Page 48 - PERPUSTAKAAN UNIVERSITAS AIRLANGGA

Kajian Dalam Bidang Ilmu Perpustakaan dan Informasi: Filosofi, Teori, dan Praktik

values prevailing in the community, post-structuralist tradition is built
upon a critical thinking basis which assumes that subjects (in this case
librarians) have autonomy and are not confined within a rigid structure.
A librarian who spends years living in a restrictive, rigid habitus will find
it arduous to generate unorthodox, innovative thoughts, but one who is
trained to think critically will generate numerous breakthroughs.
The deadlock and stagnation occurring and experienced by the
librarians in Indonesia may be torn down if librarians are accustomed to
adopting a skeptical, critical, autonomous attitude. From the perspective
of critical theorists like Derrida, for instance, structuralism tends to have a
metaphysical character in a similar vein to Western philosophical thoughts
which cause their understanding to stagnate. Derrida critiques structuralism
as he deems it to hold on to metaphysical hierarchy in the form of binary
oppositions (Haryatmoko, 2016: 142). Western metaphysics, Derrida posits,
is by chance inclined to solely validate contradictions and differences, in
that texts exhibiting differentiation—e.g., exterior/interior, good/bad,
forward/backward, among other things—in actuality carry the meaning that
one party is superior, while the other is inferior. From Derrida’s viewpoint,
philosophers are thus far confined within logocentric thinking tradition, in
which a way of thinking that brings to the fore binnary oppositions and is
hierarchical flourishes. This is in the sense that one text is positioned as
central, foundational, originary, principle, and certain, while the other is
derivative, secondary, and marginalized relative to the foregoing (Sahal,
1994: 19). Such thinking logic that oversimplifies realities within a binary
opposition space is what Derrida critiques to be the cause of us turning away
from critical and innovative thinking. Logocentrism, from where Derrida
stands, only gives rise to stuntedness and resignation and discourages the
development of world-shaking breakthroughs.
The deconstruction tradition initiated by Derrida in social sciences
offers ways in which librarians can think critically and dismantle structural
domination we do not realize until this point to have inhibited the rise
of new thoughts, innovations, and alternatives. Deconstruction per se is
simply interpreted as a philosophical thinking way that attempts to check
the work of a hierarchy and method used to unveil meanings in language.
Influential figure Jacques Derrida in his book Of Grammatology states that
deconstructive analysis aims at questioning the authority of truth. Truth is
made possible by signs and their relations with other signs, and this is the
only truth that is articulable and intelligible (Sim, 2002; Spivak, 1976).
Deconstructive analysis has also been applied in a wider context as a method
wherein incoherence of position is demonstrable. Michel Foucault, a Post-
Structuralist, draws on deconstructive analysis to explain and understand

28 Decontruction And Recontruction of The Roles of Librarians ...