Reading Structure, Sign and Play and The Man of the Crowd for Advanced CriticalReading 2006-7

Structure, Sign and Play

Summary

Derrida is concerned in this paper to examine what he calls the shared ground of two otherwise incompatible attitudes towards interpretation in knowledge. He calls these attitudes to interpretation interpretations of interpretation. Either interpretation can be an explanation of something (arepresentation of some fact or some text); or it can be a production of further signification. In the first case, the explanation would slip out of sight, thus allowing the things to be explained to emerge into view. Here the key terms would be Origin, Truth, and End. Or the interpretation itself would act as a kind of supplement or substitute for the thing itself, whilst the thing itself remains out of the frame of observation. Here the key terms would be Structure, Sign, Play, and Substitution. In each case the interpretation of interpretation falls out on one side or the other of the ancient metaphysical opposition between truth and rhetoric or science and humanism. Furthermore, in the current milieu (i.e., today), there is an acknowledgement on both sides of the absence of the centre that would otherwise guide our search for truth via interpretation. Traditionally, Science privileges the mathematical purity of the abstract form, which ought to have the power to render facts of the universe and the world in clarity and good order. Humanism is againstthis and prefers instead the non-scientific, literary, sceptical, rhetorical mode of address. Heres the kicker: the two interpretations of interpretation are incompatible because if one chooses the former (science) then one is condemned to regard even interpretation as if it was something that could be explained; and if one chooses the latter then one is condemned to forever be supplementing ones sense of what interpretation means with further signifying productions, without end, ad infinitum. So what, then, is this shared ground that Derrida calls diffrance?

Derridas examples are arranged around the concept of structure. There emerges a new attitude to the concept of structure towards the end of the nineteenth century with Heidegger, Nietzsche and Freud; but this has been intensified in a certain way by the new language based sciences ofstructuralism. This new attitude Derrida suggests might be regarded (perhaps) as an event. If so then it would be a rupture. The roles of event and rupture, respectively, are complex. Well come back to them. For Heidegger the Structure of Being for us (whoever we may bebut this is the point!) justis interpretation (the Human Being begins as a Dasein, which means being there in German but people tend not to translate it); and its situated state is always immediately (or as we sometimes say always already) covered over with interpretations. To do good ontological work (the study of being) we need to uncover our situated state. To be situated is to be, as we say (grasping for an interpretation), in time. To be in time is always to be not as one is but as and what one was. The only thing that allows us to carry on being is, therefore, the future. Because our situated state is basically covered up by interpretations these need to undergodestruction. The structure of being is what is left after this destruction of the inherited interpretations has been fulfilled. What do you suppose would be left of our being if we succeeded in this task of destruction? Heidegger thinks that it is our care and our being-towards-death.

Heideggers interpretation cannot allow a concept of truth that would function for the human being in the way that it does for positive science. Positive science requires a concept of adequation. The concept must be adequate to the thing of which it is the concept. A statement should be adequate to the state of affairs of which it is a statement (e.g., the water boiled at 100 degrees; this vase is red). But Nietzsche had already, from his earliest days as a philosopher, posed terrible problems for this ideal notion in the sciencesespecially those that had attempted to establish a human science or a social Science or a psychology. The study of Man seems permanently unable to find the concept for man itself. The problem begins not simply with the question what is man? But rather it begins with the very notion of the concept itself, which Nietzsche believes is nothing better than a rhetorical figure of some kind. The concept, as Nietzsche asserts, in On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense, whether in ordinary language or in science, is the burial site of perceptions. It can thus never reveal a perception. Rather it will replace one. mile Durkheim (one of Levi-Strausss key influences) distinguishes the ordinary language concept, which he calls a common notion from the scientific one, which ideally is unaffected by interference from ordinary language use. Nietzsche would probably have laughed at the conceit. All concepts are, for Nietzsche, metaphors: Originally it is language which works on building the edifice of concepts; later it is science. Just as the bee simultaneously builds the cells of its comb and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly at that great columbarium of concepts, the burial site of perceptions, builds ever-new, ever-higher tiers, supports, cleans, renews old cells, and strives above all to fill that framework which towers up to vast heights, and to fit into it in an orderly way the whole empirical world, i.e., the anthropomorphic world. (150). With this quotation from Nietzsche we seem to have inscribed a circle back to the earlier remarks of Montaigne, who Derrida quotes for his epigraph. It might really seem, then, that the question of interpretation, in its western forms at least, is destined to remain in deadlock between two incompatible demands, between the incompatible requirements of representation and production (a recapitulation of the ancient struggle of truth and rhetoric). Freud, too, had played his part in toppling the scientific concept and the reign of reason from its throne by asserting an irreducibly unconscious ground of human knowledge and interaction. The unconscious, Freud had shown, is an incessant struggle of incompatible demands: those of a devouringId (the IT) and a stern Superego (the interpretations of an internalised social conscience). The unconscious actually operates through processes (displacement, condensation, figurative elements and narrative constructions) that produce thought upon thought in substitutions for a lost or buried prior thought. So, together, Freud, Nietzsche and Heidegger form a powerful trio of names that can be regarded as representative of a move away from structure as a concept with a transcendental centre to the question of the structuration of structure: its enunciative or performative basis. Structuralism picks up on this at the level of the sign (the signified that locus of the concept and thus of truth; and the signifierthat locus of differences, substitutions and play.) The main section of Structure, Sign and Play, is concerned with the trouble that Levi-Strauss gets into when trying simultaneously to operate with scientific principles (empiricism) and those that confirm the structuration principles typical of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Freud (bricolage). He is very clear that neither the lost scientific paradigm nor the new joyous affirmation of play paradigm (we might call it postmodernism for convenience) is an acceptable option on its own. Someother ground, which both of these incompatibles share, is rather what Derrida chooses to point towards, with some rather enigmatic remarks about monstrous births in the future.

