From Structuralism to Poststructuralism

post-structuralism is our topic today it's a little bit of revisiting some of the material we've covered already and so far as we talked about deconstruction not yet but we did talk about this book are the Youngs that were with the word and in that I talked about deconstruction we actually have in I think two classes an actual unit dedicated to that I'm going to look at one aspect of it one text for that bye-bye Derrida to illustrate it and how it plays out so I despite the fact that nobody refers to deconstruction today as far as I know all of them employ deconstructive techniques and the assumptions are deconstructive assumptions and I'm going to get to something about those that I've not yet mentioned today or thus far which is the effect of it not only on the language but on the person that uses the language and put it briefly that the author is deconstructed so that the author's identity becomes highly suspect but I'll I'll get to that when we get to it this is chapter 4 in Terry Eagleton intro to lit theory and I'm going to just trace his argument and comment on it once again post structuralism is rooted and in and responding to structuralism so the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure and his view of meaning and language arising from difference the difference between the sign and the signifier so a cat is a cat because it's not a cap or a bat there's a distinction in terms of letters there that will allow us to understand that and then his question is how far is one to press this process of difference that cat he says is also what it is because it is not a CAD or a Matt and Matt is what it is because it's not a map or a hat and then his question where is this supposed to stop because it seems like an infinite process but if it is an infinite process how about the idea of so sir that that languages are closed fixed stable systems of meaning because so sir we mustn't read so sir as saying what the post-structuralist s-- take him to be saying he doesn't think that language is this infinite play and it's infinitely changing he thinks it's a structure and it's a stable structure at that here's how the structure plays out through the interplay between the sign and the signifier and the signified but ultimately he sees a stable structure there so he is trying to establish a universal system of understanding how language works so in that sense he's a humanist he thinks that for all the differences between languages there are certain stable structures that exist there and they just here's how they work themselves out so his assumptions are those of a humanist and human nature is a fixed stable thing for him or at least it's not something that he questions and I would say that the questioning of human nature does not even arise until the 1960s and at which point it becomes the almost the preeminent subject of study in literary theory so it's hard when I talk about romanticism which I often do and I talk about its connection with you know post-modernism and people can see the post-modernism in romanticism it's hard for us not to see the outcome of or the consequences of ideas in their germinal phase but it's and so we could be unfair to the romantics for claiming there they were they were post modernists effectively and and only saying that and can't imagine they could be read in any other way but it's plain from their contemporaries that they're not read that way and if you read the authors they're they don't intend to say what we take them to be saying either so I think it's only fair to the authors themselves and as to ourselves as scholars to try and take them as they intended to be taken and at the same time to recognize that if there is a weak or unformed or deficient idea that's presented it its deficiency works itself out in time so that everybody can see what was problematic had about it to begin with and I think that is evident in Romanticism and I think it's also now evident in the structuralist view of language and that's been demonstrated by the post structuralist but I don't think it's fair to read the structuralist as is if they were proto post-structuralist or deconstructionist even anyway I just say that is a point of scholarly integrity I think it's important too to assert that on the other hand we can't avoid seeing the consequences because of a the consequence of a bad idea if it's held on to as if it were true is very problematic for us so that we live in the light of the post structuralist and our contemporaries are still post structuralist in their view of language so our our look earlier in the semester at the linguistic turn with Martin Heidegger and with Ferdinand de Saussure with his general course in linguistics these are the foundation for later views and the later views claimed to be making comments not only about the 20th century's view of language but all language and throughout human history whereas I would have thought they could have said if the consequence of so sir are so debilitating as we see them to be then maybe his whole theory was wrong and we ought to revisit it that would seem to me the obvious thing to do so again so sir is coming up by his own admission with a new way of looking at language let's try and look at it through this idea of a structure and if the structure then keeps on morphing into more and more ridiculous ideas then you would say well maybe the theory needs to be discarded but that's not what happens so later writers will basically destroy structuralism from within while still holding on to structuralism as if it was the only view of language that was out there and with it they will then also then deconstruct human nature so it is literally at war with the word as the title of that book suggested and with that then it is an attack on liberal education from within the Academy and Frances rrv Young suggested why that might be and even suggested some of the alternatives now I didn't get into that last time but he does in this book very helpfully come and I hadn't realized this when I set this up last semester because I hadn't read the book in a few years he actually goes to Augusta and like I did and talks about how Agustin's view of language is very much of an alternative to this so have a look in the sections in this on what he says in Augusta and he goes to his confessions and his talk about time in the confessions and how that difference that distinguishes itself from this but anyway back to this so sasser's idea is that language has a closed stable system his successors the post structuralist s-- demonstrate that this is not so so if and they say if every sign is what what it is because it's not all the other signs than every sign would seem to be made up of a potentially infinite tissue of differences it's potentially infinite never stops the endless play of signifiers they will say and so another way of putting it meaning is the result of a division or an articulation of sino articulate and Latin is your your pointer your index finger articulate to articulate is to point something out so it's an articulated its articulation of signs they point out something the thing you point out gives us meaning now note again that this view of language is not what the philosophers will call a view of language where there is a a