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Poststructuralism

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Title: Poststructuralism


1
Poststructuralism
  • Deconstruction

2
  • Poststructuralist theory crucially problematizes
    the reliability or stability of meaning, placing
    language in a place where it slides between the
    signifier (word), signified (concept) and
    referent (thing).

3
  • Saussure was responsible for putting into
    circulation the terms signifier and signified in
    order to account for the arbitrary- relationship
    between words and concepts.

4
  • In Poststructuralism, language becomes text or
    textuality.
  • The insistence on the fundamentally unreliable,
    shifting nature of meaning produces a theory of
    literature which profoundly questions, the
    relation of language to empirical reality.
  • This radical view of language is perhaps most
    readily associated with deconstruction

5
AUTHOR
  • Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of the
    author in a 1968 essay in which he questioned
    the traditional assumption that a text is
    directly and solely traceable to a single author
    for meaning and production, in short, for
    authority.
  • Poststructuralist critical practice contests the
    category of the author as omniscient or the
    single source of power in relation to a text.
  • Meaning is not fixed by or located in the
    authors intention, whatever that may be.
  • What poststructuralist critics question is a
    texts reliance on a single self-determining
    author, in control of his meanings, who fulfils
    his intentions and only his intentions For
    Eagleton, textual meaning cannot be ascribed to
    authorial intention because it is the product
    of language, which always has something slippery
    about it.

6
articulated by a speaking subject located in
society
  • More recent poststructuralist debates, have
    modified this view of language and literature by
    proposing that language be considered as one
    system in relation to other systems, and always
    as one articulated by a speaking subject
    located in society, with language more accurately
    conceived as language-in-use rather than a
    fixed structure or system.

7
discourse
  • The preferred term has become discourse,
    associated with Michel Foucault.
  • a view of language as being linked to subjective,
    social processes as opposed to closed or
    immutable states.

8
DISCOURSE
  • means an instance of language or utterance
    involving the speaker/writer-subject and
    reader/listener-object.
  • Discourse is this located in and inflected by its
    social and ideological environment the term
    discourse denotes language in actual use within
    its social and ideological context and in
    institutionalized representations of the world
    called discursive practices
  • Theoretically, discourse may include any form of
    utterance. 20th theory, notably through Michel
    Foucaultss work, has stressed the collusion
    (confabulación) of discourse with power
    discourse (the articulated categories of
    thought) orders a knowledge along lines that
    produce subjects open to powers control.

9
Poststructuralism sees reality as being much
more fragmented, diverse, tenuous and
culture-specific than does structuralism.
  • Some consequences have been,
  • 1. poststructuralisms greater attention to
    specific stories, to the details and local
    contextualizations of concrete instances
  • 2. a greater emphasis on the body, the actual
    insertion of the human into the texture of time
    and history
  • 3. a greater attention to the specifics of
    cultural working, to the arenas of discourse and
    cultural practice
  • 4. a greater attention to the role of language
    and textuality in our construction of reality and
    identity.

10
According to poststructuralist theories
  • The relationship of literature any discourse- to
    reality is problematic and complex. Literature
    re-presents and refracts reality and language
    itself constitutes reality
  • Language precedes the speaking/writing subject
    who produces discourse (spoken language, a short
    story, a poem, etc.) by drawing on and arranging
    the discourses or codes always-already available
    to him or her.

11
BARTHESThe Death of the Author
  • The author is a modern figure, a product of
    capitalist society which has attached great
    importance to the person of the author.
  • Literature is tyrannically centred on the author,
    his life, person, tastes and passions.
  • The explanation of a text is sought in the person
    who produced it. In ethnographic societies, the
    responsibility for a narrative is never assumed
    by a person but by a mediator, a relator.

12
  • Barthes questioned the importance of the author.
    The effective reading of a text depends on the
    suspension of preconceived ideas about the
    character of the particular author or about human
    psychology in general.
  • It is language that speaks and not the author who
    no longer determines meaning. Consequences We no
    longer talk about works but texts.
  • The author, the reader and the text are each
    composed of a universe of quotations. The moment
    the author detaches himself from an immediate
    context, the reader is born and it is language
    which speaks.

13
  • The author is previous to his work he exists
    before it and creates it.
  • The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with
    the text. To give a text an author is to impose a
    limit, to give it a final signified, to close the
    writing.

14
From work to TextBarthes
  • The text cannot be contained in a hierarchy, not
    even in a division of genres. It contains a
    subversive force in respect to old
    classifications.
  • The text is plural, a tissue of woven fabric
    woven with citations, references, echoes,
    cultural languages, that make it anonymous,
    untraceable.
  • The text reads without its author. He is present
    just as one of its characters, no longer
    privileged, paternal.
  • The text asks from the reader a practical
    collaboration, readerly aspect o a text

15
DECONSTRUCTION
  • The most influential approach to textual analysis
    in the poststructuralist era, deconstruction, is
    associated with Derrida.
  • Deconstruction adopts an uncompromisingly
    (inflexiblemente) skeptical stance on language
    and meaning through a radical questioning of the
    sign, or the system of signs known as language.

16
  • According to Derrida, the sign lies at the core
    of Western philosophy and has traditionally
    engaged humans in the quest to arrive at that
    centre in search of being and presence. In his Of
    the Grammatologie (1967)

17
logocentrism
  • Derrida terms this drive logocentrism, (from
    Greek logos word but in philosophy also
    ultimate truth or logic) and traces its weight
    and significance in Western metaphysics to the
    fact that the New Testament invokes the term as
    the origin of all things In the beginning was
    the Word.

