GERALD GRAFF
565
is held
to
be prior
to
wntmg; fact is elevated into the ground of
thought and interpretation; the literal is made into the ground of the
figurative. Language seeks to hide the historical and social violence
at the origin of these hierarchies, masking that violence in the pre–
tense that they are natural and essential. Thus the speech-act con–
vention that meaning is determined relative to "context" is seen as a
form of linguistic law and order: "There is always a police and a
tribunal ready to intervene," Derrida writes in his critique of John
Searle, "each time that a rule ... is invoked in a case involving sig–
natures, events, or contexts. This is what I meant to say.
If
the police
is always waiting in the wings, it is because conventions are by
essence violable and precarious,
in themselves
and by the fictionality
that constitutes them, even before there has been any overt trans–
gression." Language presumably attempts to mask this fictionality,
which nevertheless allows itself to be read at the crisis points of a
text. Such a deconstructive reading claims
to
perform a more funda–
mental political critique than any analysis of mere "content."
What is crucial here is that a text viewed this way ceases to be a
static object and becomes a scene "traversed" by signifying pro–
cesses, which in turn are the traces of historical and social (as well as
psychological) origins.
It
is in this sense that deconstruction chal–
lenges the conventional assumption that texts have determinate
meanings, and not-as is sometimes supposed-by proclaiming the
reader's freedom to revise the text as he so chooses. Indeed "the
reader" himself is understood merely as the creation of discursive
forces, which equip him with interpretive strategies, codes, and
rules. Far from setting individual readers free to interpret according
to
personal whim, deconstruction denies the reader any freedom
whatsoever, viewing his interpretations as strictly determined by
institutional conventions. Since those conventions are not natural
but historical and cultural, however, they have no authority beyond
the authority of institutional power, and thus it's always possible to
challenge any putative master-code of interpretation by pointing to
alternate codes it can't contain. It's not that there are no norms of
" right" interpretation, but that these norms are always institution–
ally produced and thus owe their authority not to correspondence
with reality but to the "juridico-political" power of academic, legal,
governmental, familial, and other institutions to enforce them.
Textual meaning, then, is both fixed and not fixed: it's fixed
insofar as we can and do impose master codes (formalism, Marxism,
