UNIVERSIDAD TECNOLÓGICA NACIONAL

LICENCIATURA EN LENGUA INGLESA

ESTUDIOS LITERARIOS I
Dra. María Rosa Mucci

“What cannot be said above all must not be silenced but written.”

Jacques Derrida

A question of meaning
This is the introduction to one of my research papers at university. After reading Catherine Belsey´s
book Poststructuralism. A Very Short Introduction, I was convinced that meaning is not at our
disposal. As this exchange demonstrates, there is no such thing as a private language.
When Lewis Carroll´s Humpty Dumpty discusses the question of meaning with Alice in Through the
Looking Glass, which of them is right?
Humpty Dumpty engages Alice in one argument after another, just as if dialogue were a competition.
Having demonstrated to his own satisfaction, if not Alice´s, that unbirthday presents are to be preferred
because people can have them more often, he adds triumphantly, “There´s glory for you!”
Torn between the desire to placate him and good common sense, Alice rejoins, “I don´t know what
you mean by glory”. So Humpty Dumpty explains:

“I meant “there´s a nice knock-down argument for you!””

“But “glory” doesn´t mean “a nice knock-down argument””, Alice objected.
“When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean –
neither more nor less”.
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be Master- that´s all.”

Poststructuralism

The term is used to refer to a number of different theoretical principles and practices with a common
objective, that is, to criticize Structuralism. The idea that we can understand human societies and their
traditions according to universal structures that are replicated in texts, art and other modes of
expression is a tenet of Structuralism. It would be fair to acknowledge that Ferdinand de Saussure and
Claude Lévi Strauss are central to understand Poststructuralism. The “structurality of structure” in
words of Jacques Derrida refers to the center: “the function of this center was not only to orient,
balance and organize the structure, one cannot conceive of an unorganized structure, but above all to
make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the
structure” (Writing 278-79)

In this critique of Structuralism, the center is deconstructed, exposed as contradictory, incoherent.

Derrida considers that the center does not belong to the totality; the totality has its center elsewhere.
The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure is contradictorily coherent according to
Derrida.
Poststructuralism rejects what Derrida calls “onto-theology”, a world view in which meaning and
value are invested in the essence of an unchanging principle or divinity (theo, God). Nor does it accept
phallogocentrism, a context in which social and cultural power are invested in a symbol of pure
abstract presence (phallus) and articulated in the unchanging concepts of reason (logos). The chief
concepts of Poststructuralism are difference, openness to the other and resistance to dialectical and
binary oppositions.

One of the main exponents of poststructuralism was Roland Barthes who began his career as a
structuralist highly influenced by Saussure´s semiology and Lévi-Strauss´s structuralist analysis of
mythology and who by the late 1960s, discovered in literary and cultural texts a plurality of possible
interpretations. Barthes saw that the idea of a regulated and centered structure could be transformed
into the idea of an unregulated, decentered process of reading. Like Michel Foucault he rejected the
conventional figure of the author who originates the work. In place of the author, Barthes produces the
“modern scriptor”, “not a subject with the book as a predicate” but “born simultaneously with the
text”. So too is the reader but at the cost of the death of the author. Barthes follows Derrida in
recognizing that language is fundamentally a place of differences, deferrals and displacements of
meaning within semiotic and linguistic systems.

One common root of post-structuralist theory and practice is the work of German nineteenth-century
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He considered that the concept of truth is a falsification incapable of
grasping the flux of matter and sensation in which the human subject is immersed. He discredits the
moral ideals of western society, which train people to be ashamed of bodies and of the world of matter
in general.

One of structuralism´s characteristic views is the notion that language does not just reflect or record
the world: rather, it shapes it, so that how we see is what we see. The post-structuralist maintains that
the consequences of this belief are that we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, since we can have no
access to any fixed landmark which is beyond linguistic processing. Post-structuralism says that fixed
intellectual reference points are permanently removed. This situation of being without intellectual
reference points, is one way of describing what post-structuralists call the decentred universe, one in
which, by definition, we cannot know where we are, since all the concepts which previously defined
the centre, and hence also the margins, have been “deconstructed” or undermined.

