Poststructuralism and Deconstruction

Poststructuralism emerged in France in the late 1960s. The two figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). In essay his 'The Death of the Author', Barthes announces the death of the author, which is a rhetorical way of asserting the independence of the literary text and its impossibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended, or 'crafted' into the work. Instead, the essay makes a declaration of radical textual independence: the work is not determined by intention, or context. Rather, the text is free by its very nature of all such restraints. Hence, as Barthes says in the essay, the consequence of the death of the author is the birth of the reader. Again, in the late 1960s, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, in his 1966 lecture titled 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' sees in modern times a particular intellectual 'event' which constitutes a radical break from past ways of thought. The event concerns the 'decentring' of our intellectual universe. Prior to this event the existence of a norm or centre in all things was taken for granted: thus 'man', as the Renaissance slogan had it, was the measure of all other things in the universe: white Western norms of dress, behaviour, architecture, intellectual outlook, and so on, provided a firm centre against which deviations, variations could be detected and identified as 'Other' and marginal. In the twentieth century, however, these centres were destroyed; sometimes this was caused by historical events - such as the way the First World War destroyed the illusion of steady material progress, or the way the Holocaust destroyed the notion of Europe as the source and centre of human civilisation; sometimes it happened because of scientific discoveries - such as the way the notion of relativity destroyed the ideas of time and space as fixed and central absolutes; and sometimes, finally, it was caused by intellectual or artistic revolutions - such as the way modernism in the arts in the first thirty years of the century rejected such central absolutes as harmony in music, chronological sequence in narrative, and the representation of the visual world in art. In the resulting universe there are no absolutes or fixed points, so that the universe we live in is 'decentred' or inherently relativistic. Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre, all we have is 'free play' (or 'play' as the title of the essay has it). In the lecture Derrida embraces this decentred universe of free play as liberating, just as Barthes in 'The Death of the Author' celebrates the demise of the author as ushering in an era of joyous freedom. The consequences of this new decentred universe are impossible to predict. Both Barthes and Derridas observations in relation with the findings of Structuralist Linguists gave birth of Poststructuralist endeavor. One of structuralism's characteristic views is the notion that language doesn't just reflect or record the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see. The poststructuralists argue that the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can have no access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing, and hence we have no certain standard by which to measure anything. Post-structuralism says, in effect, that fixed intellectual reference points are permanently removed by properly taking what structuralists said about language. Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we do not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium. All the same, it decides to live

with that fact and continue to use language to think and perceive with. After all, language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realising our dependence upon it need not induce intellectual despair. By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist in insisting upon the consequences of the view that, in effect, reality itself is textual. Poststructuralism develops what threaten to become terminal anxieties about the possibility of achieving any knowledge through language. The verbal sign, in its view, is constantly floating free of the concept it is supposed to designate. Thus, the poststructuralist's way of speaking about language involves a rather obsessive imagery based on liquids - signs float free of what they designate, meanings are fluid, and subject to constant slippage. This linguistic liquidity resists our attempts to carry signification carefully from 'giver' to 'receiver' in the containers we call words. We are not fully in control of the medium of language, so meanings cannot be planted in set places, like somebody planting a row of potato seeds; they can only be randomly scattered, like the planter walking along and scattering seed with broad sweeps of the arm, so that much of it lands unpredictably or drifts in the wind.
Likewise, the meanings words have can never be guaranteed one hundred per cent pure. Thus, words are always 'contaminated' by their opposites - you can't define night without reference to day, or good without reference to evil. Or else they are interfered with by their own history, so that obsolete senses retain a troublesome and ghostly presence within present-day usage, and are likely to materialise just when we thought it was safe to use them. Thus, a seemingly innocent word like 'guest', is etymologically associated with 'hostis', which means an enemy or a stranger, thereby inadvertently manifesting the always potentially unwelcome status of the guest. Likewise, the metaphorical bases of words are often reactiviated by their use in philosophy or literature and then interfere with literal sense, or with the stating of single meanings. Linguistic anxiety, then, is a keynote of the post-structuralist outlook.

Again, Derrida on an Author of any text, says we all inherit language as a ready-made system, with its own history, philosophy, and so on already 'built in'? In this sense one might argue that we don't express ourselves in words, merely some aspect of language. The writer writes by only letting himself, after a fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system. And the reading must always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses. Besides all these, Poststructuralists are concerned on phonocentric thought process of western scholars. Western philosophical tradition, all the way from Plato to Levi-Strauss, while thinking on how meanings are established and maintained, has consistently vilified writing as a mere lifeless, alienated form of expression, and consistently celebrated the living voice. Behind this prejudice lies a particular view of 'man': man is able spontaneously to create and express his own meanings, to be in full possession of himself, and to dominate language as a transparent medium of his inmost being. What this theory fails to see is that the 'living voice' is in fact quite as material as print; and that since spoken signs, like written ones, work only by a process of difference and division, speaking could be just as much said to be a form of writing as writing is said to be a second-hand form of speaking. Just as Western philosophy has been 'phonocentric', centred on the 'living voice' and deeply suspicious of script, so also it has been in a broader sense 'logocentric', committed to a belief in some ultimate 'word', presence, essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation of all our thought, language and experience. It has yearned for the sign which will give meaning to all others the 'transcendental signifier' - and for the anchoring, unquestionable meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the

