Structural Ism and Literary Criticism

8/8/2019 Structural Ism and Literary Criticism

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"STRUCTURALISMAND LITERARYCRITICISM"

1: The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception ofthe bricoleuras opposed to the engineer; it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur , working

with what is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary-critical thingto do.

Genette then makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use,it is in fact a metaliterature , a literature on a literature. Poststructuralists will challenge thedistinction between the two, and Genette here refers to Barthes distinctions to suggest thatsome literary criticism may be literature.

He then defines literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is languageproduction in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message -- somethingone supposes like Jakobson's poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into

Jakobson's terms, the attention is on the poetic rather than on the referential function, onmedium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does notdegrade the meaning-function of the language.

Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the New Criticalunderstanding ofambiguity, the 'halt', the attention to the constitution of meaning under adifferent aspect, that also characterizes the literary; so it is that there is only a literary

function , no literariness in any essential or material sense. Genette's sense of the ambiguityof literature is similar to Jakobson's in "Linguistics and Poetics", in which essay he writes that"Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly acorollary feature of poetry...Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee

become ambiguous." (pp 49-50 in Lodge).

2: The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer'sengineer, but in a position therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treatsas signs what the writer is creating as concept: the attitude, the disposition is different. Thecritic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed accordingto various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does notignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly encountered. (65T) Wherethe post-structuralist will differ is in their denial that anything can be transparent: all conceptsare themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought issocial thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

3: Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise. While structuralism historically (inEurope) is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seem reasonable th at structuralist criticismwould then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption.

First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certainfunction and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and therelationships of sounds and meaning in a particular way. The ends then are important.As he writes on page 66, structuralist method as such is constituted at the verymoment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of

the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices.(Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.)


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Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cutsup the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is ananalogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved inlanguage but because both deal with:

1. the relation between forms and meanings,

2. the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification ofexperience,3. the cultural perception of reality, and4. the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.

Genette writes on p. 67 of the idea of a table of concordance, variable in its details butconstant in its function: it is the function, not the detail, that concerns structuralist thought.One of the elements of literature that Genette deals with later is genre, which segmentsexperience in certain ways, and controls the attitudes towards it. What is the place of thisindividual work in the systems of representation? That is a key question.

4: Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form. Genette is at pains to point outthat structuralism is not just about form, but about meaning, as linguistics is about meaning. Itis a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relationsof signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture. (67 ft) When Jakobson writes ofthe centrality of tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heartof the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we saysomething by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning-function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in #1 above. Finally in this section,Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of theanalysis of narratives, for instance -- "an analysis that could distinguish in them [that is,larger units], by a play of superimpositions [and hence knowledge through difference],variabvle elements and constant functions, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system,familiar to Saussureanlinguistics, of syntagmatic relations (real connections of functions inthe continuity of a text) and paradigmatic relations (virtual relations between similar oroposed functions, form one text to another, in the whole of the corpus considered)>"[68t]

5: Structuralism is a general tendency of thought (Cassirer) Structuralism is, however, notnecessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; [68] structuresare"systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs asit uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discoveringthem" -- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what

they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. as wecan only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of texts or eventsin their own terms (as those terms are conceived), not in relation to external causes.

When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of meanings, and to thecoherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally.Structuralist reading abandons pyschological, sociological, and such explanations. One cansee New Criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structuralanalysis of theme, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes,that is, of certain elements of filaments of the configuration, or network or matrix of, of socialmeanings, which meanings constitute culture.


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6: Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing

itself. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological criticism, inwhich one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeurrefers to this, Genette writes, as the hermeneutic method: the intuitive convergence to twoconsciousnesses, the authors and the readers. This is a little confusing, because this is not

hermeneutics properly speaking, but ratherphenomenological hermeneutics. When there ishermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, thenstructural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we aretransversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, thesearch for principles of order, coherence and meaning, becomes dominant -- literatures [71t]distant in place and time, children's literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggestthat the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical

position of the critic -- (between identity and distance, say). Structuralism is an intrinsicreading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture (71).

7: Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture. (72)

Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to -- thetraditional subjects and forms of the culture (from the Greektopos, 'place'; I prefer to refer toculturally-constucted sites of meaning as topoi, to try to retain the full meaning of the idea).Topics, ortopoi, are structural in that they underlie the way we talk and think about things inour culture. They are in a sense psychological, Genette says [72], but collectively so, notindividually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides,Genette has been suggesting that 'high' literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary,location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.

8: Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light. Different genres predispose thereader to different attitudes, different expectations [cf. the saying, attributed to Voltaire, thatlife is a comedy to he who thinks and a tragedy to he who feels, which saying suggests a wayin which genres might look differently at experience]. Different genres lead to differentexpectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and estheticvalues. Without conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, thereversals which mark the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sensestructural, as it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon.

9: Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning

system. Structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and referenceno matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the

parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. Asliterature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itselfis not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.

10: Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness.

Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section atdifferent times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of thecultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature, as the Russian formalists thought; whatthe change registers is the alterations of the relations of meaning within the culture.Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the history of literature, not as a series ofgreat works, or of influences of one writer upon another, but more structurally, more

systematically, as the way in which a culture's discourse with itself alters. The meaning of anindividual work is ultimately and inevitably only the meaning within a larger frame of
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cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time andcultures. As well, the addition of other signifying systems, such as cinema, alter but do notdisrupt the system of literature. A structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaningcan thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while themeaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being

read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.