What post-structuralist critics do

✔ They “read” the text against itself so as to expose what might be thought of as the “textual
subconscious”, where meanings are expressed which may be directly contrary to the surface
meaning. They focus on binary oppositions through which the text seems to operate.
✔ They fix upon the surface features of the words, similarities in sound, the root meanings of
words, a “dead” metaphor, and bring these to the foreground, so that they become crucial to the
overall meaning.
 ✔ They seek to show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity. They see the text
as a series of “holes” and not as a “whole”.
✔ They focus on what is assumed to be central within the text and what is treated as marginal or
ignored completely but might nonetheless offer a related yet alternative centre of interest and
valuation.
✔ They concentrate on a single passage and analyse it so intensively that it becomes impossible to
sustain a “univocal” reading and the language explodes into “multiplicities of meaning”.
✔ They look for shifts and breaks of various kinds in the text and see these as evidence of what is
repressed or glossed over or passed over in silence by the text. These discontinuities are
sometimes called “fault-lines”.
So a diagram showing the differences between structuralism and post-structuralism at the practical
level might look like this:

The structuralist seeks: The post-structuralist seeks:

Parallels /Echoes Contradictions / Paradoxes

Balances Shifts / Breaks in: tone, viewpoint,
tense, time, person, attitude
Reflections / Repetitions Conflicts
Symmetry Absences / Omissions
Contrasts Linguistic quirks
Patterns Aporia
Effect: to show textual unity and coherence Effect: to show textual disunity

● Write your source base on Jacques Derrida´s essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences”
● Read “What is an author?” by Michel Foucault.

DECONSTRUCTION

Around 1967 in Paris, Structuralism, which had dominated French intellectual life for much of the
1960s, was displaced by a new intellectual movement. The new thinking in philosophy, sociology, and
literature that began to emerge around 1967 in the work of such French thinkers as Jacques Derrida,
Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray, Héléne Cixous, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean
Baudrillard is usually referred to as Post-structuralism because it departed so radically from the core
assumptions of Structuralism.

Derrida was one of the most famous philosophers and literary theorists worldwide. When we think of
deconstruction we immediately associate the term with him but the roots of deconstruction should be
located in Martin Heidegger´s concept of destruktion. Heidegger´s expression referred to a route to
explore concepts and categories enforced on a word by tradition. Deconstruction, in this sense, is a
historicizing movement that opens texts to the conditions of their production, their con-text in a broad
sense including the traditions from which they emerged but also de conventions of language in which
they were written. Even when the term destruktion can be understood as destruction, the intention of
deconstruction is not to destroy but to present a potentially infinite process.

What did Derrida do that was so revolutionary? He began with the concept of difference that he found
in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Ferdinand de Saussure. Derrida brought the
work of Greek philosophers together. He began by focusing on Saussure´s concept of the diacritical
nature of the linguistic sign, according to which the identity of a sign is constituted by its differences
from other signs. According to Derrida, there should be a primordial process of differentiation at work
that affected everything having to do with language, thought and reality. His name for this process was
“différrance”, by which he meant a simultaneous process of deferment in time and difference in space.

Ideas and things are like signs in language; there are no identities, only differences.
This idea challenged the central assumptions of metaphysics since Derrida uses it to deconstruct
Western philosophy, which he argues is founded on a theory of “presence” in which metaphysical
notions such as truth, being, and reality are determined in their relation to an ontological centre,
essence, origin or end that represses absence and difference for the sake of metaphysical stability.
Derrida considers that the historical repression of difference is evident through a philosophical
vocabulary that favours presence in the form of voice, consciousness and subjectivity. Derrida calls
this philosophy “logocentrism” or “phonocentrism” in that it is based on a belief in a logos or phone, a
self-present word constituted not by difference but by presence.
His deconstructive method proceeds by means of slow and ingeniously detailed close readings of texts,
focusing on those points where a binary opposition, a line or argument, or even a single word breaks
down to reveal radical incongruities in the logic or rhetoric. The contradictions expose the text to the
force of its own difference, its displacement from a univocal centre of meaning.

