Structuralism and Grammatology

Author(s): Jonathan Culler

Source: boundary 2 , Autumn, 1979, Vol. 8, No. 1, The Problems of Reading in
Contemporary American Criticism: A Symposium (Autumn, 1979), pp. 75-86
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/303140

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Structuralism and Grammatology

Jonathan Culler

In organizing this conference the editors of boundary 2 have

asked us to consider the situation of contemporary American criticism, in
which, as they say, various methods and rhetorics have been competing to
replace the New Criticism. As one of the opening speakers, my job is to
utter some debatable propositions so that they can be debated: I'm going
to make tendentious remarks about the relationship between some of
these competing modes of discourse. I chose my title because I had in-
tended to concentrate on two competing discourses, which can be called
roughly the structuralist and deconstructionist, and to look at a point of
intersection, a moment of competition: Derrida's reading of Saussure in
De la grammatologie. Though I shall do this briefly in order to discuss the
relationship between structuralism and deconstruction, I respond to my
place on the program by casting my net a bit wider and addressing the
larger topic which the organizers call "The Question of Formalism: From
Aesthetic Distance to Difference." In the competition among modes of
discourse to replace the New Criticism, what has happened to formalism?
I think I can report that it is alive and well, doing very nicely.

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Back in 1970 Geoffrey Hartman published a book entitled Beyond
Formalism-hoping, perhaps, that everyone who was disenchanted with
the New Criticism would buy it. But it turned out that what lay beyond
formalism was more formalism. Indeed, as he argued in the title essay, the
faults of those who have been called formalists "are due not to their
formalism as such but rather to their not being formalistic enough.
he concluded that "to go beyond formalism is as yet too hard for us
may even be ... against the nature of understanding."1
This is not a surprising conclusion. One might even say that t
sophisticated formalist, to one interested in the form of his own cr
activity, it should be apparent in advance that beyond formalism lie
other formalisms (and perhaps one could also argue that before or in
of formalism there lies, already, formalism: "toujours ddj/.") Now w
interesting about this situation is not the paradox itself-that beyond
formalism there lies only more formalism (though for many of us this
paradox may be a small erotic fillip)-but the fact that this paradoxical
situation can be explained in two different ways. Let me briefly sketch
these two accounts of why it might be impossible to go beyond formalism
and then reflect on their implications.
The first account would say that formalism is the desire to ex-
plore the relations within a work or group of works, the desire to continue
that exploration and to postpone for as long as possible the move which
treats the work as means to some end. Since criticism inevitably makes
that move and tells us what the work is an example of, what experience it
produces or what truths it embodies-since criticism inevitably does this,
this move does not lie beyond formalism, as an alternative to it, but is, on
the contrary, a telos for formalist discourse. What lies beyond any given
formalism are new ways of exploring an order of relations and of post-
poning the move which designates the closure of that order.
By this way of thinking, the New Criticism was not formalistic
enough in that it restricted the relations it would consider to those be-
tween parts or features of a single work. Making the unity of the individual
work its goal-what criticism had to demonstrate-it closed off the investi-
gation of relations and interplay at a certain point to produce a thematic
statement. While denouncing what he called the "Heresy of Paraphrase,"
Cleanth Brooks argued that the "characteristic unity of a poem lies in the
unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and
governing attitude." The poet "comes to terms with experience;" the
poem is a resolution of conflicts.2 The formalism of the New Critics was
designed to bring readers to the point at which a mimetic claim could be
made for the poem: that it evoked a unification of experience: The poet's
task, says Brooks, "is finally to unify experience. He must return to us the
unity of experience itself as man knows it in his own experience."3
Now in the perspective of the first account of formalism one
objects to the limitation imposed by the New Critics on the investigation

