Poststructuralism and Deconstruction Deconstructed (Maybe)

               Even after our various readings, presentations, and discussions concerning poststructuralism and deconstruction, and even after Ellen’s wonderful presentation on Derrida’s essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” I still find these types of criticism to be mostly baffling.  The idea of reducing a work to its opposites by relying on what is within the work itself is mystifying and probably above my limited ability to comprehend and evaluate such heady ideas.  Also, with the small amount that I did understand, I found disagreement with some of the readings and ideas we discussed, especially with Derrida’s idea of the fiction of the transcendental signifier.  However, after researching these two types of criticism, I found that poststructuralism extends far beyond Derrida and includes other ideas that I find to be more easily interpreted and even, surprisingly, funny and interesting.

                The first website that I encountered was the most helpful in that it provides a definition of poststructuralism.  This site, called Introduction to Modern Literary Theory was compiled by Dr. Kristi Siegel, director of the English Graduate Program at Mount Mary College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  On her site, she not only provides definitions of poststructuralism and deconstruction, but she also includes links to the definitions of other types of criticism that we have and have not studied this semester.  Although she talks about Derrida and Eagleton, both of whom we read ourselves, she puts both of these authors into perspective and summarizes what we have already discussed in a plain and simple manner.  Siegel even talks about the “negative” and “positive” views of this type of criticism, and how Derrida can be more closely associated with deconstruction rather than poststructuralism; the two types of literary criticism that I had thought were two names for the same type of criticism are actually different.

However, Siegel also goes beyond Derrida and Eagleton to include other critics who left their own imprints on poststructuralism, including Foucault, Barthes, Baudrillard, Cixous, de Man, Miller, Lacan, and Johnson, many of whom helped to form poststructuralism before Derrida.  Siegel also includes the definitions of terms that we did not go over in Literary Criticism: terms such as “Aporia,” or textual contradictions, “Différance,” or the idea that words are always defined by other words , “Erasure,” or a lack of one correct meaning, Logocentrism, or the idea that, like our government, law, politics, literature, etc., is based on one universal set of ideas, “Supplement,” or the enhancer of a complete idea that is not a complete idea in itself, “Trace,” or the idea that a word is not only what it is, but also “traces” of what it is not, and “Transcendental Signifier,” or the one idea set at the heart of logocentrism—terms that can be helpful when completing our casebooks professionally. 

As for the topic of deconstruction, Jack M. Balkin of Yale University provides an accessible explanation of this type of criticism’s origin in Europe with Derrida and its further development in the United States and in Europe.  He discusses the idea that deconstruction allows the critic to make “texts mean whatever a person wants them to mean,” an idea that, according to him, is especially prevalent in the United States.  If not within the United States, then certainly within our class, for when we first began to study this form of criticism along with poststructuralism, we were, and may still find ourselves to be skeptics. 

Balkin goes on to suggest that deconstruction is now used in many areas other than in literary criticism.  He, for instance, uses deconstruction while examining legal texts and even cases.  Because he is involved with this type of criticism in this way, he writes:

“Deconstruction does not show that all texts are meaningless, but rather that they are overflowing with multiple and often conflicting meanings. Similarly, deconstruction does not claim that concepts have no boundaries, but that their boundaries can be parsed in many different ways as they are inserted into new contexts of judgment.”

In other words, he uses deconstruction to help him win a case, prove a law is unconstitutional, help out his client, and do his job.  This text helped to show me that deconstruction is now used by some in a practical manner.  This idea reminds me of the movie Liar, Liar, in which the protagonist, who is a lawyer, cannot tell a lie for a day, but must help his client to win a divorce case.  In the end, he realizes that she was married to her husband illegally, and therefore should be entitled to the money and is able to keep their children, even though she is a terrible mother and the children would rather stay with their father.  This example can be looked at from two different angles, both of which can be proven by evidence.   When deconstructed the husband and wife can be seen as good vs. evil if the husband is supported, but when the law is taken into consideration, the roles flip. Because the world around us is so complex, we sometimes need to look at it in the equally complex manner that can be found within the realm of deconstruction.

However, as interesting and possibly practical as these two types of criticism are, I do not think that I can really believe in them.  On one of my previous blogs, I wrote that as I began to think about the idea of the “transcendental signifier,” my first impulse was to disagree with it, and I knew the reason I disagreed with it was because the lack of a transcendental signifier would basically imply that God does not exist.  Of course, this sort of idea can be expected in a theory that is so entrenched in philosophy, as Jack M. Balkin of Yale University suggests in his essay entitled “Deconstruction,” since philosophy is a subject that requires a person to question society’s beliefs in every area, not just religious ones.  Greta also brings up opposition to Post-modernism for similar reasons.  On my previous blog, I mentioned the idea that all healthy newborns are able to utter every sound in every language.  Although I could not find an online academic source to prove this idea, I did discuss this in child development courses.  However, I instead found other proof that indirectly suggests the existence of a transcendental signifier.  In a study entitled “The Role of Early Language Experience in the Development of Speech Perception and Language Processing Abilities in Children with Hearing Loss” by Susan Nittrouer and Lisa Thuente Burton, the authors discuss the idea that deaf children can also develop speech.  Although the authors believed that deaf children would not be able to develop speech, they write in their abstract, “Contrary to predictions, however, the performance of roughly half the children was comparable to that of the children with normal hearing.”  They write that only “mature speech” was delayed.  Other studies suggest similar ideas, while others (type in something like “speech development in infants” into EBSCOhost and you will see what I mean) suggest that these studies are inconclusive.  Just as no one can prove the absence of a transcendental signifier, no one can prove the reality of one either.  However, I find it fascinating that science, law, philosophy, and literature can be so closely intertwined with one another as to prove, disprove, and aid in the understanding of one another.