reality that's pointed to they don't adhere to the correspondence theory of truth that's what the philosophers will call it where a word corresponds to a thing right that was Agustin's view that would fit roughly into that understanding the words don't point to things the point words point to other words and the words of course are in a sense things but for the structuralist the words never actually point to the things because the things are only revealed through the words so it's a word referring to a word and if we mean a thing by the word well that's just another word so it never gets out of the problem of language it's always words referring to other words and never gets to the point of referring to a thing if you see what I mean so if ever if language is the house of being as Heidegger puts it and if we only understand anything through words and never outside of words then we never can escape the problem of of this endless play of signifiers and we never actually can talk about anything outside of the language itself so it's this it is a closed system but the closed system never gets out of anything other than it's just talking without meaning even though it it tries to mean it never actually achieves that meaning so meaning is the as he Eagleton puts it is the spin-off of a potentially endless play of signifiers rather than a concept tied firmly to the tale of a particular signifier now if structuralism divides the sign up from the reference the thing that the sign is referring to the post-structuralist goes a step further and it divides the signifier from the signified so how does this work now he's going to illustrate here and not I I think it's quite frankly absurd I'll say the outside you probably know that anyway but he gives illustrations of it which I think are quite helpful sometimes in understanding what is being presented but he says this so another way of putting it what we just said is that the meaning is not immediately present in a sign the meanings deferred since the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not because remember the definition of black is not white it's binary right there's a system of binaries now and when contemporary gender identity theorists or whatever opposed the binary what they are in part opposing is the structuralist view of presence and absence because again even in that system of binaries there was also a hierarchy so being for instance and non-being are not equivalent things this is being this as nothing if you will these are binaries in one sense but in another sense being has reality and non-being or nothing is literally nothing so it's a and in the in binary code which we use to program computers and they write in binary code they are ones and zeros literally the whole code is written in terms of that and that are these two numbers no nothing nothing is not a number I I know that in primary school they think it is and one of the things that I found troubling when I was a boy and you probably found it troubling as well if you divide 10 by 0 you get 0 I think how is that possible maybe to provide 10 by 1 you still get 10 ok button so it's it's one less and now I get 0 that like conceptually did that ever trouble you to find that ok but that's because it's not another number if I even divide but it 10 by the smallest number possible whatever the point 0 0 0 0 all that area then I would I would end up with a huge number but if I divide by 0 I get nothing so that's because it's not a number and it would be the same whether I divided or multiplied it furthermore right 10 times 0 is just the same as 10 divided by 0 isn't it no or is 10 divided by 0 it's still 10 no it's the same right yeah so it's it's not another number it's an extraordinary thing and similarly infinity my son has a hard time with this my daughter says that I love you infinitely my son says I love you infinity plus 100 or 99 plus 99 I think well you don't get what infinity is you can't add a number like infinite means there's no but he thinks it's just another type of number and zero is taken to be that but strictly speaking something that has an existence and can be numbered finitely is not the same as something that has no finitude at all and so zero here is a very different sort of thing and so I'm just saying these are not two species of the same thing there's not an equivalence here they're in fact categorically different although we reckon that nothingness by that figure the zero very important as well and it's a philosophically potent thing as well what's the difference between being and non-being there it's numerically represented but it's not it's not just another number and then you get into the philosophy of number what actually is a number and there are different theories on what it is by the way very interesting I think but here when we get the here we get the sense that being and non-being the one defines the other but is that actually true does non-being or nothing define what something is I don't think so in in or in the same way that zero defines one well it doesn't zero has no definition right so that is not the same than of other sorts of equivalences and even hierarchy so we could talk about parent-child here or man woman or male female or whatever and according the structuralist understanding the one is simply the opposite to the other so it defines the other a male is not a female a female is not a male it's the negation of the other and but furthermore there's a recognition of a hierarchy and you can draw a roughly equivalent of hierarchy along here and this feminist scholars will do precisely that by the way they'll say that men have presence and existence and they have a status and so forth where women are effectively the equivalent of a nothing in this system because everything's binary and they assume that the binary relations are equivalent across the board whereas I would say that these things are not all like the other go back to Sesame Street one of these things is not like the other right and yes remember that it's my childhood with Sesame Street these are not all the same like a man and a woman is a very different thing than a parent-child very different these are both adults these are sexually complementary opposites a child on the other hand is just an immature adult but even an adult is not the same as a parent because you can be an adult and not be a parent so there are different relations going on there so it's not just an issue of negation but in the structuralist view of language they are just defined by their opposites so maybe you need more opposites here in order to fully define what a parent is then here so it would be child also a dolt but then in the relation there would be some sort of relational things there but that is how the structuralist view of language works is this correspondence between the two binaries but this is the thing that they most emphasize within it and this is where I think it's telling this is the key one of all the ones that have been laid out here this is the one that is key being and nothing and so the post structuralist s' arise out of the nihilism of the French in the 1960s so that French nihilism of the 50s and 60s and so forth it comes out of that and there's also a political context there in France which is roughly very sympathetic to