unity or structural stability. A deconstructive analysis exposes figures and oppositions that privilege particular positions and meanings. For example, deconstruction notes how binary oppositions (nature/culture, literal/figurative, male/female, self/other) demonstrate a particular logic or philosophy of meaning (constituting a rhetorical argument, a culturally positioned arrangement that serves a particular order of things--see Steven Lynn, Texts and Contexts) and then proceeds to question the priority of one term over another, both to show their interdependence and to suggest how “such privileging imposes an interpretive template on the subject being examined” (Approaching Poetry 242, see summary of method on p.244). Once the hierarchy is questioned and even reversed, the opposition may be displaced into a different context to challenge the function of the opposition itself (e.g., reading/writing may not only be opposed and inverted, but considered from another view/context as radically destabilized in even determining what is written or read--the illusion of a stable, essential transcendental signified is created by the opposition itself (e.g., Prospero’s white, male, aristocratic magical power vs. Sycorax’s female, black, witchlike power).

Besides reviewing online summaries of Saussure, you might reread 5.6 and 5.7 of Critical Theory in Practice (212-21), and focus on Derrida’s use of the term “différance,” to ponder how “we are always colluders in the construction of meaning” (218), so that what we seek to analyze or to critique becomes part of and to some extent structures our efforts to dismantle or to understand (master) it, until we can no longer confidently distinguish between the literal and the figurative, between our interpretive efforts or strategies and the text’s anticipation of them.

Summing Up Derrida (or Oh My Transcendental Signified!) Flores
Structuralists tend to view the sign as a union of the sound image (signifier's abstract form) and the concept (signified). But viewed in this way, the sign also tends to seen as a representation, a grid or system of differences between us and a world of phenomena and of ideas. If we think, however, of the efficacy of the sign as hinging upon the possibility of distinguishing signifiers from signifieds, then the structure of the sign can be see not as a union but as difference itself rather than a means to referentiality.

Rather than identifying signifier with the signified, Derrida thinks of language and the sign as a means of deferring the presence of the signified. Ordinarily we believe that the signifier is derived from the signified, that it serves only to mediate the presence of the signified, and that the signifier is thus secondary or provisional in relation to the signified. But Derrida attacks this notion by recalling Saussure's statement that in language there are only differences without positive terms. Without the difference between signifiers we would have no concept of the signified. Derrida concludes that the signified concept is never present in itself in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself.

To begin his critique, Derrida asks us to think of the "system" of language as a structure, within which there is only the freeplay [play] of differences between signifiers. To control this play to produce meaning, we would have to posit some origin or center to the structure that could serve as its organizing principle. But this unique center would govern or control the play of difference only by virtue of the fact that the center itself was not structured, that it must somehow remain outside the structure of language and beyond the play of difference.

One way of thinking of this center is through the terms "presence" and the "signified." Instead of seeing the presence of the signified as simply deferred by the way the signifier substitutes for the signified, we now have a way of thinking of language as a play of differences in which the presence of the signified is always deferred and cannot be appropriated either by knowing the system in its totality (Levi-Strauss) or by speaking confidently of the controlling presence of a center or transcendental signified controlling the play of differences.

Drawing upon the work of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida enables us to note that our experience of reading often seems incomplete, as if the text intended to say something more but couldn't (or the corollary experience that we are somehow inadequate interpreters). This is an experience of something in excess of the signifier (the signifying), a feeling that the signified is surpassing the signifier. But might this experience of excess, perceived in terms of gaps or silences in the text, be a function of the signifier or the play of language creating or revealing a lack in itself? The idea of this lack created by the signifier and the presence or supplementary meaning we tend to posit (and to substitute to fill the lack) as existing outside the system or play of signifiers is Derrida's point of attack and departure from Merleau-Ponty.

Derrida uses the term différance to denote neither a word nor a concept but rather the gap that is the difference between signifiers and the movement that is the deferral of the hypothetical signified. Presence is never present but always deferred. Différance, therefore, is the condition of possibility for experiencing the absence of the presence of the signified. Différance is the freeplay of signifiers that creates a trace of the other which is n(ever) absent. The experience that there is too much, more than one can say, is not due, argues Derrida, to the empirical impossibility of knowing language in its totality. Language excludes totalization because it is a field of play (play of signifiers in differential relations), of différance that permits the lack that creates the movement of supplementarity--the move to supplement a lack on the part of the signifying (and thus a lack "perceived" in the elusive/illusive signified). As Murfin notes in commenting on Derrida’s critique of Rousseau’s privileging of speech over writing, “writing is a supplement to speech that is at the same time necessary. Barbara Johnson, sounding like Derrida, puts it this way: ‘Recourse to writing . . . is necessary to recapture a presence whose lack has not been preceded by any fullness’ (Derrida, Dissemination xii). Thus, Derrida shows that one strand of Rousseau’s discourse made writing seem a secondary, even treacherous supplement, while another made it seem necessary to communication” (Murfin Turn of the Screw 182).

