Post-structuralism
Lecture Notes
John Phillips
06/02/2007
The word: post-structuralism
Immanent Transformation
The Subject of Enunciation
“Homo significans: such would be the new
man of structural inquiry” (Roland Barthes Critical
Essays 218)
The word “post-structuralism”
came into the widespread use that it still enjoys today between 1979 and
1981. Three anthologies of criticism,
one American and the other two British, which between them collected some representative
articles of (or in one case about) continental,
largely French, literary criticism and theory, serve as a kind of historical
signpost to the emergence of the idea of post-structuralism. John Sturrock’s Structuralism and Since: From
Lévi Strauss to Derrida (1979) collects commentaries on Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan and Jacques
Derrida each written by an Anglo-American scholar. Even today, owing to its patient pedagogic
aims, this remains one of the most recommendable introductions. Josué V. Harari’s Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism
(1979) and Robert Young’s Untying the
Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader each collect articles by continental
writers as well as English or American literary critics whose work resonates
with aspects of the continental material.
[The
OED defines post-structuralism as:
“An extension and critique of
structuralism, esp. as used in critical textual analysis, which rejects
structuralist claims to objectivity and comprehensiveness, typically
emphasizing instead the instability and plurality of meaning, and freq. using
the techniques of deconstruction to reveal unquestioned assumptions and
inconsistencies in literary and philosophical language.”
Needless to say, this is hopeless and will get us exactly nowhere]
There’s no mystery about the
name post-structuralism really,
though it can be misleading.
Structuralism, which as Young states in his introduction, “was a much
more diverse movement than its single name suggests” (vii), nevertheless had by
the mid-1970s become fashionable in certain circles. Harari, in his introduction, points out that
“The critical excitement generated by structuralism reached its peak in
The excitement that Harari
talks about that was generated by structuralism also involved controversy. In English and American contexts (wider than
merely those of education and academic scholarship) the diverse trends
identified as structuralist (and later post-structuralist) were celebrated and
adopted by some but received with bitter hostility by others. This combination of heartfelt enthusiasm and
angry, often malicious, rejection has accompanied the notion of
poststructuralism since its emergence.
There are problems:
1. If the single
umbrella-term post-structuralism is
supposed to cover all those who are collected in Young’s and Harari’s books,
then the diversity that (Young says) characterized structuralism is compounded
beyond reason. Too many quite different
kinds of thing are implied. But then, if
post-structuralism just means—“we don’t classify provocative critics, thinkers,
anthropologists, psychoanalysts (or whoever) under the single term
structuralism anymore”—then that means everyone
is a poststructuralist. That, however,
would be wrong.
2. More seriously, the name “post-structuralism”
rather inevitably implies “after.”
Having located “structuralism” as a diverse field of analysis that takes
as its first main reference point the Course
in General Linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure (but published posthumously
in 1915), one might then situate poststructuralism
after the post-Saussurian
developments in literary criticism, linguistics, anthropology, psychoanalysis
and Marxism that gathered in Europe throughout the 20th
century. Beginning in the Soviet-Union
but culminating in
We’ll go back to the
continental tradition later. It would be
safer, more accurate and useful for
our own purposes, not to label people
as diverse as Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and Lacan as post-structuralist. It would
be better to reserve the term, in its specific historical meaning (rather than
the more mythical one that applies in most intellectual or quasi-intellectual
contexts today), for those whose work is actually involved immanently with (meaning “actually abiding in”) the transformation of a dedicated structuralist project. Derrida, Lacan, Foucault and Deleuze each
have plenty to say about
structuralism and they use the terms of structuralism critically from time to
time but they never dedicated themselves to anything like a structuralist
project. This, on the contrary, describes the inventive criticism of Roland
Barthes and the linguistic speculations of Émile Benveniste. And it describes some aspects of the early
work of Julia Kristeva.
Roland Barthes was for a
while a member of the group called Quel
Tel, which was founded by young French writers in 1960. Tel
Quel was committed to bringing about the collapse of the idea that language
is either instrumental or decorous. The
combination of structuralism (becoming poststructuralism) and the French
literary tradition helped to bring this collapse about.
Later in the course we’ll
explore how the discovery of the enunciative
modality resonates with other traditions that make up the diverse field of
critical theory.
Roland Barthes and the Subject of Enunciation
Roland Barthes. “From Science to Literature.” The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard
Howard.
Commentary
Barthes begins with an
apparently trivial (because uncontroversial) observation: that the institution
determines the nature of knowledge. His
second point, hidden away as an analogy, is less obvious: the institution
determines knowledge in the same way as language determines the way we think. Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of la Langue can help here as a way of
thinking about how institutions function—remember that la Langue designates the institution of similarities and
differences from which classes and divisions are produced.
