How to Analyze Literature Using the Post-

structuralism School of Criticism

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A Brief Background on Post-structuralism:

Post-structuralism as a school of literary criticism made its debut (introduction) in the early
Nineteenth Century, however, it reached its apex in the 1960’s in a politically unstable France. A
reaction to the formulaic system of Structuralism, post-structuralism sees the collective works of
literature as an interconnected network of derived meanings.

Some key players in the development of post-structuralism:

Jacques Derrida:Derrida, author of the paper “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences,” spearheaded the concept of words deriving meaning from one another in an
endless and futile cycle. He sought to challenge the logocentrist structure and patterns of
western thinking, claiming that there could be no universal source of logic and meaning.

Roland Barthes: Barthes was originally a structuralist before he wrote “Death of the Author,” a
piece encouraging critics to forgo the analysis of the author’s intention. His valid argument was
that most of the time, even authors didn’t quite understand what they were trying to say, and the
only true human/literature relationship that mattered was the relationship between the novel and
the reader. Thus, post-structuralism was hailed by some as the “Birth of the Reader.”

Basic tenets of Post-Structuralism

Post-structuralism operates on a few basic tenets which revolve around the concept that
literature and art can never reach full closure.

Post-structuralist tend to focus deeper meanings

Works are inspired and based upon each other. They share techniques and subject matter. It is
impossible for a poem or novel to be self-sufficient. Perhaps in an effort to avoid this
inevitability somewhat, post-structuralists tend to focus on seemingly meaningless and small
details in a piece of literature. Consequently, critics find deeper themes such as class conflict and
social structure in pieces that on the surface deal with wholly different issues. Indeed, post-
structuralists find pride in the ability to create totally unexpected outcomes from an
analysis, but there is never one definitive outcome.
Traces

No singular meaning of literary text

And there are number of reasons

According to post-structuralist theory, literature can have no singular meaning for a

number of reasons:

1:- The first reason is that no two readers will be alike. Each person flipping through the pages
will bring his or her own life experiences to the work, and with that, his or her own interpretation
of the meaning of words and themes.

2:- Another reason for this stance against singular meaning goes along with the word
“différance,” which refers to the process of words deriving meaning from other words. Because
words are essentially meaningless symbols that can never fully represent the ideas they are meant
to convey, they are always at a distance to what they signify and are open to a multitude of
interpretations through sheer lack of specificity.

Through a process called erasure (removal), Derrida proved the theory of différance, taking
words and notions out of context and revealing their “traces.”Traces are basically indicators of
what a word or concept is not.
Color, for example, only exists as a concept because humans differentiate it from size and shape,
and is therefore defined as being a property other than shape or size. This concept of traces can
be applied to more complicated subjects for analysis.

Applying What You Know:

So, now that you understand the basic tenants of the Post-structuralism school of literary
criticism, how do you apply it to the novel you’re trying to analyze? The answer is simple
enough.

After careful consideration, pick out the main themes of the novel, and find places in the text
where these themes are playing out. There should be certain keywords within these excerpts that
you can apply erasure to.

Let’s use Oscar Wilde’s novel,The Picture of Dorian Grayas an example. A major theme in this
novel is the effect of time. The novel’s title character has found a way to escape death, so his
friends age while his body remains perfectly untouched. “Time” is one of these key words to
which we can apply erasure. Time is a theoretical concept that no longer applies to Dorian Gray,
for his portrait has made him ageless. For other characters “time” derives meaning from “age,”
but to Dorain, the word seems to lack a trace. To him, seconds, hours and minutes are
inconsequential. Years are but a daydream. A decade is only a word to Dorian Gray…a word
without an opposite and therefore a word without meaning.

General Remarks:
Many critics of Post-structuralism have said that it boils down to sense of negativism, since
everything is essentially meaningless and therefore lacking any reason to exist. Still others
preach against the theory for its lack of structure and “anything goes” attitude, but half of the fun
of analyzing literature with Post-structuralist methods is the high likelihood of unexpected
results. If you continue to apply traces to works of literature, you are sure to find interesting
correlations, and make your report/essay/whatever that much more engaging. And believe me,
when you’re dealing with literary criticism, engaging is a plus.

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Postructuralist Approaches
A. POSTSTRUCTURALISM: a reaction against structuralists' claims to "scientific objectivity"
and "universality." Most contemporary schools of literary criticism are thoroughly
poststructuralist or at least share some of the poststructuralist assumptions:

1. Anti-foundationalist: seeks to challenge or destabilize Western logocentrism (idea that

some ultimate signifier, which exists outside the play of language, centers or acts as a
foundation for all thought, language, experience--e.g., God, the Idea, the Self, etc.)
2. Foregrounds theory: feels compelled to explain theory of signification, the general
conditions that determine meaning
3. Decenters the human subject: downplays or denies that human beings have a coherent
identity with individual motivation, initiative, and purpose; instead, individuals inhabit
various "subject positions" constructed by discourse. In literature, this decenters the
author and authorial intention and emphasizes the reader (but a reader that is constructed
by the text)
4. Foregrounds discourse and the constructedness of all knowledge and behavior

B. DECONSTRUCTION: an extreme poststructuralist theory and practice of reading based on

the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Key assumptions:

1. "Undecidable" play of linguistic meanings: Saussure assumed that langue formed a

closed, stable system, with a delimited structure of meaning; if Saussure separated the
whole sign from its referent, Derrida further separated the signifier from the signified. He
demonstrated that a particular signifier does not directly yield only one signified (e.g. c-
h-a-i-r may suggest the concept of an object to sit on, but it also may suggest a person
who supervises a committee, a professorship or bishopric, etc.); even when it does
suggest one concept, its meaning will vary according to the context (e.g,, "They sent him
to the chair"). Furthermore, signifieds can only be defined by more signifiers in a
potentially endless regression.
2. In this "open-ended play of signification," social ideologies privilege certain meanings,
making them the centers around which all other meanings turn (e.g., "freedom" and
"democracy" in the U.S.).
3. Sausurrean difference becomes Derridean différance (a coinage suggesting in French
both "to be different" and "to defer"); linguistic difference creates the effect of decidable,
definite meaning, but in language meaning is actually deferred from one interpretation to
another in an endless play or movement.
4. The structures of binary opposition that are essential to logocentric language are actually
hierarchies, defined not simply by differences but by the privileging of one term at the
expense of the other (beautiful/ugly, divine/human, man/woman). Deconstruction
demonstrates not only that such hierarchies can be inverted, but also that the whole
opposition can be undermined or collapsed. Since the first term is defined by excluding
the second, it requires the second for its meaning; one cannot be thought without the
other ("what is outside is also inside").
5. Since language and meaning are inherently unstable, words and texts constantly
undermine and deconstruct themselves; the deconstructive critic simply calls attention to
this "by the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself"
(Barbara Johnson), typically by finding "double binds" of contradictory or incompatible
 meanings or by focusing on apparently minor or peripheral details which serve as threads
to unravel the fabric of the text. Deconstructive critics distinguish between the text that
tries to close off the endless play of signification and push toward a specific interpretation
(the "readerly" text that tries to keep one in the reader/consumer position) and the text
that opens itself up to many different meanings (the "writerly" text that puts one in the
writer/producer position, encouraging the creation of one's own play of meanings).

Cf. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, pp. 146-47:

Meaning may well be ultimately undecidable if we view language contemplatively, as a chain of

signifiers on a page; it becomes 'decidable', and words like 'truth', 'reality', 'knowledge' and
'certainty' have something of their force restored to them, when we think of language rather as
something we do, as indissociably interwoven with our practical forms of life. It is not of course
that language then becomes fixed and luminous: on the contrary, it becomes even more fraught
and conflictual than the most 'deconstructed' literary text. It is just that we are then able to see, in
a practical rather than academicist way, what would count as deciding, determining, persuading,
certainty, being truthful, falsifying and the rest--and see, moreover, what beyond language itself
is involved in such definitions.

------------------------------------

Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (Foucault)

Kari Boyd McBride

These influential theories of the second half of the twentieth century, all of which are focused on
language, have their origins in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913),
particularly his Cours de linguistique générale (1916) or Course in General Linguistics, taken
from his students' lecture notes and published posthumously. Contrary to many of the linguistic
theories of the day, which focused on diachronic linguistics or the changes in languages over
time, Saussure developed a theory of synchronic language, how language works in the present.
He argued that the relationship between the spoken word (signifier) and object (signified) is
arbitrary and that meaning comes through the relationship between signs, which are for

Saussure the union of signified and signifier. So the word "tree" means by custom
only and not through any intrinsic relationship between the sound and the thing. That's why both
"arbol" and "tree" can both signify the same signified. English speakers construct meaning by
distinguishing between tree and treat and trek as well as between tree and bush and flower.
Meaning, then, comes from understanding what a thing IS NOT rather than from knowing in any
kind of ontological sense what a thing IS. Meaning is constructed through difference,
particularly through binary pairs (man/woman, good/evil). There is no absolute Platonic ideal
"out there" to anchor meaning. There is no truth that is not constructed. There is nothing outside
language. Language speaks (through) us. Language is thus a system of signs or a semiotic
system, but merely one of many, all of which construct meaning, which does not exist outside
the semiotic system.

Some anthropologists seized on Saussure's theory of semiotic structure to analyze and

understand a variety of cultures, which, they theorized, could be mapped "scientifically" through
a structuralist methodology. Literary critics also drew on Structuralism to map the semiotics of
genres and individual works and, in the process, to challenge the formalist / humanist criticism
that had dominated literary study in the first half of the century. Perhaps most influential was
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who proclaimed the death of the author. That is, if language
speaks us, then the author is relatively unimportant to the process of writing.

Jacques Derrida (1930- ) used Saussure's insights to develop Deconstruction, a perspective

that focuses on the lack of a truth "out there" or at the center to provide meaning. He showed
how all Western philosophical systems are dependent on a center (God, the self, the
unconscious). But structuralism had shown that the center is a fiction, merely another signified
that has no being beyond language. Furthermore, Derrida focused on the binary pairs that make
meaning, arguing that rather than being polar opposites, each was dependent on the other for
meaning and (we might say) existence. (Hence one deconstructs the polarity of the binary terms.)
He also showed how in all binaries, one of the terms was always subordinated to the other
(man/woman, good/evil). To describe how meaning is produced, Derrida developed the term
différance, meaning to differ and to defer. He focused in particular on the binary speech /
writing, in which speech has been seen to provide a guarantee of subjectivity and presence in
the history of philosophy and linguistics (someone has to do the speaking). Alternatively, writing
is about absence, the absence of the speaker and what is signified by the written signifiers.
Derrida calls the privileging of speech and presence logocentrism.

