Monday, 30 August 2021

POST-STRUCTURALISM

 

POST-STRUCTURALISM

 

          A love-hate relationship with structuralism developed in the 1960s among many leading French thinkers.  In 1966 Jacques Derrida delivered a lecture on the title ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’.  That event decentered the former intellectual cosmos.  A year later Roland Bathes’s ‘The death of the author’ argued that the literary text has multiple meanings and that the author was not the prime source of the work’s semantic content.  Thus, the birth of the reader became the source of the proliferation of the meanings of the text.  In this way Post Structuralism appeared as not only a continuation and development of structuralism but as a form of rebellion also to it.  The Post-Structuralists began to accuse structuralists for their not following through the implications of the views about languages on which their intellectual system is based. Moreover, one of the structuralistic views is the notion that language doesn’t just reflect or record the world; rather it shapes it.  So, to them, how we see it is what we see.  As we enter a universe of radical uncertainty, we cannot access to any fixed landmark and we cannot have any standard to measure.  So, all the concepts of the structuralism are to be deconstructed.  So, the scholars like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault became Post-structuralists.

          Deconstruction, a form of semiotic analysis (signs and symbols) of Jacques Derrida (1930-2009), the French philosopher, is a theory that has actually given shape to Post-structuralism.  It argues that language in its concepts of certainty, indentity and truth is unfortunately complex, unstable and sometimes impossible to determine.  Since the systems are always changing, it is impossible to describe a complete system, like one’s insisting on the association of darkness with evil and vice versa.  As words have no absolute meaning like this, any text is open to an unlimited range of interpretations.  So, to have a better and clearer understanding of the text, we should go beyond the structuralistic theories that imply a rigid inner logic to relationships that describe any aspect of social reality.  Thus deconstruction mainly focuses its attention on the slipperiness of language.  It makes the reader reject the traditional readings and seek out contradictory view points and analyses to decipher a new meaning.

          According to Jacques Derrida, as texts have more than one interpretation, a ‘deconstructive reading’ must always aims at certain relationship by the writer between what he commands and what he doesn’t command’.  Barbara Johnson also clarifies it by saying, ‘Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction’.  But it is much closer to ‘analysis’ which etymologically means ‘undo’ or ‘to deconstruct’.  So, deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.  Thus, deconstruction that owes much to Jacques Derrida’s grammatology defined a new kind of reading practice that has become a key application of Post-structuralism.

          Peter Barry is also of the opinion that Deconstruction has to be divided into three parts namely verbal, textual and linguistic.  According to him verbal stage is close reading, where one looks for paradoxes and contradictions.  In the textual stage, a critic looks for shifts or breaks in the continuity of the poem.  In the linguistic stage, the critic looks for the implicit and explicit reference to the unreliability or unworthiness of the language.

          Moreover, Derrida doesn’t agree with the strucuralists, especially in their langue and parole concept where they establish the traditional ‘hierarchy’ of speech over writing.  She argues that as speech and writing are forms of the same science of language, grammatology, speech is also subject to the same instability of writing.  Apart from this, she also criticizes the entire tradition of western philosophy’s search for discovering the essential structure of knowledge and reality.  It’s actually their futile attempt of confronting the limits of human thought.  They want to establish a logo centrism that is stable.  But, when a novel is read again after twenty years with the deconstructive reading, it will have definitely different meaning then.  This happens because the logocentric thought won’t have a fixed meaning.  Moreover, their logocentric theories are all based on binary oppositions and hierarchical dualisms, where presence and absence, reality and appearance, male and female, have their roles to play.  Here, unfortunately the first element is regarded as stronger and thus becomes true and a preferable one.  But, in a deconstructive reading, this assumed centre, unconscious point is revealed.  Thus, the binary structure upon which the text rests is imploded (collapsed). Here, what appears to be logical is revealed to be illogical and paradoxical.

          Aporia, a philosophical term that describes a contradiction, paradox or logical impasse in a text is also considered as an effective one in Post Structuralism.  As it is a rhetorical device in which the speaker expresses uncertainty or doubt about something, often pretended one, it is to persuade the others.  In an Aporia, the writer expresses doubt about the current topic that he is dealing with.  So, there is a possibility to have an unlimited range of interpretations.  Then, Derrida also coined the term, ‘Differance’ meaning both difference and an act of ‘deferring’.  The meaning of a word is created not given.  Each word actually depends for its meaning on the meanings of other words.  The meaning is endlessly ‘deferred’ in an infinitely long chain of meanings.  These are all identified in a deconstructive reading and so it helps us to have a better and clearer understanding of the text.

