There are many criticisms, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations of ‘deconstruction’ out there, as well as postmodern and poststructuralist. To those critics, I first ask you to read some quotes from Butler[i].
“I don’t know what postmodern is, but I do have some sense of what it might mean to subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive critique. To deconstruct the concept of matter or that of bodies is not to negate or refuse either term. To deconstruct these terms means, rather to continue to use them, to repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the context in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power” (Butler, p. 17). Additionally, “to take the construction of the subject as a political problematic is not the same as doing away with the subject; to deconstruct the subject is not to negate or throw away the concept; on the contrary, deconstruction implies only that we suspend all commitments to that to which the term, “the subject”, refers, and that we consider the linguistic functions it serves in the consolidation and concealment of authority. To deconstruct is not to negate or to dismiss, but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized” (Butler, p. 15).
Additionally, when trying to understand postmodernism Haraway[ii] (1991) reminds us that “the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now” (p. 182). Thus, when universalizing and totalizing remarks are made about postmodernism, I argue one should be skeptical.
Haraway, in the “Cyborg Manifesto” suggests that ”cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel of heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues …it means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories” (p. 181). Additionally, she ads “the feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one” (Haraway, p. 173). Thus, “there is not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in contested sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement forced on us by the terrible historica experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism” (Haraway, p. 155).
Grewal & Kaplan (2006)[iii] add to the conversation about totalization in their critique of “global feminism”, which they argue “has stood for a kind of Western cultural imperialism. The term “global feminism” has elided the diversity of women’s agency in favor of a universalized Western model of women’s liberation that celebrates individuality and modernity” (p. 17). They add, “universalizing, anti-poststructuralist, anti-postmodernist movements toward an albeit nonessentialist but universal category called woman allows state power and the power of fundamentalist groups to mobilize forces against all female persons” (p. 28). Finally, they also suggest that there are misrepresentations and practices of postmodernism which “see postmodernism as a movement toward ambivalence, the decentered subject, and so on, rather than as a thorough critique of modernity and its related institutions” (Grewal & Kaplan, p. 21).
Thus, postmodernist work and those that deconstruct arguably are not in the practice of nihilism, rather this work is typically dedicated to deconstructing, networking, and pealing back layers in order to interrogate power, markings, and discourses that shape, construct, and influence.
[i] Judith Butler, “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the question of “postmodernism””. pp. 3-21. Retrieved from http://cleandraws.com/butler_contingentfoundations.pdf
[ii] Donna Haraway, (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge. Retrieved from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html
[iii] Grewal, I. & Kaplan, C. (Eds). (2006). Ch 1 Introduction: Transnational Feminist practices and Questions of Postmodernity. pp. 1-36. From Scattered Hegemonies.
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