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Vi Post-Structuralism VI POST-STRUCTURALISM Structuralism was founded on the Saus~urian principle that lan­ guage as a system of signs must be considered synchronically, that is, within a single temporal plane. The diachronic aspect of lan­ guage, how it develops and changes over time, was seen as being of secondary importance. In post-structuralist thinking temporality again becomes central. The major influence on post-structuralist literary theory is the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, though the work of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the cultural theorist Michel Foucault is also important in the emergence of post-structuralism. Derrida emphasises the 'logocentrism' of Western thinking, that is, that meaning is conceived as existing independently of the lan­ guage in which it is communicated and is thus not subject to the play oflanguage. Derrida accepts Saussure's position that meaning is the product of the differential relations between signifiers, but he goes beyond Saussure in claiming that the temporal dimension cannot be left out of account. Language is seen as a never-ending chain of words in which there is no extralinguistic origin or end to the chain. He argues that Saussure was not able to free himself from 'logocentric' thinking since, by elevating speech above writing, he indicated that he believed signifier and signified could be fused within the same temporal plane in the act of speaking. Derrida attacks such 'logocentrism' and claims that writing is a better model for understanding how language functions. In writing the signifier is always productive, thus introducing a temporal aspect into signification which undermines any fusion between signifier and signified. Written signs enjoy a semiotic independence in that though meaning is created by the differen­ tial relations between signs, as Saussure had argued, the semiotic independence of writing entails that meaning is always deferred, since writing will produce meaning in an unlimited number of potential contexts which may exist in the future. Derrida's basic formulation 'differance', by punning on the French word 'difference', which can mean both 'difference' and 'deferment', undermines 'logocentrism' by implying that meaning can never be fully present since it is always deferred. His 'deconstructive' prac­ tice with regard to the texts he analyses has also been a major influence on literary critics since, in contrast, for example, to the 112 Post-structuralism 113 New Criticism, he does not set out to demonstrate the structural coherence or organic unity of the text but to show how the text undermines its own assumptions and is thus divided against itself. His essay, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', first delivered as a lecture atJohns Hopkins University in 1966, has been especially influential on literary theory. Roland Barthes' essay, 'The Death of the Author', first pub­ lished in 1968, adopts a radically textual view of language and meaning and clearly shows his shift towards a post-structuralist position. It has close connections with his S/Z, first published in 1970, generally regarded as the first important work of post­ structuralist literary criticism. Julia Kristeva, though associated with structuralism, like Barthes eventually moved beyond it. For her, like Derrida, the emphasis is on the signifier rather than the signified in language, as the signi­ tying process undermines all stability of meaning. The signifYing process both creates and undermines systems of signs. Influenced by both psychoanalysis and Bakhtin, she stresses the role of the 'speaking subject' in language with the subject being always divided because the 'other' cannot be eliminated from discourse. She suggests that in modernist literary writing language can be a force for renewal since modernist literary language both creates and calls into question systematisation. Like Kristeva, Michel Foucault was initially seen as a structural­ ist, but his later work is usually characterised as post-structuralist, though he rejected such labels. Though his main focus was on social practices or systems of thought these were treated like 'langues' in the Saussurian sense, that is, as sign systems in which meaning was produced through the operation of rules and codes of signification. Since Foucault claimed the human subject was also produced by such rules and codes, he proclaimed the 'death of Man', the concept of the human individual having been gener­ ated by a previous cultural epoch now superseded. Works of art or literature should thus not be thought of as individual creations but as emanations of a cultural system and have to be understood in relation to the codes that operate to create meaning within that cultural system. His later writing is predominantly concerned with power and a critique of totalities. By adopting a 'genealogical' method, hierarchies can be undermined by exposing discontinu­ ities, 'subjugated' or 'buried' forms of knowledge that resist such hierarchies. Foucault's work underlies much of the theorised historical criticism associated with such critical approaches as New HiStoricism and Cultural Materialism. 114 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY THEORY Post-structuralist thinking had a major impact on American criticism in the 1970s, particularly on a group of critics who were based at Yale, the 'Yale deconstructionists'. The leading Yale theorist was Paul de Man, who argued that literary texts already incorporated Derridian 'dim~rance'. De Man argues that there is a radical division in literary texts between the grammatical or logical structure of language and its rhetorical aspects. This creates a play of signification in literary texts which is finally undecidable. De Man argues that literature is constituted by this undecidable play between the grammatical and the rhetorical in texts and not by aesthetic considerations. Any text which by deconstructive analysis can be shown to exhibit such charac­ teristics, de Man suggests, functions as literature. FURTHER READING Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London, 1975). Harold Bloom et aI., Deconstruction and Criticism (London, 1979). Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London, 1983). Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn., 1979). --, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London, 1983). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). --, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London, 1992). Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Oxford, 1977). Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (Chicago, 1979). (A critical view.) Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore, 1981). Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, 1980). Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction (London, 1983). J. Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then (Hemel Hempstead, 1991). Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1982). Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London, 1984). T. K. Seung, Structuralism and Hermeneutics (New York, 1982). (Contains critique of Derrida.) Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (London, 1981) . .
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