Poststructuralism
The Essence of
Poststructuralism
The name says
everything and nothing. It comes after structuralism; it is a reaction against
structuralism. But, in its critique of structuralism, it was not conducting a
postmortem. Structuralist influence continued to be very much alive and
kicking. It was also a very complex phenomenon, which cannot be explained just
by its relationship to structuralism. It must also be stressed that
poststructuralism and deconstruction theory are parts of a continuum and that
it is mainly for the sake of clarity that they have been allotted separate
sections. Many of the theorists too are relevant, not only to poststructuralism
and deconstruction theory, but also to psychoanalysis and feminism. Names such
as Jacques Lacan, Paul de Man, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva and others will
recur. However, examining what poststructuralism found to be wrong with
structuralism is as good a place to start as any. The great guru of the
structuralists, Saussure,was about to be dethroned, because a signifier was no
longer perceived as signifying anything any more. Or not quite as Saussure envisaged
it, at least.
With every
‘sign’, Saussure had posited, ‘signifier’ and
‘signified’ were two sides of the same coin. Although they were in an
arbitrary relationship, they stuck together through thick and thin. The word
‘dog’ and that furry creature there wagging its tail were permanently wed (at least,
in the English language they were).Then poststructuralism came along and threw
doubt on this whole cosy little arrangement. For them a ‘sign’ is a very
temporary coming together of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’: a one-night stand. The
very dictionary itself, the fount of all certainty about language, proves the
point. When you seek the meaning of a word in a dictionary you are indefinitely
deferred. Look up that word ‘dog’ and you find ‘a common four-legged animal,
especially any of the many varieties kept by humans…’ etc. Look up ‘animal’ and
you find ‘a living creature, not a plant.’ Look up ‘living creature’… and so on
ad infinitum. For poststructuralists, signifiers form complex patterns of
meaning with other signifiers and their meanings can never be pinned down. Many
of these ideas are expounded in full by Jacques Derrida but, as he is closely
associated with the concept of ‘deconstruction’, his ideas will be examined in
that section.
Saussure’s
concepts of ‘parole’ (language as utterance) and ‘langue’ (language competence)
were also under attack by the poststructuralists. Structuralists were
interested primarily in ‘langue’, the deep structure which makes communication
and meaning possible. But poststructuralists saw ‘langue’ as a kind of myth.
Language does not have an impersonal structure underlying utterances. It is
always and only an articulated system, which interacts with other systems of
meaning and with human social existence. This concept of language
poststructuralists prefer to call ‘discourse’.
According to
poststructuralists everything is discourse. Objective reporting of things and
events in language is simply impossible. All language, meaning everything we can
potentially say, pre-exists our utilisation of it. Subject and object cannot be
sharply distinguished. This not only applies to our use of language but to all
systems of knowledge, including science. New knowledge is attained when there
is a jump from one accepted form of discourse to a completely new one, a
paradigm-shift.
This blurring of
the distinctions between subject and object also throws the whole notion of
personal identity into doubt. When I use the pronoun ‘I’ or refer to myself as
‘me’, these are also signifiers which are unstable. It implies that ‘I’ can
never be fully present to ‘you’, and consequently ‘you’ can never be fully
present to ‘me’. The notion of a stable, unified self is a fiction. Another
interesting aspect of this is that, according to poststructuralists, when we
speak we have a greater sense of being at one with the ‘I’ who speaks, than we
do, when writing, with the ‘I’ who writes. Writing is second-hand, at one
remove from consciousness. It is alienated from the self. This is why the
identity of the ‘I’ in writing is always suspect. However, one should be
cautious of granting this belief universal validity, as there are people who
claim to be more at one with their self when writing than when speaking.
Roland Barthes
(1915–1980)
A central tenet
of Barthes’ thought is that all forms of communication and representation are
conventional. He despises the writer who deludes him/herself and his or her readers
into thinking that language can be a transparent medium, through which it is
possible to transmit clear unambiguous ideas or images of reality. A writer
should be honest about the artificiality of what he or she is doing.
