This is the fifth part of our survey on literary theory loosely based on Paul Fry’s Open Yale course. Last time we talked about structuralism. Today we’re moving on to deconstruction.
You can find the rest of this series here:
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 0: What am I talking about?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 1: What is Literary Theory?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 2: The Hermeneutic Circle
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 3: Formalism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 5: Deconstruction
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory
Defining deconstruction succinctly and precisely is difficult by design, but here’s a quick taste just to get us started: Deconstruction is the idea that language, particularly the structuralist view of language that encloses all of human culture, is too irreducibly complex to discuss in objective or static terms. This necessarily creates ambiguity in communication and cultural interpretation. This ambiguity results in a social acceptance of “truths” that may appear objective but are actually subjective and biased. This bias creeps in to all areas of human culture and communication, affecting even our dearest values and social identities. The term “deconstruction” means different things to different people and in different contexts, but you can generally think of it as capturing a moment in academic thought in the humanities that influenced everything that came after. Deconstruction is more than a method, but it can be used as a method to criticize various aspects of culture, including literature. Critics of deconstruction saw it as an attack on science, objective truth, and Western culture.
How did deconstruction come about?
Deconstruction is built right on top of the foundation that structuralism left us. I’m not even sure if I’d consider it to be a wholly separate school of thought: it pretty much just takes the same ideas and pushes them towards a natural conclusion. That said, it’s obvious why deconstruction was considered to be a departure from structuralism: Jacques Derrida really seems to have enjoyed drama.
You might recall me mentioning that structuralism as a dominant literary theory didn’t last all that long and was cut short in 1966. This swift downfall began with a single lecture: “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Derrida gave this lecture – which he wrote fairly quickly over just a couple of weeks – at a colloquium meant to organize and strengthen structuralism, but it was in fact an aggressive and, in my reading, bombastic critique of structuralism.
Now, I’ve only read a couple of papers by Derrida: the one I just mentioned and “Différance,” but that was more than enough to get a feel for his style. It’s just awful. Even Fry calls this out, and I don’t much care for his style either. Derrida’s essay on différance hinged on him coining the misspelling “différance” as a new word which is indistinguishable from “différence” when spoken out loud. He initially gave this essay as a speech. These were two of the most difficult essays I’ve ever read and the difficulty simply wasn’t necessary to convey the concepts. Part of me really wants to take on Of Grammatology purely for the challenge… but, goddamn, I just don’t have it in me right now.
However, I’m a bit torn on fully condemning Derrida for this. The convoluted text isn’t necessary to explain the concepts and I do suspect that he did this partially just to make it difficult for anyone to criticize him directly… but the thrust of his argument is essentially that meaning can’t be pinned down as well as structuralism claims. Making his arguments convoluted and filled with ambiguity was a form of performance art to demonstrate the point while explaining it. I still think that he could’ve just explained the damn point plainly and then provided some examples… but, it actually does do a decent job of illustrating his point.
Anyways, Derrida’s essay had a huge, immediate impact, hitting the breaks on structuralism and opening the way for theories that built on top of it. That’s really the key here: Derrida did an excellent job of shining a light on structuralism’s flaws, but his arguments were built on top of those flaws.
This actually reminds me of a quote from Paul de Man , our other author for today: “It is easy enough to see that this apparent glorification of the critic-philosopher in the name of truth is in fact a glorification of the poet as the primary source of truth… [I]f truth is the recognition of the systemic character of a certain kind of error, then it would be fully dependent on the prior existence of this error” (quote via Fry’s course.) De Man was talking about the role of poetry and literature as the fictional material that truth is built on, but I think it applies here as well.
Structuralism provides an excellent framework for analyzing culture, but in defining this framework structuralism exposed some unexpected ambiguities in language and human culture. Whether these ambiguities are a bug or a feature is up for debate, but in either case structuralism’s ability to make this issue apparent is a strength and deconstruction’s contribution only makes it better. From everything I’ve seen and read, there was a fair bit of drama and personal ego tied up in the debates over structuralism, but from our perspective, it’s all good. Reference structuralism when you’re looking for ties between different things, such as discussing genre or tropes, and reference deconstruction when you want to take that apart and look at everything in a different configuration. We’re just adding more tools to our intellectual toolboxes here. If structuralism gives us a theodolite for measuring the boundaries and patterns between things, deconstruction provides us with a teleidoscope so we can play with different perspectives.
