Poststructuralism, Poems, and Gen AI: Deconstructive Reading

This blog is created as part of my coursework for the Master of Arts in English Literature, under the unit "Derrida and Deconstruction". The task , assigned by our professor, involves a two-part task:

• Generating two original poems on the themes of Existentialism and Digital Humanities.

• Analyzing these poems through the lens of Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist theory, using Peter Barry’s three-stage deconstructive model and Catherine Belsey’s poststructuralist approach.

For background reading and theoretical context, refer to the source below: Click here for background reading

In an age where digital tools are reshaping every corner of the humanities, this literary project sets out to explore what happens when creativity, artificial intelligence, and critical theory converge. The core of the project involves generating two original poems—one centered on Existentialism and the other on Digital Humanities—and then engaging in rigorous literary analysis through the lens of Poststructuralist and Deconstructionist theory.

What makes this project unique is the use of ChatGPT in both the creative and critical phases. The poems themselves were composed using AI, demonstrating how generative models can participate in the production of literary art. Yet this project goes further, using AI not merely as a poetic engine, but as a partner in the application of complex theoretical frameworks. The first poem, “The Weight of Choice,” is examined using Peter Barry’s three-step deconstructive method—verbal, textual, and linguistic—unveiling the instability of meaning, the tensions within language, and the fragmentation of philosophical binaries. The second poem, “The Code Within the Text,” is analyzed through Catherine Belsey’s poststructuralist approach, emphasizing how meaning is culturally coded, how language resists singularity, and how interpretation is shaped by ideological positioning.

By combining digital creativity with poststructuralist critique, this project not only foregrounds the unfixed nature of meaning, but also shows the value of using AI as a reflective tool in contemporary literary studies. The process opens new possibilities: what does it mean for language to be “slippery” when composed by a machine? Can an AI-generated poem still carry the anxieties of existentialism, or expose the ideological tensions of digital culture?

Ultimately, this experiment is not just about poems or theories—it’s about testing the boundaries of what it means to write, interpret, and question meaning in a digitally mediated world.

Poem: "The Weight of Choice"

We walk alone beneath a voiceless sky,

No gods respond, no truth to clarify.

The stars burn cold, yet still we seek their flame,

To find a script, a cause, a guiding name.

The self must carve its path through doubt and dust,

In freedom lies both terror and our trust.

What meaning clings when time itself must fall?

What voice remains when silence swallows all?

Yet in this void, we forge our will to be,

Defining fate with raw autonomy.

No essence comes before our act begins—

We’re burdened gods, condemned to choose our sins.

1. Verbal Stage – Oppositional Words

In this stage, we identify key binary oppositions that structure the poem’s surface meaning. The poem builds itself around existential binaries:

• Self / Void – "The self must carve..." vs. "we walk alone... beneath a voiceless sky."

• Freedom / Condemnation – “In freedom lies… terror” vs. “burdened gods, condemned…”

• Voice / Silence – “What voice remains…” vs. “silence swallows all”

• Truth / Uncertainty – “No truth to clarify” vs. “we forge our will”

• Essence / Action – “No essence comes before our act begins”

• Gods / Humans – “We’re burdened gods”

These oppositions suggest clarity and structure, implying the speaker is navigating a coherent philosophical landscape.

2. Textual Stage – Tensions and Contradictions

Here, we interrogate the coherence of the poem’s message. On the surface, the poem promotes existential freedom: we are alone, meaning is not given, and we must create our own values. But beneath this confident existential tone, the poem betrays its own anxiety.

• Contradiction 1: The phrase “burdened gods” is self-negating. Gods are by definition sovereign and unburdened, yet here they are condemned and weighed down. This juxtaposition reveals tension between autonomy and despair.

• Contradiction 2: The line “No essence comes before our act begins” expresses Sartrean existentialism, but calling ourselves “condemned” to choose introduces a negative valence, undermining the optimism of freedom.

• Contradiction 3: “To find a script, a cause, a guiding name” implies desire for structure, which clashes with the poem’s claim that no structure or meaning exists. The speaker seeks what the universe lacks.

These tensions suggest that the poem, while claiming to affirm choice and autonomy, is haunted by the very lack of meaning it seeks to overcome.

3. Linguistic Stage – Language Undermines Meaning

This is the most radical stage: we show that language itself destabilizes the poem’s message. Deconstruction here emphasizes how signifiers slip and resist fixed reference.

• The word “voice” occurs in “voiceless sky” and “What voice remains,” implying communication and clarity, yet it is surrounded by silence. Voice collapses into silence, so its meaning is unstable.

• The poem ends with “choose our sins” — a phrase that assumes moral categories, but earlier we were told that “no truth” exists. If there is no truth or standard, how can we name anything a ‘sin’? This reveals a residue of metaphysical thought in a supposedly anti-metaphysical poem.

• The phrase “we forge our will” sounds assertive but also metallic and mechanical, hinting at an unnatural process. “Forge” can mean both to create and to fake—an undecidable pun that undermines the reality of the self’s power.

• Finally, “burdened gods” is an oxymoron. The metaphorical use of “gods” implies power, but "burdened" negates it. The phrase performs what Derrida calls différance—a meaning that is both there and deferred, divided within itself.

In essence, the poem attempts to establish existential truth, but the language it uses slips out of control, producing ambiguity, irony, and conceptual instability.

Conclusion 

According to Peter Barry’s model:

• At the verbal level, the poem presents confident oppositions between meaning and meaninglessness, self and void.

• At the textual level, it undermines its surface existentialism by revealing anxiety, contradiction, and unresolved tension.