Poststructuralism rejected the theory that one could map the structure of a language or culture.
Rather, meaning is constantly slipping from one sign to the next. Signifiers do not produce
signifieds; they merely produce an endless chain of signifiers--hence my need to find a signifier
from another semiotic system to represent the tree above. In that example, the signifier tree did
not produce the signified but merely another signifier. Language works like a dictionary where,
when you look up a word, you get other words that provide meaning. If you keep looking up
those words, you'll ultimately come back to the word you started with.

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) took Saussure's ideas and applied them to psychoanalysis, arguing
that the unconscious is structured like a language, that is, the unconscious is a semiotic system
signs stand arbitrarily for particular meanings. Lacan also postulated that every human being
goes through the mirror stage in which we construct our sense of coherent selfhood by seeing
ourselves in a mirror (real or imaginary; other people can also mirror us back to ourselves). But
that self and its coherence are based on méconnaissance or misrecognition, because the mirror
image shows us to be more unified and separate than we actually are. As in Saussure's linguistic
theory, here the self has no ontology but is rather a construct, a sign, created through relationship
and difference.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) always insisted that he was not a poststructuralist critic but rather
a genealogist. But his analysis of discourse owes a lot to Saussure's insights about the
construction of meaning. Foucault shows how discourses regulate what can be said, what can be
thought, and what is considered true or correct. So the pre-modern medical theories based on
bodily humors constructed a particular understanding of the body, and within that discourse,
certain things were true and false. However, there were many other propositions that were
neither true nor false but fell outside the discursive system altogether. Anyone who tried to think
outside the system would not have been respected or accorded a voice in the conversation about
bodies. Discourse is thus the medium through which power is expressed and people and
practices are governed; academic disciplines discipline. Foucault also argued that "the history of
thought" is a misnomer, as it implied a continuous evoltion of ideas. Rather, he used the terms
genealogy or archeology of knowledge, focusing on the ruptures or breaks between one era's
discourse and another's.

Thomas Kuhn's (1922-1996) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962; he wrote it as a grad
student) makes the kind of argument about scientific thought that Foucault made about
discourses in general (and in particular). Kuhn used the term paradigm to describe the
foucauldian discourses that regulate scientific thought. For Kuhn, science is not an
evolutionary, progressive march towards greater and greater truth but rather "a series of peaceful
interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions" (Foucault's "ruptures") in which one
point of view is replaced by another. (Think of the difference between the Ptolomaic and
Newtonian worlds.) So science's claim to truth is highly questionable and even ephemeral; since
the truths of past science have passed away, we can be certain that what science claims today
will itself one day be superseded by the claims of a new paradigm, which will itself one day be
superseded . . . .

Edward Said (1935-2003) used poststructuralist ideas to analyze Orientalism, the study of the
Orient by academics of the West. He showed how the academics and their disciplines
constructed an object of study that had very little to do with the East (which is East, of course,
only in relationship to the West, a binary relationship in which one terms has more value than the
other).

The theories inspired by Saussure's linguistic theory have influenced every academic discipline
because they all bear on epistemology or what can be known. If knowledge is relationship, a
product of societies, the medium of power, then academic endeavor is not about the discovery of
truth but rather its construction. Furthermore, the methodologies we employ in our various
academic endeavors are undermined by the insights of poststructuralism. What is the relationship
between the academic and the object of study? In what way can we know that object; is it
available to us at all? What can we know about the past? What does it mean to interpret or
analyze a work of literature? How do we choose what works to study? What is the role of the
aesthetic in either art history or literary study? How is the canon of literature or art produced?
How do we decide what is "good" or "beautiful"? Can there be any absolute standards of value at
all if meaning is a product of arbitrary relationship and difference?

Poststructuralism has also influenced materialist theory or Marxism by providing a way of

understanding ideology and showing how important it is to the maintenance of any economic
system. The union of poststructuralist and materialist theory produced cultural theories and
cultural studies, including, in literature, new historicism and cultural materialism, in which
the goal is to understand cultures as both material and discursive. In such theories, everything
can be a text (a semitic system), everything can be "read." But no one kind of text is privileged
over another. All texts are literary in a sense, as they are all produced in what we might call a
self-conscious manner. On the other hand, no self produces any text; there is no authorial
intention; language speaks through all of us, even the most "intentional" author.

The influence of Poststructuralism, particularly in its union with materialism, is what has
produced the "cultural turn" in the social sciences and humanities. And cultural criticism tends
to be interdisciplinary, as the questions it asks cannot be answered from within the old
disciplinary boundaries. Anyway, disciplines themselves have been called into question by the
foucauldian critique of discourses. We understand them as social constructs rather than as
taxonomies that arise from the nature of things.

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Post-structuralism
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Post-Structuralism is a reaction to structuralism and works against seeing language as a
stable, closed system. It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped
with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as
irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a
single center, essence, or meaning . Jacques Derrida's paper on "Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (delivered in 1966) proved particularly influential in
the creation of post-structuralism. Derrida argued against, in essence, the notion of a
knowable center (the Western ideal of logocentrism), a structure that could organize the
differential play of language or thought but somehow remain immune to the same "play" it
depicts (Abrams, 258-9). Derrida's critique of structuralism also heralded the advent of
deconstruction that--like post-structuralism--critiques the notion of "origin" built into
structuralism. In negative terms, deconstruction--particularly as articulated by Derrida--has
often come to be interpreted as "anything goes" since nothing has any real meaning or truth.
More positively, it may posited that Derrida, like Paul de Man and other post-structuralists,
really asks for rigor, that is, a type of interpretation that is constantly and ruthlessly self-
conscious and on guard. Similarly, Christopher Norris (in What's Wrong with
Postmodernism?) launches a cogent argument against simplistic attacks of Derrida's
theories:
On this question [the tendency of critics to read deconstruction "as a species of all-licensing
sophistical 'freeplay'"), as on so many others, the issue has been obscured by a failure to
grasp Derrida's point when he identifies those problematic factors in language (catachreses,
slippages between 'literal' and 'figural' sense, subliminal metaphors mistaken for determinate
concepts) whose effect--as in Husserl--is to complicate the passage from what the text
manifestly means to say to what it actually says when read with an eye to its latent or covert
signifying structures. This 'free-play' has nothing whatsoever to do with that notion of an
out-and-out hermeneutic license which would finally come down to a series of slogans like
"all reading is misreading," "all interpretation is misinterpretation," etc. If Derrida's texts
have been read that way--most often by literary critics in quest of more adventurous
hermeneutic models--this is just one sign of the widespread deformation professionelle that
has attended the advent of deconstruction as a new arrival on the US academic scene. (151)

Some commonly used terms in deconstructive theory:

Aporia - the inherent contradictions found in any text. Derrida, for example, cites the
inherent contradictions at work in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's use of the words culture and
nature by demonstrating that Rousseau's sense of the self's innocence (in nature) is already
corrupted by the concept of culture (and existence) and vice-versa.

Différance - a combination of the meanings in word différance. The concept means différer
or to differ, différance which means to delay or postpone (defer), and the idea of difference
itself. To oversimplify, words are always at a distance from what they signify and, to make
matters worse, must be described by using other words.

Erasure (sous rature) - to highlight suspect ideologies, notions linked to the metaphysics of
presence, Derrida put them under "erasure," metaphorically pointing out the absence of any
definitive meaning. By using erasure, however, Derrida realized that a "trace" will always
remain but that these traces do not indicate the marks themselves but rather the absence of
the marks (which emphasize the absence of "univocal meaning, truth, or origin"). In
contrast, when Heidegger similarly "crossed out" words, he assumed that meaning would be
(eventually) recoverable.

Further reference:

R. Selden, P. Widowson, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, ch. 6.

Suggested Websites:

 Deconstruction: Some Assumptions by John Lye

 Using Deconstruction to Confound Enemies and Astonish Friends by Warren
Hedges
 Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction
 [top]

Postmodernism

Though often used interchangeably with post-structuralism, postmodernism is a much

broader term and encompasses theories of art, literature, culture, architecture, and so forth.
In relation to literary study, the term postmodernism has been articulately defined by Ihab
Hassan. In Hassan's formulation postmodernism differs from modernism in several ways:

Modernism Postmodernism
Purpose Play

Design Chance

Hierarchy Anarchy

Hypotactic Paratactic

Totalization Deconstruction

Presence Absence

Root/Depth Rhizome/Surface

Synthesis Antithesis

Urbanism Anarchy and fragmentation

Elitism Anti-authoritarianism

In its simplest terms, postmodernism consists of the period following high modernism and
includes the many theories that date from that time, e.g., structuralism, semiotics, post-
structuralism, deconstruction, and so forth. For Jean Baudrillard, postmodernism marks a
culture composed "of disparate fragmentary experiences and images that constantly
bombard the individual in music, video, television, advertising and other forms of electronic
media. The speed and ease of reproduction of these images mean that they exist only as
image, devoid of depth, coherence, or originality" (Childers and Hentzi 235).

--------------------------------

Structuralism
Post-Structuralism
Deconstruction
 STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM

Structuralism is concerned not so much with what things mean, but how they mean; it is a
science designed to show that all elements of human culture, including literature, are
understandable as parts of a system of signs. This science of signs is called "semiotics" or
"semiology." The goal is to discover the codes, structures, and processes involved in the
production of meaning. "Structuralism claims that human culture itself is fundamentally a
language, a complex system of signifieds (concepts) and signifiers. These signifiers can be
verbal (like language itself or literature) or nonverbal (like face painting, advertising, or
fashion)" (Biddle 80). Thus, linguistics is to language as structuralism is to literature.

Structuralists often would break myths into their smallest units, and realign corresponding ones.
Opposite terms modulate until resolved or reconciled by an intermediary third term.

Structuralism was a reaction to modern alienation and despair; it sought to recover literature
from the isolation in which it had been studied, since laws governing it govern all sign systems --
clothing, food, body 'language,' etc.

What quickly became apparent, though, was that signs and words don't have meaning in and of
themselves, only in relations to other signs and entire systems. Hence, post-structuralism.

POST-STRUCTURALISM

Post-structuralism contests and subverts structuralism and formalism. Structuralists are

convinced that systematic knowledge is possible; post-structuralists claim to know only the
impossibility of this knowledge. They counter the possibility of knowing systematically a text by
revealing the "grammar" behind its form and meaning. Texts contradict not only the structuralist
accounts of them, but also themselves. All signifieds are also signifiers (a car symbolizes
achievement).

DECONSTRUCTION

Deconstructive criticism posits an undecidability of meaning for all texts. The text has
intertwined and contradictory discourses, gaps, and incoherencies, since language itself is
unstable and arbitrary. The critic doesn't undermine the text; the text already dismantles itself. Its
rhetoric subverts or undermines its ostensible meaning.

