Post-structuralism

• Structuralism perceived that its own system of analysis was somehow essentialist
• Post-structuralists hold that in fact even in an examination of underlying structures, a series of biases
introduce themselves
• At the root of post-structuralism is the rejection of the idea that there is any truly essential form to a cultural
product, as all cultural products are by their very nature formed, and therefore artificial
• A pivotal moment in 1966—Derrida’s paper “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences” delivered at Johns Hopkins University
Post-structuralism
• came into being as the result of an internal critique of the movement that preceded it – structuralism
• it shares a number of crucial characteristics with structuralism, particularly the latter’s anti-humanist
deprivileging of the individual conscious and the subject
• Scepticism towards any form of completeness of either knowledge or understanding.
• It rejects all transcendental and/or idealist ontologies and epistemologies and accepts only those theories of
being and knowledge that are premised on the final unknowability of these things.
• Post-structuralism is generally thought to have emerged at a conference held at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore in 1966 to celebrate the achievements of structuralism and showcase it to American academics.
• A young scholar by the name of Jacques Derrida presented a paper criticizing the conference’s keynote speaker and
one of the founding fathers of structuralism, Claude Lévi-Strauss - ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
Human Sciences’ (1978)
• Derrida shattered the illusion at the heart of structuralism, namely that language could be frozen long enough to
identify its universal characteristics.
• He argued, language is a continuous process, and its structures (i.e. its internal rules) are subject to
constant variation.
• extension of this idea to virtually every aspect of human thought
• no idea, concept, thought, or thing is ever fully what we think it is
• Derrida uses the word différance to name this state of affairs.
Derrida
• Algerian-born French-Jewish philosopher
• Associated with the Tel Quel group of literary and philosophical theorists
• Tel Quel, a French avant-garde literary magazine associated with nouveau roman, Surrealism, and later, Marxism
• Attacked systematic, quasi-scientific pretensions of structuralism
• Anti-foundationalism, anti-essentialism
• Notion of structure presupposes centre which escapes structurality
• eg. a class is fixed on a certain time, all the students arrive on time, but the teacher comes late.
Therefore, a center can escape structure.
• Structure, Sign and Play
• Announces an Event or Rupture in the history of metaphysics
• A radical decentring of the structure/centre
• The structure has a centre that
• Limits free play
• The result of the event must be that it leads to freeplay within the structure
• Against the idea of a fixed centre
• Against the notion of presence
• Dissemination into multiple, contradictory meanings

• 1967 – a watershed year for Derrida

• La Voix et la Phénomène (1967), translated as Speech and Phenomena (1973),
• L’Écriture et la différence (1967), translated as Writing and Difference (1978), and
• De la Grammatologie (1967) translated as Of Grammatology (1976)
• there is nothing outside the text
• Derrida helpfully explains in the useful collection of interviews, Positions (1972), translated as Positions
(1981), that these three works—Voix et la Phénomène, L’Écriture et la différence, and De la Grammatologie
(1967)—announced at once a project (the critique of logocentrism) and a method (deconstruction).
Logocentrism
• Derived from the Greek word ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’ in the sense of the word of God or some other
authority
• logocentrism is a tendency in philosophy to suppose that there must be some kind of ultimate authority
guaranteeing the meaning of language.
• Derrida states that logocentrism is the principal focus of the reading strategy he developed, namely
deconstruction
• In idealist philosophy, idea was the centre of the discourse. But in religious philosophies, this was replaced
by God, and in Marxist philosophy God was replaced by man.
• so even when the contents may vary, the centre as a locus remains unchanged.
• Logocentrism refers to the desire for a centre inherent in metaphysics.
• This centre, however, as Derrida points out, exists paradoxically both inside and outside of a given system of
ideas. It is simultaneously both ‘presence’ and ‘absence’.
• Eg. The idea of God as at once a transcendent, absent being or force and as existing within all things
• When Roland Barthes writes of the death of the author, it is precisely the death of this logocentric notion of
language that he is referring to.
• For Derrida, the most pernicious symptom of logocentrism is the widespread privileging of speech over
writing in philosophy, usually taking the form of the assumption that writing is secondary or parasitical to
speech. (Phonocentrism)
• Deconstruction of the centre - “The centre is at the centre of the totality, and yet, since the centre
does not belong to the totality (is not the part of the totality) the totality has its centre elsewhere.
The centre has its centre elsewhere. The centre is not the centre.”
Deconstruction
• a practice of reading; a reading strategy; a method of criticism
• interested in articulating the operative elements of a text, concept, or idea in their full complexity, paying
particular attention to the peculiar paradoxes of mutual interdependencies.
• every philosophical position, irrespective of how coherent it seems on the surface, contains within it the
means of its own selfundermining.
• Adapted from Martin Heidegger’s terms ‘Destruktion’ (destruction) and ‘Abbau’ (unbuilding)
• ‘to undo’ by carefully teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself
• If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one
mode of signifying over another. (binaries)
• Derrida shows that a text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying.
It may be read as carrying a plurality of significance or as saying many different things which are
fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to and subversive of what may be seen by criticism as a single,
stable ‘meaning’.
• Thus, a text may betray itself.
• There is nothing outside the text – one cannot evaluate, criticize or construe a meaning for a text by
reference to anything external to it.
Deconstruction
• In short, a text may possess so many different meanings that it cannot have a meaning. There is no
guaranteed essential meaning. – unstable