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Jacques Derrida Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse

of the Human Sciences

Derrida begins his essay by noting that structures have always informed Western thinking buthave not been paid sufficient attention due to the very nature of the structure themselves:

because they are essential to the very process of thought, they have been viewed as naturaland inevitable and therefore more or less unquestionable. Derrida takes up as his subjectmatter the largely unexamined structurality of these structures, and he begins by noting thatBy orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the centre of a structure permitsthe play of its elements inside the total form Nevertheless, the center also closes off the

play which is opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitutionof contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible (196).

This notion of the center is essential for Derridas analysis of the structure of language(which Derrida argues is the structure of all existence). However, because the center, which

is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within a structure which while governingthe structure, escapes structurality, Derrida asserts that, within classical thought, the centeris, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it the totality has its center elsewhere.The center is not the center (196). Derrida pushes this destabilized notion of the center to the

point of a rupture in the history of thought on structurality where it was necessary to beginthinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a

present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, asort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play (197). Thisrupture, this deconstruction of the center thus created a world where the absence of thetranscendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely (197). Inthis move, Derrida has not just taken a new step in a known field but has invented a new way

to walk on a piece of land that is both undiscovered and omnipresent.

Therefore, even the most radical thinkers in the past Derrida cites Nietzsche, Freud, andHeidegger have offered only limited critiques of operations within the traditionally centeredstructure. Derrida asserts that there are two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference

between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way [of the aforementioned thinkers],consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the signto thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting intoquestion the system in which the preceding reduction functioned (198). This second way isultimately characteristic of all of Derridas work in this excerpt: without fail, he seeks tomove to a new and entirely different mode of thinking instead of simply moving to new

thoughts within the same old system.

Derrida goes on to consider a number of areas in which this destabilization, this internaldecentering takes place. He first demonstrates how the ethnologist accepts into his discoursethe premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them as a generalillustration of his principle that the application of his critique to the sciences is a question ofexplicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrowsfrom a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself (199). Inshort, he seeks to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes(201), which is exactly what Derrida has done with language and discourse (and in so doinghas done to every other field, scientific, linguistic, philosophical or otherwise, because, afterall, everythingis discourse). Or, rather, what Derrida has shown language and discourse to be
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doing to themselves: No longer is any truth value attributed to [these old concepts ofempirical discovery]; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should otherinstruments appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and theyare employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which theythemselves are pieces. This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself (201).

The remainder of the essay consists of Derrida explaining three key terms that flow from hisdeconstruction of the structure of discourse: bricolage, play, and supplementary.

Bricolage is a technique that uses the means at hand, that is, the instruments he finds at hisdisposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especiallyconceived with an eye to the operation for which that are to be used and to which one tries bytrial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appear necessary, orto try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous and soforth (202). That is, because any sort of concrete link between signifier and signified has

been shown to be impossible, one is therefore free to use whatever tools in whatever ways

and in whatever combination one wishes to discuss the matter at hand.

Bricolage is permitted by that which Derrida terms play, and which he explains in thefollowing quote: If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infinitenessof a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature ofthe field that is, language and a finite language excludes totalization. The field is in effectthat ofplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite instead of

being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds theplay of substitutions (206). Play is Derridas way of simultaneously recognizing the infiniterange of deconstruction is possible not because there is an infinite range of information but

because the inherent quality of all information is to be lacking and for there to be no suitablematerial (information) with which to fill that lack. This leads to the notion of thesupplementary: The overabundance of the signifier, itssupplementary character, is thus theresult of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented (207).Because positive, concrete definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarilyrequires a supplement or supplements, something or some things which help(s) it exist and beunderstood. Yet, at the same time, the object(s) which the supplement is (are) supplementingis (are) (a) supplements itself. Extend this web in all directions and the relationship between

bricolage, play, and the supplementary begins to make sense. And there you have it:discourse, destabilization, language critiquing itself, bricolage, play, the supplementary. Ofcourse, the discussion here barely begins to scratch the surface of the implications made by

Derrida, for within not even a full fourteen pages of text, has established the foundation ofone of the most significant revolutions in the history of thought. Of course, saying thatDerrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing implodedthe foundation of Western philosophy would certainly fit better with a deconstructionist viewof the world. Yet, there is scant little chance of denying that Derrida himself holds somespecial place in this development: if not as its father then at least as its catalyst.


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TEXT

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an"event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-orstructuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing itwith caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of arupture and a redoubling.

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself areas old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy-and that theirroots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plungesto gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.

Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather thestructurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or

reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot infact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle ofthe structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orientingand organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of itselements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center representsthe unthinkable itself.

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it isthe point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center,the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed withina structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted (I use this worddeliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique,constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality.This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, withinthe structure and outside it. The center is at the center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not

belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the totality has its center elsewhere. The center is notthe center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition ofthe episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence incontradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the conceptof a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental

immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With thiscertitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of beingimplicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning atstake in the game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can beeither inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arch as telos), therepetitions, the substitutions. the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from ahistory of meaning [sens]-that is, a history, period-whose origin may always be revealed or whose endmay always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that themovement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of thestructuralality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full

presence which is out of play.


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If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must bethought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of thecenter. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, the center receives different forms or names. Thehistory of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies.Its matrix-if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring

me more quickly to my principal theme-is the determination of being as presence in all the senses ofthis word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or tothe I center have always designated the constant of a presence-eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia(essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, orconscience, God, man, and so forth.

