In terms of lit or movies.
As far as I can tell it is a really big word for talking about something. Does it mean that or is it more?
textual analysis method: a method of analyzing texts based on the ideas that language is inherently unstable and shifting and that the reader rather than the author is central in determining meaning.
It was introduced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s.
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So, you want to put that in english?
Is it basically looking at it without historical perspective? Like Shakespeare is anti-feminist with all the arranged marriages and really lack of female characters?
As written, it means that you, the audience, gets to decide what the movie means, not the auteur/director.
Basically, the idea is that because of the shifting nature of language, what movie X means to the director is not necessarily what it means to the audience (who have different understandings of the filmic language among other things) and is not necessarily what it means to you or I.
Because of this, there is no way that the text can convey a single, discreet message to everyone who sees it.
It’s also often used in another sense: that of someone rearranging elements of a given genre to point out limitations of that genre or comment on the adherence to set stories/themes, etc. Say Sergio Leone deconstructs the Western. Here, it could mean that the director is taking elements of a standard Western and putting the opposite character in (for instance, a villain who acts like a typical villain but is actually a sherriff, a character who fits the standard generic conventions of a hero, but really isn’t, etc.). By doing this, he might be trying to comment on the fact that the sheriff in a standard Western really is just a bully with a badge and under other circumstances, might be a villain so you shouldn’t think of him as a hero just because he has a badge, etc.
These things drive film students mad.
Yes, Slick, you’re basically so right. It just scares people.
The important point is that: “analyze” does not equal “deconstruct”
This is the number one error in popular thinking.
To “deconstruct” something is very different than to “analyze” something [ala the “New School”].
The point is: “DECONSTRUCT” does not equal “ANALYZE”
Maybe you’re confused by the Let’s Deconstruct The Breakfast Club discussion in Cafe forum (sorry–don’t know how to post a link). But that OP was not really deconstruction as I’ve come accross it. As others have described, deconstruction is looking beyond the work for the meaning. Usually this method, where the reader gets to define the meaning, ends up as a look “behind” the text and describes “why” the author wrote what he wrote based on historical analysis or some ciritical theory.
For example, I thought the typical entry in deconstructing The Breakfast Club would be like “Film-maker was being autobiographical with the nerd’s role, and the Ali Sheedy character’s dandruff problem was a way for him to come to grips with his own psoraisis. Also, the jock’s taping-of the butt-cheeks prank is clearly suppressed homo-eroticism stemming from film-maker’s childhood unrequited love of X. And the references to Bender’s smoking illustrate the film-maker’s misunderstanding of the relationship between class and physical self-loathing.”
That kinda stuff.
(Certainly there is more benign deconstruction, as the previous posters allude to, but as to the difference between deconstruction and “just talking about” a work, I hope this this is illustrative)
In other words it means that when Derrida writes a treatise on deconstruction I, and not Derrida, get to decide what he actually wrote. And having seen a few examples of his prose I say that he wrote nonsense.
Wait, I’m confused. Are you saying that deconstructing something is the same as analyzing it?
Deconstruction can be regarded in three ways.
With regard to literature and literary criticism, deconstruction aims to bring out and comment on certain qualities of a given text, or a genre, or the work of a given author or school, by studying its underlying construction, with particular focus on those aspects which are non-obvious, or which rely for their function on values or assumptions shared by author and reader (although the reader may not realise this).
With regard to literary and artistic creativity, deconstruction in simple terms goes like this: (1) take a given genre, (2) deconstruct it to see how it is usually put together and how it works, (3) take this ‘template’ and purposefully tamper with it or modify the elements with a view to creating something that will resemble the original but be distinct from it, thereby (a) creating fresh work and (b) making some sort of comment on the source.
A very accessible example is to get hold of an album called ‘Songs to Remember’ by Scritti Politti. All the tracks are recognisably ‘pop’ songs, and are put together using many familiar elements of what we think of as ‘pop’ music. And yet none of the tracks fully conform to the usual pattern… in every track there is at least one departure from the norm or a confounding of trad expectations, which comes across as playful, creative and inventive. (Example: the lyrics to one entire song consist of the phrase ‘My…’ followed by one of the singer’s personal qualities, all building up to the climactic line ‘Like lions out to slumber, keep unvanquishable number’, which is a variation on a line by Shelley.)
A lot of ‘deconstruction’ and the criticism spawned by it is often perceived as the worst kind of aimless philosophical drivel, which gives rise to the third way of looking at it: as a contemptuous term indicating that someone is wasting a lot of their time and ours by waffling on at great length about nothing very much, and isn’t it time they found something a bit more useful to do?
This thread was slightly inspired by the Breakfast Club thread but I’ve been wondering for a while as I hear the term used often and in usually different ways.
I thought it was about the ‘breaking down into parts’ sort of thing but they way the term is used in public is confusing.
Thanks.
Zebra:
Usually, no, they don’t 
The real idea of “deconstructing” begins with the idea that we tend to use “constructs” to think about stuff and to communicate — big complex ideas chock-full of historical connotations, emotional associations, implicit value judgments, equivocations and assumptions and so forth that we use like solid blocks of established fact.
