Title: Poststructuralism
1Poststructuralism
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
5AUTHOR
- 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.
6articulated 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.
7discourse
- 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.
8DISCOURSE
- 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.
9Poststructuralism 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.
10According 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.
11BARTHESThe 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.
14From 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
15DECONSTRUCTION
- 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)
17logocentrism
- 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.
18The 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.
20He 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
22Derrida 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.
23Deconstructive 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.
24The 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.
25Textual 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.
26Derrida
- 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.
30At 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.
33Deconstruction 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(No Transcript)