sign in sign up
<<
Home , Sign (semiotics)

Chapter Four

It is All : Reading Poststructuralism

Immanent reading can take many forms. Sociological , treated above, was but a part of the poststructuralist movement, especially in France. At first, the genesis and existence of meanings were located in the sphere of the society—or particular societies. Gradually, however, a new understanding of systems took over, and meanings were limited to intrasystemic functions. When metaphysics is excluded from the pic- ture, it is believed that people speak of language, not reality. Nominalis- tic poststructuralism became an influential movement that also changed approaches to theology. Even though Räisänen has written most of his books focusing on historical criticism and aiming at some kind of histori- cal reconstruction, his writings also have features that reflect this linguis- tic turn. His depend on ideas that sometimes veer closely to the theses of the poststructuralist movement. The task of the present chapter is to investigate how he succeeds in combining two approaches that differ so essentially from each other.

4.1. Räisänen and the Linguistic Turn: Against Logocentricism

Considering Räisänen’s rationalistic historicism and the methodological “atheism” he adopted from Bultmann, it might be difficult to imagine that he would express the core of his own hermeneutical theory in terms of later continental philosophy—but he does. Towards the end of the Beyond, when summarizing his views and attempting to define the leading theme of his new thinking, Räisänen calls his hermeneutics phenomenology. In summary, it may be more suitable to characterize the project described as a phenomenology of early Christian religious thought than as its history.1 Phenomenology, of course can mean many different things, and it is not self-evident what it means for Räisänen here. He probably refers to the “phenomenon” of religion, a social fact that appears in the community, which enables an empirical treatment. The focusing on phenomena,

1 Räisänen, Beyond, 118; italics his. it is all signs: reading poststructuralism 157 however, always implies the belief that the weight is on personal obser- vation. This is why Räisänen cannot escape the conditions twentieth cen- tury European phenomenology has provided for interpretation theory. Therefore, the very use of the term in such a crucial passage in his Beyond provokes questions concerning his relationship to the post-Husserlian phenomenological movements in Western hermeneutical tradition, be they Heideggerian or Derridean. It was not long after the Second World War that language, textuality, and became the very center of study in almost all areas of tex- tual or cultural studies. Greimas and Genette had already focused on the structure of for some decades, creating the tradition of early structuralism. Lévi-Strauss applied a structuralist approach to cultural anthropology, and Jakobson developed similar ideas in the area of seman- tics and theory. Structuralism soon became a major fac- tor in others fields, like comparative literature.2 During the revolutionary decade of the 1960s in France, structuralism went through a metamorphosis, however. Derrida attacked the logocen- tric tradition of the West, as he called it. Barthes, in turn, confronted the “theological” nature of any metaphysical exploited in the flow of cul- ture. And Lyotard, finally, provided the terminology that was to become the standard for a whole generation of scholars proclaiming the postmod- ern turn and the “incredulity towards metanarratives.”3 The new turn was a revolution but it was no longer about economic power. Instead, as Lyotard put it, this was a battle over the definitions of knowledge. Post/modern, as a critique of the modern, cannot be easily defined. There are too many ways to view the modern and too many possibilities to construct an ideology that builds only on negation. It is hard to define something that keeps postulating discontinuity without proposing one clear ideology in the stead of the previous one. Poststructuralism, how- ever, is an easier subject. This French movement stated that the indefi- niteness of the sign deprived language of its universal . Words refer to words, and language speaks of language. Epistemologically, noth- ing bridges language to reality.4

2 On the history of structuralism, see Selden-Widdowson-Brooker, Literary Theory, 150–187; also in general, Culler, Structuralist Poetics, 131–152. 3 See especially Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 10–21; 60–61. 4 Today these definitions are especially important since as a cultural current has ceased to be a relevant source of influence. For the analyses on the decline of postmodern thought, see especially Norris, What’s wrong with Postmodernism.