Deconstruction
Deconstruction is the postmodern belief that each person interprets a text in light of their own experiences, biases, and prejudices.[1] Thus, no text can have the same meaning for all people. A text's message depends entirely upon personal interpretation. Deconstruction holds an individual's interpretation of a text to be more important than the text itself
Deconstruction is a theory of interpretation favored by liberals. [2] The term “deconstruction” was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s.[3]
Deconstruction is applied not only to literature, but to all of reality. Postmodernists claim that reality is constructed by each individual based on their unique ideas, biases, prejudices, etc. Thus, there can be no universal truth because reality is different for each individual.
Contents
Deconstruction in Practice
In an essay entitled "The Death of the Author",[4] Roland Barthes argued that the origin of a text is unimportant, and that only the interpretation of the reader matters. He declared that this personal interpretation frees the text from the tyranny of the intended meaning given it by the author. No matter what a writer writes, or what they mean to say through their writing, their words will never have a universal meaning, and will be understood in a thousand different ways by the readers.
Deconstructionistic thinking has crept stealthily into American public schools. From elementary school, children are encouraged to share "What this story mean to me", rather than searching for the meaning the author intended when he wrote the text. This dangerously teaches children to believe that they can create their own meaning for a text, and even their own version of reality and truth. This relativistic view of meaning has invaded public school classrooms, purporting to encourage "love of literature", while indoctrinating students with postmoderistic ideas.[5]
Deconstruction and Christianity
Deconstruction is hostile to Christianity, and cannot be reconciled with the Christian worldview. The Bible was written with specific meaning and concrete teachings. Christians seek to discover the meaning of God's Word, and apply the Bible's truths to their lives. Deconstruction would render the Bible another meaningless piece of text to be bent into any meaning the reader sees fit.
In addition, Christianity teaches universal truth and ethics, while Deconstruction teaches that universal truth is nonexistent.
Deconstruction and Law
Critical Legal Studies is Deconstruction applied to Law. It involves dissecting and critiquing a law to find its subjective meaning, regardless of what it objectively states. Critical Legal Studies result in a view of law as tool to obtain what one wants. Susan Estich said, "You believe in principle; I believe in politics."[6] Deconstruction endangers law as we know it by rejecting standards of justice derived from religious moral absolutes and using law as a tool to beat political opponents into submission.[7]
Harvard Law School in the late 1970s and 1980s was the home for several tenured professors who became advocates of Critical Legal Studies (or "crits"), such as Professor Duncan Kennedy.[8] By the late 1980s, however, a backlash among more traditional faculty there resulted in the denial of tenure to another adherent of that movement, causing the growth of the movement to halt.
See Also
External links
- Deconstruction Encyclopædia Britannica.
- Deconstruction The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001-07.
References
- ↑ Noebel, David, Understanding the Times (Summit Ministries, Manitou Springs, Colorado 2006) ISBN 978-0936163000.
- ↑ Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu This article is a perfect example of a liberal using deconstruction in his daily life. Jon Rosenblatt was hungry and found himself deconstructing a take-out menu from a local Mexican restaurant. "Before he could decide on an order, he instinctively reduced the flyer to a set of shifting, mutable interpretations informed by the set of ideological biases—cultural, racial, economic, and political—that infect all ethnographic and commercial 'histories.' Rosenblatt woke up a neighbor at 2 am in his deconstructing rage and deduced that "any attempt to establish hierarchies and centralized power according to arbitrary dichotomies of 'right' and 'wrong' behaviors was therefore not only morally and philosophically, but also politically problematic, and, in fact, oppressive."
- ↑ Deconstruction in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.
- ↑ Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, (Aspen 1968)
- ↑ Walter Russell, Playing With Fire www.boundless.org/features
- ↑ Susan Estich in an online letter to Stuart Taylor Jr., www.slate.com/id/3628/entry/23734
- ↑ Noebel, page 312
- ↑ http://duncankennedy.net/legal_history/index.html
