Wk 3 - Structuralism to Deconstruction-Discussion.

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Wk 3 - Structuralism to Deconstruction
Answer the following three questions in 200 words or less. Use MLA format.  Reading material on next page.
What does it mean to take a structuralist approach to literature? 
What does it mean to deconstruct our understanding, and what causes readers to do so? 
What is the relationship between deconstruction and post-structuralism?
 
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Chapter 5
The Purposes of Structuralism and Deconstruction
If New Criticism focuses on the work, and reader-response criticism focuses on the reader, then structuralism might be seen as a combination of these two approaches: A structure is something—a pattern, a design—that is somehow “in” a text, but a structure is also something that readers must actively perceive. Without someone reading, there is no structure; without a structure, there is no one making sense. You have an understanding of the structure of the English language, and that allows you to identify the subjects, the verbs, the modifiers, and so forth of the sentences you are reading—and thereby make sense. This drive to find organization and meaningfulness is so powerful that human beings can find shapes in clouds or the scorch marks of a tortilla. If we can find structure where no one has created it, we can also fail to detect structures, as in hidden codes or unknown languages. But when communication takes place, it occurs because these two elements, text and reader, come together: A perceiver sees how the surface experience fits into some underlying set of conventions, imagining meaning. And if structuralism aims to understand how this conveyance of meaning occurs, deconstruction aims to show how it doesn’t—how the structures that we bring to language and experience inevitably fail, how meaning slips and slides and comes apart. Deconstruction is, in a literal and theoretical sense, what comes after structuralism: To see how something comes apart, one must first see how it went together, so a deconstructive analysis is possible only after some degree of structuralist analysis. Thus, this chapter deals with structuralism and deconstruction, but it focuses on deconstruction because its influence is enormous, helping to open up theory and reading to a multitude of other approaches. Deconstruction has not rendered structuralism obsolete, but it has, for many people at least, changed our thinking about what structuralism actually does, undermining the scientific exuberance of the early structuralists and becoming a pervasive part of our intellectual assumptions.Structuralism and SemioticsStructuralism grows from Ferdinand de Saussure’s series of lectures on language, delivered between 1913 and 1915, but not translated into English or widely known until the late 1950s. Rather than thinking of a particular language in terms of its history, moving through time, a “diachronic” view, Saussure took a “synchronic” view, looking at the relationships of all the parts of a language at a given moment in time. The surface elements of language, which Saussure called parole (French for “speech”), may vary widely. British and American speakers of English, for instance, say the word “towel” differently: Most Americans use two syllables, while most British use one. Some people in my hometown, in fact, pronounce “towel” in the same way they say the word “tile.” We may find these kinds of linguistic differences insignificant, or interesting, or amusing, or grounds for bias, but we are able to understand each other because of our understanding of the underlying structure, which Saussure called langue (French for “language”). This underlying structure allows us to make sense of the surface.Saussure’s structural approach to language not only provided a powerful analytical tool, but it also altered the way we think about language and meaning. In particular, the distinction between a “signifier” (a word, an image) and a “signified” (the concept that the signifier is pointing to) is crucial, exposing the arbitrary relationship between the words we use and the ideas in our heads. Anyone who can speak two languages fluently knows that some things that are easy to say in one language may be difficult or even impossible to say in another. Different languages structure the world differently: If one language has eleven different words for fog, and another language has only one, then it’s reasonable to assume that speakers of these two languages look at fog differently (and probably spend different amounts of time in fog). It’s not that one system of meaning is better than another—that fog either comes in eleven different kinds or one. Fog comes in however many kinds we are able to perceive (and desire to distinguish)—and this organizing of the world is based on underlying structures we perceive and create. Crucially, structure is based on difference: The word “bat” is not “cat” because of the difference in the two initial sounds. Structuralism seeks to bring a scientific approach to language, finding the underlying commonalities and distinguishing differences.As a method, however, structuralism can be applied to anything, not just language, and “semiotics” is the term usually employed for this larger enterprise. In the late 1950s, for instance, Claude Levi-Strauss began to demonstrate how structural analysis could be applied to cultures—with fascinating results. Looking for the underlying structures of food preparation, for instance, Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked (1964) observed that in every culture people divide their food into three classes: raw, rotten, and cooked. This fundamental structure has resulted in some wildly different cuisines that are nonetheless organized in the same way. In one society, moldy clumps of solidified cow’s milk are consumed; in another, whale blubber with maggots in it is valued. Specific rules that create systems of meaning allow both these cultures to make sense of their food. All of our meaning-making as humans—what it means to be a “person,” to be “married,” to be “good” or “guilty” or “in love,” or not—depends upon the linguistic structures that we inhabit.Poststructuralism and DeconstructionThe term “deconstruction” as an activity in theory and criticism derives from Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, and his 1967 work Of Grammatology, and it is easily one of the most edgy and exhilarating concepts developed in the twentieth century, or one of the most scandalously outrageous ideas, depending on one’s perspective. (Or both.) The term rather quickly became so pervasive and was used in so many different ways and contexts that it became hard to say what it means. As Gregory Jay put it in 1991, “deconstruction has now become an indeterminate nominative” (xi): a name without a particular reference. Derrida himself, rather than clarifying his usage, seemed much more interested in saying what deconstruction was not than what it is. But if the assumptions of deconstruction are correct, “deconstruction” always was an uncertain term, for deconstruction’s supposition that all terms are unstable must apply to itself. Few efforts would appear to be more ironic, perhaps even comical, than attempting to define and explain a philosophical position that assumes the inevitability of error and misreading, the impossibility of explaining and defining in any stable way.There are, however, at least three reasons to attempt to explain deconstruction anyway:1. The alternative to explaining what in the final analysis cannot be explained is silence. We explain deconstruction, and we practice it, even though something is always left undone, unstated, unclear, unthought of. Another explanation can supplement this one, and then another one can supplement it. Such is the case with any term, or perhaps with any thing human. Perhaps we should have more compassion for each other, given the ultimate futility of what we endeavor every day.2. Deconstruction makes no effort to suppress its own irony or absurdity; instead, deconstructive critics have generally indulged in a playfulness that from the perspective of traditional criticism seems at times unprofessional; in the merciless punning of some of the most prominent deconstructive critics, it has seemed occasionally almost juvenile.3. Deconstruction as a method, or antimethod, can be learned and practiced by students, and in my experience it often stimulates a wonderfully imaginative playfulness and scrutiny. In fact, rather than being an esoteric, foreign, abstract, discouraging approach, deconstruction for most students makes tremendous sense: It articulates precisely what they have, in fact, already assumed in a vague way. Students who understand deconstruction tend to be much more adventurous, questioning, insightful readers.So, here we go. The next little stretch is a bit theoretical and even strange, but you’ll see several illustrations later on. Just fasten your seat belt and prepare for a little turbulence.Structuralism and semiotics have produced many richly revealing and interesting analyses of texts and social phenomena—wrestling matches, detergent boxes, advertisements, anything. But some thinkers, exposing gaps and inconsistencies in the structures they examined, started to question just how far structuralist readings could be taken. This push beyond structuralism, revealing the failures of systems of meaning, came to be known as poststructuralism. Poststructuralism did not put structuralism entirely out of business: One can still do structuralist analysis today, but poststructuralism has altered our sense of what is produced by such readings. And poststructuralism is the set of assumptions and ideas that make deconstruction possible. What is deconstruction? To answer that question, let’s turn to Jacques Derrida (who isn’t going to tell us, but that is an intriguing part of the story…).