As this is the first post after “structuralism,” it would make sense if we were discussing post-structuralism here… but, at least according to Derrida himself, we’re not. Derrida’s conception of deconstruction was very nebulous: it’s not post-structuralism, it’s not a method, it’s not an analysis, and it’s not a technique. For someone who critiqued structuralism so vehemently, he really leaned into defining deconstruction by what it’s not.
I should also point out that much of the issue that Derrida took with structuralism, and Lévi-Strauss’s writing in particular, was actually addressed by Lévi-Strauss’s own writing prior to Derrida taking it on. So, again, it’s easy to imagine an alternate history where Derrida was a zealous structuralist remembered for solidifying and expanding structuralism, rather than as an opponent who blew it apart.
But, we’re getting a bit too deep into the political drama of deconstruction, which might be interesting to you, but I don’t particularly care. I’m here for the concepts.
Deconstruction came about in response to structuralism. Derrida can claim that it’s not a critique of it, and maybe it’s not solely a critique of structuralism, but it definitely came about in the form of a critique given at a structuralist colloquium. Derrida pointed out some flaws and the various academic communities ran with it. This moment in the humanities saw an explosion of ideas: it’s important to be aware of how limited this series of blog posts is in covering all of it. We’re tracing a quick path through some of the biggest ideas in literature, but there’s a lot more to dig into here if you’re interested – regardless of whether deconstruction is post-structuralist, it’s certainly related to post-structuralism and post-modernism broadly.
What is deconstruction?
If you haven’t read my post on structuralism, you’re really going to want to get to that first.
So, you understand all the stuff about signs, right? How they’re comprised of a signifier, a signified, and the relation between them? How the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary? You also grok the bit about the value of signs being defined negatively via binary opposition?
Cool, now, does it feel like anything’s… missing?
Maybe it’s just because I spent most of my life in software, but what I’m seeing here is a system of variables all referencing each other without any literal values ever supplied to resolve the expressions. Ever dealt with C or C++ header files? Saying that A equals B is great and there’s no problem with saying that A equals B which equals C. You can even throw some transformations in there if you’d like! A = 3 * B. B = C – 4. You can even have long chains of variables evaluating to other variables with some transformation and that’s all fine, but at the end of the chain there needs to be some sort of literal value: something that “just is,” an axiom. A = B = C = D = 5.
The two properties: (1) “signs are arbitrary” and (2) “the value of a sign is determined by binary opposition to other signs” don’t provide any way to actually collapse the system of signs into real values! If these two properties are strictly true, then how could we ever assign any definite meaning to any sign? How could we even agree on what, specifically, a sign means unless we’re all working with the exact same set of signs? Changing just one sign changes all other signs and we don’t have any special, transcendental signs that we can take as our foundation.
Another way to think of this is to point out something from structuralism that was kind of just asserted without solid reasoning: language is synchronic. Theoretically, sure, language is a system that exists at a point in time in totality: it doesn’t “take time” for this system to interrelate. I can put it all into a book and put that book on my shelf and the pages won’t turn blank. But, that doesn’t have much to do with how I actually use language, does it? If I actually need to look something up, that takes time. Every usage of language happens in real time.
When I read or hear a sound-image (recall that this basically just means “word”) I don’t instantly follow the chain of relations between this signifier’s sign and every other sign. My brain is pretty good at conjuring up a quick answer most of the time, but sometimes I need to think about it for a moment (and even when it’s quick it’s not instant.) For something really complex, it might take quite a while and I might be aware and involved in the process. I might even let some biases creep in. In reality, we can’t actually trace the chain of binary oppositions to its end because it doesn’t really have an end.
