Derrida, deconstruction and postmodernism

Structuralism has its difficulties of course. In fact, it is probably correct to claim, as Edith Kurzweil does in The Age of Structuralism (1980), that the age of structuralism is over. The reasons for its decline may have as much to do with intellectual fashion as with its intellectual problems, but for present purposes it is instructive to explore some of these problems.

First, and in some ways least interestingly, no one has been successful in actually deriving a convincing structure of axioms and rules of transformation. Lévi-Strauss's universal system of binary opposites (light/dark, good/ bad, and so on), after a promising start, ran into innumerable difficulties which could only be resolved by retreating to a degree of complexity that removed most of its theoretical power. And Lévi-Strauss himself, despite an abiding admiration for the pioneering nature of Propp's work on fairy tales, revealed considerable weaknesses in his treatment of the same. In short, in none of the spheres over which structuralist theorists have ranged has anything like a 'grammar' emerged.

Second, it will have been clear, even from this brief exposition, that the move from structural linguistics through anthropology to a structuralist theory of literature and finally art is questionable. To treat music, for instance, as comparable to a natural language is mistaken, as we saw in Chapter 5. But even if we accept the legitimacy of this extension, the resulting view seems to encounter precisely the same objection as we found in philosophical aesthetics. That is, we end up with something called the function of poetic language, the role of literature. These are ways of talking which seem just as subject to sociological objection as the pursuit of a Platonic definition of art or poetry or literature.

But third and most importantly, the theories that emerge from structural- ism appear to contradict its originating thought. This is the line of objection developed by the French literary theorist Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), perhaps the major influence on post-structuralist thought. Derrida's corpus of writing is very large, hard to understand, still harder to generalize about and impossible to summarize. Here I shall elaborate his criticisms of structuralism as they appear in the essays 'Force and Signification' and 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences', both of which appear in the collection of essays entitled Writing and Difference (Derrida 1990).

Derrida thinks that structuralism arises from and reflects an important 'rupture' in the history of human thought, a final break with Platonism of the sort some people have detected in philosophical aesthetics. A Platonist view of language thinks of words and signs as substitutes for the things they signify, and further thinks that these transcendental objects are the fixed centre on which structures of thought and language are built. But the crucial rupture in the history of thought consisted in a recognition that:

the substitute does not substitute for anything which has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no centre . . . that [the centre] was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign- substitutions come into play. This was . . . the moment when in the absence of a centre or origin everything becomes discourse. (Derrida 1990: 280)

What Derrida is saying here is that whereas most theorists have thought of human language and the external world as two distinct entities related by correspondence, structuralism sees that the underlying reality is not some fixed world, but rather the structure of thought and language itself. It is upon this recognition that the whole of structuralism rests, but according to Derrida its proponents (in these two essays he refers chiefly to Lévi-Strauss and the literary critic Jean Rousset) do not pursue the basic insight of structuralism to its logical conclusion. 'Structuralism', he says, 'lives within and on the difference between its promise and its practice' (ibid. p. 27). Structuralism denies the independent existence of the structures upon which it rests. To this extent it treats 'parole' (the utterance) as basic and has no place for reified or concretized Platonic forms. Yet instead of recognizing that if every- thing has become discourse, a series of utterances, 'structure' is itself a metaphor, structuralists continue to treat 'structure' as a sign in the Platonic fashion, as an existing entity upon which theories may be built. Thus despite pretensions and appearances of being a radical alternative to Western philosophy, 'modern structuralism [is] a tributary of the most purely traditional stream of Western philosophy, which, above and beyond its anti-Platonism, leads from Husserl back to Plato' (Derrida 1990: 27).

For as long as the metaphorical sense of the notion of structure is not acknowledged as such, that is to say interrogated and even destroyed as concerns its figurative quality . . . one runs the risk through a kind of sliding as unnoticed as it is efficacious, of confusing meaning with . . . its model. One runs the risk of being interested in the figure itself to the detriment of the play going on within it.

