Deconstruction

Stephen C. Hicks

Deconstruction is the process of undoing the social constructions that poststructuralism argues are merely contingent and not fundamental organizing structures, and that structuralism claims are the preverbal deep polarities involved in all human organization. To structuralism, these structures and their relationships between parts and wholes give primary order and sense to the raw unmediated world. Poststructuralism suggests that any such organization is not deep, organic, or natural but, rather, socially constructed by forces with agendas to further. Thus, any definitive signification is suspect and founded not on certain or stable points beyond contention but only on assumed natural, social, or human facts. To the extent that the content of such structures is of value and is knowable, poststructuralism tries to decipher the meaning of the world of experience and its assumptions. However, deconstruction focuses on the signifier as such, not on its content. The aim is to see how texts ...

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