Page 19 - Culture and Cultural Studies

18 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

and its pretensions to surety of knowledge are based, is the subject of attack by poststructural-
ism. That is, poststructuralism deconstructs the very notion of the stable structures of language.

Poststructuralism (and postmodernism)
The term poststructuralism implies ‘after structuralism’, embodying notions of both cri-
tique and absorption. That is, poststructuralism absorbs aspects of structural linguistics
while subjecting it to a critique that, it is claimed, surpasses structuralism. In short, post-
structuralism rejects the idea of an underlying stable structure that founds meaning
through fixed binary pairs (black–white; good–bad). Rather, meaning is unstable, being
always deferred and in process. Meaning cannot be confined to single words, sentences
or particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts, that is, intertextual-
ity. Like its predecessor, poststructuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of the uni-
fied, coherent human subject as the origin of stable meanings.

Derrida: the instability of language

The primary philosophical sources of poststructuralism are Derrida (1976) and Foucault
(1984d) (see Chapter 3). Since they give rise to different emphases, poststructuralism
cannot be regarded as a unified body of work. Derrida’s focus is on language and the
deconstruction of an immediacy, or identity, between words and meanings.
Derrida accepts Saussure’s argument that meaning is generated by relations of differ-
ence between signifiers rather than by reference to an independent object world. However,
for Derrida, the consequence of this play of signifiers is that meaning can never be fixed.
Words carry many meanings, including the echoes or traces of other meanings from
other related words in other contexts. For example, if we look up the meaning of a word
in a dictionary, we are referred to other words in an infinite process of deferral. Meaning
slides down a chain of signifiers abolishing a stable signified. Thus, Derrida introduces
the notion of différance, ‘difference and deferral’. Here the production of meaning in the
process of signification is continually deferred and supplemented.
Derrida proceeds to deconstruct the ‘stable’ binaries upon which structuralism, and
indeed western philosophy in general, relies. He argues for the ‘undecidability’ of binary
oppositions. In particular, deconstruction involves the dismantling of hierarchical con-
ceptual oppositions such as speech/writing, reality/appearance, nature/culture, reason/
madness, etc., which exclude and devalue the ‘inferior’ part of the binary.
For Derrida, ‘we think only in signs’ and there is no original meaning circulating out-
side of ‘representation’. It is in this sense that there is nothing outside of texts or nothing
but texts (by which it is not meant that there is no independent material world). That is,
the meanings of texts are constitutive of practices.

01-Barker_4e-4300-Ch-01 (Part 1).indd 18 11/11/2011 7:54:48 PM