The event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper, wouldpresumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is tosay, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word.From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the

center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacementsand its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself,which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does notsubstitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probablynecessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form ofa beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sortof non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was thatin which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center ororigin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, wheneverything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, isnever absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signifiedextends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would besomewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate this occurrence. It isno doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and

begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or two"names," and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence has most nearlymaintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean critique ofmetaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the conceptsof play, interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-presence,

that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, ofthe determination of being as presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues aretrapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between thehistory of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doingwithout the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language-no syntaxand no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition whichhas not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeksto contest. To pick out one example from many: the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the helpof the concept of the sign. But from the moment anyone wishes this to show, as I suggested a momentago, that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay ofsignification has, henceforth, no limit, he ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the word


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sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification "sign" has always beencomprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifierdifferent from its signified. If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is theword signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. When Levi-Strauss saysin the preface to The Raw and the Cooked that he has "sought to transcend the opposition between the

sensible and the intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of signs," thenecessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the signcannot in itself surpass or bypass this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. Theconcept of the sign is determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its historyand by its system. But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, we cannot give up thismetaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity,without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self-identity of a signified reducing into itselfits signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself. For there are twoheterogenous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified: one, the classicway, consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the sign to

thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into question thesystem in which the preceding reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between thesensible and the intelligible. The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed theopposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction. And what Iam saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences ofmetaphysics, in particular to the discourse on "structure." But there are many ways of being caught inthis circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less systematic, more orless close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these differences whichexplain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who makethem. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger

worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from asyntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This iswhat allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally-for example, Heidegger considering

Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician,the last "Platonist." One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a number ofothers. And today no exercise is more widespread.

What is the relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called the "human sciences"?One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place-ethnology. One can in fact assume that ethnologycould have been born as a science only at the moment when a de-centenng had come about: at themoment when European culture-and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts-

had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture ofreference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or scientific discourse, itis also a moment which is political, economic, technical, and so forth. One can say in total assurancethat there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism-the very condition ofethnology-should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the destruction of thehistory of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same era.

Ethnology-like any science-comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily aEuropean science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them.Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does not depend on a decision on his part-theethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he isemployed in denouncing them This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency. We


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ought to consider very carefully all its implications. But if nobody can escape this necessity, and if noone is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little, this does not mean that all the ways ofgiving in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhapsmeasured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and toinherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of the

human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of puttingexpressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resourcesnecessary of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.

If I now go on to employ an examination of the texts of Levi-Strauss as an example, it is not only because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among the human sciences, nor yet because thethought of Levi-Strauss weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical situation. It is above all

because a certain choice has made itself evident in the work of Levi-Strauss and because a certaindoctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a more or less explicit manner, in relation to thiscritique of language and to this critical language in the human sciences.

In order to follow this movement in the text of Levi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding threadamong others the oppostion between nature and culture. In spite of all its rejuvenations and itsdisguises, this opposition is congenital to philosophy. It is even older than Plato. It is at least as old asthe Sophists. Since the statement of the opposition - Physis/nomos, physis/techne [nature/culture,nature/art or making] - it has been passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes "nature"to the law, to education, to art, to technics - and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to society,to the mind, and so on. From thebeginnings of his quest and from his first book, The ElementaryStructures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing thisopposition and the impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures, he begins fromthis axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is universal and spontaneous, not depending on

any particular culture or on any determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, whichdepends on a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one socialstructure to another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But, in the very first pages of theElementary Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing,encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates thenature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the

predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibitionis universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms andinterdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural.

Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and ischaractenzed by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and

presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact,or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far fromappeanog as a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, andindissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictoryattributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of allthe social rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character.

Obviously, there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the differencebetween nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the incest-prohibition, Levi-

Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that this difference, which has always been assumedto be self-evident, becomes obliterated or disputed. For, from the moment that the incest-prohibition


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can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer be said that it is ascandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent significations. The incest-

prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditionalconcepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them--probably as thecondition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical

conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave inthe domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin ofthe prohibition of incest.

I have dealt too cursorily with this example, only one among so many others, but the examplenevertheless reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. This critiquemay be undertaken along two tracks, in two "manners." Once the limit of nature/culture oppositionmakes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of theseconcepts. This is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither a

philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words. Concerning oneself with

the founding concepts of the whole history of philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertakethe task of the philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances, it isprobably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy. The step"outside philosophy" is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those whothink they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics

by the whole body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.

In order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice-which I feelcorresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Levi-Strauss-consists in conserving in the field ofempirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits,treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there

is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In themeantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery towhich they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the humansciences criticizes itself. Levi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth, theinstruments of the method and the objective significations aimed at by it. One could almost say thatthis is the primary affirmation of Levi-Strauss; in any event, the first words of the ElementaryStructures are: "One begins to understand that the distinction between state of nature and state ofsociety (we would be more apt to say today: state of nature and state of culture). while lacking anyacceptable historical signification, presents a value which fully just)fies its use by modern sociology:its value as a methodological instrument."

Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument thatwhose truth-value he criticizes.

On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. Morethan thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the text I have

just quoted: "The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seemstoday to offer a value which is above all methodological." And this methodological value is notaffected by its "ontological" non-value (as could be said, if this notion were not suspect here): "Itwould not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a general humanity; this firstenterprise prepares the way for others . . . which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to

reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemicalconditions."


