-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shag writes "I've never understood what people think is wrong with deconstruction. *shrug*"
There's nothing wrong with it per se. Essentially it is just a technique of close reading. What differentiates it from close reading (l'explication de texte), which was a school room exercise in France and a reactionary lit crit movement in the U.S., is that it blends close reading with a de-natured Marxism. That is, it pretends to include history but only always ultimately to exclude it and to revert to the "text" as the all explanatory methaphor. I could also say something about the wilfully obscurantist language that it chooses and the politically reactionary nature of this choice, but that's an old argument that I don't want to go through again.
Joanna
^^^^^^^ CB: The exclusion of history reflects its roots in Levi-Straussian structuralism.
But Levi-Strauss was dealing with the myths ( "texts") of societies that did not change over tens of thousands of years, i.e. didn't have history; not with modern class based societies with which have histories of class struggle. They were "cold" societies as opposed to modern "hot" societies. The structuralist motto was "plus ca change; plus la meme chose"( The more things change the more they stay the same.) No history. The structure keeps reasserting itself. Levi-Straussian "structures" are metaphors. Group theory algebra deals with "metaphors" also.
In this post-structuralism is still structuralism