A. Jacques Derrida: ''Structure, Sign, And Play in the Discourse of the human Sciences''
The term deconstruction first emerged in 1966 when Derrida delivered the following lecture at a John Hopkins University symposium in which he questioned the already-held metaphysical assumptions of Western philosophy. Derrida's other influential theses are expanded in his other books and essays. My purpose is to provide a very short introduction to the commencement of Post-structuralism.
§ The concept of structure is as old as the episteme, knowledge, in western science and its roots go far deep into the language.
§ The structurality of structure has always been offered a fixed position or a presence that gives it a centrality and limits thereby the 'the play of structure'.
§ The function of this centre is to 1) orient, balance, and organize the structure, and 2) limit the freeplay of the structure. Thus, this so-called unique centre paradoxically constitutes and governs the structure while escaping structurality.
§ The centre is at the totality, and yet, totality has its centre elsewhere since the centre does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality). That is, the centre is not the centre.
§ Since the concept of structured centre is the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science, structured centre, like episteme, is based on a certitude or stability which rejects the idea of play.
§ This centre is arche or telos being paradoxically within the structure and outside it.
§ Western culture and western thought is dominated by rationalism and metaphysics. (Logocentrism)
§ So, the history of structure is nothing more than a chain of substitution of names. The centre receives only different forms and names but holds the same unique essence.
§ On the one hand, there is a desire for a centre in the constitution of structure; on the other hand, the process of signification requires displacement or substitution.
§ The centre, thus, is removed into its substitute—it has been de-centred. So the centre cannot be thought as presence-being or a fixed locus. Rather, the centre is a process, a non-locus in which countless sign-substitutes come and play. This leads to a never-ending discourse.
§ Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, of the concept of being and truth, Freudian critique of consciousness, of self-identity, and Heideggerian destruction of metaphysics, of determination of being as presence are exemplary authors in whose discourses 'decentring' has occurred.
§ The metaphysics of presence; that is some intuitively grasped and immediately present extra-linguistic reality, is attacked with the help of the concept of sign: there's no transcendental or privileged signified.
§ 'Il n'y a rien hors du texte': meaning is not present outside the text and inside objects, thoughts, minds, ideas; rather, it is a function of the sign system, of language itself.
§ In each word there reside both forces of signification: those of difference and deferment.
B. Ronald Barthes: "The Death of the Author"
Roland Gérard Barthes, French essayist and social and literary critic, whose writings on semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, helped establish Structuralism. He later revised his theses under the influence of Derrida and Lacan and became a leading intellectual figure of Post-structuralism. By the essay "The Death of the Author" he impressed many post-modernist thinkers and writers.
§ As soon as a fact is narrated, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, and writing begins.
§ Author as an individual is the product of the modern capitalist society.
§ In France, Mallarme, was the first to see and to foresee the necessity to substitute language itself for the person [author] who until then had been supposed to be the owner of his work and to restore the pl
A group of the most influential thinkers of the latter part of the 20th C. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althousser, Jean Francois Lyotard, Jean Boudrillard and some others inaugurated a new era of thinking that inspired the emergence of Post-structuralism.
§ The author is believed to exist before his book and nourish it like a father and his child. In contrast, the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text.
§ Every text is eternally written here and now.
§ Writing can no longer designate an act of 'depiction' as the Classics would say. It is, instead, a performative, rare verbal form.
§ A text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. [This thesis later developed to the concept of Intertextuality.]
§ Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. Criticism is today undermined along with the Author.
§ To give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.
§ The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost…the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.
§ A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet, this destination cannot any longer be personal.
§ The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.
C. The Influence of Michel Foucault (1960s and 1970s)
(Michel Foucault, a prominent thinker in the post-modernist critical movement, focused on the historical construction of knowledge.
As a prolific postmodern philosopher, it is impossible to draw post-structuralist premises out of one single essay of his. Therefore, we a recourse to a general look at his major propositions would probably suffice.)
§ What is considered rational and scholarly is determined not by absolute standards of reason but by unspoken rules, institutional constraints and the power of particular discursive practices.
§ Power works through discourses and discursive formations. One of these discourses in which power is firmly located is language, the business of literary studies.
§ We have so completely internalized discourses that they even 'induce pleasure'.
§ We live and breathe discourses and function unknowingly as links in a good many power chains.
§ 'Discourse' is a cluster of claims to knowledge; a loose structure of interconnected assumptions that makes knowledge possible. In his Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault tells us that a discourse is 'a series of sentences or propositions' and that it 'can be defined as a large group of statements that belong to a single system of formation.'—a so-called discursive formation. ''I shall be able to speak of clinical discourse, economic discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse.''
§ Such a discourse, then, produces claims to knowledge and it is these claims –which we accept—that give it its power. Therefore, there is an intimate relationship between knowledge and power.
§ Knowledge or episteme is a way to define and categorize others. Instead of emancipating us from ignorance, knowledge leads to surveillance and discipline.