This notion of 'play' is important in Derrida, but before looking at it further we should note that Derrida acknowledges the extreme difficulty of recognizing fully the implications of the 'rupture'. To express, or even merely to signal, our abandonment of traditional ways of thinking requires us to use the language of tradition, and hence to run the risk of being recaptured by it. Derrida thinks this is what has happened to the structuralists as well as the literary and art critics who have pursued structuralist methods.

[S]tructure, the framework of construction, morphological correlation becomes in fact and despite his theoretical intention the critic's sole preoccupation . . . no longer a method within the ordo cognoscendi, [the realm of knowing] no longer a relationship in the ordo essendi, [the realm of being] but the very being of the work.

It is arguable that this difficulty is of Derrida's own making and that it cannot in fact be overcome, because what he is demanding is that structuralists, and philosophers quite generally, speak in a wholly new language, when of course there cannot be any such thing. We could only invent a new language by translating terms and concepts we already employ. A less flatly contradictory interpretation is that Derrida does not demand a completely new language, but only that we use language in a different way, 'knowingly', which is to say, conscious of its limitations. In other words, there is a way out of the linguistic 'trap' if we stop trying to devise replacements for old theories and instead understand them in a different way.

[W]hat I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy . . . but continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. This alternative way of reading is to be contrasted with the older way of thinking, back into which structuralism slides. It is here that the notion of 'play' becomes important.

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play . . . the other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism.

Faced with a work or a text or a myth or a story, then, we cannot hope to detect within it something which will determine for us the correct interpretation of it. We can only 'play' upon it, and a good deal of Derrida's later work consists precisely in 'play' of this sort, as does the work of critics inspired by similar thoughts. Such a prospect, he thinks, could be greeted negatively. Having lost all prospect of there existing a thought-determining centre or origin we may incline to the 'saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play'. Or we might find instead a cause for

the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation.

Derrida's conception of free interpretation has been taken up with enthusiasm by some students of literature, notably the American critics Hillis Miller and Paul de Man, though the same free interpretation could as easily be applied to paintings, drama or music. This sort of interpretation has come to be known as 'deconstruction', the sustained unravelling of 'imposed' structures. Literary criticism of this sort, as inspired by Derrida, seems to have capitalized on ideas arising from a number of different but contemporaneous sources. Derrida's distinction between two types of interpretation, for instance, bears a close similarity to Roland Barthes's distinction between lisible (readerly) and scriptible (writerly) texts. In the former, the reader is expected to be passive, to 'receive' a reading of the text and hence absorb an established view of the world. In the latter, the writer and the text itself (for it is not just a matter of intention but of style) acknowledges its malleability and involves the reader's interpretation as part of the creation of the work. Barthes seems to think that the most we can hope for from 'readerly' texts is pleasure, whereas from 'writerly' texts, which invite our active participation, we can expect something much more exhilarating - jouissance - a term deployed by the Marxist/post-structuralist theorist Lacan - something similar to Derrida's 'joyous affirmation of play'.

The point to be stressed in the thought of both thinkers is that a proper understanding of structuralism leads to a liberation from the very idea of structure itself. It leads to a certain sort of freedom, the freedom of indefinitely many 'readings'. These are to be teased out from the work in a host of different ways, and much of Derrida's later writing consists precisely in doing this (as does Hillis Miller's). The idea that must be abandoned is that of natural, innate or proper meaning, and interpretation must recognize that it moves in a world without fault, without truth, without origin.

But if this liberation from the idea of structure is complete, no interpretation can be wrong. (This is one reason that the influential German philosopher Habermas thinks the thoughts of Derrida, and Foucault, to be irrationalist.) Moreover, no distinction or discrimination can be required of us, and this includes the distinction between art and non-art and the discrimination between the aesthetically valuable and the aesthetically valueless. Derrida appears to recognize and to accept this implication when he anticipates an objection from Rousset.

Does not one thus run the risk of identifying the work with original writing in general? Of dissolving the notion of art and the value of 'beauty' by which literature is currently distinguished from the letter in general? But perhaps by removing the specificity of beauty from aesthetic values, beauty is, on the contrary, liberated? Is there a specificity of beauty, and would beauty gain from this effort?

