SEMIOTICS AND DECONSTRUCTION THEORIES

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Malang,      December 2014

Writer

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

For linguistics in the 1960s-80s, the research paradigm remained mainly at the level of sentences and phrases, and until recently was not as concerned with additional levels of cultural meaning surrounding sentences, large bodies of discourse, or the formal units of written cultural genres. Many forms of discourse studies, sociolinguistics, and semantics are part of the field of linguistics today. French and European semiology adapted Saussure's linguistic model for analysis of larger cultural formations (especially for the study of literature, anthropology, and popular culture). Unfortunately, Anglo-American and European disciplinary identities and boundaries have separated the research agendas and starting premises in areas of common concern (how human cultures use language and all kinds of meaning-systems and communicate meanings across space and time), though there are now many areas of cross-disciplinary research with many areas open for new convergence.

Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of “deconstruction” in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. “Deconstruction” became a banner for the advance guard in American literary studies in the 1970s and 80s, scandalizing departments of English, French, and comparative literature. Deconstruction rejected the project of modern criticism: to uncover the meaning of a literary work by studying the way its form and content communicate essential humanistic messages. Deconstruction, like critical strategies based on Marxism, feminism, semiotics, and anthropology, focuses not on the themes and imagery of its objects but rather on the linguistic and institutional systems that frame the production of texts.

In Derrida’s theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. Western culture since Plato, Derrida argues, has been governed by such oppositions as reality/representation, inside/outside, original/copy, and mind/body. The intellectual achievements of the West its science, art, philosophy, literature have valued one side of these pairs over the other, allying one side with truth and the other with falsehood.

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

1.      The Focus of Semiotics and Deconstruction Theories

Semiotics is the theory of the production and interpretation of meaning. Semiotics is the theory and study of signs and symbols, especially as elements of language or other systems of communication, and comprising semantics, syntactic, and pragmatics. Semiotics can be used to manipulate any type of art or communication, either in writing or built by using different type of imagery. Semiotics may be considered difficult, as it implements the use of signs to explain other signs, ultimately creating a story in an image, with or without words.

Deconstruction is a method of textual analysis and investigation emerging from the works of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and 1970s. Deconstruction can be defined as a way of understanding how something was created, usually things like art, books, poems and other writing. Deconstruction is usually known as a theory used in the study of literature or philosophy which says that a piece of writing does not have just one meaning and that the meaning depends on the reader. Sometimes deconstruction looks at how an author can imply things he does not mean. It says that because words are not precise, we can never know what an author meant.

a.      The Focus of Semiotics Theory

General Semiotics tends to be formalistic, abstracting signs from the contexts of use; Social Semiotics takes the meaning-making process, "semiosis", to be more fundamental than the system of meaning-relations among signs, which are considered only the resources to be deployed in making meaning. Semiotics that focuses on our relation to language and the manner in which this relationship manipulates our conception of reality. This principle is the basis of structuralism, an approach to language which focuses on the patterns or structures that generate meaning rather than on the ‘content’ of a given code or custom.

Semiotics focuses mainly on units of meaning and the generalizable conditions for encoding across symbolic systems (linguistic, visual, auditory), and, in general, uses language as the modeling system for other "second order" systems that function according to systematic rules (e.g., visual art, music, literature, popular media, advertising, or any meaning system). We now have methods for merging the "generative" approach of linguistics with the "networks of meaning" approach in semiotics. The next step is to develop models for a "generative grammar" and "generative semiotics" of culture, describing the rules for producing new cultural forms from our established base of meaning and content systems (in language, images, music, digital mixed media, or any transmittable cultural genre). The models developed by Peirce and Bakhtin have allowed for new research on this central question.

b.      The Focus of Deconstruction Theory

Sometimes deconstructive analyses closely study the figural and rhetorical features of texts to see how they interact with or comment upon the arguments made in the text. The deconstructor looks for unexpected relationships between different parts of a text or loose threads that at first glance appear peripheral yet often turn out to undermine of confuse the argument. A deconstructor may consider the multiple meanings of key words in a text, etymological relationships between words, and even puns to show how the text speaks with different (and often conflicting) voices. 

