Discuss Structure, sign and Play elaborating Derrida's view

Topic:- Discuss Structure, Sign and Play elaborating Derrida’s                                     view

Paper Name: Literary Theory and criticism

Paper no.: 7

Name: Bhatt Urvi

Roll no.: 32

Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Introduction:-

                             Jacques Derrida was Algerian born French Philosopher. In the area of philosophy and literary criticism alone, Derrida has been cited more than 14000 times in Journal articles over the past two decades. Derrida’s deconstructionist works are integrally related to post-modernism. He taught philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964. One values Derrida’s writings and the philosophical position and intellectual positions from which he proceeds, it would be wrong handed to think of him as an occupant of some ‘Ivory Tower’.

v Structure, Sign and Play Elaborating Derrida’s view:-

                  “Structure, Sign and Play” shows how philosophy and science understand ‘Structure’. Derrida discusses with structuralism, a type of analysis which understand individual elements of language and culture as embedded in larger structures. The archetypal example of structuralism is discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure.

                        Derrida also directly dealt with Saussure in a related book title Grammatology. In Grammatology the relationship between elements of cultural systems like mythology is analyzed.

                             The New York Times pointed out in its obituary for Derrida that “Structure, Sign and Play” offered professors of literature a philosophical movement they could legitimately consider their own.

           

“Structure, Sign and Play” was first published in 1970. Derrida admirers the reflexivity and abstract analysis of structuralism, but argues that these discourses have still not gone far enough in treating structures as free floating or ‘playing’ sets of relationships. He accuses structuralism discourses of holding on a ‘center’: a privileged term anchoring the structure and does not play. Derrida suggests that this model of structure will end-is ending and that a never and freer thinking about structures will emerge.

                       The essay begins by speculating, “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-structuralist – thought to reduce or suspect.” The ‘center’ is that element of a structure which appears given or fixed, thereby anchoring the rest of the structure and allowing it to play.

                                 In the history of metaphysics, this function is fulfilled by different term like

        “eidos, arche, telos, energia, ousia [essence, existence, substance subject] aleteia,         transcendentality, consciousness or conscience, God, man, and so forth.”

                                      Whichever term is at the center of the structure, argues Derrida, the overall pattern remains similar. This central term ironically escapes structurality, the main character of structuralism by which all meaning is defined relationally, with the help of other structure.                                  

                              The question to be discussed is the opening of the structure which became inevitable ”when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought” and the contradictory role of the center exposed. The result of the event, according to Derrida, must be the full version of structural “free play”, a mode in which all terms are truly subject promised by structuralism.

                                             According to Derrida, just as philosophers use metaphysical term used and concept to critique metaphysics, the ethnologist “accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is employed in denouncing them”.

                                           Derrida further discusses, Levi-Strauss use of the term ‘bricolage’. Brecolage becomes a metaphor for philosophical and literary critiques, exemplifying Derrida’s argument about the necessity of using the language available. The bricoleur’s foil is the engineer, who creates out of whole cloth without the need for bricolage.

Derrida says:-

                                     “Structural discourse on myths-mythological discourse on myths-mythological discourse-must itself is mythopomorphic.”

                                    Derrida also criticizes Levi-Strauss for his inability to explain historical changes-for describing historical changes-for describing structural transformation as the result of mysterious outside forces. Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.

v Define Deconstruction:-

                         Deconstruction, as applied in the criticism of literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine” the assumption that the system of language provides groups that are adequate to establish the boundaries, the coherence or unity, and the determinate meanings of a literary text.

·       Deconstruction:

                  In the criticism of literature, Deconstruction is a theory and practice of reading which questions and claims to ‘subvert’ and ‘undermine’. The attention was shifted from the writer to the work of literary text, consequently textual analysis become more important than extra textual information. In this process the important of the reader and his understanding increased, and the Reader Response or Reception Theory came into being. Derrida gives the same process a further and final push according to which what matters is the reading and not the writing of the text. The readers rules the supreme and the validity of his reading cannot be challenged. However the structure of each reading has to be coherent and convincing.

·       Decentering the centre:-

                             Derrida deconstructs the metaphysics of presence. He seeks to prove that the structurality of the structure does not indicate a presence above its free play of signs. This presence was earlier supposed to be the centre of the structure which was paradoxically thought to be within, and outside this structure, it was truth and within, it was intangibility. But Derrida contends that, ‘the centre could not be thought in the form of a begging presence’. The textuality is the free play of signifiers. There is no signifier that is not itself a signifier. Derrida seeks to undermine “a prevailing and generally unconscious ‘idealism’, which asserts that language does not create meanings but reveals them, thereby implying that meanings, pre-exists their expression.”

                                      This for Derrida is nonsense. For him there can be no meaning which is not formulated, we cannot reach outside language.

·       Supplementarity:-

                       A text is a work of language and language as such according to Derrida, is like time, ever in a state of flux. Just as time has no origin, so also the origin of language is inconceivable.

v Derrida quotes and approve Levi-Strauss who writes:

“Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one full swoop.”

It is always gaining in new elements and loosing the older ones.

“The totality of the myths of a people”

Derrida quotes Levi-Strauss:-

“is of the order of the discourse. Provided that these people do not become physically or morally extinct, this totally is never extinct.”

                 The language paradoxically comes into being as a quest of imaginary truth apart from language and continues to realize the lack of truth in the words that it employs. The absence of centre of a origin is the movement of Supplementarity. The process of Supplementarity has no end. Because positive and concrete definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily requires a supplement or supplements, something or some things which helps it exist and understood.                     The truth of the text which in fact only language, and create in our quest another text through our criticism to supplement the lack of the original text. Original text-reading is reactivating the expressivity of the text with help of its indicative signs. But in the words of John Sturrock,

“The meanings that are read into it may or may not coincide with the meanings which the author believes he or she has invested it with.”

                          Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing imploded the foundation of western philosophy. There is scant little chance of denying that Derrida himself holds some special place in this development: if not as its father than at least as its catalyst.

                             Derrida emphasizes that to deconstruct is not to discovery, that his task is to “dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures” operative in a texts “not in order to reject or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way”, that he puts into question the “search for the signified not annual it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind.”

v Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences:-

                   In his famous essay, ‘structure, sign and play in the Discourse of the Human science s’ which was read at the John Hapkins International colloquium on “The Language of Criticism and the sciences of Man” in         October 1966. Derrida demonstrates how structuralism as represented by the anthropologist  Claude Levi-Strauss which sets out as a criticism or  rejection of science and metaphysics can be read as embodying precisely those aspects of science and metaphysics which it seeks to challenge. The essay concludes by saying:

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of free play, the one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from free play and from the order of the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.”

                      Thus, we have two diametrically opposite interpretations of structuralism, and we are unable to decide which the ‘right’ one is. Thus ‘aporia’ between two interpretations is due to the force of ‘difference’ intrinsic to the structure of language. Characteristically, Derrida in this essay notes that ‘language bears within itself, the necessity of its own critique’. The essay considered as inauguration of ‘post structuralism’ as a theoretical movement.

v Conclusion:

                                                            Derrida concludes by reaffirming the existence of a transformation within structuralism, suggesting that it espouses this affirmative view of unlimited free and presenting it as unpredictable yet inevitable.