Page 98 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POST-STRUCTURALISM

For Derrida, this theory of language leads to deconstruction, as a
particular way of reading texts. What is entailed in deconstruction is
a deliberate pushing of textual meaning to its limits, intended so as to
discover the blindspots within the text—the ways in which it fails to
say what it means to say. This might well appear little more than a
peculiarly obtuse form of literary criticism—and so it has been
interpreted by the Yale School of American “Derrideans”. But for
Derrida himself, deconstruction is as much a philosophy and a politics
as a type of literary criticism. For Derrida “what one calls…real life” 42
is itself a text, and it can, therefore, be deconstructed. It should be
obvious that Derrida’s work clearly anticipates, and perhaps initiates,
many of the preoccupations of the later Barthes. But despite the
undoubtedly “ludic” element in his work, as in the punning, for example,
Derrida’s own position is much more theoretically serious, much less
self-indulgently hedonistic. For Derrida’s insistence on the indeterminate
openness of meaning is deliberately subversive of all authoritarianisms,
whether epistemological, ethical or political, and of the fear of change
that often inspires such authoritarianism. Hence Derrida’s concluding
invocation, at Johns Hopkins University, of “the as yet unnamable
which is proclaiming itself and which can do so…only under the species
of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of
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monstrosity”. A Derridean politics would be, above all, a politics of
demystification through relativization.
In Foucault’s late work, as in Derrida, we also find a repudiation
of the older structuralist aspiration to scientificity. Here, however,
post-structuralism moves in a very different direction. Indeed, one
might even add an opposed direction: certainly, Foucault himself
remained deeply dismissive of Derrida’s “little pedagogy”. The later
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Foucault relativizes discourse, not by any radical reconstruction of
the notion of signification itself, but rather by the attempt to substitute
relations of power for relations of meaning. “I believe one’s point of
reference should not be to the great model of language…and signs”,
argues Foucault, “but to that of war and battle. The history which
bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a
language”. The term coined to describe this later approach is
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“genealogy”, as distinct from “archaeology”. And the key text which
announces the shift is Discipline and Punish (1975), a study of the
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birth of the modern prison. For Foucault himself, there is little novelty
in a focus on the interconnectedness of discursive and institutional

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