Structuralism
1. Model of reading texts
2. How to unpack the elements that
constituted the text's meaning
(textual analysis)
3. How to pay close attention to language and form
4. Formulaic structure.
Poststructuralism
Expression of a sense of disillusionment—with the nation-state,
with philosophies of emancipation.
-a shift away from the formulaic,
ordered work of structuralism.
Roland Barthes
moved away from his structuralist phase (S/Z and the Structural Analysis of Narrative)
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Post structuralist phase
A).'openness’ of texts
B).the text's connections with other texts
C).the reader's role in the production of meaning.
Jacques Derrida
The First complete book - Of Grammatology
appearing in 1976
translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
1970- 1990
Works of Derrida
The historian of ideas, Michel Foucault
The philosophers Jean- François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari
The Marxist literary critic- Frederic Jameson
Semiotician-psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva
Spivak's own work, that of postmodernists, Slavoj Žižek, Jean Baudrillard
and feminists like Judith Butler.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Michel Foucault, Professor of the History of the Systems of Thought
which he calls as
‘archaeology of the human sciences’
1.The rise of the forms of knowledge
2.The classificatory mechanisms
of knowledge
3. The rules by which knowledge was collected, archived and disseminated.
Foucault's interest lay in
1. Unpacking the process of inquiry (knowledge-gathering),
2. The very nature of the object (about which knowledge is being gathered), and
3. The possibilities of using and distributing this knowledge.
Knowledge is constructed, organized, shared and used through particular forms of speech, writing and
language—or what is called discourse.
Discourse is the context of speech,
representation, knowledge and understanding.
It is the context in which meaning itself
is produced.
Foucault's major contribution has been to show how these discourses
condition people's lives and inform their thinking.
THE DECONSTRUCTIVE TURN: BARTHES AND DERRIDA
Roland Barthes rebels against structuralist readings of texts.
He argued that texts can be either ‘readerly’ or ‘writerly’. A readerly text was one that left the reader with nothing to do—it explained, and described everything.
Controlled meaning and the reader was a mere passive recipient of meaning.
Barthes was proposing that meaning was not embedded within the text but within the reader who derived meaning from the textual process, as he puts it in ‘The Death of the Author’.
A text, on the other hand, is a process in language. ‘Text’ here begins to mean a series of linguistic processes that are decoded by the reader.
As Barthes puts it in ‘From Work to Text’: ‘the text is experienced only as an activity of production’.
Barthes sees the author as the controlling authority that prevents a work from becoming a text. It will remain a work, and not become a text.
1. The text is plural,
2. The text is open to other texts in an endless series of intertextual operations (what Barthes terms ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’, ),
3. The author is ‘dead’ and is therefore no more the sole authority over a text's
meaning,
Derrida's early work built upon the Saussurean notions of language and
signification.
Derrida argued that if the relation between signifier and signified is arbitrary and all language is relational then the process of ‘reading’ is a movement from one signifier to another.
We can never come to the ‘end’ of signification and discover the meaning because when we get to the end we are faced not with the signified but with yet another signifier.
Every signifier refers to other words/signifiers in an endless postponement—deference—of meaning.
There is no ‘final’ signified because even that signified will consist of more words (signifiers).
Every signifier, argued Derrida, is made up of an absence. The meaning is the result of difference. Derrida suggests that every word carries within it the
words that we are aware of as being different.
Every signifier is a series of presence of difference. Meaning, ironically, depends as much on the absence
of other words.
Derrida's chief contribution has been to show how language is fundamentally slippery, based on self-contradictory, unfinalizable conditions of difference and deference.
His arguments have focused on
the need to pay closer attention to the way in which meanings are produced temporarily rather than with any finality, through contradictions and ambivalence, and have consistently rebelled against any 'authoritative’ or authoritarian meaning.
What Derrida achieved with these twin moves—of meaning as based on
difference and absent presences, and as perpetually deferred—was a radical
rethinking of the very process of language use.
Différance: a term that combines difference and deference (postponement).
All writing is this différance, and a study of this différance is what Derrida
famously termed ‘grammatology’.
Both suggested the endless play in language and literary texts, the unreliability of any meaning, the openness of texts, the instability of language, the unfinalizability of any meaning or text, the relationships between words, meanings and texts as intrinsic to meaning rather than the words themselves.
Derrida termed this privileging of speech over writing, phonocentrism.
Speech is privileged because it seems to have an ‘essence’: the speaker.
Listeners assume the speaker embodies the truth of what is being said because the speaker is present.
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