          Thus, Post-structuralists have pushed language to the extreme and have concluded that truth, meaning and understanding are impossible.  So, as words have no absolute meaning, any text is open to an unlimited range of interpretations.  Apart from Derrida there are many Post-structuralists like Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, who had their sizable contributions to Post-structuralism.  Moreover, it is not that much easy to distinguish Post-structuralism from Structuralism as both theories are based on the concepts of Saussure and Strauss.  But, the Post structuralists have applied their insights to a wider range of topics and radicalize some of the premises of the Structuralists.


----Thulasidharan V

Sunday, 29 August 2021

STRUCTURALISM

 

STRUCTURALISM

 

            Structuralism is an intellectual movement by the influence of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), that began in France in the 1950s.  It was first seen in the works of the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss (1908 -2009) and the literary critic Roland Barthes (1915-1980).  It designates the practice of analyzing and evaluating a work of art on the explicit model of Structuralist linguistics.  It is based on the concept that things cannot be fully understood in isolation.  They have to be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of.  So, structuralism is a method of interpreting and analyzing literature that focuses on contrasting ideas and elements of structure and attempts to show how they relate to the whole structure.

          According to Ferdinand de Saussure, who moved away from the then present historical and philological study of language to the study of structures, patterns and functions of language, language is not a naming process by which things get associated with a word or name.  It is a process where the linguistic sign is made of the union of ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’.  The ‘signifier’ is what we call ‘something’.  It is the sign’s physical form.  The sound, image and the printed word are signifiers.  The word, ‘tree’ for tree.  The ‘signified’ is the meaning, idea and concept expressed by a sign.  It is the sign’s conceptual aspect.  By the word tree what we mean is ‘signified’.

          Apart from these ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’ concept, Saussure’s langue and parole concept too influenced the structuralists.  Langue (language) referred to the rules behind the way the language is arranged and used.  Parole (speech) referred to the actual utterance of language, both spoken and written.  The structuralists began to illustrate with the help of narratology how a story’s meaning developed from its overall structure (langue) rather than from each individual story’s isolated theme (Parole).  The structuralists used the semiotic theory of Saussure too in their critical analysis.  As all the signs in the sign system of language are cultural constructs, they have taken on their meaning through repeated, learned and collective use.  So, they are arbitrary and relational.  The paradigmatic chain in hovel-Shed-hut-house-mansion-palace, shows that the meaning of each is dependent upon its position in the chain.        

          Similarly, Binary opposition is also an important concept of Structuralism.  It is actually the fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture and language.  According to Saussure, though binary opposition is actually the presence – absence dichotomy, it is not a contradictory relation but a structural and a complementary one.  It can easily be understood with an example of good and evil.  We cannot conceive of ‘good’ if we don’t understand ‘evil’.

          Structuralism was the first school of psychology that tried to understand the basic elements of consciousness using a method known as introspection.  Edward. B. Tichener talks about the three elementary stages of consciousness, which are actually the three components of structuralism.  They are sensations (sights, sounds and tastes), images (components of thoughts) and affections (components of emotions).  So, meaning is always an attribute of things.  The meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them.

          When we are confronted with Donne’s ‘Good Morrow’, it can only be understood if we have a clear notion of the genre it belongs to.  That is the ‘alba’ or ‘dawn song’, a poetic form dating from the 12th century in which the lovers lament the approach of day break because it means that they must part.  To understand ‘alba’ well, we should know the concept of courtly love too.  Thus, the structuralist approach, makes the reader move away from the interpretation of the individual literary work and have a parallel drive towards understanding the larger, abstract structures that contain them.

Roland Barthes’ ‘Mythologies’, Jonathan Culler’s ‘Structuralist Poetics’ and Robert Scholes’s ‘Structuralism in literature’, attracted worldwide attention.  However, by the late 60s, many of the structuralistic concepts attacked by Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser and even by Roland Barthes.  Though the elements of their works were all related to structuralism, they began to consider themselves as Post Structuralists.


------Thulasidharan V