Jacques Derrida opposed the "metaphysics of presence, . . . the claim in literature or philosophy
that we can find some full, rich meaning outside of or prior to language itself." The hierarchy of
binaries on which this assertion rests is untenable. Privileging speech over writing =
logocentrism; spoken or written words have meaning only by "differance" from other words.
Deconstructive critics focus on the text like the formalists, but direct attention to the opposite of
the New Critical "unities." Instead, they view the "decentering" of texts and point out
incompatabilities, rhetorical grain-against-grain contradictions, undecidability within texts. There
is often a playfulness to deconstruction, but it can be daunting to read too.

------------------------------

Structuralism, Post-structuralism and Deconstruction!

1. What's Structuralism?

Structuralism is a school of art and social criticism . A structuralist is someone who rejects the
notion that there is "inherent meaning" in a piece of art, or civilization, or any other object of
study. Instead, she focuses her analyses on the formal structures of the object in question,
attempting to "read" it as one would decipher parts of an interdependent
text.

Both post-structuralist and and deconstruction practices have developed from the basis of
structuralism.

2. Who Was Saussure?

Structuralism begins with the study of linguistics, particularly the ideas of Ferdinand de
Saussure. Before Saussure, linguists followed one of two main schools (historical and rational),
both of which thought of language as a simple naming process, and both of which assumed a
natural link between the name and its object.

Saussure was trained as a specialist in Sanskrit and ancient Indo-European languages, and much
of his work challenged the idea that one could study "language" as a unfied field. (I think you
had to read Sandskrit to even get away with a challenge like that, back in the day. ) By the of his
lectures comprised in Course in General Linguisitics Saussure had decided instead to focus on
the configurations of particular national languages, like English and French. He had learned
something we take for granted today: that there is no History of Language, only histories of
languages.

(Note: for those interested in dates, S. was a contemporary of Freud and Durkheim...)

3. Saussure's first question: What gives meaning in a language?

Looking carefully at particular language structures, Saussure asked : what is that permits the
human mind to make meaning out of a spoken utterance?

Saussure noted that in speech, there are "phonetic contrasts" which permit us to distinguish
between one word and another. So "I'm here now", for instance, is often heard as
"AHEMHEERUHNAHOWE" or some such, with or without proper pauses between words. Our
ears (and brain), trained to understand particular dialects and speech patterns, make sense of it
all.

True to standard linguistic beliefs, Saussure conjectured that many phonetic speech contrasts
probably some kind of natural history in human development (think of how we came up
utterances like "Ow!" for instance.) He thought that this natural history of spoken sound might be
somehow linked to it ultimate meaning, but he didn't really delve deeply into the particulars of
this all. The problem of the natural origins of speech was later taken up by linguists like Noam
Chomsky, and even hard-core child development specialists like hmmm I can't think of a name
here!)

4. What's the Signifier and Signified Thing About?

Next, Saussure moved his analysis from spoken to written language. He asked, "When we think
of the "meaning" of a spoken phoneme, and compare it to a written word, do we mean the same
thing?" Contrary to the linguistic traditions of his day, Saussure's answer was a definite NO.
Sound signifier and signified
For Saussure, the written word is a radically different beast than the spoken one. Oral language
based is on sound, and as such, it may make meaning between words and things (for example
onomatopoeias). Written language, on the other hand, is based on signs, and therefore can only
make meaning by way of "signifieds" and "signfiers."

People get confused by the signified/signifier thing, and I've found one of the easy ways to
explain it, as well as Saussure's notion of "difference", is by talking about money. Here goes:

Did you ever wonder why a dollar bill is worth more than a penny? Of course the answer is that
it isn't, in its purest sense. Because it can be melted down and used for tools, copper is worth
more in some cultures than paper. Copper is what Marx would call a penny's "use value".

But as everyone knows, a dollar bill has another value--a culturally agreed upon value at which
one paper dollar becomes equal to one hundred pennies, ten dimes, and so on. This culturally
agreed upon value is what Marx would call "exchange value." For Marx, while use value is tied
to an item's natural state, exchange value is the result of its cultural state.

A dollar bill is a signifier, because its meaning is culturally derived. There is no "thing" that a
dollar bill is, save a piece of paper that has more cultural importance than other pieces of paper.
The buying power of that dollar bill is its signified. The relationship of the dollar bill (exchange
value) to its buying power (use value) is the relationship of the signifier to the signified.

Now, let's move from money to words. Like the paper on which a dollar bill is printed, printed
words have a crappy use value (which is why when they are typed out of sequence we think of
them as gibberish.) But relative to ONE ANOTHER, written words have significant exchange
value. "Kill boy girl" means little to us. But "The boy killed the girl" and "the girl killed the boy"
mean very different things, because in English, it is culturally agreed upon that word order
denotes subject and object of a sentence.
Today, this seems like an obvious proposition. But it's important to remember, prior to Saussure,
linguists were arguing that there was an inherent relationship between an object and its name
(mostly suggesting that if one went back far enough, to say, Sanskrit, that relationship would
become obvious.) Saussure, a Sanskrit scholar himself, did not agree. He felt that while a scream
might be universal (that is, a scream is a scream in any language) all writing must be culturally
constructed and agreed upon to have meaning at all. If you think this is hair-splitting, try
remembering the Clinton impeachment hearings. Law, which is based upon nothing but written
language with the force of police power, derives its sole authority by determining the legitimate
placement of words in an argument.

5. Why is the Sign Arbitrary?

Saussure is famous for calling the meaning of signs "arbitrary", which means they are selected at
random and without reason. This kind of flew in the face of the "universal logic of language"
crowd. Saussure thought that signs are kind of like money. You can change a ten word sentence
to a five word sentence and retain meaning, the same way you can use twenty nickels or ten
dimes to make a dollar. Signifiers can be swapped out. Signifieds--the concepts pointed at by
signifiers--can be swapped out, too. If the government declares tomorrow that the buying power
of one dollar has shifted, that's a change in the signified.

Actually, the analogy Saussure liked to use was chess. In his wonderful _Fifty Key
Contemporary Thinkers_, John Lechte's explains that Saussure thought of language "both as a
history lesson and a chess game." To see language historically is to give it a diachronic
perspective, but to see language as a chess match is to give it a much-needed synchronic
perspective. "In chess, not only is the present configuration of pieces on the board all that matters
to a newcomer to the game, but any number of items can be switched around for pieces on the
board (a button for a king, etc.)" Cryptography is a kind of chess game with words. So is poetry,
or any kind of writing, really.

6. What's Difference for Saussure?

If the sign is arbitrary, then how do we make meaning in writing, and how come everything
doesn't seem like crazy poetry? What allows you to read this paragraph, and see it as more than
gibberish? This is where Saussure's idea of "difference" comes in.

Difference, for Saussure, is "the means whereby value is established in any system of linguistic
signs." Kind of a stock market of linguistic meanings. Grammar, usage, custom, history, syntax,
and spelling are all difference mechanisms, in that they define what words will mean when
placed next to one another. Meaning is impossible to ascertain outside of the system of
difference.

7. Structuralists After Saussure

After Saussure's work was rediscovered in the 1960's, there was an explosion of interest in
theories of difference and formal "textual analysis", and not just of language, but of entire social
systems. Today, we think nothing of referring to movies, sports events or psychological
interactions as "texts" to be read.

One of the main critiques of Saussure's flavor of structuralism was that it was too closed off to
social change. Because he was a big old Commie (it's a joke, people) Mikael Bakhtin was
obsessed with using Saussure's methods to illuminate the "dialectical struggles" within words. In
_Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_, he argued that language happens primarily through
of a "clash of social forces" between people who use words. To study the changes in signs, and
to chart those changes, is to study the class struggles of society itself.

It is from Bakhtin that Michel Foucault draws the very useful notion of "normative language".
"Normative" is a fancy way of saying, "Words that have become naturalized over time, and thus
hide their power base. " For instance (to take Foucault's famous example) "Sanity" is equated
with a particular brand of culturally sanctioned behavior. Over time, the term "sane" is
normalized, and becomes synonymous with "the natural state." Insanity", on the other hand,
shifts in meaning from "un-sane" to "un-natural."

In her book _Epistemology of the Closet_, Eve Segwick makes a similar claim about the term
"homosexual", arguing that "natural" heterosexuality is an impossible idea without the creation
of an "unnatural" sexuality--homosexuality. In truth, both sanity and insanity, as well as hetero
and homosexuality, "mean" nothing outside their cultural exchange values--which is to say their
differences.

I bring these examples up to demonstrate that structuralism is alive and well in contemporary
thought. Indeed, you really can't engage in post-structuralist critique without resorting to
structuralism at some point. As my friend Jennifer likes to say: "Can't go over it. Can't go under
it. Gotta go through it."

8.What's Post-structuralism?

Structuralism was really big in the 1960's and 1970's, and though it still has its die-hard fans, it
has been replaced in the academy by post-structuralism. Post-structuralism has an interesting
historical beginning in the student uprisings at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1968. It also comes as a
result of some important moments in political history (the dawn of "second wave" feminism in
the U.S. and parts of Europe, the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.) Here,
however, I will only concentrate on its status as a philosophical movement which seeks to
redress some of the problems of structuralism.

For many folks, post-structuralism begins with Jacques Derrida, who adapts notion of Saussure's
"difference" and changes it into "differance" (with some wacky French accents)-- which Derrida
calls a combination of "difference" plus "deferral".

_The Bloomsbury Guide_explains it this way, "For Derrida, no word (or sign) can ever be
brought directly into alignment with the object it purports to recall. This means that meaning is
always deferred, and can never be final." Sounds good to me, but let's back up a second.

8. Structuralists say Yes to Meaning, and talk about Difference.

The difference (hahah) between Saussure and Derrida, indeed the very rift between structuralism
and post structuralism, is a disagreement over the following question: If the sign is always
arbitrary, is there anything that has meaning, prior to culture?

A structuralist answer is, "Yes, pre-cultural meaning exists." Different structuralist locate pre-
cultural meaning differently. Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau Ponty argue that pre-
cultural meaning resides in the body's ability to gesture. Elaine Scary has argued that the body in
pain is a pre-cultural source of meaning.

Psychoanalysts like Jacques Lacan hinted that there were two kinds of pre-cultural meaning. One
he called The Imaginary, was formed by pre-Oedipal drives of the psyche (Julia Kristeva calls
this place "the chora.") The other, which he called The Real, has to do with the clash of social
forces and language, and can only be apprehended in fragments.

Structuralist anthropologists like Levi-Strauss found pre-cultural meaning in tribal ritual and
formation. .Certain structuralist linguists like Chomsky argue that there is pre-cultural meaning
in certain particular universal sound patterns, like screams. And the list goes on

9. Post-structuralists say "No" to Meaning, and talk about Differance.

A post-structuralist answer is: "Pre-cultural meaning is at best a fantasy, and at worst a dream
that hiding a series of class-based nightmares. Differance helps us to remind ourselves to
continually defer assigning fixed meaning to anything within language."

