{"id":6175,"date":"2021-06-20T07:34:22","date_gmt":"2021-06-20T02:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/?p=6175"},"modified":"2021-06-20T09:54:05","modified_gmt":"2021-06-20T04:24:05","slug":"buddhadeb-dasgupta-mando-meyer-upakhyan-critique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningandcreativity.com\/silhouette\/buddhadeb-dasgupta-mando-meyer-upakhyan-critique\/","title":{"rendered":"Buddhadeb Dasgupta\u2019s Mando Meyer Upakhyan: A Deconstructive Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"jacques

Jacques Derrida (Pic: Wikimedia CC 3.0)<\/p><\/div>\n

Postmodernism and Critical theory often together mentioned as Culture Studies are broad rubrics for intellectual movements rather than specific theories. Though basically deriving from Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Modernism and Social Semiotic Analysis, Postmodernism and Jacques Derrida\u2019s Deconstruction theory are of prime importance to students of Culture Studies and art theoreticians. Postmodernism is hard to define because it\u2019s a concept that appears in a wide variety of disciplines and areas of study including art, technology, architecture, sociology, history, fashion and so on. Postmodernism inherits a lot from modernism viz. emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing, a blurring of distinction between genres, rejecting boundaries between \u2018high\u2019 art and \u2018low\u2019 art, emphasizing irony, parody, etc., favouring self-consciousness, discontinuity, reflexivity, ambiguity, with special emphasis on destructured, decentred, dehumanised subject. However, Postmodernism differs from Modernism in its attitude towards a lot of these trends. Modernism tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history but presents the fragmentation as tragic. Post modernism, in contrast, doesn\u2019t lament the idea of fragmentation and incoherence but celebrates it. To put it simply, the postmodernist finds it to be his duty to ‘deconstruct’ the existing network of all elementary assumptions in terms of which every aspect of our experience, knowledge and existence is interrelated and interpreted so that no one particular belief is more \u2018true\u2019 or important than any other. The concept of truth is thus relative to the individual.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/u><\/strong>Derrida\u2019s concept of Deconstruction and Differance<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

Derrida, one of the proponents of the concept of Deconstruction as a Postmodernist theory observed that the Western philosophy has analysed the world from time immemorial in terms of binary opposites: good v\/s evil, man v\/s woman, mind v\/s body and so on. Each pair is organised hierarchically \u2013first term enjoying supremacy over the second one. These binary opposites, according to Derrida came from the concept of \u2018centre\u2019, which he discussed in his book \u2018Of Grammatology\u2019. A \u2018centre\u2019 is something that guarantees meaning for everything else and all Western thoughts according to Derrida are based on the concept of \u2018centre\u2019. But all \u2018centres\u2019 exclude and automatically marginalise others, e.g., male-centred culture marginalises woman, Brahmin-centred cultures marginalise Non-Brahmins and so on. Deconstruction unveils the techniques by which the \u2018centre\u2019 masquerades as the \u2018centre\u2019. Deconstruction subverts the traditional \u2018centre\u2019 by establishing the \u2018Other\u2019 as the \u2018Centre\u2019. This shows that there is another way to read\/interpret things, i.e., there is no one cultural meaning of a text. A staircase can be seen from below of from above, a circle can be seen as a convex or a concave\u2014neither alone, is the true picture and you can switch from one to other.<\/p>\n

For Derrida, all texts exhibit \u2018Differance\u2019: they allow multiple interpretations. According to him, all language is constituted by \u2018differance\u2019 which means \u2018to differ\u2019 and \u2018to defer\u2019 \u2013 \u201cwords are to be deferred presences of the things they mean, and their meaning is grounded in difference\u201d. For example, take the case of the binary opposites \u2018good v\/s evil\u2019. Our concept of either depends on our understanding of how they differ and defer from the other. Any one means nothing without the comparison and contrast with the other. Part of one\u2019s definition is embedded in the other. Thus, meaning depends on \u2018differance\u2019. A point to note here is that, while studying the concepts of binary opposites, Derrida revealed the fundamental binarism that privileges speech over writing (speech v\/s writing) and he wanted to subvert that. \u2018Differance\u2019 in French is exactly the same in speech as \u2018difference\u2019. However, in writing there is a difference between these two terms (\u2018a\u2019 and \u2018e\u2019). This proves writing is superior to speech and Derrida thus reversed the positions of speech and writing.<\/p>\n

Through deconstruction and differance, Derrida allows for the text to be opened up to numerous meanings and interpretations.<\/p>\n

\"Mando

Rituparna Sengupta in Mando Meyer Upakhyan<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/u><\/strong>Mando Meyer Upakhyan<\/u><\/em><\/strong>: a Deconstructive reading<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

I have taken up Buddhadeb Dasgupta\u2019s film Mando Meyer Upakhyan<\/em> (henceforth referred to as MMU<\/em>) for my study.<\/p>\n

What lies at the centre of MMU<\/em>? Journey. Actually, there can be these three journeys:<\/p>\n