Barbara Johnson and "Deconstruction"

I read an interesting article written by Barbara Johnson. This article is about deconstruction. Deconstruction is a theory of literary criticism and philosophical movement which questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth.

In The article of Barbara Johnson “Writing and reading differently” mentions that the reader interprets and reads the literature from his personal view and experience. In this case each reader will understand the literature different. The understanding will be depending on the reader’s social background, knowledge, religion, political attitude and so on. However, privileging commonality and simplicity and seeking unifying principles deconstruction emphasize difference, complexity, and non-self-identity. A deconstructive reading of a text, or a deconstructive interpretation of philosophy (for deconstruction tends to elide any difference between the two), often seeks to demonstrate how a seemingly unitary idea or concept contains different or opposing meanings within itself. The elision of difference in philosophical concepts is even referred to in deconstruction as a kind of violence, the idea being that theory's willful misdescription or simplification of reality always does violence to the true richness and complexity of the world. This idea can be taken as a rejection of the philosophical law of the excluded middle.

If we combain this with the quotion of Barbara Johnoson

“…Deconstruction is first and foremost a way of paying attention to what a text is doing – how it means, not just what it means…”

She is trying to say that it is not just the text (vocabulary) it is also important how the writer tries to demonstrate his purpose. This kind of writing verdures that there are not one right interpretation. We can say that a text is not passive it is active. It does something with the reader. Because the text is influencing the reader how he she has to understand it. She says that reading is not the task of churlish the true single meaning of the text, but of churlish its multiple meanings, which are often unstable and conflicting. This ambiguity has allowed readers to enter texts at the locations where the author tries to erase, or distort the various claims that are made through language their identities.