For Scottie with Love and Deconstruction

WILL HOCHMAN (hochman@uscolo.edu)
Thu, 02 Jul 1998 13:32:26 -0600 (MDT)

If your desire to know what I meant is sincere, i will cut this piece of
my dis into our discussion, hoping that my academese is not to
inappropriate and that you understand I'm trying to get at the idea of
deconstruction clearly and quickly...

here's more on deconstruction as I understand it...

Perhaps the most important deconstructive concept was differance.  This
term was developed by Derrida and explained in Positions as a word which
foregrounded the play of differences, to forbid at any moment, or in any
sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only
to itself (26).  As Danny J. Anderson pointed out in his essay,
Deconstruction, differance emphasized that meaning was trapped in the
system of language where each element has significance only by virtue of
its difference from other elements of the system: Meaning is not present,
as an essence, within any linguistic unit (Atkins and Morrow 141).
The central reading strategy of Deconstruction was to determine
hierarchies of opposing meanings.  In Andersons words, 

Deconstruction must demonstrate that the opposition is always already
other, that it works because the repression of differance within the very
terms of the opposition, and that such repression is the mark of the drive
toward power and mastery.  (143)


Deconstruction sought to subvert the idea of one meaning in a text so that
it unraveled the rhetorical thread of the text.  It denied closure in a
text.  Instead of the New Critical idea of tension (including irony,
paradox, and ambiguity) in an organic form, Deconstruction sought to find
contradiction in polysemantic forms.
Deconstruction opened literature by subverting the very ideas the canon of
literature was based on.  Hierarchies based on logocentrism were put into
question by Deconstruction because the possibilities of its foci of
attention, language, knowledge, meaning and interpretation, were never
fixed.  Deconstructive criticism was a process of showing the difficulties
and contradictions of any interpretation.  
Instead of finding truth, Deconstruction found the repressive forces that
are engaged in power struggles between language, knowledge, meaning and
interpretation.  Perhaps one of the best statements defending
Deconstructions critical position was made by Barbara Johnson in the
preface to her book, The Critical Difference:  

It is not, in the final analysis, what you dont know that can or cannot
hurt you.  It is what you dont know you dont know that spins out and
entangles that perpetual error we call life. (xii)


Literature was not the civilized location of truth, but a creative
wilderness where contradictions of language, knowledge, meaning and
interpretation struggle to survive. (See Criticism in the Wilderness by
Geoffrey Hartman for a practical demonstration of this idea.)   The power
and authority of a literatures significance in its struggle between known
and unknown was almost always at the center of deconstructive criticism. 


*****
(sorry for tranlation probs and ommissions of italics, apostrophes and
quotes)

(Also scottie, if you've read this far I think I was mistaken or perhaps
loose to use "sublimate" when "subvert" was the stronger word
choice...;)will