Marxism so it's a way of philosophically pursuing a destabilization of the powers and authorities but jean-paul Sartre says that if God exists then I don't exist I can't tolerate the idea that God exists because if he exists then I am nothing I am annihilated I think it's it's a bad form of thinking but if you think in the binary terms and I am defined by what I'm not if God is then I am NOT again if he is ultimate being than I in comparison to him have no being and if I can't even see it as degree but of kind which all these things are there is no degree here it's all just kind right these are distinctions all unkind whereas I would say as a Christian that a man and a woman are not differences of kind they're at per se I don't even know how to describe it it's not a difference in quality it is a difference in it's not a difference in kind neither the two together are human kind furthermore the two together are one flesh in marriage and the two together are called by God to be are called man furthermore troubling the feminists just the term even but there's a unity within that differentiation here whereas there is no unity in this differentiation although there is and there's no unity of the same species as this one so does the structuralist account of language actually work very effectively in differentiating things for us and distinguishing thing is and accounting for how language actually operates I just simply don't think so but the post-structuralist accept that all of language works in a binary way and with that then they go to this thing the Being and Nothingness as the distinguishing thing as the key they don't go talking about man women or a parent child they could have done that they didn't or even human non-human or something like that they talk about it in terms of being or nothingness so with that said what does Eagleton say about this another way of putting what we've just said is that meaning is not immediately present in a sign since the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not its meaning note that it defines it by negation this is a very funny way of definition I would have thought when you're using words you're defining what it is so a cat isn't a dog or a cat was not a that was it that was this deconstructionist way but a cat is a feline it's a four-legged creature that eats this does that you'd have all sorts of things that would characterize the definition both four-legged both mammals etc but what are the differences well you would say something that was distinct about it not that it was not a dog because it would also be not a horse that's not helpful you would say what it is but here it's what it is not so since the mean of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not its meaning is always in some sense absent from it - it's gonna they're gonna make heavy weather of this absence so meaning if you like is scattered or dispersed among the whole chain of signifiers it cannot be easily nailed down it is never fully present in any one sign alone now if deaf if meaning or words are defined by what they're not this is true but they're they're mistaking that words are defined in this way but anyway reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace so it flickers between presence and absence because whenever I speak of a woman I have in the back of my mind not a man and again for the feminist something that has being as opposed to something that has no being no public status or ever the public in the private all of these definitions at which point it becomes an existential fight if I don't have equivalence equality then I have no status at all but there's another sense in which we can never quite close our fists over meaning says which arises from the fact that language is a temporal process when I read a sentence the meaning of it is always somehow suspended something deferred or still to come one signifier relays me to another and that to another earlier meanings are modified by later ones and although the sentence may come to an end the process of language itself does not there is always more meaning where that came from I do not grasp the sense of the sentence just by mechanically piling one word on the other for the words to compose some relatively coherent meaning at all each one of them must so to speak contain the trace of the ones which have gone before and hold itself open to the trace of those which are coming after each sign in the chain of meaning is somehow scored over crossed out or trace through with all the others to form a complex tissue which is never exhausted and to this extent no sign is ever pure or fully meaningful this to me is absolute gobbledygook and nonsense but though what I've put in my notes here is this is a bizarre form of alphabetical determinism that the means determined by the letter so is the bat the cat the mat or whatever and that determines the mean well this is ridiculous no language works that way at this point if this is what is meant by so sirs structuralism then we just dispense with so sort of structuralism but I'm not even sure it's fair to consider so sir this way but this is what Jacques Derrida will do with him and he doesn't in accordance with again these two things the Being and Nothingness and he will use them to talk about all these other things now where does this go the fact that a sign can be reproduced is part of its identity but it's also what divides its ident what divides its identity because it always can be reproduced in a different context which changes this meaning so what does he give us an illustration this is a funny illustration cat a cat it can be a furry four-legged creature it can also be a malicious person you know use cat and English fight like cats it's also a knotted whip a cat-o'-nine-tails that's a cat in in British English you can call that a cat you know the oh nine toes just a cat it's also an American hey cat no it's also a horizontal beam for raising a ship's anchor that's also called a cat a it's a six legged tripod apparently it's a short tapered sic stick and so on all these are uses of the word cat so the context is going to explain the meaning but even when it it just means a four e a furry four-legged animal this meaning will never quite stay the same from context to context the signified will be altered by the various chain of signifiers in which it is entangled so your cat and my cat these are all cats but the context means adds a little different meaning to what the cat is apparently so there is a furry four-legged animal that lives in my house he's gray his name is Gandalf that's my cat you may have a different cat and but for me he has associations with I guess the name and the name with other things so those are the meaning of the cat Gandalf that resides in my house that crazy four-legged beasts not mythological but strange all the same so for me cat has different associations and those come from the different contexts and the different time and the experience and all that so to some degree all of those things are part of the meaning of cat for me he says and so the implication of this is that language is much less stable than scizor suggested it's much less stable this is there does main point nothing is ever fully present in signs ever some of the meaning is deferred and it's endlessly so you