Mashrur Shahid Hossain

POSTSTRUCTURALISM Department of English

Jahangirnagar University
A VERY BRIEF INTRO April 2023

ONLINE VERSION: For learning purpose only

DISCLAIMER: The images are collected from the Net or printed books for learning purpose
CAUTION: Any unauthorized use or duplication or distribution of this PPT might be
deemed violation of the Copyright Act 2000, hence susceptible to punitive measures.
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THIS IS AN IMAGE OF – WHAT?

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HOW DOES A SENTENCE MEAN?
“Time flies like an arrow”

1. “time” – a noun; “flies” – a verb; “like” – a preposition

2. “time” – a verb; “flies” – a noun; “like” – a preposition

3. “time flies” – a noun; “like” – a verb

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LECTURE OUTLINE

1. Poststructuralist Tenets
2. Derrida and Foucault
3. Deconstruction

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1. POSTSTRUCTURALIST TENETS

1.1. The Tenets

1.2. Attempted Under/Standing
1.3. From Structuralism to Poststructuralism

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1.1. POSTSTRUCTURALIST TENETS
• Reality is textual
Derrida in Of Grammatology proclaims, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” meaning
“There is no outside-text.”
• No centre is the centre
Potstructrualism questions (and subverts) any transcendental meta-narrative.
• Signs are inherently unstable; meanings are plural
Every text is subject to interpretation. No meaning is fixed or final or total.
• Binary oppositions are tools of hierarchy and domination.
The binary opposites (day/night, man/woman, white/black) are not simply
modes of knowledge rather means of subordination and control.
• Ideology and power construct human subjectivity.
Power produces (and normalizes) knowledge to serve it sown purpose.
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1.2. ATTEMPTED UNDER/STANDING

• Poststructuralism
• is reluctant “to ground discourse on any theory of metaphysical origin,”
• insists “on the inevitable plurality and instability of meaning,”
• distrusts “systematic scientificity,” and
• abandons reason and rationality, i.e. “the old Enlightenment project” (Macey 309)

• Deconstruction
• is a form of textual analysis, often associated with Jacques Derrida.
• It contends that meaning is always the product of the difference – or, play –
between signs (words, or images) and it is always deferred by “a temporal
structural that never comes to an end” (Macey 86).

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1.3. FROM STR. TO POSTSTR.

• Origins
• S – from linguistics
• PS – from philosophy
• Attitude to Language
• S – reality is constructed and accessed through language
• PS – language is full of spillages & slippages; words are incoherent
• Objectives
• S – looks to develop a universal model to read all human experiences
• PS – questions the validity of a centre; plurality and diversities inform reality
• Binary Oppositions
• S – endorses binary opposites as a premise of knowledge
• PS – views binary opposites as hierarchical, as tools of discrimination
• Tone and Style
• S – scientific coolness; objective detachedness; tends towards generalization
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• PS – engaged warmth; flamboyant and euphoric; word-play, ironic, self-reflexive
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2. DERRIDA & FOUCAULT

2.1. Critique of Logocentrism

2.2. Power/Knowledge

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 2.1. CRITIQUE OF LOGOCENTRISM 10

• Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004; Algeria-France)

• Critique of Logocentrism
• logos – the Word (or, the reason) that is the originator, hence unquestioned
• the biblical “Word” implies “the existence of a primal or transcendental
signifier which is the origin of all meaning” (Macey)
• Saussure’s notion – that a meaning is a product of the difference between the
signs – is a recent example of logcentrism
• western logocentrism is ethnocentric too
• Différance
• incorporates both “difference” (dissimilarity) and “deferral” (postponement)
• claims that there is never any final or complete correspondence between the
signifier and the signified; e.g. connotations of “love” and “sacrifice” (Habib 241)
• Aporia
• like Plaot’s pharmakon, aporia is “the undecidability of terms”
ES 019/MSH/2023 • a paradox (self-contradiction) that cannot be resolved dialectically
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2.2. POWER/KNOWLEDGE
• Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984; France)
• Discourse
• Discourse is written or spoken communication
• Discourse is a supralinguistic phenomenon, articulated through verbal and
visual images, which is formed within various social practices and institutions.
• Discourse is both [i] a product, a mode of representation, and [ii] a producer –
it constitutes (and naturalizes) a subject through representation.
• To Foucault, discourse is more than a text; it is “a group of statements that
belongs to a single system of formation” (Order 121)
• Power/Knowledge
• Knowledge or understanding occurs through representation.
• Representation appears in a discourse.
• Discourse produces knowledge.
• Power produces discourse.
• Power produces knowledge.
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• Resistance is possible: re-coding is resistance, is re-representation.
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3. DECONSTRUCTION

3.1. Deconstructing
3.2. Deconstructive Reading and Writing

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• Premise: It highlights “the inevitable point of duplicity in every text and … image”. A text
is “characterized by disunity rather than unity” (B).
• Textual subconscious: It reads the text against itself. In doing so, deconstructionists look
for the fault-lines.
• Break-point: If there is a “break with univocity in every text … deconstruction refers to
the effort to find this break-point”. These break-points – i.e. discontinuities which are
evidence of “what is repressed or … passed over” – are dubbed fault-lines.
• Extensive close reading: Deconstructionists often concentrate on a particular passage
and gives a rigorous reading of its linguistic (e.g. the use of tense) and figural (e.g.
metaphors) features to locate the fault-lines.
• Working out the fault-lines:
 It can be “an apparently incidental detail” (e.g. the angle of a photograph).
 It can be words or images that are “always ‘contaminated’ by their opposites”.
 It can be words or images that are “interfered with their own history.”
 It can be “an unassimilable, contradictory element – an incompatible element of
duplicity in a concept or word”
 A pun/metaphor or a rebus (an allusive device used in painting) can “evoke the plurality
of meaning in words and images”
• Working on the fault-lines: Once the fault-lines are identified, “the deconstructionist
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3.2. DECONSTRUCTIVE READING
• Deconstructing Frost
• Take “The Road Not Taken.” You may analyze, e.g. which road the poem is
about, or, if it is about both; then, what the title refers to.

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3.2. DECONSTRUCTIVE READING
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
• Deconstructing Frost
And looked down one as far as I could
• Take “The Road Not Taken.” You may analyze, e.g. which road the poem is
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
about, or, if it is about both; then, what the title refers to.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, […]

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

from Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

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3.2. DECONSTRUCTIVE READING
• Deconstructing Frost
• Take “The Road Not Taken.” You may analyze, e.g. which road the poem is
about, or, if it is about both; then, what the title refers to.
• Deconstructing Achebe
• Take Things Fall Apart. You may analyze –
 why the novel that starts with an oral narrative of Okonkwo’s achievement in
wrestling ends with the thinking of a British District Commissioner, and
 why the novel that starts with the title, Things Fall Apart ends with the
proposed title of a book the DC is planning to write, The Pacification of the
Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

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 Mashrur Shahid Hossain

POSTSTRUCTURALISM Department of English

Jahangirnagar University
A VERY BRIEF INTRO March 2023

ONLINE VERSION: For learning purpose only

DISCLAIMER: The images are collected from the Net or printed books for learning purpose
CAUTION: Any unauthorized use or duplication or distribution of this PPT might be
deemed violation of the Copyright Act 2000, hence susceptible to punitive measures.