• At the core of deconstruction is Derrida’s notion of différance, which is at once the means of doing
deconstruction and an example of it. – the continuous (and endless) postponement or deferral of meaning.
• For example, in his notion of ‘forgiveness’ Derrida argues that it is only the unforgivable that can truly be
forgiven because it is only the unforgivable that meets the demand of that which can be forgiven, his point
being that if something can be forgiven that forgiveness is in a sense given in advance and therefore not
really in need of forgiveness
Other Deconstructionists
• Yale School
• Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom
• They, along with Derrida, contributed to the major work, Deconstruction and Criticism
• Gayatri Spivak
• Jonathan Culler
• Barbara Johnson
Différance
• Derrida explains that the term is spelled the way it is to bring together two senses of the verb to differ,
which as Derrida reads it means both to defer and to identify the different.
• It is a neologism coined by Derrida. It incorporates two words – ‘to differ’ (to vary) and ‘to defer’ (to
postpone)
• It is intentionally ambiguous and virtually untranslatable. It derives from the French word ’différer’ meaning
‘to defer, postpone, delay’ and also ‘to differ, be different from’.
• Derrida uses différance as a way of pushing Saussure’ theory of language to its ‘logical’ conclusion (it was
Saussure who posited that ‘signs’ in language arbitrary and differential).
• The word itself illustrates Derrida’s point that writing does not copy speech; the distinction between the two
different forms différance and différence does not correspond to any distinction in their spoken form.
• Meaning is continuously and endlessly deferred since each word leads us on to yet another word in the
system of signification.
• The sign is always the present mark of an absence
• the sign as sign is a sign of something else
• Zeno’s paradox – flight of an arrow – the arrow is static at every point, but always in motion
Play
• “Free play” following the decentring of man from philosophical discourses.
• “Freeplay is the disruption of presence.”
• “Freeplay is always an interplay of presence and absence.”
• “Presence” is centre, logic, truth, God, etc. and freeplay leads to contradictory meanings that clash and
cancel each other, leaving a void at the centre.
• All structures desire “immobility” beyond free play, but this can never be.
• Acc to Derrida, there is no structure that does not involve some play. A “fixed structure” is a myth, albeit a
powerful one.
Trace
• Trace is the absent part of a sign’s presence; what it differs / defers from.
• A sign leaves behind a trace
• All presences contain traces of absences.
• eg. banana bunch not given..only 1 banana with leftover stem given..but the presence of 1 banana also brings
along with it the absence of the bunch
Roland Barthes
• Early works derived inspiration from Saussure, Sartre, Brecht
• Writing Degree Zero (1953)
• Mythologies (1957)
• Structuralist works
• Elements of Semiology (1964)
• “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (1966)
• “Death of the Author” (1968)
• Poststructuralist works
• S/Z (analysis of Sarrasine, 1970)
• “From Work to Text”
• The Pleasure of the Text
• In Structuralist phase
• Preoccupied with how ideologies and value-systems are coded in languages and social usages
• Applied Structural linguistics on signifying systems like fashion
• Poststructuralist phase (1970s)
• Emphasis on subjectivity and physical experiences of the body
Barthes
• Work embodies transition from structuralist to poststructuralist perspectives
• Certain works have a Marxist perspective
• Extended structural analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena
• Confronted the limits of structuralism
• Death of the Author (1968)
• Deconstructionist, anti-humanist theory
• Author, symbolically male and end of all meaning, is now deposed.
• The Death of the Author is followed by the Birth of the reader; not just the reader, but the scriptor or writer.
• Reading in between the lines
• The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. Once the Author is removed, the
claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it
with a final signified, to close the writing.
• In S/Z (study of Balzac's “Sarrasine”):
• Readerly (lisible) text (specific meanings—close meaning; conventions of 19th century Realism; console the reader;
fulfills expectations; pleasure)
• Writerly (scriptable) text (galaxy of signifiers—encourages reader to be producer of meanings; conventions of
Modernism; disturb the reader; resists closure; presents plurality; jouissance)
• In The Pleasure of the Text:
• Comfortable plaisir (pleasure) of conventional texts; comes from culture and does not break with it
• jouissance (bliss) of uncontrolled play of signifiers; imposes a state of loss, defamiliarizes and unsettles the reader’s
historical, cultural and psychological assumptions (a modernist or avant-garde text)
Sarrasine