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On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, he presents as what he calls bricolage what might becalled the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the meansat hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there,which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be usedand to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it

appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin areheterogenous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and ithas even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. I am thinking in particularof the article by G[erard] Genette, "Structuralisme et Critique litteraire," published in homage to Levi-Strauss in a special issue of L'Arc, where it is stated that the analysis of bricolage could "be appliedalmost word for word'' to criticism, and especially to "literary criticism."

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which ismore or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engi~eer, whomLevi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be one to construct the totality of his language, syntax,

and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absoluteorigin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it "out of nothing," "out of whole cloth,"would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself. The notion of the engineer who had supposedly

broken with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss tells uselsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that thee engineer is a myth produced by the

bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse breakingwith the received historical discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound bya cenain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs then the veryidea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.

This brings out the second thread which might guide us in what is being unraveled here.

Levi-Strauss describes bricolage not only as ;n intellectual activity but also as a mythopoeticalactivity. One reads in The Savage Mind, "Like bricolage on the technical level, mythical reflectioncan attain brilliant and unforeseen results on the intellectual level. Reciprocally, the mythopoeticalcharacter of bricolage has often been noted."

But the remarkable endeavor of Levi-Strauss is not simply to put forward, notably in the most recentof his investigations, a structural science or knowledge of myths and of mythological activity. Hisendeavor also appears-I would say almost from the first-in the status which he accords to his owndiscourse on myths, to what he calls his "mythologicals." It is here that his discourse on the mythreflects on itself and criticizes itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of concern to

all the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What does Levi-Strauss say of his"mythologicals"? It is here that we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect,what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the statedabandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to anabsolute arche'. The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the "Overture" to his last

book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few key points.

1. From the very start, Levi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book asthe "reference-myth" does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the use ofthe myth improper. This myth deserves no more than any other its referential privilege: In fact the

Bororo myth which will from now on be designated by the name reference-myth is, as I shall try toshow, nothing other than a more or less forced transformation of other myths originating either in the


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same society or in societies more or less far removed. It would therefore have been legitimate tochoose as my point of departure any representative of the group whatsoever. From this point of view,the interest of the reference-myth does not depend on its typical character, but rather on its irregular

position in the midst of a group.

2. There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of the myth are alwaysshadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place.Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on thisacentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. Inorder not to short change the form and the movement of the myth, that violence which consists incentering a language which is describing an acentric structure must be avoided. In this context,therefore, it is necessary to forego scientific or philosophical discourse, to renounce the epistemewhich absolutely requires, which is the absolute requirement that we go back to the source, to thecenter, to the founding basis, to the principle, and so on. In opposition to epistemic discourse,structural discourse on myths- mythological discourse-must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the

form of that of which it speaks. This is what Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, fromwhich I would now like to quote a long and remarkable passage:

In effect the study of myths poses a methodological problem by the fact that it cannot conform to theCartesian principle of dividing the difficulty into as miany piarts as are necessiary to resolve it. Thereexists no veritable end or term to mythical analysis, no secret unity which could be grasped at the endof the work of decomposition. The themes duplicate themselves to infinity. When we think we havedisentiangled them from each other and can hold them separate, it is only to realize that they are

joining together again, in response to the attraction of unforeseen affinities. In consequence, the unityof the myth is only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state or a moment of the myth. Animaginary phenomenon implied by the endeavor to interpret, its role is to give a synthetic form to the

myth and to impede its dissolution into the confusion of contraries. It could therefore be said that thescience or knowledge of myths is an anaclastic, taking this ancient term in the widest sense authorized

by its etymology, a science which admits into its definition the study of the reflected rays along withthat of the broken ones. But, unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go all the way back to itssource, the reflections in question here concern rays without any other than a virtual focus. . . . Inwanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythical thought, my enterprise, itself too brief andtoo long, has had to yield to its demands and respect its rhythm. Thus is this book, on myths itself andin its own way, a myth.

This statement is repeated a little farther on: "Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (thefirst-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of athird-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths. This iswhy it would not be wrong to consider it a myth: the myth of mythology, as it were." It is by thisabsence of any real and fixed center of the mythical or mythological discourse that the musical modelchosen by Levi Strauss for the composition of his book is apparently justified. The absence of a centeris here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author: "The myth and the musical work thusappear as orchestra conductors whose listeners are the silent performers. If it be asked where the realfocus of the work is to be found, it must be replied that its determination is impossible. Music andmythology bring man face to face with virtual objects whose shadow alone is actual. . . . Myths haveno authors."


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Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function. Butby the same token, this function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a centerappear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion.

Nevertheless, even if one yields to the necessity of what Levi-Strauss has done, one cannot ignore its

risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent? Shall we have toabandon any epistemologica; requirement which permits us to distinguish between several qualities ofdiscourse on the myth? A classic question, but inevitable. We cannot reply-and I do not believe Levi-Strauss replies to it-as long as the problem of the relationships between the philosopheme or thetheorem. on the one hand, and the mytheme or the mythopoem(e), on the other, has not beenexpressly posed. This is no small problem. For lack of expressly posing this problem, we condemnourselves to transforming the claimed transgression of philosophy into an unperceived fault in theinterior of the philosophical field. Empiricism would be the genus of which these faults would always

be the species. Trans-philosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical naivetes. Onecould give many examples to demonstrate this risk: the concepts of sign, history, truth, and so forth.

