Page 106 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes • Derrida goes on to consider a number of areas in which this destabilization, this internal
decentering takes place. He first demonstrates how "the ethnologist accepts into his discourse
the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them" as a general
illustration of his principle that the application of his critique to the sciences "is a question of
explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows
from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself". In
short, he seeks "to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes",
which is exactly what Derrida has done with language and discourse (and in so doing has
done to every other field, scientific, linguistic, philosophical or otherwise, because, after all,
everything is discourse). Or, rather, what Derrida has shown language and discourse to be
doing to themselves: "No longer is any truth value attributed to [these old concepts of empirical
discovery]; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other instruments
appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed
to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces.
This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself".
• The remainder of the essay consists of Derrida explaining three key terms that flow from his
deconstruction of the structure of discourse: bricolage, play, and supplementary.
• Bricolage is a technique that "uses 'the means at hand', that is, the instruments he finds at his
disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially
conceived with an eye to the operation for which that are to be used and to which one tries
by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appear necessary,
or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous - and
so forth". That is, because any sort of concrete link between signifier and signified has been
shown to be impossible, one is therefore free to use whatever tools in whatever ways and in
whatever combination one wishes to discuss the matter at hand.
• Bricolage is permitted by that which Derrida terms "play," and which he explains in the
following quote: "If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness
of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of
the field - that is, language and a finite language - excludes totalization. The field is in effect
that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite… instead of
being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the
play of substitutions". Play is Derrida's way of simultaneously recognizing the infinite range
of deconstruction is possible not because there is an infinite range of information but because
the inherent quality of all information is to be lacking and for there to be no suitable material
(information) with which to fill that lack. This leads to the notion of the supplementary: "The
overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude,
that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented". Because positive, concrete
definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily requires a supplement or
supplements, something or some things which help(s) it exist and be understood. Yet, at the
same time, the object(s) which the supplement is (are) supplementing is (are) (a) supplements
itself. Extend this web in all directions and the relationship between bricolage, play, and the
supplementary begins to make sense.
• And there you have it: discourse, destabilization, language critiquing itself, bricolage, play,
the supplementary. Of course, the discussion here barely begins to scratch the surface of the
implications made by Derrida, for within not even a full fourteen pages of text, has established
the foundation of one of the most significant revolutions in the history of thought. Of course,
saying that Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so
doing imploded the foundation of Western philosophy would certainly fit better with a
deconstructionist view of the world. Yet, there is scant little chance of denying that Derrida
himself holds some special place in this development: if not as its father then at least as its
catalyst.

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