I find myself still contemplating the idea of deconstruction. I think I understand on the surface what it means. I just can’t stop thinking about the implications of it in a more metaphorical sense.
It helps me to think of deconstructionism as viewing words like puzzle pieces. Each puzzle piece holds a little bit of information, but it only means something when it connects to another puzzle piece, and that one to another, and another, and so on. This is understandable to me. Except you’re not putting together a complete puzzle; there is no complete puzzle. You just have the text: a box full of puzzle pieces. It presents no one true meaningful satisfying picture at the end. The puzzle pieces are signifiers and the “whole” puzzle is the signified. The signifiers give each other meaning in that you can tell each puzzle piece is distinct from the next, but the whole picture is ambiguous. There is no universal picture uniting the puzzle pieces except that they all came from the same box and are meant to fit together. You can interpret the whole puzzle in any way you want, but those interpretations will contradict each other, and ultimately, the puzzle will fall apart.
Deconstructionism, to me, appears to say that any meaning set up by a text will inevitably fall apart into nothing, net zero. And as life is one big text, life falls apart into nothing, too. I don’t know how to feel about that.
Wow! I was still a little shaky on deconstruction but you provided a really nice metaphor to explain it but its also a little depressing. In a way, I feel like the idea of deconstruction kinda deconstructs itself.
I was also still a bit confused about the concept of deconstruction. This is a clever metaphor to use and I think if we would’ve talked about it in a less “theoretical” way it would have been clearer. I also agree with Dillan that the end is somewhat depressing, but other than that nice work!!
I liked how you took the idea of deconstruction in literature and applied it to life. I want to think that, as literature does, there is always a reason why someone might do a sure thing, which I think you got the idea across. My critique is that halfway through when you talk about the puzzle box, it gets a little repetitive, which can be tricky to read and keep a train of thought. But, to think about the section with deconstruction and the purpose of the repetition, I think it does an excellent job of poking fun at deconstruction.
I don’t pretend to understand deconstruction completely, but if I had to explain it, I would relate it to binary oppositions. Binaries are useful ways to discuss features of reality, but as features of human language, they are never accurate. Hot and cold, for example, are helpful to understand the relative heat of something. Like instructing someone to avoid a hot stove. But understood in perfect scope, just the words hot and cold are worthless. We need numbers and nuance to actually understand temperature. Even Kelvin, the measuring system which fully accounts for absolute zero, avoids the understanding that heat is really the ratio of motion of molecules. (Not an official definition I am not a physicist)
Deconstruction is a process that acknowledges binaries, takes them apart, steps back, and asks how we got here.
So I do not see the process as you do, it seems. Though there is still some overlap. I’ve always understood Postmodern philosophy as an understanding that both centers and discredits language as reality. It emphasizes the distance between language’s real and Reality’s Real.
I am probably wrong on some level, but these heuristics got me an A on my last english paper. If you want to start a Derrida book club, I will buy everyone both an English and French edition of Grammatology.