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 shadows. This seems especially true of the language presumptuously as “theory” but is still popularly referred to as poststructuralism or deconstruction.
The first neologisms adopted by this movement were signifier and signified, employed to distinguish words from their referents, and to illustrate the arbitrariness of the terms we choose. The use of these particular terms (rather than, respectively, word and thing) underlined the seriousness of the naming process and its claim on our “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 and executioner who leaves a text totally dismantled, if not reduced to a pile of rubble.
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