SEXUATED TOPOLOGY AND THE
SUSPENSION OF MEANING
A NON-HERMENEUTICAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL
APPROACH TO TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
WILLIAM J. URBAN
3.2 Post-Structuralism
As post-structuralism is often identified with 'deconstruction,' it is quite appropriate to begin with a discussion of Derrida, who coined this term. In general deconstruction is a method of textual analysis which reveals incompatibilities within a text that the text itself attempts to assimilate. More specifically this method seeks out binary oppositions to show how the text structures them hierarchically, then overturns this hierarchy to make the text say the opposite of what it initially appeared to say, and finally re-inserts the opposition itself into a nonhierarchical relation of 'difference' which ultimately exposes the text as incapable of maintaining a univocal center of meaning. With his deconstructive technique Derrida calls on us to understand a text as that which simultaneously strives toward and defers that impossible convergence between what it says and how it says it. The particular notion of difference that deconstruction makes use of is said to haunt every unity.
Derrida applies his reading approach to a few historically significant texts in his Of Grammatology (1967).290 The first is none other than Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, through which he derives some of the terms that will later come to be strongly associated with his deconstructive technique. In a first step Derrida establishes the binary terms of speech and writing and tells us that Saussure falls well within the logocentric history of Western culture, from the pre-Socratics through Heidegger, which holds that written language is secondary to the presence to be had by the spoken word.291 Accordingly Saussure makes speech the proper object of his linguistic investigation. Derrida then closely reads Saussure to confirm historically the privileging of the voice over the letter, for the voice has been said to give forth an immediate self-presence and authenticity to the speaker who hears and understands himself; in contrast, writing is held to be a mere derivative and delayed copy of speech. Yet while doing so Derrida shows that Saussure's text actually inverts this hierarchy to give priority to writing over speech. For as Derrida notes, Saussure is of course synchronically analyzing language as fixed in writing. By the end of his chapter on Saussure, the latter's text itself is shown to have subsumed speech and writing to a linguistic field characterized not by hierarchy but by difference.292 Above in Section 3.1 we saw how for Saussure the signified and signifier, which make up the linguistic sign, are valued negatively as each is constituted on their own differential plane; but when combined into linguistic signs, they become positive units embodying the substance of meaning. What Derrida effectively does is add one more degree of complexity to Saussurean differentiality by removing from the linguistic sign this characteristic of positivity to have it also constituted on the differential plane. No longer just in opposition to other signs, the differentiality of the sign is now highlighted to be its most essential characteristic. This doubled notion of difference whereby the linguistic sign is constituted through its difference to other signs each of which is composed of two elements similarly constituted is designated by Derrida by the neologism différance (as opposed to simple différence [difference]). His overall project of investigation into 'the science of writing – grammatology'293 is in fact a science of différance and is meant to demonstrate both the necessity and impossibility of such a science. The demonstration of différance brings to light what was only implicit in Saussure since he, as was seen above, favored the analysis of the value of signifieds and signifiers over-against their meaningful combination. But deconstruction does not so much shift the focus back to meaning as rather bring meaning down to the primary level of a structural analysis, one that is decidedly decentered. For the smallest meaningful unit in the semiotic system is unstable as each sign simultaneously confers and derives its meaning diachronically with respect to other signs. This implies that any given sign leaves its 'trace' in any other. The temporal process of deferring or postponing invoked by différance thus frustrates the notion that the sign has the ability to embody a stable meaning. Deconstructive analysis rather demonstrates how meaning is dispersed across the semiotic system and is that which resists determination.