© The New Yorker Collection, 1992, Stephanie Skalinsky from cartoonbank.com. All Rights Reserved.Derrida is without question the most important figure for deconstruction. He relentlessly and astonishingly exposed the uncertainties of using language. Derrida starts, we might say, from the recognition that words do not refer directly to things. If they did, all languages would represent the world in the same way, and the meanings of words would be stable. Instead of words referring to things, Saussure argued that the signifier (the word) and the signified (its reference, a concept) are not a unified entity, but rather an arbitrary and constantly shifting relationship. A dictionary only seems to stabilize a language, for what we actually find in a dictionary is the postponement or deferment of meaning: Words have multiple definitions, and these definitions require us to seek the meaning of other words, which are themselves defined in the same way.Even if it were possible to construct instantaneously a dictionary that would be perfectly up-to-date, we would still find ambiguity, multiplicity, and slippage pervading the language. The reason is nicely captured in Derrida’s most famous statement, il n’y a pas de hors-texte, which appears in Of Grammatology (158–159) and which has been variously translated as “There is no outside-text,” “There is nothing outside the text,” and “There is no outside to the text.” (In itself, this uncertainty regarding translation tells us something important about language.) Derrida’s point, it seems, is that in making meaning we can’t get outside of language. Anything we say is contextual; words always refer to and depend upon other words.Deconstruction reveals the arbitrariness and open-endedness of language most strikingly by exposing the contradictions in a text, thereby showing how a text undermines itself. As Barbara Johnson puts it, deconstruction proceeds by “the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself” (5). Or, as Jonathan Culler says, “To deconstruct a discourse is to show how it undermines the philosophy it asserts, or the hierarchical oppositions on which it relies” (Deconstruction, 86). This exposure of a text’s self-contradictions is possible, deconstruction assumes, because words cannot stabilize meaning: If we choose to say one thing, we are leaving out another thing. And there is always a gap, a space in the text, that the reader cannot ultimately fill in, as we shall see.Deconstruction is therefore particularly valuable because of its power to open up a text that we may have seen as limited or closed. Popularly, “to deconstruct” has often been used to mean “to dismantle” or “to destroy,” as if “deconstruction” were a fancier form of “destruction.” But for most informed critics, deconstruction is not so much a way to obliterate the meaning of a text as it is a way to multiply meaning by taking something apart, to show the contingency of how something is put together by disassembling it. Deconstruction thus encourages us to resist a complacent acceptance of anything and to question our positions and statements in a particularly rigorous way, even reading texts against themselves.For instance, let’s take a very simple text, one appearing beside an elevator: “Seeing Eye Dogs Only.” A deconstructive reading of this text might point out that although it appears to extend assistance to the visually impaired, it literally should force them to walk up the stairs, for the sign appears to say, “This elevator is reserved for seeing eye dogs. No other animals or persons can ride it.” The text shifts power and privilege to a certain kind of dog, while ignoring the owners of the dogs. Here’s a text ostensibly put up to help blind persons, and it actually ignores them. A blind person with a helpful friend, or a seeing eye monkey, presumably, must not ride. Plus, ironically, blind persons obviously cannot read the sign, which suggests that some other intention motivates it. Perhaps the sign is intended to make sure that someone who is fully sighted and has a retired seeing eye dog as a pet can take such a dog on the elevator? Isn’t that what it says? What is the point of this sign?Although such undoing of a text may seem at first glance a bit silly, it actually has the potential for enormous practical value. Imagining all the things a text might be saying, including even the opposite of what it may appear to say, will help us to become more creative and careful readers and writers. Some colleagues of mine wrote a policy statement that told students “You will fail your Freshman English course if you miss more than three scheduled tutoring sessions.” One student read this statement as a prediction rather than a rule, and he elected to skip all his tutoring sessions in order to prove the prediction wrong. As he told me later, appealing his failing grade, “I knew I was smart enough to pass the course without any help, and I resented them telling me I couldn’t do it, and I worked twice as hard as I would have otherwise.” A deconstructive stance might have anticipated