Neil Bowen on
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction - key concepts from Peter Barry’s ‘Beginning Theory’
1. Meaning in language is relational, created through differences between words, not through connection between words and things in the world (sign and referent). The 8.15 train & wearing a jacket examples. Language hovers over reality but never touches it. Language doesn't reflect or describe the world, it creates it.
2. For structuralists Language is a coherent object that can be analysed in the same way as physical phenomena can be through science; for poststructuralists language is an ever shifting ocean; it is fluid, slippery, inconstant, unreliable.
3. If our language is fundamentally unstable so are the concepts such as reason, the human subject, truth, reality. These ideas are created through language and have no objective reality.
4. We have entered a world of radical uncertainty, without fixed points, centre or margin, up nor down, without gravity, where meaning is relational and conditional; a ‘decentred universe’. We simply cannot continue to pretend that we Europeans, our values, culture, morality, language and so forth is the centre.
5. We cannot talk of a real world behind the world of the text, such as the writer’s intentions; to do so is to construct another text
Hans Bertens in ‘Literary Theory, the basics’
1. ‘Language is not a window on the world. On the contrary, it always inserts itself between us and the world - like a smudgy screen or distorting lens.’
2. The idea of the autonomous human subject is also destabilised. Shaped by structures that themselves are unstable, ‘in reality we are inherently unstable, and, like language itself, without a centre...we are made up of fragments’.
Problems? If language explodes with infinite potential meanings and the writer is insignificant as the reader is the centre where meaning is made…How we get outside of language to examine it when our only tool is language?
What Poststructuralist Critics do to/with texts
1. Poststructuralist critics read against the grain of texts ‘The text against itself’ to reveal internal contradictions, exposing and dismantling the sources of textual power, uncovering the subconscious of the text, teasing out the 'warring forces of signification within the text' (Barbara Johnson) making 'the not-seen accessible to sight' (Derrida)
2. ‘The deconstructive process will often fix on a detail of the text which looks incidental...and then use it as the key to whole text’ (Peter Barry)
3. Inverting traditional critical practices, Deconstructionalists focus on gaps, breaks, fissures, fault lines, omissions, what is repressed and suppressed in texts, in order to prove fundamental textual disunity.
4. Very close analysis of short passages to expose futility and ideological agenda of totalising readings. Under this scrutiny ‘language explodes into multiplicities of meaning’
5. Barry proposes a three stage process to deconstructive methodology: verbal, textual and linguistic
(1) verbal - instances of paradox or contradiction in the language
(2) textual - shifts in p.o.w., tone, time scheme, breaks between stanzas/ paragraphs/ scenes
(3) linguistic - moments in which the adequacy of language as a means of communication is questioned.
Hans Bertens adds
1. Poststructuralists explore how texts create an artificial centre through privileging one term in a series of binary oppositions e.g white/black, European/other, inside/outside and therefore also a a margin. Like a move in ‘Star Trek’, they reverse the polarity of the binaries or ‘decentre’ the privileged term… So that ‘in deconstruction of binary opposites...’either/or gives way to both/and’.
2. ‘Interpretations are mere freeze-frames in a flow of signification’