Another text Derrida analyzes is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, which demonstrates another technique at the disposal of deconstruction. If signs leave traces, it stands to reason that these traces might accumulate in certain signs, which would thereby mark them from other signs. We should thus be on alert for the text's own 'exorbitant' terms, whose statuses are undecidable and function to frustrate the unity of the text. In Confessions the term supplément 'is quite exorbitant, in every sense of the word.'294 For Rousseau can only consciously use it in one of its two meanings of 'substitute' and 'addition' at any one time. But whichever meaning he intends to convey, the other meaning is nevertheless carried along with it. Picturing the text as a web of forces both unifying and unraveling, Derrida's strategy is to tarry along with the term to show how the unintended meaning draws together threads in Rousseau's text in a manner which threatens to unravel it. This instability and plurality of language is typical of textuality in general, for there is no transcendental meaning and, as he famously remarks, '[t]here is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n'y a pas de hors-texte].' So instead of rushing to explicate the text's presumed meaning, one should remain at that point where the choice between incompatible readings renders the leap to an outside so tempting and endeavor to understand the textual tensions behind this choice. Moreover, the reader should recognize how his very reading produces the signifying structure which constitutes the difference between what the author 'commands and what he does not command of the patterns of the language that he uses.'295 So not only does the text always subvert and exceed the author's intended meaning, but it is a perpetually self-deconstructing literary object whose meaning must be constituted from within the system as functions of difference. This is a long way from Frege's notion that the meaning of an expression lies with the definite object referred to, for deconstruction views linguistic representation not as a mimesis of the world but rather as a self-representation where the operations of différance both repress and foreground themselves to give off the illusion of referentiality. With deconstruction, meaning is exposed as being produced intertextually and arbitrarily as an effect of writing.
Prior to the analysis of Confessions Derrida also discusses at length Tristes Tropiques. The official Marxist writing lesson Lévi-Strauss hypothesizes 'is so quickly confirmed that it hardly merits its name. These facts are well known.'296 The critique of this book and its views on writing lies elsewhere, and Derrida takes as his starting point Lévi-Strauss' suggestion that if the tribe possesses no writing, they somehow escape the violence which comes with writing. The suggestion here is that writing is an intrusion from without which disturbs the original presence of the voice. For Derrida this is simply not the case, for writing troubles language from within as différance. Moreover, simply because the tribesmen do possess language is enough for Derrida to claim that they additionally possess an arche-writing as all speaking beings do. This arche-writing is an equivalent term for différance, and it comes with an even greater violence of its own. The empirically verifiable violence of writing spoken of by Lévi-Strauss can be safely set aside as it is once – even twice – removed from the more primordial violence which accompanies arche-writing. Concurrent with Derrida's critique is a parallel development of another thesis initiated by a curiosity that Lévi-Strauss reports, namely, that the customs of the natives included a strong prohibition regarding the use of proper names. Derrida claims '[f]rom the moment that the proper name is erased in a system, there is writing, there is a "subject" from the moment that this obliteration of the proper is produced, that is to say from the first appearing of the proper and from the first dawn of language. This proposition is universal in essence and can be produced a priori.'297 What is suggested here is a link between arche-writing or différance and subjectivity. Where there is the former there is the latter and Derrida's return to a concern for subjectivity and its representation after its abandonment by classical structuralism is also characteristic of post-structuralism in general.
A more direct discussion of these issues is to be had in "Sending: On Representation" (1982).298 There Derrida problematizes the term representation through a detailed and lengthy discussion of its etymological roots and the problems of its translation in an address to a congress of French-speaking philosophical societies. Well noted is the difficulty of fixing meanings to words, the impossibility of giving all meanings and the struggle to overcome the polysemy of a name. This is all linked to the use of the French term représentation (from the Latin repraesentatio) which gives the impression that what is present comes back as an image or copy of the thing in the absence of the thing for, by and in the subject.299 While the German equivalent Vorstellung fares somewhat better, we are still in the Cartesian epoch by which an object presents itself behind its representation for a subject. Even further, representation has 'become the model of all thought of the subject... and modifies it in its relation to the object. The subject is no longer defined only in its essence as the place and the placing of its representations; it is also, as a subject and in its structure as subjectum, itself apprehended as a representative.'300 This gives the impression that there is an original presence beneath the representative self, and this is precisely what is denied by Derrida. He will conclude his discussion by claiming that what lies beneath are traces of différance, but first he turns to discuss two examples of what is not represented in the program of the congress to consider what they have to offer towards this conclusion. Now he had earlier suggested that what cannot be represented is representation itself (i.e., there is no representation of representation) and he correctly finds this in the Freudian Vorstellungs-repräsentanz and Lacan's reading of this conception as a binary signifier, which produces the aphanisis [disappearance] of the subject. We might speculate that because this Freudian-Lacanian notion indexes primordial repression in contrast to secondary repression, Derrida sees it as possibly analogous to the primordial and secondary levels of violence associated with writing. But the reasons offered for his turn to psychoanalysis are slim and certainly calculated to provide a