Understanding Deconstruction Through DERRIDA’S
“STRUCTURE, SIGN AND PLAY IN THE DISCOURSE OF HUMAN SCIENCES.”
Derrida, the noted philosopher and
theorist. Rooted in Heidegger’s theory of Deconstruction, ‘deconstruction’
involves simultaneous affirmation and undoing. In 1967, Derrida said: “To
‘deconstruct’ philosophy, thus, would be to think—in the most faithful,
interior way—the structured genealogy of philosophy’s concepts, but at the same
time to determine—from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnamable by
philosophy—what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making
itself into a history by means of this…motivated repression.”
In his essay, ‘STRUCTURE, SIGN AND PLAY IN THE DISCOURSE OF
HUMAN SCIENCES’, Derrida enunciates what he owes to structuralism and his
points of divergence from it. Any attempt to undo a particular concept is more
likely to be caught in the terms upon which the concept depends. According to
Derrida, the meaning of sign is always detached, always without any anchor – a
void between the subject and what he wants to express. While Saussure considers
language to be a closed system, it is an open system for Derrida. As Das and
Mohanty opines, “a center diminishes the structurality of structure by posting
an objective reality.”
Derrida deduced that each sign performs two functions:
‘differing’ and ‘deferring’. While one is spatial, the other is temporal.
Coining the term ‘sous rature’ to express “the inadequacy of the sign”, Jacques
Derrida brings forth the notion that every sign is written under erasure.
Aiming to liberate language from the age-old concept, he said that there are
two interpretations of ‘interpretation’, ‘structure’, ‘sign’ and ‘free play’:
“…one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an
origin, which is free from free play and the order of the sign… The other,
which is no longer turned towards the origin, affirms free play.”
Thus an author can never express his feeling accurate and
exact. He must always mean something different, something more than what he had
desired. In the words of John Sturrock, “The meanings that are read…may or may
not coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested
it with.” Presented as a symposium on
Structuralism at the John Hopkins University, Jacques Derrida concludes this
essay with the belief that we would gradually progress towards an
“interpretation of interpretation” where one would no longer be “turned towards
the origin.”
Deconstructing Derrida: Review of "Structure, Sign and Discourse
in the Human Sciences"
INTRODUCTION
The first impulse a reader is likely to have upon starting
to read chapter 10 is to close the book in dismay and disgust. The sentences
appear to become increasingly entangled, to lead nowhere, and ultimately to add
up to nothing. However, Derrida’s spectacular success in the academic world
requires an explanation. A philosophic detection of Derrida’s text must assume
that words have meaning and that he has a purpose in mind, as much as he
attempts to camouflage it. (My own comments are presented as questions or are
in parenthesis.)
Derrida sets up the scene for this text right away in the
quote from Montaigne: “We need to interpret interpretations more than to
interpret things” (278). His focus is directed inward, at the workings of our
minds, away from the objects our minds are supposed to interpret. The need for
an interpretation of interpretation implies a paradox, because the “higher”
interpretation also needs to be interpreted by an even “higher” interpretation
that also needs to be interpreted, and so on to infinity. The quote already
prepares the reader for a self-conscious, torturously abstract reading.
DECONSTRUCTING STRUCTURE AND SIGN TO MAKE ROOM FOR PLAY
Derrida begins his text with a reference to a recent event
in the history of the concept of structure, but immediately retreats to
question the use of the word “event.” He is concerned that the word “event” is
too loaded with meaning. Why is this a problem? Because the function of
thinking about structure is to reduce the notion of events. Why is it so?
Because thinking about structure must be abstract and exclude concretes such as
events. Still, Derrida wants to report on something that happened, which is
relevant to the concept of structure, so he allows the event to be admitted
into the discussion, provided it is enclosed in quotation marks, as a word and
not an actual event. The event is now identified as that of “rupture” and
“redoubling.” Of what? The reader will not find out until the end of the essay:
“The appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes
about--and this is the very condition of its structural specificity--by a
rupture with its past, its origin, and its cause” (290). Then this is what has
recently happened in the history of the concept of structure: a nascent
structure is struggling to be born out of the old one, and it collides with the
old structure--its origin and cause. The reader, however, is still in the
beginning of the essay and has no clue what the rupture is about.
Back in the beginning of the essay, Derrida proceeds to talk
about the center of a structure, which controls the structure by orienting and
organizing it. Derrida admits that an unorganized structure is conceivable
and that a structure without a center is unthinkable, but he contends that the
center delimits and diminishes the possible play within the structure. Play,
then, is whatever goes against the organization and coherence of the structure.
Derrida now points out the paradox that the center of the structure must be
both inside and outside the structure. It must be a part of the structure, but
also independent of it, in order to control it. Derrida appears to delight in
refuting the Law of Identity. He exclaims that since the center is both inside
and outside the structure, “the center is not the center” (279). Nevertheless,
he continues to write about the center, confident that it can exist and
function while not being itself. So much for Aristotle in Derrida’s esteem.
Next Derrida surveys the entire history of the concept of
structure, up to the recent, still-mysterious, rupture, as a series of
substituting one center for another. Never was there a structure without a
center, full of nothing but play. What types of centers were there so far?
Derrida names a few: essence, existence, substance, subject, consciousness,
God, man. The structure, then, is not just any structure, but a structure of
concepts, that is, philosophy, with one central concept that controls it.
According to Derrida, the event of the rupture occurred when there was a
disruption in the series of substituting one center for another. (In plain English,
there was a disruption in the process of changing the central concept of the
prevalent philosophy.) This disruption occurred when the very idea of the
structurality of the structure became the subject of somebody’s thought.
(Somebody, probably a philosopher, was rethinking the very notion of the center
and then there was no new center to substitute the old one.) However, according
to Derrida, a center cannot substitute itself, it cannot be repeated. The old
center could not stay and there was no new one. Then, for the first time in the
history of structure, “it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no
center.” Instead, “an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play”
(280). In the absence of a center, play finally had its chance. What does play
consist of? Derrida describes how, once there was no center, language invaded
the scene and everything became discourse. (Instead of a structure of concepts,
philosophy, there was only a collection of signs, language.) The signified
became indistinguishable from the signifier, and the play became “a play of
signification.” Signs, that is, words, could have any meaning, in a boundless,
infinite play.
Derrida stops
short of embracing Nihilism.
In a half-hearted admission of historical events, Derrida
points out several individuals who contributed to the historical elimination of
the center (who must have been the ones to rethink the notion of the center.)
Nietzsche’s critique of the concepts of “being” and “truth”; Freud’s critique
of self-presence, consciousness, self-identity, and the subject himself; and
finally, Heidegger’s radical destruction of metaphysics. Still, Derrida stops
short of embracing Nihilism. He admits that it is impossible to destroy a
concept without using it. It is impossible to pronounce a proposition without
using the form, the logic, and the postulations of what it attempts to contest.
He points out that signs must signify something. Once the signified is
eliminated, the very notion of signs must be rejected as well. The endless,
boundless play is over.
Why is Derrida concerned about saving the distinction
between the sign and what it signifies? Because “we cannot do without the
concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without
also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity” (281).
Like Prometheus, who was not allowed to die so that the eagle could keep eating
his liver, the sign has to be kept in existence in order to keep being
critiqued. The ugly face of Deconstruction finally shows itself. Derrida is
characteristically blunt about the paradox that the metaphysical reduction of
the sign needs what it is reducing. He goes further to say that Nietzsche,
Freud, and Heidegger could destroy each other only because they worked within
an inherited system of metaphysics. They inherited enough of what to destroy.
INCEST, MYTH, AND
MUSIC IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE HUMAN SCIENCES
At this point, Derrida asks: “What is the relevance of this
formal scheme when we turn to what are called the ‘human sciences’”? (282)
(Indeed, how can philosophy and language be relevant to the human sciences once
they are deconstructed?) Derrida brings up ethnology as the human science that
can benefit from his discussion in part one. He draws out a parallel between
the history of ethnology and the history of the concept of structure. Ethnology
emerged as a science when European culture lost its ethnocentric notion of
itself--when the central idea in Western culture, ethnocentrism, lost its
control over Western culture. The critique of European ethnocentrism coincided
with the destruction of the inherited metaphysics by Nietzsche, Freud, and
Heidegger. Ethnology is caught up in a similar paradox as the metaphysics of
deconstruction. It depends on that which it seeks to destroy. It originated in
Europe and uses European concepts, but it attempts to destroy the notion of
European ethnocentrism. There is no escaping the paradox: “The ethnologist
accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment
when he denounces them” (282). This deterministic conclusion should be
sufficient to invalidate ethnology as a science, but Derrida defies this
paradox and continues to write about ethnology.
At this point Derrida brings up the opposition between
nature and culture, which is an ancient philosophical issue. He uses the
ethnological writings of Claude Levi-Strauss as an example of the study of this
opposition. Levi-Strauss discovered a scandalous paradox inherent in the
nature/culture opposition. The taboo on incest, as Levi-Strauss observed, was
both natural and cultural: It was a universal taboo, not particular to a
specific culture, but still a part of each culture. The problem, obviously, is
not with the taboo on incest, but with Levi-Strauss’s interpretation of its
universality as “natural.” As Will Thomas observed in
his essay , the natural and the universal are not
synonymous. Still, Derrida uses this “paradox” in order to commend Levi-Strauss
for continuing to use the nature/culture opposition in his ethnological studies
while criticizing its inherent paradox. This is an example of deconstruction,
which must continue to use what it is deconstructing. The “scandal” of this
paradox is like a storm in a teacup, but it is sufficient for Derrida to
require that the nature/culture opposition be questioned. Derrida proceeds to
claim that once the opposition between nature and culture is questioned, there
is no way to separate nature and culture, and they become indistinguishable.
Another successful deconstruction has taken place. At this point, Derrida
proceeds to search for the origin, or originator, of language. In a
conglomeration of linguistic musings, he hypothesizes that if there was such an
originator, he must be a myth, because he would be “the absolute origin of his
own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing’” (285).
However, Derrida admitted before that signs could not exist independently of
what they signify. The logical conclusion would be that language did not come
into existence out of nothing, but was preceded by the concepts it was about to
name. In Objectivist terms, man developed a conceptual capacity before he
developed language. Nevertheless, Derrida continues to use Levi-Strauss’s
writings to explain that language was preceded and created by mythology. He
describes mythology as a structure with no center, that is, no origin or cause.