Examples: “discrimination”, “terrorist”, “effeminate”, “moral values”
To “deconstruct” something that someone says or writes might mean identifying some of those solid-block concepts and open them up, unpack them, examine the way they are used to assert stuff without having to back it up and defend it directly, and so forth.
Meanwhile, historically speaking, the vast majority of people using the word deconstruction to describe what they were doing over the last 2 decades have been poststructuralists, many of whom were not trying to clarify so much as win arguments using language as a weapon rather than as a tool. They were pretty open about that: they see every possible communication-space as a “discourse”, the locus of a power struggle, and seeing themselves as up against the Structured Establishment of Historically Entrenched Power they are rather realpolitic-flavored in their attitude towards dominating each discourse. Using phrases full of polysyllables that no one can parse for the explicit purpose of obfuscation is a tactic. Arguing against all meaning, making every possible meaning of anything a choice that is never better than some alternative choice is another tactic (used primarily to destroy existing standards…remember, they’re up against the Structured Establishment and therefore up against existing Standards). Many of them are arrogant bastards, as you’d expect from a group blatantly seeking to twist any exchange of ideas to secure the outcome they want.
As a consequence, “deconstruction” (and “poststructuralist”) are now constructs of their own, with their own baggage of connotations and associations, most of them well-earned.
Cafe Atlantico in DC serves “deconstructed clam chowder” consisting of separately served raw clams, a clam gelatin, a cold potato mousse, with a sorbet of onion and cream infused with bacon.
Here’s a half-humorous take on the subject: How to deconstruct practically anything.
Touchè, Tyrrell. I felt the need to be repetitive because the term is tossed about so much.
Derrida was not a literary critic; he was a philosopher. And philosophers can get away with just about anything. Paradigms for philosophy, literary or film criticism are usually instigated by physics. Physicists are the true pioneers in cultural discourse. Just look at chaos theory.
For those who think that “deconstructionism” is nonsense, you might want to see how you go about your daily life. If you drive by a billboard sign, which says something provocative, you aren’t going to take it at face value. You’re going to ask yourself: “Who paid for this billboard? Why is it here on this particular street? Why did they put it up at this particular time?” Surprise!: you’re now a deconstructionist.
If you pause in your work to consider the ramifications of the feminine mystique and the artificiality of modern standards of beauty in society (as opposed to simply hooting at her ta-tas), are you a deconstruction worker?
Wait a second! Wouldn’t that be an example of “reverse engineering?”
Yes, well done. That’s exactly what he was saying.
We need not consider Guizot’s own views upon what the text means. His or hers will merely be another view and not the view. Although a literal reading of guizot’s text may lend itself to a multiplicity of meaning one must be remember that the text itself concentrates primarily on subjective experience. By allowing the text to define itself, and indeed deconstruct itself, a sense of self propulsion is engendered. Guizot’s text is simultaneously both superficial and open to deeper interpretation.
I propose that the text is the result of the a nebulous interplay between an autonomous phenomenology and a shared value system. The resultant conflict leads to a gestalt innovation that gains its value relationally rather than directly incurring such relationships form any socio-political Zeitgeist.
Analysis itself does not progress in a linear fashion, but is instead the end result of an interplay between regression and progresison, and indeed between evolution and devolution. With that in mind the text is able to be read obliquely, by allusion, and thus the separation between analysis and deconstruction ceases to be inevitable.
The archetypal may be fundamentally an act of separating material into component parts. However Guizot’s text does not accept that analysis in itself instead the text is introducing an entirely new paradigm. Instead the text argues for a liberatory analysis based upon non-static ontological categories and hierarchies. Within such a narration denial of the link between analysis and deconstruction is contingent upon a naïve realism.
We need not consider Guizot’s own views upon what the text means. His or hers will merely be another view and not the view. Instead any imagic representation demands that the text is the result of the a nebulous interplay between an autonomous phenomenology and a shared value system. The resultant conflict leads to a gestalt innovation that gains its value relationally rather than directly incurring such relationships form any socio-political Zeitgeist.
So in conclusion the text not only calls into question traditional distinctions of deconstruction/ analysis, it demands that in any shared tradition of structuralism analysis transcends any methodological pedagogical articulation and reconstitutes itself to produce an overt disavowal of any theorisation of the power problematisation through reductionism. A synchronic analyses of the structures of “analysis” and “deconstruction” then simultaneously produces a signature of both terms within the textual practice that renders them indistinguishable.
Thus Guizot is saying that deconstructing something is the same as analyzing it.
OK, the preceding post is mostly taking the mickey. (Hands up all those who waded through the entire first paragraph trying to make sense of it before they caught on?)
However it does highlight an important point, which is that if you accept deconstruction as a method that has more than niche applicability it becomes useless to ask someone what they meant. Their meaning is whatever message you received. If you believe that Guizot was saying that deconstruction and analysis are the same then they are indeed the same. He/she may not have intended you to receive that meaning, but because of the constructs within the post (not least the constructs “ analysis” and “deconstruction”) you received that meaning at the time you read it. As a result that is what Guizot meant, even if it’s not what they intended it to mean.
Ding Ding Ding we have a winner!