One of Derrida´s clearest examples of a deconstructive reading concerns the relation between speech
and writing. Whereas Saussure, as “phonocentric” linguist, favours speech as the proper object of
linguistic investigation, rather than writing as a secondary representation or even disguise of speech, he
is forced to acknowledge the dangerous, usurping power of writing over speech. Derrida approaches
this problem by confirming historically the priority of voice over the letter: speech is immediate, self-
present, and authentic in that it is uttered by a speaker who hears and understands himself or herself in
the moment of speaking; by contrast, writing is the copy of speech and is therefore derivative,
marginal and delayed. But having outlined a speech/writing hierarchy in this way, Derrida shows how
Saussure´s text inverts the hierarchy, giving priority to writing over speech. The inversion of the
hierarchy constitutes one-half of a deconstruction; Derrida completes the procedure by showing how in
Saussure´s own terms, both speech and writing are subsumed into a larger linguistic field in which all
language, spoken and written, is constituted by difference rather than hierarchy.
Despite many resistances to deconstruction, Derrida´s impact on critical thought has been significant
and extensive. As part of a general poststructuralist tendency to move language to the forefront of
discussion, that is, to rethink both word and world from the point of view of textuality, deconstruction
has had a vital influence in multidisciplinary studies involving feminism, theology, psychoanalysis,
Marxism, anthropology and linguistics. As a method of literary criticism, however, deconstruction first
became identified largely with the work of critics at Yale University (Geoffrey Hartman, Hillis
Miller and Paul de Man).

Paul de Man´s method of textual analysis resembled Derrida´s in its recurrent effort to uncover
hierarchical oppositions within texts and to reveal the linguistic and philosophical grounds upon which
those hierarchies are built. Such a method, called a “critique”, seeks to make explicit what is implicit,
assumed, repressed or contradicted in a text. Stylistically, however, de Man is far from Derrida; puns,
multilingual resonances, and other rhetorical flourishes do not play a significant role in de Man´s
prose, which by contrast is analytical.

For deconstruction, language is dynamic, ambiguous and unstable, continually disseminating possible
meanings; existence has no center, no stable meaning, no fixed ground; human beings are fragmented
battlefields for competing ideologies whose only “identity” is the one we invent and choose to believe.
This means that for deconstruction, literature is as dynamic, ambiguous, and unstable as the language
of which it is composed.

Meaning is not a stable element residing in the text for us to uncover or passively consume. Meaning is
created by the reader in the act of reading. But the meaning that is created is not a stable element
capable of producing closure; that is, no interpretation has the final word. Rather, literary texts consist
of a multiplicity of overlapping, conflicting meanings in dynamic, fluid relation to one another.
There are generally two main purposes in deconstructing a literary text: a- to reveal the text´s
“undecidability” and b- to reveal the complex operations of the ideologies of which the text is
constructed. To reveal the text´s undecidability is to show that the “meaning” of the text is really an
indefinite, undecidable, plural, conflicting array of possible meanings and that the text, therefore, has
no meaning, in the traditional sense of the world. The other purpose is to see what the text can show us
about the ideologies of which it is constructed.

▪ This is part of Samuel Beckett´s The Unnamable (1959). This is a stream of consciousness
novel in which we can identify contradictory statements separated only by commas, without the
usual adversative but or however. Evidently, Beckett was a deconstructionist. Identify the
binary oppositions that contradict the logic or rhetoric. What silences are evident?

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call
them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that
one day I simply stayed in, in where, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend day and night as
far away as possible, it wasn’t far. Perhaps that is how it began. You think you are simply resting, the
better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do
anything again. No matter how it happened. It, say it, not knowing what. Perhaps I simply assented at last
to an old thing. But I did nothing. I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me. These few
general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how
proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner
or later? Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is
quite hopeless. I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without
knowing what it means.
 In Derrida's work, deconstruction is a complex response to a number of theoretical and philosophical
movements, especially phenomenology, structuralism, and psychoanalysis. But in the English-
speaking world, deconstruction has had a major impact on literary theory and criticism, with flow-on
effects in the social sciences resulting from the narrative and textual turns in those disciplines. In these
contexts, deconstruction can be understood as a theory and method of reading and analytic inquiry that
aims to undermine the logic of opposition within texts.

Derrida argues that language has two important characteristics: a- its play of signifiers continually
defers, or postpones meaning and b- the meaning it seems to have is the result of the differences by
which we distinguish one signifier form another.

These questions may help you deconstruct a text:

a- Identify center and margins

b- What is your interpretation?
c- What questions are unanswered?
d- What ideology does the text promote?
e- What binary oppositions structure this text?
f- What inconsistencies can you see?

The Road Not Taken

BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

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,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

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.

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