Page 42 - Critical and Cultural Theory

THE SIGN
and sentences we actually use displace myriad alternatives and
their own value as signs is concurrently displaced. This critique of
Structuralism has been developed, since the mid-1970s, by a
cluster of theoretical positions commonly grouped under the
heading of Poststructuralism.
Poststructuralism embraces the structuralist idea that meanings
are constructed by language but suggests that language itself is not
a reliable model. Language does not deliver universal structures or
presences but rather traces, barely legible yet daunting imprints of
an absent other which simply cannot be fixed. All structures are
transient and all meanings inconclusive, for signifiers and signifieds
have a knack of pulling apart and reuniting in ever new and often
unforeseen combinations. Poststructuralism deems the notion of a
universal system sustained by binary oppositions an act of
violence bent on arresting the endless play of signs. At the same
time, it emphasizes the remainders which language seems to ignore
and yet which play a crucial part in all people's lives: silences,
gaps, inexpressible ideas and feelings, things we mean but cannot
say and things we say without actually meaning them. Language is
incapable of representing a stable order. It is, rather, an ongoing
process in which a sign can evoke multiple meanings, and in which
a single meaning can be evoked by legion signs.
The field of poststructuralist theory termed deconstruction, prin-
cipally associated with the work of Jacques Derrida (b. 1930), has
challenged the structuralist dream of producing scientific accounts
of culture by discovering its underlying sign systems. 4 These
accounts are based on the assumption that there are stable points
of reference outside the systems themselves - a centre, a transcen-
dental signified - which secure their intelligibility. For Derrida,
these points of reference are fictions. Even if they did exist, they
would not be reliable - for how could something stable be trusted
to sanction the intelligibility of systems which, as Structuralism
itself concedes, undergo constant mutations? In rejecting the possi-
bility of systematic analyses of culture, Derrida also questions the

4 **~ Derrida's deconstructionist theories are discussed further in Part I, Chapter
3, 'Rhetoric'. Other thinkers whose theories are commonly classified as poststruc-
turalist are examined in Part II, Chapter 1, 'Ideology'; Part II, Chapter 2, 'Subjec-
tivity'; and Part III, Chapter 6, 'The Simulacrum'.

25