In _Writing and Difference_, Derrida argues that the belief in the "meaning" is at its core,
Platonic. The Greek philosopher Plato argued that for every idea (artificial), there is a
corresponding form (natural). In Saussure's story, writing is the idea and speech is the natural
form.

But, asks Derrida, is this really so? Saussure holds that speaking precedes writing for humans,
and is thus a purer form of communication. But when you think about it, Saussure's chronology
doesn't really hold. Did the "cave people" speak before they drew, or pointed? Does a child's
gesturing at birth precede or follow her first cries? And what of deaf people, many of whom
gesture (and gesture, because it is a sign, is considered "writing", here), before they speak? If
speaking doesn't "come first", is it really more "natural" and privileged than writing? Of course,
Derrida answers, No.

In _Speech and Phenomenon_, Derrida takes issue with the old-fashioned notion of philosophy
which attempts to "explain" reality, or old-fashioned
critics who purport to "say" what art "really means." For Derrida, these constructions use speech
metaphors (or other metaphors about embodiment) that they implicitly mean to be seem more
truthful than writing. But the truth is, there is no such thing as "pure speech" outside of writing,
just as there is no "meaning" outside of culture.

In Truth in Painting, Derrida argues that these are not his insights, but are rather buried within
philosophy texts themselves. Kant concluded, for example, that God was an undecideable
proposition, but in order to continue the work of philosophy, Kant made what he called a "leap of
faith" and kept writing. Derrida refuses, or in his words "defers" the leap of faith necessary to
make meaningful philosophy.

11. What's Deconstruction? (Note: I'd like to do a little more on this section, when I get
time.)

When it refuses the leap of faith, Derrida argues, traditional philosophy cannot ultimately state
what something "means", and finds itself rendered worthless.

For this reason, Derrida urges a new form of philosophy: deconstruction. A deconstructionist is a
post-structuralist who acknowledges (to return to Saussurian terms) that there are no signifieds,
only signifiers. Derrida, deconstruction forgoes the "why" of traditional philosophy, supplanting
it with an extended analysis of the "how".

Derrida is famous for the deconstructionist statement, "there is nothing outside the text".
People misinterpret Derrida's words here, thinking he means to say that written texts matter more
than everything else in the world. What he means is exactly the opposite. To Derrida,
EVERYTHING ALREADY is a text, and the job of the philosopher not to tell the universe what
things mean writ large, but rather to be one of many "readers" of that text.

Because we live in a technological time, I'll use an analogy many people are more comfortable
with: hypertext. Many of us understand the notion that "the world is always hypertext" to mean
that these days, everything we experience seems to contain "links" (sometimes visible,
sometimes not) to other things. I see a flower, that flower reminds me of my grandmother,
which reminds me of her pie, and suddenly every time I see a rose I need to go to the diner
and get pie a la mode, etc. I also understand that when my best friend sees a rose, she may
need to go swimming, for a set of enirely diffferent (yet still connected to her personal
story) reasons.

When I shake my head and say, "Wow it's all hyperlinked", I don't mean that nothing counts
except for the World Wide Web. Rather, I mean that everything in the world functions as if it
were a web page, according to the arbitrary logic of hyperlinking. This is Derrida's argument, as
well.

12. Is Deconstruction Apolitical?

Contrary to critics who argue that deconstruction is tantamount to saying "everything is relative",
a number of minoritarian scholars (feminists, queer theorists, Black Atlantic theorists, cultural
studies thinkers) have pointed out that deconstruction can be a powerful political tool. Perhaps
this is better explained through examples:

For legal critics like Barbara Johnson, there is no "justice" or "crime", but a series of decisions
and events which shape the juridical system. Ironically, it is in its reading of legal matters that
post-structuralist thinkers come heavily under attack. Some folks, particularly a group of
Germans called the Frankfurt School (led by Jurgen Habermas), argue that in the wake of the
Holocaust, the ideas of justice and society needs to be resurrected, not abandoned to the terrain
of "word gamesmanship". The post-structuralist retort to this attack is, I hope, something you'll
already know by now, so I won't detail it here.

Here's another example: To theorist Judith Butler, "sex" and "gender" don't really exist per se.
Certainly, she concedes in Bodies that Matter, there are constellations of physiological signs that
are understood to be (for example) "heterosexuality" or "femaleness." But in truth, these
understandings are cultural inheritances rather than given facts." Ironically, she points out, the
very fact that we have discourses around "the body" indicates its status as a shifting term, lacking
any securable ultimate meaning.

Of course, just because something is difficult to define doesn't mean that the project of making
definitions should be abandoned. And both Johnson and Butler, both of whom are quite actively
politically, are hardly "moral relativists." Though some critics accuse them of doing so, post-
structuralism thinkers rarely advocate nihilism or even relativism for that matter. Instead, they
demand that philosophy turn away from the false conviction that it can say for certain what
anything "is" outside of culture and history. This is why, when making decisions with a
postructuralist outlook, principals like provisionality, standpoint analysis, and at times "strategic
essentialism" often come in handy. Other things post-structuralists tend to employ are irony,
parody, mimicry, and camp, all used as strategies to understand the ways in which different
viewpoints radically affect what something philosophically "is".

Understood this way, post-structuralism needn't be off-putting, mind-blowing or scary. Instead,

for many of us, it seems a rather a reasonable description of the way things "are" these days. The
truth may well be, as the old saying goes, if we really knew what it was we thought we were
talking about, we wouldn't talk about it so much!

At one level, post-structuralism is more playful than other ways of doing philosophy, but at
another level it is quite profound. As the debates circulating around the "viability of the fetus" on
one hand and "ethical euthanasia" on the other demonstrate even the thing we call "life" is
difficult to secure via language. Anyone who has ever had to wrestle with a handful of
arguments, a series of breath and brain wave patterns on a machine, and a hope that they can live
with the consequences of their actions, knows what I mean.

----------------------------------------
Structuralism, Post Structuralism,
Deconstruction and Super Structuralism
January 13, 2011 in Critical Theory, Literary Criticism, Literature, Personal, Poem, Poetry,
Writing | Tags: criticism, Literature, structuralism

The following post is taken from my book A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Critical Theory
Structuralism

Structuralism has its origin in the science of linguistics. In 1915 ferdinand de Sassure of France
published Cours de Lingustique Generale, from which the basis of linguistics was established.
From this point of evolution, the movement under the label of Structuralism started in the field of
language and literary theory, which is concerned with ‘language’ in a most general sense (not
just the language of utterance in speech and writing).

Structuralism considers everything, from the point of view of codes of communication. Any way
Sassure made a number of important original contributions:

1. The concept of language as a sign system: According to Sassure, language is a ‘sign system’ or
structure whose individual components can be understood only in relation to each other and to
the system as a whole

NOTE:

Code: Though ‘code’ generally means a collection or digest of laws or a system of rules etc., in
structuralism it is rather specific – it denotes a culture’s system of signification through which
reality is mediated. The theory of structuralism is that all cultural phenomena are products of
codes or code.

Everything in the theory of structuralism, is a product of a system of signification or code. The

relationship between the elements of the code give it signification . codes are arbitary (as all
signs are arbitary).

1. Distinction between “langue”and “parole”: “Langue” and “parole” are the terms which Sassure
introduced as fundamental to structuralism. Their English equivalents are “language” and
“speech”. “Langue” denotes the system or totality of language shared by the ‘collective
unconsciousness’ . Thus ‘langue’ means the whole system of language with its elements like
rules for combination (grammar, syntax etc.). ‘Parole’ is the use which individuals make of the
resources of language, which the system produces or combines, in speech or writing or
utterance. ‘Langue’ is what people use in thinking and “parole” is what they use in speaking or
writing. So the former is abstract where as the later is concrete. Sassure hence defined
distinguistic study as the study of system which underlies any particular human signifying human
practice, not the individual utterance.. thus “langue” represents the language as a whole (e.g.
 French, English etc.) and “parole” representing utterance, a particular use of individual units of
language.

1. Distinction between “Diachronic” and “Synchronic”: sassure coined these two terms in 1913. A
diachronic approach to a study of language involves an examination of its origin, development,
history and change. In contrast synchronic approach entails a study of the linguistic system in a
particular state without reference to time. The importance of the Synchronic approach is that,
Sassure theorized each sign as with out any properties other than the specific relational ones
which defines it with in its own system.
2. Distinction between “Signifier” and “Signified”: In Cours de Linguistique Generale (1915)
sassure describes language system as a ‘series of differences of sound combined with a series of
differences of ideas’. He coined two terms “Signifier” and “Signified”. According to him , each
sign in language is an union of signifier (i.e. sound image or its graphic equivalent) and a signified
(i.e. the concept referred to). The letter of h-o-u-s-e, form a signifier which evoke the signified
‘house’. The association of signifier and signified has no natural link. And each sign in a linguistic
system possesses ‘meaning’ by virtue of the fact that it is different from any other sign rather
than because of any linguistic reason why this should be so. ‘House’ is different from ‘louse’ or
‘mouse’. Thus a word can be identified because of how it is related to, and different from other
words in that linguistic system. As Sassure puts it: “in language there are only differences
without positive terms”. Sassure’s works have been fundamental to all developments in
structuralism and post-structuralism and hence have also influenced psychoanalytical criticism
as developed by for instance Jacques Lacan.

Structuralism during this period was being influenced by three movements (and which were also
labeled under it):

 C. S. Peirce’s “Semiotics”
 Geneva School of “Phenomenology”
 Prague Linguistic Circle (Russian formalism)
Strauss’ Myth criticism and Narratology

Then structuralism was furthered by Claude Levi-Strauss, who developed a structural theory
(later known as Narratology) in a consideration of myth, ritual and kinship, especially in his
classic work Anthropologie Structurale (1958). He sees social structure as kind of model and
shows that the behaviour patterns of kinship and the existence of institutions depend on methods
of communication that are all characteristics of how the human mind works. Thus he analyses
modes of thoughts as well as modes of action, looking for the system of differences which
underline practice, rather than their origins and causes. This developed into “Narratology” – a
further aspect of structuralism.]

Narratology or the “Structuralist Analysis of Narratives” was begun by Strauss in 1958. He

believes that the totality (i.e. all myths that are available) have some constant, basic and universal
structures, through which all myths can be explained.

He sees myth as language system, which can be broken into smaller individual units called
‘mythemes’ – by analogy with phonemes. Myths can be read in relation to each other rather than
as reflecting a particular version. Hence the concept of a kind of ‘grammar’ or ‘set of relations’
under the surface of the narrative. Later this theory was developed into a major part of critical
theory.

