Jacques Derrida
first read his paper “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human
Sciences (1966)” at the John Hopkins International Colloquium on “The
Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” in October 1966
articulating for the first time a post structuralist theoretical paradigm. Derrida
starts this essay by putting into question the basic metaphysical assumptions
of Western philosophy since Plato which has always principally positioned
itself with a fixed immutable centre, a static presence. The notion of
structure, even in structuralist theory has always presupposed a centre of
meaning of sorts. Derrida terms this desire for a centre as “logocentrism” in
his seminal work “Of Grammatology (1966)”. ‘Logos’, is a
Greek word for ‘word’ which carries the greatest possible concentration of
presence. As Terry Eagleton explains in “Literary Theory: An Introduction
(1996)”, “Western Philosophy…. has also been in a broader sense,
‘logocentric’, committed to a belief in some ultimate ‘word’, presence,
essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation for all our thought,
language and experience.
Derrida then introduces the idea that some
"event" has occurred. This "event" is some sort of
"rupture" or break. What he's
talking about is what he sees as a major shift or break in the fundamental structure
of western philosophy (the episteme). This break is a moment where the whole
way philosophy thought about itself shifted. That shift, or rupture, was when
it became possible to think about "the structurality of structure."
In other words, this is the moment when structuralism pointed out that language
was indeed a structure, when it became possible to think (abstractly) about the
idea of structure itself, and how every system--whether language, or philosophy
itself--had a structure.
As Peter Barry
argues in “Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural
(1995)” that in the twentieth century, through a complex process of
various historico-political events, scientific and technological shifts, “these
centers were destroyed or eroded”. For instance, the First World War
destroyed the illusion of steady material progress; the Holocaust destroyed the
notion of Europe as the source and centre of
human civilization. Scientific discoveries – such as the way the notion of
relativity destroyed the ideas of time and space as fixed and central
absolutes. Then there were intellectual and artistic movements like modernism
in the arts which in the first thirty years of the century rejected such
central absolutes as harmony in music, chronological sequence in narrative, and
the representation of the visual world in art. This ‘decentering’ of
structure, of the ‘transcendental signified’ and of the sovereign subject,
Derrida suggests – naming his sources of inspiration – can be found in the
Nietzchean critique of metaphysics, and especially of the concepts of Being and
Truth, in the Freudian critique of self-presence, as he says, “a critique
of consciousness, of the subject, of
self-identity, and of the self-proximity or self-possession”, and more
radically in the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, “of the
determination of Being as Presence”.
A less concrete example of a system with a center
would be a philosophical or belief system--say, the Puritan mindset. In the
Puritan system of belief, GOD was the center of everything--anything that
happened in the world (i.e. any event, or "unit", of the system)
could be referred back to God as the central cause of that event. And nothing
in the system was the equivalent of God--nothing could replace God at the
center as the cause of all things. Refer this back to Saussure's idea that
value comes from difference; that idea is based on the exchangeability between
units (verbs are not nouns, but both are words, and could be exchanged for each
other). The center of a system is something that has no equivalent value,
nothing can replace it or be exchanged for it, it's the cause and ultimate
referent for everything in the system.
Because of this, Derrida says, the center is a weird
part of a system or structure--it's part of the structure, but not part of it,
because it is the governing element; as he puts it (84) the center is the part
of the structure which "escapes structurality." In the Puritan
example, God creates the world and rules it, and is responsible for it, but
isn't part of it.
The center is thus,
paradoxically, both within the structure and outside it. The center is the
center but not part of what Derrida calls "the totality," i.e. the
structure. So the center is not the center. The concept of the centered
structure, according to Derrida, is "contradictorily coherent."
Thus it has always
been thought that the center, which is by definition unique, constituted that
very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping
structurality. This is why classical thought concerning structure could say
that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it. The
center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not
belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its
center elsewhere. The center is not the center.
Derrida argues that
this centre thereby limits the “free play that it makes possible”, as
it stands outside it, is axiomatic – “the Centre is not really the centre”.
Under a centered structure, free play is based on a fundamental ground of the
immobility and indisputability of the centre, on what Derrida refers to “as the
metaphysics of presence”.
Derrida argues that all these attempts at
‘decentering’ were however, “trapped in a sort of circle”.Structuralism,
which in his day was taken as a profound questioning of traditional Western
thought, is taken by Derrida to be in support of just those ways of thought.
Semiotics and Phenomenology are similarly compromised. Semiotics stresses the
fundamental connection of language to speech in a way that it undermines its
insistence on the inherently arbitrary nature of sign. Phenomenology rejects
metaphysical truths in the favor of phenomena and appearance, only to insist
for truth to be discovered in human consciousness and lived experience. It is
important to note that Derrida does not assert the possibility of thinking
outside such terms; any attempt to undo a particular concept is likely to
become caught up in the terms which the concept depends on. For instance: if we
try to undo the centering concept of ‘consciousness’ by asserting the
disruptive counterforce of the ‘unconscious’, we are in danger of introducing a
new center. All we can do is refuse to allow either pole in a system to become
the center and guarantor of presence.
Derrida concludes this seminal work which is often
regarded as the post-structuralist manifesto with the hope that we proceed
towards an “interpretation of interpretation” where one “is no
longer turned towards the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man
and humanism”. He says that we need to borrow Nietzsche’s idea of
affirmation to stop seeing play as limiting and negative. Nietzsche
pronouncement “God is dead” need not be read as a destruction of a cohesive
structure, but can be seen as a chance that opens up a possibility of diverse
plurality and multiplicity.