Page 43 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
view that certain texts (scientific, philosophical, or historical) are
more reputable than stories and fictions. All texts, he maintains,
are equally questionable because all texts inevitably provide
subjective, partial and fragmentary versions of reality. No text,
however objective it may claim to be, depicts the world as it is. All
texts, moreover, are riven by internal contradictions: a piece of
writing intended to prove a certain truth always contains elements
which contradict its main argument. Deconstructing a text consists
of recognizing and highlighting its internal incongruities. Although
the verb 'to deconstruct' is often colloquially employed as if it
meant 'to pull apart', this usage is incorrect. Derrida is not
encouraging us to pull texts apart but actually inviting us to
identify ways in which texts dismantle themselves through their
own inconsistencies, ambiguities, paradoxes, silences and gaps.
Deconstruction is not something one does to a text. Rather, it is
something which the text has always already done to itself.
In conclusion, Structuralism could be described as a unifying
system which seeks to map out scientifically a broad spectrum of
cultural phenomena according to the model of language. It
acknowledges the arbitrariness of the processes through which
signs acquire their meanings, yet believes that fundamental linguis-
tic rules are universal and universally applicable. In the context of
Poststructuralism, reality is not only a linguistic construct but also
an unstable concept. Language incessantly shapes and reshapes
the world in a baffling variety of ways, which indicate that the
signs through which history, philosophy, literature and human
subjectivity itself are constructed are always open to freeplay.

26