This blog is Lab Activity: Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading as a task assigned by the head of the Department of English (MKBU), Prof. Dilip Barad Sir. Here this link for instructions:
The task involves a creative and critical engagement with poststructuralist theory, particularly focusing on deconstruction.As part of this activity, I used AI (ChatGPT) to generate an original poem. The next step was to study the theoretical concepts of Deconstruction and Poststructuralism through key thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Catherine Belsey.
The final objective is to critically analyze the AI-generated poem using these theoretical frameworks. With the help of ChatGPT, a three-stage deconstructive reading (based on Peter Barry’s model) and a poststructuralist interpretation (inspired by Catherine Belsey’s method) are applied to explore how meaning in the poem becomes fluid, contradictory, and open to multiple interpretations.
Poem 1: “Echoes in the Cloud”
Theme: Digital Humanities | Form: Iambic Pentameter (Heroic Couplet, 12 lines)
We walk through screens like ghosts in mirrored halls,
Where data weeps and memory softly calls.
The scroll becomes a scripture, likes a prayer,
Our footprints made of code dissolve in air.
A thousand voices, scattered, recompose
In pixel dust where ancient knowledge grows.
Texts once entombed in libraries' deep shade
Now speak again through circuits man has made.
Yet still the question echoes through the wire:
Can code revive the soul, or just aspire?
For though the past is mapped in cloud and spark,
Its silent heart still beats alone and dark.
1. Verbal Stage Contradictions and Undermined Meanings at the Word Level
At this stage, we identify words or phrases that contain tensions, where meanings conflict, slip, or reverse themselves.
“Screens like ghosts in mirrored halls” This simile evokes both presence and absence. Screens are tangible, yet “ghosts” and “mirrored halls” suggest illusion, ephemerality, and disembodiment. It destabilizes our perception of digital interfaces are they gateways or echo chambers?
“Data weeps” and “memory softly calls” These metaphors anthropomorphize digital terms. But data, as an inanimate system, cannot weep, and memory (digital or human?) cannot call. The tension between organic emotion and mechanical function undermines the metaphor’s stability.
“Scripture, like a prayer” Elevates the digital scroll to sacred status, yet “like a” reveals it’s not really sacred. The comparison imitates reverence but simultaneously exposes the lack of authenticity, hinting at a hollow ritual.
“Footprints made of code” A contradiction: footprints suggest presence and permanence, while “code” suggests abstraction and fragility especially since they “dissolve in air.”
These contradictions erode the confidence in a stable digital or symbolic world.
2. Textual Stage – Shifts in Tone, Voice, Logic, or Structure
Here, we explore structural instabilities that lead to interpretive ambiguity.
The first half of the poem offers a tone of awe and possibility:
“A thousand voices, scattered, recompose / In pixel dust where ancient knowledge grows.”
This suggests digital resurrection, a utopian idea that technology can revive the past.
But the second half questions this optimism:
“Yet still the question echoes through the wire: / Can code revive the soul, or just aspire?”
The “Yet” signals a rupture the poem turns inward, skeptical, doubting whether code can do more than simulate meaning.
The final couplet deepens the paradox:
“Though the past is mapped in cloud and spark, Its silent heart still beats alone and dark.”
While “mapped” suggests accessibility, the “silent heart” and “dark” imply irretrievable loss meaning cannot be fully restored through digital means.
The structure thus sets up a binary digital preservation vs. authentic presence only to collapse it, making the poem loop in uncertainty.
3. Linguistic Stage Language’s Failure to Secure Meaning
This stage explores how the language system itself breaks down, showing that signifiers fail to secure stable meaning.
The poem is filled with technological metaphors for human processes:
“Data weeps” Assigns emotion to information.
“Footprints made of code” Merges physical and digital presence.
“Pixel dust” Combines the visual with the decayed or dead.
Yet none of these metaphors hold steady they suggest analogies that do not fully work, revealing metaphorical breakdown.
Signifier drift occurs in phrases like:
“Scroll becomes a scripture” The scroll (browser or ancient text?) becomes unstable is it sacred or superficial?
