The "True" Meaning Of Deconstruction

Those who know what it means in academia, here's your opportunity to step forward and explain it.

Simple. A Deconstruction is basically taking apart an idea by explaining why elements from it wouldn't work. Thus a Reconstruction is reworking those elements so that the idea works again.

edited 18th Jun '12 8:33:05 AM by AtomJames

Isn't that the TV Tropes meaning of the word? I thought there was another, truer, original, academic meaning?

Thats the only english I recognize it in.

have fun.

Prognosis: I will go through that mess. I will try to sum it up. It will probably present many different uses of the term, and they're probably mutually exclusive. Then I'll come back here, attempt to come up with one definition we can use, and someone will come and tell me I completely missed the point.

Alternately: I skip that part and have the experts tell us directly what they think and what their authorities are.

Do you want me to explain it for you? I can...

Kind of a quick thing here since I'm just on work break and typing on tablet, but:

Deconstruction is basically about breaking everything down and looking at WHY the author put it in the work, look at each chapter, line, word, however far it's broken down, in the context of the story, the setting, the author's other works, the time period and part of the world the author lived in. It's based on the fact that nothing just accidentally shows up in writing (except for actual typos) so everything that's in the work was something that was consciously or subconsciously chosen to be put in by the author.

Why those character traits? Why did the plot go in this direction? Why this word choice for the narration or a piece of dialogue? Questions like that.

So, why was this trope used here?

Furthermore, where deconstruction itself is a process, a literary deconstruction as a fictional work is one that applies the principles of that process to a genre or an idea, then builds a plot, a cast and a setting from that dissection, performing the analysis through the motion of the story. Watchmen is a good example, as is a postmodernist meta-novel like John Barth's Chimera.

You can also use a character or setting as an individual deconstruction of a concept, although that is a tad trickier. A song or another "simple" medium may also be deconstructive if the right logic is applied to its creation (Scritti Politti's "Aretha Franklin (Wood Beez)"), though how the audience perceives it is a different matter.

edited 18th Jun '12 11:13:54 AM by JHM

Not so much just tropes as "everything", and not necessarily Enforced Tropes, since that implies that the author was directly pressures by outside sources, as opposed to it being more concerned with that EVERYTHING in the story is something the author intentionally chose based on some reason.

But yeah, at its basic core it's about asking "Why did the author put X in the story?"

But that's guessing authorial intent... dicey... Plus, I thought the intent didn't matter nowadays?

For some of us it still does.

"Death of the author" does not mean that authorial intent ceases to exist, or even that it is unimportant; rather, it means that the author is not the sole arbiter of interpretation. One could argue that unintentional subtext, for example, may be just as crucial to a full understanding of the work as the author's stated goal, as might historical or socio-cultural context. Furthermore, the essay that gave the concept its name was in and of itself a deconstructionist work, so the point is moot.

You mean it's a work by a deconstructionist author or that the work itself is deconstructing something? And how is deconstructin, by the definition you gave, special? I thought looking at the whys and the hows was the way to do an in-depth analysis. Or maybe it's just that, when I started reading literary analysis, the method had become the default approach?

Also, how does deconstructism relate to post-constructivism? Are they the same thing?

For an explanation of how Barthes' views on critique were deconstructionist in spirit if not in name, I suggest that you read The Other Wiki's articles on the essay and the man himself, but the short answer is that the article itself is basically a deconstructive critique of the entire notion of authorial intent as the arbiter of interpretation. Granted, I do not agree with many of Barthes' more radical conclusions - while no one interpretation may be gospel, narrowing down one's scope to what can be seen as closest to an objective "truth" requires taking intent into account (which, even if truth is never absolute, remains the ideal to seek after) - it is certainly in the Derrida vein: A relentless examination of the intents and preconceptions inherent to criticism itself.

The difference between most formal literary analysis and deconstruction is that the former is rarely so microscopic or abstract in intent. Deconstruction is more about creating more questions than it is answers, leaving it up to the reader of the critique to find their own answers to the conundrums at hand. Deconstruction is, in a word, about absurdity: The absurdity of ideas and the absurdity of believing that one can be sure that one has all the answers.

Also, when you say "post-constructivism," do you mean post-structuralism? If so, then a lot... though they are not one in the same.

edited 18th Jun '12 12:54:08 PM by JHM

Oh. Yeah. I meant to say post-constructivism. [blushes]

Could you expand on what they have in common?

As for absurdity, I don't know, there's a limit to how many questions we can answer, and there's no limit to how many questions we can ask (just keep asking why?), but that doesn't mean that the answers that we do have are invalid. They are inevitably temporary though.

I should point out here that most of these French literary-philosophical movements - Deconstructionism, Letterism, Situationism, Post-Structuralism - had their roots in three very different yet very similar movements: Dada, Surrealism and Existentialism. Despite diverging on specifics, all of these movements ultimately rejected the concept of objective meaning and truth in human existence while embracing egalitarian ideals and radical left-wing politics. From a deconstructionist perspective, the absurd is not bad. Questions may be meaningless, but they are not pointless, and if they lead you to a useful conclusion, all the better.

As to the differences between those two particular ideologies: It's in the names. Post-structuralism is structural, but not so formal as structuralism; deconstructionism is deconstructive, and less structural than post-structuralism. It's all very... rigorous.

edited 18th Jun '12 1:49:43 PM by JHM

That trope is me in a nutshell...

Try this instead of the mess that is the standard English TOW article; http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction

Why am I thinking of Sokka from Avatar The Last Airbender?

There's also our very own Analysis page for Deconstruction, which for some curious reason deals with Derrida's concept rather than what the main article calls "deconstruction."

Actually it addresses it fairly well:

So the way we use it, while legit, is just very very restricted. Which is okay, I guess.

"Shallow" might be another way of describing how it's generally used here. Not that it's worthless.

Well, deep deconstruction sounds like more work than actually writing, so...