A contemporary intellectual current, especially in philosophy, literary theory, and criticism, which (among many other things) tests the rigor of established hierarchies so central to Western thought and culture.
For example, in the oppositions: work/play, spirit/body; presence/absence; signifier/signified; speaking/writing; it is generally accepted that one of the two sides is more important. That is, higher in the opposition hierarchy.
Of course, it is important to note that the complete elimination of hierarchies is impossible, because every time we choose to do one thing instead of another, we place it at a higher level (prioritize it over the unselected). It is important to note, again, that semiological theories often simplify the things they try to explain, thus changing their essence.
This text explains the point of view of Deconstructionism. It is not, like any other one-sided position, an explanation of “the world, the meaning of life and everything else.”
For many of us, signs are just ways of representing objects to show something to the mind that could not otherwise be represented.
Using words and gestures (i.e., linguistic and other signs), I am talking about a storm that you have not seen. I’ve been there and you haven’t. So you need a verbal presentation of the event. From such cases, it can be concluded that the signs are irrelevant, while the reality they speak of is the only one that has value and meaning.
Jacques Derrida tests what he calls the metaphysics of presence. The view is that apart from the signs there are things or events that could be presented to the mind.
In Western culture, a world other than the world of signs is traditionally privileged. In response to George Berkeley’s statement Esse est percipi (“To be, means to be accepted”), Samuel Johnson kicks a stone and says, “That’s how I disprove it.”
The same impulse is often portrayed as a reaction to the deconstructivist statement that “Nothing exists outside the text” or “All signifiers, in turn, become signified.” The point of these claims that there are no absolutely solid and unshakable objects, it seems, is that they represent gigantic violence against common sense. But Johnson’s action of kicking the stone is meant to show something that Berkeley’s alleged position could capture. For Johnson’s contemporary opponents of deconstructivism, there is indeed a world different from that of signs. This is the world whose presence we encounter immediately when we kick the stone or something surprises us.
There is also a world for deconstructivists, but it opposes us, first and foremost as a text, as an endless chain of signs in which the game of meanings constantly rejects the possibility of fixing, once and for all, meaning (and thus reference) of each sign.
The desire for transcendental meaning makes us stand for the world as a text. The desire to escape the labyrinth of language is the same as the desire to come into direct contact with the transcendental signified. At the present time, nothing more needs to be said about such a significant thing, nothing can be seen (or felt) anymore. But here the defenders of deconstruction can turn to our common intuition. Doesn’t it always happen that there is still something to be said, a new interpretation or a metaphor to be suggested? And don’t these new words support our vision, sharpen and deepen our perceptions and sensibilities? Aren’t those who would stop the game of signifiers limited and even tyrannical? Do they not inflate the authority of public thought and even of those imprisoned, meaning in narrowly delineated cells?
We could not be just the obvious act of volitional or intellectual skill in one language or any other sign system that means nothing, rather every sentence, text, or sign process always means more and even something different. which the speaker had in mind or could have imagined.
To reveal the subsurface and complex ways in which the text turns and underestimates itself – to explore the ways in which the text self-destructs is the main task of deconstructivist critics.