The Structure of the essay: Derridas essay can be broken down into discrete sections. It is worth getting to know it in this way, much as one might get to know a large and dusty house (the old European manor houses so beloved of writers and directors of gothic horror narratives and ghost story adaptations): each room is connected via a maze of passageways.

Page 278: The title, epigraph and opening paragraph can be taken as cluster of entryways, each offering more or less condensed and allusive clues as to the main concerns.

278-282 (top): Here the history of the concept of structure up to its recent rupture is described in a rather dense way, with some heady references indeed (to Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger as well as to Levi-Strauss). The before the rupture concept of structure involves the assertion (even legislation) of a centre (an origin, a transcendental determination in the abstract value of presence) that grounds the structure. The after the rupture concept affirms the absence of such a centre but thinks rather the structures structuration in the effects of infinite substitution and play independently of the workings of a rational and self-present mind, which is now regarded as something of a myth. At the bottom of 280 a large BUT intervenes to point out that as ruptures go this one is not that new after all. Rather, metaphysics, philosophy and science have always moved in a circle of production and destruction. The example on page 281 explains why. The concept of sign, which is supposed to allow us to move beyond metaphysics, still requires the concepts of metaphysics in order for us to be able to use them for our critique (the signifier and the signified are only the latest version of the ancient distinction between the sensible and the intelligible, and thus the empirical and the transcendental). The signifier is always a sign of (thus leaving the signified in the place of origin and truth).

282-292 (middle) This is the main body of the argument and is taken up entirely with a close reading of the works of Levi-Strauss, with close attention to the aporia of his method, which seems to involve the incompatible demands of a traditional empiricism and those of the new concept of bricolage. The main body itself can be usefully broken down into smaller segments:

282 to the top of 284: The nature-culture example and the scandal that confounds it: nature is supposedlynecessity; and culture (or society) contingency (accident). The incest prohibition seems to be both natural (necessary) and cultural (contingent on the structures of society). Here we have a glimpse of the unthinkable.

284 to the top of 286: Language bears the necessity of its own critique. But the critique can take two paths:

1. One can question the history (the genesis and structure) of these concepts to the point that one takes the step out of philosophy. Is this possible?

2. By conserving the old concepts, and using them not in terms of their truth value but only as method, thus distinguishing between method and truth (nature and culture play merely methodological roleswe need have no

faith in their descriptive validity). This is the empirical method that allows our observations (at base sensory perception) to determine and alter the concepts we use to describe and interpret things. Preserve the instrument but criticise its value as truth.

284-286: The two dimensions of Levi-Strausss method:

1. Putting the nature-culture opposition into question (on the one hand).

2. bricolage (on the other hand).

286-287: The role of bricolage in a general decentering:

1. no such thing as the reference myth but for its irregular position in the group.

2. no unity or source: everything begins with structure, difference and relation.

Concluding that the mythopoetic function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a centre appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion

287 (bottom) to 290 The big NEVERTHELESS: Seductive as L-Ss new mytho-poetics might seem, do we have to then abandon the epistemological requirements that allow us to distinguish, to classify?