In particular Barthes is
interested in the division between science
and literature. What defines science, he says, is its status.
Science is the name given by society for what counts as knowledge
(whatever that happens to be). If,
however, we were to define science by its content, its methods, its morality
and its modes of communication, then there’d be no significant difference
between science and literature.
Having identified the ways in
which science and literature can be considered united, he then offers one last
similarity—and this is the crucial one—that they are both discourses. In other words, if the only thing that
distinguishes a science is that it is a particular kind of discourse then
distinctions between kinds of discourse indicate relative values. Literature is no
less a discourse than science yet each discourse has a different status from
the other.
Now, given that both science
and literature are discourses, we assume that they are each constituted by
language. This, again, could not be
controversial. However, as Barthes writes,
“science and literature do not assume—do not profess—the language that
constitutes them in the same way.” A
scientist uses language as a tool, an instrument of communication. Indeed, the sciences of language—Theoretical
and Applied Linguistics—treat their object, language,
as if it was a tool or an instrument.
For literature, on the other hand, language is the “very being of literature, its very world.”
Let’s now look at the earlier
assumption: the difference between science and literature is their relative
status. In all other respects they are
the same. They are the same, too,
because they are both discourses.
However, each of them reveals a different attitude towards what they
are. Sciences uses discourse as if it
was there to function as a tool or instrument in its service in discovering and
communicating its knowledge. Literature,
on the other hand, acknowledges from the beginning that it, and thus all other
discourses too, are constituted in and by the language it thematizes.
So Barthes can say
“Literature is alone today in bearing the entire responsibility of
language.” This would be because all
other discourses fail to reflect on their being discourses. Only literature assumes the language that constitutes it. All other discourses dodge the question of language, and thus the question of discourse, exploiting all its
possibilities without acknowledging where those possibilities derive.
What does it mean to assume the language that constitutes you
as a speaking being? Here we can draw on
a worthwhile distinction (it has different names and is quite old and
established in some discourses): the difference between the statement and the mode of enunciation.
Emphasis on the statement
would draw attention to its content, its sense and reference, whether it is
true or false, and on what attributes or qualities are predicated of what
subject. For instance the statement
“this vase is yellow” predicates some actually existing ornament with a yellow
color and can thus be tested against the actually existing ornament for truth
or falsity. If the only part of language
we were interested in was its function as statement then we’d all be
scientists, predicating objects of all kinds with qualities, attributes and
causes and declaring statements true or false or even establishing conditions
according to which truth and falsity could be guaranteed.
If we shift our emphasis now
onto the mode of enunciation we are
less interested in what is being said and instead look at how, by saying it,
the speaker is constituted institutionally in some way or another according to
value and status. We are interested in
the performance or the practice of speaking in this way or that—the role it plays in constituting or perpetuating a particular
world of discourse. The speaker is no
longer a subject with autonomous feelings and thoughts but, rather, is
constituted as this or that according to a modality of
discourse. Barthes calls all the
different ways of addressing oneself to others “image-repertoires.”
In “From Science to
Literature” Barthes is using lessons learned from the failure of structuralism
to turn itself into the science of literature, in order to establish the enunciative modality of science
itself. In this way he forces science
(in his hands, as a structuralist) to reflect on its own conditions of being a
science, and thereby taking it outside science (which we must still understand
on the model of predicative and cause-effect oriented statements). Science in his hands thus becomes a kind of
literature as it begins to more and more rigorously attempt to come to terms
with the impossibility of grasping its own conditions of possibility, as a
scientist would grasp the identifiable qualities of some object.
Narrative Codes (from “Textual Analysis of Poe’s
‘Valdemar’”)
Codes (not
determinations) –see page 155 on what codes are for Barthes
Textual Analysis: not descriptive but productive
Structuration as opposed to Composition
Code: “A
corpus of rules that are so worn we take them to be marks of nature; but if
narrative departed from it, it would very rapidly become unreadable” (156)
From Work to
Text: Barthes refuses “unity” or “totality” and instead
reads the text in its fragmentary, intertextual density. The reader is now responsible for arbitrary
division of the text. Realist fiction is
densely coded fiction (miming the densely coded construction of the real itself). The text is not a “window” but a “volume.”
Stereography: (writing the illusion
of the concrete)
Writing is the moment of obliteration
(of author, origin, sense, reference).
Note
Well:
“We shall not
speak of the author, Edgar Poe, nor of the literary history of which he is a part”
(137).
Cultural
Codes
Scientific
Rhetorical
Metalinguistic
Chronological
Socio-historical
Code of Communication
The Symbolic Field
Code of Actions
The Enigma
Link:
Who is the
subject of Enunciation? (commentary with applications)