After 1966 onwards two new views in context with structuralism came to front:

I. Deconstruction theory

II. Post-structuralism

Both of these provided complement to structuralism.

Derrida’s Deconstruction

In 1966, Jaquous Derrida published an essay titled : Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of
Human Sciences which was later followed by his book Of Grammatology (1967). In these two
works Derrida argued the following:

 A text can be read as something quite different from what it appears to be saying. In short a text
may possess so many different meanings that it can not have a meaning (i.e. there is no
guaranteed essential meaning to a text).
 The priority since the time of Plato was given to speech over writing, as it was believed that
there is a gap in writing, which speech does not possess. But Derrida’s theory argued that both
speech and writing are lacking in ‘presence’. In short previously the meaning conveyed by (or
signified by) speech was considered as instable and writing having a fix stable meaning. But
Derrida’s theory that a text can’t have a meaning, stressed that writing is equally unstable.
 Derrida’s theory suggested that there can’t be ‘binary opposition’ in a language system or any
code. As Derrida believed that a text does not have a single meaning of any kind and as there is
only the text and no meaning, then it can not have a centre, to which there can exist a binary
opposition. Hence, he discarded presence of any binary opposition in a text. Moreover, he has
mentioned that in the place of binary opposition there exist ‘disseminations’ (i.e. diffusement of
meaning) . the various meanings spread over one another and hence betray any center.
 Derrida proposed the theory of “Differance”, which he used to oppose “logo centrism”. In
French language “differer” means to “postpone, to delay” and also it means “to differ or be
different from”. Derrida uses “differance” in pushing Sassure’s theory to its logical conclusion
and argues that to differ or differentiate is also to defer, postpone or withheld. The word itself
illustrates Derrida’s point that writing doesn’t copy speech; the distinction between the two
different forms “differance” and “difference” doesn’t correspond to any distinction in their
spoken form. Thus meaning is continuously and endlessly postponed as each word leads us on
to yet another word in the system of signification. So, Derrida sees a text as an endless sequence
of signifiers, which has no ultimate signifier.

Barthe’s Poststructuralism –The Death of Author

In 1967 Ronald Barthe published Elements of Semiology (1967), which stands as a temporal
marker of post-structuralism. Hence he proposed that structuralism is capable of an explanation
of any sign system of any culture (i.e. all system of signification). But he also perceives that such
an explanation necessitates a theology of meaning or explanation. This gave rise to the idea of
“Meta Language”, which in fact “beyond language” or “Second order language” which is used to
describe, explain or interprete a “First order language”. Each order of language implicitly relies
on a metalanguage by which it is explained. Regarding metalanguage Barthes says that when
one language is interpreted there comes the indefinite regression or “Aporia”. Thus the result
will be that all metalanguages will be vanished in interpreting one another. This Barthes used to
defend structuralism , which stress on binary opposition and on its idea that text has a meaning
(which is opposed by Deconstruction). He believed thus the signifying meanings of a text can be
fixed and are need not to be diffuse or disseminated as proposed by Derrida.This theory even
puts Deconstruction in a place (against its principles and design) where deconstruction acts like a
meta language.

But as we see, discourse upon discourse in regression – which is one aspect of Barthe’s post
structuralist thinking – is fundamentally, deconstructive. Barthe’s later theories includes his
concepts of

 Death of author (In his essay The Death of Author )

 “Plaisir” and “Jouissance” are the experiences that a reader has while reading.
 Text may be ‘readerly’ or ‘writerly’ or even both.

NOTE:

Readerly / writerly:

Barthes proposed this theory in his book S/Z (1970). A readerly text means a book to which
areader’s response is more or less passive (e.g. any realistic novel). Writerly text makes demands
on the reader to work things out (e.g. Ulysses by James Joyce). Here reader is no longer a
consumer but a producer of the text.

Death of Author concept of Barthes can be seen in reference to his concept of ‘writerly’ text. He
believed that the reader must be free of the concept the author associated with the text. Because,
the author if remains a suppressing force, then the reader sees what the author wants to project,
thus he is unable to see the plurality of text. In a ‘writerly’ text the reader, is more independent to
see the plurality of text.

Krestivan poststructuralism – foundation to Feminstic Criticism

Further important contributions to Post structural theory was made by Julia Krestiva of France.
In 1974, she published Le Revolution du Language Poetique . in this she discusses the
relationship between “orderly/rational” and “hetrogenious/irrational” and also between the
“conscious” and “unconscious” . she suggests that Semiotic material is irrational and illogical,
the material of impulse and rhythm ; while reason creates logic, syntax and coherence and brings
about the symbolic element. There are implied antimonies such as feelings/ thoughts ; heart/
brain and to reverse the sequence in the binary opposition.

She stresses that the “semiotic element” is linked with the concept of “infant” – a word which is
“speechless” – and is opposed to “symbolic order”, hence sees it as a means of undermining the
symbolic order. It is at its pre-oedipal (or infant) stage is opposed to strict meaning, a static
condition. Rather it is at this time fluid and it is there fore opposed to any binary opposition, such
as masculine/ feminine.

Though of course there is sometimes more than a hint of binary opposition. Hence semiotic
writing is bi-sexual. For instance James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are semiotic writers, using a
fluid disseminated ‘writerly’ mode and style. Such kind of structural thinkings of Julia Krestiva,
raised the possibility of “Feminstic Criticism” – a theory of the idea of “é criture feminine”

Superstructuralism

In 1987, Richard Harland coined the term “Superstructuralism” in his treatise

Superstructuralism: the Philosophy of structuralism and Post structuralism (1987)

He uses it to cover the whole field of structuralism, post structuralism, semiotics etc.
He also suggests that the term can be read as “Superstructure – alism”, and elaborates the idea
that “superstructuralists” invert our ordinary base and superstructure models until what we used
to think of as super structure takes precedence over what we used to think of as basic.

——————————————————————————————

A Beginner’s Guide to Modern Critical Theory published by Prakash Book Depot, bareilly, UP
(India), 2005, ISBN:81-7977-147-4: This is a book for Post Graduation level students (in English
Literature)of Indian Universities.

(c) 2005, All Rights Reserved. No part of the above post can be published any where in any form
(electronic or non-electronic ), with out the written permission of author. However you can direct
yours links to this page in your websites.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Postmodernism, structuralism, post-

structuralism, deconstruction and art
criticism

Ingrid Stevens

Art criticism is often closely related to, or influenced by, theories that are current in other
branches of philosophy and by prevailing ideologies and theory-based approaches. This
connection between criticism and theory is more than ever apparent in contemporary discourse.
The terms `postmodernism', `post-structuralism' and `deconstruction' are often used in relation to
criticism, but are problematic, the first because it is very vague and the others because they refer
to particularly complex ideas. This article will first seek to define these terms in an accessible
and relevant manner, although it will not attempt to give a full account of their complexity. It
then aims to analyse some of the implications of these theories for the practice of art criticism.
POSTMODERNISM

Modernism is said to have been superseded, although not necessarily replaced, by

postmodernism, since approximately the 1960s, although some theorists view this change as
having begun well before this time. Postmodernism is a much-used and abused term that refers to
many cultural and creative endeavours: architecture, literature, photography, film, dance, music
as well as art. It can also refer to a general condition within Western mass culture. It can thus be
defined in many different ways. Postmodernism is generally a term that refers to an artistic
approach that is distinct from modernism or, more importantly, to a `cultural category' (Sulieman
1991:112). It implies, among other things, the demise of the avant-garde in the face of social and
political changes, accompanied by `changes in artistic practice, related criticism and general
critical theory' (Hoestery 1991:IX). Postmodernism can be seen as a rejection of the purism and
the certainty of modernism.

In place of a mainstream culture, separated from popular culture and defended and explained by
certain figures of authority, there is instead a pluralism in art, criticism and philosophy. This
pluralism can refer to a plurality of styles, to plural ways of thinking about art, and to a
disintegration of boundaries between high art and popular culture, so that the field of culture
appears to be extremely full and diverse. It is a cultural condition that resembles `the
appropriation, misappropriation, montage, collage, hybridization, and general mixing up ...'
referred to by Suleiman (1991:118). The culture of post-modernism is `dynamic and decentred'
(Hutcheon 1989:118), as apparent opposites overlap. High art, advertising, documentary, history
and theory mix together to deny mainstream ideas of art. By comparison, the ideals of
modernism can be rejected as an `elitist, arrogant and mystifying master-code of bourgeois
culture ...' (Huyssens quoted in Hutcheon 1989:27).

This pluralism can be understood as a response to the realisation that Western society has few
shared values and no common symbolic system, a realisation that some writers explain was a
result of feminist questioning of male-dominated modernist thinking (Hoestery 1991:xii).
Women's participation in experimental art and writing in the 1970s and 1980s might or might not
form the basis of postmodernism. There is, however, `an insistent feminist voice' (Suleiman
1991:115) within postmodern culture. `Feminist perspectives have brought about a major shift in
our ways of thinking about culture, knowledge and art' (Hutcheon 1989:20). These perspectives
denied the voices of authority. Thus feminist artists and critics questioned dominant modes of
representation, and helped to transform art practice. Feminists also created an awareness of the
art of the `other': of women, homosexuals, the insane, the criminal, other cultures, etc. This too
increased and made more complex the cultural arena.

POSTMODERNISM AND CRITICISM

These philosophical shifts affect contemporary art making and related art writing, in diverse
ways and for a variety of reasons. A contemporary critic must take these shifts into account, or
risk becoming irrelevant. Burgin (1986:162) refers to the fact of a `crisis in the very culture in
whose name criticism pronounced its judgements ... Orthodox criticism was safe neither in its
empiricism nor its intuitionism ...'
A critic must now confront a greater variety of types and approaches when viewing new art. The
critic can no longer justify a strict preference for one type of art over another, and difficulty
arises with value judgments. The critic would find it philosophically difficult to argue that one
approach is the mainstream, or dominant mode, although it is possible to pick out a variety of
relevant modes. All approaches seem, in this postmodern and diverse culture, to be equally
worthy of attention.

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Furthermore, a postmodern critic gives attention not only to `high' art, but equally to other
cultural manifestations, for example aspects of popular culture, advertising, cinema, comics,
fashion, as well as the art market, the institutions of art, and more. So the contemporary critic
must be aware of all these cultural manifestations, and often include them in critical writings.
Even so-called fine art often demands, by its very nature, a multi-disciplinary critical approach.
The performances of an artist such as Laurie Anderson, for instance, require that a critic who
wishes to do justice to them might refer to contemporary music, drama, performance, poetry and
philosophy, as well as visual art. Criticism has thus become more multi-disciplinary than it was
in the earlier modernist era, and this makes the contemporary critic's task more demanding.

