Chapter4
Post-structuralism, Deconstruction,
Post-Modernism
There have always been two traditions in
philosophy.
One asserts that there are truths that are
universal and eternal.
The other school claims that the word is
physical and historical and that any truth
we arrive at about it is equally historical,
equally located within physical universe.
The second is closer to science than to
religion, and it promotes the ideal of
progressive change.
Disputes between these two positions
occasionally break out, and one such war
erupted after 1967, when a French
philosopher named Jacques Derrida
strongly reasserted the claims of the
second position in three books-Writing
and Difference, of Grammatology, and
Speech and Phenomenon, all published in
1967.
He argued that the most recent attempt to
assert the first or absolutist and
foundationalist position in the work of
Edmund Husserl was mistaken .
Husserl argued that all truth was like
geometry: one could in one’s mind
picture an ideal triangle.
To understand that, you have to think about
how your own mind works.
Your mind possesses an ability to abstract.
Before you is a society you might be inclined to
think of as something of a slave society.
People do nothing but work most of the time,
and most of the work produces value and
wealth for a very small sliver of the populationinvestors, large property-owners, corporate
executives, etc. – who reap the benefits of
others’ labors.
All societies are pyramids.
But still, there are all these sticky and
contentious differences between places
and people, or between moments in time.
If you choose the universalist position,
you lose the differentiated detail; if you
go for the differentiated detail, you lose
sight of your perfect abstraction.
Husserl thought he had solved this
problem.
He argued that you can start with your
consciousness of the world – which is
called phenomenology because it deals
with phenomena or things that appear as
images in your conscious mind,
But , according to Husserl, if you use
your powers of abstraction to transcend
or step outside that flow of experience,
you attain a transcendental realm of
cognition where the thing you wish to
grasp with your mind exists in a purely
ideal form purged of all connection to the
world.
He argued that the transcendental place
outside time and space where universal
knowledge seemed possible is itself
merely one more place among other
places and one more moment of
consciousness that is shadowed by other
moments.
You can never get outside time and space.
There is no transcendence.
Essentially, Derrida inverted Husserl.
If Husserl claimed the flow can always be
converted into an absolutely ideal truth,
one that exists in a pure mental space,
Derrida said that all absolute truths and
all supposedly pure mental states are
merely part of the flow.
Derrida’s most interesting intellectual move
was to suggest that difference characterized not
only language but also all reality, from our
thought processes to the world itself.
Derrida found many instances of thinkers who
either were aware of the way difference
undermined identity or were committed to a
suppression of difference in order to lay claim
to absolute truth.
He contends that metaphysics usually consists
of the ideal world, to be axiomatic.
One of the more interesting ways of mapping
philosophy that Derrida encountered in his
investigations concerned the opposition of
speech and writing, or of mind and the external
techniques of graphic representation upon
which knowledge depends.
He borrows it as a term for the way difference
in time and space breaks up identity and
presence.
The prejudice against graphic representation
turns up in many places in western culture and
especially in literature.
A graphic representation such as writing is also
conventional: it depends on agreements that
allow images to mean certain things.
A school of literary criticism called
deconstructionism sprang up in America
as a result of Derrida’s influence.
Critics such as Paul de Man argued that
literary texts are inherently incoherent.
The two most noteworthy practitioners of
deconstructive feminism were Helene
Cixous and Luce Irigaray.
Irigaray argues, in Speculum of the Other
Woman and This Sex Which is not one,
that in western philosophy woman have
been portrayed as matter, body, fluidity,
boundarylessness, irrationality,
artificiality, and the like.
Women are the opposite or mirror image
of men, who are assigned reason, truth,
authority, and authenticity.
Male philosophic speculation abstracts from
concrete particularity and bodily materiality
when it resorts to metaphysical concepts and
categories such as being universality, truth, and
infinity.
Derrida’s work helped inspire a movement
called post-structuralism which sought to learn
from Saussure and the other structuralists while
moving beyond them to other concerns such as
social power.
The Post-Modern Condition and The
Differend. Lyotard argues that knowledge
and discourse are inseparable.
Jean Baudrillard, began as a structuralist
sociologist interested in the way the
semiotic regimes of advertising shape and
categorize reality.
Preoccupied with the power of cultural
representations to become lived reality.
Metaphysics claims that difference arises
from identity, but in fact difference
generates identity.
Another deconstructive move would be to
examine texts for ideals of truth that seem
aloof from representation or signification.
The task of deconstruction is to undo
such hierarchies and to show that all truth
is differential and physical.