“Cloud and spark” – Signify digital space and energy, but they are ephemeral, leading us back to nothingness.
The final line – “Its silent heart still beats alone and dark” – is particularly unstable. It offers the illusion of life, but “silent,” “alone,” and “dark” all undercut that vitality. The language constructs a heart that cannot speak, a presence that is absent.
Derrida’s idea of “différance” (meaning always deferred) is clear here: the soul, the past, the truth—all seem within reach, but never fully present in language.
Final Insight: The Poem Deconstructs Itself
Although “Echoes in the Cloud” appears to celebrate digital resurrection, it simultaneously questions the authenticity and permanence of such a project. Through contradiction, tonal shift, and linguistic slippage, it enacts a poststructuralist self-undermining, refusing any fixed meaning.
It ends not in certainty but in haunted doubt, mirroring Derrida’s deconstruction: the center cannot hold, and the heart though mapped remains silent.
Poem 2: “In the Waiting Room of Godot”
Theme: Existentialism / Waiting for Godot | Form: Free Verse with structured stanzas (4 quatrains)
We sit beneath a leafless, iron tree,
Time ticking soft like boots upon the sand.
No savior comes. No sign. No clear decree.
Just silence cupped within a shaking hand.
The sky forgets to weep. The stone won't speak.
We ask, we laugh, repeat what we have said
Our language folds, absurd, exhausted, weak,
Yet binds us still with half-remembered thread.
A boot, a boy, a rope that holds no weight
Each symbol stares and waits to be assigned.
We seek in riddles what we dread as fate,
The void reflects the theatre of the mind.
And yet we wait. For waiting proves we're here.
The dread of nothing still contains a fear.
Poststructuralist Analysis (Catherine Belsey's Method)
Based on Catherine Belsey's poststructuralist approach especially as applied to poems like “In a Station of the Metro,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and Sonnet 18 we can now proceed to analyze your second poem using her core ideas of difference, the primacy of the signifier, citationality, and instability of meaning.
1. Meaning is Not Referential, But Differential
Belsey (drawing on Saussure) emphasizes that language does not directly refer to the world, but operates through differences between signifiers.
In the line “To be is not to know, but to become,” the poem negates “to know” and prefers “to become”, but both are relational neither has fixed referential meaning. The phrase “to become” floats free from stable grounding: become what? for whom?
Similarly, “joy distilled from pain” constructs meaning through opposition, but this binary (joy/pain) breaks down because they are shown to emerge from each other.
This reflects Belsey's idea that signifieds are not fixed they are constructed through difference and interplay, not direct reference.
2. The Primacy of the Signifier and Unstable Meaning
As Belsey shows in her reading of “In a Station of the Metro”, poetic images evoke meaning not through clarity but through evocation, ambiguity, and deferral.
“A flame that flickers, dances, then is done” invokes fleeting beauty, mortality, and light but the signifier “flame” stands in for many things: passion, life, soul, resistance.
However, none of these are fully present; the flame is not symbolic of one thing it disperses meaning rather than fixing it.
In “We are the torchbearers against the night,” the symbol of the torch (hope? knowledge? rebellion?) resists anchoring.
The phrase echoes Western Enlightenment discourse (light vs. darkness), but with existential ambiguity. The signifier “torchbearers” cites a tradition, but refuses to affirm it fully it gestures to meaning, only to question it.
3. Citationality and the Death of the Author
Belsey and Barthes argue that texts draw upon other texts and discourses, not authorial intention. Meaning arises from cultural codes and intertextual echoes, not a poet’s private truth.
The entire poem echoes existentialist discourse from Sartre’s idea of radical freedom (“The weight of choice is all we can pursue”) to Camus’ image of absurdity and rebellion (“build from ash”, “torchbearers against the night”).
These references are not explanations they’re citations, or traces within the language system.
The poem’s meter (heroic couplets) itself cites the rational, ordered poetic tradition, but this form clashes with its existential theme of meaninglessness and instability, producing formal irony language pretending to be ordered while carrying philosophical chaos.