never get to that point of closure because we are always speaking within the context of being finite in our being and language likewise being only meaningful from within language itself so further words are going to amend or change the initial definition and every time I add a word it changes the meaning of the thing so language changes that and furthermore and this is the next implication of it and I said it at the outset and this is where 1960s Leary goes with this nothing being ever fully present in the signs it's an illusion for me to believe that I can ever be fully present to you in what I say are right because to use signs at all entails that my meaning is always somehow dispersed divided and never quite at one with itself and not only my meaning but me and so in the 1960s we I think I assigned this but I'm not 100% sure I've taught this course several times over the years and I sometimes change some of the core texts but Roland Bart this is not Carl Bart the philosopher this is Roland bar at the French critic well write an essay called the death of the author and this is that exactly what he is maintaining here is that we are not even sure of there being an author we only have access to the author's through the text and the text being composed of words but the words being endlessly defers and furthermore meaning something only in relation to their absence it defers our understanding of who the author is in fact the author as such does not even exist first so this is another attack on logo centrism since language is something I am made out of rather than merely a convenient tool I use the whole idea that I am a stable unified entity must also be a fiction not only can I never be fully present to you but I can never be fully present to myself either I will need new signs I'll need to use signs when I look into my mind or reach my soul and this means I will never experience any full communion with myself Bart calls this the death of the author and remember in in the classical understanding of what you do in your reading is that you are understanding the author's intention but he says we don't have access we can never achieve that process because what language does in undermining that there's always a loss of not only the original author but even our own consciousness yes of course and in fact it will become explicit there they will say so he's God that that the g.od is a transcendental signifier signified and they will explicitly say there is no transcendental signified but if there's no god now in the 19th century the theologies called the death of God it's categorized by that Nietzsche himself says it god is dead and people were scandalized by it although Nietzsche was actually probably not the inventor of that idea so much as the popularizer you know God is dead and we have killed him he's very proud of that fact here the consequence of that comes closer to home the author is dead and human nature is dead as a consequence it's an it's a it's a category that we've assumed up to this point has integrity coherence meaning purpose etc but this view of language undermines that certainty and so this becomes a consistent come the 1960s and Roe Lombard it's not just what what Jung says it's not only at war with the word it's at war with the person it's at war with the author it's also there for a war with authority because I think that Eagleton is correct when he says later in this chapter that unlike the anglo-american school the French School of Derrida has a political agenda here in a way that probably the Americans don't it is more related to Marxism it is related more to undermining the claims of authority of those who are in authority and it does so by attacking all authority as a fiction a very useful fiction for those in power so Michel Foucault who will also come in the wake of the post structuralist will talk about language as power and say that language is in fact used to further the purposes of the powerful and will even define things in order to punish people and of course with Foucault he himself was a homosexual so he will come up with an idea that again the homosexual is a form of suppression of the hetero or the heterosexual of the homosexual and again that's binary the homosexual has existence is acknowledged in law has status whereas the homosexual does not exist at all it's Niall 8 it's nothing it's being destroyed these this sort of life and it's a power-play at that point well it would be a power-play if words can never mean anything right if that's another consequence if if it is true what the deconstruction is say about language and that we can't even know the author or ourselves then what do words do other than try and further an agenda not of establishing meaning but of establishing power and then you get back in the position of for semuc us in Plato's Republic who says that justice is the powerful getting their advantage go back and read the Republic's halt it's all in Plato it is and in our day the cultural Marxist exactly what they'll say power privilege access whatever right the intersectionality what's my identity well it's related to this nexus of factors that give me being or non being either I have them in which case I have power privilege access whatever or I don't have them in which I'm effectively nothing and so the purpose of language then is to overturn the status quo and to give power and privilege and access and resources and standing and status etc to those who currently don't have it through a through the use of language which was is unjust why is it unjust well it's not actually unjust it's just that it's oppressing those who don't have the power and exalting those who do have the power but they can't appeal to the concept of justice because it doesn't exist justice is just a word for them they announce it quite explicitly so once again if you are of the mindset that post-structuralism is correct then you were announcing quite openly and publicly that your use of language is really not about understanding or dialogue or anything like that although they use the terms it's simply a power play that's what they say of their opponents but that's what they believe about themselves so language is a form of warfare against the establishment and now it happens from within the establishment so the claim is that this polarity of being meaningful or absent of meaning demonstrates the absence as much as the meaning and meaning is never fully established it ends up in a sort of a nihilism into despair and a despair about the possibility of truth and goodness and beauty and justice gives rise to an anger and a hostility which then marks the academy and not the passing on of knowledge but rather the transformation of the academy into a form of activism social activism but I can still persuade myself that things are meaningful how does that happen well here's what a Eagleton says one way I might try to persuade myself that being met that having meaningful experiences or meaningful life one way I can persuade myself and he could say delude myself is by listening to my own voice when I speak so it's not that I don't exist I if I listen to my voice I know that I do exist after all that's what Descartes did right I think therefore I am so I I have established the certitude about my thinking there right so I