This is, frankly, a pretty obvious realization when you think about it. I mean, we all know that language is just “good enough,” right? You probably expect that your understanding of what I’m writing here isn’t exactly the same as my understanding of it. We convey our meaning the best we can and if it’s not sufficient on the first try then we try again. That’s all fine when we’re just having a conversation, but these little ambiguities can really add up in a larger discussion or debate, and this can sometimes be a pretty big deal. How many major political divides have two sides that both see the other as completely stupid and unethical? If language and human understanding could be coerced into an objective, clear, and precise form, then we could theoretically just sit the two sides for any issue down and talk things through until they both see things the same way. Selfishness, ego, and corruption all play a role in preventing mutual agreement, but it’s obvious that communication itself prevents us from ever having a perfectly common, mutual understanding of anything complex in human culture.
Derrida explains this in a couple of ways.
Free-play and transcendental signifiers
In “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Derrida explains the concept of “free-play.” In this series of posts, we’ve covered a very short period and region of history in philosophy, but it’s enough to see how the root of interpretation changes every so often. In a theological reading, God is the “center” of all interpretation. “What did God mean by this?” “How would God want us to interpret this?” With the Enlightenment, the center was pulled out and exchanged for “man” (I would say “humanity,” but… it really was “man” for the most part.) “What did the author mean by this?” “What does this mean to me?” Even if all of language is arbitrary, having some focus – some metaphysical but ultimately real basis for at least some signs – provided a way to collapse our chain of relations between signs into definite values.
It’s not just a line from God to humanity either: note how the Russian formalists ran into opposition for not rooting their analysis in Marxists concepts of class and realism. I’ve read enough literature targeted at software engineers to see a center built from utilitarianism, Capitalism, and efficiency for its own sake. The Mythical Man-Month and The Phoenix Project are great books, but they take it for granted that efficiency is good: all other conclusions are filtered through that lens. Plenty of programmer literature comments on the benefit of a good work-life balance and a low-stress workplace… to corporate efficiency. Flexible work hours are great because they improve efficiency: if they didn’t, then they’d be bad, or at-best they’d be a competitive advantage for recruiters. On some level, it’s not all that different from Christian literature centered on God’s absolute divinity and benevolence: it’s a debatable assumption that the reader needs to buy wholesale if they want to engage with the text as intended.
Formalism’s insistence on ignoring things outside the text pulls this center away, placing “form” in its place. This… I mean… it never really made perfect sense, did it? Formalism is interesting, but at least in my reading, it really never felt complete. The broad concept that form can be looked at without considering context is great, but none of the formalist thought I read provided an unbiased or objective definition of form. Structuralism, in a way, provides this center by taking language itself as its center. This is a different sort of exchange than what came before! God and humanity were centers that weren’t really part of the system they were the center of: they centered it from the outside. They transcended the system of language and literature as transcendental signifieds, each with a meaning that transcended all signs. Language does not transcend itself. With structuralism, we have a system centered on itself: it’s not pinned to reality at all!
To be sure that this sinks in, really consider the visual metaphor of “pinning” here. If you’re familiar with the idea, imagine a big physical representation of a graph. If you’re not, then imagine that you have a big web or rope net where each node or knot represents a signifier. Maybe one node represents “dog” and it has the neighbors “bear,” “cat,” and “god” as signifiers with some relation to it. Now, find your transcendental signified and pin the node on your graph to it. Maybe you have a family bible that you can stick the God node to. Or, if you’d prefer to use man, then stick it to yourself or to some person you respect. Once you have your transcendental signifier pinned to your transcendental signified, note that you can still move the graph/web/net around a fair bit, but you are limited to what you can reach. You have some “play” within the range that you can move it around, but it’s still restricted. Well, now structuralism comes along and you unpin your transcendental signifier: now you pin this node to the graph itself, which it’s a part of. Now you can drag this graph/web/net around with you wherever you’d like! It’s a bit like getting batteries instead of a power cord. You have free play.
Okay, I’m going to leave that visual metaphor in with the hope that it helps someone – this is more-or-less what I imagine (I’m actually imagining the graph as a giant amoeba for some reason) – but let’s go back to our equation metaphor from before in case that visual only makes sense in my head.
You have a whole bunch of equations denoting relationships between signs. You can think of this as a system of linear equations. Actually, if you’re familiar with systems of linear equations, the notion that a variable might evaluate to a space within the system should make sense, but let’s step through it with a less technical example.
