Deconstruction theory: how it challenges the text and systems of meaning-making Premium

Understanding Derrida’s Deconstruction theory: how it challenges the text and systems of meaning-making

The common sense understanding of language is that it consists of words (written signs and phonemes), which carry specific meanings, and rules for combining those words into sentences.

We believe that any use of language — a speech or a piece of writing — refers to ‘something’ in the ‘real world’ out there. This ‘something’ is typically what we consider as the ‘meaning’ of a given instance of speech or writing. This assumption of a text’s meaning being stable, along with the necessary use of binaries (black/white, nature/culture, male/female, etc) underpins the Western philosophical tradition of reason, logic, ethics, and values that together constitute modernity.

This tradition has been challenged by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who questioned categories such as ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’ and ‘identity’. Algeria-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) carried this critique to its furthest end with his theory of ‘deconstruction’. In the words of the famous American literary critic M.H. Abrams, deconstruction is “a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ or ‘undermine’ the assumption that the system of language provides grounds that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.”

Derrida never explains in a straight forward fashion what deconstruction is and how it is done. His books are complex and tough to read, and deliberately so. Rather than expound his theory in a linear fashion, his preferred mode of explication was via practice — through a close reading of canonical Western texts or literary works. For instance, in his most well known work, Of Grammatology, published in 1967, he analyses Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ‘Essay on the Origin of Languages’ (1781) to show how it operates on the basis of a series of binary oppositions in which one is privileged or considered superior to the other, whereas the very language of the text contains enough contradictions. Such an identification and inversion of binaries is a common mode of deconstructive critical reading.

In Rousseau’s text, for instance, rather than culture being a ‘supplement’ of ‘nature’ (it is assumed that primitive man was a child of ‘nature’ who acquired culture with the invention of language), one could argue that it is ‘nature’ which is the supplement of culture (since there could not be a concept of ‘nature’ unless there existed a culture that could think of it in the first place). Again, the idea of a ‘supplement’ is a key element of Derridean deconstruction, denoting what is seemingly inessential and accorded an inferior status in a hierarchy compared to the ‘original’ but is, in fact, always already embedded in the original — as seen in the nature/culture binary. This almost ritual challenging of traditional, hierarchical binaries (pure/impure, high/low, master/slave, etc) also meant that deconstructive practice could be a handy political tool to destabilise normative power structures through subversive interpretative manoeuvres.

Derrida’s other two seminal works on deconstruction are Writing and Difference (1967) and Speech and Phenomena (1967). A major contention in these works is that “there is no outside-the-text”. His opponents have often wilfully misinterpreted this principle to suggest that Derrida believes that there is ‘nothing’ outside a text — that ‘everything’ is a linguistic construct, and that he is denying the materiality of the ‘real world’ outside language.

But what Derrida actually meant was to challenge the unitary nature of a text and question the assumption of a text’s boundaries. In other words, by implying that a text’s meaning had no fixed boundaries, he was suggesting that all meaning-making activity was always already context-driven (originating ‘outside’ the text) and therefore inherently unstable. This is so also because of the very nature of language. Derrida uses the portmanteau word ‘différance’, combining ‘differ’ and ‘defer’ to underscore two properties of language: that meaning is based on difference between signs, and that meaning is infinitely deferred. He builds on the Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) theory of language as a system of signs where each sign is able to generate meaning not because it refers to a ‘thing’ in the world outside language but because of its difference from other signs within the language.