listen to my own voice rather than writing my thoughts down on paper now they're gonna make it big heavy weather but this jacques derrida will make a big deal about the difference between speaking and writing here and the privilege of speaking because he says that people try to establish certain to certainty about themselves by speaking whereas they ought to observe the importance of writing and he's going to go to Plato and I that's when I when we do the deconstruction segment I'm going to look at his little work on the Plato's pharmacon it's about writing and about language but he says in the act of speaking I seem to coincide with myself in a way quite different from what happens when I write so say I can think that I'm thinking I'm certain about my being I'm not caught up in this absolute and nihilistic despair that I might not even exist I I can hear my own voice however when I write there's a distance there and my spoken words seem immediately present to my consciousness and my voice becomes they're inanimate intimate rather spontaneous meaning whereas in writing my meanings threatened to escape from my control somebody can misinterpret my words I write a text I know what I mean when I write the text the person on the other end of the text misconstrues my meaning I realized that a written word can lose the context in which I'm writing it like I'm writing the text here somebody is on the other side of Toronto they don't understand that I'm responding to something immediately around because I haven't said that I've just used the words and they misinterpret what I've met or I'm not a very clear writer whatever so writing loses that sense of certitude and Derrida observes that writing seems to rob me of my being the very certitude I had when I spoke is lost when I go to write it's a secondhand mode of communication writing a pallid mechanical transcript of speech and so always it one removed from my consciousness and it's for this reason that the Western philosophical tradition all the way from Plato to clothe levy Strauss the anthropologists I talked about a few classes ago has consistently vilified writing as a mere lifeless alienated form of expression and consistently celebrated the living voice so says Eagleton and so says Derrida who would we say is exempt from this I would say Christians they're the people of the book it is the Word of God but it's the written word as well it's written down these are the very words of God there's a there is an exaltation of writing not just speaking but writing in Plato we can note and we will note when we look at Derrida his correct observation that Plato was very concerned about writing things down and the loss of meaning that comes with it and he distrusted writing and he gives an illustration of why that is gives a little one of his little stories about writing in the danger writing people write things down in order to remember them right so to preserve them he notices the more you write things down the less you remember them because you don't commit it to memory you just commit it to the page and then you can forget it you write in your notes and then you stick it somewhere and they have remembered it well it's just like the internet it's all written text somewhere I'm gonna do some research well you don't know anything you're just gonna look it up right so that's it's replaced knowledge and and the memory the text that you would have memorized at one point is gone people can't even cite scripture anymore and the he said he further says then writing as I say robs me of my being and behind this prejudice and he says it's throughout the whole Western tradition and I think there is something to his case it's just when it comes to Christianity it's totally false it's the exact I don't want to say it's the opposite Christians say that the Bible is the Word of God and you must not alter it you must not add to it you must not take away from it look at the book of Revelation so derrida's comments about the Western tradition ignore the Western tradition they act as if there was the ancient world of Plato and then we come all the way over to Rene Descartes and then some there's this sort of thing that happened in between that which I thought was transformative and important it was called Christendom but Derrida treats it as species of the same thing and it's just because I think he's fundamentally not a serious scholar in this sense and those that are again in the Academy who are not very attentive to the distinctives of Christian Christian life and Christendom are happy to undermine the authority of the authorities particularly if they're connected with the church and with Christian doctrine and Christian doctrine one of the foremost points being the theology of the human person it's a legacy of that like where do we get the idea that human beings have a sanctity the sanctity of life where is this idea come from it's not from the classical the Romans didn't think it the Greeks didn't think it the Romans and Greeks enslaved people they massacred their enemies they committed eugenic experiments or maybe not eugenic experiment well they did sort of the Spartans dead that set the weak out to die so the strong the gene pool would be strengthened by the hardy swords this is a sort of eugenics program the idea that human beings have a sanctity of life comes from Christian doctrine that we bear the imago Dei and that God alone not only defines life but has the prerogative to take it away and no one else but him other than in accordance with his law so it says you shall not murder but if you do murder there's a consequence if it's first-degree murder it's capital offense right so there it is justified but then again again it's justified in accordance with the written word but in the Roman tradition life is very cheap and the out the extra Christian traditions of the world there is no sanctity to life and the Chinese are correct when they have said that your idea of the sanctity of life is a Western construct they're incorrect insofar as they say it's a Western construct it's not Western it's Christian because Western included people who agreed with the Chinese that there are no human rights it's Christians that upheld the humanity of the slave and the orphan and the child and the and the woman by the way under Roman law a woman has no rights her husband can take her life she's not even allowed to inherit property so when he says that the Western tradition here this summary statement that the Western philosophical tradition all the way from Plato up to levy Strauss has consistently celebrated the living voice of and not the written word he deliberately I would say miss represents the influence of Christianity or he's ignorant and I don't think he's ignorant he's too smart too well read here but behind this prejudice he says lies a particular view of man man is able spontaneously to create and express his own meanings to be in full possession of himself and to dominate language as a transparent medium of his inmost being where do we get this idea from that our expression is our identity who says that self-expression is the is the locus of our human nature the Romantics this arises from the romantics it does not it does this is not a classical doctrine they would think this was absurd and that was the very view