Empiricism raises its head, troubling the bricoleurs reduction of concepts to empty methodical tools.

The critique of empiricism is always nonetheless a kind of justification of empiricism.

The totalization quotation that Derrida interprets here suggests two incompatible definitions of why totalization is not the business of the ethnographer:

1. It is meaningless and pointless. 2. It is impossible.

The two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization:

1. The classical way (more things than there are forms). 2. From the point of view of play (language excludes totalization because there is something missing from it).

The missing centre determines a need for incessant supplements. The movement of signification adds something each time but maintains the absence of a centre. The absence of a centre is replaced by the permanent and productive insistence of a something missing from the field (of language, experience, culture, etc.)

290-292: The tension that the concept of play is always caught up in:

The concept of play is always in tension with history and the history of the determination of being as presence. Middle of 291: history as the detour between two presences THE RISK: the neutralization of time and history in the concept of Structure.

292 (top): the tension (number two) of play and presence. But the concept of playbefore the opposition of presence and absence brings to light repetition and therepeatability that grounds both play and repetition and thus absence and presence.

292 (middle) to the end: Levi-Strauss represents the negative side of a thinking, of which the Nietzscheanaffirmation is just the other side.

The oppositions include:

Sadness/nostalgia

affirmation/joy

Conclusion The two interpretations of interpretation truth and origin/structure and play No question of choosing between them Focus instead on their diffrance The indication of a birth in the offing and the prediction of the monstrous birth the terrifying form of monstrosity The irreducible world of the future.

Detailed Commentary 1. Title and Epigraph

The title can be regarded as a site specific reference (to the conference at which it was first presented), and includes the curious jointing of humanities and sciencethe human sciences (the first of manyoxymorons).

The epigraph: from Montaigne (the pinnacle of humanist scepticism towards the sciences of knowledge): It is more of a business to interpret the interpretations than it is to interpret the things/texts. The echo of Petrarca.

2. Perhaps ... The provisional nature of the perhaps at the opening of the first sentence/paragraph gestures to a future that we cannot possibly completely know (and thus foreshadows the final paragraph of the essay). It also does suggest something rather deep in the relationship posited by the terms structure and event that already problematizes their opposition. It leaves something open: this is what gives (give a little, take a little?)or it is where play will emerge. The undecidable or indeterminacy suggested by the perhaps can be related to moments later in the essay where Derrida talks of the something missing in the field of anthropological research and the question of what the shared ground might be between the two incompatible interpretations of interpretation, the one that favours structure and the one that favours play.

3. The various oppositions put into play:

Structure (from de stru re to build)

Rupture (from rupt-, ppl. stem of rump re to break)

Evenement (event)

Redoublement (repetition ad infinitum)

Structure

Event

Structuralism operates as a kind of analysis of oppositions (especially in the work of Levi-Strauss). Derrida accepts the oppositions to an extent but right from the beginning he makes sure to find what is undecidable in their relation. Structure implies not only putting together but also the principles that are posited as those according to which the relations between parts are determined. So the structurality of structure implies the principles according to which parts are related in a whole. If one adds a con (with) between the French de (of or to) and Struire one will get the multi-hybrid de-con-struire and ultimately deconstruction. Rupture also carries echoes of dis-ruption and inter-ruption. Deconstruction somehow negotiates between the holding together of the whole and its several ways of coming apart. Perhaps being apart is one of the conditions according to which parts may be related. We also established that the most basic and deepest meaning of the word difference implies not simply the differences between things but the difference from itself of anything.

The problematic of the centre shifts the troubling of oppositions to the opposition of inside and outside. To think the outside and the inside of a structure implies a structure that is bounded but perhaps not entirely closed. Perhaps this might remind us of the Universe as it was imagined before Copernicus, whose main contribution to knowledge is understood as a kind of de-centring of Man. Freud also claims in several places to have brought about a revolution analogous to the Copernican cosmic one with a psychoanalytic psychic decentring of consciousness. Nietzsche had already done this in philosophy and Heidegger with another one, after Nietzsche. A series of decentring events thus begins to take shape.

What is it weve been forbidden to think ... ?

Deconstruction and Play: permutations, substitutions, repetitions, and presence.

Presence and Absence: in place and time, history, memory, mourning and forgetting.

The repeatability that lies as the shared condition of the following:

Structure, Event, Play, Repetition, Difference, Permutation, Substitution, Presence.

