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126 Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism

Post-structuralism

Post-structuralists reject the idea of an underlying structure upon which meaning can
rest secure and guaranteed. Meaning is always in process. What we call the ‘meaning’
of a text is only ever a momentary stop in a continuing flow of interpretations follow-
ing interpretations. Saussure, as we have noted, posited language as consisting of
the relationship between the signifier, signified and the sign. The theorists of post-
structuralism suggest that the situation is more complex than this: signifiers do not pro-
duce signifieds, they produce more signifiers. Meaning as a result is a very unstable
thing. In ‘The death of the author’, the now post-structuralist Barthes (1977c) insists
that a text is ‘a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumer-
able centres of culture’ (146). Only a reader can bring a temporary unity to a text.
Unlike the work that can be seen lying in apparent completion on library shelves and
in bookshops, the text ‘is experienced only in an activity of production’ (157). A text is
a work seen as inseparable from the active process of its many readings.

Jacques Derrida

Post-structuralism is virtually synonymous with the work of Jacques Derrida. The sign,
as we noted already, is for Saussure made meaningful by its location in a system of dif-
ferences. Derrida adds to this the notion that meaning is also always deferred, never
fully present, always both absent and present (see discussion of defining popular cul-
ture in Chapter 1). Derrida (1973) has invented a new word to describe the divided
nature of the sign: différance, meaning both to defer and to differ. Saussure’s model of
difference is spatial, in which meaning is made in the relations between signs that are
locked together in a self-regulating structure. Derrida’s model of différance, however, is
both structural and temporal; meaning depends on structural difference but also on
temporal relations of before and after. For example, if we track the meaning of a word
through a dictionary we encounter a relentless deferment of meaning. If we look up
the signifier ‘letter’ in the Collins Pocket Dictionary of the English Language,we discover it
has five possible signifieds: a written or printed message, a character of the alphabet,
the strict meaning of an agreement, precisely (as in ‘to the letter’) and to write or mark
letters on a sign. If we then look up one of these, the signified ‘[a written or printed]
message’, we find that it too is a signifier producing four more signifieds: a commun-
ication from one person or group to another, an implicit meaning, as in a work of art,
a religious or political belief that someone attempts to communicate to others, and to
understand (as in ‘to get the message’). Tracking through the dictionary in this way
confirms a relentless intertextual deferment of meaning, ‘the indefinite referral of