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of formal relations. Thus Hartman's attempt to go beyond Brooks's formal-
ism involved, as he said, "a formalistic exercise in literary history."4 The
question of whether Wordsworth's Lucy poems return to us the unity of
experience is postponed and they are read as critical revisions or trans-
formations of 18th century lyrics. Nor is there any reason to stop here.
One can have recourse to a wider intertextuality, attempting to relate the
poem or poems to the institution of literature in general: its conventions,
its most common structural models, its figurative modes. At this point, of
course, one has a program which in one version has been called Russian
Formalism and in another Structuralism, where a work can be submitted
to extended formal analysis, studied in relation to the various properties of
literary discourse which it exemplifies. The moment or point of total-
ization may be postponed for a very long time. Indeed, in works of poetics
which explicitly seek to avoid interpretation, the strategy may be simply
to label the work as an example of literary discourse. This is a very ab-
stract totalization, but it still functions as a non-formal telos commanding
the activity of formal analysis. That is to say, it imposes a closure by
positing a content: the work can be seen as exploring, modifying, and thus
commenting upon the systems of language and literature. There is always a
content, even if it be only "I am a work of literature."5 By this view
which I have been sketching, the New Critics stopped too soon, ignoring
vast orders of formal relationships, which structuralism, for example, set
out to explore.
The second account of why one can not go beyond formalism
would take a different tack, arguing that whenever criticism tries to
identify a content conveyed by a form, it deludes itself and ends up
reproducing a form. When one thinks one has isolated a content all one has
in fact done is to translate one form or structure into another. One of the
more familiar versions of this argument is deployed against Marxist critics
and others committed to notions of representation: that what they appeal
to as History, the solid content which a work represents, is as problematic
a narrative construct as that from which they were appealing, and they
have not moved out of the order of textuality at all. A more complex
version of this argument would be that any attempt to escape formalism
by asserting what a text really means is an allegorization which, in general,
can be shown to have been deconstructed by the text itself, so that the
move which asserts a determinate referentiality is not a move beyond
formalism but a predictable move within the orbit of formalism.
I have left these two lines of argument very abstract because I am
not at the moment trying to convince anyone of the truth or falsity of
either. I am interested in the fact that there are two different ways of
arguing that one can not go beyond formalism and in the different assump-
tions which mark these two lines of argument. The first made use of a
notion of content (though a very relativistic one) as a kind of boundary
which made formal analysis possible. The second, on the other hand,

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claimed that anything which was identified as content could be shown to
be just more form. The first treated the distinction between form and
content as a variable one but insisted on the importance of making it,
whereas the second insisted that the variability of the distinction made it
inappropriate and vitiated any conclusions based on it. As is doubtless
apparent, one can identify these two modes of argument with structural-
ism and deconstruction respectively, and it is perhaps easier to show the
appropriateness of these identifications if we change terms and instead of
talking about form and content talk about signifier and signified.
Structuralism insists on the difference between signifier and signi-
fied: indeed, the radical difference and then arbitrary association of signi-
fier and signified is the basis of its account of the sign. Deconstruction, on
the other hand, demonstrates that any signified is itself a signifier and that
the signifier is already a signified, so that signs cannot be authoritatively
identified and isolated. However, by approaching the problem in terms of
form and content rather than signifier and signified, one can see these
movements as part of the larger "question of formalism" and one can
explicate, in part, an apparently anomalous situation: structuralism and
deconstruction seem in various ways opposed to one another; each of
them is opposed to the New Criticism (whose faults are usually said to
involve excessive formalism); nevertheless both can be identified with the
impossibility of going beyond formalism.
Let me now consider more directly the relationship between
these competing discourses by focusing on a situation of competition,
Derrida's reading of Saussure in De la grammatologie.6 The main lines of
Derrida's argument are by now, I imagine, well-known: he reveals in
Saussure a powerful logocentrism and phonocentrism on the one hand,
and on the other the elements of a powerful critique of logocentrism and
phonocentrism. On the one hand, Saussure is adamant in his condem-
nation of writing as derivative and corrupt-both inessential and danger-
ous. He privileges voice. Yet when he tries to explain the nature of
language he is led to draw his illustrations from writing, and he asserts,
unequivocally, that in the linguistic system there are only differences,
without positive terms-a principle that sorts ill with the logocentric privi-
leging of voice. It is, as I say, well known that Derrida's reading reveals
these contradictory strains in the Cours de linguistique ge'nrale, which is
the founding text for structural linguistics and structuralism. What is
perhaps less well understood are the implications of Derrida's brilliant and
scrupulous reading. Indeed, it is often taken as an attack on Saussure, just
as John Searle has taken Derrida's reading of Austin as an attack on
Austin.7 We think of a deconstructive reading as an attack because we
assume that self-contradiction (the self-deconstruction which a decon-
structive reading reveals in a text) invalidates any intellectual enterprise.
But one of the effects of deconstructive readings is to have shown us that
the power and pertinence of a text is not inconsistent with the presence in