Ross Murfin elaborates: “This is how deconstruction works: by showing that what was prior and privileged in the old hierarchy (for instance, metaphor and speech) can just as easily seem secondary, the deconstructor causes the formerly privileged term to exchange properties with the formerly devalued one. . . . Once deconstructed, literal and figurative can exchange properties, so that the prioritizing between them is erased. . . And, just as literal and figurative can exchange properties, criticism can exchange properties with literature, in the process coming to be seen not merely as a supplement—the second, negative, and inferior term in the binary opposition creative writing/literary criticism—but rather as an equally creative form of work. Would we write if there were not critics—intelligent readers motivated and able to make sense of what is written? Who, then, depends on whom? (Turn of the Screw 186)

Let’s review and proceed further; in much of what follows I draw upon, add to, and quote liberally from Hans Bertens’s account of poststructuralism (Literary Theory: The Basics, 2001). With the structuralists, we assume that “the structures of language and culture speak through us” (Bertens 122) but unlike structuralists, poststructuralists address/recognize the problem of trying to analyze such structures even as we speak/write/discern from within those structures in ways already structured by that we wish to make the subject of our statements and analysis. There is no position outside language/structure from which to speak.

We may feel that such arbitrary and conventional arrangements are experienced as quite natural, and this doesn’t bother us unduly because “we see language as only an instrument” (122) for self-expression, used to express something that is prior to language: “something that exists in our minds before we resort to language to give what is already present to us an appropriate expression and shape in words, and basing our trust in language upon the confidence of daily practice in our use of it, particularly in terms of our sense of our own intentions and choices (someone else may lie or misrepresent or fail to understand us but that’s their problem!). If someone says, “be honest with yourself” we may very well think that is possible, a matter of will rather than a problem of knowledge or representation (I think therefore I am and I know what I think or say or write).

Derrida argues that because words in their differential relations are detached from the world, there is no stable anchoring connection that fixes meaning in relation to some real absolute point of reference. Instead, because meaning is produced through difference, “that meaning is always contaminated” (Bertens 124) by the traces of other words (in a signifying chain) that precede and follow, with meaning also deferred along such relations of difference, which are the conditions for meaning to be possible, which in turn puts into question the possibility of distinguishing what is truly present (as opposed to what is absent either in the past, present, or future).

Derrida dismantles the structures of the structuralists, but agrees with them in rejecting the idea of authentic truth, or presence, or voice related to some essential concept of being, of self/presence—instead, we “make use of a language that simultaneously uses us” (127). Speech is, argues Derrida, already a form of writing (writing defined broadly as language in its condition of différance). The play of différance produces a surplus of meaning that we tend mistakenly to assume can be pursued successfully to the truth of its ultimate origin or outcome (the transcendental signified).

How do we cope with such excessive, surplus of signification? “Poststructuralism’s answer is that texts set up one or more centers—derived from the language they make use of—that must give them stability and stop the potentially infinite flow of meaning that all texts generate. If there is a center, there is also that which does not belong to it, which is marginal. Setting up a center automatically creates a hierarchical structure: the central is more important than the marginal [binary opposition, with one term in the dyad privileged, the other subordinated and/or absent]” (128). But such binary oppositions “are a good deal less oppositional than they would seem to be. Within binary oppositions we do not only find an oppositional relationship between the two terms involved, we also find a strange complicity” (129). The supposedly inferior term is an important condition for the opposition as such.

“No matter whether a text is literary or non-literary, it can always be deconstructed and can be shown to rely for its internal stability on rhetorical operations that mask their origin in difference and the surplus meaning that is the result of différance. . . .the text remains a field of possibilities” (131).

There is “no getting away from différance and infinite uncertainty [undecidability]. But for politically motivated criticism uncertainty is a poor starting-point. If I want to achieve certain political ends there is not much help in the thought that all meanings—including the values that have led to my political stance—are merely the result of difference and have no solid foundation” (135).

Madan Sarup sums up: "Derrida has made a close study of many philosophers: Nietzsche, Rousseau, Husserl, Heidegger and others. He argues that they have been able to impose their various systems of thought only by ignoring or suppressing the disruptive effects of language. One of the ruling illusions of Western metaphysics is that reason can somehow grasp the world without a close attention to language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method. Derrida's work draws attention to the ways in which language deflects the philosopher's project. He does this by focusing on metaphors and other figurative devices at work in the texts of philosophy. In this way Derrida underlines the rhetorical nature of philosophical arguments.

Deconstruction stresses the irreducibility of metaphor, the difference at play within the very constitution of literal meaning. It should be remembered that deconstruction is not simply a strategic reversal of categories which otherwise remain distinct and unaffectted. It is an activity of reading in which texts must be read in a radically new way. There must be an awareness of ambivalence, of the discrepancy between meaning and the author's assertion. Derrida discovers a set of paradoxical themes at odds with their manifest argument. His method consists of showing how the privileged term is held in place by the force of a dominant metaphor and not, as it might seem, by any conclusive logic. Metaphors often disrupt the logic of an argument.

Derrida writes that we have a metaphysical desire to make the end coincide with the means, create an enclosure, make the definition coincide with the defined, the 'father' with the 'son'; within the logic of identity to balance the equation, close the circle. . . . Derrida wants us to 'erase' all oppositions, undoing yet preserving them" (51-52).

Klages on Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play . . ."

Additional jumble of voluminous notes on Derrida