rationale for dismissal. For as he writes, both Freud and Lacan are 'thinkable only by reference to a fundamental semantic tradition, or again to a unifying epochal determination of representation.'301 For Derrida this psychoanalytic notion evidently still carries too much meaning to primordially disturb representation, unlike the completely meaningless structural mechanism of différance. The second example he turns to is philosophical. Hegel and Heidegger are both briefly examined, two thinkers who seek the limit-question of the unrepresentable and place thought into the beyond of representation. However, they are judged not to adequately investigate the prohibition that bears on representation since they tend to dismiss it as derivative of the impossibility of adequate representation. For Derrida only the notion of différance fully removes from consideration the prospect of an original presence of Meaning or Self or any other transcendent essence beneath representations for interpretation to aim at in either a pre- or post-Heideggerian sense. Indeed Derrida expressly characterizes différance as pre-ontological. In more descriptive language différance is that which marks a primordial divide that cannot gather itself together; it is an envoi [sending] or 'so many different traces referring back to other traces and to traces of others... [I]t is altogether different from subject.'302 Like hermeneutical phenomenology, the post-structuralism of Derrida posits a dimension prior to the subjectobject schema, but unlike the former it does not imagine this to be a meaningful experience of being. For différance not only constitutes the very decentered core of language and subjectivity, it is a structural dimension prior to meaning itself. Différance frustrates our full grasp of meaning at its every turn.
In more polemical terms, Foucault also discovers a violence acknowledged by post-structuralist thought which pits it against the hermeneutical tradition in his paper "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx" (1964).303 He at once contrasts the two fields by speculating that if one were to compile an encyclopedia of all interpretive techniques from the Greek grammarians to the present, its introduction might muse how language 'has always given rise to two kinds of suspicions. First of all, the suspicion that language does not say exactly what it means. The meaning that one grasps, and that is immediately manifest, is perhaps in reality only a lesser meaning that shields, restrains, and despite everything transmits another meaning, the meaning "underneath it." This is what the Greeks called allegoria and hyponoïa.'304 This suspicion is the domain of hermeneutics and is contested by what Foucault will argue to be the more critical type of investigation which stems from the second suspicion, namely, that language overflows its proper verbal form so that even nonspeaking entities also speak. The original semaïnon of the Greeks, this latter suspicion leads to what we consider today the domain of semiology. This new field was only possible after Nietzsche, Freud and Marx effectively made a break in the 19th century from the interpretive traditions which established themselves in the 16th century. Foucault groups the achievements of these three men under two themes. The first concerns the disposition and spatiality of signs. Where 16th century thinkers could dispose of signs uniformly since for them signs occupied a homogeneous space, the three 19th century thinkers accomplished a profound transformation of the distributive space of signs. From now on signs would stage themselves 'in a much more differentiated space, according to a dimension that we would call depth, on the condition that one understand by that not interiority but, on the contrary, exteriority.'305 In other words, no longer should interpretation aim for a deep meaning which supposedly dwells in the pure interior of the object-text. Rather, interpretation should instead project itself out over the depth to expose the textual secret as absolutely superficial.
Without the possibility of arriving at a final meaning, there is nothing to draw the interpretative activity to a close. This insight is the second theme and is clearly an echo of Nietzsche. But the work of Freud and Marx also bear witness to the full recognition that interpretation is an endless task without deep meaning. Foucault notes how this is especially seen in Freud, where the acknowledgement of the interminability of analysis is aptly demonstrated and openly professed. All of these men further recognize how interpretive structures take precedence over the interpreting subject, for 'the further one goes in interpretation, the closer one approaches at the same time an absolutely dangerous region where interpretation is not only going to find its points of no return but where it is going to disappear itself as interpretation, bringing perhaps the disappearance of the interpreter himself.'306 The essential incompleteness of interpretation has two additional postulates. The first reads how no sign presents itself passively without already being an interpretation of other signs, so any interpretation that interprets a sign is a violent seizure of an interpretation already there. For instance, Freudian interpretation aims at the patient's fantasy, which is already the result of the patient's own interpretative activity. Secondly, if interpretation precedes the sign, this implies that the sign has permanently lost its 16th century status as a simple benevolent being which proves the benevolence of God. After Nietzsche, Freud and Marx the sign's ambiguous, even malevolent status makes it suspect to its interpreter, and the positive space the sign once occupied is now deemed negatively infinite, without real content or reconciliation. Foucault concludes by highlighting the circularity of hermeneutics. That is, from the perspective of semiology ultimately the interpreter and his interpretation are made the true 'objects' of the interpretive activity. To believe otherwise is to profess a faith in the existence of original signs referring to objects standing outside the semiotic system and which are taken to be ultimate Meanings. This would submit semiology to hermeneutics and in fact would be the 'death of interpretation.'307 In contrast, the life of interpretation begins by placing semiology prior to the hermeneutical field. For if it is the case that hermeneutics and semiology are indeed ferocious enemies (as the second citation, which opens this chapter, states) then semiology clearly has the upper hand, as it does not forego the violence and madness which attends to incomplete and infinite interpretative activity deemed to be without subject or object.
