Page 102 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 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's critique of structuralism bases itself
on this idea of a center. A structure assumes a centre which orders the structure and gives
meanings to its components, and the permissible interactions between them, i.e. limits play. Derrida
in his critique looks at structures diachronically, i.e., historically, and synchronically, i.e. as a
freeze frame at a particular juncture. Synchronically, the centre cannot be substituted: "It is the
point at which substitution of contents, elements and terms is no longer possible." (Structuralism
thus stands in tension with history as Derrida argues towards the end of the essay.) But historically,
one centre gets substituted for another to form an epistemological shift: "the entire history of the
concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center." Thus, at a
given point of time, the centre of the structure cannot be substituted by other elements, but
historically, the point that defines play within a structure has changed. The history of human
sciences has thereby been a process of substitution, replacement and transformation of this centre
through which all meaning is to be sought - God, the Idea, the World Spirit, the Renaissance Man,
the Self, substance, matter, Family, Democracy, Independence, Authority and so on. Since each of
these concepts is to found our whole system of thought and language, it must itself be beyond that
system, untainted by its play of linguistic differences. It cannot be implicated in the very languages
and system it attempts to order and anchor: it must be somehow anterior to these discourses. The
problem of centers for Derrida was thereby that they attempt to exclude. In doing so, they ignore,
repress or marginalize others (which become the Other). This longing for centers spawns binary
opposites, with one term of the opposition central and the other marginal. Terry Eagleton calls
these binary opposition with which classical structuralism tends to function as a way of seeing
typical of ideologies, which thereby becomes exclusionary. To quote him, "Ideologies like to draw
rigid boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not".
Derrida insists that with the 'rupture' it has become "necessary to begin to think that there was no
center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no
natural locus….a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into
play." Derrida attributes this initiation of the process of decentering "to the totality of our era". 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".
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. This is true, according to
deconstructive thought, for almost all critique of Western thought that arises from within western
thought: it would inevitably be bound up with that which it questions - "We have no language-no
syntax and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition
which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely

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