Deconstructive readings focus intently, obsessively on the metaphors writers use to make their points. Their purpose is to demonstrate, through comparisons of a work's arguments and its metaphors, that writers contradict themselves not just occasionally, but invariably and that these contradictions reflect deep fissures in the very foundations of Western culture. In other words, deconstruction claims to have uncovered serious problems in the way Plato and Hemingway and you and I think about matters ranging from truth and friendship to politics and masturbation.

Method of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from the work of Jacques Derrida that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. Such oppositions are characteristically “binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative; examples include nature/culture, speech/writing, and mind/body. To “deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed in the text and other aspects of the text's meaning, especially its figurative or performative aspects. The deconstruction “displaces” the opposition by showing that neither term is primary; the opposition is a product, or “construction,” of the text rather than something given independently of it. The speech/writing opposition, according to which speech is “present” to the speaker or author and writing “absent,” is a manifestation of what Derrida calls the “logocentrism” of Western culture i.e., the general assumption that there is a realm of “truth” existing prior to and independent of its representation by linguistic signs.

2.      The Views Related to Literary Studies Owned by Each Theory

Both Semiotics and Deconstruction involve close reading of a text or cultural to reveal logical or philosophical inconsistencies in that text, to reveal the assimilation of latent and blatant ideological and/or cultural layers of discourse (which are often incompatible, giving rise to the inconsistencies). Deconstruction is heavily grounded in semiotics and Saussurean structuralism, redefining the nature and function of the sign. Critics at Yale University in the 1970s and 1980s greatly expanded the scope and applications of Deconstruction in literary criticism, with specific regard to style, method, structure, and language. Deconstruction began to take over contemporary American discourse in the 1980s, and while the method has become less common, its effects remain clearly visible. Deconstruction relates to identity construction in the fact that the analysis tends to take the same method of semiotics to look at how ideologies and subsequently identities are built, maintained, and represented.

Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic, deconstruction arose as a response to structuralism and formalism. Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture, including literature, may be understood as parts of a system of signs. Derrida did not believe that structuralists could explain the laws governing human signification and thus provide the key to understanding the form and meaning of everything from an African village to Greek myth to a literary text. He also rejected the structuralist belief that texts have identifiable "centers" of meaning a belief structuralists shared with formalists.

Formalist critics, such as the New Critics, assume that a work of literature is a freestanding, self-contained object whose meaning can be found in the complex network of relations between its parts (allusions, images, rhythms, sounds, etc.). Deconstructors, by contrast, see works in terms of their undecidability. They reject the formalist view that a work of literary art is demonstrably unified from beginning to end, in one certain way, or that it is organized around a single center that ultimately can be identified. As a result, deconstructors see texts as more radically heterogeneous than do formalists. Formalists ultimately make sense of the ambiguities they find in a given text, arguing that every ambiguity serves a definite, meaningful, and demonstrable literary function. Undecidability, by contrast, is never reduced, let alone mastered. Though a deconstructive reading can reveal the incompatible possibilities generated by the text, it is impossible for the reader to decide among them.

3.      The Contributors of Semiotics and Deconstruction Theories

a.      Semiotics

Semiotics is associated with the work of the Americon philosopher, C S Peirce (although its roots are in medieval philosophy) and semiology with the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure Charles Sanders Peirce, who was working with a different theory of semiotics at the end of the 19th century.

The primary contributors to this body of knowledge include Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Sanders Peirce, Roman Jakobson, Susanne Langer and more recently Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida.

b.      Deconstruction

In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and 1970s, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson. History of Deconstruction Rene Descartes (1596- 1650) and Fredrick Nietzsche (1844-1900) were pioneers in deconstruction. They began to question the objective truth of language. This is also known as Poststructuralist, this criticism came after structuralism.

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION

            Understanding both semiotics and deconstruction is one of the most importance to the artist. In creating new pieces and interpreting other artists’ works, it is important to dully understand the significance of varying symbols. Likewise, understanding the process of deconstruction will equip the artist with further techniques and abilities in the creation of new art. The artist must understand how semiotics and deconstruction function in the psyche of his or her audience in order to effectively convey their own work.

 

REFERENCES

Meyer, C. F. (2009). English Linguistics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

http://www.utwente.nl/cw/theorieenoverzicht/Theory%20clusters/Public%20Relations,%20Advertising,%20Marketing%20and%20Consumer%20Behavior/Semiotic_Theories/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_%28semiotics%29

https://www.typotheque.com/articles/deconstruction_and_graphic_design_history_meets_theory