• At the linguistic level, the very words and metaphors used betray undecidability, slipping meanings, and the impossibility of a stable message.

Thus, the poem deconstructs itself—not by accident, but by performing the very linguistic and philosophical instability that post-structuralist deconstruction uncovers.

Sonnet: "The Code Within the Text"

In glowing screens, the ancient lines are cast,

Encoded echoes from the age of ink.

What once was bound in vellum, fading fast,

Now speaks anew in data's fluid link.

The scholar's gaze now scans with widened eyes,

Through networks vast where meanings interlace.

The archive breathes beneath electric skies,

As algorithms trace the ghost of grace.

Machine and mind in dialogue engage—

A lexicon reborn in silicon.

We map the myths, the themes from age to age,

With circuits tuned to truth and Babylon.

Yet still the soul must seek through wire and wave,

What lies beneath what language could not save.

Introduction to Belsey’s Poststructuralist Approach

Catherine Belsey, in Critical Practice, challenges the assumption that texts possess inherent, stable meanings. Instead, she shows that:

• Meaning is not fixed, but constructed in language.

• Language is not transparent, but a system of signs that refer only to other signs.

• Meaning arises from intertextuality, cultural codes, and reader positioning, not authorial intent.

• Texts are sites of ideological struggle, not neutral carriers of truth.

Using Belsey’s method, we will demonstrate how “The Code Within the Text” is not a simple celebration of digital progress, but a complex site of unstable meaning, ideological tension, and cultural re-inscription.

1. Meaning Is Not Fixed

On the surface, the poem appears to celebrate how technology preserves and revitalizes ancient texts. But a Belsey-style reading asks: Is that all it says?

Take the final couplet:

“Yet still the soul must seek through wire and wave, / What lies beneath what language could not save.”

• This undermines the earlier optimistic claim that “the archive breathes” and that we “map the myths.”

• “Language could not save” implies that something essential has been lost, perhaps irretrievably.

• So, even as the poem affirms the digital resurrection of culture, it hints at a deeper absence—the soul, meaning, or presence that cannot be retrieved through screens or circuits.

Thus, meaning is ambiguous, split between technological triumph and cultural mourning.

2. Language Resists Stability

In line with Belsey's method, let’s examine how the language resists precise anchoring:

a. Metaphor as a Vehicle of Instability

• Phrases like “ghost of grace” and “lexicon reborn” rely on unstable metaphors. Is “grace” divine, aesthetic, or cultural? Is the “rebirth” authentic, or a simulation?

• The term “encoded echoes” is inherently slippery: an echo is a repetition already detached from origin, and encoding adds further layers of mediation.

b. Contradictory Diction

• Words like “trace” and “map” suggest precision—but paired with “myths” and “ghost,” these terms gain ambivalence. What is being mapped—truth, or illusion?

c. Ambiguous Syntax

 “With circuits tuned to truth and Babylon.”

• “Babylon” is multivalent: a biblical symbol of decadence, a metaphor for civilization, or a code for confusion (as in ‘Babel’).

• The phrase “tuned to truth” sounds exact—but what “truth”? The word invites belief while resisting definition. 

Thus, language in this poem refuses to pin down a singular message, enacting the poststructuralist belief that signifiers float, never fully securing what they signify.

3. Interpretation Depends on Cultural Codes

Cultural codes shape the reader’s response. Different interpretive communities will read this sonnet through different lenses:

a. Digital Humanist Reading

• A scholar familiar with DH might celebrate the poem’s affirmation of machine-human synergy, reading “silicon” and “circuits” as signs of progress.

b. Romantic or Humanist Reading

• Another reader might find the poem melancholic, mourning the loss of presence, the “soul” that machines cannot retrieve, echoing Belsey’s idea that texts are not unified but divided by ideological conflict.

c. Poststructuralist Reading

The interplay of “algorithm” and “archive,” “data” and “grace,” points to the constructedness of knowledge—what Belsey calls a critique of the transparency of signification.

In this view, the poem enacts the instability of its own claims: it cannot firmly assert the power of digital media without also gesturing toward its limits.

4. The Reader Constructs the Text

As Belsey argued in her reading of Sonnet 18, meaning is not author-given but reader-activated.

• The line “The scholar’s gaze now scans with widened eyes” invites identification—but who is this scholar?

• Is it a figure of knowledge and hope?
• Or a passive consumer of digital fragments?

The poem interpellates the reader into a specific position—but does so uncertainly, allowing multiple identifications. This aligns with Belsey’s belief that the text positions the reader ideologically, but the position is never singular or secure.

Conclusion: 

Using Catherine Belsey’s poststructuralist model, we can say that:

• The poem’s surface meaning (digital revival of literature) is destabilized by its deeper tensions and contradictions.

• Language itself is revealed as unstable, metaphorical, and contradictory—never wholly under control.

• Meaning arises from cultural codes, interpretive positions, and ideological frameworks—not from the poem’s internal unity or authorial intent.

• The poem becomes a site of struggle, between technology and soul, preservation and loss, system and mystery—mirroring Belsey’s poststructuralist claim that all texts are open, plural, and ideologically charged.

REFERENCES: 

Barad, Dilip. Deconstructive Analysis of Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" and William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow." ResearchGate, 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'.

Barad, Dilip. Poetry and Poststructuralism: An AI‑Powered Analysis. July 2024. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.11536.42248. ResearchGate, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382114259_Poetry_and_Poststructuralism_An_AI‑Powered_Analysis.

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. 3rd ed., Viva Books Private Limited, 2010.

Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. OUP Oxford, 2002.