But wasn’t “center” defined before as an overruling concept, which mythology
certainly has? In an application of the deconstructing play, the meaning of the
word “center” has shifted to “origin.” The origin of mythology is indeed
unknown, which qualifies it as a center-less structure. Similarly, the musical
works of the archaic societies studied by Levi-Strauss have no known composers,
so music qualifies as a center-less structure as well. In another shift of the
meaning of “origin,” Derrida quotes Levi-Strauss’s claim that the audience of a
musical performance is like “a silent performer,” so the origin of the music is
indeterminate. It is in the conductor, the performers, and the audience,
everywhere and nowhere. The reader may think that mythology and music still
have an overruling concept, they have a meaning, but once they are defined as
center-less, their meaning is doomed to be deconstructed as well: “‘Music and
mythology bring man face to face with potential objects of which only the
shadows are actualized’” (287).
Derrida wants to
save philosophy for the same purpose he wanted to save the sign: for endless
deconstruction.
After stating that the mythological discourse has no center,
Derrida leaps to the conclusion that the philosophical or epistemological
requirements of a center appear as no more than a historical illusion.
Philosophy never had a real center, only an illusionary one, because it depends
on language, which depends on mythology, which never had a center. Again,
Derrida recoils from the inevitable Nihilism of this conclusion. He prefers to
leave open the question of the relationship between philosophy and mythology,
so that philosophy may still have a center. He acknowledges that the
possibility that philosophy never had a center is a problem that cannot be
dismissed, because it may become a fault within the philosophical realm. Such a
fault, however, is a species of Empiricism, a doctrine that Derrida obviously
holds in great disregard. Derrida is concerned that Empiricism is a menace to
the discourse he attempts to formulate here. (No doubt, Empiricism is like the
child in the story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” who exclaims that the Emperor is
naked--that Derrida’s discourse has no basis in reality.) Derrida wants to save
philosophy for the same purpose he wanted to save the sign: for endless
deconstruction. He stresses that it is impossible to actually turn the page on
philosophy. Even “transphilosophical” concepts that attempt to go beyond
philosophy can only amount to reading philosophers in a certain way. There is
nothing to be studied beyond philosophy. (And there will be nothing left to
study once philosophy is completely deconstructed.)
Derrida proceeds to deconstruct Empiricism, the one
philosophy he will not miss. He attempts to invalidate the Empiricist critique
of Levi-Strauss’s ethnological theories. Levi-Strauss was criticized for not
conducting an exhaustive inventory of South American myths before proceeding to
write about South American mythology. He defended himself by claiming that a
linguist can decipher a grammar from only a few sentences and does not need to
collect all the sentences of a language. Derrida obviously agrees with him.
However, grammar and mythology are not analogous. Each myth is unique and can
add more to the study of mythology, whereas all the sentences in a language use
the same grammar, so only a sample of sentences is needed for the study of
grammar. However, this is empirical evidence, which Derrida disregards. He uses
Levi-Strauss’s example of the study of grammar to prove that “totalization” is
both useless and impossible. It is useless and impossible to encompass the
totality of language in order to study its grammar. In the absence of
totalization, what emerges is “nontotalization,” which is again defined as
“play.” This time, it is language, not structure that loses its coherence to
“play.” However, the play remains the same: words can now have any meaning.
THE EVENT OF THE RUPTURE
Finally,
after some more linguistic musings, the event of rupture which was introduced
in the beginning of the essay is defined: “The appearance of a new structure,
of an original system, always comes about--and this is the very condition of
its structural specificity--by a rupture with its past, its origin, and its
cause” (291). Derrida is still uncomfortable with the notion of historical
events, because “the internal originality of the structure, compels a
neutralization of time and history” (291). The nascent structure must be
independent of the event of rupture that brought it about. One must “set aside
all the facts” in order “to recapture the specificity of a structure” (292).
The new structure, i.e., new philosophy, must be purely abstract and free of
the concrete realm. Events must be set aside too, but Derrida would have had no
reason to write his essay if there never was an event of rupture in the history
of the concept of structure.
In the conclusion of his essay, Derrida observes that there
are two ways to interpret structure, sign, and play. One seeks to decipher a
truth or an origin, and avoids play. The other affirms play and tries to pass
beyond man and humanism. The first way was dominant throughout human history.
The second way is only emerging now. What is there for man beyond man and
humanism? Derrida contends that presently we are only catching a glimpse of
what he means, which is still “unnamable,” “formless,” “nonspecies.”
Nevertheless, he concludes his essay with an affirmation of play. Play must
supersede the alternatives of presence and absence. There is no need to be concerned
with the absence of a center, or of origin. Levi-Strauss, in his study of
archaic societies, brought play to light, but he still yearned for an ethic of
presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins. Rousseau also exhibited sadness,
negativity, nostalgia, and guilt about the lost or impossible origin. Only
Nietzsche could interpret the absence of a center as the presence of a
non-center, rather than be concerned with the loss of the center. Only
Nietzsche could affirm a world of play, “a world of signs without fault,
without truth, and without origin” (292). Derrida leaves no doubt as to his
position when he indicates that Nietzsche pointed the way. He reproaches those
who cannot face the inevitable birth of the world of play. Play is possible, if
only we can forego our need for truth. If only we can forego our terror of the
monstrosity that emerges as the new center-less, formless structure makes it
appearance. It is possible, then, to have a philosophy without concepts,
without orientation, and without coherence. It is possible to keep
deconstructing philosophy, language, or anything and still be safe in the world
of play.
THIS is the meaning of “Structure, Sign and Language in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences.”
I hope my paper on Chapter 10 of “Writing and Difference”
provided some insight into Derrida’s method of thinking and his state of mind.
I searched the Internet for some stories about Derrida that can shed light on
his character. My impression is that he takes himself very seriously, certainly
not as a playful Court Jester. In an interview in the New York Times in
1998 he is dead serious about Deconstruction and about his position as the
greatest philosopher living.
Essay II
Derrida: “Structure, Sign and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
From Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978): 278-93.
“We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret
things” (Montaigne).
Derrida refers to the history of the concept of structure
and an “event” in that history (it should be noted that in this opening
paragraph, Derrida himself highlights the bracketing of the term event in
quotation marks to serve as a precaution). Even here, the choice of the word
“event” is “loaded” with a “meaning” that structural or structuralist thought
seems to preclude. Thus we would have to say this word “event” as though it
were crossed out or sous rature (under erasure). And so, with
these precautions and noting structuralism’s potential objections, Derrida
chooses to speak of an event whose “exterior form would be that of a rupture and
a redoubling” (278).
This rupture perhaps brings to mind what Althusser normally
calls an “epistemic break”, insofar as Derrida notes how the concept and word
“structure” are as old as the episteme of Western philosophy
and intertwines deeply with the “soil of ordinary language”. In fact the word
and concept of structure are metaphorically displaced by the “deepest recesses”
of the episteme. Of course, Althusser attributes epistemological
breaks specifically to Marx and the way in which ideological conceptions are
replaced by scientific ones. Here, what concerns the notion of an “event” in
the history of the “structurality of structure” is the way in which it has
always already been at work and “neutralized or reduced” due to its spontaneous
attribution of a center or point of presence, “a fixed origin”. The goal of
attributing a fixed center to structure is in order to “limit what we might
call the play of structure”. It is not to eliminate play but
to limit it according to the “total form” of structure that the episteme has
succeeded in warding off “the notion of a structure lacking any center”, which
would represent “the unthinkable itself”. (279).
Perhaps the reason why the word “event” would be foreclosed
by the metaphysics of presence tied to the concept of structure is rooted in
the etymological root of the word “event”, which literally means “to come out
(of), to fall out”, etc. Thus events, etymologically speaking, would by
definition elude and fall out of the structurality of structure (a falling out
of the grasp of the presence of the center), thus displacing the play that
structure would attempt to centralize.
The center both closes off play and makes it possible, it
limits the permutation, transformation and substitution of elements. And this
is why the epistemic conception of center (as regards structure) hits upon a
paradox, wherein the “center is not the center”, i.e. is both “within the
structure and outside it”. Derrida, obliquely referencing
Freud, claims that this coherent contradiction “expresses the force of a
desire”. (In the English translation, Bass appends a very helpful footnote,
pointing us to Derrida’s unpacking of this claim in Dissemination [“Plato’s
Pharmacy”] and adding that “in dream interpretation…a given symbol is
understood contradictorily as both the desire to fulfill an impulse and the
desire to suppress the impulse” (fn. 1)). The role of centering play is to
reinstate an “immobility and a reassuring certitude” (read: presence)
that wards off and masters anxiety, since the latter “is invariably the result
of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught in the game,
of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset”. It should be noted
here that the words translated here in English as “play” (i.e. the concept of
“play” in the title of the essay) and “game” are translating the same, single
word “jeu” in the French text. Thus the “game” or “play” that the center limits
and restricts is also the necessity of controlling and mastering anxiety by
giving it well defined confines.
What is at stake here in the outset is pointing out the ways
in which, in its contradiction, the center—so central to structure—is thought
both as “origin or end, arche or telos), and this
contradiction is the necessity of thinking structure and center as “a full
presence which is beyond play”. And we could add, it is the notion of a full
presence that coincides with the reduction and mastering of anxiety, since
anxiety implies an absence, in particular insofar as it lacks an object to
anchor anxiety down into the presence of a definite fear.
As will become clear later on in the essay but which is
indicated here, the fact that center “plays” on both sides of its binary oppositions,
this will entail that we cannot sustain a proper deconstruction of this concept
without foregoing the approaches of an archaeology or eschatology (at least in
their current forms determined by a metaphysics of presence).
Before we delve into the impact of the rupture or event
cited in the first paragraph, Derrida notes that we should be aware of how the
history of the concept of structure “must be thought of as a series of
substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the
center”. What is at stake in the metaphysics and determination of “Being
as presence” is the history of these “metaphors and metonymies” (eidos,
arche, telos, energeia, ousia), etc. (279-80).
The event is the (re)thinking of structure, which is at once
a rupture and repetition. What entails is that the center of structure eludes
“being-present” and thus entails that the “absence of the transcendental
signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely”.
