Page 98 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 8.2 Part One

1. Ante-structuralism:
(i) "structure…has always been neutralised or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a
centre or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin": all structures or systems
oriented themselves through a centre, a moment at which the substitution of elements
ceased, something that fixed or held the structure in place. For example, God in the
medieval feudal hierarchy, the king on a chess board, the anterior mental image which the
word represents. The centre was conceived as providing in a sense the reason deter of the
structure, that which legitimised it, that to which everything could ultimately be referred,
that which lent the system its closure. And, further, this centre was associated with the
fullness of presence, of being, of positivity, of essence, of being something.
(ii) Yet, there was always something of a paradox here: since the centre needed to be both in
the structure (part of it), and yet outside (somehow exceptional, something that did not
quite obey the rules that all other elements of the structure were subject to). The history of
the concept of structure can be read as a series of substitutions of centre for centre, of a
chain of determinations of the centre (in terms of being/presence/fullness/positivity)---
Plato’s ideas, Aristotle’s telos, Descartes’ ego, Kant’ transcendental "I, Hegel’s absolute
spirit; these would all exemplify different ways of describing or determining the centre
through which the philosophical structure gained its coherence.
A moment of direct relevance to us in this regard will be Foucault’s essay "What is an
Author?". What Foucault does there is to shift the problem of what an author is to the
question of the cultural anxiety that is implied by the desire to be able to fix the author.
For what "authorial intention" provides is precisely a centre, a point of origin, a presence
to which the question "what does it mean?" can be referred. And thus far we have seen a
relay of such centerings: against the background that "authorial intention" allows us to fix
meaning, New Criticism insisted that the "closure of the text" fixes meaning; against both
these, Fish initially argues that the "reader" fixes meaning. In each case the structure of
meaning grounds itself upon a centre that is seen as being a point of presence, of being, of
essence: "author", "text," "reader." And from another angle, Foucault’s essay does what
Derrida’s does: decentres the centre.
2. Then there was structuralism (and its own antecedents/co-cedents, Freud/Nietzsche):
Structuralism would seem to be the antithesis of these earlier, essentialist, presentist ways of
thinking, in that it insists that elements of a structure have no positive essence, no being, but
are simply the effects of sets of differential relationships (cf. Saussure’s notion that there are no
positivities, only differential relationships out of which what look like positive entities emerge).
One consequence of this is that Structuralism re-construes the centre not as something that
precedes the structure, not as that which is somehow anterior to and the basis of the structure;
rather, structuralism basically rethinks the centre as an effect of the structure. The centre was
not simply there, and thus should not be thought of on the basis of presence. This moment is
what Derrida calls the decentering ,which occurs when one thinks through the structurality of
the structure, thinks through what makes a structure a structure. Levi-Strauss? notion of myth
is a good example: the "core" of myth, that is, the set of oppositions constituting that deep
structure doesn’t really exist in the world---it is simply the retroactive point of reference
constituted by the differential relationships among the different verisons. These are different
"versions" of the myth not because there was some basic mythic structure out of which they all
grew, but because, through the development of the individual, related stories, a virtual object
emerged (like extending backwards the rays reflected from a mirror to construct the virtual
image---not a brilliant analogy but along the right lines).
3. Structuralism and its discontents:
So, structuralism advocates acentricity, refuses the positivity of the centre that had so long
been thought essential to the very idea of a structure. But does it succeed, or is it another one

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