this reading, and precluded it by revising the sentence (although such a stance must also acknowledge that every possible misreading can’t be anticipated or prevented).But a deconstructive stance not only may help us anticipate some of the ways that even simple texts can be misread; it may also help us see what is being excluded or suppressed in a text. For instance, the J. Peterman Company advertises a reproduction of “Hemingway’s Cap.” The point of the advertisement is, of course, that Ernest Hemingway picked out a tough, distinctive, very masculine hat to wear, and now you can have the same. The ad conveys this message by telling us that Hemingway possibly bought the cap “on the road to Ketchum,” which is where Hemingway’s Idaho ranch was located, the scene of hunting, fishing, and other outdoor activities; that he found it “among the beef jerky wrapped in cellophane,” which also helps create a rustic, macho atmosphere (isn’t beef jerky primarily eaten by guys in a duck blind or deer stand—or wishing they were?); that the bill is longer than average, longer in fact than the advertiser has ever seen, and “impervious” to rainstorms; that the cap is the color of “scalding expresso”—a drink for tough men who need a tough cap; that there’s an elastic band “to keep this treasure from blowing off your head and into the trees”; and much else. Thus, the advertisement celebrates masculine toughness, durability, endurance, and sensibility, using these values to sell the product.But a deconstructive stance encourages an acute alertness to rhetorical strategies and even the assumptions these strategies depend upon.Hemingway’s Cap.He possibly bought his in a gas station on the road to Ketchum, next to the cash register, among the beef jerky wrapped in cellophane. Or maybe in a tackle shop in Key West.I had to go to some trouble to have this one made for you and me, but it had to be done. The long bill, longer than I, at least, ever saw before, makes sense.Hemingway’s Cap (No. 1537). The visor: calfskin, soft and glareless and unaffected by repeated rain squalls. The color: same as strong scalding espresso, lemon peel on the side, somewhere in the mountains in the north of Italy.Ten-ounce cotton duck canvas. Six brass grommets for ventilation. Elastic at back to keep this treasure from blowing off your head and into the trees. Imported.Sizes: M, L, XL.Although the cap appears to promote and depend upon a masculine toughness, deconstruction tells us that it also unavoidably promotes and depends upon masculine insecurity. Why would anyone want the longest bill anyone ever saw? For the same reason one might want the fastest car anyone ever saw. Or the biggest ranch. Such a desire for preeminence is risky because it requires constant monitoring and measuring and exposes one to a sense of fragility and uncertainty. Made of “calfskin,” this longest bill becomes a symbol of its owner’s power and potency. The bill, one could argue, is a phallic substitute: An earlier version of the cap was made of “deerskin,” and it is pretty clear what part of their skin many men would consider most “dear” (and deconstructive critics do tend to love puns). Certainly, Hemingway was fascinated by potency and its lack: In The Sun Also Rises, for instance, Jake Barnes has been emasculated by a wartime injury and loses Brett, Lady Ashley, to a young bullfighter and then to another aristocrat.Likewise, the idea that Hemingway may have bought his cap “on the road to Ketchum” conjures up scenes of hunting and fishing. But Ketchum is also where Hemingway committed suicide. Seriously ill for some time, he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Denied the sort of active, impervious masculinity embodied in the cap, Hemingway apparently could not face a compromised life.How the cap relates to this weakness or insecurity is most startlingly seen in an especially revealing (or especially disturbing) phrase, referring to the “elastic at back to keep this treasure from blowing off your head.” In asserting that the cap is a “treasure,” the ad unavoidably raises the danger—the inevitability really—of losing it. This sentence is meant to reassure potential owners, but it also points out how only the elastic (which must age and wear out) stands between the owner and loss of his manly treasure. The advertisement thus helps to foster an insecurity that the cap covers over; but in such a value system, depending on potency and toughness, the danger of something “blowing off your head” is very real, as Hemingway’s own case reveals.Is such a mischievous, even outrageous, allusion intended in “blowing off your head”? Although I’ve had students who insist that the phrase is a wickedly clever joke, that the ad’s author must have been aware of the implications of “blowing off your head” in the context of Hemingway, the issue is really undecidable, and from a deconstructive point of view irrelevant because other conflicting and contradictory meanings are always available to the attentive, creative reader. There will always be a trace of “don’t buy this hat” left in any urging to “buy this hat.” And this counterreading can also be reversed. (I do own two of the caps.)Let’s turn now to some other examples and to the practical matter of how structuralism and deconstruction work on more complex texts, which often even more readily lend themselves to opening up.How to do Structuralism and DeconstructionIn an essay designed to question and criticize, Lawrence Lipking shows how deconstruction would deal with W. B. Yeats’ famous poem “Sailing to Byzantium.” Since deconstruction turns a text against itself, multiplying its meanings, it seems only appropriate that Lipking’s attack on deconstruction should provide a convenient illustration of deconstruction’s value.Here is Yeats’s poem.**Reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from THE COLLECTED WORKS OF W. B. YEATS, VOLUME 1: THE POEMS, REVISED by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1928 by The Macmillan Company; renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. All rights reserved.Sailing to Byzantium††Byzantium: “Byzantium” is the name of an ancient city with an unusually rich set of associations. It was the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries and was celebrated for its art, architecture, and culture. Byzantium later became Constantinople, and then Istanbul, which is of course in modern-day Turkey. The city’s crucial location along the Silk Road allowed it to connect the European and Asian worlds.William Butler YeatsIThat is no country for old men. The youngIn one another’s arms, birds in the trees—Those dying generations—at their song,The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas5Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer longWhatever is begotten, born and dies.Caught in that sensual music all neglectMonuments of unaging intellect.IIAn aged man is but a paltry thing,10A tattered coat upon a stick, unlessSoul clap its hands and sing, and louder singFor every tatter in its mortal dress,Nor is there singing school but studyingMonuments of its own magnificence;15And therefore I have sailed the seas and comeTo the holy city of Byzantium.IIIO sages standing in God’s holy fireAs in the gold mosaic of a wall,Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,‡20And be the singing-masters of my soul.Consume my heart away; sick with desireAnd fastened to a dying animalIt knows not what it is; and gather meInto the artifice of eternity.IV25Once out of nature I shall never takeMy bodily form from any natural thing,But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths makeOf hammered gold and gold enamelingTo keep a drowsy Emperor awake;30Or set upon a golden bough to singTo lords and ladies of ByzantiumOf what is past, or passing, or to come.(1927)‡perne in a gyre: A “gyre” is a spiral or a vortex. A “perne” is a spool or cylinder or cone that one would wind thread onto. Yeats did use this unusual word “perne” in at least one other place: In Per Amica Silentia Lunae (New York: Macmillan, 1918, page 90), he says “I begin to study the only self that I can know, myself, and to wind the thread upon the perne again.” Also, a “pern,” as John Unterecker has observed in his A Reader’s Guide to W.B. Yeats (New York: Noonday, 1959, page 173), is a kind of hawk, commonly called a “honey-buzzard.” It seems possible, even though the spelling is different, that Yeats is also suggesting the image of a hawk moving in a spiral. The Latin verb “perneo,” as Phyllis Katz has noted (in a conversation reported by Patrick Gillespie: see his discussion of this poem on his website “PoemShape,” accessed 8 August 2015), means “spin,” and its imperative form is “perne.” Thus, “spin in a gyre” makes perfect sense, although we might wonder why Yeats would have used a Latin imperative verb here.Deconstruction needs a norm or a convention to work against. If we don’t assume a text is logically coherent, then exposing its incoherence and self-difference is hardly remarkable. In a way, then, a deconstructive reading is like an extension of a New Critical reading: Setting aside authorial intention and the reader’s response, one first identifies the unity that appears to be present in the text and then divides and dispels it. But a deconstructive reading also looks somewhat like a structuralist reading that is pushed beyond the breaking point. I want to illustrate this point by studying the classic New Critical reading of Yeats’ poem that is offered by Cleanth Brooks in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947). Saussure asserted that language operates by means of binary oppositions: “cold” means something because it is opposed to “hot”; “nice” makes sense because we understand “mean.” Brooks’ reading of Yeats’ poem depends on his perception of a structure of certain tensions or oppositions, which include, for instance, “nature versus art.” By this opposition, Brooks means (among other things) that the first two stanzas talk about “fish, flesh, or fowl” and about aging—aspects of nature. The second two stanzas talk about “gold