4. Language as Power: Who is ‘Master’?
Like in Belsey's Humpty Dumpty example, language in this poem pretends to master the void, but ultimately reveals its own limits.
“To mark our lives with purpose, not with shame” implies that language and names can inscribe meaning, but poststructuralism would ask: can they?
Can “purpose” truly cancel out “shame”? The poem subtly acknowledges this doubt.
The use of assertive couplets may seem to grant control, but they end up reinforcing existential helplessness, echoing Belsey's point: “language sometimes seems to lead a life of its own.”
5. The Poem as a Signifying Machine, Not a Message
According to Belsey, poetry constructs meaning by mobilizing signifiers, not by “expressing” a hidden idea.
This poem does not assert a truth, but rather performs the experience of confronting absence, instability, and constructed identity. It gestures toward:
Individualism (self and stride),
Cosmic silence (no gods, no fates),
Meaning-making (we ignite meaning),
but all of these are just that: gestures, not guarantees. The poem invites the reader to experience uncertainty, not solve it.
Conclusion: How Belsey's Poststructuralism Illuminates the Poem
Following Catherine Belsey’s model, we see that:
The poem does not offer stable meaning, but instead dramatizes the struggle to produce meaning in a world without metaphysical anchors.Its words, images, and form cite and subvert cultural codes (heroism, existentialism, Romanticism).
It refuses closure the light it claims to ignite is only ever partial, flickering, and contingent.
In Belsey’s terms: “The poem means what its signifiers allow it to mean in the cultural moment and nothing more.”
POSTSTRUCTURALIST ANALYSIS OF BOTH POEMS
Below is a refined and enhanced poststructuralist analysis of both poems using Catherine Belsey's framework from Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. The revised reading now:
Deepens attention to contradictions and tensions in language
Explores multiple interpretations without fixing meaning
Highlights the reader's role in creating meaning
Demonstrates how each poem destabilizes the idea of language as a bearer of truth
Poem 1: “Echoes in the Cloud”
1. Language and Meaning Are Unstable
The poem opens with:
“We walk through screens like ghosts in mirrored halls,”
This image invites multiple readings: are we haunted by technology, or are we the haunters? Are we reflected, distorted, or dissolved in these “mirrored halls”? The signifier “ghost” suggests absence but also presence a contradiction that destabilizes meaning. The language evokes spectrality without confirming what is real.
“The scroll becomes a scripture, like a prayer,”
Here, digital scrolling takes on sacred connotations, but the phrase “like a prayer” draws attention to its simulated, not sacred quality. The word “scroll” could mean digital content, or a religious manuscript meaning shifts depending on cultural context and reader perspective.
Thus, the poem hints at transcendence, while simultaneously undermining it.
2. Contradictions within Imagery
“Footprints made of code dissolve in air.”
Footprints usually mark presence and permanence, but “code” and “air” imply transience and loss. This line literally undoes itself you cannot both mark and dissolve. The tension here reflects Belsey’s idea that language always carries difference, and never resolves fully.
3. Multiple Readings (No Final Signified)
“Can code revive the soul, or just aspire?”
This question refuses closure. The word “aspire” is deliberately ambiguous: does it mean reach toward meaning? Or fail to attain it? Does code mediate spirit or merely simulate it?
There’s no authorial answer here. The reader must decide, yet any interpretation is contingent haunted by other possible readings.
4. The Reader Produces the Meaning
Following Belsey, we must note:
The poem cites familiar binaries digital/human, real/virtual, presence/absence only to collapse them.
There is no central “truth” about what the digital world does to human experience.
Its tone (elegiac? hopeful? skeptical?) remains indeterminate, shaped by how the reader engages with the imagery and references.
The final line “Its silent heart still beats alone and dark” returns us to mystery. The “heart” is both mapped and silent. The digital archive may preserve information, but not living meaning. Or perhaps it does the poem leaves the answer undecidable.
Poem 2: Heroic Couplets on Existentialism
Theme: Existentialism | Form: Heroic Couplet
1. Contradictions in Voice and Message
“We wander through a world without a guide, / No stars to steer us, only self and stride.”