A vital shift is that the object is no longer seen as a stable entity which can be rationally tied to
certain definitive interpretations. According to Ray (1991:134),

Postmodernism retains the notion of the art object, but redefines it as a site, a crossroads traversed by
communication highways continuously rerouted by external, extra-textual circumstances ... Any method
which attends only to the object will prove inadequate.

But added to this is the notion that even language and its meanings are potentially unstable.
Foucault (1990:9) states that

... the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that,
when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the
other's terms: it is vain to say that we see what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.

Given the diversity and relative instability of the art object, as well as the relationship of
language to object, it becomes more difficult for the critic to discuss, and particularly to judge,
this new art. The critic must define, and argue in support of, any criteria chosen to judge the art.
So standards and criteria are not assumed to be absolute, universal or obvious, as they were by
modernist critics. This has been seen as one of the problems of postmodernism, and has been
used to criticise postmodernism itself. Greenberg himself implied that postmodernism is a
relaxation of the standards of modernism:

The making of superior art is arduous, usually. But under modernism, the appreciation, even more the
making, of it has become more taxing, the satisfaction and exhilaration to be gotten from the best new
art more hard-won ... Yet the urge to relax is there, as it's always been. It threatens and keeps on
threatening standards of quality (quoted in Ray 1991:138).
Yet in spite of the contemporary critic's problems with confronting diversity and setting
standards, criticism in the postmodern age becomes of increasing importance. Because objects
are seen as unstable, subject to multiple possible interpretations, the writing that accompanies art,
including critical writing, becomes vital. The art object is no longer merely an object, but is
rather a site or event, such that `... the meaning of events depends entirely on the commentary
gathering to them' (Ray 1991:141). In a sense this `commentary' is dependent on, and consists of,
the responses of both critics and viewers, all of whom bring their own world view and frame of
reference to the work. This proliferation of criticism is not a new phenomenon. Welleck
(1963:345) wrote that the twentieth century could be called the age of criticism: Not only has a
veritable spate of criticism descended upon us, but criticism has achieved a new self-
consciousness, a much greater public status, and has developed, in recent decades, new methods
and new evaluations.

This expanding discipline shows a shift of focus away from the object itself, and from the
aesthetic issues that were the major concern of modernism, towards a concern with social and
cultural interpretations of an inter-textual nature, a kind of merging of concerns. Bird (1986:37)
refers to `an emphasis upon the essentially plural and diffuse play of meanings across the
boundaries of individual works'.

Thus it becomes clear that in a postmodern cultural situation any critic must have a multi-
disciplinary approach, and any theory that attempts to explain art criticism must be both broad
and flexible. Criticism follows culture, and our culture, according to Lyotard (quoted in
Hutcheon 1989:24) `is characterised by no grand totalizing narrative, but by smaller and multiple
narratives which seek no universalizing stabilization or legitimisation'. This plurality can be
found in any contemporary art magazine: Artforum September 1990, for example, had articles by
critics on art censorship, courtroom dramas in life and the mass media, contemporary music,
technology, American myths, and Elvis Presley, as well as articles and reviews of visual art. An
art critic like Lucy Lippard, who is a feminist critic whose approach also relates to

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postmodernism, writes about, and finds connections between, art as diverse as prehistoric art
(1983), contemporary women's art (1995) and the art of minority groups situated in Western
societies (1990).

Thus the plurality of the contemporary situation can be embraced. Perreault (quoted in Nairne
1990:77) writes:

My own feeling is that this is a healthy state of affairs. It may be confusing for the art dealers, the art
collectors, the art spectators, the art curators, and even for many artists and some art critics. But it
reflects our society and the possibility of egalitarian pluralism.

Fuller (1988:213), however, takes a negative view:

And so we are left with a shifting pattern of changing strategies and substitutes, a shuffling of
semiotic codes and devices, varying ceaselessly according to audience and circumstances. Thus
was authenticity dissolved.

Whether a critic views postmodernism positively or not, it makes the critic's task an increasingly
challenging one.

STRUCTURALISM AND POST-STRUCTURALISM

STRUCTURALISM Structuralism is an approach to linguistics, developed by Ferdinand de

Saussure and applied by Claude Levi-Strauss to sociology, which was dominant in the
humanities in France, and later in America, between the 1950s and 1970s. It analyses meaning,
generally in literary texts but also in other cultural products, by paying attention to underlying
systems and structures (Bullock & Stallybrass 1977:607). The approach supposes that
underneath all particular instances of writing, of social relations and of culture, lie some basic,
unifying factors, some universal structures. These generate the variety of individual cultural
products. Levi-Strauss (quoted in Cantor 1988:349) wrote:

That which constitutes a society and a culture is a universal code that runs through the culture and the
institutional and behavioural forms of that society ... This universal cultural system objectively exists,
structuring mental processes as well as social institutions.

This universal system or code operates in language, myths, art and the unconscious, and no
matter how complex it may be, can be analysed, according to the structuralists.

Connor (1990:736-737) uses the metaphor of the `centre' to describe structuralism. The
structuralists, according to him, used austerely rigorous methods to analyse the parts that made
up the `centred' whole that is a text or work. These parts, in literary analysis, included rhythm,
imagery, figures of speech and plot. So the notion of centre, which might be the definition of the
genre, the significance of the text, or broadly the notion of the wholeness of the text, could be
understood by analysis of the interaction of the textual elements. So Levi-Strauss, for example,
analysed a body of myths around the centralising concept of pairs of thematic opposites (Connor
1990:741). Other centralising notions on which structuralism rested are such principles as:

the belief in the original intention of the author, the idea of a uniquely individual style, the power of
literary texts to resolve and unify thematic conflicts, and the historical narratives of the slow growth to
perfection, either in the work of individual authors, or in the development of literary traditions (Connor
1990:742).

The application of this approach might be illustrated by the comment of Mallarme (quoted in
Welleck 1963:349) that `poetry is not written with ideas but with words'. So structuralist critics
studied the structures of language, for example rhyme, metre, prose rhyme, style, symbols, and
even the ambiguities of language, and devised many technical methods for the study of texts.
Thus the rigorously analytical forms of structuralism are close to a formalist approach to art
criticism. For example, a critic such as Greenberg analysed an artwork by detecting and defining
the formal devices employed by the artist, and ignored any content except the visual. So too, the
structuralist `will eschew content analysis for an account of the various discursive and literary
conventions that are embedded in the text' (Freadman & Miller 1992:60). One basic difference,
however, is that the structuralist critic tended to analyse groups of texts, such as myths, in search
of the underlying structure, while the formalist critic tended to give close readings of individual
works.

Roland Barthes contributed to the development and popularisation of a branch of structuralism

called semiology, the study of signs, or signifiers, which form the system of signification by
which human beings communicate. He studied language itself, in conjunction with gestures,
advertisements, food, objects, clothes, music and many other cultural manifesta-

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tions, in a broad analysis of communication. He included art as part of this sign system, and thus
encouraged interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary investigations by critics in their analyses of
art. This strategy, which reflects a shift from structuralism towards post-structuralism,
encouraged the break down of barriers between different art forms and cultural manifestations,
because all are seen as part of a single system of communication. Umberto Eco also contributed
to semiotics, and produced challenging novels and critical writings based on its premises. He
wrote that:

... every act of communication to or between human beings ... presupposes a signification system as its
necessary condition. Signs bounce off each other in an endless series of significations. Since signs are
cultural units interacting infinitely, and since semiotics embraces all forms of communication, not only
language but also involving art history, film and advertising, it is obvious that semiotics has much
material to explore (in Cantor 1988:353).

Semiotics, although related to structuralism, did not involve close reading of an artwork or
related group of works, but instead tried to find the codes that underpinned the work. According
to Cantor (1988:346), `[this] moves the focus of reality from the individual to the system.' Thus
the system becomes the focus of critical investigation, and the ultimate carrier of meaning, rather
than the individual work. Critics looked beyond the individual artwork to find the underlying
system. Although essentially concerned with literary texts, these latter forms of structuralism
held implications for art criticism.

STRUCTURALISM AND ART CRITICISM

Structuralism, or more particularly semiotics, encouraged critics to become `plural', with many
interests, so that they could write about, and compare, 'not only the academically sanitized'
(Cantor 1988:353) but anything from Coca-Cola to Milton or Keats. Because signs have a
multiplicity of meanings, critics could find a great variety of meanings in various cultural
products. This notion, while it ironically diminishes the role of the artist and the individual
artwork, allows greater creativity to the critic. It is this greater interdisciplinary or intertextual
nature of structuralism that, according to Cantor (1988:353), has opened up attractive new
possibilities for literary and art criticism.
Structuralist critics are seldom interested in evaluation: like the psychoanalytic critics, they see
art as a system of signs which they wish to uncover, and one system need not necessarily be
better than another. Certain structuralists, however, have suggested that a work which had a
`higher information load' (Lotman, in Selden 1989:53), that is, which was more complex and
contained more information, is a better work, certainly for the purposes of structuralist analysis.

Structuralism also questions the notion of originality. The more traditional view of an artwork as
a `child of the author's creative life' (Selden 1989:51), which expresses something essential about
the artist or author, which tells some truth, and which can communicate to the reader-viewer, is
radically questioned. Barthes (quoted in Selden 1989:51) states that writers only `mix already
existing writings ... reassemble or redeploy them; writers cannot use writing to ``express''
themselves, but only to draw upon that immense dictionary of language and culture which is
``always already written''.' Hence the statement `The author is dead!'

Structuralism has been criticised for ignoring the artist, the artwork and the reader-viewer in
favour of the system of communication. It may appear to offer a certain objectivity, but does this
at the cost of the text or artwork. It ultimately appears to privilege the critic, who can look at
anything in any way, in order to discover the underlying systems. It has indeed resulted in
extremely imaginative and creative writings from structuralists such as Barthes and Eco.

Since the mid-1970s, structuralism has been superseded by what might be referred to as post-
structuralism, as the dominant cultural theory or trend. Because post-structuralism grew out of,
and was a reaction to, structuralism, they can best be understood in relation to each other.

POST-STRUCTURALISM

Post-structuralism is not a single system, nor a unified theory as such. It is closely related to
postmodernism, and might be seen as the theoretical side of postmodern culture. It is a viewpoint
or a philosophy which developed from questioning the premises of structuralism. It might,
according to Connor (1990:736), imply certain critical procedures without stating them. He
views it as part of `the critical upheavals of the last twenty years.'

Both postmodernism and post-structuralism seem to recognise that the world is `fragmented
culturally and aesthetically, [and is] a world of subcultures ... one in which a comprehensive,
integrating cultural theory is lacking' (Cantor 1988:345). Like structuralism, post-structuralism
deals with literary theory and linguistics, but has implications for art criticism.