What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turningthe page of philosophy (which usually comes down to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to readphilosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking of is always assumed by Levi-Strauss and it isthe very price of his endeavor. I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all the faults menacing adiscourse which continues, as with Levi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be scientific. If we wanted to

pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would probably end up very quickly witha number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in structuralethnography. On the one hand, structuralism justly claims to be the critique of empiricism. But at thesame time there is not a single book or study by Levi-Strauss which does not offer itself as anempirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by new information. The structuralschemata are always proposed as hypotheses resulting from a finite quantity of information and whichare subjected to the proof of experience. Numerous texts could be used to demonstrate this double

postulation. Let us turn once again to the "Overture" of The Raw and the Cooked, where it seemsclear that if this postulation is double, it is because it is a guestion here of a language on language:

Critics who might take me to task for not having begun by making an exhaustive inventory of SouthAmerican myths before analyzing them would be making a serious mistake about the nature and therole of these documents. The totality of the myths of a people is of the order of the discourse.Provided that this people does not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never closed.Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the grammar of alanguage without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered since that

language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as longas the language continues to exist. Experience proves that an absurdly small number of sentences . . .allows the linguist to elaborate a grammar of the language he is studying. And even a partial grammaror an outline of a grammar represents valuable acquisitions in the case of unknown languages. Syntaxdoes not wait until it has been possible to enumerate a theoretically unlimited series of events before

becoming manifest, because syntax consists in the body of rules which presides over the generation ofthese events. And it is precisely a syntax of South American mythology that I wanted to outline.Should new texts appear to enrich the mythical discourse, then this will provide an opportunity tocheck or modify the way in which certain grammatical laws have been formulated, an opportunity todiscard certain of them and an opportunity to discover new ones. But in no instance can therequirement of a total mythical discourse be raised as an objection. For we have just seen that such arequirement has no meaning.


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Totalization is therefore defined at one time as useless, at another time as impossible. This is no doubtthe result of the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. And I assert onceagain that these two determinations coexist implicitly in the discourses of Levi-Strauss. Totalizationcan be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subjector of a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master.

There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way:not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as assigning us to an empirical view, but from thestandpoint of the concept of freeplay. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because theinfinity of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature ofthe field-that is, language and a finite language-excludes totalization. This field is in fact that offreeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field

permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being aninexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is somethingmissing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions. One could say-rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is always obliterated in French-that this

movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement ofsupplementarily. One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its

place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as asupplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there isalways more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, tosupplement a lack on the part of the signified. Although Levi-Strauss in his use of the wordsupplementary never emphasizes as I am doing here the two directions of meaning which are sostrangely compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses this word twice in his "Introduction tothe Work of Marcel Mauss,'' at the point where he is speaking of the "superabundance of signifier, inrelation to the signifieds to which this superabundance can refer":

In his endeavor to understand the world? man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus ofsignification (which he portions out amongst things according to the laws of symbolic thought-whichit is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study). This distribution of a supplementary allowance[ration supplementaire]-if it is permissible to put it that way-is absolutely necessary in order that onthe whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remain in the relationship ofcomplementarity which is the very condition of the use of symbolic thought.

(It could no doubt be demonstrated that this ration supplementaire of signification is the origin of theratio itself.) The word reappears a little farther on, after Levi-Strauss has mentioned "this floatingsignifier, which is the finite thought":

In other words-and taking as our guide Mauss's. precept that all social phenomena can be assimilatedto language-we see in mana, Wakau, oranda and other notions of the same type, the consciousexpression of a semantic function, whose role it is to permit symbolic thought to operate in spite ofthe contradiction which is proper to it. In this way are explained the apparently insoluble 1 antinomiesattached to this notion. . . . At one and the same time force and action, quality and state, substantiveand verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and localized-mana is in effect all these things. But is itnot precisely because it is none of these things that mana is a simple form, or more exactly, a symbolin the pure state, and therefore capable of becoming charged with any sort of symbolic contentwhatever? In the system of symbols constituted by all cosmologies, manawould simply be a valeursymbolique zero, that isto say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary [my

italics] to that with which the signified is already loaded, but which can take on any value required,


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provided only that this value still remains part of the available reserve and is not, as phonologists putit, a group-term.

Levi-Strauss adds the note:

Linguists have already been led to formulate hypotheses of this type. For example: "A zero phonemeis opposed to all the other phonemes in French in that it entails no differential chararacters and noconstant phonetic value. On the contrary, the proper function of the zero phoneme is to be opposed to

phoneme absence." (R. Jakobson and J. Lutz, "Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern" Word, vol. 5,no. 2 [August, 1949], p. 155). Similarly, if we schematize the conception I am posing here, it couldalmost be said that the function of notions like mana is to be opposed to the absence of signification,without entailing by itself any particular signification.

The superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that isto say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.

It can now be understood why the concept of freeplay is important in Levi-Strauss. His references toall sorts of games, notably to roulette, are very frequent, especially in his Conversations, in Race andHistotory, and in The Savage Mind. This reference to the game or free-play is always caught up in atension.

It is in tension with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to which are I now wellworn or used up. I shall simply indicate I what seems to me the formality of the problem: by reducinghistory, Levi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a concept which has always been in complicity with ateleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with that

philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The thematic of historicity,although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has always been required by the

determination of being as presence. With or without etymology, and in spite of the classic antagonismwhich opposes these significations throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown that theconcept of episteme has always called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a

becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge oriented toward theappropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self.History has always been conceived as the movement of a resumption of history, a diversion betweentwo presences. But if it is legitimate to suspect this concept of history, there is a risk, if it is reducedwithout an express statement of the problem I am indicating here, of falling back into an anhistoricismof a classical type, that is to say, in a determinate moment of the history of metaphysics. Such is thealgebraic formality of the problem as I see it. More concretely, in the work of Levi-Strauss it must be

recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure, compels aneutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a new structure, of an originalsystem, always comes about-and this is the very condition of its structural specificity-by a rupturewith its past, its origin, and its cause. One can therefore describe what is peculiar to the structuralorganization only by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its pastconditions: by failing to pose the problem of the passage from one structure to another, by puttinghistory into parentheses. In this "structuralist" moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity areindispensable. And Levi-Strauss does in fact often appeal to them as he does, for instance, for thatstructure of structures, language, of which he says in the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss"that it "could only have been born in one fell swoop":

Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animallife, language could only have been born in one fell swoop. Things could not have set about


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signifying progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of thesocial sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over came about from a stage wherenothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it.

