SEMIOTICS AND DECONSTRUCTION THEORIES
SEMIOTICS AND DECONSTRUCTION
THEORIES
This paper is arranged to fulfill ENGLISH
DRAMA class
Lecturer: Dra. Andarwati, MA
By Fitrah Ramadhan / 12320015
English Language and Letters
Department
Faculty of Humanities
Maulana Malik Ibrahim State Islamic
University, Malang
2014/2015
PREFACE
Praise to Allah who has given taufik, guidance, and
inayah so that we all can still move as usual as well as the author so I can
complete the task of English Drama paper entitled “Semiotics and Deconstruction
Theories”. Generally, this paper contains about the competence to be a good
translator.
The paper is organized so that readers can add insight
or expand existing knowledge about formerly being a good translator that we
present in this paper an arrangement of a concise, easy to read and easy to
understand.
The authors also wish to express many thanks to his
teammates and the lecturer who has guided the authors in order to make authors
of scientific paper in accordance with the provisions in force so that it
becomes a scientific paper is good and right.
Hopefully, this paper can be useful for readers and
expanding horizons about the theories of Semiotics and Deconstruction in details.
And do not forget also the authors’ apology for any shortcomings here and there
of paper’s authors do. Please critique and suggestions. Thank you
Malang, December 2014
Writer
TABLE OF
CONTENT
TITLE
PREFACE
TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER II: DISCUSSION
1.
What is the focus of semiotics
and deconstruction theories?
2.
What views related to literary
studies are owned by each theory?
3.
Who are the contributors of
each theory?
CHAPTER III: CLOSING
REFERENCES
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.
https://www.typotheque.com/articles/deconstruction_and_graphic_design_history_meets_theory
