1

Post-structuralism

1. Language - representing all signifying systems – makes meaning.

New knowledge = new vocabulary and syntax.

Meaning is differential and not just referential (Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 1916)

 Is Marx a structuralist? He talks of an underlying structure that determines social reality, and that is
the economic base. But he argues for historical change.
 Is Freud a structuralist? He maps the structural organisation of the mind. But he understands it
historically i.e. within the life of the individual, from infancy to adulthood. Infancy or childhood of
the individual ontogeny – infancy or childhood of the human race phylogeny.
2. “Post-structuralism names a theory, or a group of theories, concerning the relationship between human
beings, the world and the practice of making and reproducing meanings.” Catherine Belsey,
Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002
3. Meaning is a potentially endless play of signifiers, dispersed along a whole chain of signifiers. Language
is a much less stable affair than the classical structuralists had considered. In fact even the individual,
constituted by language, can never have a pure unblemished meaning or experience at all # idea of man
who is spontaneously able to create and express his own meanings, to be in full possession of himself
and to dominate language as a transparent medium of his inmost being. Perhaps this is the reason why in
western philosophy, from Plato to Levi Strauss, speech has been celebrated over writing.
4. Western philosophy has been dominantly phonocentric (prominence of speech) 1 and logocentric
(committed to the belief in some transcendental signifier—word, essence, presence, truth or reality---
pointing to the transcendental signified, whose candidates have been god, Idea, the spirit, the substance,
self, matter etc). Each of these concepts hopes to found our whole system of thought and language and
thus itself must be untainted by the play of linguistic differences. It must be anterior to these discourses-
the lynchpin of a whole thought system, the sign around which all others revolve.
5. Are these transcendental meanings a fiction? Is it that out of the play of signifiers certain meanings are
elevated by social ideologies to elevated positions, or made the centre around which other meanings are
forced to turn. These meanings are seen sometimes as origins and sometimes as goal (the telos of all
other meanings as language, as history etc). Eg. Freedom, Authority, Order, Democracy, Family etc.

1
Speech is superior to writing? Vilification of writing from Plato to Levi Strauss. Behind this prejudice lies a
particular view of man as spontaneous creator of his own meanings, in full possession of himself and able to
dominate language. But this theory fails to see that the living voice is in fact as material as print.
 2

6. The web like complexity of signs, the back and forth, the present and absent, forward and sideways
movement of language in its actual processes is what post structuralism designates by the word, text.
7. Jacques Derrida.2
i. Labels as metaphysical any thought system which depends on an unassailable foundation, a first
principle or unimpeachable ground upon which a whole hierarchy of meanings may be constructed.
“In a traditional philosophical opposition we have not a peaceful coexistence of facing terms but a
violent hierarchy. One of the terms dominates the other…occupied the commanding position. To
deconstruct the opposition is above all, at a particular moment, to reverse the hierarchy.” 3These first
principles deconstructed, can be shown to products of a particular system of meaning. The first
principles are part of binary oppositions (which classic structuralists sought to find) and thus defined
by what they exclude. Thus the need for vigilance and policing of the frontier. But perhaps what is
outside is also inside, alien as well as intimate. There is perhaps no absolute and the separation has
been already transgressed. Structuralist readings of binary oppositions in a text, sometimes banishes
to the text’s margins certain niggling details which can be made to return and plague them. Derrida’s
reading often seizes a peripheral fragment of the work, a footnote, a recurrent minor term or image, a
casual allusion and works it tenaciously to dismantle the oppositions which govern the text as a
whole. Derrida accepts that his own thoughts must also be already contaminated.
ii. Dissemination. Roland Barthes had contended in his book S/Z, written within the context of a post-
Formalist concern with the specificity of a poetic or literary language, the need to distinguish
between different regimes of meaning, famously called by Barthes the lisible or the readable and the
scriptable or the writeable. If Barthes argued for the polysemic existence of multiple meanings in a
text. Derrida contended to go beyond the horizon of meaning. He borrowed a word from Mallarmè,
dissemination, to signify this excess of meaning that was always both more than and otherwise than
plurality of meaning. “ For if beyond this textual instances, there is no thematic unity or total

2
1960s and 1970s in France, culturally and politically, is dominated by the revolt of the students and the
workers in 1968, against Vietnam war and the rigidities of French politics exemplified by president Charles de
Gaulle. Although eventually contained, radical, at times revolutionary ideas came to dominate the intellectual
world of France and beyond: Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard,
Philippe Sollers etc
3
Derrida, Positions, Chicago Univ. Press, 1982 (A collection of three interviews that make more accessible the
complex concepts and terms treated extensively in such works as Writing and Difference and Dissemination.
Derrida takes positions on his detractors, his supporters, and the two major preoccupations of French
intellectual life, Marxism and psychoanalysis).
 3

meaning that might be reappropiated, within say the imagination, intentionality or lived experience,
then the text is no longer the expression or representation (successful or not) of any truth that might
be said to be diffracted or gathered up in the polysemy of literature. This hermeneutic concept of
polysemy needs therefore to be replaced by the idea of dissemination…..Dissemination affirms the
always already divided generation of meaning.” 4 The impossibility of beginning.
iii. There is always a ‘surplus’ over exact meaning. Literary discourse is the place where this is most
evident.
iv. A structure always presumes a center, a fixed principle, a hierarchy of meanings, and a solid
foundation and it is just these notions with the endless differing and deferring of writing throws into
question.
v. Derrida does more than simply discover new techniques of reading. …“deconstruction is for him an
ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought
and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions maintains its force.”
(TE). He sees truth, meaning, identities, intentions, historical continuities as effects of a wider,
deeper history of language, unconscious, language and social practice.

4
Derrida, Dissemination, Critique, 1969. Also Leslie Hill, The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida,
2007