(Cat) = worse (Dog)
(Dog) = (Man)’s best friend
(Man) = creation of (God)
(God) = Almighty source of reason and truth
Or, similarly:
A = B
B = C
C = D
D = 1
Since we have our definition for God “pinned” to a definition that doesn’t involve any other signifiers, we can “solve” for any other sign in the system (they’re all “one with God” here.) You could just as easily change this:
(Cat) = worse (Dog)
(Dog) = (Man)’s best friend
(God) = creation of (Man)
(Man) = Creative source of reason and truth
Either way, we have one sign pinned to a transcendental signified and now we can solve for the entire system.
Well, with structuralism, now we have:
(Cat) = worse (Dog)
(Dog) = (Man)’s best friend
(God) = creation of (Man)
(Man) = speaker of (Language)
(Language) = “(Dog) = (Man)’s best friend, (God) = creation of (Man), (Man) = speaker of (Language), ….”
This isn’t a perfect example. Of course, actual signs aren’t defined with relation to only one other sign, so each line in these equations should be far more complex, but I hope you get the idea: structuralism unpins the system of language from anything “real” or transcendental to language and what we’re left with is an endless heap of signs that are only defined with relation to each other.
Now, to be clear here, Derrida didn’t provide this critique as a disproof of structuralism. It’s a criticism of much of structuralist thought, but it doesn’t make structuralism useless or irrelevant.
Take a look at this quote from Derrida’s essay with the really long title. Note that the whole goddamn paper was worded like this: I didn’t cherry-pick a particularly dense example, if anything this bit is relatively coherent.
“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, through the history of all of his history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche showed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the “inspiration of a new humanism.” There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation – which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy – together share the field which we call, in such a problematic fashion, the human sciences. For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their differences and define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing – in the first place because we are in a region (let’s say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive of the common ground, and the différance of this irreducible différence. Here there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance towards the business of childbearing – but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless ,mute, infant, and terrifying form of a monstrosity.”
Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences – Jacques Derrida
What Derrida is really critiquing here is structuralism’s attempts to find or construct a center. Think back to Lévi-Strauss’s thoughts on myth. There was a push within structuralism to find some generic, all-encompassing, transcendental signified within humanity: something that would push humanism forward by finding some common ground to root ourselves in. There was a lot of searching within psychology and myth for some new center to pin structuralism to.
Wouldn’t it be convenient if we could define language (and hence culture and thought, in structuralist thinking) in terms of human physiology or psychology? If we could do that, then we could form a worldview centered on humanity in a way that would make sense to all humans everywhere and for all time. It wouldn’t even matter if it didn’t always relate to reality in an objective, absolute sense, as no human would ever be capable of seeing the flaw.
Derrida saw this struggle and cut it short: rather than saving us from bad centers, structuralism finally frees us from the need for a center! Rather than building the perfect enclosure for ourselves, we can open the door and be free. It’s controversial and scary. We’re essentially admitting that language is just too complex to pin down… but we’re also seeing that this complexity and irreducibility allows us to be fluid with our meanings and play with language as we see fit. In a way, this is the supreme realization of the Enlightenment: rather than using words like a human, to merely reflect God’s reality, we can conjure meaning into being as freely as stating “let there be light.” Light, here, meaning what I want it to mean or what you want it to mean. It’s just a sign, after all.
Différance
Okay, back up a bit and let’s approach this concept from a different angle. Now, unfortunately, the terminology here is kind of specific to French, but it’s not too complicated. In French, “différer” means both “to defer” and “to differ.” Derrida coined the misspelling “différance” to mean “difference and deferral of meaning.” Différance isn’t a word that could mean either “to defer” or “to differ,” it means both.
Okay, so, Derrida was being kind of cute here with this term, but just move past it, as the actual concept is really interesting.
With signs in a system of binary opposition, we say that the value of a sign is built up negatively from the contrast between it and every other sign in the system. In other words, a sign’s value is in how it differs from all other signs.
So, where does “to defer” come in?