mosaic,” “artifice,” “hammered gold”—works of art.Brooks discusses these other oppositions:becoming vs. beingsensual vs. intellectualhere vs. Byzantiumaging vs. timelessnessTo unify these oppositions, Brooks focuses on the speaker’s “prayer,” which begins in the third stanza and which asks the “sages” to “come from the holy fire”; and Brooks makes the word “artifice” the crux of the poem:The word “artifice” fits the prayer at one level after another: the fact that he is to be taken out of nature; that his body is to be an artifice hammered out of gold; that it will not age but will have the finality of a work of art. (188)In every opposition, Saussure said, one element is favored or privileged over the other. Yeats seems, Brooks says, to favor the second elements in the list above. “Artifice,” however, complicates matters:But “artifice” unquestionably carries an ironic qualification too. The prayer, for all its passion, is a modest one. He does not ask that he be gathered into eternity—it will be enough if he is gathered into the “artifice of eternity.” The qualification does not turn the prayer into mockery, but it is all-important: it limits as well as defines the power of the sages to whom the poet appeals. (189)This move, as I pointed out in the chapter on New Criticism, is typical, as Brooks finds an ironic center that unifies the poem. Here is Brooks’ thesis, as stated early in his essay, responding to the question of “which world” Yeats commits himself to:The question is idle—as idle as the question which the earnest schoolmarm puts to the little girl reading for the first time “L’Allegro—Il Penseroso”: which does Milton really prefer, mirth or melancholy . . . .Yeats chooses both and neither. (187)Yeats manages, in other words, to unify the poem’s oppositions, choosing both and neither. More directly, Brooks articulates his position this way near the end of his essay:The irony [of the poem] is directed, it seems to me, not at our yearning to transcend the world of nature, but at the human situation itself in which supernatural and natural are intermixed—the human situation which is inevitably caught between the claims of both natural and supernatural. The golden bird whose bodily form the speaker will take in Byzantium will be withdrawn from the flux of the world of becoming. But so withdrawn, it will sing of the world of becoming—“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” (189–90)This “intermixture” that Brooks finds is for him the force unifying the poem’s complex oppositions, thereby making possible the poem’s greatness.A deconstructive reading observes the text’s structure of oppositions, as Brooks has done, but it refuses to accept their unification, and instead focuses on how their apparent resolution can be teased apart. Brooks claims that Yeats chooses both art and nature. But is that really true? In the final stanza, the speaker says, “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing.” If he escapes nature and becomes a golden work of art, then he has certainly chosen one member of the opposition. Brooks tries to cover this problem by saying the bird, outside of nature and time, will sing of the world of becoming—“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” But surely singing of something is not the same thing as being in it. Yeats does choose—art over nature, being over becoming, the intellectual over the sensual.Or does he? The final step of deconstruction (after finding oppositions, assessing their hierarchy, positing their resolution, and questioning that resolution) is to call the reversal into question, placing the text in uncertainty. Lawrence Lipking, who aims to illustrate a deconstructive stance in order to criticize it, repeatedly shows us how a deconstructive critic would find that the poem fails to resolve its meaning. He asks, for instance, why should soul “louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress”? Is it singing to distract itself or us from the tatters of its mortal dress? Then the singing is opposed to the tatters, as the soul sings in spite of physical ailments. Or is it singing in celebration of these tatters, because the body’s deterioration brings the soul closer to separation from the body? Lipking ponders these alternatives and concludes that “the line does not make sense, if by sense we understand a single unequivocal meaning or even the Aristotelian logic that asserts that nothing can be itself and not itself at the same time. Language goes its own way” (431).Likewise, Lipking raises the question of whether, in the third stanza, there is a singing school. If “Nor is there singing school” means there isn’t one, which seems reasonable enough, then how come the speaker wants some singing masters in the next verse? Perhaps the speaker says there is no singing school unless it consists of studying monuments of the soul’s magnificence. But such activity hardly sounds like a singing school, and it seems unlikely that such soul singing is learned in an academic way. In the final analysis, Lipking suggests that the poem, through a