of human nature that he ridiculed at the outset did Eagleton I can't believe that he's not being disingenuous here but this this view of man what the view of man in other words the romantic man the man who exists when he expresses himself he's creative his words define who he is what this fear theory fails to see is that the living voice is in fact quite as material as print and that since spoken signs like written ones work only by a process of difference in division speaking could be just as much said to be a form of writing as writing is said to be a second form hand form of speaking that's Eagleton's critique of the deconstructionist there so you're not going to have the deconstructionist because really all Eagleton's agenda is here as as a Marxist is too he's unhappy with the fact that the that that the deconstructionist aren't on board with the political project of Marxism they're just a little too nihilistic here for him that's and self-defeating you can even apply to your phone Oh centrism as he called it but just as Western philosophy and now he now he is towing the Derrida line just as Western philosophy has been phono centric no phone oh here in Greek means voice a phonograph is a voice phonetics is the the sound of the words phonics just as the Western philosophy has been phono centric when he says Western philosophy he means Plato not true of Aristotle actually but it is there in Plato and it's true of a few others perhaps I hate these grand sweeping statements but just as Western philosophy has been photo centric centered on the quote living voice unquote and deeply suspicious of script so also it has been in a broader sense logo centric committed to a belief in some ultimate word presence essence truth or reality which will act as the foundation of all our thought language and experience it's always been committed to some sort of transcendental being as opposed to non being truth as opposed to falsehood or presence or essence these are categories and as he notes rightly these aren't just binary opposites there's there there's a status to one in a non status to the other but as it has been connected with all of these things it is yearned for the sign which will give meaning to all the others and what is that the transcendental signified namely God that will hold together all of these what Plato calls the forms but it needs that one thing that will unite all of these signifiers the anchoring unquestionable mean to which all our signs can be seen the point and a great number of candidates for this role God the idea the world spirit the self substance matter and so on have thrust themselves forward from time to time I think it's probably accurate and these are not equivalents by the way so in the romantics it's probably the self Christian thinking it's God in platonic thinking it's the idea in Hegel it's the world spirit you could argue in Aquinas it's being amongst materialists it'll be matter but it's this concept that anchors all the other ones these have come from forward from time and since each of these concepts hopes to found our whole system of thought and language it must itself be beyond that system right because it'll be the founder it's the undefined definer so it can't be contained within the whole system of thought it's outside the system of language its untainted by its play of linguistic differences because remember the play of differences contains that of being a non being and so something grounds all being can't have non-being as part of its definition so therefore God can't exist it must have existed before they did but it can't because as soon as we refer to God we also think not God and that in conclusion here he says that that any such transcendental meaning is a fiction though perhaps a necessary fiction is one consequence of the theory of language I have outlined what other things are involved in this implicated in the challenge and the problem here of the idea that God is a necessary assumption for all the other ones to hold and yet it is only that well what else is in the same sort of thing freedom the family democracy independence Authority order and so on all of these things originate in God without God no freedom without God no family without God no idea that there is rights and power to the people democracy no sense of Independence etc these are all they all originate in God these are inalienable rights we hold these things to be true now this is Derrida and he says that any system that depends on foundation of metaphysics the first principle is metaphysical and metaphysics he says is already using language and thereby inferring the the negation of metaphysics so then metaphysics is also impossible there is no transcendental medica signified so the idea that God exists is defeated by the view of language which he presents and language again works through this play of signifier signified in this case being and non-being or being in nothingness so when I talk about the ultimate being of God it falls into the problem of the binary again for me this is this is not troubling or problematic for getting around the whole dilemma that he creates which is just this is a false view of language nobody nobody operates this way nobody thinks this way you have to be thoroughly disturbed and to persist with this view of language it's not even the way your own language works and it denies the very thing that that Christians have upheld about the Bible namely that it is the Word of God and that it's revelation further now that's also important this is not just humans saying things about God this is God telling us who he is he's revealing himself through people in words but it is revelation it's not description right it's self declaration this is why we read the Bible in a Christian service of worship because there's no replacement for you can't substitute human words for God's revelation of himself he declares who he is in the very thing that you're reading about God he is the he's revealing himself to you through that but again Derrida doesn't consider that and neither does mr. Eagleton when he's summarizing here so these are false inferences from faulty premises speculative private premises it seems to me when we come to feminism which will come in a few classes they will make much out of this though this this dichotomy that that Derrida constructs they will say that woman is the opposite of man so if here I am my self and and this will become so I talked about Being and Nothingness and if you look at these master concepts so we could talk about the self up here what would be its opposite it would be the other then we would have the native in the alien the male and the female you can see these dichotomies being set up and the equivalents is drawn between them all as well again myself I have being a man house being has status and so forth but the woman who's the opposite must not only be opposite the male but other than the male again it does not attend then to the distinctions which scripture actually says about the nature of woman it's not just other if she's other so it was an animal and so's a plant so it was a tree or so it was whatever so is the water so is the air in that sense all these things are other than man but that's not what's meant by what woman it's not the other but in feminist theory that is