I find Jeff Goldstein’s diatribe elevating intention as the sole arbiter of meaning continue(see also You can’t spell history without the ‘story’: History and Memory in the Fictive and Imaginary” — Course Supplement, Notes, and Commentary to be highly entertaining. (I posted about this earlier. I am also wondering what in the hell happened to Thersites? Anyone? Anyone?) Now, granted, I never formally studied deconstructionism, nor delved into literary criticism farther than a dilletante would go, but nonetheless, I find deconstructionism extremely useful in understanding not only literature but history as well. There is also something of a kinship between deconstruction and the now non-intuitive leading edge of theoretical physics. What both Derrida and Einstein (and Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Planck et al) have in common is the fact that they have deliberately thrown away many things that we would otherwise consider axiomatic. This is the main reason why intention cannot be the sole determinant in the meaning of a text. Most sane authors do not make explicit what they would otherwise hold to be axiomatic, and would expect their readers to understand these are axiomatic, but everyone knows that, given enough time, social conventions change, and what is axiom today may quite easily be invalid tomorrow, and yet there is no reason why meaning should be lost. The only way to preserve meaning, however, is to make explicit these so-called axioms and the only way to do this is to examine context.

This is extremely useful in post-colonial theory, because most of the literature examined in the neo-colonial era is fraught with racist and nationalistic assumptions that white writers assume their white readers already know, but which often times will be completely alien to anyone else. We are not just talking about the fraying of meaning under the lens of multiculturalism, however. The fact of the matter is that convention is completely arbitrary, and deconstruction tries to make what is unspoken explicit.

Even worse, most authors aren’t even completely aware of their ingrained biases. (There are white people who will continue to insist that the only form of racism is active, overt racism, when in fact what most people of color decry these days is the institutionalized form of what James Madison would call “the tyranny of the majority.” If one needs a non-racial example, one can examine the ongoing cultural debate among the heterosexual majority over the issue of homosexuality to see something similar.) It is here where deconstruction excels, by bringing what is unspoken and unconscious into the discussion. Does it necessarily displace intention? No, intention always has relevance to the text, but much richness and nuanced meaning is preserved in the interpretation if one also considers the context, or perhaps you might call it the paratext.