We close this chapter with a brief discussion of some work by LaCapra and White, which investigates the limitation and production of meaning from the perspective of their 1980s post-structuralist thought and from within their overall project to rethink intellectual history. With respect to LaCapra, in the opening chapter of his Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983)308 the notion of textuality is used to frustrate the commonsensical idea of reality by reminding us how we are always already implicated in problems associated with the use of language. These problems certainly extend to the historian's task of recovering past meaning, and to this end LaCapra offers a distinction 'between documentary and "worklike" aspects of the text.'309 This distinction raises questions regarding the possibilities and limitations of the appropriation of past meaning. However, the terms of this binary are not on the same level. For while the documentary approach to reading texts has predominately characterized intellectual history by situating historical texts on the factual and literal plane so as to prepare them for empirical verification, the worklike aspects of the text register another dimension which can only be approached dialogically, that is, by considering the text relationally. This notion of a dialogue with the past is of course inspired by Heidegger, whom LaCapra discusses as often as he does Foucault. Indeed his project could be seen as an attempt to incorporate insights from hermeneutical phenomenology into his predominately post-structuralist project – we might say this makes his project as tense as the inherent tension he expressly recognizes between the documentary and worklike tendencies of texts. This latter tension finds a theoretical outlet through LaCapra's systematic discussion of the relation between texts and their various contexts.310 These six contexts, which are potential causes or interpretive keys to the meaning of texts, are rejected one by one. At the one extreme, the context of the author's intention examined in the scientific style of Hirsch is rejected because of its unitary conception of meaning which lends itself to empirical verification. In this case the dialogical approach is sacrificed for an exclusive focus on the documentary aspects of the text. It succumbs to the erroneous belief 'that authorial intentions fully control the meaning or functioning of texts' and thus overlooks important dimensions of language use.311 At the other extreme is the relation of the text to various modes of interpretive discourse, which champions instead the dialogical over the documentary aspects of the text. This contextual approach also fails to explore the proper post-structuralist question of how modes of discourse function in texts. In effect we find here a critique of Gadamer's hermeneutical phenomenology, for LaCapra argues that the act of interpretation 'is not an autonomous hermeneutic undertaking that moves on the level of pure meaning to establish a "fusion of horizons" assuring authoritative continuity with the past,' as interpretive activity 'cannot be reduced to mere subjectivity.'312 But this critique notwithstanding, evidently erring on the side of the dialogical is what is called for when faced with the two opposed tendencies of the human sciences which together form the extreme limits of the discipline. For LaCapra, there is the (intellectual) tendency to be too concerned with 'core meanings' and the tendency (of the historian) to easily slip into an 'uncontrolled plurality or dissemination of meanings.'313 The intellectual historian is thus called on to make a performative approach to the historical text and to reflect on his dialogical relation to the past in order to place these two tendencies into a proper internalized dialogue. This type of inquiry not bound by rules of methodology is deemed best in coming to terms with the above limitations which establish themselves through language use.