If you’re reading this in order then you might already know! In the section just above this one, on free play, we discussed how the chain of signifiers doesn’t ever really end. If you had infinite time, then I suppose that you could just follow the chains infinitely. But you don’t, and you probably have shit to say, so what do you do? You follow it until you have a value that’s good enough for your purpose. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re not, but it’s generally not a big deal if you weren’t precise enough on your first try as you can always clarify later.
Let’s say that you’re hosting a big party with plenty of guests who are all parked on the street in front of your home. Part way through the night, you take a moment outside to get some air and you realize that someone’s car is blocking a hydrant. So, you head back inside and say “hey, someone’s red car is blocking a hydrant, you’d better move it.” Well, this is a big party, and you notice that nobody heads outside: it turns out that there are multiple red cars. Fine. “Someone’s red Chevy is blocking a hydrant.” Looks like that did it, someone catches your eye before heading outside to move their car. That was good enough for your party, but if you were announcing a car being towed in a supermarket’s parking lot, you might need to come up with a model or even a license plate number. You’re as precise as you need to be and you defer digging any deeper until it’s necessary.
The point here is that the precise meaning is always potentially deferred. The meaning is good enough until it isn’t, then we need to follow the chain a bit further.
This really screws with all that stuff we said about synchrony and diachrony in the post on structuralism. Language is synchronic, but our usage of it really just defers the diachronic process of actually digging through everything.
So, there we go, the value of a sign is built up by how it differs from other signs and we defer fully evaluating this value when we use it. Derrida’s term to capture this is “différance.”
Note that this isn’t just about precision but also about meaning. Consider the questions regarding transgender people in professional sports. Here’s a great example of a context where society thought that our definitions for gender were sufficient, but now we’ve encountered a case where we can no-longer defer digging deeper into our chains of relationships between signs. How, exactly, do hormone treatments differ from steroid use? We could say that our definitions were perfectly fine in the past… but if our definitions were perfect before, then they would have been resilient to new perspectives. The fact that our definitions were arbitrary and built up from binary opposition means that changing social views on gender throw a lot of other definitions into question: when we change our views on gender, we also need to consider our views on steroid use.
What does deconstruction do for us?
We have some interesting ideas here, but what do they actually mean for us? My goal here is to find new ways to analyze, relate to, and discuss literature: finding out that interpretation of literature is essentially baseless evaluation of arbitrary signs whose values are always ultimately deferred doesn’t do much for me on the surface.
But, even if it doesn’t make things easier, if we accept the concepts of deconstruction then we can only either work with them or fight against them. So let’s try to work with them.
I encourage digging around Wikipedia’s deconstruction page for a bit, as there’s a lot of interesting stuff here. I even found an essay discussing the term in an Evangelical Christian context which argues that deconstruction is a method where deconversion is only one possible result. Deconstruction’s meaning really is hard to pin down, so there’s a good deal of free play possible for deconstruction itself.
As Derrida asserted, deconstruction isn’t merely a method, but it certainly includes or prescribes a method. You’re probably familiar with it, actually. In some sense, it’s similar to a close reading but with a key difference: in both cases you obsess over small details in the text to find extra meanings beyond the simple words, but where a close reading focuses only on form and ignores the circumstances that produced the text, deconstruction is overtly suspicious of any extra meanings, included biases, or default values coming from the circumstances of the text’s production or its interpretation by society.
It’s important here to remember that we’re not merely talking about analyzing poetry or even text anymore. After all of the discussion on poetry, novels, and close readings we had with formalism, it’s also important to remember that how we interpret text – or any cultural artifacts – is actually really important. You certainly can apply deconstruction to a poetic description in a novel purely as a way to derive more aesthetic value from the text, but you can also apply it to religion, as the essay on deconstruction and deconversion above mentions. You could apply it to history to challenge the prevailing interpretations of events. It’s been applied to law, politics, and pretty much any other cultural cache of interpretations. Deconstruction of race and gender has gone well beyond the scope of deconstruction itself, but draws from much of the same theory.
If you want to practice deconstruction yourself, you basically just need to take the structuralist and semiotic theories on signs, apply them to a work, then see what you get when you engage in some free play with the values. Let’s look at a couple of examples.