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it of a self-deconstructive movement. On the contrary, the power and
pertinence of a text may depend to a considerable extent on the fact that
it deconstructs the philosophy in which it is implicated.
In saying this, what am I saying about Saussure? First, I am
saying, as Derrida shows, that the presence in Saussure of two motifs or
lines of argument is not merely fortuitous: the result of accident or error.
They are in a relationship of solidarity (albeit of solidarity that can lead to
no synthesis), the solidarity of an aporia. It is important to understand
why one line of thought implies the other.

In Saussure's argument, the further and the more rigorously he

presses his investigation of the nature of linguistic units, the more he is led
to deny that the linguistic signifier is in any way phonic, that sound itself,
as material element, can belong to the linguistic system; he is led to the
conclusion that in the linguistic system there are only differences with no
positive terms.8 It does not follow from this analysis, however, that
Saussure's privileging of voice-his designation of writing as a represen-
tation of a representation which distorts that which it represents-is an
unfortunate error which might have been avoided. The theory of the sign,
which makes possible the Saussurian and post-Saussurian analysis of
language, requires a privileging of voice. Why is this so? Because linguistic
analysis (and by extension, semiological analysis, structural analysis)
depends on the possibility of identifying signs-on the possibility of de-
termining, for example, that bet is one sign and pet is another. The identi-
fication of signs cannot be carried out on the plane of the signifier alone,
because the question is what portions of the signifying plane count as
signifying units. To identify signs, then, one must be able to identify
signifieds. A sequence is a signifier only if it is correlated with a concept of
signified. We know bet and pet are different signifiers because each has
associated with it a different signified. And if we ask how we know this, at
what place or moment this association is given, the answer will ultimately
refer to the moment of speech, the moment of utterance, when signifier
and signified seem simultaneously present, unequivocally associated. When
I speak, my words are not external, material objects which I first hear and
then interpret. At the moment of utterance my words seem transparent
signifiers which do not separate me from my thought; at the moment of
speech consciousness seems present to itself; concepts present themselves
directly, as signifieds which my words will express for others. Voice, as
Derrida says, "is the unique experience of the signified producing itself
spontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept,
in the element of ideality or universality."9
Since the possibility of grasping or identifying signifieds is neces-
sary to the semiotic and structuralist project, it is no accident that struc-
turalist theory should find itself implicated in phonocentrism and logo-
centrism. It is neither an accident nor, I want to insist, a mistake-an
incorrect move. Let me quote another passage from the Grammatology:

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 The privilege of the phone does not depend on a choice
that could have been avoided. It responds to a moment
of economy (let us say of the 'life' of 'history' or of
being-as-self-relationship'). The system of 's'entendre-
parler' through the phonic substance-which presents
itself as the non-exterior, non-mundane and therefore
non-empirical or contingent signifier-has necessarily
dominated the history of the world during an entire
epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the
idea of world-origin that arises from the difference
between the worldly and the non-worldly, the outside
and the inside, ideality and non-ideality, universal and
non-universal, transcendental and empirical, etc.10