The Man of the Crowd (now gets its own page)

General Remarks and Glossed Terms

Diffrance Diffrance is a term that Derrida coins on the basis of a pun that the French language makes possible. An understanding of this term is helpful because it can explain a lot about Derridas apparently mischievous playing with language and ideas. I put mischievous in quotation marks because many people have misunderstood the powerful implications of his witty strategy. The pun is possible because in French the word diffrer can mean either to differ or to defer, depending on context.

Diffrence: to differ from something and to defer full identity and presence

If I were comparing two different objects of the same generic type (this hat is different from this one) Id use diffrer just as I would if I was putting off an appointment (lets defer it until a time when well both be free). The one, take note, implies spatiality (difference) while the other implies temporality (deferral). What Derrida is asking us to do is to combine both, normally mutually exclusive, meanings in the one new term diffrance. The pun involves the use of the little letter a. The French diffrence might mean either difference or deferral. Derridas new term, spelt with an a instead of an e, should be taken to mean both difference and deferral simultaneously. The first part of the pun we can call the performative--or auto-referential--aspect. What this means is that by both differing from itself (it means two different things at once) and deferring until infinity any final meaning (it cannot at any one time mean both differ and defer) the word itself is a performance of its meaning. Diffrance just is what diffrance means. The second part of the pun involves the fact that Derridas misspelling is only noticeable when the word is written. Sayingdiffrence and diffrance makes no difference in French. It is pronounced the same way with or without the alteration. What this brings to our attention is the difference between phoneme (audible mark) and grapheme (written, visible mark) and a certain imperceptibility of this particular difference. It is this imperceptible difference that Derrida is using in his article Diffrance to draw our attention to the simultaneously absent and present trace, which as a structuring principle is both inaudible and invisible but which allows for the supplement of the audible for the visible and vice versa. In that article, he then goes on to show the same structurality at work in the relation between language and ideas, and between the sensible and intelligible fields of experience, toothat is, thoughts and sensible intuitions turn out to be related as repetitions of the same in a mutually parasitical structure.

So we can say that Diffrance is the word that Derrida coins to describe and perform the way in which any single meaning of a concept or text arises only by the effacement of other possible meanings, which are themselves only deferred, left over, for their possible activation in other contexts. Diffrance thus both describes and performs the situation, or the conditions, under which all identities and meanings can occurso that any text can be repeated in an infinite number of possible contexts for an infinite number of potential but undetermined addressees. The term operates as a powerful modification of the ordinary notions of identity and difference.

Enunciation The French linguist Emile Benveniste is responsible for outlining the need to make a distinction between what he calls the subject of the nonc and subject of the nunciation. In two influential arguments Benveniste focuses on the role and implications of the ubiquitous first person pronoun (and its reciprocal second person), used at least implicitly in every language known to man and woman. In On the Nature of Pronouns he notes that the first person, I, operates in a way quite unlike other pronouns because it is essentially linked to the exercise of