exactly what they will say she is the other man she is non man the negation of man so she doesn't have a sense of selfhood she's no security of person she has no being it's given to her by men just take it for herself will to power she's gonna be the ubermensch she's the negation of she's a defective man and modern feminism I think in fact this is my critique of modern feminism is that it hates women it's it presents women in an androgynous fashion it's a it's a defective male so it defines it so this is perverse and bizarre women defining themselves by their their deficiencies as men like you would have thought of feminism would assert itself and the goodness of the female as distinct from the male but that's not how its defined it's what it it can't do as a male and it wants to demonstrate its validity as if as women by doing everything that a man can do but then if if a man is the opposite of a woman you're doing exactly you're negating the very thing which is supposed to be distinct it leads to androgynous thinking and furthermore it leads to cyborg thinking by the way because the innate the natural and artificial is like white a specious category but we'll come to that later on the course but even we come to men a man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other as his opposite so I only becoming a man by beating down women like the caveman right I got to drag her around by the hair and show her who's boss right all those texts that you read about the from the ancient cavemen that describe what the early cave dwellers were like in their relations right because they always got dragged around by the hair with the bone that was in their tear to keep it up in place but you didn't drag them around by the hair you know who's really funny on this is GK Chesterton really really funny what's that text that he wrote I've recommended it to a few days just to oh it'll come to me but he talks about the the how anthropologist described the early societies and the men are invariably beating down women and he says there's they don't have any text so where are they getting their evidence for this like there's no text that demonstrates this at all none and even the what does remain of early cave dwellers and maybe they're not even dwelling in the caves maybe they just use caves for their artistry because there are the things that remain right if they had any houses then they're going to be gone by now anyway I mean our houses are gone within a hundred years why would their houses last for centuries named millennia why would they do so the caves remain and there are there are paintings on the side well maybe this is a nursery that's why the that's why the paintings look so primitive because the kids like it bright colors but there's no writing so we have no idea what they thought but but but the anthropologists posit this idea that early human origins were barbaric and vulgar and men were bashing down women dragging them around by their hair and then gradually we became more and more civilized and more and more equal that demonstrates that they are wonderful and the male/female differences is a bad thing but so the so the man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out this other or opposite defining himself in antithesis to it and by his whole identity I'm reading you Olson here page 115 is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique autonomous existence woman is not just a the other in the sense of something beyond his Ken but and other intimately related to him as the image of what he's not and therefore is an essential reminder of what he is man therefore needs this other even as he spurns it is constrained to give a positive identity to what he regards as no thing nothing not only is his own being parasitically dependent upon the woman and upon the act of excluding and subordinating her but one reason why such exclusion is necessary is because she may not be quite so other after all anyway get in line right Ray's getting your but even there there's a sense but what if the my relation to the woman also defines me in the act of crushing the woman I'm also undermining myself again the whole thing is weird perverse twisted and very familiar because it's the discourse of our contemporaries so the summary here which is bottom of 115 structuralism was generally satisfied if it could carve up a text into binary oppositions high low light dark nature culture so on and then expose the logic of their working so that's what structuralism did just the binaries and then how do they relate to another what's the logic between these two binders deconstruction tries to show how such opposition's in order to hold themselves in place are sometimes betrayed into inverting or collapsing themselves and I get I said the master category is this one upon which all the others depend this one just so it's smuggled in there as if it were one all like the others but it's not this is the master one its betrayed into inverting or collapsing themselves or need to be banished to the text margin certain niggling teeth details which can be made to return and plague them Derrida zone typical habit of reading is to seize on some apparently peripheral fragment in the work a footnote or a recurrent minor term or usage a casual allusion and work it tenaciously through to the point where it threatens to dismantle the opposition's which govern the text as a whole the tactic of d constructive criticism that is to say is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic they get unstuck they contradict themselves and they thereby deconstruct the author that comes with that who intends to mean something and finds himself embarrassed so this will move into Derrida into Michel Foucault it will work into the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and it will work into the French feminist philosopher julia kristeva all similarly there are differences between them and the distinctions but it's in it's in Foucault for sure now I'm going to come to Foucault when we look at that little text I've given you plastic people and within that the agenda of the of gender identity is there even if not the intent the seeds of it are sown in there the will to power to express something that does not exist as if it existed and to do so does to deny what does exist well what then it does exist I would say that sex and gender are opposites this is not just a binary there's a hierarchy this one has power this one doesn't have does not in order to overturn the powerlessness of these ones we have to usurp this so everyone sex has to give way to gender just as for feminists to get their way all men must be put down from positions of power authority privilege etc just as myself has to give away to the other just as other people outside Canada have to have privilege over those who are born in this country so we have to welcome worldwide immigration and so for this part of an ideological agenda just as we have to give rights to the criminal and deny them to the victim or the person in authority comments or questions here I've got five minutes left do you have any thoughts on this we've come a long way from where we began last semester we're talking about literary theory and the subject matter and what it was related to certainly its exposition in Horace when he