These are large claims. They may become more comprehensible if

one notes that oppositions such as inside/outside, worldly/non-worldly,
transcendental/empirical depend on a point of differentiation, a line of
division where, for example, inside and outside meet: a point from which
or with reference to which the difference between inside and outside can
be conceived. The claim is that the moment of speech, where signifier and
signified seem given together, where inner and outer are for a moment
joined, serves as the point of reference in relation to which all these
distinctions can be posited. The privileging of speech is thus the basis of
our "logocentric" metaphysics.
Derrida does not argue that Saussure was mistaken in asserting
the primacy of voice and founding linguistic analysis on the necessarily
logocentric notion of the sign. On the contrary, Derrida's analyses of the
ubiquity of logocentrism-even Georges Bataille can be shown ultimately
to be a Kantian-show that analysis is necessarily logocentric, that even the
most rigorous critiques of logocentrism cannot escape, since the concepts
they must use are part of the system being deconstructed. There are, of
course, various ways of resisting or playing with this system that one
cannot escape, but it would be an error to suggest that Derrida and decon-
struction had provided us with an alternative to structuralism and logo-
centrism. Grammatology, Derrida has said, is not a new discipline which
could replace a logocentric semiology; "it is the name of a question."111
Indeed, Derrida's discourse is a series of strategic manoeuvres and displace-
ments in which he modifies his terms, producing a chain of related but
non-identical operators-differance, supplement, trace, hymen, espace-
ment, greffe, parergon, etc.-to prevent any of them from becoming con-
cepts of a new science.
Derrida's reading of Saussure is an exploration of the self-
deconstruction of linguistics and semiotics. Indeed, in the interview in
Positions entitled "Semiologie et grammatologie" he identifies his double
science or double reading not with a mode of discourse which would lie

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outside or beyond semiology but with a special practice or attention with
semiology: "One can say a priori that in every semiotic proposition or
system of research metaphysical presuppositions will cohabit with critical
motifs, by virtue of the fact that up to a certain point they inhabit the
same language. Grammatology would doubtless be less another science, a
new discipline charged with a new content or a new and delimited domain
than the vigilant practice or exercise of this textual division ('la pratique
vigilante de ce partage textuel')."1 2
In order to make apparent the implications for literary criticism
of what I have been saying, I ought to explain the polemical thrust of my
argument and identify the line of thought that I am rejecting. I think there
are two positions which my account of the relationship between structu-
ralism and deconstruction is implicitly criticizing. The first general po-
sition is one with which boundary 2 often flirts. If I were to give it a name
for ease of reference, I might call it "lhab Hassan," or perhaps "The Post
Position." This is a form of historical optimism which says-naively in my
view-"we're post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-historical, post-
logocentric; we're rid of all those old scientific and logocentric hang-ups,
beyond it all." Proponents of "lhab Hassan" believe, as Eugenio Donato
recently put it, though he does not himself endorse this position, that for
them "language sheds the burden of nostalgia and on the contrary accent-
uates its own playfulness, proclaiming unashamedly its incapacity to
control its tropology."13 Against "lhab Hassan" one would cite Derrida
himself, whose analyses are the best argument against the possibility of
going beyond logocentrism. Attempts to escape may be extremely interest-
ing or very boring; what is certain is that to believe one has escaped is
naive.

The other position I am opposing is one I take more seriously.

Since it's more diffuse and anonymous I will call it "George." "George"
says that we need not take note of structuralism any more because it has
been superseded by deconstruction, which has shown, among other things,
that structuralists were wrong to think they could work out a science of
literature. Deconstructionists use a lot of jargon, refer to too many philo-
sophers, especially Germans, and go too far in their interpretations, but at
least they see that their job is to interpret texts. "George" is, I suppose, a
sort of native American know-nothing version of the position put forward
by Hillis Miller in 1976 when he argued that critics influenced by conti-
nental criticism could be divided into the

