Deconstruction. Stanford Presidential Lectures in the Sciences and Arts
Deconstruction. New World Encyclopedia
Definition of Deconstruction by Elif Ayiter
Deconstruction is a term which is used to denote the application of post-modern theory, to a "text". A deconstruction is meant to undermine the frame of reference and assumptions that underpin the text. Jacques Derrida, who coined the term, argued that the existence of deconstruction implied that there was no intrinsic essence to a text, merely the contrast of difference. This is analogous to the scientific idea that only the variations are real, that there is no established norm to a genetic population, or the idea that the difference in perception between black and white is the context. A deconstruction is created when the "deeper" substance of text opposes the text's more "superficial" form. According to Derrida, one consequence of deconstruction is that the text may be defined so broadly as to encompass not just written words, but the entire spectrum of symbols and phenomena within Western thought. To Derrida, a result of deconstruction is that no Western philosopher has been able to escape successfully from this large web of text and reach that which is "signified", which they imagined to exist "just beyond" the text.
The more common use of the term is the more general process of pointing to contradictions between the intent and surface of a work, and the assumptions about it. A work then "deconstructs" assumptions when it places them in context. For example, someone who can pass as the opposite sex is said to "deconstruct" gender roles, because there is a conflict between the superficial appearance, and the reality of the person's gender.
More about Deconstruction. Source: Derrida and Deconstruction
"We can understand how deconstruction operates if we examine Jacques Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss, which is exemplary. A much-republished essay from 1968, called “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” has contributed to a widespread understanding of Derrida as a key “poststructuralist” thinker. Derrida’s writing has certainly contributed to the critical revision of structuralism that has occurred over the years, but his own work is more wide ranging than the term “poststructuralism” suggests.
In The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss had made the following statement: “Science as a whole is based on the distinction between the contingent and the necessary, this being also what distinguishes event and structure” (21). Derrida begins “Structure, Sign and Play” with the following observation: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural--or structuralist--thought to reduce or suspect” (278).
So Derrida begins by drawing attention to the popularity of structuralism (in the 1960s) as an event in the history of the concept of structure. But the meaning of the word event is something that structuralism would need to contain as an element within a structure or at least exhaustively determined by a structure. In the same way that science must contain all contingencies (chances, accidents and secondary causes) within the thought of what is necessary, all events should be contained as parts of a comprehensive structure.
The reference is to the structuralist model that contrasts La Langue (the system or structure) to parole (the event of speech or the utterance). So strictly speaking, and according to Levi-Strauss, the concept “event” is opposed to the concept “structure.” Once again the model is a version of empirical/ transcendental difference.
The logic is as follows: The event of structuralism is a “rupture” in so far as the break between classical thinking in the human sciences and structuralism is like an overturning of old ways of thinking by new ones. But the concept of structure is itself a classical concept and its meaning belongs to ordinary ways of speaking. Furthermore its meaning is something like “that which determines and makes possible all events.” The concepts “event” and “structure” must have been determined by the field that structuralism sets out to explore and explain, that is, structure (rather than event)"
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