The character of post-structuralism

Post-structuralism retains structuralism’s commitment to de Saussure’s view that the meaning of words derives from their relationship to one another and not from any postulated relationship to non-linguistic reality. However, it places a much more intense focus on the origins of language. As one would expect, there is no unified voice to be heard here. We find language being situated within societal relationships of power (Foucault) and within the unconscious (Lacan), to give just two examples. In such exercises, the difference between post-structuralism and structuralism stands forth in clear relief. Structuralism looks for decisive shaping factors in structural forms discoverable within society or the unconscious, or both. Not so post-structuralism. Structures no longer offer the life line they were once seen to be throwing to the shipwrecked. There is no life line to offer. Post-structuralism has abandoned positivism. It remains ahistorical and theoretical. It still offers its mild invitation to demystify the experience of reality. Above all, it is as anti­humanist as ever. But claims to being ‘scientific’ have well and truly gone.

Indeed, for all the echt with which the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism has invariably been announced, the latter clearly exhibits a remarkable fidelity to all but one of the five major structuralist motifs we identified above: positivism seems the sole casualty of this bloodless revolution in thought. (Milner 1991, p. 76)

In the move to post-structuralism, Barthes takes his ‘death of the author’ a step forward. He writes of the distinction between ‘readerly’ (lisible) and ‘writerly’ (scriptible) texts, that is, between texts that envisage a merely passive, receptive reader and those that call upon the reader to be an active creator of meaning. This is an important ingredient in his post-structuralism. The readerly text is bourgeois text. It is realist or classical in form and confirms readers in the subject position assigned to them by culture. Writerly texts, on the contrary, are texts that explode convention and shatter the reader’s wholeness. In similar vein, Barthes contrasts ‘the text of pleasure’ with ‘the text of bliss’. The former is comfortable, the latter unsetding and crisis-provoking. Writerly texts, or texts of bliss, are destabilising for both society and the individual ego (Barthes 1975).

Foucault’s move from the structuralist orientation he displayed in the 1960s to his 1970s post-structuralism can be detected in his treatment of power.

His work in the 1960s focused on language and the constitution of the subject in discourse. The individual subject was an empty entity, an intersection of discourses. In his later work Foucault shifted from linguistic determination to the view that individuals are constituted by power relations, power being the ultimate principle of social reality. (Sarup 1993, p. 73)

In Foucault’s later work on power, we detect no positivist searching for meaning in linguistic structures or social institutions. Power as he envisages it is not a reality lying there for its meaning to be discovered. It is itself a generator of reality and meaning. Power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’ (Foucault 1980, p. 39). ‘For Foucault’, states Sarup (1993, p. 74), ‘conceiving of power as repression, constraint or prohibition is inadequate: power “produces reality”; it “produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’”. There is no standing back from this power and the discourses it effects. All that one can do is to engage with the dominant discourse from within (shades of Adorno’s ‘immanent critique’?), attempting to disrupt and demystify it by revealing its indeterminacy and, paradoxically, the possibilities it thereby has to offer.

In this respect at least, as Milner makes clear (1991, p. 75), Foucault manifests an affinity with Derrida ‘despite their apparent mutual animosity’. Like Camus and Althusser, Jacques Derrida is Algerian-born. Unlike Barthes and Foucault, he is not a convert from structuralism. In fact, since bursting onto the French academic scene in the late 1960s, he has been a stem critic of stmcturalism. One of his prime targets has been the positivism it displays. Derrida does not accept the possibility of general laws governing the nature of reality. Nor does he accept the split between subject and object that is required if one is to attempt an ‘objective’ description of things. For him, as for anti-positivists generally, there can be no description of reality into which the standpoint and interests of the observer have not entered.

One form that Derrida’s anti-structuralism takes is a fierce opposition to the fixed relationship that stmcturalism posits between signifier and signified. In describing the sign, he breaks apart what for Saussure is an essential unity of word and concept. For Saussure word and concept are like sides of a lens that is at once concave and convex. For Derrida, however, word and concept never come together definitively in this fashion. ‘He sees the sign’, Samp observes (1993, p. 33), ‘as a stmcture of difference: half of it is always “not there” and the other half is always “not that’”. And signifiers and signifieds refuse to stand still. Signifiers constandy turn into signifieds, which keep turning into signifiers. As we search for meaning, we find ourselves led along a whole concatenation of signifiers/signifieds—an infinite regress of signification.