It is fairly clear what Derrida takes the answer to these rhetorical questions to be - there is no one thing that is aesthetic beauty, and once we see this we are freed to discover beauty everywhere and anywhere, not just in those things conventionally accepted as 'works of art'. This freedom is the mark of 'postmodernism'. While the modernist (at least on some uses of the term) strives to find 'the' right proportions and harmonies, the postmodernist abandons any such attempt as futile, and thus opens up a world liberated from conventional and culturally relative constraints.

The terminology is confusing here since Derrida's conclusion seems to be deeply in accord with the art of the readymade discussed in Chapter 10 under the general heading 'modern' art. But the modernism to which Derrida's thought is 'post' is not the art of the avant-garde in general, but that movement in early twentieth-century architecture that thought of itself as penetrating the essentials of pure form. In fact, the expression 'postmodernism' makes its first appearance in architecture and is perhaps most easily understood in that context, since thereafter it assumed multiple meanings (one commentator having identified no fewer than fourteen!).

In the present context, 'postmodernism' is to be understood in the context of Derrida's account of structuralism and its aftermath, and we may reason- ably raise questions about the cost of accepting this way of thinking. As with consistent Marxism, it seems to involve us in the abandonment of art theory altogether. Indeed, worse than this. At least Marxism points us in the direction of an alternative type of inquiry, namely the socio-historical, whereas for Derridian studies everything, and hence anything, goes. Thus, should literary critics choose to interpret the railway timetable, or art critics 'explore' the wrapping from a takeaway hamburger, there is nothing to be said about the fitness or unfitness of the objects of their attention. We can ask only whether joyful affirmation in a system of signs is possible, whether the result is 'jouissance'.

It is open to Derrida, Barthes and those who think in this way to accept this conclusion and regard it as an honest recognition of the wholly unconstrained or liberated condition in which critics find themselves. But there are at least two further points to be made. First, in the work of the deconstructionists there is a measure of the same tension between promise and practice which they allege is to be found in structuralism. Although it is impossible to classify Derrida as a philosopher, critic or social theorist because he refuses, on theoretical grounds, to work within these traditional distinctions, he does nevertheless discuss almost exclusively the work of philosophers, critics and anthropologists. He does not discuss the scribbles of race-track punters or the instructions on packages of medicine (though Barthes does examine 'literary' works such as these). In other words, distinctions are being made within the sphere of 'the letter in general', even if these distinctions are not the most familiar and are treated with a greater degree of flexibility than the study of literature has traditionally done.

Second, it is hard to see how this could conceivably be avoided. Indeed, a certain measure of Platonic realism seems to lurk in Derrida's thought itself and to be for this reason inescapable. It seems tempting to express his view by saying, for instance, that those critics who persist in looking for a centre or an origin do not acknowledge the factof their condition, that their criticism is really free. To speak in this way, however, is to reintroduce the idea of an independent reality against which understanding and interpretation are to be tested.

What exactly is wrong with speaking in this way? Some version of the Marxist idea of 'false-consciousness' runs through nearly all of the critical attacks on philosophical aesthetics we have been considering. Essentialism, unwarranted generalization, Platonism or the failure to recognize the mind- dependent structures upon which systems of meanings depend, the trans- formation of 'structure' itself into a centre or origin - the error in each of these philosophies is said to lie in the assumption that there is a 'given' which can determine our understanding for us, whereas, according to the deconstructionist, the interpretative mind is free to 'play'. However, there must be a serious doubt whether the thrust of this criticism can be sustained. As I have suggested, some kind of Platonic realism seems inescapable if we are to speak of this assumption as an error, for 'error' suggests that these philosophies misrepresent how things really are. But suppose traditional metaphysics is erroneous in this regard. Even so, if the motivation behind deconstruction and its forerunners is to free critical interpretation from the imaginary metaphysical constraints, another line of thought deploying a different conception of constraint can be seen to open up.