This standpoint does not prevent Levi-Strauss from recognizing the slowness, the process of

maturing, the continuous toil of factual transformations, history (for example, in Race and History).But, in accordance with an act which was also Rousseau's and Husserl's, he must "brush aside all thefacts" at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure. Like Rousseau, hemust always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe -an overturning ofnature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of nature.

Besides the tension of freeplay with history, there is also the tension of freeplay with presence.Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying andsubstitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay isalways an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must beconceived of before the alternativeof presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or

absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around. If Levi-Strauss,better than any other, has brought to light the freeplay of repetition and the repetition of freeplay, oneno less perceives in his work a sort of ethic presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic ofarchaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech-an ethic, nostalgia,and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when hemoves toward archaic societies-exemplary societies in his eyes. These texts are well known.

As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic ofbroken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking offreeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and

without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation-would be the other side. Thisaffirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the gamewithout security. For there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given andexisting, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to geneticindetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks todecipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order ofthe sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turnedtoward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man beingthe name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words,

through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, theorigin and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzscheshowed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the "inspiration of a newhumanism" (again from the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss").

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these twointerpretations of interpretation-which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live themsimultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy-together share the field which we call, insuch a problematic fashion, the human sciences.

For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and

define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing-in the firstplace because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the


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category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceiveof the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort ofquestion, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, theformation, thegestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing-

but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their

eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as isnecessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless,mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.

Paul de Mans Semiology and Rhetoric

Form and Content


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The main argument of de Mans seminal essay can be stated as follows: The grounds of literarymeaning (and by extension all meaning) must be located in rhetoric rather than in any of the other

possible dimensions (form, content, reference, grammar, logic etc.). But a rhetorical reading cannotguarantee authority over interpretations. Therefore there is no authority that can guarantee a reading.This doesnt license us to read a text just anyway we want to. Rather it commits us to readings that

take full account of the possibilities and limits of reading (and writing) generally. One name for thesepossibilities and limits might be deconstruction.

de Man begins by noting a decline in what he calls formalist and intrinsic criticism. And heaccounts for this by observing an increasing interest in reference amongst literary critics. What is atstake? By formalist and intrinsic criticism he designates a wide range of practices that we finddominating literary criticism throughout the middle of the twentieth century from the thirties andforties into the sixties. Notice that his article is written in 1973. So what distinguishes these

practices? The word formalism implies a rather conventional but nonetheless very powerfuldistinction (because it appeals to common sense) between form and content. Those of us who have

read our Ferdinand de Saussure know the distinction in terms of the difference between signifier(form) and signified (content). How do you make the form your object? To study the form of a workyou study how it gives rise to its meaning. Imagine we meet each other at breakfast and take turns atgiving an account of the party we all attended the night before. We will have a lot of differentaccounts of one event, a lot of forms for only one content. In the same way anyone could havewritten a poem about school children dancing but only W. B. Yeats could have written AmongSchool Children. The poem is unique not because of its contentwhat it is aboutbut because ofits form. The New Criticism of the thirties and forties established certain techniques of closereading, especially in the work of its figurehead I. A. Richards, whose Principles of Literary Criticismis now a modern classic.

Now Richards would perhaps have been surprised to hear his idea of form described in terms of themetaphor of inside and outside. How does the metaphor work? Imagine a nut. A nut has a shell that,once removed, yields a nutritious centre. This is what de Man means by the following statement:when form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seemssuperficial and expendable. The formalists, on the other hand, taught that it is the shell, rather thanits content, that is important in literature. So when de Man observes that the trend in literary criticismhas moved from form to reference, what interests him is the underlying metaphor that governs howwe have up until now alwayswithout thinking about it too muchimagined meaning to comeabout. That is, before we interpret a text we have already accepted an interpretationbased upon ametaphorof what interpretation is. It is this unwitting interpretation of interpretation that interests

de Man. He obviously has less concern about whether formalism, structuralism, historicism or authorcriticism is right or wrong. Rather he is more interested in the unwitting assumptions that theseapproaches all share, i.e., the metaphor of inside and outside. There is more at stake in this than youmight have at first realized. Think about it: most of us (but not all) will have had some experience inwhat we call close reading. First year English students at NUS as well as some school students willalready have learned to do what we call practical criticism (after I. A. Richards and his school). Thismeans that we read the texts according to literary forms like figures (metaphors, similes, symbols),narrative structures (first or third person narrators, point of view, character, plot, action, etc.), formalaspects of genre (meter, rhythm and rhyme) and themes (non-referential but thematic constants likedeath, love, the struggle of good and evil, etc.). Here form is related to meaning intrinsically and noreference to the context of an outside world is necessary. One might have asked, justifiably: what isthe purpose of it? Arguments about how the ability to evaluate a literary text is good for you, even at


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their most ingenious, ultimately fail to satisfy (and there have been many seemingly persuasiveanswers of this kind). Undoubtedly this kind of knowledge counts as a skill and those of us who cando it derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it, but the question still remainswhat gooddoes it do? How does it apply, if at all, beyond literature?