18
The Word carries the greatest possible
concentration of presence
  • and underwrites the full presence of the world
    everything is the effect of this one cause.
  • The Word is compared with God, since the entire
    world is generated through divine utterance and
    the Word was God (John 1.1).
  • The fact that God speaks the word into being
    has traditionally conferred on speech a
    privileged status over writing, something Derrida
    calls phonocentrism, and it is closely associated
    with logocentrism.

19
  • Manifesting an intellectual debt to Saussure,
    Derrida denies the signs ability to achieve full
    presence by arguing that the sign is itself not
    unitary but split.

20
He invokes the ambiguous neologism différence, a
term
  • which lies at the heart of his analytical method
    and inquiry, and points to the dual way in which
    language prevents full access to meaning.
  • Différance combines the two French homophones
    contained in the verb différer, meaning both to
    differ and to defer (the pun also works in
    Spanish diferir). Différance is pronounced the
    same as différence, moreover, the ambiguity is
    silent in speech and visible only in writing.

21
  • At the same time, the sign also endlessly
    postpones fully present meaning since meaning is
    always being deferred from one sign to another.
  • If you look up a word in a dictionary, all it
    can give you is another words to explain it so
    in theory, at least- you will then have to look
    these up, and so on without end

22
Derrida terms violent hierarchies, such as the
binaries or couplets
  • nature/civilization, male/female, good/evil,
    philosophy/literature, etc.
  • The most scrutinized of these by Derrida is the
    speech/writing hierarchy, where speech, according
    to the traditional Western thought, occupies the
    privileged first place in the binary and where
    the latter term writing- is held to be a
    polluted version or to threaten contamination of
    the former with its materiality, or simply to be
    lacking in presence.

23
Deconstructive method
  • proceeds to unsettle this hierarchical
    arrangement by noting that speech itself shares
    characteristics with writing.
  • Both are signifying processes that cannot escape
    the difference/deferral sequence in pursuit of
    meaning.
  • Since full meaning full presence- is
    unattainable in speech or in writing, it makes no
    sense to accord a privileged status to either
    term or, writing is just entitled to occupy the
    first slot in the hierarchy. In other words,
    writing precedes speech.

24
The basis of Derridean deconstructive method
  • Identify a binary or violent hierarchy,
    destabilize it, reverse it and, ultimately,
    resist the temptation to hierarchize the
    (original) second term.

25
Textual or literary deconstruction seeks to
demonstrate
  • that the either/or paradigm promoted by binary
    oppositions in reality masks both/and
    relationships, it upholds the undecidability of
    the text.
  • A text never achieves closure, remaining instead
    an open field of possibilities.
  • Deconstructions critiques. It has been accused
    of being wilfully obscure, nihilistic,
    self-contradictory and, in its attention to
    formal aspects of language and textuality,
    apolitical or ahistorical.
  • Nevertheless, in its pursuit of difference rather
    than identity, deconstruction has proven
    immensely suggestive and influential with regard
    to more explicitly engaged readings of texts.

26
Derrida
  • father of deconstructionism, a system of analysis
    which challenges the basis of traditional western
    thought.
  • The deconstructive approach argues that all
    writing has multiple layers of meaning which even
    its author might not understand and which leave
    it open to an endless process of reinterpretation

27
  • Derrida was the embodiment of the
    philosopher-rebel, admired for his explosive
    critique of the authoritarian values latent in
    orthodox approaches to literature and philosophy.
  • Using the term "deconstruction", he challenged
    the notion that language can express ideas
    without changing them and questioned the "ruling
    illusion of western metaphysics"

28
  • his way of reading texts was to highlight
    blind-spots (aporias, from the Greek meaning "the
    impassable"), equivocations and contradictions
    within it.
  • Typically, he sought to show how certain elements
    within the work - often marginal elements like
    prefaces and footnotes - subverted the conceptual
    distinctions and hierarchies that its author set
    out to defend.

29
  • Derrida's deconstructionism probably exercised
    its greatest influence upon North American
    academics, especially literary critics.
  • He once admitted that deconstruction was "a
    certain experience of the impossible".
    Deconstruction is related to post-structuralism
    and postmodernism.

30
At its core
  • deconstruction is an attempt to open a text
    (literary, philosophical, or otherwise) to a
    range of meanings and interpretations.
  • Its method is usually to take binary oppositions
    within a text -rigidly defined pairs of opposites
    like good/evil or male/female-
  • and show that they are not as clear-cut or as
    stable as it first seems, that the two opposed
    concepts are in fact fluid, then to use this
    newfound ambiguity to show that the text's
    meaning is similarly fluid.

31
  • This fluidity stands as a legacy of traditional
    (that is, Platonist) metaphysics founded on
    oppositions that seek to establish a stability of
    meaning through conceptual absolutes where one
    term, for example 'good', is elevated to a status
    that designates its opposite, in this case
    'evil', to its perversion, lack, or inferior.
  • However, these "violent hierarchies", are
    eventually silently challenged by the texts
    themselves, where the meaning of a text depends
    on this contradiction or antinomy.

32
  • No 'meaning' is ever stable rather, the only
    thing that keeps the sense of unity within a text
    is what Derrida called the 'metaphysics of
    presence', where presence was granted the
    privilege of truth.

33
Deconstruction French word that he received but
did not invent. Often described as
  • A method of analysis
  • An act of reading
  • A type of critic
  • A way of writing
  • What has been seen as revolutionary about his
    work for both philosophy and literary studies is
    the particular way he attends to language.

34
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