6 - From Textuality to Materiality

Summary

Among the postulates of deconstruction that we presented in Chapter 5 was the following:

5. In a society or culture, discourses and explanatory narratives become dominant by repressing counterdiscourses, narratives, and voices that they cannot assimilate. Deconstructive readings attempt to elicit these unwanted “other” stories and show how they haunt the official discourse and thus undo its supposed coherence and inevitability.

We added that “the political efficacy of deconstructive reading strategies (and their link to Marxism, feminism, and other directly sociopolitical forms of criticism) rests on a claim that these strategies can help shake dominant discourses by revealing their repressed contradictions.” Among the issues to which we now turn is the extent to which such claims of political efficacy can be justified.

If they think nothing else about it, media detractors of deconstruction believe that it is politically armed and dangerous. In the preceding chapter, we attempted to defuse some of the polemics and dispel some of the misapprehensions that have long surrounded deconstruction. We ended by agreeing, however, that the deconstructive argument that linguistic meaning is self-divided, performative, and interested “inevitably returns us to politics.” Texts indeed become political, we suggested, when their meanings are understood not to be natural, stable, or simply “there,” but instead determined, and thus “produced,” by particular cultural interests and institutional circumstances, by the clash of social discourses and interpretive systems.