In a long paragraph that ends the first section of this
essay, Derrida notes a few “names” and indications that have prepared this
event: Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics (of Being and truth, for which the
concepts of play, interpretation and sign were substituted); the Freudian critique
of self-presence/consciousness; “and, more radically, the Heideggerian
destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of Being as
presence”. And yet we are nevertheless implicated and complicit with this
logocentricism/metaphysics of presence, and we lack the language for overcoming
it or foregoing it (280-281). Even with the concept of sign. As Derrida says:
“But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up the
metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing
against this complicity, or without the risk of erasing difference in the
self-identity of a signified reducing its signifier into itself or, amounting
to the same thing, simply expelling its signifier outside itself” (281). We are
thus caught in a circle—more or less exasperated or naive depending on the
formulation or formalization of this circle. This leads to a conundrum, an
“exercise” which is the most widespread (282), which is the following: “Since
these concepts are not elements or atoms, and since they are taken from a
syntax and a system, every particular borrowing brings along with it the whole
of metaphysics. This is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other
reciprocally—for example, Heidegger regarding Nietzsche, with as much lucidity
and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last
“Platonist”. (281).
Since we are at a break in this essay, it would be
interesting to point out that this is precisely one of the inspirations for the
early forms of non-philosophy that Laruelle proposes. Laruelle also sees in the
matrix of philosophical decision the spontaneous interworkings of its syntax.
In suspending the decisionality of philosophy’s tactical and syntactical
matrix, one thereby undoes the “widespread” exercise of turning philosopher’s
against each other in the habitual conflicts of internecine warfare.
Here Derrida turns to ethnology, and as above, it is only
with a decentering and dislocation of European culture that ehtnology could be
brought about. Both the destruction of the history of metaphysics and the birth
of ethnology “belong to one and the same era”. (282). Just like Derrida
described language and its inevitable complicity with metaphysics, “the
ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the
very moment when he denounces them”. Also, just as we are caught in the
metaphysical circle, there are different gradations of being implicated in such
a circle or in the logo-eurocentric bind: “The quality and fecundity of a
discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relation
to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought”. Thus
Derrida is bringing up the stakes of being indebted to and complicit with a
sort of metaphysical and ethnocentric inundation of language and “the resources
necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy”.
As Derrida points out, this is what will make Lévi-Strauss a
touchstone for these issues in the human sciences, insofar as his work is
elaborated through “this critique of language and this critical language in the
social sciences”. Pointing to a binary opposition that stems back to the
pre-Socratic foundations of philosophy, Derrida brings up the nature/culture
dyad, which Lévi-Strauss both relies upon to a certain extent and works to
undo: “that which is universal and spontaneous, and not
dependent on any particular culture or any determinate norm, belongs to
nature…that which depends upon a system of norms regulating
society and therefore is capable of varying from one social
structure to another, belongs to culture” (283). Yet he encounters what he
refers to as a “scandal”, which is the scandal of the incest prohibition, since
it at once seems to be universal and yet, as a prohibition, also seems to be a
norm and therefore cultural. Yet, as Derrida points out, “Obviously there is no
scandal except within a system of concepts which accredits the difference
between nature and culture”. As Derrida will argue, incest prohibition both
“escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them—probably as the condition
of their possibility”.
As a side note, this brings to mind the way in which Deleuze
and Guattari will deal with incest in Anti-Oedipus as a “threshold”.
One is either on this side of or beyond the limit of incest: in fact, they will
eventually quote Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology for
backup on making this point.
As Derrida argues, what Lévi-Strauss is contemplating as a
scandal here is the evidence that “language bears within itself the necessity
of its own critique” (284). And there are two paths in Derrida’s mind. The
first path is to “systematically and rigorously” question the history of these
concepts through a philosophical and philological investigation. And yet this
would be not to fetishize them or circumscribe them but to “deconstitute them”
in a way that is not familiar to the traditional work of the philologist or
historian of philosophy. As he says, this is the “step ‘outside philosophy’”,
something he claims is more difficult than it appears, since we are “swallowed
up in metaphysics in the entire body of discourse” from which we have claimed
to disengage.
I have to comments to add here, both of which are with an eye
to Laruelle’s elaboration of non-philosophy in Philosophy and
Non-philosophy. First, as Laruelle will claim, philosophy and its language
cannot analyze and critique itself from within, thereby stepping out of it: for
this, there must be a formalization and axiomatization (non-philosophy).
Secondly, non-philosophy shows that we are not “in” philosophy, and that this
is merely a hallucination. One does not exit philosophy to enter the real. This
is taken up in the last chapter explicitly of Philosophy and Non-philosophy with
regard to Marx’s notion of an Ausgang or out-going. Let’s
return to Derrida’s text, lest we get sidetracked for too long.
The second path, which Derrida suggests is closer to the
path of Lévi-Strauss, is to treat the old concepts as “tools which can still be
used” (285). This will get us to the notion of bricolage that
Lévi-Strauss coins. “No longer is any truth value attributed to [old concepts];
there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments
appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and
they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of
which they themselves are pieces. This is how the language of the social
sciences criticizes itself”. This is how he plans to distinguish “method from truth,
the instruments of the method and the objective significations envisaged by
it”.
The essence of bricolage, then, seems to be that
Lévi-Strauss will utilize as a tool the truth value of which he will call into
question.
Due to this precariousness and openness, Lévi-Strauss will
oppose the engineer to the bricoleur. The engineer “should be the
one to construct the totality of his language, syntax and lexicon. In this
sense the engineer is a myth”. Thus the engineer is a fantasy or a myth, “a
theological idea”: “and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere that bricolage is
mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur”.
Following this path, however, we see that the engineer and the scientist are
also “species of bricoleurs”, and thus the distinction begins to
break down (which may itself show that the concept of bricolage itself
is a tool in the vein of bricolage, meaning to break down after
serving a certain usefulness, albeit Derrida does not venture that here,
perhaps leaving it implicit).
Furthermore, insofar as Lévi-Strauss reflects on the
mythopoetic status of bricolage, he is also criticizing the
utilization of one his key terms. And this critique coincides with what Derrida
seems to be most fascinating about his work, namely, “this critical search for
a new status of discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center,
to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin,
or to an absolute archia”. It is precisely in the critique of bricolage and
of its status that Lévi-Strauss will continue the “theme of this decentering”
in the “Overture” to his last book, The Raw and the Cooked (286).
First, Lévi-Strauss disrupts the notion of a central myth,
and therefore chooses the Bororo myth as one that is highlighted not because it
is typical but because it is irregular.
Second, he points out how the myth itself is decentralized
or acentric in terms of its origin, and thus it cannot “have an absolute
subject or an absolute center”. As Derrida says: “In opposition to epistemic discourse,
structural discourse on myths—mythological discourse—must itself
be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks”.
This mythomorphic or, as Lévi-Strauss calls it, “anaclastic” (in the sense of
relating to the study of reflected and diffracted rays) discourse must
“respect” the “rhythms” of myths (287). The logic behind this treatment of his
language is due to his search for a tertiary code. The primary code would
“provide the substance of language”, and the secondary code would be myths
themselves in their mobilization of identities and relations. The tertiary code
of critical discourse would allow for the “reciprocal translatability of
several myths”. Hence the discourse in the Raw and the Cooked is
itself a myth, a “myth of mythology”. And, insofar as myths themselves are
anonymous, so too is this tertiary discourse, whose function “makes the
philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as
mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion”.
But this dimension of meta-mythology runs the risk of making
all discourses on myth irreducibly and unevenly equivalent. As Derrida says,
this is both “classic, but inevitable question” and one to which Lévi-Strauss
does not answer. Furthermore, it perhaps cannot be posed as a question even
until the relations between the “philosopheme or the theorem” and the “mytheme
or the mythopoem” has been posed explicitly, “which is no small problem” (288).
There is an inherent danger here of reducing all concepts down to naivetes. For
Derrida, going beyond philosophy is not in “turning the page of philosophy”
(albeit, Heidegger and Derrida themselves will contemplate the “death of
philosophy” as a sort of unavoidable event, which Laruelle rightly shows a
begging of the question of sorts), but “in continuing to read
philosophers in a certain way”. Yet, Lévi-Strauss seems to be aware
of these problems, since Derrida shows that he not only sees structuralism as a
means of critiquing empiricism, but also that his own essays are in themselves
empirical and “can always be completed or invalidated by new information”.
But after Derrida’s long quote of Lévi-Strauss (288-89) we
come back to the notion that the lack of a center in his mythological discourse
is the fact that in his work totalization is both “useless” and “impossible”.
This is not merely due to the finitude inherent in empirical study but also
“from the standpoint of the concept of play” (289). This is to say
that totalization is not impossible due to an indefiniteness of the empirical,
“but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite
language—excludes totalization”. This is because it lacks a center that would
halt play, “a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite”. The
movement of play, made possible by this lack of a center, is “the movement of
supplementarity”. As he notes elsewhere, the supplement (the Nachtrag in
Freudian terms), is the appendix, postscript, footnote, at once what is missing
and a surplus. Signification is always “floating”, always performing a
“vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified”.
As Derrida closes his essay, he continues to look at the
text of Lévi-Strauss, particularly the way in which he uses the term
“supplement” without the emphasis Derrida gives it here. In the quote from his
introduction to Marcel Mauss, Lévi-Strauss discusses the way in which humans
symbolically portion out significations that resonate with a symbolic surplus.
This surplus is what he calls a ration supplémentaire (supplementary
allowance, as Bass translates it). This supplementarity is complicit with a
complementarity of signifier to signified “which is the very condition of the
use of symbolic thought” (290).
Here Derrida shifts to another quote in which the concept
of mana as a linguistic “zero phoneme” is introduced to
ballast—supplement—the notion of play. Mana is a stand-in, at
once material and empty sign, it coheres in its contradiction as a “sign
marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary to that with which
the signified is already loaded, but which can take on any value required,
provided only that this value still remains part of the available reserve and
is not, as phonologists put it, a group-term”. This is to signify further,
drawing on Roman Jakobson, that the zero phoneme is not a phoneme absence but
an emptiness of preliminary presence that can fulfill any function do to its
lack of “differential characters”. Not the absence of signification, and yet
not a particular signification.
Moving to the final paragraphs, what is at stake in the
notion of play is that it is not just the play of absence and presence
(Freud: fort/da), but also must be conceived before this
alternative: “Being must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of
the possibility of play and not the other way around” (292). This is to remove
that “ethic of nostalgia for origins” that, in many sense, reminds me of
Nietzsche, his critique of hope and his call upon an eternal recurrence
whose sameness is not presupposed or ready-made (present) but
empty, whose repetition precedes its origin. Here, Derrida confirms this by
juxtaposing the sad nostalgia of Rousseau seeking to restore an origin or faced
with the exhaustion of a non-originary origin, and “Nietzschean affirmation, that
is 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. This
affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of center”.
