VI POST-STRUCTURALISM

Structuralism was founded on the Saus~urian principle that lan-

guage as a system of signs must be considered synchronically, that
is, within a single temporal plane. The diachronic aspect of lan-
guage, how it develops and changes over time, was seen as being of
secondary importance. In post-structuralist thinking temporality
again becomes central.
The major influence on post-structuralist literary theory is the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, though the work of the
psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the cultural theorist Michel
Foucault is also important in the emergence of post-structuralism.
Derrida emphasises the 'logocentrism' of Western thinking, that is,
that meaning is conceived as existing independently of the lan-
guage in which it is communicated and is thus not subject to the
play oflanguage. Derrida accepts Saussure's position that meaning
is the product of the differential relations between signifiers, but
he goes beyond Saussure in claiming that the temporal dimension
cannot be left out of account. Language is seen as a never-ending
chain of words in which there is no extralinguistic origin or end to
the chain. He argues that Saussure was not able to free himself
from 'logocentric' thinking since, by elevating speech above
writing, he indicated that he believed signifier and signified could
be fused within the same temporal plane in the act of speaking.
Derrida attacks such 'logocentrism' and claims that writing is a
better model for understanding how language functions. In
writing the signifier is always productive, thus introducing a
temporal aspect into signification which undermines any fusion
between signifier and signified. Written signs enjoy a semiotic
independence in that though meaning is created by the differen-
tial relations between signs, as Saussure had argued, the semiotic
independence of writing entails that meaning is always deferred,
since writing will produce meaning in an unlimited number of
potential contexts which may exist in the future. Derrida's basic
formulation 'differance', by punning on the French word
'difference', which can mean both 'difference' and 'deferment',
undermines 'logocentrism' by implying that meaning can never be
fully present since it is always deferred. His 'deconstructive' prac-
tice with regard to the texts he analyses has also been a major
influence on literary critics since, in contrast, for example, to the

112
 Post-structuralism 113
New Criticism, he does not set out to demonstrate the structural
coherence or organic unity of the text but to show how the text
undermines its own assumptions and is thus divided against itself.
His essay, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences', first delivered as a lecture atJohns Hopkins University in
1966, has been especially influential on literary theory.
Roland Barthes' essay, 'The Death of the Author', first pub-
lished in 1968, adopts a radically textual view of language and
meaning and clearly shows his shift towards a post-structuralist
position. It has close connections with his S/Z, first published
in 1970, generally regarded as the first important work of post-
structuralist literary criticism.
Julia Kristeva, though associated with structuralism, like Barthes
eventually moved beyond it. For her, like Derrida, the emphasis is
on the signifier rather than the signified in language, as the signi-
tying process undermines all stability of meaning. The signifYing
process both creates and undermines systems of signs. Influenced
by both psychoanalysis and Bakhtin, she stresses the role of the
'speaking subject' in language with the subject being always
divided because the 'other' cannot be eliminated from discourse.
She suggests that in modernist literary writing language can be a
force for renewal since modernist literary language both creates
and calls into question systematisation.
Like Kristeva, Michel Foucault was initially seen as a structural-
ist, but his later work is usually characterised as post-structuralist,
though he rejected such labels. Though his main focus was on
social practices or systems of thought these were treated like
'langues' in the Saussurian sense, that is, as sign systems in which
meaning was produced through the operation of rules and codes
of signification. Since Foucault claimed the human subject was
also produced by such rules and codes, he proclaimed the 'death
of Man', the concept of the human individual having been gener-
ated by a previous cultural epoch now superseded. Works of art or
literature should thus not be thought of as individual creations
but as emanations of a cultural system and have to be understood
in relation to the codes that operate to create meaning within that
cultural system. His later writing is predominantly concerned with
power and a critique of totalities. By adopting a 'genealogical'
method, hierarchies can be undermined by exposing discontinu-
ities, 'subjugated' or 'buried' forms of knowledge that resist such
hierarchies. Foucault's work underlies much of the theorised
historical criticism associated with such critical approaches as New
HiStoricism and Cultural Materialism.
114 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERARY THEORY

Post-structuralist thinking had a major impact on American

criticism in the 1970s, particularly on a group of critics who were
based at Yale, the 'Yale deconstructionists'. The leading Yale
theorist was Paul de Man, who argued that literary texts already
incorporated Derridian 'dim~rance'. De Man argues that there is
a radical division in literary texts between the grammatical or
logical structure of language and its rhetorical aspects. This
creates a play of signification in literary texts which is finally
undecidable. De Man argues that literature is constituted by this
undecidable play between the grammatical and the rhetorical
in texts and not by aesthetic considerations. Any text which
by deconstructive analysis can be shown to exhibit such charac-
teristics, de Man suggests, functions as literature.

FURTHER READING

Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London, 1975).

Harold Bloom et aI., Deconstruction and Criticism (London, 1979).
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism
(London, 1983).
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, Conn., 1979).
- - , Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism
(London, 1983).
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore,
1976).
- - , Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London, 1992).
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Oxford, 1977).
Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society
(Chicago, 1979). (A critical view.)
Geoffrey H. Hartman, Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy
(Baltimore, 1981).
Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric
of Reading (Baltimore, 1980).
Vincent B. Leitch, Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Introduction
(London, 1983).
J. Hillis Miller, Theory Now and Then (Hemel Hempstead, 1991).
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1982).
Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (London, 1984).
T. K. Seung, Structuralism and Hermeneutics (New York, 1982). (Contains
critique of Derrida.)
Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (London,
1981) .