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.