What is key to Nietzsche’s affirmation is that it does not have anything to
fall back upon, and is therefore insecure but, as I would say, free. This is to
radicalize the loss of presence in Nietzsche’s affirmation: “For there is
a sure play: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present,
pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination,
to the seminal adventure of the trace”. Here already, Derrida
is invoking the notion of dissemination, which is something that Rousseau, too,
inspires him with, even if he may usually instill the negative image of this
notion.
I will add as a quick note that the juxtaposition of
Rousseau and Nietzsche here vis-a-vis presence certainly is helpful as pertains
to the notion of play, but I would suggest two things: first, Nietzsche takes
much from Rousseau and generally finds a lot of inspiration in his work, even if
he sometimes is critical of certain notions; and second, I would suggest that
Rousseau “coheres contradictorily” with Derrida’s quick description here of
nostalgia, insofar as I believe he both thinks this nostalgia and uses it as a
means by which to critique and undermine it. Thus Derrida’s description of
Rousseau seems more true at a glance rhetorically than more
profoundly thematically. This, too, would perhaps collapse under
scrutiny, and we will leave this for another time.
And this leads us to two “interpretations of
interpretation”. Either an origin that escapes play, “which lives the necessity
of interpretation as an exile”, or one that no longer concerns itself with the
origin, “and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name
of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in
other words, throughout his entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the
reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play”.
These two interpretations are “irreconcilable” and yet lived
“simultaneously”, reconciled in “an obscure economy” in the problematic field
of the “social sciences” (293).
We cannot choose between the two, since we are caught in a
region wherein the choice is “trivial” and “because we must first try to
conceive of the common ground and the différance of this
irreducible difference”. The question facing us is a historical one that
involves conception, formation, gestation and labor, childbearing
metaphors that faces us with a “birth [that] is in the offing, only under the
species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant and terrifying form of
monstrosity”.
This is how the essay ends, and I will merely point out that
this nonspecies and monstrosity are what is at stake in the notion of the overman,
which itself, in retrospect on Lévi-Strauss, seems to be a signifier much like
that of mana, i.e. a zero phoneme whose play cannot be decided from
a preestablished center or structure, which is what makes its monstrosity so
terrifying.
Essay III
Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Science
In his essay Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Science, Derrida firstly describes the idea of freeplay,
which is a decentering of systems within the systems
themselves. Centering of systems is supposed to limit
freeplay, yet this centering of systems, designed to give coherence to the
system, is contradictory because it is there by force of desire, not by any
fundamental principle. The basis of a structure comprise of historic patterns
and repetitions that can be observed through historical records, and
these patterns comprise of a series of substitutions for the
center. The moment of substitution, which Derrida called "rupture",
is the moment when the pattern or repetition reasserts itself through
decentering and re-centering the structure, an example of freeplay (within the
system) disrupting history (a series of events that provides linear, logical
coherence to a system).
The three major critiques of de-centering (by Heideggar, Freud and Nietsche)
use the language of metaphysics to breakdown / critique / deconstruct the
principles of metaphysics itself. This paradox is relevant as it applies to the
dislocation of culture, whether historically, philosophically, economically,
politically, etc. The developement of concepts birth their opposing sides
(binary oppositions).
Derrida then moves into the discussion of Levi-Strauss' bricolage -
the necessity of borrowing concepts from other texts (intertextuality of
whatever concepts seem handy to give coherence, an intertextual collage)
(obviously subject to change). This bricolage leads to the idea of myth,
and while it is assumed that all myths have an engineer, [the
concept/person] who creates concepts "out of whole cloth", the idea
of the engineer is impossible since it would mean that a system is created from
concepts from outside the system - so where did the engineer get these concepts
from? Levi-Strauss suggests that the bricoleur invented it -
but suspecting the engineer's existence would be to threaten the bricoleur's
centered system.
Bricolage is not just an intellectual concept; it is also mythopoetical. Yet
for a myth-based concept it seems to command respect as an absolute source. To
go back to an absolute source, it is important to reject existing epistèmè
(foundations / sciences), yet to oppose mythomorphic discourse on myth,
mythomorphic principles must be used. It is a similar quandry the triple
philosophers have towards metaphysics.
Myth has no author, therefore determining that it requires a source is a
historical illusion, which brings up the question: does this principle (that
the absolute source is a historical illusion) also apply to other fields of
discourse?
Levi-Strauss only brings up this question, and Derrida does not attempt to
answer it. Instead, he writes that there is an assumption on many philosophers'
parts: to go beyond philosophy is impossible - there is no language beyond what
is available, therefore there is no language that could explain the outer
bounds of the centered system. Derrida suggests that to go beyond philosophy,
it has to be read in "a certain way", not assume there is something
beyond it. Empiricism(gathering of information which relies on what
can be expressed within the system), which informs the language and information
base we have to center our systems around, menaces scientific discourse by
constantly challenging it, yet it is based in scientific discourse.
Paradoxically, structuralism - the school of critique that
emphasizes a system of binaries - claims to critique empiricism, and Derrida
points out that Levi-Strauss' books and essays are all empirical stuff that can
challenged as well.
The concept of sciences calls for the concept of history, as history records
information / data and enables sciences to have a center for reference in
empirical principles. Empiricism also fails as a system that informs because in
order to be completely valid, all information must be gathered (totalization).
However, due to freeplay (constant substitutions of the center), totalization
of all this infinite information is impossible.
Freeplay not only disrupts the sense of history, it also disrupts presence.
Although Levi-Strauss points this out, there is a sense of centered-ness in his
critique to ground its presence in a sense of origin, speech and an unmarred
source.
Finally, Derrida points out the two reasons for schools of interpretations
which are irreconciliable yet exist simultaneously: 1) the interpretation which
seeks to decipher an original Truth that is uncluttered by freeplay, and 2) the
interpretation which affirms the role of freeplay within the system.
I chose to work with Derrida because his philosophy of not being centered in a
single one philosophy has validity. Derrida, as taught in the school of
deconstruction, encourages the use of several perspectives (several centers, so
to speak) to view a concept. This does not help to affirm any holistic view,
but it enables a chance to find common ground between perspectives even though
the idea seems impossible. To me, if the purpose of freeplay is to de-center
within a system, then it is perhaps possible to use the idea of freeplay to develop
and enlargen the system in order to accommodate new centers for thought. This
seems to be the point of the post-modern spirit: finding new ways of viewing
the world that is not set in any specific system, but constantly moving around
with the principles of freeplay in order to participate in the world better.
Essay IV
“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences” by
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida first read his paper “Structure,
Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences (1966)” at the John
Hopkins International Colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man” in October 1966 articulating for the first time a
post structuralist theoretical paradigm. This conference was described by
Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donata to be “the first time in United
States when structuralism had been thought of as an interdisciplinary
phenomenon”. However, even before the conclusion of the conference there
were clear signs that the ruling trans-disciplinary paradigm of structuralism
had been superseded, by the importance of Derrida’s “radical appraisals
of our assumptions”
Derrida begins the essay by referring to ‘an event’ which
has ‘perhaps’ occurred in the history of the concept of structure, that is also
a ‘redoubling’. The event which the essay documents is that of a definitive
epistemological break with structuralist thought, of the ushering in of post-structuralism
as a movement critically engaging with structuralism and also with traditional
humanism and empiricism. It turns the logic of structuralism against itself
insisting that the “structurality of structure” itself had
been repressed in structuralism.
Derrida starts this essay by putting into question the basic
metaphysical assumptions of Western philosophy since Plato which has always
principally positioned itself with a fixed immutable centre, a static presence.
The notion of structure, even in structuralist theory has always presupposed a
centre of meaning of sorts. Derrida terms this desire for a centre as
“logocentrism” in his seminal work “Of Grammatology (1966)”. ‘Logos’,
is a Greek word for ‘word’ which carries the greatest possible concentration of
presence. As Terry Eagleton explains in “Literary Theory: An Introduction
(1996)”, “Western Philosophy…. has also been in a broader sense,
‘logocentric’, committed to a belief in some ultimate ‘word’, presence,
essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation for all our thought,
language and experience. It has yearned for the sign which will give meaning to
all others, – ‘the transcendental signifier’ – and for the anchoring,
unquestioning meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the
transcendental signified’).”
Derrida argues that this centre thereby limits the “free
play that it makes possible”, as it stands outside it, is axiomatic – “the
Centre is not really the centre”. Under a centered structure, free
play is based on a fundamental ground of the immobility and indisputability of
the centre, on what Derrida refers to “as the metaphysics of presence”.
Derrida’s critique of structuralism bases itself on this idea of a
center. A structure assumes a centre which orders the structure and gives
meanings to its components, and the permissible interactions between them, i.e.
limits play. Derrida in his critique looks at structures diachronically, i.e.,
historically, and synchronically, i.e. as a freeze frame at a particular juncture.
Synchronically, the centre cannot be substituted: “It is the point at
which substitution of contents, elements and terms is no longer possible.” (Structuralism
thus stands in tension with history as Derrida argues towards the end of the
essay.) But historically, one centre gets substituted for another to form an
epistemological shift: “the entire history of the concept of structure
must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center.” Thus,
at a given point of time, the centre of the structure cannot be substituted by
other elements, but historically, the point that defines play within a
structure has changed. The history of human sciences has thereby been a
process of substitution, replacement and transformation of this centre through
which all meaning is to be sought – God, the Idea, the World Spirit, the
Renaissance Man, the Self, substance, matter, Family, Democracy, Independence,
Authority and so on. Since each of these concepts is to found our whole system
of thought and language, it must itself be beyond that system, untainted by its
play of linguistic differences. It cannot be implicated in the very languages
and system it attempts to order and anchor: it must be somehow anterior to
these discourses. The problem of centers for Derrida was thereby that they
attempt to exclude. In doing so, they ignore, repress or marginalize others
(which become the Other). This longing for centers spawns binary opposites,
with one term of the opposition central and the other marginal. Terry Eagleton
calls these binary opposition with which classical structuralism tends to
function as a way of seeing typical of ideologies, which thereby becomes
exclusionary. To quote him, “Ideologies like to draw rigid boundaries
between what is acceptable and what is not”.
