Discuss Structure, sign and Play
Introduction:-
Jacques Derrida was Algerian born
French Philosopher. In the area of philosophy and literary criticism alone,
Derrida has been cited more than 14000 times in Journal articles over the past
two decades. Derrida’s deconstructionist works are integrally related to
post-modernism. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964. One
values Derrida’s writings and the philosophical position and intellectual
positions from which he proceeds, it would be wrong handed to think of him as
an occupant of some ‘Ivory Tower’.
Structure, Sign and Play Elaborating Derrida’s view:-
“Structure, Sign and Play” shows how
philosophy and science understand ‘Structure’. Derrida discusses with
structuralism, a type of analysis which understand individual elements of
language and culture as embedded in larger structures. The archetypal example
of structuralism is discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure.
Derrida
also directly dealt with Saussure in a related book title Grammatology. In
Grammatology the relationship between elements of cultural systems like
mythology is analyzed.
The
New York Times pointed out in its obituary for Derrida that “Structure, Sign
and Play” offered professors of literature a philosophical movement they could
legitimately consider their own.
“Structure, Sign and Play” was first published in 1970.
Derrida admirers the reflexivity and abstract analysis of structuralism, but
argues that these discourses have still not gone far enough in treating
structures as free floating or ‘playing’ sets of relationships. He accuses
structuralism discourses of holding on a ‘center’: a privileged term anchoring
the structure and does not play. Derrida suggests that this model of structure
will end-is ending and that a never and freer thinking about structures will
emerge.
The
essay begins by speculating, “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-structuralist – thought to reduce or suspect.” The ‘center’
is that element of a structure which appears given or fixed, thereby anchoring
the rest of the structure and allowing it to play.
In
the history of metaphysics, this function is fulfilled by different term like
“eidos, arche,
telos, energia, ousia [essence, existence, substance subject]
aleteia, transcendentality,
consciousness or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”
Whichever
term is at the center of the structure, argues Derrida, the overall pattern
remains similar. This central term ironically escapes structurality, the main
character of structuralism by which all meaning is defined relationally, with
the help of other
structure.
The question to be discussed is the opening of the
structure which became inevitable ”when the structurality of structure had to
begin to be thought” and the contradictory role of the center exposed. The
result of the event, according to Derrida, must be the full version of
structural “free play”, a mode in which all terms are truly subject promised by
structuralism.
According
to Derrida, just as philosophers use metaphysical term used and concept to
critique metaphysics, the ethnologist “accepts into his discourse the
premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them”.
Derrida further discusses, Levi-Strauss use of the term ‘bricolage’. Brecolage
becomes a metaphor for philosophical and literary critiques, exemplifying
Derrida’s argument about the necessity of using the language available. The
bricoleur’s foil is the engineer, who creates out of whole cloth without the
need for bricolage.
Derrida says:-
“Structural
discourse on myths-mythological discourse on myths-mythological discourse-must
itself is mythopomorphic.”
Derrida
also criticizes Levi-Strauss for his inability to explain historical changes-for
describing historical changes-for describing structural transformation as the
result of mysterious outside forces. Derrida concludes by reaffirming the
existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses
this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet
inevitable.
Define Deconstruction:-
Deconstruction, as applied in the
criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which
questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine” the assumption that the system
of language provides groups that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the
coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.
Deconstruction:
In the criticism of literature, Deconstruction is a theory and practice of
reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ and ‘undermine’. The attention
was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text, consequently textual
analysis become more important than extra textual information. In this process
the important of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader
Response or Reception Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a
further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not
the writing of the text. The readers rules the supreme and the validity of his
reading cannot be challenged. However the structure of each reading has to be
coherent and convincing.
Decentering the centre:-
Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. He seeks to prove that the
structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play
of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure
which was paradoxically thought to be within, and outside this structure, it
was truth and within, it was intangibility. But Derrida contends that, ‘the
centre could not be thought in the form of a begging presence’. The textuality
is the free play of signifiers. There is no signifier that is not itself a
signifier. Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally
unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings
but reveals them, thereby implying that meanings, pre-exists their expression.”
This
for Derrida is nonsense. For him there can be no meaning which is not
formulated, we cannot reach outside language.
Supplementarity:-
A text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like
time, ever in a state of flux. Just as time has no origin, so also the origin
of language is inconceivable.
Derrida quotes and approve Levi-Strauss who writes:
“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 full swoop.”
It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the
older ones.
“The totality of the myths of a people”
Derrida quotes Levi-Strauss:-
“is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these
people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totally is never
extinct.”
The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart
from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it
employs. The absence of centre of a origin is the movement of Supplementarity.
The process of Supplementarity has no end. Because positive and concrete
definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily requires a
supplement or supplements, something or some things which helps it exist and
understood. The truth of the text which in fact only language, and create
in our quest another text through our criticism to supplement the lack of the
original text. Original text-reading is reactivating the expressivity of the
text with help of its indicative signs. But in the words of John
Sturrock,
“The meanings that are read into it may or may not
coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested it
with.”
Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing
imploded the foundation of western philosophy. There is scant little chance of
denying that Derrida himself holds some special place in this development: if
not as its father than at least as its catalyst.
Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to discovery, that his task is to
“dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures” operative in a texts
“not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another
way”, that he puts into question the “search for the signified not annual it,
but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.”
Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences:-
In his famous essay, ‘structure, sign and play in the Discourse of the Human science’s
which was read at the John Hopkins International colloquium on “The
Language of Criticism and the sciences of Man” in October 1966.
Derrida demonstrates how structuralism as represented by the
anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss which sets out as a criticism or
rejection of science and metaphysics can be read as embodying precisely those
aspects of science and metaphysics which it seeks to challenge. The
essay concludes by saying:
“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of
structure, of sign, of free play, the one seeks to decipher, dreams of
deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from free play and from the
order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.”
Thus, we have two diametrically opposite interpretations of structuralism, and
we are unable to decide which the ‘right’ one is. Thus ‘aporia’ between two
interpretations is due to the force of ‘difference’ intrinsic to the structure
of language. Characteristically, Derrida in this essay notes that ‘language
bears within itself, the necessity of its own critique’. The essay considered
as inauguration of ‘post structuralism’ as a theoretical movement.
Conclusion:
Derrida
concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within
structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited
free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.
VERY HELPFUL
ReplyDelete