• Ernest-Jean Sarrasine was an artistic boy who had problems in school and became the protege of the
sculptor Bouchardon
• Sarrasine’s sculpture wins a competition and he goes to Rome where he sees a theatre performance of
Zambinella
• He falls in love with her; attends all her performances; and feels she is the ideal woman. But she hints some
danger in their relationship
• There is a party at the French embassy and Sarrasine wants to abduct Zambinella from there. Then
Zambinella’s patron, a cardinal, tells him she is a castrato. Sarrasine abducts her anyway.
• Zambinella confirms that she is a castrato
• When Sarrasine is about to kill, the cardinal’s men barge in and kill Sarrasine
• The old man in the house is Zambinella
• Mme Rochefide expresses her distress and the story ends
Readerly and Writerly
• readerly and writerly (lisible and scriptible)
• proposed these terms in S/Z (1970), translated as S/Z (1974)
• to distinguish between literary works that because of their specific formal qualities either constrain the
reader to adhere closely to the text with little or no room for interpretive manoeuvre (readerly), or, demand
that the reader work hard to make sense of the text and effectively contribute to its very writing (writerly).
• The first kind of text renders the reader passive, while the latter variety forces the reader to become active
• Barthes classifies so-called classical or realist texts, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2) and Honoré
de Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet (1833), as readerly
• because there is a central organizing plot (usually in the form of an enigma—
• either something has happened or is about to happen, but it isn’t immediately known what this is) around which the
story develops in a very structured fashion—
• it is always known who is speaking, who they are speaking to and what they are doing and why.
• In contrast, a writerly text, and for Barthes this generally means the modernist works of experimental
authors like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, offers the reader no such clarity of attribution.
• It is, therefore, a more plural text in Barthes’s view, implying that it gives the reader greater freedom to
construct meanings for themselves.
Work and Text
• (oeuvre and texte)
• Barthes proposed this distinction in the essay ‘De l’oeuvre au texte’ (1971), translated as ‘From Work to Text’
(1977)
• which together with Jacques Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences’ (1978), is generally regarded as
one of the inaugural texts of post-structuralism
• The cultural object—in which he includes the relations between readers, writers and critics—is what he
wants to call text (he sometimes writes it as Text to underline the fact that it is an ontological distinction he
is trying to make).
• In contrast, work refers to an older conception of the cultural object, which is self-contained, singular and
closed.
• He compares the distinction to the one Jacques Lacan makes between reality and the real:
• the work belongs to the order of reality inasmuch as it can be held in the hand
• whereas the text is of the same order as the real, which is to say it is a problematic or experimental field and not a
concrete object.
• It is rather the limit through which a work must pass if it wants to attain what modernist critics praised as
the new.
• The distinction between work and text restates and complicates the distinction Barthes previously made
between the readerly (work) and writerly (text).