Something which
characterises much poststructuralist thought is the occurrence of infinite
regress or doubt. In Elements of Semiology (1967), Barthes expresses the
belief that structuralism can be applied to all sign systems. However, he
thinks that, by the same token, structuralism can also be subjected to a
structural analysis, and indeed to other modes of analysis. Following upon this
he cannot avoid the conclusion that metalanguages (processes of thought that
reflect on other modes of thought or processes) can be subject themselves to
analysis by other metalanguages ad infinitum. All forms of thought are by this
token, therefore, fictions. No ultimate truth is ever discernible.
The most famous
of Barthes’ works is, undoubtedly, The Death of the Author (1968). In
this essay, he rejects the view that an author is the originator of his text
and the sole authority for its valid interpretation. A work in no way and on no
level reflects an author’s intentions concerning the work. The author is
nothing more than the location where a verbal event takes place. The reader can
therefore approach the text from any direction whatsoever, and can interpret
the text (the ‘signifier’) without respecting any intended meaning (the
‘signified’).
In The
Pleasure of the Text (1975), Barthes pursues this self-indulgence on the
part of the reader even further. For him, there are two kinds of pleasure to be
gained in reading a text. The first is simple ‘pleasure’. We feel this when we
perceive something more than the simple and obvious meaning of what we read. We
make an association, draw an inference, recall an image etc. This disrupts the
linear flow of the text. Something, in a sense unjustified, is brought into
association with the basic meanings of a text. We gain pleasure also from the
rhythm of the narrative and from allowing our attention to wander. All this is
acceptable and non-provocative in the context of normal cultural pursuits.
Barthes’ second
type of pleasure is what must appear to be an odd interpretation of the concept
for most people. For many it is difficult to identify it as a kind of pleasure at
all. The word he uses for it is jouissance, which means ‘pleasure’ in
French, but which is usually translated as ‘bliss’, as he clearly envisages a
stronger, virtually orgasmic form of pleasure. For Barthes, it is clearly
something akin to the thrill of revolutionary feelings or actions. A text which
provides a sense of ‘bliss’ ‘unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural,
psychological assumptions’. It is the thrill of discovering the new, the
dangerous, that which threatens chaos, anarchy. If the reader is not receptive
to such an experience, he or she will feel only boredom but surrendering to it
will bring the sense of ‘bliss’. It seems a little like the effect which Franz
Kafka required of a good book: that of an ice-axe breaking the frozen sea of
the mind.
One of Barthes’
most notorious books, which many consider to be his most impressive, is the
oddly named S/Z (1970). In this work he starts with a thorough critique
of structuralist attempts to trace common basic structures in all stories. He
is more interested in what makes them different than what they have common.
Every text refers back, in different ways, to all other texts that have ever been
written. For Barthes, there are two types of text: that which allows the reader
only to comprehend in a predetermined way and that which makes the reader into
the producer of his or her own meaning. The first type of text he calls
‘readerly’ (lisible) and the other ‘writerly’ (scriptible). It is
clear that Barthes prefers the second kind: ‘this ideal text is a galaxy of
signifiers, not a structure of signifieds.’ It is possible for a reader to
apply an infinite number of interpretations to such a text. None of them needs
to be compatible nor part of an overall unity.
Barthes
demonstrates his approach to actual texts by breaking down a novella by Honoré
de Balzac (Sarrasine) according to specific codes. He first divides the
story into a random number of reading units (581 ‘lexias’). Each of them is
then subjected to analysis according to five codes:
1. Hermeneutic
(relating to the enigma or mystery in the story).
2. Semic
(relating to associations evoked).
3. Symbolic
(relating to polarities and antitheses in the story).
4. Proairetic
(relating to basic action and behaviour).
5. Cultural
(relating to commonly shared cultural knowledge between text and reader).
