Okay, I'm about to get all theoretical on your ass, so make sure you've braced yourself and you know the locations of your nearest emergency exits.
I don't think of myself as a 'fan' of literary theory. It's useful as a method of analysis, primarily of texts (as a job), but of all kinds of other stuff, too. Considering I'm in pop culture, it's only logical that I should be able to turn this stuff on anything, a movie, a comicbook, the design of a desk, the place-mat at a taco restaurant, whatever. Theory just isn't a useful expenditure of my time and energy unless it gives me a new tool of analysis, or it shows me what my analytical tools already were, and here emerges my point.
According to John Storey's three-page run down of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, I'm a deconstructionist structuralist, which is either a fantastic innovation for which money, tenure-track jobs, and adoring fans (or at least the middle one) will be reigned upon me, or it's a huge, gaping contradiction in my analytical approach.
The classic example of deconstruction is not letting binaries be. Deconstructionists, including myself, just don't like them. The binary structure is too fixed, to falsely self-evident for us, and it's usually based on shoring up a very specific power structure. The easiest example is male/female. Keeping those two things oppositional, and defining them in particular ways, supports the patriarchy.
If we have a problem with that, we have two choices as to what to do about it. We can either work to show that women are 'just as strong as' men, 'just as smart as,' etc. However, doing so merely supports the binary itself. We're still defining women against men. Our other choice is to try to disassemble the binary itself, show that the two things are not inherently seperate, that the definitions we use for them are arbitrary, basically lay bare the mechanisms that support the binaries, and the mechanisms that the binaries support.
However, to do so presupposes a social structure that is consistent, that has structures of power that work in a certain way. Basically, it presumes that society itself functions like a big machine, allowing certain kinds of discourse and disallowing others (hello M. Foucault). But the belief that there's an underlying mechanism to the whole system is structuralist, non?
That leaves me kinda between worlds. I like the deconstructionist method of looking at the world, "don't accept systems as they're presented, always question the system itself," but deconstructionism allies itself with post-structuralism, which doesn't like the very idea of an underlying structure. Both are based on the idea that the systems are constructs, that language itself (percieved as the building-block of all social systems) is in (according to Derrida), infinite deferal.
So where the hell does that leave me?
Posted by orion at October 29, 2005 2:14 PM