Poststructuralism

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Poststructuralism

• Deconstruction

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• Poststructuralist theory crucially problematizes
  the reliability or stability of meaning, placing
  language in a place where it slides between the
  signifier (word), signified (concept) and
  referent (thing).

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• Saussure was responsible for putting into
  circulation the terms signifier and signified in
  order to account for the arbitrary- relationship
  between words and concepts.

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• In Poststructuralism, language becomes text or
  textuality.
• The insistence on the fundamentally unreliable,
  shifting nature of meaning produces a theory of
  literature which profoundly questions, the
  relation of language to empirical reality.
• This radical view of language is perhaps most
  readily associated with deconstruction

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AUTHOR

• Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the
  author in a 1968 essay in which he questioned
  the traditional assumption that a text is
  directly and solely traceable to a single author
  for meaning and production, in short, for
  authority.
• Poststructuralist critical practice contests the
  category of the author as omniscient or the
  single source of power in relation to a text.
• Meaning is not fixed by or located in the
  authors intention, whatever that may be.
• What poststructuralist critics question is a
  texts reliance on a single self-determining
  author, in control of his meanings, who fulfils
  his intentions and only his intentions For
  Eagleton, textual meaning cannot be ascribed to
  authorial intention because it is the product
  of language, which always has something slippery
  about it.

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articulated by a speaking subject located in
society

• More recent poststructuralist debates, have
  modified this view of language and literature by
  proposing that language be considered as one
  system in relation to other systems, and always
  as one articulated by a speaking subject
  located in society, with language more accurately
  conceived as language-in-use rather than a
  fixed structure or system.

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discourse

• The preferred term has become discourse,
  associated with Michel Foucault.
• a view of language as being linked to subjective,
  social processes as opposed to closed or
  immutable states.

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DISCOURSE

• means an instance of language or utterance
  involving the speaker/writer-subject and
  reader/listener-object.
• Discourse is this located in and inflected by its
  social and ideological environment the term
  discourse denotes language in actual use within
  its social and ideological context and in
  institutionalized representations of the world
  called discursive practices
• Theoretically, discourse may include any form of
  utterance. 20th theory, notably through Michel
  Foucaultss work, has stressed the collusion
  (confabulación) of discourse with power
  discourse (the articulated categories of
  thought) orders a knowledge along lines that
  produce subjects open to powers control.

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Poststructuralism sees reality as being much
more fragmented, diverse, tenuous and
culture-specific than does structuralism.

• Some consequences have been,
• 1. poststructuralisms greater attention to
  specific stories, to the details and local
  contextualizations of concrete instances
• 2. a greater emphasis on the body, the actual
  insertion of the human into the texture of time
  and history
• 3. a greater attention to the specifics of
  cultural working, to the arenas of discourse and
  cultural practice
• 4. a greater attention to the role of language
  and textuality in our construction of reality and
  identity.

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According to poststructuralist theories

• The relationship of literature any discourse- to
  reality is problematic and complex. Literature
  re-presents and refracts reality and language
  itself constitutes reality
• Language precedes the speaking/writing subject
  who produces discourse (spoken language, a short
  story, a poem, etc.) by drawing on and arranging
  the discourses or codes always-already available
  to him or her.

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BARTHESThe Death of the Author

• The author is a modern figure, a product of
  capitalist society which has attached great
  importance to the person of the author.
• Literature is tyrannically centred on the author,
  his life, person, tastes and passions.
• The explanation of a text is sought in the person
  who produced it. In ethnographic societies, the
  responsibility for a narrative is never assumed
  by a person but by a mediator, a relator.

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• Barthes questioned the importance of the author.
  The effective reading of a text depends on the
  suspension of preconceived ideas about the
  character of the particular author or about human
  psychology in general.
• It is language that speaks and not the author who
  no longer determines meaning. Consequences We no
  longer talk about works but texts.
• The author, the reader and the text are each
  composed of a universe of quotations. The moment
  the author detaches himself from an immediate
  context, the reader is born and it is language
  which speaks.

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• The author is previous to his work he exists
  before it and creates it.
• The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with
  the text. To give a text an author is to impose a
  limit, to give it a final signified, to close the
  writing.

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From work to TextBarthes

• The text cannot be contained in a hierarchy, not
  even in a division of genres. It contains a
  subversive force in respect to old
  classifications.
• The text is plural, a tissue of woven fabric
  woven with citations, references, echoes,
  cultural languages, that make it anonymous,
  untraceable.
• The text reads without its author. He is present
  just as one of its characters, no longer
  privileged, paternal.
• The text asks from the reader a practical
  collaboration, readerly aspect o a text

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DECONSTRUCTION

• The most influential approach to textual analysis
  in the poststructuralist era, deconstruction, is
  associated with Derrida.
• Deconstruction adopts an uncompromisingly
  (inflexiblemente) skeptical stance on language
  and meaning through a radical questioning of the
  sign, or the system of signs known as language.

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• According to Derrida, the sign lies at the core
  of Western philosophy and has traditionally
  engaged humans in the quest to arrive at that
  centre in search of being and presence. In his Of
  the Grammatologie (1967)

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logocentrism

• Derrida terms this drive logocentrism, (from
  Greek logos word but in philosophy also
  ultimate truth or logic) and traces its weight
  and significance in Western metaphysics to the
  fact that the New Testament invokes the term as
  the origin of all things In the beginning was
  the Word.

