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
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