language. In other words, the sign I links Saussures two dimensions of language, the collective intelligence of langue and the ephemeral individual acts of parole: it is this property that establishes the basis for individual discourse, in which each speaker takes over all the resources of language for his own behalf (220). In fact the I not only links the otherwise heterogeneous dimensions of langue and parole but it also keeps its speakers unaware of this profound difference. What is peculiar about the signs I and you is that they are essentially empty of meaning except when they are being used. So the reality to which I or you refers is solely a reality of discourse. They refer to nothing but the fact that someone is speaking or has spoken (and nothing changes when we consider fictional or reported dialogue). Benveniste states the precise definition for I as follows: I is the individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I (218). By taking the always implicit and often explicit situation of address into account, one has the symmetrical definition for you: the individual spoken to in the present instance of discourse containing the instance you. Now after Saussure we know that all signs are intrinsically empty of meaning, which is determined only in the repetitions of institutions, systems and events. However, I and you are instances of signs that lack even the possibility of material reference. These signs cannot be misused because they do not assert anything, they are not subject to the condition of truth and escape all denial (220). The implications are far reaching. First by indicating the situation of the speaker yet by escaping the conditions normally attributed to language (especially when it is regarded as an instrument of communication), the pronoun tells us something about the relation of the human animal to the language she speaks. Language is not something the human subject uses (as Rene Descartes and the traditions of modernity that follow his lead had always asserted), but rather, the human subject is something only made possible by language. In his 1958 article, Subjectivity in Language, Benveniste underlines this point: We are always inclined to that nave concept of a primordial period in which a complete man discovered another one, equally complete, and between the two of them language was worked out little by little. This is pure fiction. We can never get back to man separated by language and we shall never see him inventing it It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition of man. (224). We probably should be a little careful here, because when Benveniste says that language provides the very definition of man, we mustnt assume, with theoretical linguistics, that we know what language is. At this stage language provides us with the definition of man only because of the peculiarity of personal pronouns. The foundation of subjectivity is determined, according to him, by the linguistic status of the person: Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use I only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally I becomes you in the address of the one who in his turn designates himself as I (224-225). So the basis of subjectivity, if we take language as a model, would not be those aspects that constitute either its lexical content (meaning) or its formal and grammatical rules, but it would only be discoverable in the exercise of language. It thus becomes necessary to recognize an irreducible division corresponding to that between enunciation and statement (nonc). The subject of the statement seems fixed in time, a snapshot of a moment that has immediately passed, already fading in its enunciation. The speaker is already in principle out of the picture and all that remains is his representative in language. What this means is simply that subjectivity comes into being in language alone and that, in speaking, the human subject is irreconcilably divided in himself. A temporal disjunction between the subject speaking (enunciation) and the subject represented in speech (statement) implies that with the single pronoun I, there are always at least two subjects: a subject who is speaking and a subject represented in speech. By focusing on one we necessarily lose sight of the other. There are instances that bring this situation to light rather obviously. The old paradox of the Cretan Liar provides a fine example. When someone says I am lying, the I must refer to a different subject than the one who makes the statement. When someone says I am dead a similar situation arises. The I in principle (and thus in fact)lives on beyond the I who speaks. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that the meaning of the statement is the same whether it is true or false at the moment of utterance and is destined to be true anyway independently of any individual speaker or writer. But it is this at the moment of utterance that loses its anchor once we begin to focus on the modality of personal address. Benveniste

reminds us that linguistic time is self-referential (227). The eternally present moment is an illusion that covers up or sutures the fundamental disjunction in language according to which a present moment (the moment of utterance) can only ever appear as a representation (the statement).

Benvenistes distinction plays a decisive role in the work of Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault, who are some of the names we associate with the category of critical theory called poststructuralism. For Lacan this distinction in language corresponds exactly to Freuds distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. For Lacan, since the subject comes into being through language he does so through the exercise of signifying articulationthe act of enunciation. As soon as he comes into being he finds himself not as he is (what Lacan would call the truth of his being) but as he imagines himself to bethat is as a representation (at the level of the statement). In order to discover the subject of the unconscious the analyst must focus on the level of enunciation (performance, expression)in order to recognize the truth of the subject in the articulation of languageits enunciation. Lacan puts it like this: In order to be situated in the locus of the Other, the presence of the unconscious is to be sought in any discourse in its enunciation (Ecrits 834). So the relation between statement and enunciation (the said and the saying) actualizes the divided structure of the psychoanalytic subject and helps us further to grasp the difference between the imaginary (fixed and complete image of person) and the symbolic (the constitutive function of language).

Roland Barthes explicitly draws attention to the imaginary function of the I in classic realist fiction in his S/Z. He draws attention to the use of the personal pronoun as character forming and rethinks the distinction nonc/enunciation as that between a character (for traditional readings) and a figure: In principle, the character who says I has no name (Prousts narrator is an outstanding example); in fact, however, I immediately becomes a name, his name. In the story (and in many conversations), I is no longer a pronoun, but a name, the best of names: to say I is inevitably to attribute signifieds to oneself; further, it gives one a biographical duration, it enables one to undergo, in ones imagination, an intelligible evolution, to signify oneself as an object with a destiny, to give a meaning to time. On this level, I (and notably the narrator of Sarrasine) is therefore a character. The figure is altogether different: it is not a combination of semes concentrated on a legal name, nor can biography, psychology, or time encompass it: it is an illegals, impersonal, anachronistic configuration of symbolic relationships. As figure, the character can oscillate between two roles, without this oscillation having any meaning, for it occurs outside biographical time (outside chronology): the symbolic structure is completely reversible: it can be read in any direction As a symbolic ideality, the character has no Name; he is nothing but a site for the passage (and return) of the figure. (S/Z 68). All of S/Zs polarities can be situated on the model of nonc/enunciation. What is revealed, if anything, is that, above the bar (on the level of the statement) we find the sum total of determinations, institutions, codes and systematizationsthe whole sedimented world of the statement and its theoretical conditions of truth and falsity. Beneath the bar, however, we find the conditions of discourse itself in an essentially empty sign.