Derrida insists that with the ‘rupture’ it has become “necessary
to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be
thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus….a
sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into
play.” Derrida attributes this initiation of the process of
decentering “to the totality of our era”. As Peter Barry argues
in “Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural (1995)” that
in the twentieth century, through a complex process of various
historico-political events, scientific and technological shifts, “these
centers were destroyed or eroded”. For instance, the First World War
destroyed the illusion of steady material progress; the Holocaust destroyed the
notion of Europe as the source and centre of human civilization. Scientific
discoveries – such as the way the notion of relativity destroyed the ideas of
time and space as fixed and central absolutes. Then there were intellectual and
artistic movements like modernism in the arts which in the first thirty years
of the century rejected such central absolutes as harmony in music,
chronological sequence in narrative, and the representation of the visual world
in art. This ‘decentering’ of structure, of the ‘transcendental
signified’ and of the sovereign subject, Derrida suggests – naming his sources
of inspiration – can be found in the Nietzchean critique of metaphysics, and
especially of the concepts of Being and Truth, in the Freudian critique of
self-presence, as he says, “a critique of consciousness, of the
subject, of self-identity, and of the self-proximity or self-possession”,
and more radically in the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, “of
the determination of Being as Presence”.
Derrida argues that all these attempts at ‘decentering’ were
however, “trapped in a sort of circle”. Structuralism, which in his
day was taken as a profound questioning of traditional Western thought, is
taken by Derrida to be in support of just those ways of thought. This is true,
according to deconstructive thought, for almost all critique of Western thought
that arises from within western thought: it would inevitably be bound up with
that which it questions – “We have no language-no syntax and no lexicon-which
is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition
which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit
postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” Semiotics and
Phenomenology are similarly compromised. Semiotics stresses the fundamental
connection of language to speech in a way that it undermines its insistence on
the inherently arbitrary nature of sign. Phenomenology rejects metaphysical
truths in the favor of phenomena and appearance, only to insist for truth to be
discovered in human consciousness and lived experience. To an extent Derrida
seems to see this as inevitable, “There is no sense in doing without
the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics”; however, the
awareness of this process is important for him – “Here it is a question
of a critical relationship to the language of the human sciences and a question
of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting
expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a
heritage the resources necessary of that heritage itself.” It is
important to note that Derrida does not assert the possibility of thinking
outside such terms; any attempt to undo a particular concept is likely to become
caught up in the terms which the concept depends on. For instance: if we try to
undo the centering concept of ‘consciousness’ by asserting the disruptive
counterforce of the ‘unconscious’, we are in danger of introducing a new
center. All we can do is refuse to allow either pole in a system to become the
center and guarantor of presence.
In validate this argument, Derrida takes up the example of
Saussure’s description of sign. In Saussure, the ‘metaphysics of presence’ is
affirmed by his insistence on the fact that a sign has two components – the
signifier and the signified, the signified which the mental and psychological.
This would imply that the meaning of a sign is present to the speaker when he
uses in, in defiance of the fact that meaning is constituted by a system of
differences. That is also why Saussure insists on the primacy of speaking. As
soon as language is written down, a distance between the subject and his words
is created, causing meaning to become unanchored. Derrida however critiques this
‘phonocentrism’ and argues that the distance between the subject and his words
exist in any case, even while speaking – that the meaning of sign is always
unanchored. Sign has no innate or transcendental truth. Thus, the signified
never has any immediate self-present meaning. It is itself only a sign that
derives its meaning from other signs. Hence a signified can be a signifier and
vice versa. Such a viewpoint entails that sign thus be stripped off its
signified component. Meaning is never present at face-value; we cannot escape
the process of interpretation. While Saussure still sees language as a closed
system where every word has its place and consequently its meaning, Derrida
wants to argue for language as an open system. In denying the metaphysics of
presence the distances between inside and outside are also problematized. There
is no place outside of language from where meaning can be generated.
Derrida next considers the theme of decentering with respect
to French structuralist Levi Strauss’s ethnology. Ethnology too demonstrates
how although it sets out as a denouncement of Eurocentrism, its practices and
methodologies get premised on ethnocentricism in its study and research of the
‘Other’ – “the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of
ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them This
necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency”. Derrida uses
the classical debate on the opposition between nature and culture with respect
to Levi Strauss’s work. In his work, Elementary Structures, Strauss
starts with the working definition of nature as the universal and spontaneous,
not belonging to any other culture or any determinate norm. Culture, on the
other hand, depends on a system of norms regulating society
and is therefore capable of varying from one social structure
to another. But Strauss encountered a ‘scandal’ challenging this binary
opposition – incest prohibition. It is natural in the sense that is it almost
universally present across most communities and hence is natural. However, it
is also a prohibition, which makes it a part of the system of norms and customs
and thereby cultural. Derrida argues that this disputation of Strauss’s theory
is not really a scandal, as it the pre-assumed binary opposition that makes it
a scandal, the system which sanctions the difference between nature and
culture. To quote him, “It could perhaps be said that the whole of
philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the
nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the
unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the
origin of the prohibition of incest.”
This leads Derrida to his theory of the bricoleur inspired
from Levi Strauss. He argues that it is very difficult to arrive at a
conceptual position “outside of philosophy”, to not be absorbed to some extent
into the very theory that one seeks to critique. He therefore insists on
Strauss’s idea of a bricolage, “the necessity of borrowing
one’s concept from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or
ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur.” It is
thereby important to use these ‘tools at hand’ through
intricate mechanisms and networks of subversion. For instance, although Strauss
discovered the scandal, he continued to use sometimes the binary opposition of
nature and culture as a methodological tool and to preserve as an instrument
that those truth value he criticizes, “The opposition between nature
and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer a value
which is above all methodological.” Strauss discusses bricolage not
only as an intellectual exercise, but also as “mythopoetical activity”.
He attempts to work out a structured study of myths, but realizes this is not a
possibility, and instead creates what he calls his own myth of the mythologies,
a ‘third order code’. Derrida points out how his ‘reference myth’ of the Bororo
myth, does not hold in terms of its functionality as a reference, as this choice
becomes arbitrary and also instead of being dependent on typical character, it
derives from irregularity and hence concludes, “that violence which consists in
centering a language which is describing an acentric structure must be
avoided”.
Derrida still building on Strauss’s work, introduces the
concept of totalization – “Totalization is…. at one time as useless, at
another time as impossible”. In traditional conceptualization, totalization
cannot happen as there is always too much one can say and even more that exists
which needs to be talked/written about. However, Derrida argues that
non-totalization needs to conceptualized not the basis of finitude of discourse
incapable of mastering an infinite richness, but along the concept of free-play
– “If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinity of
a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because
the nature of the field-that is, language and a finite language-excludes
totalization.” It is finite language which excludes totalization as language is
made up of infinite signifier and signified functioning inter-changeably and
arbitrarily, thereby opening up possibilities for infinite play and
substitution. The field of language is limiting, however, there cannot be a
finite discourse limiting that field.
Derrida explains the possibility of this free play through
the concept of “supplementality” – “this movement of the free play,
permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarily.
One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its
place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over
and above, comes as a supplement”. Supplementality is thus involves
infinite substitutions of the centre which is an absence which leads to the
movement of play. This becomes possible because of the lack in the signified.
There is always an overabundance of the signifier to the signified. So a
supplement would hence be an addition to what the signified means for already.
Derrida also introduces the concept of how this meaning is always deferred
(difference), how signifier and signified are inter-changeable in a complex
network of free-play.
This concept of free-play Derrida believes also stands in
tension with history. Although history was thought as a critique of the
philosophy of presence, as a kind of shift; it has paradoxically become
complicitous “with a teleological and eschatological metaphysics.” Free-play
also stands in conflict with presence. Play is disruption of presence. Free
play is always interplay of presence and absence. However, Derrida argues that
a radical approach would not be the taking of presence or absence as ground for
play. Instead the possibility of play should be the premise for presence or
absence.
Derrida concludes this seminal work which is often regarded
as the post-structuralist manifesto with the hope that we proceed towards
an “interpretation of interpretation”where one “is no
longer turned towards the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man
and humanism”. He says that we need to borrow Nietzsche’s idea of
affirmation to stop seeing play as limiting and negative. Nietzsche
pronouncement “God is dead” need not be read as a destruction of a cohesive
structure, but can be seen as a chance that opens up a possibility of diverse
plurality and multiplicity.
Essay V
Structure Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Science
The present essay can be regarded
as the manifesto of post modernism, deconstruction and post structuralism. No
philosopher has recently such great influence on critical theory as Derrida,
with whom the concept of deconstruction is primarily associated. Deconstruction
attacks all notions of center, origin and totality.
Derrida attacks all western
metaphysics for the logo centrism and hierarchy like in speech/ writing,
nature/ culture etc. Logo centrism is the tendency for seeking centre and
presence. Derrida says that centre-seeking tendency began to be questioned from
Nietzsche who declared the 'Death of God' and replaced god with superman.
Another figure to challenge the logocentrism is Freud, who questions the
authority of consciousness and claims that we are guided by unconscious.
Heidegger also challenges the notion of metaphysics of presence.
Derrida, therefore, primarily
attacks structuralism. He views that the concept of centre does work but it is
not essential; hence center is under eraser. Center is needed to form a
structure but immediately it escapes from the so- called centrality. Derrida,
in fact, is not suggesting on the abandonment of the idea of center, but rather
he acknowledges that it is illusory and constructed. He talks about the
binaries of structuralism which are in hierarchical order, in which the first
term is priviledge over the other. These binaries are not true representations
of external reality, rather are simply constructions. Any signified is not
fixed. Signified also seeks meaning. When it seeks meaning it becomes
signifier. So, there is chain of signifiers, there is no constant existance of
signified. It means, there is no centre, no margin, and no totality. As a
result, meaning is not determined in the text. In fact, meaning is like
jellyfish and knowledge is a matter of perpetual shifting. There is no single
stable meaning. Since signifiers do not refer to thing but to themselves, text
does not give any fixed meaning. In such situation, multi- meanings are
possible. So, sign is only chain of signifiers. Saussure views that sugnifier
and sinified are inseparable but Derrida attacks Saussure that he himself
separated the signifier and signified.
