Page 101 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Unit 8: Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’—Jacques Derrida: Detailed Study

on myth. Hence a peculiar tension in L-S's work between a critique of empiricism (structuralism Notes
claims to go beyond the manifest diversity to modes of underlying regularity) and the fact that his
work always claims to be empirical (dependent on new information). So that structures underwrite
experience (are "prior" to experience) and yet are always dependent upon experience: you never
reach the structure in a sense. Hence too the ambiguity of his response to the demand for
"totalisation": it is a meaningless requirement because it is impossible (because the empirical field
is too vast) and because it is unnecessary (you don't need to enumerate all instances to elaborate
the structure).
However, another way of conceiving totalisation would not be based upon thinking of it in terms
of an empirical impossibility but because of a "structural" feature of the discourse itself: because of
a lack that allows for an infinite circulation within a closed structure.
And by the same token, the idea of "truth" (the discourse of the engineer) turns out itself to be
simply a lost ideal, an historical illusion, which we can never have, but which is necessary for this
notion of "acentricity" to take hold. What Levi-Strauss’ theory of bricolage and method evokes in
seeing these as exemplifying "acentricity" is an ideal image of a discourse of pure truth and self-
sufficiency, that of the engineer or scientist who would "be the one to construct the totality of his
language, syntax and lexicon," who would represent the purity of a meaning present to itself. It
evokes this ideal image as something lost, something that no longer exists, and precisely through
this loss the discourse of method/bricolage stabilises itself. There is, in other words, a buried,
unacknowledged tension in Levi-Strauss’ own descriptions between the upholding of an acentric
structure of differences (exemplified by bricolage) and the hankering after an idealised, mythic lost
presence (the engineer, epistemic discourse) whose absence is what leads to acentricity. It is in the
shadow of loss that the bricoleur operates, elevating thereby that loss itself to the level of the centre.
8.4 Text-Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences"

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. This conference was described by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donata to be "the first
time in United States when structuralism had been thought of as an interdisciplinary phenomenon".
However, even before the conclusion of the conference there were clear signs that the ruling trans-
disciplinary paradigm of structuralism had been superseded, by the importance of Derrida's "radical
appraisals of our assumptions"
Derrida begins the essay by referring to 'an event' which has 'perhaps' occurred in the history of
the concept of structure, that is also a 'redoubling'. The event which the essay documents is that of
a definitive epistemological break with structuralist thought, of the ushering in of post-structuralism
as a movement critically engaging with structuralism and also with traditional humanism and
empiricism. It turns the logic of structuralism against itself insisting that the "structurality of
structure" itself had been repressed in structuralism.
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. It has yearned for the sign which will give meaning to all others, - 'the transcendental
signifier' - and for the anchoring, unquestioning meaning to which all our signs can be seen to
point (the transcendental signified')."

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