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Connor explains post-structuralism as a shift of emphasis from centred to decentred structures

(1990:736) or from the centres to the margins (1990:745--746). The shift from structuralism to
post-structuralism began in the late 1960s, and can be detected in the writings of Barthes, who
eventually questioned his own search for the structures underlying literature; Jacques Derrida,
who `undid' structuralist texts by applying a kind of metacriticism, claiming to show that there
were no governing structures; Jacques Lacan `with his systematic assault on the idea of a centred
and unified self' (Connor 1990:743); and Michel Foucault `with his abandonment of the idea of a
single and continuous history of mankind' (Connor 1990:743). All share a suspicion of `centred'
thought.

Post-structuralist approaches attempt to show that even so-called basic structures can be broken
down into further underlying structures, and that the unifying centres themselves can be broken
down. All that remains is a free play of relationships between signs.

It can be seen as a `mockery of structuralism ... comic and anti-heroic in its refusal to take such
claims seriously' (Selden 1989:71). It set in motion the `undoing of the structure' (Selden
1989:73). This implies that, as systems are detected and then themselves pulled apart, and as the
systems of analyses are themselves further analysed, so no final structure can any longer be
envisioned. There is no point at which the process can logically stop, there is no underlying truth,
there is no so-called master narrative that is beyond question. One is now in Fuller's (1988:213)
realm of the `shifting pattern of changing strategies and substitutes, a shuffling of semantic codes
and devices, varying ceaselessly according to audience and circumstances'.

POST-STRUCTURALISM AND ART CRITICISM

One notion that was decentred by post-structuralism was the very idea of the work, whether
visual artwork or literary text. Victor Burgin (1986:73--74), who can be taken as an example of a
post-structuralist critic, explains this shift in the idea of the artwork. It was still seen by the
structuralists as `a self-contained entity', an autonomous object, even if its meaning resided not in
itself, but in the underlying formal codes that made up all such works. For the post-structuralists,
however, at the prompting of writers like Derrida, the work is no longer seen as an `object', but
rather as a space between the object and the viewer:

a space made up of endlessly proliferating meanings which have no stable point of origin, nor of closure.
In this concept of `text', the boundaries which enclosed the `work' are dissolved; the text opens
continuously into other texts, the space of intertextuality (Burgin 1986:73).

As the notion of `work' is decentred, so too is the notion of genres. Any particular definition of
terms such as `art', `craft' or `literature' becomes problematised. Connor (1990:743) explains this:

In order to define the edges of what is `literature', for example, it is necessary to hypothesize a centring
principle which will govern all particular manifestations of the literary - `hence science-fiction/women's
romance/football chants are not literature because they do not use imaginative forms creatively to
ennoble or extend the human spirit.' This self-validating form of thought can develop into the exercise
of cultural power and exclusion, as, for example, when it involves the compacting of human history
around centring concepts like (male) Man, or (European) Civilisation, or even History itself.

Thus post-structuralism can be seen as a vital factor in the postmodernist breakdown of barriers
between art forms and genres, and between high and mass culture. It is related to some feminist
strategies which also reject such notions as `genius', `masterpiece' and conventional notions of
the aesthetic. Connor (1990:746) states that post-structuralist feminists use decentring as
subversion. They do not wish to simply take over the power positions previously held by males,
but wish to break apart the centres that held that power in place, specifically `the belief in
absolute truth, universal meaning and the serenely self-knowing individual'.

Post-structuralist views imply that meaning lies neither with the artist, viewer, critic, nor the
work itself but that it is a constantly shifting, intertextual process. One result of this thinking was
an increasing acceptance of alternative and continuously revised interpretations, which need have
little to do with the actual work and can be seen as a kind of game. Alternatively, Selden
(1989:75) refers to `contested interpretations', where each `utterance' implies further dialogue,
interference and conflict. Interpretation might be either thus enriched, or else diminished as a
pointless process with no hope of closure.

Both postmodernism and post-structuralism can be defined as an acceptance of pluralism, in

cultural manifestations and philosophically. They can be seen, somewhat negatively, as part of a
`discourse of irrationality

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to displace the discourse of rationality initiated by the Enlightenment' (Habermas in Hoestery

1991:xi). They have, more positively, been referred to as `incredulous towards metanarratives'
(Rorty 1991:84), which implies that both refuse to believe that there is some dominant truth,
some ultimate authority or universal criteria for judging anything. According to Jay (1991:100),
for the post-structuralists, as well as the postmodernists, `an untotalizing network of
supplementary differances is posited as the superior alternative to the seemingly rigid and
unyielding dichotomies of modernist differentiation'. So postmodernist and post-structuralist
thinking rejects that which is universal or homogenising, those `truths' of Western culture which
sustained `the prior order of things' (Turim 1991:179). Burgin (1986:164) refers to the sense that
the age of reason has failed, and that where no one truth is possible, we face instead a `vertigo of
interpretation'. No critical statement can now be seen as final. Thus evaluation too becomes
pointless, because any system of criteria becomes indefensible. According to Burgin (1986:198),

... what have expired are the absolute guarantees issued by over-riding metaphysical systems.
`Certainties' and 'necessities' are now seen as inescapably positional, derived from, and applied within,
complex networks of mainly local and contingent conditions.

Another implication of this decentring is that it raises doubts about the critical practice of
applying any one theory to the interpretation of an artwork. Coller (1990:744) refers to J Hillis
Miller's argument that the history of critical readings of the novel, whether these were Freudian,
romantic, symbolic, Marxist, feminist, etc, has shown a desire to discover `a single secret truth ...
an unequivocal principle of explanation that would account for everything in the novel'. He
argues that no such centring principle exists.

Even the critic him or herself may be seen, and thus doubted, as a centring principle. So all
authority is questioned. Burgin(1986:199) writes that criticism is changed from `an operation
performed by a self-possessed subject upon a discrete and distanced object' to `an act of reading,
imbricating, implicating, a divided and unstable subject in the multiple instabilities of a text
which continually opens onto other texts'.
This loss of a centre in post-structuralism and postmodernism can be seen as `tragic'. Yeats's line
`Things fall apart, the centre will not hold' is often quoted. It can, however, be seen as a
liberation from all stultifying codes. It can liberate artists, who are freed to fuse forms, break
barriers, and mix approaches, as well as critics, who can move across disciplines, drawing on
discourses from criticism, art, literature, philosophy or politics, and can mix these up. The critic
and viewer can approach the artwork in any way that pleases them, `is free to enter the text from
any direction ...' (Selden 1989:78). There is in this an element of playfulness and creativity, as
well as of irrationality.

Both post-structuralism and postmodernism might thus promote an attitude of anti-elitism, anti-
authoritarianism, acceptance of open and indeterminate discourse, in which meaning is disputed
or even denied, and an obliteration of barriers between high and low culture is effected.

DECONSTRUCTION

Post-structuralism developed into the influential and radical discourse of deconstruction under
the influence of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, in the early 1970s. An original and
provocative thinker, his works defy classification, and `are unlike anything else in modern
philosophy' (Norris 1982:18). He first used the word `deconstruction' in Of grammatology
(1977), although he was not specific as to the meaning of the term: `All sentences of the type
``deconstruction is X'' or ``deconstruction is not X'', a priori, miss the point ...' (quoted by Mapp
1990:778). His is a radical argument that, according to Selden (1989:87), puts in question the
basic metaphysical assumptions since Plato. Deconstruction as a theory or a philosophy, as well
as an attitude or a process, became extremely popular, and was taken up by American literary
critics such as Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman and J Hillis Miller. It became `the avowed
inspiration for a variety of critical practices' (Mapp 1990:782) and has had a deep influence on
literary criticism, as well as on artists and art criticism.

Deconstruction is against existing critical traditions and practices. In fact it stands against the
basic underlying notion of literary criticism `that texts have meaning and that criticism [seeks] to
know that meaning' (Norris 1982:xii). Its implications for art criticism are even more radical for,
if literary texts that employ language have no specific meaning and cannot be deciphered, how
much less can visual artworks have specific meaning or be deciphered by means of language?

Derrida began by questioning the assumptions of structuralism. He saw structuralism as

idealistic, seeking vainly for `ideal deep structures within the world ...' (Cantor 1988:357). He
did this by pointing

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out contradictions hidden in structuralist texts, such as in the writings of Levi-Strauss. He

implied by doing this that the centre of meaning is not absolute, but is itself subject to
structuralist analysis, and so on, ad infinitum. He did not `deconstruct' only structuralist texts,
however, but also other literary, critical and philosophical texts such as the writings of Saussure,
Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl and Rousseau (Mapp 1990:779). He does not reject their writings, and
certainly does not aim to set up an alternative theory, but `discovers in each a set of paradoxical
themes which opens them up to a deconstructive reading' (Norris 1982:4). He unpicks the whole
notion of meaning as something stable, and language as a reliable conveyor of meaning.

Derrida uses the term logocentrism to refer to this desire to find centre, meaning or truth that is
such an intrinsic part of Western thinking. He refers to this craving for origins, truth and
presence as `the logocentric myth' (quoted in Norris 1982:70), which is always found by
privileging one term above another. The logocentric myth might, for example, privilege the
notion of the `author', `reality', or `structure'. Derrida sees this as an illusion: `Meaning is only
ever produced within a complex play of relationships in which the final closure of meaning upon
a point of original certainty is endlessly deferred' (Burgin 1986:33).

Deconstruction can be seen as both anti-rationalist and anti-common sense. Derrida does not
accept the `common sense' notion that some texts are straightforward and can be interpreted as
such (Norris 1982:112). Paul de Man (in Norris 1982:103) states that deconstruction applies to
all texts, although he acknowledges that the reader-critic has a choice of two approaches to the
text: 'naive or deconstructionist'. Selden (1989:97) states that the deconstructivists rebel against
scholarly commonsense criticism, which claims or aims to produce consistent meanings.

Deconstruction is thus sometimes seen as a form of, or alternatively as the root of, post-
structuralism. Both find no central meaning in texts or artworks, and deny traditional concepts of
what such works are. But whereas post-structuralism is a term for a variety of attitudes and
approaches, deconstruction offers a particular approach, although it is a rather indefinable one,
often presented in complex writing styles that use `paradox, plurality of styles ...' (Norris
1982:67) and a mixture of devices. Mapp (1990:777) refers to the deconstructivists' `thorny
locution'. Derrida for example `[throws] off all the old irksome restraints of method and style'
(Norris 1982:115). He notoriously applies erasures and brackets to his own texts, crossing out
terms that he must use but simultaneously wishes to undermine.