Saussure says that meaning comes in
terms of difference. But Derrida says that such hierarchy is constructed and
the idea to understand one in reference to other is purely haphazard, inhuman
and unnecessary. One signifier has no completeness and, therefore, we need
other signifiers to understand it. It is endless process and there is only
chain of signifiers other than signified. Derrida says that center and margin
are equally important for one depends on another. So, there is no center and no
margin. Without female the concept of male can't exist. Structuralists believe
that from much binary opposition, single meaning comes but Derrida says each
pair of binary oppositions produces separate meanings. So, in a text, there are
multi- meanings. Since the center lacks locus, center is not the center.
Therefore, the idea of decentering for Derrida is erasing the voice and,
therefore, avoiding the possibility of logocentrism.
Structuralists believe that speech
is primary and superior to writing but Derrida opposes and says that the
vagueness of speech is clarified by the writing. Since, the writing has the
pictorial quality of the speech, both are equally important, there is no hierarchy.
To prove this he talks about 'Differance'. Derrida himself coins this very
word. It comes from the French verb' differer'- meaning both to ' differ' and
'defer'.
But the word ' differance' itself
is meaningless for it does not give any concept. Meaning is a matter of
difference. It is a continuous postponement. It is moving from one signifier to
another and it endlessly continues. Since meaning is infinite, we never get
absolute meaning of any word. As we can't be satisfied with meaning, we have to
go further and further to search the meaning. As a result, we don't have final
knowledge. We don't get fixed meaning rather we undergo chain of signifiers and
as soon as we get signified it slides.
Similarly, Derrida subverts the
concept of hierarchy of binary opposition created by Levi- Strauss. He (Levi)
creates hierarchy of nature/ culture and says that nature is superior to
culture. For him, speech is natural and writing is culture. So Speech is
superior to writing. But Derrida breaks this hierarchy bringing the example of
incest prohibition. Strauss says that ' Incest Prohibition' is natural and at
the same time it is cultural construction or the outcome of culture; hence it
is a norm. Therefore, it belongs to culture. So, incest prohibition can belong
both to natural and culture. In this way both nature and culture go side by
side, so we can't claim nature as superior to culture, both are interrelated
and something can occupy the nature and culture at the same time.
Similarly, Levi- Strauss has made the
hierarchy between artist and critic. He claims artist is originator but critic
comes later. Likewise artist uses first hand raw materials as engineer does but
critics use second hand raw materials. In contrary to him Derrida argues that
neither artists nor critic works on first hand materials, rather both of them
use the materials that were already existed and used. In this sense, there is
no hierarchy between them.
In short, Derrida means to say that
meaning is just like peeling the onion and never getting a kernel. Likewise,
the binary opposition between literary and non-literary language is an
illusion. But the prime objective of deconstruction is not to destroy the
meaning of text but is to show how the text deconstructs itself. Derrida's idea
of no-center, under erasure, indeterminacy, no final meaning, no binary
opposition, no truth heavily influenced subsequent thinkers and their theories.
These theories are: psychoanalysis, new historicism, cultural studies, post
colonialism, feminism and so on.
Essay VI
Structure,
Sign and Play
The essay “Structure, Sign and
Play” begins with an attempt to find perhaps “something has occurred in the
history of the concept of structure that could be called an event” and asks the
question “what would this event be then?” and, “Where the structure does
occur?” (2) And answer is that the structure occurs in “the centre... (which)
permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form.” (1) It is a
process of giving structure a center or a fixed origin. In doing so, Derrida rejects
the old notion which says that the center is “within the structure and outside
it”. He draws a relation between philosophical concepts like “center”,
“subject”, and “event”. In addition, he offers a dichotomy of ways to think:
“classical” v/s “poststructuralist.” Beside he thinks the center is not center
as its totality lies elsewhere called “the origin.”
For Derrida, structure is a
“rupture” or “series of substitution... a linked chain of determinations.” (1)
If we look at the structure of Anand’s “Untouchable” we find the
structure rooted not in poverty but in caste system which is result of
hierarchal society based on old notion of history. Thus, structure is a thought
or law to govern the human societies. “When everything became a system where the
center is signified, the original or transcendental, is never absolutely
present outside a system of differences.” (2)
Derrida studies various concepts
such as “an event,” “center,” “bricolage,” (the necessity of borrowing
concepts from other texts which leads to myth) and “totalization” to show the
relationship between writers such as Nietzsche (concept of being and truth
substituted with play, interpretation and sign), Freud (critique of self
possession) and Heidegger (destruction of metaphysics). Bricolage is not only
as an intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical activity,” (6) which
can be applied to almost word for word to criticism, and especially to literary
criticism.
Derrida (in defining sign) says,
the relation between metaphysics and destruction of metaphysics describes a
unique circle. The metaphysics is attacked with the help of sign which is the
result of “opposition between the sensible and the intelligible.” (3) He
introduces the two ways to erase the difference: first, submitting the sign to
thought; second, going against the first. Derrida writes, “If one erases the
radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the word signifier
itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept.” (3)
Freeplay (organising the structure)
is “centered structure” (1) and “notion of a structure lacking any center
represents the unthinkable itself.” (1)
Derrida attacks all western for the
hierarchy in speech/ writing, nature/ culture etc. He undermines the
concept of hierarchy created by Strauss that is between nature and culture and
says that nature is superior to culture; speech is natural and writing is
culture so speech is superior to writing. Structuralists believe that speech is
primary and superior to writing but Derrida opposes by saying that the
vagueness of speech is clarified by the writing. The writing has the pictorial
quality of the speech, both are equally important, there is no hierarchy.
Derrida breaks this hierarchy bringing the example of incest prohibition. Strauss
says that “incest prohibition” (5) is natural and the outcome of culture; hence
it becomes a norm, therefore, it belongs to culture.
This is the state to which he calls
“scandal.” Both nature and culture go side by side, so we can't claim nature as
superior to culture, both are interrelated and something can occupy the nature
and culture at the same time. We can say that without female the concept of
male can't exist. Here he thinks, “The whole of philosophical conceptualisation
... is designed to leave in the domain of unthinkable.” (5) Structuralists
believe that from much binary opposition, single meaning comes but Derrida says
each pair of binary oppositions produces separate meanings. So, in a text,
there are multi meanings. Similarly, Levi-Strauss has made the hierarchy
between artist and critic. He claims artist is originator but critic comes
later. Likewise artist uses first hand raw materials as engineer does but
critics use second hand raw materials. In contrary to him Derrida argues that neither
artists nor critic works on first hand materials, rather both of them use the
materials that were already existed and used. In this sense, there is no
hierarchy between them. The binary opposition between literary and non-literary
language is an illusion.
In short, Derrida means to say that
meaning is just like peeling the onion and never getting a kernel. The prime
objective of deconstruction is not to destroy the meaning of text but is to
show how the text deconstructs itself. In future, Derrida’s ideas heavily
influenced theories like psychoanalysis, new historicism, cultural studies,
post colonialism, feminism and so on.
Here Derrida defines not only the
structure a “rather structurality of structure.”(1) The opening makes it clear
that the quarrel is between “western science and western philosophy—and ... the
soil of ordinary language.” (1) Most of the concept are taken from the syntax
of Levi-Strauss, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Rousseau and Husserl and “every
particular borrowing drags along with ... the whole of metaphysics.” (3) The
question of reltationship between the language and the relation between the
human science is a always “a problem of economy and strategy” (4) which oppose
nature to law, to education, to art and technics—and also to liberty, to the
arbitrary, to history, to society, to the mind and so on.” (4)
Perhaps something has occurred in
the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event,” if
this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of
structural—or structurality—thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the
term “event” anyway, employing it with caution and as if in quotation marks. In
this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a rupture and a redoubling.
It would be easy enough to show
that the concept of structure and even the word “structure” itself are as old
as the epistémé—that is to say, as old as western science and western
philosophy—and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language,
into whose deepest recesses the epistémé plunges to gather them together
once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.
Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define,
structure-or rather the structurality of structure—although it has always been
involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of
giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The
function of this center was not only to orient; balance, and organize the
structure—one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure—but above all
to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we
might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orienting and
organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the
freeplay of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a
structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself.
Nevertheless, the center also
closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it
is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no
longer possible. At the center, the permutation or the transformation of
elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within a structure) is
forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted2 (I
use this word deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center,
which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure
which governs the structure, while escaping structurality. This is why
classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is,
paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is
at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the
totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center
elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered
structure—although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé
as philosophy or science—is contradictorily coherent. And, as always,
coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of
centered structure is in fact the concept of a freeplay based on a fundamental
ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a
reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With
this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of
a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of
being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.3 From the basis
of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be either
inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché
as telos), the repetitions, the substitutions, the transformations,
and the permutations are always taken from a history of meaning [sens]—that
is, a history, period—whose origin may always be revealed or whose end may
always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps
say that the movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an
accomplice of this reduction of the structurality of structure and always
attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full presence which is out
of play.
If this is so, the whole history of
the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be thought of as
a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of
determinations of the center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the
center receives different forms or names. The history of metaphysics, like the
history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its
matrix—if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so
elliptical in order to bring me more quickly to my principal theme—is the
determination of being as presence in all the senses of this word. It would be
possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or
to the center have always designated the constant of a presence—eidos,
arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth. The
event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this
paper, would presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had
to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that
this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word. From then on it
became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for
the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification
prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central
presence—but a central presence which was never itself, which has always
already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does
not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then
on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that
the center would not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center
had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of
non- locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play.
This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that
in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became
discourse-provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything
became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental
signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The
absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of
signification ad infinitum.
Where and how does this
decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would be
somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to
designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era, our
own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work.
Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or
two “names,” and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence
has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite
the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being
and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and
sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique or self-presence, that
is, the critique of consciousness, subject, of self- identity and of
self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean
destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of being as
presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are
trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of
the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the
history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts
of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax
and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single
destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic,
and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest. To pick
out one example from many: the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the
help of the concept of the sign. But from the moment anyone wishes this
to show, as I suggested a moment ago, that there is no transcendental or
privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay of signification has,
henceforth, no limit, he ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the
word sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification
“sign” has always been comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of,
signifier referring to a signified, signifier different from its signified. If
one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the
word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept.
