Deconstruction assumptions

In deconstruction the basic structuralist principle of difference is located ontologically as well as semiotically: at the very point of beingness of every thing there is difference -- or différance -- because only through différance is one thing not another thing instead. Différance comes before being; similarly, a trace comes before the presence of a thing (as anything which is is itself by virtue of not being something else, by differing, and that which it differs from remains as a trace, that whose absence is necessary for it to be); so too writing precedes speech -- a system of differences precedes any location of meaning in articulation. See my summary of Derrida, Différance.
Deconstruction, as do other poststructural theories, declines the structuralist assumption that structural principles are essences -- that there are universal structural principles of language which exist 'before' the incidence of language. (The emphasis on the concrete, historical and contingent in opposition to the eternalities of essence reveals one of deconstruction's filiations with existentialism.) All 'principles' of existence (i.e., of experience) are historically situated and are structured by the interplay of individual experience and institutional force, through the language, symbols, environment, exclusions and oppositions of the moment (and of the previous moments through which this one is constructed). Structures are historical, temporary, contingent, operating through differentiation and displacement.

Structuralist groundworks

Reality as we understand it is constructed of certain deep structural principles or organizations which may be configured differently on the level of experienced life, as we both operate and interpet them differently. Language, for instance, is compose of basic resources (langue) from which individual instances of its use are drawn (parole); cultures are formed through basic relations of economic production (the Marxist conception of the 'base'), but these may appear differently as cultures (economies, in the economic and more general sense) configure their ideas and arrangements (the 'superstructure'). The idea is that there are basic structures which are operationalized according to certain transformative rules in relation to the particulars of specific situations.

Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory

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Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not exclusively on the writings of the Paris-based Jacques Derrida. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based in part on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing, in part on the sophistication and intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.