talks about ARS Poetica talks about different genres and the effect of them in the in certain classical texts and the role of classical texts and pedagogy and in inculcating beautiful writing and exalting human nature and then we move on to Agustin and his discussion of all that and and then into the Renaissance where he's repeating and this idea of teaching and delighting this is now a project of no delight I would say except through destruction and the teaching is oh so this is an interesting another one what's the difference between this another antinomy here if you will poetry and criticism they are related to one another but the poet is not the critic the critic and the poet are very different things but come deconstruction the critics are as poetic and self expressive as the poet's work and so in the English literature you can in first-year English go and study English and what you will read is the critics not the poets right because that's the way of subverting the authority of poetry after all what is literature if Shakespeare can see cease to become literature then why wouldn't the critics crappy writing be exalted as the thing we ought to read because critics can't write their illegible or ought to be illegible but it's certainly gibberish but you will read what the critics say rather than what Shakespeare says because that's one of the other points critics become not just parasites on the poets they replace the poets as the text in order to produce the transformation the subversion of the establishment which is the project of the 1960s and continues to this day comments are questions or please make a comment you're thoughtful yes what you can see what I'm saying about it being dependent on the premises of the previous that's why I set it up but when you come to it it seems frivolous unnecessary and maybe unserious and yet it's held very strongly and adamantly this is the thing this is what we are about the establishment so I'm in agreement with you on the other hand I'm simply on this course I have it's not like the other ones I teach in the other ones I teach what I think is good and what's best here I'm trying to do you a service by saying here's what's out there and here's what's influential and so when I come to the as we get towards the end of the semester it gets more and more estranged from being meaningful and good but it's pervasive and it's it's extraordinarily influential and this is the world in which you're living you have to operate if I just began there with the latest theories which are getting Canada research chairs now by the way so ecofeminism and post humanism and so forth these are getting research chairs and universities which means that somebody's making a living from this and people will be studying with those professors getting their doctorates in it and they then be stuck in a position for 40 years teaching others of the same thing and they've never even read Shakespeare so it is it's a bad thing to place at Mile to put it mildly but it is there and you will encounter it so that's the function here but as I say it's a very different animal than any other course that I teach but I agree with you it's it's unnecessary its fallacious its its analysis of everything that went before is simply false and it can't put it any I can't present it better than that like it's just wrong it's it's not accurate it's not scholarly the idea that the voice had been privileged over the word the written word is there in Plato he talks about it but he's talking about it pragmatically you're not worried about language he wrote texts right if he were that worried about it but he doesn't in one of his letters and in one of his dialogues he talks about the problem that writing poses for memory so he's concerned about it it's an interest but he isn't saying that the voice has a privilege over writing this is ridiculous it's not the sum and substance of Plato but you would think reading Derrida that it was but again look at what Eagleton said himself Derrida chooses marginal peripheral footnotes and then he makes them the substance of the text it's sort of persuasive and yet it isn't because nobody outside the Academy is persuaded in fact there it seems to me a law of diminishing returns the degrees cost more but they people value them less over time so you they they are in the positions of the Academy in the sense that now again because they have the levers of power to use their own analogies about power and institutions they have power and they are able to wield it but the the question is is everybody else going to follow them in this as they as they once did because the humanities used to have some poll because you would come out of it a better well more well rounded person is that what we're getting in the Academy now I don't think so and what can they do outside of their area absolutely nothing so it's a law of diminishing returns they have power but the power was based on nothingness and it's collapsing into nothingness which is why they're angry they know their time is short don't really thirst 8 it's a wholly negative project it's a Paris it's parasitic on the humanities and in the end I I can't believe that people still send their kids to universities in masses I can't believe it I would discourage it myself although I think there is something to be said for humanities education I try and give you one I think that's genuinely good but that's not what you're getting in most universities and the cost then you have this millstone of debt around your neck and you're ill-equipped to do anything to get rid of it because you can't think it's not a good place to be anyway but that I I could not agree any more it becomes more and more absurd and more and more peripheral but not but that even that is tracing the trajectory away from the imago which I talked about the human towards things that are not human now and what really matters now well it's the environment ok but the environment includes human nature actually you thought so because they say man the environment as a dichotomy here and one has being and the other is non being we've been oppressing the environment etc what a what a terrible depiction of what has happened historically people in their environment if he never heard of animal husbandry no people couldn't use that you can't use that term anymore but right you're looking after the creatures right and and hunting is there for the purposes of not only feeding yourself but of calling the herd it's like an agriculture like there is a good use of human culture there's also bad uses but in the environmentalist understanding any culture is opposed to nature because again they see them as polar opposites and one is the negation of the other either we're going to have nature or we're going to have culture while then cultures gotta go gotta go you know I think that's it well beyond

Channel: Dr Scott Masson

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Keywords: #poststructuralism, #euthanasia, #nihilism, death of the author, roland barthes, jacques derrida, claude lévi-strauss, structuralism and poststructuralism, post structuralism, scott masson, structuralism vs post structuralism

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Length: 78min 37sec (4717 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020