ABSTRACT
This chapter includes an early worked example of deconstruction which was designed to show how the approach can be ‘applied’ to a piece of text. I was invited to write it for a book on ‘everyday explanation’ in the mid-1980s, and there are some aspects of the chapter that are useful reminders of a particular historical moment in the paradigm ‘crisis’ debates in social psychology when the ‘turn to language’ was itself beginning to turn into a ‘turn to discourse’.
You will notice that I refer to ‘post-structuralism’ as if it really was a complete theoretical package, and this gives me an opening to link the deconstruction of conceptual oppositions to deconstruction of power. The chapter was for a book that was itself an intervention into social psychological understandings of accounts that people give of their own experience, and there was an attempt in the book (which was sympathetic to the ‘new paradigm’ qualitative researchers) to shift attention from the accounts that psychologists gave of other people's behaviour (those outside the discipline commonly supposed to be ‘non-psychologists’) to the accounts people themselves gave. Also notice the way I formalize deconstruction here as if it was a procedure that could be followed through particular ‘steps’. It seemed at the time that I had no choice but to do this in order to make the approach accessible to psychologists who like ‘methods’, but it makes me cringe a bit today.
I aimed to show how techniques developed in literary theory could be ‘applied’ to everyday explanation. However, as you will see when we come to the empirical example, the deconstruction of a piece of text involves a radical overturning of traditional social-scientific distinctions between what are ‘ordinary’ spontaneous accounts and what is extraordinary, manufactured script, script as psychological writing itself is.
