Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction

by Christopher Butler

The text, as really constructed by the reader, was thereby liberated and democratized for the free play of the imagination. Meanings became the property of the interpreter, who was free to play, deconstructively, with them. It was thought to be both philosophically wrong and politically retrogressive to attempt to determine the meaning of a text, or any semiotic system, to particular ends. All texts were now liberated to swim, with their linguistic or literary or generic companions, in a sea of intertextuality in which previously accepted distinctions between them hardly mattered, and to be seen collectively as forms of playful, disseminatory rhetoric (rather like Derrida’s own lectures, which became freewheeling, disorganized, unfocused, lengthy monologues). The pursuit of verbal certainties in interpretation was thought to be as reactionary in its implications as was the manufactured consensus of the established political order.