Perhaps then it would follow that criticism should start looking outside the text to the extra-textualworld of real references. George Orwells Animal Farm is a parodic critique of the communistrevolution (and by association, all such revolutions). Shakespeares King Lear is a not so subtlewarning to King James (it was first played to him and his small court) not to lose his throne. What wehave come to understand as historicism develops as a way of extending the reach of our literaryknowledge so that we can talk about its relation to historical events and processes. This is what wemight call extrinsic criticism. The text now has its meaning located outside itself. Whatfundamentally we are left with is a defining distinctionthat is not itself fully explicablebetweenfiction or, more generally, rhetoric and reality. An example of what often happens in literarycriticism would bear this out. A text by an Asian-American author like Russell Leong features

characters who are migrant Chinese in the USA very often reflecting on and getting into situations ofthe kind Asian-Americans get into. You might then want to argue that 1) the text in some sensetranslates the experience of the author; and 2) the text can be read as an engagement with actualsituations that Asian-Americans find themselves in and, by extension, as a critique of ideological andhistorical conditions that help to determine those situations.

So the rejection of pure formalism is not a rejection after all but a repetition that takes the form of areversal: The polarities of inside and outside have been reversed, but they are still the same polaritiesthat are at play: internal meaning has become outside reference, and the outer form has become theintrinsic structure. The text is regarded either as something that has its meaning inherent in it(formalism) with no need to refer outwards to contexts or other texts, or it has its meaning outside

itself, in the reference to author, period, history, social relation, reader or culture (etc.). What all theseapproaches to texts share is the unwitting assumption that meaning can be understood on the model ofinside and outside, whether the content is outside and the form inside or the form outside and thecontent inside.

At this stage in the article de Man provides a very important clue as to his approach. He says hewants to avoid using the terms of the old metaphor (now we know thats what it is) and insteadrelocate the problem of literary meaning by examining a couple of terms that, as he says, are lesslikely to enter into chiasmic reversals. Chiasmus is a rhetorical term (from the Greek: Chiasmus, adiagonal arrangement) meaning the repetition of ideas in inverted order. Shakespeares got a goodone:

But O, what damned minutes tells he oerWho dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves. (Othello 3.3)

So instead of this endless repetition of a powerful yet clearly awkward notion of interpretation andmeaning, de Man gets his alternative terms pragmatically from the observation of developments anddebates in recent critical methodology. Whats he saying? He will get his new explanation ofreading from reading. Notice that there is no attempt offered to formulate yet another original theory.The new terms are as old as the hills and they are to be derived from current critical theory texts.

Semiology, Grammar and Rhetoric


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Hes right of course to observe that his alternative terminology is as old as the hills. What shouldbe instructive is that it allows considerable rigor in his textual and theoretical analysis. Notice, again,that he is not proposing a new theory. He is analyzing a simultaneously theoretical and practicalsituation as he finds it. It is simultaneously theoretical and practical because he refuses to read thetheory as if it was a simple meta-language (a vocabulary to be used for discussing language). He

reads it as if it too needs reading. This is how he was able to tease out the metaphor that liesunheeded at the grounds of most notions of meaning and interpretation. And he deals with the

problems of reading by reading texts that deal with the problems of reading (but which text doesnt?).

We dont, I hope, have to spend too much time on the question of semiology. Semiology establishessome basic tenets: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the system of differences that gives the signits value, and the conventional codes that operate as prompts for signification, sometimes making itseem rather culture bound. (What is it that frees language from cultural specificity? The arbitrarinessof the sign and its repeatability: ah, bold and italics, must be important). Remember this: a sign doesnot simply refer to its referent (on the model of re-presentation). A sign is coded according to its

system and thats how it comes to have its particular meanings. Notice that in passing de Manobserves that French writers (poets and novelists) seem always to have been aware of this, while onlysince structuralism have French critics twigged to it: a first definitive instance of the affirmation of theexplanatory power of literature itself.

Now, grammar. After de Saussure, whose structural linguistics aims to derive general laws oflanguage, the grammatical laws (which are as structural as anything) tended to become a rather

privileged object of structuralist analysis. A simple grammatical structure (sentence: nounphrase/verb phrase/noun phrase) can generate increasingly complex structures both at the level of thesentence and beyond to the paragraph, the chapter, the book even. At the level of the sentence alonesome complexity is possible. See the first sentence from the paragraph of Proust (Wolfreys 336),

which has four lines of phrases all generated from the model: noun phrase/verb phrase/noun phrase.

In literary structuralism, especially in France, the analysis of deep grammatical structures went handin hand with the analysis of rhetorical tropes (figures of discourse). What this means is that the twoaxes of language, the syntagmatic (at the level of the generated sentence) and the paradigmatic (theaxis of substitutions) can be read as operating together in a discourse. We can thus explain what deMan means by assimilations of rhetorical transformations or combinations to syntactical,grammatical patterns with reference to the coexistence in structuralist theory of patterns of bothmetonymy (which is syntagmatic) and metaphor (which is paradigmatic). The syntagmatic axis iscomposed of the marks (words to you and I) that we find (or put) together in a given text:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In this example, which Ive stolen from de Man, all the elements that we find in the four lines are to be regarded as belonging together only syntagmaticallythey are found together because thatswhere theyve been put. When we think about what they mean, then we inevitably turn to the

paradigmatic axis, which we cannot see because it belongs to the system (and not to the parole). Wecannot see it, that is, because it is the axis of possible substitutions (imagine I re-write Yeatss verse:

