Is the basic idea of deconstruction just abandoning all a priori...

Is the basic idea of deconstruction just abandoning all a priori, practical/common sense assumptions about a text (for example, that it will have a coherent meaning, that it's content will cohere to some degree with the time period it was written in and basic biographical info about the author)?

I read Paul de Man's Semiology and Rhetoric and part of it seems like he's saying that based on the text alone you can't prove that, for example, a question is rhetorical even in really obvious situations. That seems really trivial to me since of course you will never be able to prove one interpretation of a text, but I genuinely want to understand what the point is.

No

De Man is a clown. Avoid him. In fact, I'd put a lot of the blame on him for turning deconstruction into an American liberal circlejerk

I understand in the broad sense deconstruction is concerned with more general issues, but I mean strictly in relation to interpretation of literature.

Also I've heard the idea that the American interpretations of it are shitty, why do you hold that opinion?

Also if you've read that text by de Man, is that not what he's saying to some degree? That a non-rhetorical reading of the Yeats poem can contradict the assumed meaning of the poem if you suspend the natural assumption that it's rhetorical?

It's more, from what I understand, about revealing the ways in which traditionally inscribed oppositional terms are actually dependent upon one another and in fact traditionally privileged terms are actually constituted by the traditionally othered. In language, this leads to radically heterogenous meanings, and the purpose of deconstruction is to both faithfully account a traditional "construction" of a text, and then to start pulling on the loose threads of meaning within its language to reveal ironies, irrationalities, and playful reinscriptions of new meanings which illuminate a subterranean surface of much more freely negotiable meanings which explode the possibilities of a text and make them visible in spite of their conventional elision or repression in the traditional construction.

>but I mean strictly in relation to interpretation of literature.
>Also I've heard the idea that the American interpretations of it are shitty, why do you hold that opinion?
Honestly, I never really understood how deconstruction could be applied to literature. Fiction is not logocentric ...
It's also weird considering the vast - VAST - majority of what Derrida wrote about was philosophy.
Seems to me that that only works if you have a pretty singular - dare I say logocentric - notion of "meaning" in relation to poetry.
I remember that being one of my problems with De Man: he makes huge generalisations and assumption about people, "ordinary" people, people not like him. Albeit Derrida falls prey to this sometimes too: they just assume that everyone who isn't them is some metaphysical prig.

It's not so much abandoning all practical/common sense assumptions so much as recognizing sometimes those don't hold.

Shakespeare in the Bush is a good example of how something that seems universal breaks down as soon as you tell the same story to a tribal elder in Africa.
Another example that's probably easily understood by Veeky Forums is the savage's interpretation of Shakespeare in Brave New World. While it won't have the same spin as Stoppard on Shakespeare, it's still a worthwhile interpretation.
The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead interpretation of the same play, like Shakespeare in the Bush or Huxley's character, don't take meanings from Shakespeare but add meanings to them that wouldn't be obvious or common sense, but are still influential in their own way.

I get that I guess, it just seems like it's all based on a bankrupt theory of meaning that ignores use and forms of life in the Wittgensteinian sense to work.

I'm Wittgensteinian too. I'd recommend Rorty's essays on Derrida, specifically "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing", "Is Derrida a Transcendental Philosopher?", and "Is Derrida a Quasi-Transcendental Philosopher?"

Right but I guess my point isn't whether traditional assumptions 'hold', or have any objective validity over any other set of assumptions you can bring to reading, as much as just recognizing the fact that texts in our tradition were written under certain assumptions and that making them intelligible and, in a broad sense, practical and worthwhile requires adopting those assumptions regardless of their universal validity.

I'll check them out, I like Rorty.

>Shakespeare in the Bush is a good example of how something that seems universal breaks down as soon as you tell the same story to a tribal elder in Africa.
Why would I care about illiterate savages unfamiliar with monogamy, not knowing about Christian conceptions of the afterlife or with castles, and whose conclusion is telling you repeatedly to listen to your village elders that they could teach you wisdom? If the latter existed they wouldn't be so culturally foreign.

Of course they need context to read, watch or listen to a play from Shakespeare, whoever would claim he can be universally understood by all mankind without any prerequisites?

Of course Shakespeare wrote with a particular target audience in mind who doesn't include savages and their foreign belief systems in which they'd try to pigeonhole his genius.

How is this any philosophical achievement? To research context to figure out what's being said is what hermeneutics' been preaching since forever.

>as much as just recognizing the fact that texts in our tradition were written under certain assumptions and that making them intelligible and, in a broad sense, practical and worthwhile requires adopting those assumptions regardless of their universal validity.
m8, you don't want to do that. The commonly held assumption doesn't include
>a women saved Shakespeare from being edited to happy endings
>Shakespearean studies are based on "these plays cannot be understood without being a woman"
There's a lot of the history of Shakespeare scholarship there you'd have to learn and which SJWs would go nuts over and take out of context, and it's just much easier if we ignore the Lady Montagu and pretend that everyone wanted to save the scripts as is between Shakespeare's era and now, without doing the messy bit in between.