So words need to be put sous rature, Derrida maintains. Literally translated, this means ‘under erasure’. Drawing on a device used earlier by Heidegger, Derrida crosses words out but leaves the crossed-out words in the text. It is a move reminiscent of Adorno’s negative dialectics. By it Derrida is indicating that, while the word is inadequate, it is still necessary. One must be ready to hold word and concept in precarious tension. What this means, above all else, is that in every sign there remains the trace of ‘the other’ that eludes our grasp. Something is always absent. Philosophy, of course, has characteristically predicated itself not on absence but on presence. Derrida reverses this. He rejects ‘the metaphysics of presence’ and directs our attention to absence. ‘Our attention is therefore to be constandy displaced’, writes Yates (1990, p. 224). ‘Every boundary to context, like that of stmcture and its centre, is no more than a mark within a chain of signifiers in which there are no a priori fixed points, places of certainty or security.’

Suppose we were to read a text with all this in mind. Instead of assuming a definite sense in what is written, we remain aware of the infinite regress of meaning just referred to. We find ourselves engaged in ‘a remorseless worrying away at the other possible meanings of words’ (Milner 1991, p. 74). We read the text ‘so closely that the author’s conceptual distinctions on which the text relies are shown to fail on account of the inconsistent and paradoxical use made of these very concepts within the text as a whole’; the very ‘standards or definitions which the text sets up’ are ‘used to unsetde and shatter the original distinctions’ (Sarup 1993, pp. 34-5). In such an ironic exercise, we are following in Derrida’s footsteps and carrying out what has come to be known as ‘deconstruction’.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? There is, indeed, a playful (or ‘ludic’) dimension to what Derrida is doing. Yet Derrida is dealing with matters of great moment. The ambiguity associated with the sign mirrors a much deeper ambiguity within human existence itself. As Derrida insists, deconstruction is not neutral but ‘intervenes’ (1981, p. 93). Reflecting on this, Wolin underscores the need to discover how deconstruction intervenes and on what basis it can claim any privilege or priority as a mode not only of interpreting texts but also of influencing daily social life. As Wolin sees it (1992, p. 199), whether deconstruction ‘possesses sufficient conceptual resources for the tasks of contemporary cultural criticism’ is a question that must be asked. Derrida, it seems, would agree. Certain of his statements constitute a forthright invitation, issued to all deconstructionists, to engage in self-criticism. ‘It is’, says Wolin (1992, p. 217), ‘an initiative that should be seized’.

Any such self-criticism would need to examine the deconstructionist attitude towards metaphysics. From Derrida’s standpoint, metaphysics analyses the world in terms of polarities. Derrida lists some of the polarities for us: ‘normal/abnormal, standard/parasite, fulfilled/void, serious/non-serious, literal/non-literal, briefly positive/negative and ideal/ non-ideal’. These are ‘value oppositions clustered around an ideal and unfindable limit’. One member of each opposition is always subordinated to the other. In this way metaphysics becomes the ‘enterprise of returning “strategically”, ideally, to an origin or to a “priority” held to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc.’ (Derrida 1977, p. 236). Derrida’s strategy is to address these binary oppositions so beloved of the metaphysicians and to subvert them from within. ‘What Derrida does’, writes Yates (1990, p. 208), ‘is to locate the lacunae and blind-spots within this system, and to attempt to use their unforeseen and unperceived problems and contradictions to invert the terms, overturn the hierarchy and work differendy within the field they demarcate’.

In all this, let us note, Derrida focuses on the written rather than the spoken word. It was not that way with Saussure. Speech came first for Saussure, as it has done for Western philosophy generally. As Derrida sees it, Saussure’s emphasis on the unity of the sign in speech causes him to collapse voice into thought. The signifier fades from the picture and the concept is allowed to occupy pride of place. ‘The exteriority of the signifier seems reduced’, complains Derrida (1981, p. 22). Why is this unfortunate? Because it admits ‘the possibility of thinking a concept signified in and of itself, a concept simply present for thought, independent of a relationship to language, that is of a relationship to a system of signifiers’ (Derrida, 1981, p. 19). Derrida rejects such ‘phonocentrism’, the privileging of the spoken word, and makes writing, rather than speech, his starting point. He goes so far as to say (1976, p.158), ‘There is nothing outside of the text¹. Speech has been traditionally privileged because it appears closer to the presence of meaning. Writing is discounted because it appears a step further away. This is a ‘logocentric’ way of viewing things. It assumes a ‘transcendental signified’ (a logos), that is, an essence or form of truth in which beliefs can be grounded. It assumes a presence of meaning one might be close to or far removed from. Derrida has no time for a philosophy of presence of this kind. Logocentric as it is, it represents an unwarranted concession to metaphysics.

We have noted above that, for Derrida, the sign is a structure of ‘difference’. It is founded as much on the absence of what it is not as on the presence of what it is. Derrida writes of the ‘play of differences’. No element of discourse is simply ‘present in and of itself; instead, it bears ‘the trace within it of other elements in the chain’, so that everywhere there are ‘differences of differences and traces of traces’ (Derrida 1981, p. 26). In our search for meaning, therefore, we are sent to difference, and meaning is deferred. To capture this twin significance of difference and deferral, Derrida invents a word of his own—differance. One is reminded of Heidegger’s ‘difference’ (Aus-trag), a movement in which ‘Being and beings are borne or carried outside of one another yet at the same time borne toward one another’ (Caputo 1982, p. 148).

