7. Post-structuralism- Jacques Derrida-“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

Question 1

“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

Answer 1

• ”Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an ’event’, if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural – or structuralist – thought to reduce or to suspect” (89).
• To suspect, that is, of being the derivative, subordinated, accidental, and secondary pole of the structure/event dichotomy.

Question 2

Enter: the Center

Answer 2

• What the structure/event dichotomy has basically ignored is a third term: that of the center.
• “Nevertheless up to the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure – or rather the structurality of structure – although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure – one cannot in fact conceive of an unorganized structure – but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself” (90).

Question 3

Thinking the structurality of structure I

Answer 3

• Taking the example of Lévi-Strauss: While the structure – with the basic nature/culture antinomy – stays the same, the center allows for the play – the almost innumerable – varieties of actual myths to take place.
• Indeed, although it has never been admitted, the thought of an unorganized structure doesn’t make any sense, since an unorganized structure is no structure at all, but simply chaos.
• This unacknowledged center, however, leads a rather paradoxical life, since, while it allows for the structure to be organized, it escapes structurality itself:
• “Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which, while govering the structure, escapes structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is not the center. The concept of centered structure – although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the epistémé as philosophy or science – is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire” (90).
• Note that “coherence in contradiction” is basically the definition of – myth!
• And myth is also, according to Horkheimer/Adorno, the expression of a fear – or rather, the desire to overcome fear, to control it.
• “The concept of centered structure is in fact a concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset” (90)

Question 4

Thinking the historicity of structurality

Answer 4

• “If this is so, then the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of center…. It could be shown that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated an invariable presence – eidos, arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), alétheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth” (90/1)
• To think, then, of the historicity of these centers as constituting some kind of a directed and logical continuity would also be mistaken, since that in itself would assume a telos of this history – which again presumes two centers (an origin and a goal) as presence.
• This supplementary chain of centers driven by a desire will also play a huge role in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Question 5

Event(ually): The linguistic turn

Answer 5

• “… it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse … that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (91).
• As there is no such thing as a transcendental signified (there never has been), not only is the controlled play guaranteed by it “turned loose”, so to speak; the transcendental signified itself is part of this playful, supplementary chain that, in turn, is unorganized itself.

Question 6

No way out…

Answer 6

• There is, however, not simply a way out of this philosophical discourse that has shaped our views for centuries; we cannot simply leave it behind and create, ab ovo, a new one. That something like such an act of creation (a new origin) should be possible, is itself a myth: the myth of the engineer, made up by the bricoleur.
• “There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We have no language – no syntax and no lexicon – which is foreign to this history; we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip in the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest” (91/2).

Question 7

Bricoleur vs. Ingenieur

Answer 7

• We thus have to proceed with what Lévi-Strauss – defining mythical ”logic” – has termed bricolage: to work with what is at hand.
• Contrary to the bricoleur, the engineer is the origin of his own discourse – which, as we now know, is impossible. It is, in fact, another myth:
• ”The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it ’out of nothing,’ ’out of whole cloth,’ would be the creator of the verb itself… the odds are that the engineer is a myth produced by the bricoleur” (96).
• The engineer, to be more precise, is the invention of a bricoleur who, out of anxiety and/or desire, needs at least the assumption that an engineer is possible – that total control and a unique origin is possible – which is exactly the problem that Lévi-Strauss’ analysis of the Oedipus myth unveils.

Question 8

No way out? The specter of relativism

Answer 8

-“If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myth equivalent? Shall we have to abandon any epistemological requirement which permits us to distinguish between several qualities of discourse on the myth?” (98)

– or, for that matter, on anything whatsoever?

-“… the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way” (98).

Question 9

‘Transcendental homelessness’: to be mourned or celebrated?

Answer 9

• There are basically two options – another dichotomy!!! – how we can handle the insight that there is no (and has never been) such a thing as a transcendental signified, but just a supplementary chain of arbitrary ‘placeholders’:
• “The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of signs, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology – in other words, throughout his entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play” (102).
• The fundamental questions thus are:
  1) Can we actually live without such (a desire for) assurance, and can we just celebrate its loss?
  2) Can/should anything “take its place,” that won’t turn into a (another) transcendental signified?
  3) Are we thus facing a cynical politics of ‘bricolage’?

Question 10

Now what?

Answer 10

• On the one hand, deconstruction contains an enormously explosive political force, as it unveils any kind of (power) center as arbitrary. Much to the disdain of his critics, however, who have accused him of nihilism or relativism, and thus a conservative political agenda, Derrida has never proposed anything like a ‘politics’ that could be based on his insights.
• Nor, for that matter, could he have done, as all political action would have to be legitimated by, and take its start from, another transcendental signified.
• That is why he clothes the consequences of the “event” he has described in the rather ambiguous figurality of the ‘monstrous’, as we are “faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (103).