What metaphysics imagines is ideality is
in fact merely an effect of signification,
something physical and historical, rather
than metaphysical and eternal.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(1)
King Lear enacts a philosophic tragedy as
much as a personal one.
The play argues for a notion of identity as
internal essence.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(2)
Derrida would consider the crisis of
representation in the play, which allows
truth to be denied, falseness to be taken
for truth, and signification to triumph
over meaning, to be a crisis of western
rationalism or logocentrism.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(3)
Like logocentrism, the play portrays truth as
interior to the mind or logos; it stands outside
signification and can do without its external
assistance.
Signification is an addition to truth, a substitute
whose power of imitation, substitution, and
repetition represents the danger that
signification might do without truth or meaning
altogether, take its place, and kill it off.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(4)
She and others describe her relation to
signification as one of appropriate delay
or deferment: truth is always describe in
this way in the logocentric tradition, as an
essence outside signification that could
exist on its own and that only secondarily
and accidentally enters signification,
which is characterized as a realm of
empty markers devoid of life or of any
essential connection to meaning.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(5)
That the play reproduces certain western
prejudices regarding truth and representation as
well as speech and writing is borne out in
subsequent scenes in which letters play an
important role in helping to undermine truth
and paternal authority.
The treachery of the servant and treachery of
writing intersect most forcefully in Oswald’s
handing over to Goneril of Regan’s letter to
Edmund.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(6)
At stake in the play is not merely a debate
between modes of signification but rather the
idea that there is such a thing as a
transcendental signified, a truth or meaning that
stands outside signification in an ideal
ideational realm.
Edmund is the arch-contriver in the play, and it
is important that he is the one least convinced
of the ideal of the transcendental signified.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(7)
Without a transcendental signified, which
guarantees a differentiation between ideal
and material, spirit and matter, truth and
sign, inside and outside, all the orders of
law that kept things apart in discrete
identities and hierarchical oppositions
between the virtuous and the nonvirtuous,
everything becomes mixed.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(8)
Edgar restores not only the state but also
the proper order of truth and signification
as western metaphysics conceives it.
According to the play’s metaphysics,
internal essences like virtue are identities
that then give rise to differences.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(9)
Yet strive as it will to expel the qualities of
signification and writing from truth and
speech, the play nevertheless suggests
that its ideals are essentially and originally
contaminated and compromised by what
they seek to expel.
The most important distinction in the play is
the one that places convention, the
conventions especially that make the
marks of writing capable of signifying,
outside truth.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(10)
Lear himself discovers this internal
fissure and danger- that power, authority,
and truth might be conventions, mere
repetitions of codes, rather than essences
whose expression compels recognition- in
his encounters with Goneril and Regan,
encounters which provoke him to lose his
sense of an internal identity.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(11)
The ideal of the direct expression of truth
conceived as an internal essence of the mind is
realized most forcefully in Lear’s
performatives, his curses and commands
particularly.
Edmund is portrayed negatively for having
contracted with both Regan and Goneril, while
others, Edgar especially, act in accordance with
more virtuous inner motives that stand aloof
from the play of articulation and signification in
such contracting.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(12)
In order for feeling to be spoken,
signification must be at work, and if
signification is at work, so is convention,
an ought or a set of rules that govern the
expression of content in form, of meaning
in signification.
I cannot conceive you, kent says to
Gloucester, when Gloucester cannot tell
the difference between his two sons.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(13)
The original and foundational values of the
play, therefore, such as truth and virtue, are the
effects and the products of a fashioning fit, a
forming according to a model or a convention.
The play is a reflection on what it means to
allow someone like Edmund to rise above his
proper place in society, but linked to that is the
problem of what it means to allow language to
have other functions than to convey true ideas.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(14)
Edgar is the character most charged with
curing the madness brought about by the
overturning of the right order of truth and
signification.
Truth should precede and determine
signification in language, but in the play
that relation is inverted.
Edgar is associated with a spiritualist
ideal of absolute truth.
Exercise 4.1
William Shakespeare, King Lear(15)
The ideal of restored absolute power in a social
and political sense depends on the elimination
of those associated with signs, rhetoric, and the
inversion of the proper relation between truth
and signification.
It is such moments that a deconstructive reading
would focus on. They show that convention,
signification, and difference are more essential
to metaphysical ideals of truth than metaphysics
cares to let on.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (1)
About an illustrated Bible which contains
modern photographs of Middle Eastern scenes.
The Bible, as a story about God and humanity,
contends that the real world is actually just a
metaphor or symbol whose meaning is spiritual.