The Balzac story
is commonly regarded as a realist work and Barthes, in Terry Eagleton’s words, ‘drastically
rewrites and reorganizes it out of all conventional recognition’. Sarrasine thereby
becomes what Barthes terms a ‘limit text’ for literary realism. His analysis
reveals the limits of the realist mode of writing.
Michel Foucault
(1926–1984)
The post that
Michel Foucault held at the Collège de France, Paris, at the time of his death,
aptly sums up his unique
specialist field: ‘Professor of the History of Systems of Thought’. He can
justifiably be described as poststructuralist in one important sense. The
structuralists used linguistics as their
model of analysis but Foucault considered this inadequate and focused instead
on the history of social and political systems and discourses. Because of this,
he has been very influential in the field of literary history. His concept of
‘discourse’ needs some clarification.
Foucault’s use
of the term ‘discourse’ is closely related to his concept of power. The power
of the human sciences (eg psychology, economics etc) derives from their claims to
be knowledge. They expect respect for their claims and thereby exert power and
influence. Practitioners in these fields set themselves up as experts and it is
through their claimed expertise that power is exerted. For Foucault, a discourse
is a loose structure of interconnected assumptions which makes knowledge
possible. He expounded this idea most clearly in his work The Archaeology of
Knowledge (1972), in which he asserted that discourse can be defined as a
large group of statements belonging to a single system of formation, what he
calls a ‘discursive formation’. He cites the examples of ‘clinical discourse, economic
discourse, the discourse of natural history, psychiatric discourse’. One of the
main reasons why knowledge can be a form of power is that it is a method of
defining and categorising other people. It leads eventually to disciplining
those who do not conform or, in the case of psychiatry, those who are defined
as unsocial or criminal. It also leads to surveillance, what Foucault calls ‘panopticism’.
This is realised, for example, in the form of policing and the setting up
guards in prisons to observe every move of the inmates. Of course, when
considering the latter part of the twentieth century, one might want to add the
advent of widespread CCTV surveillance.
Foucault was
greatly influenced by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and his
concept of power. Nietzsche argued that all forms of knowledge are expressions
of the ‘Will to Power’. On this assumption it is not possible to assume the
existence of absolute truths or any kind of objective knowledge. An idea or
theory is only ‘true’ if it accords with notions of truth held by the prevailing
authorities of the day, whether intellectual or political. For Foucault, what
it is possible for an author to say changes from one period to another. What is
considered normal or rational in any given period is confirmed by rules, tacit
or otherwise. Those who do not abide by the rules are excluded from the
prevailing discourse, and are either suppressed or condemned as mad. The
education system is also important in institutionalising these rules and inculcating them into the minds of
new generations.
Foucault points
out that different forms of knowledge have arisen in different historical
periods and been replaced eventually by new systems of thought. For him, history
is such a series of disconnected discursive practices. Specifically he was
interested in the fields of psychiatry, medicine, sex and crime. It must be
stressed that the rules governing such discourses are not consciously employed.
We can understand the bodies of discourse of earlier eras only because we are
governed by different discourses and are remote from that era. As we view past discourses
through our own unconscious discourses, we can never possess an objective
knowledge of history.
The work of
Foucault which deals most explicitly with writing and authorship is the essay What
is an Author? (1969). In this essay, he recognises the importance of Barthes’
essay The Death of the Author but views the question of authorship as
being more complex. However, the idea of an ideal society in which literature
could circulate anonymously appeals to him greatly. It would seem that, for
Foucault, the aim of writing is not to express the self or to fix a meaning but
to create an individual object behind which the writer can efface him or
herself: ‘Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules
and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt
the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a
question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly
disappears.’
In one sense,
Foucault does consider the author to be dead, but this death is one in which
the author is complicit. The author of fiction especially attempts to deny his
or her presence (it would seem that Foucault is thinking of realist fiction in
particular): ‘Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and
what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular
individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more
than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in
the game of writing.’
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