Already, in this necessarily brief account of Jacques Derrida, we have encountered much that is prominent in post-structuralist literature. ‘It would be of litde value to produce a list of post-structuralist “concepts’”, says Yates (1990, p. 206), ‘but many of those we might wish to include stem from Derrida’s work’.

Another noted thinker in this tradition is Jacques Lacan. With Lacan, psychoanalysis strides onto the structuralist/post-structuralist stage. Taking the unconscious to be structured like language, Lacan has translated Freud’s categories into linguistic forms. As Merquior puts it (1986, p. 149), ‘Lacan “Saussureanized” psychoanalysis’. He has been helped in this task by the work of Russian formalist Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who brought together the literary dichotomy of metaphor/metonymy and Saussure’s analysis of language. Lacan seizes upon this same dichotomy to cast light on the workings of the unconscious. He believes, for instance, that one can give Freud’s concepts of condensation and displacement greater precision by recasting them as metaphoric and metonymic processes, respectively.¹⁷ ‘He sees censorship and repression, the classical Freudian mechanisms, as symbol mills, ever churning out metaphors and metonymies’ (Merquior 1986, p. 153).

Taking the unconscious to be structured like language has the further outcome that language and sexuality arrive together. We might revisit what we have already considered about this aspect of Lacan’s thought.

For Lacan, the child originally inhabits a pre-Oedipal ‘imaginary’ characterised by speechless identity between child, mother and world. Entry into the symbolic order of language, and the acquisition of subjectivity, are achieved only at the price of a loss of this imaginary identity with the mother. The symbolic order is thus masculine, it is, in short, the law of the father. (Milner 1991, p. 95)

Lacan has had significant influence on French feminism. This is evident in the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, whose contributions we considered in the previous chapter. We noted there that, while both are indebted to Lacan, neither has proved to be an orthodox disciple. Irigaray was expelled from Lacan’s school at Vincennes because of her divergent views on female sexuality. Kristeva, for her part, significandy reworks Lacan’s analysis of the pre-Oedipal situation. Where Lacan posits ‘the imaginary’, Kristeva talks of ‘the semiotic’ and, while accepting that the semiotic is repressed, she insists, contrary to Lacan, that it is not superseded. The semiotic—‘the “raw material” of signification, the corporeal libidinal matter that must be harnessed and appropriately channelled’—is a ‘movement of “cutting through”, breaking down unities’ (Sarup 1993, pp. 124,126).

This cutting through and breaking down entails, among other things, an intertextuality that brings the ‘plurality of the text’ to the fore. Intertextuality brings all texts together as a matrix within which one text is transported into another. Kristeva expounds intertextuality with impressive insight and considerable originality. Owing particularly to her influence, intertextuality has become a stock theme within poststructuralist discourse. We should not underestimate its impact. It has played a key role, Bannet reminds us, in ‘bringing the human sciences together’ and enabling post-structuralists ‘to give their marginalised disciplines a new centrality and importance’.

… it made it possible for Lacan, Barthes, Foucault and Derrida to roam at will among different types of discourse and among different types of text, pulling things together and making what sense of them they would, without conforming to the traditional limitations and prescriptions of any one discipline or any one text. (Bannet 1989, p. 244)

This constant intertwining and blending of elements once seen as distinct, and the consequent need to disentangle them and redefine them as best we can, is not just true of texts and the disciplines that study them. Everywhere we look, if we are looking through post-structuralist eyes, the once clear-cut lines of demarcation appear blurred. Hierarchical oppositions seem to meld even as they stand apart. The traditional antinomies, so dear to our heart—where have they gone? The focus is now on cutting through and breaking down. It is a process of disentanglement that brings us back to what we have already found to be postmodernism’s pivotal theme.

This confluence does not justify an identification of post­structuralism with postmodernism. For the most part, post-structuralism has not come to its standpoint in and out of an encounter with the postmodern world precisely as postmodern world. Claims made on its behalf that it is itself a postmodernism hardly stand up to close scrutiny. ‘In general’, states Milner (1991, p. Ill), ‘French post-structuralism has been far too preoccupied with the high modernist canon to accord any serious attention to a contemporary culture that has acquired an increasingly postmodernist complexion’. In regard to Derrida in particular, Wolin makes the comment that he ‘has intentionally avoided associating deconstruction with the postmodern turn in criticism and the arts’ (1992, p. 206), even if more recendy ‘he has taken an increasing interest in postmodern architectural theory and practice’ (1992, p. 249). For all that, as we return from our excursion into post-structuralism to a consideration of more stricdy postmodernist thought, we find ourselves better able, as a result of the former, to appreciate and evaluate the latter.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.