Behind the physical universe is a spiritual one.
The literal physical world itself is just an
illusion, or even an illustrstion.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (2)
She notes that the images of the Seven
Wonders in the illustrated Bible are a
touch familiar.
Note too that the idea of a spiritual world
depends still on something physical-being
engraved.
They are contingent and historical, rather
than eternal and extrs-worldly.
Her tone is mocking at times.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (3)
Crusaders did of course literally return to
the Middle East to convert it from an
Arab homeland into a Holy Land. Think
about how there are two kinds of
imperialism at work there.
She turns to a description of the actual
physical world.
She suggests that time has eroded
something.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (4)
Writing, according to Derrida, is a form of
representation from which spiritual meaning
would seem to be absent because it is not living,
not the voice of consciousness, and more
images of writing immediately follow in the
poem.
Her encounter with the literal lines of the letters
also gives rise to imagery usually associated
with mystical encounters, with spirituality.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (5)
The second stanza is so completely
different from the first that you wonder if
you have not in that final image of the
first stanza passed through a doorway of
some kind.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (6)
The first line of the third stanza is in
keeping with the second philosophic
position described above, the one that
emphasizes the endless sophic position
described above, the one that emphasizes
the endless flow of experience and life
through space and time, a flow that never
can be converted into a transcendental
meaning or truth that stands outside the
flow.
Exercise 4.2
Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a
Complete Concordance (7)
It would also be a world that could not be
considered to be an illustration of a spirit
world that stands behind it or of a
transcendental truth.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(1)
It helps to bear in mind that foundationalist
sounds like fundamentalist.
But are they like fundamentalists in believing
that women should honor traditional female
roles in society?
The men occupy center stage, and in the end it
is Edgar and Albany who manage the allocation
of power and blame. Cordelia, no longer needed,
dies.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(2)
The difference between the absolutist position
and the deconstructive one is often calibrated as
a difference between men and women.
Women writers are sometimes quite good at
mocking the absolutist position and at drawing
attention to its shortcomings.
Virginia Woolf, for example, has great fun
picking on male philosophers in To the
Lighthouse.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(3)
To Woolf, that detail seems more true than their
complete dictionary, even if it is the kind of
knowledge that does not fit in a dictionary.
Another woman writer who likes to mock male
pretensions is Alice Munro.
Differently is something of a love story
between women, although its plot concerns a
sexual affair between Georgia, the central
female figure, and a man named Miles. Miles
also sleeps with Georgia’s best friend, Maya,
and that ruins their friendship.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(4)
We never behave as if we believed we
were going to die, Georgia remarks to
Raymond, Maya’s husband. How should
we behave? He asks. Differently, she
answers.
If truth were available for knowing in the
way that both foundationalists and
fundamentalists believe is possible, such
regret would not be possible
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(5)
But this is a story by a woman, and that sense
of absoluteness that in the past so assisted men
in managing their world with such authority and
certainty is missing.
We instead as readers find ourselves in a world
of missed chances, missteps, problematic
motives for action, and complex feelings of
anger and obligation toward others.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(6)
It is more differential or relational than
absolute and certain.
The story begins with what seems like a
contrast between the two contending
philosophic positions.
How we identify thing is crucial for how
we know the world and for what the
meaning of things in the world is.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(7)
Why point out that things can be
identified in different ways?
Joyce’s stories are quite acerbically
realist; no fairy tales at all.
A story within a story now begins, and we
hear more about Maya. She is described
as gifted and brittle and the most
vulnerable person of all.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(8)
From a foundationalist perspective, there is
only one truth to reality, not multiple truths.
We learn that Maya and Harvey are having an
affair that she characterizes, humorously, as
exercise.
We are clearly in a world of fuzzy moral lines
here.
Georgia’s life in the bookstore evokes the
possibility of absolute knowledge.
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(9)
Instead, Georgia sees plausible promises, and
notice that the first book she mentions is in
praise of folly.
It might be fun to compare her humorous
conception of madness or folly and his tragic
one.
Ho does it change power relations between
them? How is this a comment on men and
marriage in general?
What does it mean to say that her marriage
seemed a world of ceremony, of safety, of
gestures, concealment?
Exercise 4.3
Alice Munro, Differently(10)
The narrator begins the final section of the
story with what might appear to be a
conundrum.
Given how the story is about missteps and
mistakes, about not seeing clearly and yet
acting on the basis of unclear knowledge,
how does Maya’s vision in the end offer a
kind of protective security against the
contingency.