Page 183 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

underlying structure of sign systems and the grammar that makes meaning
possible. Here the process of selection and combination of signs, which are
organized into a signifying system, is said to produce meaning. Crucially, signs do
160 not make sense by virtue of reference to entities in an independent object world,
but rather they generate meaning by reference to each other. Thus meaning is
generated through the organization of signs that are held together by cultural
convention.
Poststructuralism deconstructs the very notion of the stable structures of
language that structuralism assumes. Meaning, it is argued, cannot be confined to
single words, sentences or particular texts but is the outcome of relationships
between texts, that is, intertextuality. Derrida accepts the argument that meaning
is generated by relations of difference between signifiers rather than by reference to
an independent object world. However, he argues that 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.
Here, the production of meaning in the process of signification is continually
deferred and supplemented, an idea encapsulated in the concept of ‘différance’ –
‘difference and deferral’ – by which the continual substitution and adding of
meanings through the play of signifiers challenges the identity of noises and marks
with fixed meaning. 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 whereby
meaning slides down a chain of signifiers abolishing a stable signified. For Derrida,
there is no original meaning circulating outside of representation nor a primary
source of signification and self-present transparent meaning that could eternally fix
the relation between signifiers and signifieds.
The other key figure of poststructuralism for cultural studies is Foucault, who also
argues against structuralist theories of language that conceive of it as an
autonomous rule-governed system with an underlying structure. Instead, he is
concerned with the description, analysis and effects of the regulated ‘surface’ of
language (that is, discourse) under determinate material and historical conditions.
For Foucault, discourse constructs, defines and produces the objects of knowledge
in an intelligible way while at the same time excluding other ways of reasoning as
unintelligible. However, meaning does not proliferate in an endless deferral but is
regulated by power which governs not only what can be said under determinate
social and cultural conditions but who can speak, when and where.
Poststructuralism is anti-humanist in its de-centring of the unified, coherent
human subject as the origin of stable meanings. For poststructuralism, a person or
subject is not a stable universal entity but an effect of language that constructs an
‘I’ in grammar. Thus, for Foucault the subject is radically historicized, that is,
persons are understood to be wholly and only the product of history. The speaking
subject is dependent on the prior existence of discursive subject positions, that is,
empty spaces or functions in discourse from which to comprehend the world.
Living persons are required to ‘take up’ subject positions in discourse in order to
make sense of the world and to appear coherent to others.