When Lévi-Strauss says in the preface to “The Raw and the Cooked”4 that
he has “sought to transcend the opposition between the sensible and the
intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of
signs,” the necessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us
forget that the concept of the sign cannot in itself surpass or bypass this
opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The concept of the sign
is determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its
history and by its system. But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, we
cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique
we are directing against this complicity, without the risk of erasing
difference [altogether] in the self- identity of a signified reducing into
itself its signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it
outside itself. For there are two heterogenous ways of erasing the difference
between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way, consists in
reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting
the sign to thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first
one, consists in putting into question the system in which the preceding
reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between the sensible
and the intelligible. The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the
sign needed the opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the
system, along with the reduction. And what I am saying here about the sign can
be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of metaphysics, in
particular to the discourse on “structure.” But there are many ways of being
caught in this circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical,
more or less systematic, more or less close to the formulation or even to the
formalization of this circle. It is these differences which explain the
multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who
make them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche,
Freud, and Heidegger worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements
or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular
borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is what allows
these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally- for example, Heidegger
considering Nietzs che, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and
misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last “Platonist.” One could do
the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a number of others. And today
no exercise is more widespread.
What is the relevance of this formal
schema when we turn to what are called the “human sciences”? One of them
perhaps occupies a privileged place—ethnology. One can in fact assume that
ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a
de-centering had come about: at the moment when European culture—and, in
consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts—had been dislocated,
driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of
reference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or
scientific discourse, it is also a moment which is political, economic,
technical, and so forth. One can say in total assurance that there is nothing
fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism—the very condition
of ethnology—should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the
destruction of the history of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same
era.
Ethnology—like any science—comes
about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a European science
employing traditional concepts, however much of it may struggle against them.
Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does not depend on a decision
on his part-the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of
ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them. This
necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency. We ought to
consider very carefully all its implications. But if nobody can escape this
necessity, and if no one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however
little, this does not mean that all the ways of giving in to it are of an equal
pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured
by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of
metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question of a
critical relationship to the language of the human sciences and a question of a
critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting expressly
and systematically the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from
a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage
itself. A problem of economy and strategy.
If I now go on to employ an
examination of the texts of [the anthropologist Claude] Lévi-Strauss as an
example, it is not only because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among
the human sciences, nor yet because the thought of Lévi-Strauss weighs heavily
on the contemporary theoretical situation. It is above all because a certain
choice has made itself evident in the work of Lévi-Strauss and because a
certain doctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a more or less
explicit manner, in relation to this critique of language and to this critical
language in the human sciences.
In order to follow this movement in
the text of Lévi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding thread among others the
opposition between nature and culture. In spite of all its rejuvenations and
its disguises, this opposition is congenital to philosophy. It is even older
than Plato. It is at least as old as the Sophists. Since the statement of the
opposition—physis/nomos, physis/techné—it has been passed on to
us by a whole historical chain which opposes “nature” to the law, to education,
to art, to technics—and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to
society, to the mind, and so on. From the beginnings of his quest and from his
first book, The Elementary Structures of Kinship,5 Lévi-Strauss has felt
at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing this opposition and the
impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures, he
begins from this axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is universal
and spontaneous, not depending on any particular culture or on any determinate
norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which depends on a system of
norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social
structure to another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But,
in the very first pages of the Elementary Structures, Lévi-Strauss, who
has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing, encounters what he
calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the
nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one
and the same time the predicates of nature and those of culture. This
scandal is the incestprohibition. The incest prohibition is universal;
in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system
of norms and interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural. Let us
assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of
nature and is characterized by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to
a norm belongs to culture and presents the attributes of the relative and the
particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact, or rather an ensemble
of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far from
appearing as a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least
equivocation, and indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in
which we recognized the contradictory attributes of two exclusive orders. The
prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all the social
rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character (9).
Obviously there is no scandal
except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference
between nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the
incestprohibition, Lévi-Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that
this difference, which has always been assumed to be self-evident, becomes
obliterated or disputed. For, from the moment that the incest prohibition can
no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer
be said that it is a scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of
transparent significations. The incest-prohibition is no longer scandal one
meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional concepts; it is
something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them—probably as
the condition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of
philosophical conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture
opposition, is designed to leave in the domain of the unthinkable the very
thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of the prohibition
of incest.
I have dealt too cursorily with
this example, only one among so many others, but the example nevertheless
reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.
This critique may be undertaken along two “tracks, in two “manners.” Once the
limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want to question
systematically and rigorously the history of these concepts. This is a first
action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither a
philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words.
Concerning oneself with the founding concepts of the whole history of
philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertake the task of the
philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances,
it is probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside
of philosophy. The step “outside philosophy” is much more difficult to conceive
than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with
cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics by the whole
body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.
In order to avoid the possibly
sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice—which I feel corresponds
more nearly to the way chosen by Lé vi-Strauss—consists in conserving in the
field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time
exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be
of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness
to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In
the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to
destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are
pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human sciences criticizes itself.
Lévi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth, the
instruments of the method and the objective significations aimed at by it. One
could almost say that this is the primary affirmation of Lévi-Strauss; in any
event, the first words of the Elementary Structures are: “One begins to
understand that the distinction between state of nature and state of society
(we would be more apt to say today: state of nature and state of culture),
while lacking any acceptable historical signification, presents a value which
fully justifies its use by modern sociology: its value as a methodological
instrument.”
Lévi-Strauss will always remain
faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that whose
truth-value he criticizes.
On the one hand, he will
continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More
than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Minds6
faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: “The opposition between nature
and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer value
which is above all methodological.” And this methodological value is not
affected by its “ontological” non- value (as could be said, if this notion were
not suspect here): “It would not be enough to have absorbed particular
humanities into a genera humanity; this first enterprise prepares the way for
others ... which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to reintegrate
culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its
physiochemical conditions” (327).
On the other hand, still in The
Savage Mind, he presents as what he calls bricolage7 which might be
called the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says Lévi-Strauss,
is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at
his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been
especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used
and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to
change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once,
even if their form and their origin are heterogenous—and so forth. There is
therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even
been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. I
am thinking in particular of the article by G. Genette, “Structuralisme et
Critique litteraire,” published in homage to Lévi-Strauss in a special
issue of L’Arc (no. 26, 1965), where it is stated that the analysis of bricolage
could “be applied almost word for word” to criticism, and especially to
“literary criticism.”8 If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing
one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or
ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer,
whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to
construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the
engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of
his own discourse and would supposedly construct it “out of nothing,” “out of
whole cloth,” would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself.
The notion of the engineer who had supposedly broken with all forms of bricolage
is therefore a theological idea; and since Lévi-Strauss tells us elsewhere
that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that the engineer is a myth
produced by the bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in
such an engineer and in a discourse breaking with the received historical
discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by a
certain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also
species of bricoleurs then the very idea of bricolage is menaced
and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.
This brings out the second thread
which might guide us in what is being unraveled here. Lévi-Strauss describes bricolage
not only as an intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical activity.
One reads in The Savage Mind, “Like bricolage on the technical
level, mythical reflection can attain brilliant and unforeseen results on the
intellectual level. Reciprocally, the mythopoetical character of bricolage has
often been noted” (26). But the remarkable endeavor of Lévi-Strauss is not
simply to put forward, notably in the most recent of his investigations, a
structural science or knowledge of myths and of mythological activity. His
endeavor also appears—I would say almost from the first in the status which he
accords to his own discourse, on myths, to what he calls his “mythologicals” It
is here that his discourse on the myth reflects on itself and criticizes
itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of concern to all
the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What does
Lévi-Strauss say of his “mythologicals”? It is here that we rediscover the
mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect, what appears most
fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the
stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to
a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.
The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the “Overture” to
his last book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few
key points.
<!--[if
!supportLists]-->1) <!--[endif]-->From the very start,
Lévi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book as
the “reference- myth” does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is
specious and the use of the myth improper. This myth deserves no more than any
other its referential privilege:
In fact the Bororo myth which will from now on be designated by the name
reference-myth is, as I shall try to show, nothing other than a more or less
forced transformation of other myths originating either in the same society or
in societies more-or less far removed. It would therefore have been legitimate
to choose as my point of departure any representative of the group whatsoever.
From this point of view, the interest of the reference- myth does not depend on
its typical character, but rather on its irregular position in the midst of a
group (10).
<!--[if
!supportLists]-->2) <!--[endif]--> There is no unity
or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of the myth are always
shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in
the first place. Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the
relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is,
cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. In order not to
short change the form and the movement of the myth, that violence which
consists in centering a language which is describing an acentric structure must
be avoided. In this context, therefore it is necessary to forego scientific or
philosophical discourse, to renounce the episteme which absolutely requires,
which is the absolute requirement that we go back to the source, to the center,
to the founding basis, to the principle, and so on. In opposition to epistemic
discourse, structural discourse on myths—mythological discourse—must
itself be mythomorphic. It must have the form of that of which it speaks. This
is what Lévi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, from which I would
now like to quote a long and remarkable passage:
In
effect the study of myths poses a methodological problem by the fact that it
cannot conform to the Cartesian principle of dividing the difficulty into as
many parts as are necessary to resolve. There exists no veritable end or term
to mythical analysis, no secret unity which could be grasped at the end of the
work of decomposition. The themes duplicate themselves to infinity. When we
think we have disentangled them from each other and can hold them separate, it
is only to realize that they are joining together again, in response to the
attraction of unforeseen affinities. In consequence, the unity of the myth is
only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state or a moment of the
myth. An imaginary phenomenon implied by the endeavor to interpret, its
role is to give a synthetic form to the myth and to impede its dissolution into
the confusion of contraries. It could therefore be said that the science or
knowledge of myths is an anaclastic, taking this ancient term in the
widest sense authorized by its etymology, a science which admits into its
definition the study of the reflected rays along with that of the broken ones.
But, unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go all the way back to
its source, the reflections in question here concern rays without any other
than a virtual focus. ... In wanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of
mythical thought, my enterprise, itself too brief and too long, has had to
yield to its demands and respect its rhythm. Thus is this book, on myths itself
and in its own way, a myth.
