00142--Post-structuralism [The Death of the Author/Roland Barthes/Jacques Derrida/Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences]

            Post-structuralism emerged in France in the late 1960.  The two figures most closely associated with this emergence are Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.  Barthes's work around this time began to shift in character and move from a structuralist phast to a post-structuralist phase.  The essay 'The Death of the Author' by Barthes shows his change of phase from structuralism to post- structuralism.  In that essay he announces the death of the author, which is a rhetorical way of assisting the independence of the literary and its immunity to the possibility of being unified or limited by any notion of what the author might have intended, or 'crafted' into the work.  Instead the essay makes a declaration of radical textual independence: the work is not determined by intention or context.  Rather the text is free by its very nature of all restraints.

            The early phase of post- structuralism seems to license and revel in the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority.  Later there is an inevitable shift from his textual permissiveness to the more disciplined and austere textual republicanism.  According to Barbara Johnson, deconstruction is not a hedonistic abandonment of all restraint, but a disciplined identification and dismantling of the sources of textual power.

            The second key figure in the development of post- structuralism in the late 1960s is the philosopher Jocques Derrida.  Indeed, the starting point of post- structuralism may be, taken as his 1966 lecture, 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'.  In this paper Derrida sees in modern times a particular intellectual 'event' which constitutes a radical break from part ways of though, loosely associating this break with the philosophy of Nietzche and Heidegger and the psychoanalysis of Freud the event concerns the (decentring) of our intellectual universe.

            Prior to this event the existence of a norm or centre in all things was taken for granted: thus 'man', as the Renaissance Slogan had it, was the measure of all other things in the universe:  White Western norms of  dress,  behaviour, architecture, intellectual out look, and so on, provided a firm centre against which deviations, aberrations, variations could be detected and identified as 'Other' and marginal.  In the twentieth century, however, these centres were destroyed or eroded; sometimes this was caused by historical events - such as the way the First World War destroyed the illusion of steady material progress, or the way the Holocaust destroyed the notion of Europe as the source and centre of human civilisation; sometimes it happened because of scientific discoveries - such as the way the notion of relativity destroyed the ideas of time and space as fixed and central absolutes, and sometimes, finally, it was caused by intellectual or artistic revolutions - such as the way modernism in the arts in the first thirty years of the century rejected such central absolutes as harmony in music, chronological sequence in narrative, and the representation of the visual world in art.

            In the resulting universe there are no absolute or fixed points, so that the universe we live in is 'decentred' or inherently relativistic.  Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre, all we have is 'free play' (or play' as the title of the essay has it).  In the lecture Derrida embraces this decentred universe of free plays as liberating, just as Barthes in "The Death of the Author" celebrates the demise of the author as ushering in an era of joyous freedom.  The consequences of this new decentred universe are impossible to credit but we must enedeavour not to be among 'those who....turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself' (Newto p.154).  This powerful often apocalyptic tone of post structuralist writing.

            If we have the courage, the implication is, we will enter this new Nietzcheque universe, where there are no guaranteed facts, only interpretations, none of which has the stamp of authority upon it, since there is no longer any authoritative centre to which to appeal for validation of our interpretations.