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The Word carries the greatest possible
concentration of presence

• and underwrites the full presence of the world
  everything is the effect of this one cause.
• The Word is compared with God, since the entire
  world is generated through divine utterance and
  the Word was God (John 1.1).
• The fact that God speaks the word into being
  has traditionally conferred on speech a
  privileged status over writing, something Derrida
  calls phonocentrism, and it is closely associated
  with logocentrism.

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• Manifesting an intellectual debt to Saussure,
  Derrida denies the signs ability to achieve full
  presence by arguing that the sign is itself not
  unitary but split.

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He invokes the ambiguous neologism différence, a
term

• which lies at the heart of his analytical method
  and inquiry, and points to the dual way in which
  language prevents full access to meaning.
• Différance combines the two French homophones
  contained in the verb différer, meaning both to
  differ and to defer (the pun also works in
  Spanish diferir). Différance is pronounced the
  same as différence, moreover, the ambiguity is
  silent in speech and visible only in writing.

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• At the same time, the sign also endlessly
  postpones fully present meaning since meaning is
  always being deferred from one sign to another.
• If you look up a word in a dictionary, all it
  can give you is another words to explain it so
  in theory, at least- you will then have to look
  these up, and so on without end

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Derrida terms violent hierarchies, such as the
binaries or couplets

• nature/civilization, male/female, good/evil,
  philosophy/literature, etc.
• The most scrutinized of these by Derrida is the
  speech/writing hierarchy, where speech, according
  to the traditional Western thought, occupies the
  privileged first place in the binary and where
  the latter term writing- is held to be a
  polluted version or to threaten contamination of
  the former with its materiality, or simply to be
  lacking in presence.

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Deconstructive method

• proceeds to unsettle this hierarchical
  arrangement by noting that speech itself shares
  characteristics with writing.
• Both are signifying processes that cannot escape
  the difference/deferral sequence in pursuit of
  meaning.
• Since full meaning full presence- is
  unattainable in speech or in writing, it makes no
  sense to accord a privileged status to either
  term or, writing is just entitled to occupy the
  first slot in the hierarchy. In other words,
  writing precedes speech.

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The basis of Derridean deconstructive method

• Identify a binary or violent hierarchy,
  destabilize it, reverse it and, ultimately,
  resist the temptation to hierarchize the
  (original) second term.

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Textual or literary deconstruction seeks to
demonstrate

• that the either/or paradigm promoted by binary
  oppositions in reality masks both/and
  relationships, it upholds the undecidability of
  the text.
• A text never achieves closure, remaining instead
  an open field of possibilities.
• Deconstructions critiques. It has been accused
  of being wilfully obscure, nihilistic,
  self-contradictory and, in its attention to
  formal aspects of language and textuality,
  apolitical or ahistorical.
• Nevertheless, in its pursuit of difference rather
  than identity, deconstruction has proven
  immensely suggestive and influential with regard
  to more explicitly engaged readings of texts.

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Derrida

• father of deconstructionism, a system of analysis
  which challenges the basis of traditional western
  thought.
• The deconstructive approach argues that all
  writing has multiple layers of meaning which even
  its author might not understand and which leave
  it open to an endless process of reinterpretation

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• Derrida was the embodiment of the
  philosopher-rebel, admired for his explosive
  critique of the authoritarian values latent in
  orthodox approaches to literature and philosophy.
  
• Using the term "deconstruction", he challenged
  the notion that language can express ideas
  without changing them and questioned the "ruling
  illusion of western metaphysics"

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• his way of reading texts was to highlight
  blind-spots (aporias, from the Greek meaning "the
  impassable"), equivocations and contradictions
  within it.
• Typically, he sought to show how certain elements
  within the work - often marginal elements like
  prefaces and footnotes - subverted the conceptual
  distinctions and hierarchies that its author set
  out to defend.

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• Derrida's deconstructionism probably exercised
  its greatest influence upon North American
  academics, especially literary critics.
• He once admitted that deconstruction was "a
  certain experience of the impossible".
  Deconstruction is related to post-structuralism
  and postmodernism.

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At its core

• deconstruction is an attempt to open a text
  (literary, philosophical, or otherwise) to a
  range of meanings and interpretations.
• Its method is usually to take binary oppositions
  within a text -rigidly defined pairs of opposites
  like good/evil or male/female-
• and show that they are not as clear-cut or as
  stable as it first seems, that the two opposed
  concepts are in fact fluid, then to use this
  newfound ambiguity to show that the text's
  meaning is similarly fluid.

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• This fluidity stands as a legacy of traditional
  (that is, Platonist) metaphysics founded on
  oppositions that seek to establish a stability of
  meaning through conceptual absolutes where one
  term, for example 'good', is elevated to a status
  that designates its opposite, in this case
  'evil', to its perversion, lack, or inferior.
• However, these "violent hierarchies", are
  eventually silently challenged by the texts
  themselves, where the meaning of a text depends
  on this contradiction or antinomy.

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• No 'meaning' is ever stable rather, the only
  thing that keeps the sense of unity within a text
  is what Derrida called the 'metaphysics of
  presence', where presence was granted the
  privilege of truth.

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Deconstruction French word that he received but
did not invent. Often described as

• A method of analysis
• An act of reading
• A type of critic
• A way of writing
• What has been seen as revolutionary about his
  work for both philosophy and literary studies is
  the particular way he attends to language.

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