This statement is repeated a little farther on
(20): “Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (the first-order codes
being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft
of a third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of
translation of several myths. This is why it would not be wrong to consider it
a myth: the myth of mythology, as it were.” It is by this absence of any real
and fixed center of the mythical or mythological discourse that the musical
model chosen by Lévi-Strauss for the composition of his book is apparently
justified. The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject and the
absence of an author: “The myth and the musical work thus appear as orchestra
conductors whose listeners are the silent performers. If it be asked where the
real focus of the work is to be found, it must be replied that its determination
is impossible. Music and mythology bring man face to face with virtual objects
whose shadow alone is actual.... Myths have no authors” (25). Thus it is at
this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its
mythopoetic function. But by the same token, this function makes the
philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center appear as
mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion. Nevertheless, even if
one yields to the necessity of what Lévi-Strauss has done, one cannot ignore
its risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths
equivalent? Shall we have to abandon any epistemological requirement which
permits us to distinguish between several qualities of discourse on the myth? A
classic question, but inevitable. We cannot reply-and I do not believe
Lévi-Strauss replies to it-as long as the problem of the relationships between
the philosopheme or the theorem, on the one hand, and the mytheme or the
mythopoem(e), on the other, has no t been expressly posed. This is no
small problem. For lack of expressly posing this problem, we condemn ourselves
to transforming the claimed transgression of philosophy into an unperceived
fault in the interior of the philosophical field. Empiricism would be the genus
of which these faults would always be the species. Transphilosophical concepts
would be transformed into philosophical naivetes. One could give many examples
to demonstrate this risk: the concepts of sign, history, truth, and so forth.
What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not
consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually comes down to
philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain
way. The risk I am speaking of is always assumed by Lévi-Strauss and it is
the very price of his endeavor. I have said that empiricism is the matrix of
all the faults menacing a discourse which continues, as with Lévi-Strauss in
particular, to elect to be scientific. If we wanted to pose the problem of
empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would probably end up very quickly
with a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the
status of discourse in structural ethnography. On the one hand, structuralism
justly claims to be the critique of empiricism. But at the same time there is
not a single book or study by Lévi-Strauss which does not offer itself as an
empirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by new
information. The structural schemata are always proposed as hypotheses resulting
from a finite quantity of information and which are subjected to the proof of
experience. Numerous texts could be used to demonstrate this double
postulation. Let us turn once again to the “Overture” of The Raw and the
Cooked, where it seems clear that if this postulation is double, it is
because it is a question here of a language on language:
Critics who might take
me to task for not having begun by making an exhaustive inventory of South
American myths before analyzing them would be making a serious mistake about
the nature and the role of these documents. The totality of the myths of a
people is of the order of the discourse. Provided that this people does not
become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never closed. Such a
criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing
the grammar of a language without having recorded the totality of the words
which have been uttered since that language came into existence and without
knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as long as the language
continues to exist. Experience proves that an absurdly small number of
sentences ... allows the linguist to elaborate a grammar of the language he is
studying. And even a partial grammar or an outline of a grammar represents
valuable acquisitions in the case of unknown languages. Syntax does not wait
until it has been possible to enumerate a theoretically unlimited series of
events before becoming manifest, because syntax consists in the body of rules
which presides over the generation of these events. And it is precisely a
syntax of South American mythology that I wanted to outline. Should new texts
appear to enrich the mythical discourse, then this will provide an opportunity
to check or modify the way in which certain grammatical laws have been
formulated, an opportunity to discard certain of them and an opportunity to
discover new ones. But in no instance can the requirement of a total mythical
discourse be raised as an objection. For we have just seen that such a requirement
has no meaning (15-16).
Totalization is therefore defined at one time as useless, at
another time as impossible. This is no doubt the result of the fact that
there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. And I assert once
again that these two determinations coexist implicitly in the discourses of
Lévi-Strauss. Totalization can be judged impossible in the classical style: one
then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subject or of a finite discourse in
a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master.
There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be
determined in another way: not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude
as assigning us to an empirical view, but from the standpoint of the concept of
freeplay. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because
the infinity of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite
discourse, but because the nature of the field—that is, language and a finite
language—excludes totalization. This field is in fact that of freeplay,
that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite
ensemble. This field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is
finite, that is to say, because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in
the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something
missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of
substitutions. One could say rigorously using that word whose scandalous 'signification
is always obliterated in French-that this movement of the freeplay, permitted
by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity.
One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements9 it, which
takes its place in its absence—because this sign adds itself, occurs in
addition, over and above, comes as a supplement.”10 The movement of
signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is always
more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a
vicarious function, to supplement a lack on the part of the signified. Although
Lévi-Strauss in his use of the word “supplementary” never emphasizes as I am
doing here the two directions of meaning which are so strangely compounded within
it, it is not by chance that he uses this word twice in his “Introduction to
the Work of Marcel Mauss,”11 at the point where he is speaking of the
“superabundance of signifier, in relation to the signifieds to which this
superabundance can refer”:
In his endeavor
to understand the world, man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus
of signification (which he portions out amongst things according to the laws of
symbolic thought-which it is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study).
This distribution of a supplementary allowance [ration supplémentaire]—if
it is permissible to put it that way—is absolutely necessary in order that on
the whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remain in
the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the use of
symbolic thought (xlix).
(It could no doubt be demonstrated that this ration
supplémentaire of signification is the origin of the ratio itself.)
The word reappears a little farther on, after Lévi-Strauss has mentioned “this
floating signifier, which is the servitude of all finite tho ught”: In other
words—and taking as our guide Mauss's precept that all social phenomena can be
assimilated to language—we see in mana, Wakau, oranda and other notions
of the same type, the conscious expression of a semantic function, whose role
it is to permit symbolic thought to operate in spite of the contradiction which
is proper to it. In this way are explained the apparently insoluble antinomies
attached to this notion.... At one and the same time force and action, quality
and state, substantive and verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and
localized- mans is in effect all these things. But it is not precisely because
it is none of these things that mana is a simple form, or more exactly,
a symbol in the pure state, and therefore capable of becoming charged with any
sort of symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols constituted by all
cosmologies, mana would simply be a valeur symbolique zero, that is to
say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary [my
italics] to that with which the signified is already loaded, but which can take
on any value required, provided only that this value still remains part of the
available reserve and is not, as phonologists put it, a group-term.
Lévi-Strauss adds the note:
Linguists have already
been led to formulate hypotheses of this type. For example: “A zero phoneme is
opposed to all the other phonemes in French in that it entails no differential
characters and no constant phonetic value. On the contrary, the proper function
of the zero phoneme is to be opposed to phoneme absence.” (R. Jakobson and J.
Lutz, “Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern,” Word, vol. 5, no. 2
[August 1949], p. 155). Similarly, if we schematize the conception I am
proposing here, it could almost be said that the function of notions like mana
is to be opposed to the absence of signification, without entailing by
itself any particular signification (1 and note). The superabundance of
the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a
finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.
It can now be understood why the concept of freeplay is important in
Lévi-Strauss. His references to all sorts of games, notably to roulette, are
very frequent, especially in his Conversations,12 in Race and History,13 and in The Savage
Mind. This reference to the game or freeplay is always caught up in a
tension.
It is in tension with history, first of all. This is a classical
problem, objections to which are now well worn or used up. I shall simply
indicate what seems to me the formality of the problem: by reducing history,
Lévi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a concept which has always been in
complicity with a teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words,
paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of presence to which it was
believed history could be opposed. The thematic of historicity, although it
seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has always been required by
the determination of being as presence. With or without etymology, and in spite
of the classic antagonism which opposes these significations throughout all of
classical thought, it could be shown that the concept of episteme has always
called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a
becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge oriented
toward the appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward
knowledge in consciousness-of-self.14 History has always been conceived as the
movement of a resumptio n of history, a diversion between two presences. But if
it is legitimate to suspect this concept of history, there is a risk, if it is
reduced without an express statement of the problem I am indicating here, of
falling back into an anhistoricism of a classical type, that is to say, in a
determinate moment of the history of metaphysics. Such is the algebraic
formality of the problem as I see it. More concretely, in the work of Lévi-Strauss
it must be recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal
originality of the structure, compels a neutralization of time and history. For
example, the appearance of a new structure, of an original system, always comes
about-and this is the very condition of its structural specificity-by a rupture
with its past, its origin, and its cause. One can therefore describe what is
peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account, in the
very moment of this description, its past conditions: by failing to pose the
problem of the passage from one structure to another, by putting history into
parentheses. In this “structuralist” moment, the concepts of chance and
discontinuity are indispensable. And Lévi-Strauss does in fact often appeal to
them as he does, for instance, for that structure of structures, language, of
which he says in the “Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss” that it “could
only have been born in one fell swoop”:
Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its
appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in
one fell swoop. Things could not have set about signifying progressively.
Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of the social
sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over came about from
a stage where nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it
(xlvi).
This standpoint does not prevent Lévi-Strauss from recognizing the
slowness, the process of maturing, the continuous toil of factual
transformations, history (for examp le, in Race and History). But, in
accordance with an act which was also Rousseau's and Husserl's, he must “brush
aside all the facts” at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity
of a structure. Like Rousseau, he must always conceive of the origin of a new
structure on the model of catastrophe—an overturning of nature in nature, a
natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of nature.
Besides the tension of freeplay with history, there is also
tension of freeplay with presence. Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The
presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference
inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is
always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically
conceived, freeplay must be conceived of before the alternative of presence and
absence; being must be conceived of as presence or absence beginning with the
possibility of freeplay and not the other way around. If Lévi-Strauss, better
than any other, has brought to light the freeplay of repetition and the
repetition of freeplay, one no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic of
presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural
innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech15--an ethic,
nostalgia, and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the
ethnological project when he moves toward archaic societies— exemplary
societies in his eyes. These texts are well known. As a turning toward the
presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic
of broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty,
Rousseauist facet of the thinking of freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation—the
joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and without truth, without
origin, offered to an active interpretation— would be the other side. This
affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center.
And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure freeplay: that
which is limited to the substitution of given and existing,
present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself
to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.16 There are
thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay.
The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is
free from freeplay and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the
necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned toward the
origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name
man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or
of onto-theology—in other words, through the history of all of his history—has
dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of
the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche
showed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Lévi-Strauss wished, the
“inspiration of a new humanism” (again from the “Introduction to the Work of
Marcel Mauss”). There are more than enough indications today to suggest we
might perceive that these two interpretations of interpretation which are
absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile
them in an obscure economy- together share the field which we call, in such a
problematic fashion, the human sciences.
For my part, although these two
interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their différence and
define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question
of choosing in the first place because here we are in a region (let's say,
provisionally, a region of historicity) where the category of choice seems
particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive
of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference.17 Here
there is a sort of question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing
today the conception, the formation, the gestation, the
labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of
childbearing-but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I
do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet
unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary
whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species,
in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.
