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Innovations in language are never completely new. When the words used for familiar things change, or words for new things enter the language, they are usually borrowed or adapted from stock. Assuming new roles, they drag their old meanings along behind them like flickering shadow. This seems especially true of the language of the contemporary school of literary criticism that now prefers to describe its work simply and rather presumptuously as theory but is still popularly referred to as post structuralism of deconstruction.
The first neologisms adopted by this movement were signifier and signified, employed to distinguish arbitrariness of the term we choose. The use of these particular terms (rather than, respectively, words and thing) underlined the seriousness of the naming process and its claim on our attention. Since in English “to signify” can also mean “to portend,” these terms also suggest that words predict coming events.
With the use of the term deconstruction we move into another and more complex realm of meaning. The most common use of the terms construction and deconstruction is in the building trades, and their borrowing by literary theorists for a new type of criticism cannot help but have certain overtones to the outsider. First, the usage suggests that the creation and critical interpretation of literature are not organic but mechanical processes; that the author of any piece of writing is not an inspired, intuitive artist, but merely a laborer who cobbles existing materials (words) into more or less conventional structures. The term deconstruction implies that the text has been put together like a building or a piece of machinery, and that it is in need of being taken apart, not so much in order to repair it as to demonstrate underlying inadequacies, false assumptions, and inherent contradictions.
This process can supposedly be repeated many times and by many literary hard hats (a conservative who is intolerant of opposing views); it is expected that each deconstruction will reveal additional flaws and expose the illusions or bad faith of the builder. The fact that deconstructionists prefer to describe their activities as deconstruction rather than criticism is also revealing. Criticism and critic derive from the Greek Kritikos, “skillful in judging, decisive.”
Deconstruction, on the other hand, has no overtones of skill or wisdom; it merely suggests demolition of an existing building. In popular usage criticism suggests censure but not change. If we find fault with a building, we may condemn it, but we do not carry out the demolition ourselves. The deconstructionist, by implication, is both judge and executioner who leaves a text totally dismantled, if not reduced to a pile of rubble.