The debate between structuralism and deconstruction.

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Deconstruction

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty told Alice, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master-that's all."
 (1)

Deconstruction can be seen as a long commentary on this conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. It represents a way of thinking about language, meaning, reading, politics, culture, institutions and the aims of scholarly endeavour.

Deconstruction has the usual problems of definition. Part of the problem with defining or describing deconstruction is that one of its claims is that definitions or descriptions are never correct. They are always deceptions-constructions of truth which can be shown to be deficient at certain points. Deconstruction is a way of reading or interpreting texts which seeks not to discover what they mean, but why they can't mean what we think they mean. Deconstruction amounts to a denial that we can ever have a metaphysics. In other words, any discourse which is based upon a system (or an 'arch', in Derrida's terms) will fall short of its ambition, break down, and another system will rise out of its ruins. Deconstruction is an unusual form of rhetorical criticism which persuades the reader of the inadequacies of language to express anything true about the real world. deconstructionist's claim is that the language we use to make distinctions never holds true-it is never powerful or precise enough. We see this by examining the language closely. Culler gives an example (which he has taken from Nietzsche) of this type of analysis. (3) He considers the statement: "A cause is something which produces an effect". The cause is considered logically and temporally prior to the effect. However, in our experience, the cause is only labelled as such after the effect. We sit on a pin; we feel pain; we look for the object which produced the pain. We say the pin has caused the pain, but on another level the pain caused us to discover the pin. We experience this cause-and-effect scenario in the opposite way to how we think about it. Deconstructionists call this a disruption of the rhetoric of causality. It can be said that 'cause' and 'effect' as meaningful words are mutually dependent and not hierarchical. We understand them by each other, in connection with each other, and we use them to describe and explain each other. This is how deconstructionists do their work. They endeavour to find the paradoxes and contradictions and tensions (what Derrida calls the 'aporia') in discourse and to 'deconstruct' them-to pull down the structure which we think holds the language together, and show that it is faulty. Deconstruction uses the discovery of contradictions, in its breakdown of binary opposites, to argue against the concept of contradiction! Derrida is aware of this dilemma. Deconstruction as a method of philosophical enquiry has no moral dimension, since it avoids or defers any 'center'.

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Center & signifier

In order to talk about the center, it has to have a signifier-like the word 'god'. It has to exist in the world of language. the word 'dog' can only be understood by its difference from other words-'not a cat', 'hairy', 'four legs but not a horse', and so on. Its meaning cannot be centralised; it has to be constructed from other signifiers. The difference between these signifiers is what enables meaning. Derrida claims that, because meaning in language is established by differences between signifiers, meaning is actually always deferred. One signifier always leads to another, and ...

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