deconstructive lens anyway, is confusing.Similarly, Lipking asks if the artifice of eternity is “something permanent (an eternal artifice) or something evanescent (an illusion without any substance)” (432). He confesses he can’t decide. He also points even to the uncertain syntax of the opening “That” (which, Lipking points out, “Yeats himself said was the worst syntax he ever wrote”). In sum, Lipking finds that “the elementary polarities that seem to provide its [the poem’s] frame—the dialectic of ‘that country’ and Byzantium, of young and old, of time and timelessness, of body and soul, above all of nature and art—do not hold up under a careful reading” (432). Thus, “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” only appears to parallel “what is past, or passing, or to come.” The word “lives” would parallel “born” better than “passing,” and “begotten” does not clearly relate to “past.” Even the word “dies” is not entirely satisfactory because the birds’ “song” is one that lives on from generation to generation.These points may seem rather minor but, as Lipking amusingly puts it, there is one internal contradiction “so important and obvious that it is noticed by a great many students, and even some critics”:When the speaker claims that “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from any natural thing,” he seems to ignore the blatant fact that every bodily form must be taken from nature, whether the form of a bird or simply the golden form embodied by an artist. (432–33)In a famous letter, Sturge Moore did write to Yeats that “a goldsmith’s bird is as much nature as a man’s body, especially if it only sings like Homer and Shakespeare of what is past or passing or to come to Lords and Ladies” (qtd. Lipking, p. 433). In fact, art seems already to be present in the world of nature that is described so artfully in the first verse. “That” country and Byzantium, Lipking says, “are equally unreal; they acquire significance only by being contrasted with each other” (433). “That” country never appears in the poem; it is always absent. Nor does the poet arrive at Byzantium, as Lipking reminds us: He is only “sailing to” it. And the problem, deconstruction tells us, is that we “swim in a sea of language” (435), where enduring “presence” is impossible: We never arrive where we’re going, linguistically. Instead, we find only oppositions and differences that defer meaning.In making this case, Lipking is depending on, I would argue, the following assumptions:1. Meaning is made by binary oppositions, but one item is unavoidably favored (or “privileged”) over the other.2. This hierarchy, favoring one item over another, is arbitrary and can be exposed and reversed.3. Further, the text’s oppositions and hierarchy can be called into question because texts contain within themselves unavoidable contradictions, gaps, spaces, and absences that defeat closure and determinate meaning. All reading is misreading.These assumptions, I believe, lead Lipking to something like the following strategies:1. Identify the pattern of oppositions in the text.2. Determine which member appears to be favored and look for evidence that contradicts that favoring.3. Expose the text’s indeterminacy.Lipking, to be sure, is demonstrating deconstruction only to attack it. He is not alone in thinking that deconstruction is disturbing and even dangerous. But many other people find it invigorating and useful. The most damning charge against deconstruction is that it allows a text to mean anything at all—or, as Lipking sees it, ultimately nothing. But deconstruction’s supporters, both in Europe and America (who have somewhat different conceptions of the matter), believe that texts always already were unavoidably open to interpretation. Deconstruction, in this case, really changes nothing except our awareness of the complexity and “otherness” and openness of our discourse. We might think prior to deconstruction that opposing viewpoints can’t both be true: If a movie critic, for instance, says that the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men (based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, which alludes, of course, to Yeats’ poem) is shallow and nihilistic, and another critic says that the movie is profoundly deep and inspiringly masterful, then we might reasonably assume that one is right, and the other isn’t—or at least, one is more right than the other. A deconstructive stance, however, keeps leading us to “both/and” assertions, rather than “either/or” choices, as we can see how contradictions can both be true—and also not true.The whole idea, of course, of reducing deconstruction to a formula, to a set of steps, is so wrong and inconsistent within the theory of deconstruction itself that it seems mischievously deconstructive to do so. But you need, as a deconstructive critic might put it, to (mis)understand deconstruction first in order to (mis)understand it.Here’s another example to help you get more comfortable using this approach (or abusing it), as we leave Yeats’ golden bird for one of another metal.