There's a lot about the common understanding that isn't reflective of the conditions its written under, and saying that the current one actually got it right is as much revisionism as saying the tribal elder got it right. People like to believe that the current interpretations of the mainline are historically accurate, but we burnt through a lot of canon's actual history when the Victorians were deciding what was and was not cultural.
It's practical to ignore that point, but it doesn't mean that we're actually perpetuating tradition back to 500BC, so much as 1895 or so.

It's really a whole bunch more reading, and far off the mainstream practical "facts" we generally use to deal with texts, to actually deal with the assumptions and conditions under which they were written and passed down to us.
Dealing with the assumptions we make now that aren't true (like our interpretation of the Greeks was in no way influenced by Pharr in 1920, or Shakespeare's always ended that way) is practical, but it's not reflective of the circumstances under which the texts were written for many of the practical "facts" we use. That it is an accurate enough reflection is kind of a white lie that works for cursory study.

However, for any depth study, deconstruction can be deeply valuable. It can tell us how we arrived at the common assumption, as well as how other different common assumptions have gone before.

>tl;dr- it's way more reading and going to be very hard to bring the current mainstream in line with actual fact rather than convenience. probably best not to try.

>savages
>not the Brave New World one though
you're gonna be really butthurt about the Lady Montague bit in my other post, aren't you? it's fine, anyone ever mentions it, just start screaming GARRICK at them until they leave you alone.

I think you took my idea of commonly held assumptions to be more specific and historical then I meant it, but I see where you're coming from in general. I wasn't commenting on the challenges of historical understanding and I'm fully aware of the challenges involved. The idea of 'common assumptions' sounds facile but I mean it in a formal sense. Anyhow thanks for trying to help me figure this stuff out.

I went out of my way to read the Shakespeare in the Bush thingy, and all they did was the opposite of the white anthropologist's job description: interrupt the narrator constantly, and endlessly disrespect and mock tale, teller and their culture.

I simply fail to see the originality of the #ContextLivesMatter movement. Of fucking course it does, business as usual.

It's the same thing when I read the Iliad and there's a value system that's quite different to our present day one going on. Hence the introduction telling me about kleos, society before the polis, etc.

I should add that historical scholarship like you were talking about is specifically complementary to what I meant and ignoring complexities because it would make reading easier isn't the kind of 'practicality' I meant.

There's a good introduction to how to apply deconstruction and what it means and is used for by Hacking, called "The Deconstruction of What?"

It's a pretty useful idea for historiography, especially because it only seeks to co-exist with other interpretations which means that we can continue teaching less accurate things that are still practical, even if they're only practical at a surface level.

>There's a good introduction to how to apply deconstruction and what it means and is used for by Hacking, called "The Deconstruction of What?"
Are you thinking of "The Social Construction of What?" or is it something else entirely?

Might want to check the date on the article before you start acting like this is news. It's probably before your birthdate and you seem to want to give it a current context so you can be older than it.
Ignoring complexities because it makes reading easier is how we educate everybody. The model of the atom does not work the way you are taught it in high school, because most people do not need to know atomic physics better than Bohr. The history of Shakespeare given to everyone does not start "the greatest writer in the English language since one titled bitch said so", even though that's when and how it happened.

It's not practical at all to teach that depth to most people in most subjects, which is exactly why people know only how euclidean triangles sum, and not what a non-euclidean space is. We need people to operate on the assumption that when you say "triangle" you don't need to specify "euclidean" in most cases. You don't want to live in an actually accurate world at all, famalam.

Not him, but it's that.

Yeah, I am. I'm very not sober now so fact check all my shit as you should do here any way.

Again, I'm not asking about historical complexities.

Ok but that book isn't actually about deconstruction. It's about constructivism which albeit was inspired by deconstruction is not the same thing

I'd have rather thought math was current, but maybe you're not being clear about which kind of complexity you want to talk about

>so you can be older than it.
More like so you can pretend hermeneutics didn't exist before 1966.

Who (is the author) (quis/persona)?
What (is the subject matter of the text) (quid/materia)?
Why (was the text written) (cur/causa)?
How (was the text composed) (quomodo/modus)?
When (was the text written or published) (quando/tempus)?
Where (was the text written or published) (ubi/loco)?
By which means (was the text written or published) (quibus faculatibus/facultas)?

This and many other questions go all the way back to Greeks and the earliest Biblical exegesis, you clinical retard.

lol yeah, it's probably why I got the title wrong. It is a handy book about how methods since have been deployed and why.
>More like so you can pretend hermeneutics didn't exist before 1966.
It's kind of hard to pretend the Greeks or anyone else gave that reading before 1966, but maybe we'll find some scrolls where they managed to extrapolate that within the system usually used on Hamlet as the universal one.

>that reading
It's not a reading by any stretch of the word, the savages were bullying the anthropologist, and the story was altered. The text is not udergoing decostruction, but destruction in the everyday, ordinary sense of the world.

Do you perhaps intend to tell me that if you do violence to the text you might get a different interpretation, and that I ought to pretend this is an extraordinary discovery that could never happen before 1966, as if nobody ever had a controversy over a Bible verse or whole books in it?

>oh no they're bullying the anthropologist
To be fair, the anthropologist was asking for it.