§ Knowledge is the product of a certain discourse, which has enabled it to be formulated, and has no validity outside it. The 'truth' of human sciences is the effect of discourses, of language. Their knowledge does not derive from access to the real world, to authentic reality, but from the rules of their discourse.
§ The knowledge of human sciences only counts as knowledge because the discourse in question is powerful enough to make us believe that it is knowledge.
§ Since we are all extensions of the discourses that we have internalized, we ourselves constantly reproduce their power, even in our intimate relations.
Deconstruction and Foucault
Deconstructionism is not blind to the fact that language is tied up with power—its dismantling of binary oppositions testifies to this. Foucault, however, places language in the centre of social power and of social practices —rather than textual power. The social role of language.—including literature—and its hegemonic power is the starting point for a myriad of post-structural approaches including New Historicism and Cultural Materialism.
D. The Influence of Francois Lyotard (1960s)
§ The influences of grand narratives of human progress and liberation rooted in Enlightenment thought have lost credibility. The grand narratives are untenable and repressive. They lack credibility. They impose restrictive boundaries on an otherwise pluralist cultural formation. They delimit discourse and exclude or marginalize voices that do not suit the dominant group.
§ The truth claims and assumed consensus which have till now provided the firm base for human history and its grand narratives are unreal, for there is no single objective truth.
§ A culture of detached media images [collage] has come to suffocate and out clone the 'the real world', ousting old-fashioned worries about the relationship of the image to the real.
§ Capital, masculine and so on – all the forms of a dominant ideological thought which characterizes the modern world—depend upon the erasure of figurality and its premature transliteration into the form of discursivity.
E. The Influence of Jean Boudrillard: The Loss of the Real (post-1970s)
§ In the epoch of 'simulation' reality is gone for good and we are left only with appearances.
§ There is no longer a 'real' external world to which signs can refer; there has been an implosion of image and reality. This implosion leads into the simulated non-space hyper-reality.
§ The real is now defined in terms of media in which it moves. The real is the image-creating post-modern communication technologies—especially television—which proliferates self-generating, self-mirroring, depth-less images.
§ Experience everywhere, now superficial, achieves its final 'utopian' form in instantaneous abundance and banality of the cultureless society of the United States, quintessentially, in Disneyland.
§ Everything is obscenely on display, moving endlessly, transparently and literally superficially across a surface where there is no control or stabilizing depth.
§ What emerges, for society, theory and art, is the option to recombine, repeat, relaunch, the scattered pieces of a (lost) past. Humankind should surrender to the triumphant world of objects, human subjects and subjectivity are involved in a (mostly) losing battle with invasive postmodern technologies.
F. Terry Eagleton: ''Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism"
§ Postmodernism has been called by Fredric Jameson the 'cultural Logic of the late capitalism' and is compared to a 'pastiche' which is the 'imitation of a peculiar mask'. It is pastiche because it is 'devoid of any motive', any satiric impulse and without any laughter or conviction; just 'a dead language'.
§ Works of art are equal to commodities of common consumption. Postmodernism admits this communist value: ''Art is commodity, accept it!''
§ Postmodernism parodies modernism, the revolutionary art of 20th C. avant-garde.
§ Postmodernism seeks to erase the critical boundaries between cultural and political society and destroy the institutional autonomy of art.
§ 'High art' of modernism is replaced and sneered at by 'hot art' of postmodernism.
§ Postmodernism frowns at the art making claims to depth of meaning or significance. Depth is denounced as a metaphysical illusion.
§ The depthless, styles, de-historicized surfaces of postmodern culture free from the guilt of alienation (emphasized by modernists). There is nothing to be alienated from. In fact, we are alienated from our alienation.
§ The remote Utopia is, too, dissolves into a shimmering fantasy. There is no distant dream; all is here.
§ The present and now is established as the only reality. Therefore, things are what they are now.
§ Postmodernism is a reunification of art and social life, but this time by vacating art of its social content.
§ Art does not reflect life because life itself has nothing worth reflecting. Reality is all a reflection, a simulacrum, a gratuitous fiction. Social reality is art, an aesthetic commodity packaged and commodified.
§ Concepts like 'Truth' and 'Reason' are replaced by words like 'Performativity' and 'Power'. The logic of the late capitalism disowns the very idea of logic and theory. Modernism dies as soon as it is accepted, conventionalized or institutionalized.
§ Postmodernism fails to distinguish between good and bad, proclaiming 'bad is good'—neither affirmed nor denied, but simply accepted.
§ Postmodernism has embraced Wittgenstein's positivism: ''World is just as it is, and no other way.''
§ There is no rational discourse of ethical or political value, for values are mere constructions—illusions—and do not have a being.
§ Postmodernism has borrowed a few things from modernism: the fragmented self, bizarre experience, and from the avant-garde the dissolution of art into social life, the rejection of tradition and opposition to high culture.
References
Charles E. Bressler, Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, Fourth Ed.
Hans Berens, Literary Theory: The Basics
K.M. Newton, Twentieth Century Literary Theory: A Reader
Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Criticism
Sharad Rajimwale, Contemporary Literary Criticism