Chapter Deconstruction Assumptions of Critical Theory 4: Deconstruction by Literary Criticism

in, or implicit in, signification and textuality. Take, for example, the sorts of conflict Jonathan Culler suggests in On Deconstruction that the critic is on the lookout for:

1. The asymmetrical opposition or value-laden hierarchy (e.g. host and parasite, logocentrism and nihilism) in which one term is promoted at the expense of the other. The second term can be shown to constitute or signal the condition for the first, and the hierarchy up-turned (this is not a simple reversal, as the reversal is then in the condition of reversibility, and so forth).

2. Points of condensation, where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets of values (and hostilities to hosts hosting the Host).

3. The text will be examined for ways in which it suggests a difference from itself, interpretations which undermine the apparently primary interpretation. Figures of self- reference occur when a text applies to something else a description, figure or image which can be read as a self-description, an image of its own operations. This opens up an examination of the stability and cogency of the text itself. An example of self- reference is in the vines and parasites in place of the erased (i.e. under erasure) antique and learned imagery of Shelley's "Epipsychidion". In Miller's "The Critic as Host," the natural images are themselves an image for and replacement for (every image of is also a replacement for) the tracing of writing, which is itself the writing that constitutes the poem; the images of the poem themselves attempt to naturalize what cannot be naturalized. Writing itself, in a recuperation in which the act of naturalizing reveals itself as an ancient strategy of meaning, so the imagery is an image of itself. Conflicting readings of a texts can be see as re-enactments of conflicts within a text, so that readings can be read as partializing moves simplifying the complex interplay of potential meaning within the text.

4. Attention to the marginal, and that which supplements - as with hierarchized oppositions, the margin in fact encompasses or enables the rest, so that a marginalized figure, idea, etc. can be re-read as the 'centre', or controlling element; similarly the supplement re-centres and re-orients that which it supplements, as the fact of supplementing reveals the inadequacy, the partiality/incompleteness of the supplemented item.

The deconstructive activity is ceaseless. It can never be resolved in a dialectic (that is, there is no synthesis), but is 1) always reaching back to a pattern of operations, antitheses, displacements and so forth, each 'behind', or 'before', or logically, ontologically, referentially, hierarchically, temporally or semantically or etymologically, etc, 'prior to' the other, and 2) alternating between the poles of antitheses or opposite.

Like the form of mathematics called topography, deconstruction studies surfaces, as there are no depths, however firmly we may think we see them: there are only twists, (con)figurations, (re)visions.