Page 96 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POST-STRUCTURALISM

Post-structuralism

If structuralism proper displays a recurrent aspiration to scientificity,
then post-structuralism clearly betrays that aspiration by its equally
recurrent insistence that meaning can never be pinned down, not even
by structuralism itself. The three major variants of French post-
structuralism are those represented by: first, that type of literary
“deconstruction”, practised by the later Barthes, and more especially
by Derrida; secondly, Foucault’s later writings on the theme of the
knowledge/power relation; and thirdly, Lacanian psychoanalysis. Given
that the latter has proven influential mainly by virtue of its partial
incorporation into recent feminist theory, I propose to postpone
consideration of Lacan’s work until the chapter that follows. Derrida,
and the later Barthes and Foucault, have proved much more
independently influential, however, especially in the field of literary
and cultural studies. Wherein, then, lies the theoretical novelty of this
post-structuralist departure?
For Barthes himself, the key moment of transition from structuralism
to post-structuralism, occurs with S/Z, his study of Balzac’s short
story, Sarrasine. In what appears initially as conventionally structuralist
narratology, Barthes breaks up the text into 561 lexias, or units of
reading, and analyses them, exhaustively, in terms of five main codes.
He also distinguishes between readerly and writerly texts, respectively
those which position the reader as passive consumer, and those which
demand that the reader actively participate as co-author of the text. 35
This distinction provides, once again, for a valorization of modernist
aesthetics, if not in this case of a modernist text. But if Sarrasine is a
writerly text, as Barthes argues, then it follows that it can have no
single meaning: “to decide on a hierarchy of codes…is impertinent…it
overwhelms the articulation of the writing by a single voice”. Barthes’s
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five codes are thus self-confessedly arbitrary, and the story itself thus
has no determinate meaning, but is rather both plural and diffuse.
The distinction between readerly and writerly texts is later
reformulated as that between plaisir and jouissance, that is, between
pleasure and ecstasy, or “bliss”, in the slightly later The Pleasure of
the Text (1973). Here Barthes advances the, in itself perfectly sensible,
proposition that reading is pleasurable, and pleasurable, moreover,
in a strongly erotic and corporeal sense. Barthes is still too much of a
structuralist to contemplate a return to the reading subject; but the

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