This writing style serves to warn the reader not to accept the statements made at face value, that
they are provisional and inadequate. It makes reading a difficult process, and eschews conveying
obvious, definite or clear meanings. It can be viewed as a device to show the radical scepticism
of deconstruction towards the possibility of capturing any definite meaning via language. It
avoids the traditional objectivity of critical writings, and is, according to Mapp (1990:783) `itself
excitingly multiplex, part of an anti-totalitarian project'. Critics of Derrida, however, view his
writing style with suspicion, `a combining of stylistic exotica with apparent conceptual rigour
[which] has also done much to ease the passage for ideas which are problematical but
sufficiently cloaked in rhetorical cleverness to seem irrefutable' (Freadman & Miller 1992:120).

Derrida's approach has its roots in earlier philosophies, for example Friedrich Nietzsche, who
also produced a critique of Western philosophy. Both Nietzsche and Derrida practice a `sceptical
rigour [with] no safe resting place in method or concept' (Norris 1982:57--62). Both analyse the
dependence of philosophy on language, which to them `has bottomless relativity of meaning'. So,
according to Nietzsche, `truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions'.
Neither Nietzsche nor Derrida offers alternative logic, but `merely an open plurality of discourse
where all such priorities dissolve into the disconcerting ``free play'' of signs'.
Derrida sees texts (and by implication artworks) as just such a free play of signs. Barnes
(1988:95) points out that he defines `text' so broadly that nothing remains outside it. `There is
nothing outside of the text', so a text is not a writing or body of writings, nor an artwork or a
body of artworks, but rather a `differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to
something other than itself, to other differential traces. Thus the text overruns all the limits
assigned to it so far' (Derrida 1984:84). Derrida also refers to the way in which one text `reads'
another, or one text `loves' another (1984:147) as well as to `the jubilant multiplicity of self-
references' (1984:174). Thus a text is not a stable, unified or autonomous object, but a network of
references.

The notions of `trace' and differance are used by Derrida to explain this network of references
that is an artwork. Each sign in a text carries traces, or multiple references to other signs. For
Derrida, this substitution of one trace with another, and then with another, is an infinite process.
There is no centre, no finite meaning

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that can be uncovered to stop the process. According to Barnes (1988:96),

... trace is not a trace of some originalü... but a trace of a trace of a trace, ad infinitum ... And there was
never that original sign, e.g. the writer himself was not immediately present ... he did not know exactly
what he meant ...

So there can be no appeal to an authority, not even the author or artist, to define the meaning of
signs in a text. The meaning of the text cannot be settled. Language and meaning depend on
differance. Hereby Derrida indicates both `difference' and `deferral' (Norris 1982:32). The
meaning of a sign lies in its difference from other signs, but this meaning is always endlessly
deferred. A `fixed and present meaning' (Barnes 1988:97) is sought in vain. Selden (1989:109)
refers to differance as `inserting a gap between signifier and signified ...[which] disorganises
established knowledge'. So what is left is a play of signification, a process without end or
closure. There is not, as traditional criticism supposed, one interpretable meaning in a text, or
even a number of alternative meanings, but `infinite meanings ... moving from the immediate
conscious layer towards the unconscious ... Deconstruction is theoretically an involuntary
process because of the intrinsically fragmentary nature of the signifier' (Cantor 1988:360).
Meaning can never be mastered.

This network implies that no word or image stands on its own. The network includes each sign,
the combination of signs that make up the text, and all other texts. This denies the autonomy or
independence of any artwork, as well as the notion of originality and authenticity, and confirms
the importance of the notion of intertextuality. Intertextuality has been defined as:

a space in which there is a play of all of these associations, and moreü... everything we already know
and which the image may therefore evoke, whether by intention or not. These intertextual fields are
themselves, of course, in constant process of change ... (Burgin 1986:50).
DECONSTRUCTION AND ART CRITICISM

Deconstruction has been regarded with some excitement by many artists and critics, but because
of its anti-authoritarian nature, it is difficult to find an authoritative critic who is overtly
deconstructionist. Even within literary criticism `its impacts ... have been various and often
confusing' (Freadman & Miller 1992:137). Many critics use Derrida's concepts and style in a
piecemeal way, so it is hard to generalise about deconstructive practice. It does, however, have
implications for artists, artmaking and art writing.

Its main application to art criticism might be described as a radical decontextualisation of a work
or series of works. Such a `mis-reading', or radically new reading of works, overturns previous
interpretations to the extent that the meaning of the work shifts radically, which implies that still
more radical rereadings are possible in the future. This deconstructive strategy is seldom used
consistently by any art critic, but is applied only in certain instances. One example is the
interpretation of the work of Christo Coetzee by Herloo van Rensburg (1995:14-17), where,
rather than examine the artist's paintings for meaning, the writer interprets the events of 1975 and
1978 when the artist defaced and destroyed his own work. Van Rensburg interprets this as the
key, the focus, of the artist's oeuvre, rather than as a peripheral event. Thus he radically alters the
way in which the work may be viewed and interpreted. The British art critic Peter Fuller,
although certainly no deconstructivist, could yet be said to have deconstructed in certain cases.
His reading of Jackson Pollock as `a desperate professional painter who had nothing to say and
no way of saying it' (1983:101), rather than as an artist who greatly advanced the evolution of art
in a formalist sense, or of the Venus de Milo as `an utterly helpless woman, without arms ... a
pin-up' (1983:227), rather than as the epitome of classical beauty, both wrench the works away
from their previous contexts and change the ways they are viewed and interpreted.

Deconstruction has other, less definable, implications for art criticism. On the one hand, it
appears to devalue the artist or author of the work. It certainly grants the creator no control over
the interpretation of the work. Derrida attacks the notion that texts can `be owned, controlled,
``limited'' or appropriated in the name of some legitimate authorial source' (Norris 1982:113).
However, artists may respond to the freedom that is also implicit in deconstruction, that frees
them from having to make sense, that legitimises complexity, density, ambiguity and
uninterpretability. Deconstruction might be seen to be sympathetic to the actual processes of
creativity and artmaking, which are often personal, variable, ambiguous and indefinable,
although it is certainly not the only theory that is open to these aspects of art making.

It also has implications for the reader or viewer. In a sense it empowers the viewer: he or she is
encouraged to discover personal responses and associations within the play of references of an
artwork, and to be sceptical of all `experts', whether these are artists or

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critics. The viewer has a responsibility and is no longer, according to Burgin (1986:33), in the
comfortable position of the consumer of meaning, but is, precariously, the producer of meaning.
He or she is a vital part of all processes of communication and signification, including the visual
arts, and has a role that is as creative as that of the artist. Both can be part of the `jubilant
multiplicity of self-references' (Derrida 1984:174). This is a view of deconstruction as
celebration and liberation.

Deconstruction denies any defensible and universal methods or theories by which a critic may
approach artworks, except, of course, the deconstructive `method'. Derrida (1984:97) wrote
`Every method is a fiction.' All methods are subject to suspicion, so deconstruction can be seen
to devalue criticism and its methods. For example De Man (in Selden 1989:93) stated that
`criticism/reading is always necessarily ``misreading''...' Just as a text can be deconstructed and
found never to finally render up its meaning, so too can critical texts be deconstructed.

In a sense deconstruction is against interpretation. The artwork itself has a force far greater than
its meaning, and the critic `tries to enclose it' (Bloom 1984:vii) by interpretation. This view is
similar to that of the formalist-modernist critics and, like them, deconstructive `interpretations'
often avoid any kind of traditional interpretation. `The text or intertext is in constant flux'
(Barnes 1988:98), and interpretation becomes impossible when a work is seen to have no one
meaning that can be privileged above any other, whether by virtue of tradition, culture or a
critic's authority. The critic can no longer play the part of the `expert' who `puts an end to doubt
concerning a work's meaning, and therefore its worth [and offers] the reassuring security of an
explanation and an evaluation ...' (Burgin 1986:33).

On the other hand, deconstruction can be seen to liberate the activity of interpretation. Derrida
(in Cantor 1988:362) writes of `the necessity of interminable analysis' in the perpetual
uncovering and overturning of meaning. Derrida thus offers unlimited horizons for criticism, and
`an open-ended free play of style and speculative thought, untrammelled by ``rules'' of any
kind, ... [and] a freedom to play between ``creative'' and ``critical'' writing' (Norris 1982:91).
This view proposes that artist, author, critic and philosopher are essentially engaged in similar
activities. Derrida rejects any distinction between philosophy, criticism and literature, because he
sees all of them as products of rhetorical devices (Norris 1988:7). They are thus all artistic
constructs, made up of devices used to persuade a reader of the validity of a fictional world.

So `... critics are no more ``parasites'' than the texts they interpret, since both inhabit a host-text
of pre-existent meanings' (Norris 1982:93). Critical writings therefore are no longer to be viewed
as secondary to, and feeding off, the original artwork, but are as original, creative and interesting
as the `artwork', just as Derrida on Rousseau is as interesting as Rousseau himself. Thus `the
critic is effectively absolved of all responsibility for limiting the play of his own imagination'
(Norris 1982:96). Deconstruction, seen this way, obliterates the line between art and
interpretation.

Evaluation becomes indefensible and virtually impossible. If meaning or intention cannot be

firmly discovered, then criteria for evaluation are particularly problematic. Furthermore, De Man
(in Mapp 1990:777) points out that a deconstructive reading does not evaluate a text either
positively or negatively, but really uses that text to break down the tradition of interpretation
itself:

Deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction ... It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of
the word analysis, which etymologically means `to undo' - a virtual synonym for `to de-construct'. The
deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion, but by the careful
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.

Deconstruction can be seen as anti-rationalist, sceptical, anti-common sense, or even anti-

humanist or anti-scientific. It has been called nihilist because of its `ability to devalue all values'
(Bloom 1984:226). Norris (1982:xi) refers to its critics, who see it as `an affront to every normal
and comfortable habit of thought.' It can be seen as unnecessarily complicated, a mystification of
texts. However, the most logical arguments against deconstruction are those against scepticism in
general: if everything is subjected to doubt and mistrust, then deconstruction itself can be
subjected to the same. If no text has any determinate meaning, then how can deconstruction have
any such meaning? The activity of deconstruction is thus meaningless.

Freadman and Miller (1992) point out that post-structuralism and its more radical form,
deconstruction, can be refuted on many of their claims: the denial of the

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referential power of texts; the denial of the individual and `the adoption of ``decentred'' models
of the self' (1992:12); the denial of the originary authority of the author; the denial of
determinate meaning and the notion of the text or work as embodying an infinite plurality of
meaning. All these can be subjected to counter-arguments.

On the other hand, deconstruction is seen by many as a liberation from traditional constraints of
Western thinking, and as an exciting challenge in its resistance to closure, its opening up of new
viewpoints and its potential creativity. Whichever view one holds, it is a key to a prevailing
attitude in the postmodern era, that acknowledges fragmentation and pluralism, and is part of a
post-structuralist move away from a belief in universal or global values.