O banana tree, little-rooted flourisher, and you can see what kinds of substitutions are possible).However to understand metaphor now no longer as just a kind of substitution but more as a kind of


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combination we find that a possible substitution is given in the third and fourth lines, where thequestion about the dancing body seems to be a kind of repetition of the question about the tree, thusmaking the dancer in some metaphorical sense equivalent to the tree. Here, then, we have ametaphorical substitution on a metonymic axis. de Mans point is that we might in this way havechosen to include the metaphor within (and thus subordinate to) the grammatical, linear unfolding

without acknowledging that there may be tensions between the two modes of signification in thediscourse itself. That is, the assimilation operates as a kind of smoothing over device to help us finishoff the interpretation.

Remember: de Man deals with the problems of reading by reading texts that deal with the problems ofreading. Perhaps its not that obvious to us that Among School Children is a text about readingbutdoes it matter? de Man can read it as if it was and certainly, then, it would seem to be.

So what is at stake? The difference between metaphorical substitutions and metonymic combinations(rhetoric and grammar) can be seen as a kind of repetition of a deeper and older opposition: betweenrhetoric and logic. But (a big, big but) metonymy is not a grammatical category. It is no less

figurative than metaphor. The predicative structure of a sentence (noun/verb/phrase) cannot guaranteeits meaningas the example of Archie Bunkers rhetorical question shows. In that case, as de Mansays, the same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literalmeaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning. Thequestion, whats the difference? actually means theres no difference. Now the pointas de Man

points out in the next paragraphis this: the only way out of the confusion engendered by thisparadox is through an intention that cannot be reduced to the grammar of the statement. What ArchieBunker means by the question is not contained by the questions grammar. And nor is it contained byany other verifiable aspect of the statement. This is the meaning of rhetoric. When the meaning of astatement cannot be established through an analysis of its grammar we call it rhetorical. So when de

Man says that, rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referentialaberration, he is drawing attention to the fact that meaning (intentions people have when they makestatements or when they read statements) cannot not be based on firm logical grounds. Rhetoric isabyssal and aberrant. You can hope to be understood but you cannot guarantee it. Once we recognizethat grammar is subordinate to rhetoric we are in the realm of interpretive decisions. The structuralistdream of a fully analyzable language is now lost. But theres more at stake than that. The logicalgrounds of interpretation have gone entirelyespecially when we deal with the literary text, which isabove the norm in rhetorical meaning. Both logic and grammar are questionable when we read aliterary text. Grammar assumes a simple logical one-to-one relationship between language unit(word, sentence, etc.) and meaning. Rhetoric contests that assumption. Logic postulates the

possibility of universal truth (a concept that independently of its objects remains unchangeable,eternal and unaffected by rhetoric). We know from de Saussure that such a concept has no place in asystem like the language system, which provides meaning only through the values that the differences

between signifiers allow. In other words, when we make meaningful statements we do so by actingon the combined resources of difference and rhetorical substitution. This gives us considerablefreedom but at a costwe can no longer hope to control or to limit the structures of linguisticmeaning and the multiple possibilities of confusion that always threaten. But please pay attention tothe implications of this last point. If as readers of literature we can no longer guarantee a fullycontrollable text, then so long as we can show where these limitations resideas de Man has donewith his exampleswe have won considerable interpretive freedom for our rhetorical readings.

Metaphor and Metonymy


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It remains for me to say a few words about de Mans reading of Proust. He has chosen the examplefor a simple reason: it thematizes reading (the most striking aspect of this passage is the juxtapositionof figural and meta-figural language). The role of the meta here is very, very, important. Whensome faculty (language, consciousness, experience, thought) takes itself as its own topic or object wecan identify a self-reflexive or auto-referential role. Such a role always exhibitsin the form of

paradox or contradictionirrevocable limits to logical, formal or empirical analysis. Ask me aboutthisthere are many examples of the self-reflexive paradox and each of them can be revealing indifferent ways. Now, in the case we have before us, the paradox reveals itself in two different ways.First we have a meta-figurative discourse and, second, we have a meta-reader-ly discourse, whichthematizes reading.

First we have a passage of fiction (and figurative discourse), which thematizes the role of figurativediscourse. This is the text in its two dimensions overlapping. The two dimensions of a text are asfollows: it is composed first of what we might call its statement. This is the level of content (whetherconsidered extrinsic or intrinsic). It is what the text is about. But all texts are composed of a second

dimension, that of their enunciation, the writing or speaking (the how) of the text. In traditionalterms this would be its form. But in de Mans new terminology form would not do, because theword suggests empirical and analyzable elements, and, as weve, seen this would miss the rhetoricalaspects of meaning and intention. Here instead of form we can talk about performance. In this waywe can actually make sense of the difference between Archie Bunkers intention and his wifesinterpretation. The subject of the statement changes when the subject of its enunciation changes. Theimage repertoire that Roland Barthes writes about occurs at the level of enunciation. When youread a text, the subject of (its) enunciation is you. So reading is just as much a kind of performance aswriting, which is why de Man maintains that the difference between literature and criticism isdelusive. (Student: Are we doing criticism or literature? Teacher: Whats the difference?).

The second way that a paradox of self-reflexivity is revealed is in the fact that a reader (Paul de Man)is reading a text in terms of the way it thematizes the problems of reading. In this way de Man canread the text as rigorously as possible in terms of what the tex

Structural Ism and Literary Criticism

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