Decentering Texts

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

Decentering is the process of rejecting a center, a privileged reference, or an absolute archia. Decentering is consistent with the rejection of the usefulness of mega-theories or all-encompassing descriptions of social processes and thus challenges sociology's desire to secure a fully centered human subject comfortably situated in a world of roles, statuses, norms, values, and structured social systems. This rejection was characterized by Jacques Derrida as the rupture in the history of structure that occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, heralded by Friedrich Nietzsche's destruction of all axiological–ontological systems as well as Martin Heidegger's destruction of traditional metaphysics and ontotheology.

What is included in the concept of “text” being decentered includes the broadest use of the term possible. It may apply to any representation. This would include a written work, such as a book or poem; words of a song; written music; a film; or an e-mail conversation. Some scholars use paintings and pictures as texts that they analyze.

Implicitly assumed in this methodology is that meaning and meaning-making occur through expression in symbols or written text. Nothing is ever outside of a text or not capable of being represented by language. Decentering texts builds on Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist theory of language. Challenged is the idea that readers, writers, and speakers occupy concrete places where thoughts, intentions, and meanings are organized in logical sequential and linear order clearly understandable to the listener or reader in a oneness of central meaning. It is the position of the decentering scholar that meaning-making of the speaker or writer is structured by language that does not permit all of the parties to the communication (whether it be speaker, writer, or listener or reader) to have full access to the meaning. Everyone has a subjective experience of articulation or, in other words, constructs the text differently. Thus, there is no center of meaning contained in a text.

It is in the process of decentering that various “-centrisms,” such as ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, phallocentrism, egocentrism, theocentrism, and logocentrism, are revealed. Rooted in post-structuralist theory, the methodology of decentering texts posits that texts need to be understood in their historical, political, and cultural places and times. Their author was working and experiencing meaning-making in a particular historical place and time that would have affected that author's meaning-making.

To decenter a text is to unsettle or make visible the familiar philosophical and political frameworks or mainstream notions of experience, human rights, white antiracism, human progress, scientific progress, modernity, the unity of scientific method, the desirability of universal knowledge claims, and other ideas central to philosophy. It is to take a perspective from elsewhere to reveal the frameworks that structure our thoughts and actions “here.”

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