Socratic, theoretical, or canny critics, on the one hand,

and Apollonian/Dionysian, tragic, or uncanny critics, on
the other. Socratic critics are those who are lulled by the
promise of a rational ordering of literary study on the
basis of solid advances in scientific knowledge about
language.... For the most part these critics share the

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 Socratic penchant, what Nietzsche defined as "the
unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic,
can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that
thought is capable not only of knowing but even of
correcting it".... Opposed to these are the critics who
might be called "uncanny".... These critics are not
tragic or Dionysian in the sense that their work is wildly
orgiastic or irrational. No critic could be more rigorously
sane and rational, Apollonian, in his procedure, for ex-
ample, than Paul de Man. . ... Nevertheless the thread of
logic leads . . . into regions which are alogical,
absurd. ... Sooner or later there is the encounter with
an "aporia" or impasse .... In fact, the moment when
logic fails in their work is the moment of their deepest
penetration into the actual nature of literary language,
or of language as such.14

These are only the salient moments of an extended description of

the two modes of criticism, but the point is clear: the canny and the
uncanny critics both pursue a rigorously logical enquiry, but while the
uncanny critics, who have no faith in logic, are rewarded with "deep
penetration" into the nature of literary language, the canny, with their
unshakable faith, are rebuffed. Miller's description makes the difference
between structuralism and deconstruction primarily a matter of faith: of
inwardness, of intention. Both follow logic but those who have no faith in
logic are rewarded while those who have faith are punished for their confi-
dence and, one presumes, pride-whose modern name, among literary
scholars, is "science."
Leaving aside the question of faith, it is not hard to see that such
an account re-enacts the favorite New Critical battle between poetry or
humanism and science, and the history of this battle ought to make one
suspicious of a critical move in which science once again plays the villain.
One of the virtues of structuralism, after all, was to have called into
question that opposition between scientific and humanistic discourse, both
by analysing sciences as semiotic practices and by insisting that rigor and
explicitness had their place in all forms of enquiry. Deconstruction has
continued the questioning of the opposition between scientific discourse
and other sorts of discourse and has shown that literary discourse can have
the logical power and complexity that was previously thought the prero-
gative of philosophy and the sciences.

Miller sees structuralists as lulled by the promise of science into

an unshakable faith that thought can penetrate the deepest abysses of
being. It's hard to direct that accusation at Barthes and Genette, whom
Miller mentions. The only description he offers of a critic deceived by
thought is this: "a critic like Culler, with his brisk common sense and his

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reassuring notions of literary competence and the acquisition of con-
ventions, his hope that all right-thinking people might agree on the mean-
ing of a lyric or a novel, or at any rate share a 'universe of discourse' in
which they could talk about it."15 There is again the question of faith:
the hope that right-thinking people will agree.
Since I'm accused of having an unshakable faith, let me prove
Miller wrong by confessing that my faith has been shaken. Let me confess,
more specifically, that my "faith in reason" has been shaken by Derrida's
arguments. For those interested in faith this may settle the matter, but I
would prefer to argue about critical practice rather than faith and in-
tention, and here I can say with confidence that structuralism need not
hope that right-thinking people will agree on the meaning of a novel, a
lyric, or even on the meaning of a word. Structuralism can start from
whatever effects it happens to observe: if it seems to be the case that
readers disagree radically about the meaning of a lyric or a word, that is
what requires explanation. Since no one has ever maintained that reading
and interpretation were completely random processes, since on the con-
trary it is our experience that these are social activities which do involve a
certain learning, then in principle there are facts to be explained: in parti-
cular, there are effects of communication to be accounted for. In de-
scribing codes, conventions, and logics, structuralism and semiotics
attempt to identify the structures necessary to account for events.
This mode of explanation is a Saussurian legacy: confronted with
speech events, the analyst describes a system to account for the events of
parole. This is the primary mode of explanation in the human sciences and
to it we owe much of our understanding. But as Saussure recognized, this
mode of explanation leads ultimately to a paradox, for the system which is
cited by way of explanation is not something given but is itself a result, a
product of events. And when Saussure attempts to describe the relation-
ship between historical events and the system, he specifies, on the one
hand, that events do lead to modifications of the system but he must
maintain, on the other hand, that "a diachronic fact is an event with its
own rationale; the synchronic consequences which may follow from it are
completely foreign to it."'16 We reach, in fact, an aporia in which Saussure
must simultaneously assert and deny the causal connection between langue
and parole. The logic of langue and parole, of synchronic and diachronic,
of system and event, leads to the identification of a relationship which
that logic cannot admit. We have here a version of the aporia of Derridian
difftrance: diff6rance is a difference always ready in place which makes
meaning possible and an act or event of differing which produces the
differences that it presupposes.17
It is another version of this aporia which Miller identifies as the
insight of his first uncanny critic, Paul de Man: "The aporia between
performative and constative language is merely a version of the aporia
between trope and persuasion that both generates and paralyses rhetoric
and thus gives it the appearance of a history."18 Indeed, Miller recognizes