Lovecraft Country deconstructs Lovecraft’s xenophobia and racism by changing the protagonists’ race and seeing how a true-to-form Lovecraft story changes with that one sign flipped. The success of this deconstruction comes, to a great extent, from how this change hardly disruptions the horror at all: if anything, it makes more sense for the protagonists to deal with a xenophobic story when everyone else really is out to get them in a realistic way. Do the cops even need to be cultists when they’re already out to kill you? There’s a lot to explore there, both in celebrating the show and in recognizing what it says about Lovecraft and race.
Fanfiction does this all the time by changing a character’s gender and then seeing what happens to the rest of the world with that one sign changed. Sometimes this is just done to allow for a heterosexual pairing with another character, which begs the question of whether that same pairing would have made sense in a homosexual relationship without changing the gender. Other times, it’s just to come up with more cosplay options.
Side note: Lina Inverse’s original costume design was actually pretty gender-neutral (the Granblue version currently used on Wikipedia is pretty close to the original design), it was made more explicitly feminine for the anime, so if I ever actually do cosplay as Lina, I don’t actually need to deconstruct anything.
It’s particularly interesting to look back on decades of gender-swap fanfiction in light of current trends in our understanding of gender and sexuality: where a single gender-swap fanfiction deconstructs its source, you could meaningfully deconstruct the notion of gender-swap fanfiction with modern definitions: what does it say about society that gender-swap fanfiction is so popular or that it’s often done in an explicitly erotic way? You could take gender-swap fanfiction as a genre (a structuralist term,) and then deconstruct this genre.
If you want some more fun examples, just click around in TV Tropes’ Deconstruction page. There is a lot of stuff here.
Next time
Alright, that was a quick one. At least, compared to the last couple. Frankly, there was more in the readings, particularly in de Man’s essay, but I just didn’t find it necessary for the basic concepts here… or particularly interesting. I’ve also received some feedback that massively long posts aren’t necessarily desirable. Personally, I love sitting down to read an hour-long essay, and I’ll use as many words as I need for a topic… but I’m not going to pad this out for length either.
I also want to mention that my wife and I are still trying to buy a house, so delays between posts will probably continue for a bit. Based on my telemetry, it looks like nobody but my wife and a few of our friends are actually reading these, so I doubt anyone minds, but just in case someone stumbles across this site in the near future: I do plan on making posts more consistently timed once I’m less busy.
Next time we’re going to take a look at psychoanalytic criticism. I haven’t gotten through all of the reading yet, but so far it’s really interesting, so I’m looking forward to it!
Readings
- Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In The Critical Tradition. Published 1966.
- This reading is mostly summarized above in the section on free play, but check it out if you want a deeper dive. Or just read it for the challenge, figuring out what the hell this essay was saying was not a fun process.
- Derrida, Jacques. “Différance.” In The Critical Tradition. Published around 1967.
- Same as #1, but in the section above on Différance.
- De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” In The Critical Tradition. Published multiple times, but this version is from the early 1980s.
- I’m pretty sure that Fry included this reading just to give an example of deconstruction in practice. I couldn’t reference this essay much in this post simply because it doesn’t really say much, broadly, about deconstruction. I mean, it kind of tries to, but most of the general statements are so heavily qualified and exploratory that it’s hard to really take them seriously. It does, however, have some great examples of deconstruction.
- There are some interesting bits in here about the “rhetorization of grammar” and the “grammatization of rhetoric.” Honestly, I didn’t think that this idea was sketched out very well in this essay, but it was interesting.
- An example of the “rhetorization of grammar” is a rhetorical question: it’s a question whose actual function is separate from its supposed grammatical role.
- An example of the “grammatization of rhetoric” is, basically, the structural and functional roles of content, or grammar on a scale larger than the sentence. Deconstruction of literature can take the form of taking apart a text and identifying the grammar of the rhetoric within it. For example, poetic language can mean one thing within the rules of grammar and in a literal interpretation, but serve a second function to set the mood of the scene or reference something outside the text.
- We didn’t discuss de Man much here, but if you’re interested, there’s a whole scandal around his early writing as a journalist for the Nazis that I found interesting.