Deconstruction in literary studies

Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors, most notably structuralism and New Criticism. Beginning in France in the 1950s, the structuralist movement in anthropology analyzed various cultural phenomena as general systems of “signs” and attempted to develop “metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which the different sign systems could be described. Structuralist methods were soon applied to other areas of the social sciences and humanities, including literary studies. Deconstruction offered a powerful critique of the possibility of creating detached, scientific metalanguages and was thus categorized (along with kindred efforts) as “post-structuralist.” Anglo-American New Criticism sought to understand verbal works of art (especially poetry) as complex constructions made up of different and contrasting levels of literal and nonliteral meanings, and it emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts. Deconstructive readings, in contrast, treated works of art not as the harmonious fusion of literal and figurative meanings but as instances of the intractable conflicts between meanings of different types. They generally examined the individual work not as a self-contained artifact but as a product of relations with other texts or discourses, literary and nonliterary. Finally, these readings placed special emphasis on the ways in which the works themselves offered implicit critiques of the categories that critics used to analyze them. In the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, deconstruction played a major role in the animation and transformation of literary studies by literary theory (often referred to simply as “theory”), which was concerned with questions about the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the relationship between literature and the numerous discourses that structure human experience and its histories.

Deconstruction in the social sciences and the arts

Deconstruction’s influence widened to include a variety of other disciplines. In psychoanalysis, deconstructive readings of texts by Sigmund Freud and others drew attention to the role of language in the formation of the psyche; showed how psychoanalytic case studies are shaped by the kinds of psychic mechanisms that they purport to analyze (thus, Freud’s writings are themselves organized by processes of repression, condensation, and displacement); and questioned the logocentric presuppositions of psychoanalytic theory. Some strands of feminist thinking engaged in a deconstruction of the opposition between “man” and “woman” and critiqued essentialist notions of gender and sexual identity. The work of Judith Butler, for example, challenged the claim that feminist politics requires a distinct identity for women. Arguing that identity is the product or result of action rather than the source of it, they embraced a performative concept of identity modeled on the way in which linguistic acts (such as promising) work to bring into being the entities (the promise) to which they refer. This perspective was influential in gay and lesbian studies, or “queer theory,” as the academic avant-garde linked to movements of gay liberation styled itself.

In the United States, the Critical Legal Studies movement applied deconstruction to legal writing in an effort to reveal conflicts between principles and counterprinciples in legal theory. The movement explored fundamental oppositions such as public and private, essence and accident, and substance and form. In anthropology, deconstruction contributed to an increased awareness of the role that anthropological field-workers play in shaping, rather than merely describing, the situations they report on and to a greater concern about the discipline’s historical connections to colonialism.

Finally, the influence of deconstruction spread beyond the humanities and social sciences to the arts and architecture. Combining deconstruction’s interest in tension and oppositions with the design vocabulary of Russian constructivism, deconstructivist architects such as Frank Gehry challenged the functionalist aesthetic of modern architecture through designs using radical geometries, irregular forms, and complex, dynamic constructions.

Influence and criticism

In all the fields it influenced, deconstruction called attention to rhetorical and performative aspects of language use, and it encouraged scholars to consider not only what a text says but also the relationship—and potential conflict—between what a text says and what it “does.” In various disciplines, deconstruction also prompted an exploration of fundamental oppositions and critical terms and a reexamination of ultimate goals. Most generally, deconstruction joined with other strands of poststructural and postmodern thinking to inspire a suspicion of established intellectual categories and a skepticism about the possibility of objectivity. Consequently, its diffusion was met with a sizeable body of opposition. Some philosophers, especially those in the Anglo-American tradition, dismissed it as obscurantist wordplay whose major claims, when intelligible, were either trivial or false. Others accused it of being ahistorical and apolitical. Still others regarded it as a nihilistic endorsement of radical epistemic relativism. Despite such attacks, deconstruction has had an enormous impact on a variety of intellectual enterprises.