'transcendental signified'). A great number of candidates for this role - God, the Idea, the World Spirit, the Self, substance, matter and so on - have thrust themselves forward from time to time. Since each of these concepts hopes to found our whole system of thought and language, it must itself be beyond that system, untainted by its play of linguistic differences. It cannot be implicated in the very languages which it attempts to order and anchor: it must be somehow anterior to these discourses, must have existed before they did. It must be a meaning, but not like any other meaning just a product of a play of difference. It must figure rather as the meaning of meanings, the lynchpin or fulcrum of a whole thought-system, the sign around which all others revolve and which all others obediently reflect. To Poststructuralists any such transcendental meaning is a fiction. To them, there is no concept which is not embroiled in an open-ended play of signification, shot through with the traces and fragments of other ideas. It is just that, out of this play of signifiers, certain meanings are elevated by social ideologies to a privileged position, or made the centres around which other meanings are forced to turn. Consider, in our own society, Freedom, the Family, Democracy, Independence, Authority, Order and so on. Sometimes such meanings are seen as the origin of all the others, the source from which they flow; but this, as we have seen, is a curious way of thinking, because for this meaning ever to have been possible other signs must already have existed. It is difficult to think of an origin without wanting to go back beyond it. At other times such meanings may be seen not as the origin but as the goal, towards which all other meanings are or should be steadily marching. 'Teleology', thinking of life, language and history in terms of its orientation to a te/os or end, is a way of ordering and ranking meanings in a hierarchy of significance, creating a pecking order among them in the light of an ultimate purpose. But any such theory of history or language as a simple linear evolution misses the web-like complexity of signs which I have been describing, the back and forth, present and absent, forward and sideways movement of language in its actual processes. It is that weblike complexity, indeed, which post-structuralism designates by the word 'text'. Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher whose views we have been expounding over the last few pages, labels as 'metaphysical' any such thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed. Post-structuralism is much more fundamental: it distrusts the very notion of reason, and the idea of the human being as an independent entity, preferring the notion of the 'dissolved' or 'constructed' subject, whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces -that is, not an essence at all, merely a 'tissue of textualities'. Thus, its torch of scepticism burns away the intellectual ground on which the Western civilisation is built. Post-structuralism contests the concept of 'man' as developed by enlightenment thought and idealist philosophy. Rather than holding as in the enlightenment view that 'individuals', are sacred, separate and intact, their minds the only true realm of meaning and value, their rights individual and inalienable, their value and nature rooted in a universal and transhistorical essence -- a metaphysical being, in short -- the post-structural view holds that persons are culturally and discursively structured, created in interaction as situated, symbolic beings. The common term for a person so conceived is a 'subject'. However, the post-structuralist literary critic is engaged in the task of 'deconstructing' the text. This process is given the name 'deconstruction', which can roughly be defined as applied poststructuralism. Essentially, the deconstructive reading of literary texts tends to make them emblems of the decentred universe we have been discussing. Now, the question may come, how can we be benefitted through this applied post-structural enterprise? Deconstruction, Derrida argues, should be understood as an analysis, the object of which is the sedimented structures

which form the discursive element, the philosophical discursivity in which we think. Derrida adds immediately to his description of the object of analysis that the discursivity of thought the structure in which we operate occurs through language. Equally, it operates through western culture. The tactic of deconstructive criticism, that is to say, is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic; and deconstruction shows this by fastening on the 'symptomatic' points, impasses of meaning, where texts get into trouble, come unstuck, offer to contradict themselves. According to Jonathan Culler, deconstructionist criticism may look for: 1. the value-laden hierarchy 2. where a single term brings together different lines of argument or sets of values 3. anything in the text that counters an authoritative interpretation, including interpretations that the work appears to encourage 4. attention to the marginal -- hierarchies depend on exclusions; the marginalized is what the text resists, and therefore can be identified by.
To deconstruct a text the following steps may come: Understand the intended meaning of the text, or the accepted meaning of the text. For example, if you have access to the author's opinions of the text's meanings, focus on this as you read; if a classic text is generally interpreted or taught in a particular way, use this information as you read. 2. Locate ways in which the text doesn't conform to its stated or accepted meaning. A classic example of this is Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which has generally been accepted as an antislavery book. However, Huck and Tom continue to pretend Jim is a slave after he attains freedom. They treat him cruelly, as if he is their slave. This section of the book doesn't conform to the accepted meaning.
1. 3. Find tensions and contradictions within the text, looking for ideas that

don't readily match other ideas present in the text.

4. Seek out the text's assumptions. Look for what it presents as normal,

natural, apparent or primary. Likewise, seek out where the text sets up a distinct binary opposition between two categories. For example, it might insist that there is a firm distinction between gay sexuality and straight sexuality, or it may indicate that heterosexuality is natural, while homosexuality is a perversion.
5. Demonstrate how binaries and hierarchies break down under scrutiny

by showing how the text's idea of "normal, natural, apparent or primary" is actually none of those things, or by showing how one thing (such as heterosexuality) needs another (homosexuality) to define itself against. Without both categories, neither one makes much sense.

Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least, was likely to beat you over the head for doing so.