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Neither the First Word nor the Last on Deconstruction, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Semiotics for SF Readers . . . to dissolvethe introductory problem, to search out a common vocabulary among the debates' discussants, to pinpoint common ideas orpresuppositions they share, to locate common centers for argument, or to describe the general rubric of language-as-model-for-all-meaningprocesses that many of the dialogues have taken place under might well be construed by a number of the dialogues' participants as an aspect of a totalizing urge, a will to knowledge-as-power, a desire for mastery which has come under severe criticism and intense analysis at numerous points in these very debates. We might even saythat a recurrent "theme" of the poststructuralist wave of these dialogues is that all such urges are distorting , biasing, untrustworthy,ideologically loaded, and finally blinding, so that they must be approached with continuous oppositional vigilance. What you,my hearers, however, cannot see is the quotations marks around "theme" in the paragraph fragment above. Aseasily I could have put a line through the word, placing "ErreHie.—to take a figure from Derrida's 1967 book Of Grammatology, a figure that Derrida borrowed from the German philosopher Martin Heidegger—"sous rature," or "under erasure." A reason for this move is that this same critique of the totalizing impulse to masteryholds that even the social process of constituting aTheme-is, itself, an example of the same totalizingurge. The critique holds: A "theme" has the same political structure as a prejudice. Both the words "theme" and "thesis" derive from the Greek word Ti6evai , to place, to pose, to posit, to position, or to let stand. Thus the idea of 9 142 Shorter Views atheme-is etymologically grounded in the idea of having, or holding to, a position. Indeed, as my semantically sensitive listeners will hear as we progress, the idea of positivity, of posing, of positionality is packed into—is impacted throughout—the entire discourse around (that is, posed or positioned around) the notion of theme/position itself. No matter how much we talk as if Themes were objects we found present in, or positioned by,a text, this critique maintains that Themes are actually patterns that we always impose on a text (i.e., the position is always a position we position)—and always for reasons we cannot fully understand, that we can never fully master, that we remain blind to. We will confuse them just the waywe confuse the "positions" within the parentheses in the last sentence. No matter how much we claim to have found objective evidence of one or anotherTheHie.present in one or another text, the constitutive elements of that "theme" have already been politically in place, i.e., posited, before we made the blind move of recognizing it. "The theme is already in place before the text is read." "The text reads, if you like, the theme is us." "The theme is historicallysedimented: It is not an aesthetically privileged ground for the text." ... to use some locutions characteristic of the rhetoric associated with structuralist/poststructuralist discourse. Paradoxically, if this criticism is correct—and I feel that it is—one of its inescapable consequences is that, really,we can never escapefrom thematics . Thus we must always maintain an alert and severe analytical stance toward them. This iswhyyou will frequentlyhear, in discussions of "deconstruction" vs."thematic criticism," people speak of the opposition between the two—or talk about a basic and essential antagonism between them. (Latin:position and opposition. Greek: thesis and antithesis .) The thematic critics' oppositional argument sees the searching out of themes (along with their sisters and their cousins and their aunts: symbols, allegories, and metaphors) as the primary activity of the critic, with a bit of semantic analysis, a bit of historical rereading—i.e., a bit of deconstruction—as a supplementary activity to complete the job, perhaps to add a critical form to the search, to give it closure at the end, to provide a sense of commencement at its opening. The proper critical position for "deconstruction" (which is, after all, almost a synonym for analysis), saythe thematic critics, adding their own ironic quotes to the term, should be as an adjunct to thematics. Deconstruction should be used to trace out themes from particularly hazypassages, should be used to complete themes, to elide one theme to another, to fix a theme's autonomy, to do, in general, what deconstruction seems to do best and [3.140.198.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 10...

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