White engages with many of the same issues as LaCapra in his The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (1987).314 He also begins his discussion with how best to construe the way language relates to the world of objects, rejecting both its mimetic and symbolic functions to treat language instead as a system of signs or codes. The analysis here continues in the spirit of his earlier work, which defined the historiography of past time periods according to specific tropes. Yet although he makes use of the classical structuralist analysis of Saussure, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, he decidedly adds to them a diachronic dimension. This is demonstrated in the present book by his intense focus on the way these codes are said to 'shift' in a text. Such a focus leads to his conceptualizing a text as an internally self-propelling force, one which addresses a crucial concern for intellectual historians, namely, 'the problem of meaning and that of translating between different meaning systems, whether as between past and present or between the documents and those readers of history books who wish to know what these documents "really mean."'315 But we should always be attentive to the fact that when structuralists or post-structuralists directly speak of meaning, its problematic nature is often highlighted and accordingly the accent tends to fall on how one is to account for its phenomenon and not with the meaning produced per se. So when a page later White takes up 'the question of meaning – or more precisely that of the meaning of meaning' once again, the inquiry is characteristically in the form of a meta-question which attends to the 'production, distribution, and consumption' of meaning316 rather than with the simple experience of its content. As he takes pains to demonstrate with his detailed semiological analysis of the code switching which occurs in The Education of Henry Adams, it is the form and not the content of a text which holds the key to meaning production. This is what he calls 'typicality,' and its notion is to be defended from accusations by hermeneuts that this amounts to structuralist reduction. Incidentally, typicality is what makes the text-context problem 'resolvable from the semiological perspective to the extent that what conventional historians call the context is already in the text in the specific modalities of code shifting by which Adam's discourse produces its meanings.'317 In other words, the context does not shed hermeneutical light on the text; rather, the context itself is illuminated in its detailed operations by the structural moves made in the text at the level of its form. Simply said, White's semiological approach paradoxically reveals how the context is already in the text. Interestingly, this approach privileges the classic text but for reasons quite unimaginable for someone like Gadamer. For what makes the classic text intriguing from White's perspective is that it actively draws attention to and makes as its own subject matter its own processes of meaning production and thus provides us insight into processes universal and definitive of the human species. In true post-structuralist style, White also finds that the subjectivity of this species is in a sense actively produced by these semiotic processes. As he writes in a formulation which nicely captures his project both in terms of meaning and subjectivity:
'The more interesting question would be to ask, not What do Freud, Foucault, and so on, assert, allege, argue? but How do they establish, through the articulation of their texts, the plausibility of their discourse by referring to the "meaning" of these, not to other "facts" or "events," but rather to a complex sign system which is treated as "natural" rather than as a code specific to the praxis of a given social group, stratum, or class? This is to shift hermeneutic interest from the content of the texts being investigated to their formal properties, considered not in terms of the relatively vacuous notion of style but rather as a dynamic process of overt and covert code shifting by which a specific subjectivity is called up and established in the reader, who is supposed to entertain this representation of the world as a realistic one in virtue of its congeniality to the imaginary relationship the subject bears to his own social and cultural situation.'318
As White himself acknowledges, this notion of subjectivity is inspired by Louis Althusser. What he adds is some clarification to this process, suggesting how the materialization of the subject is tied up with the processes of code shifting, the discourse of which at the same time produces the meaning of the text.
Indeed the notion that meaning and subjectivity have their point of origin with the structural mechanics of texts could be said to be a general truth of (post)structuralism. By articulating the problematic in such a manner which brings to the forefront the question of a possible cause of meaning, the critics of (post)structuralism become that much easier to understand. From the standpoint of hermeneutics, (post)structuralism is easily construed as treating meaning as a product of positive determinism. For if meaning is said to emerge as the end result of a signifying chain, this seems to be a reversion to the reasoning of natural science and should accordingly be dismissed as naïvely mechanistic. Certainly (post)structuralists do not intend to reduce the hermeneutical problematic of the human sciences to the natural sciences. But their analysis tends to lead to such an understanding. This is quite possibly the inevitable outcome of a project that treats questions of meaning only tangentially, busy as it is with the structural form of language. The relation of meaning to language is taken up once again from the psychoanalytic perspective in Chapter 5 below. But first aesthetic theory is examined, which does not so much build on (post)structuralist work per se but does continue in its own way the trajectory that we have been slowly tracing out since the first chapter: i.e., the general movement away from meaning toward the opening up of new senseless domains which, for all that, are not without their link to meaning.
Book based on this dissertation
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