At first glance, this affirms existential individualism. But what is “stride” without a guide? Is “self” truly free, or thrown into meaninglessness? The line implies confidence yet reeks of disorientation.
“The void looks back…”this reversal of human agency (echoing Nietzsche or Sartre) unsettles reader authority: are we gazing, or being gazed upon by absence?
2. Unstable Binaries and Disrupted Certainties
“No gods to judge, no fates that must be true,”
This line dismantles religious and metaphysical anchors, but what replaces them?
“The weight of choice is all we can pursue.”
Choice sounds empowering until we recall that “weight” implies burden, not freedom. The line both liberates and crushes, suggesting that freedom itself is a trap a contradiction deeply poststructuralist in tone.
3. Multiple Meanings through Metaphor
“We build from ash, we hope where none remain,”
Ash suggests both ruin and rebirth (Phoenix myth? Post-apocalypse?). Is this heroic construction or delusional repetition?
“Ink distilled from pain” evokes creativity, but also suffering aestheticized. Is this romanticizing trauma or reclaiming it?
Meaning is never final as Belsey says, language exceeds the author, and poems become “spaces of signification” rather than vehicles of truth.
4. Reader as the Site of Meaning
“To be is not to know, but to become…”
This philosophical claim destabilizes identity itself. It references Heideggerian being, yet also rejects fixity. The line is a citation, not a conclusion.
“We are the torchbearers against the night.”
The phrase sounds triumphant but “night” could symbolize death, ignorance, meaninglessness, or even historical forgetting. The image is evocative, but it offers no stable referent.
Whether it’s a call to resistance or an empty gesture, depends entirely on the reader's reading. As Belsey writes: “The reader produces the meaning that the text allows.”
Final Poststructuralist Insight
Both poems deconstruct themselves. They perform what Belsey identifies in modern poetry:
Language appears rich, even revelatory, but offers no foundation.
Signifiers are free-floating, and the referent always deferred.
The author’s intention is irrelevant these texts are webs of cultural signs.
The reader, through their knowledge of existentialism, digital metaphors, poetic form, and cultural code, must assemble a meaning only to realize that meaning is never singular or stable.
As Belsey reminds us, meaning is not “behind” the words. It is in the relations between signs, in their ambiguity, and in the reader’s interpretive play.
Conclusion: Poststructuralist Reading of the Two Poems
Through a poststructuralist lens informed by Catherine Belsey, both poems “Echoes in the Cloud” and “Heroic Couplets on Existentialism” demonstrate that language does not convey stable, singular truths. Instead, they function as fields of signification, filled with contradictions, shifting meanings, and rhetorical uncertainties.
Rather than affirming fixed binaries like presence/absence, self/other, or truth/illusion, the poems destabilize these oppositions, inviting the reader into a space where meaning is constantly deferred, contingent, and constructed. Imagery such as “ghosts in mirrored halls” or “the void looks back” resists closure and emphasizes the slippery nature of signs a core insight of both Derridean deconstruction and Belsey’s critical framework.
Most importantly, these poems do not “express” a singular authorial message. Instead, they cite cultural discourses of digital identity, existential freedom, metaphysical doubt and leave it to the reader to assemble meaning from fragments. Any interpretation remains partial, open-ended, and shaped by the reader’s position within language and culture.
In the spirit of poststructuralism, then, the poems mean only what their language allows and never once, finally, or completely.
References:
- Barad, Dilip. “Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' and William Carlos Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow.'” Research Gate, 03 July 2024, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/381943844_Deconstructive_Analysis_of_Ezra_Pound's_'In_a_Station_of_the_Metro'_and_William_Carlos_Williams's_'The_Red_Wheelbarrow'. Accessed 04 July 2025
- Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory, 3/E. Viva Books Private Limited, 2010.
- Barad, Dilip, Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound's 'In a Station of the Metro' and William Carlos Williams's 'The Red Wheelbarrow', Researchgate.net, Accessed 4 July 2025.
- Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions). OUP Oxford, 2002.
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