Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences, the center is not the center

Why does Derrida say that the center is not the center in his essay “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences?''

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. 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.

Derrida then introduces the idea that some "event" has occurred. This "event" is some sort of "rupture" or break.  What he's talking about is what he sees as a major shift or break in the fundamental structure of western philosophy (the episteme). This break is a moment where the whole way philosophy thought about itself shifted. That shift, or rupture, was when it became possible to think about "the structurality of structure." In other words, this is the moment when structuralism pointed out that language was indeed a structure, when it became possible to think (abstractly) about the idea of structure itself, and how every system--whether language, or philosophy itself--had a structure. 

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”.

A less concrete example of a system with a center would be a philosophical or belief system--say, the Puritan mindset. In the Puritan system of belief, GOD was the center of everything--anything that happened in the world (i.e. any event, or "unit", of the system) could be referred back to God as the central cause of that event. And nothing in the system was the equivalent of God--nothing could replace God at the center as the cause of all things. Refer this back to Saussure's idea that value comes from difference; that idea is based on the exchangeability between units (verbs are not nouns, but both are words, and could be exchanged for each other). The center of a system is something that has no equivalent value, nothing can replace it or be exchanged for it, it's the cause and ultimate referent for everything in the system. 

Because of this, Derrida says, the center is a weird part of a system or structure--it's part of the structure, but not part of it, because it is the governing element; as he puts it (84) the center is the part of the structure which "escapes structurality." In the Puritan example, God creates the world and rules it, and is responsible for it, but isn't part of it. 

The center is thus, paradoxically, both within the structure and outside it. The center is the center but not part of what Derrida calls "the totality," i.e. the structure. So the center is not the center. The concept of the centered structure, according to Derrida, is "contradictorily coherent."

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.

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 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. 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. 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.

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.