DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstruction is a concept central to post-modernism. Deconstruction is a process of rigorously analyzing and making apparent the assumptions, judgments and values that underlie social arrangements and intellectual ideas.

Jacques Derrida developed a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. Jacques Derrida's work was labeled post-structuralism and is also associated with postmodern philosophy.

Derrida rejects the idea that there is any correspondence between texts and truth, suggesting that texts (the writing of Marx or Plato) have no objective links to external events.

This being so these texts are not used to learn about the external events or to evaluate those events. Rather the text is only examined internally to search for the hidden text (or subtext) which gives meaning.

Postmodern Deconstruction Of Newtonian Science: A Physical-to-social Transposition Of Causality, L. Frederick Zaman III, Neural Engineering Research & Development 
Abstract: A postmodern 'deconstruction' of basic physical theory is made possible through a physico-social transposition of the Newtonian-based 'event causation' of physical bodies (passive objects), whose inertia, accelerative force, and action-reaction become the 'agent causation' of social beings (active subjects). This deconstruction is a counterfactual that perhaps can validate Steven Lukes' 'three faces of power' in the natural sciences. It shows that the modernist context of mechanism within which scientific discourse is always conducted, in classical physics specifically and the natural sciences generally, is a manifestation of social power in natural science. The psychological basis of this power is an underlying objectivist worldview that metaphysically informs modernity's understanding of physical cause and effect. The physico-social causality thereby established for reinterpreting the natural world reconfigures in a fundamental way the meanings of the words 'social' and 'science.' For it shows how it can be that, in the words of Bruno Latour, 'The social is not a [separate] domain, but only one voice in the assemblies that make up things in this new (very old) political forum: the progressive [from the physical up through the biological and social] composition of the common world.' - theoryandscience.icaap.org/ content/vol002.001/05zaman.html

Realism, Deconstruction and the Feminist Standpoint - Caroline New 
Feminist Standpoint Theory claims that by virtue of their social positioning women have access to, or can achieve, particular and/or better knowledge of gendered social relations. The epistemology, various versions of which are reviewed in the paper, has been criticised for over homogenising women. In its simplest form this critique claims that women's diversity rules out communality and collective interests, and that FST unawarely takes white middle class Western women as representative. In its stronger, postructuralist form this critique undermines feminism by reducing the category 'women' to an effect of discourse whose referent is, and should be, constantly shifting. The paper argues for the reality of sex difference and puts forward a realist defence of a modified Feminist Standpoint Theory. - blackwell-synergy.com

Narrative after deconstruction: structure and the negative poetics of William Burroughs's 'Cities of the Red Night.'
Style, Spring, 1995 by Daniel Punday
William Burroughs's recent writing poses problems for critics. Traditionally Burroughs is known for a negative poetics that assaults the word and all continuity for the sake of breaking down social controls.(1) His recent writing attempts to balance this negative poetics with a narrative continuity previously foreign to his writing. Burroughs remarked in a recent interview, for example, "I don't think there's any substitute for [narrative structure]. I mean -- people want some sort of story in there. Otherwise they don't read it. What are they going to read? That's the point" (Skerl 11). This shift towards increased narrative cohesion is one that we can observe in most postmodern authors. Thomas Pynchon shifts from the radical discontinuity of Gravity's Rainbow (1973) to the more cohesive style of Vineland (1990); Ishmael Reed moves from absurd parody in Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Yellow Back Radio Broke-down (1969) to somewhat more realistic social satire in The Terrible Twos (1986); Kathy Acker quiets some of the radical discontinuity of works like The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973) in her recent In Memoriam to Identity (1990). Burroughs and these other writers can be seen as working through the deconstructive impulse that dominated writing of the 1970s and searching for some way of reintroducing narrative structure without rejecting that deconstruction wholesale. Because Burroughs's writing was, perhaps, more radically deconstructive than any of these other writers, his movement towards a narrative continuity is more pronounced and promises to be particularly revealing. Our challenge is to explain how Burroughs can adopt a narrative structure without renouncing his confrontational, negative poetics. - findarticles.com