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that structuralism leads to the same aporias as deconstruction. Arguing
that the crucial moment in the writings of the uncanny critics is the
"encounter with an 'aporia,' " he writes, "In fact, the moment when logic
fails in their work is the moment of their deepest penetration into the
nature of literary language or of language as such. It is also the place where
Socratic procedures will ultimately lead if they are carried far enough."19
If the point of arrival is the same in both cases, what is the
difference between the canny and the uncanny critics? Miller puts it in
terms of faith in reason, but it is also possible to argue, without raising
such difficult questions as whether Roland Barthes has more faith in
reason than Paul de Man, that structuralists do not seek the aporias as such
or treat them as the primary insights. For structuralism, aporias are the
result of methodological distinctions, as between langue and parole,
synchronic and diachronic, performative and constative, literal and figura-
tive, which are indispensable to an analytical program but which turn out
to be undermined by the results of the program which they made possible.
Structuralists are interested in what can be done with concepts that prove
to be both necessary and problematic. Though Miller praises uncanny
critics for insights into the nature of literary language (which is what
canny critics are seeking), uncanny critics usually present their work as
interpretations of individual texts, as a teasing out of its aporias. It is the
canny critic-in this case Miller-who moves from interpretation to poetics
by drawing the lessons about literary language and making the uncanny
canny, transforming a "failure of logic" into an exemplary insight or a
methodological concept. There is a relationship of interplay and solidarity
here, between structuralist and deconstructionist discourse, which is more
important for the present and the future of criticism than their alleged
discontinuities.

Cornell University

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NOTES

1 Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970),
p. 42.

2 Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947),
p. 207.

3 Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, p. 213.

4 Hartman, Beyond Formalism, p. 49.

5 The most obvious example of this move in structuralist writings is Levi-

Strauss's contention that myths ultimately signify the human mind which
produces them.

6 De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 46-108. Of Grammatology,

trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976), pp. 30-73.

7 See J. Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" and John Searle "Reiterating the
Differences: A Reply to Derrida," in Glyph I, (1977). Derrida's reply,
"Limited Inc." is in Glyph II, (1977).

8 For detailed exposition of Saussure's argument, see my Ferdinand de Saussure

(New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 10-48.

9 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 20.

10 Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 7-8.

11 Derrida, Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 22.

12 Derrida, Positions, pp. 49-50.

13 Eugenio Donato, "The Idioms of the Text," Glyph 2 (1977), p. 12.

14 J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," The Georgia Review
30 (Summer, 1976), 335-38.

15 Miller, "Stevens' Rock," p. 335.

16 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gdndrale (Paris: Payot, 1967),

p. 121.

17 See Derrida, "La Diffirance," in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit,

1972), pp. 3-29.

18 Miller, "Stevens' Rock," pp. 338-39.

19 Miller, "Stevens' Rock," p. 338.

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190.5.32.45 on Sun, 07 Apr 2024 00:17:28 +00:00
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