Page 37 - Culture and Cultural Studies

36 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

frameworks of understanding and rules of reference about the way the social order is
constructed. In doing so they supply answers to the question: How shall we live?
Stories take different forms and utilize a variety of characters, subject matters and nar-
rative structures (or ways of telling a story). However, structuralist theory has concerned
itself with the common features of story formation. According to Todorov (1977), narra-
tive minimally concerns the disruption of an equilibrium and the tracing of the conse-
quences of said disruption until a new equilibrium is achieved. For example, an
established soap opera couple are shown in a loving embrace as a prelude to the later
revelation that one of them is having an affair. The question is posed: Will this spell the
end of the relationship? A good deal of talk, emotion and explanation takes place before
the characters are either reconciled or go their separate ways. Soap opera is the name of
a genre. Genres structure the narrative process and contain it; they regulate it in particu-
lar ways using specific elements and combinations of elements to produce coherence and
credibility. Genre thus represents systemizations and repetitions of problems and solu-
tions in narratives (Neale, 1980).

Deconstruction Deconstructionism is associated with Derrida’s ‘undoing’ of the bina-
ries of western philosophy and the extension of this procedure into the fields of lit-
erature (e.g. De Man) and postcolonial theory (e.g. Spivak). To deconstruct is to take
apart, to undo, in order to seek out and display the assumptions of a text. In particu-
lar, deconstruction involves the dismantling of hierarchical conceptual oppositions
such as man/woman, black/white, reality/appearance, nature/culture, reason/madness,
etc. Such binaries are said to ‘guarantee’ truth by excluding and devaluing the ‘inferior’
part of the binary. Thus, speech is privileged over writing, reality over appearance,
men over women.
The purpose of deconstruction is not simply to reverse the order of binaries but to
show that they are implicated in each other. Deconstruction seeks to expose the blind-
spots of texts, the unacknowledged assumptions upon which they operate. This includes
the places where a text’s rhetorical strategies work against the logic of a text’s arguments.
That is, the deconstruction seeks to expose the tension between what a text means to say
and what it is constrained to mean.
One of the central problems faced by the process of deconstruction is that it must use
the very conceptual language it seeks to undo. For example, to deconstruct western phi-
losophy is to use the very language of western philosophy. To mark this tension, Derrida
places his concepts under erasure. To place a word under erasure is first to write the word
and then to cross it out, leaving both the word and its crossed-out version. As Spivak
explains: ‘Since the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains
legible’ (1976: xiv). The use ‘under erasure’ of accustomed and known concepts is
intended to destabilize the familiar. As such it marks it as useful, necessary, inaccurate and
mistaken. Thus does Derrida seek to illuminate the undecidability of meaning.

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