Something Old, Something New...: Sociology and the Organisation of Psychiatry 
David Pilgrim, Anne Rogers 
Whilst sociology has taken a consistent interest in psychiatry, theoretical and methodological approaches have varied. This paper summarises three versions of the sociology of psychiatry (social causationism, interpretive micro-sociology and structuralism). These are then contrasted with the more recent post-structuralist emphasis on deconstruction. The latter has emphasised a discursive shift in psychiatry since Victorian times, from brain to mind, from coercion to voluntarism, and from hospital to community. The advantages and disadvantages of such an analysis are examined. It is concluded that this analysis has been illuminating but that the older approaches it challenges still have merits. The implications of attempting to reconcile these approaches to the analysis of contemporary psychiatry are discussed. - soc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/2/52

CONTESTED BOUNDARIES AND EMERGING PLURALISM 
T. K. Oommen 
The rise and fall, construction and deconstruction of different types of boundaries - biological, psychological, geographical, cultural, social, political, economic - make up the very story of human civilisation and of contemporary social transformation. Drawing from a wide variety of contexts, this paper shows how new boundaries do not replace the old ones but rather they tend to co-exist. This co-existence is sometimes harmonious but often tension-prone. Life in a society without boundaries will be nasty, brutish and short. On the other hand, societies with a proclivity to maintain boundaries that ignore the pulse of the times will be condemned to stagnation and decay. Thus, boundaries are constantly contested and hence the real challenge is to abolish obsolete boundaries and build desirable new ones which is the essence of pluralism. - iss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/10/3/251

Deconstruction in a `Thinking' Science: Theoretical Physicists at Work 
Martina Merz, Karin Knorr Cetina 
We apply the laboratory study approach of the new sociology of scientific practice to a `thinking science': theoretical physics. To specify the work and accomplishments of theoretical physicists we choose the notion of `deconstruction'. Deconstruction involves the expansion of a concrete object, such as an equation, into a series of other objects upon which the `hardness' of a problem can be shifted and distributed. In solving an equation, however, the determinate path of a deconstruction method needs to be supplemented by the exploration of clues and guesses, trials and tricks. We trace a series of devices, and iterations thereof, which physicists mobilize in dealing with hard problems: formal deconstructions, detours and tricks to identify a working deconstruction, variation, `doing examples', modelling and, finally, thought alliances between subjects. - sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/27/1/73

Philosophy: Re-marking Deconstruction
Peter Davio
Abstract: In this paper, I discuss the French philosopher Jacques Derrida and his practice of deconstruction in relation to the age-old tradition of Western philosophy, and the current practices of conceptual analysis. Though difficult and sometimes obscure, I argue that Derrida's work is not irrational, nonsensical, or nihilistic. Through a close reading of his essays and a critical examination of the logic of deconstruction, I suggest several ways in which we can re-mark deconstruction as a philosophical practice, and thus move beyond the often simplistic remarks that characterize its discussion. - physics.westmont.edu

THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE SELF
Peter L. Callero ­
An emerging sociological approach to the self reflects new emphases on power, reflexivity, and social constructionism. The significance of power in shaping the self is central to a new scholarship associated with Foucault. This body of work offers an important corrective to traditional sociological orientations associated with Mead and symbolic interactionism. The principle of reflexivity is at the core of the Meadian tradition and provides a pragmatic foundation for understanding agency and political action missing from much of the new scholarship. The principle of social construction is common to both new and traditional sociological approaches to the self and guides most recent empirical analyses. Promising avenues of research are evident in work that explores the sociological context of self-construction, the social resources employed in the construction process, and the growing importance of nonhuman objects in self-construction. The limitation of scholarship that overemphasizes the psychological products of self-construction is also examined. - arjournals.annualreviews.org

Codes of Power. Deconstruction of institutional discourses
Abstract: The text introduces the semiology as method in the analysis of Sociology as area of authoritarian social discourse. In opposition to an "empirical" description where the "fact" is described as if it was not "social" but a fact "of nature" the deconstruction of the Power discourse shows that the "fact" is produced as definition or description, i.e, the Power-discourse works as Code which through strict controls of human behaviour, thought and language "produces" a particular form of "Reality". Prisoners of this "hyperreality" the inmates of the State are blind for another kind of "reality" their existence resumed to a utilitarian code production and consumption lacks existential meanings and subjectivity. Their world is the small celular space of a Social Prison. - lub.lu.se/cgi-bin/show_diss.pl/soc_11.html

Men in the Public Eye: The Construction and Deconstruction of Public Men and Public Patriarchies. by Jeff Hearn 
Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 104-105 - doi:10.2307/2074908