Poststructuralism/ Deconstruction/ Postmodernism Terms

Question 1

Postmodernism

Answer 1

1) historical period - after ww1 (jenkins), or in 1960s (klages)
2) a style - resembles high modernism (fragmentation, self-reflexivity, multi-vocality, etc) but is more accepting towards aesthetic developments & the cultural change they demarcate
3) a worldview- sometimes functions as an ideology that critiques the subject, rationality, truth, binary distinctions, hierarchy, exclusion, etc.

Question 2

Postructuralism

Answer 2

1) broad philosophical movement across disciplines
2) reaction to structuralism and phenomenology
3) a “linguistic turn” in thinking

Question 3

Deconstruction

Answer 3

1) Derrida 🤢
2) 1967 - “structure sign and play” and “of grammatology” (italics)
3) grounded in structuralism and phenomenology
4) associated w/ post structuralism and postmodernism, but narrower.

Question 4

Phenomenological reduction

Answer 4

Finds transcendental signifier that limits/produces all others

Question 5

Historicizing

Answer 5

Locating a text in context

Question 6

Double reading (deconstruction)

Answer 6

1st reading - identify logic of text as defined by binary distinctions and hierarchies; respect intent and force of argument
2nd reading - locates “navel” or center, and key terms of the text that governs logical system of text; discusses connotations, etymologies, or puns that reveal instability of center (contradictions, inconsistencies, tensions, slips, play, etc); reread text to show how binaries blur/ hierarchies flip

Question 7

Différance

Answer 7

“Différance” (1968) 120-1
-Différance “is literally neither a word or a concept.” “The ‘a’ of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb… thereby let us anticipate the delineation of a site, the familial residence and tomb of the proper in which is produced, by différance, the economy of death. This stone- provided that one knows how to decipher its inscription- is not far from announcing the death of the tyrant”
135 footnote 26 - “Différance is not a species of the genus ontological difference… différance is not a process of propriation in any sense whatever. It is neither position (appropriation) nor negation (expropriation), but rather other.”

Question 8

Bricolage

Answer 8

“Structure Sign and Play” (1966) 88-90
-“The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, Or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogenous-and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it has even been said that bricolage is critical language itself.”
-“Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage
deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function.
But by the same token, this function makes
the philosophical or epistemological requirement of
a center appear as mythological, that is to say, as a
historical illusion.”

Question 9

Subject

Answer 9

“Structure Sign and Play” (1966) 89
-“The discourse on the acentric structure
that myth itself is, cannot itself have an absolute
subject or an absolute center.”
-“The absence of a center is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author”

Question 10

Play

Answer 10

“Structure Sign and Play” (1966) 91
- “nontotalization can also be determined in another way… from the standpoint of play. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field- that is, language, and a finite language- excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play… a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite… because instead of being an inexhaustible field… there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.”

Question 11

Supplement

Answer 11

“Structure Sign and Play” (1966) 91
“one could say… that this movement of play, permitted by lack or absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the center and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the center, which supplements it, taking the center’s place in its absence- this sign is added, occurs as a surplus, as a supplement”
- footnote 14 “This double sense of supplement- to supply something which is missing, or to supply something additional- is at the center of Derrida’s deconstruction of traditional linguistics”

Question 12

Trace

Answer 12

“Différance” (1968) 135
- “And it is at this moment when Heidegger recognizes usage as trace that the question must be asked: can we, and to what extent, think this trace and the dis of différance as Wesein des Seins[ [beings of being] ? Does not this dis of différance refer us beyond the history of Being, and also beyond our language, and everything that can be named in it?”

-Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - “experience as the experience of the present is never a simple experience of something present over and against me, right before my eyes as in an intuition; there is always another agency there. Repeatability contains what has passed away and is no longer present and what is about to come and is not yet present. The present therefore is always complicated by non-presence. Derrida calls this minimal repeatability found in every experience “the trace.””

Question 13

Absence

Answer 13

“Signature Event Context” (1971) 5, 7
-“It is first of all the absence of the addressee. One writes in order to communicate something to those who are absent. The absence of the sender, the receiver, from the mark that he abandons, and which cuts itself off from him and continues to produce effects independently of his presence and of the present actuality of his intentions, indeed even after his death, his absence, which moreover belongs to the structure of all writing”
“How to style this absence? One could say at the moment when I am writing, the receiver may be absent from my field of present perception. But is not this absence merely a distant presence, one which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation? This does not seem to be the case, or at least this distance, divergence, delay, this deferral [différance] must be capable of being carried to a certain absoluteness of absence if the structure of writing, assuming that writing exists, is to constitute itself.”

Question 14

Writing

Answer 14

“Signature Event Context” (1971) 7

• “A written sign is proffered in the absence of the receiver.”
• “In order for my ‘written communication’ to retain its function as writing… it must remain readable despite the absolute disappearance of any receiver… My communication must be repeatable- iterable- in the absolute absence of the receiver… Such iterability-(iter, again, probably comes from itara, other in Sanskrit, and everything that follows can be read as the working out of the logic that ties repetition to alterity)- structures the mark of writing itself”

Question 15

Author-function

Answer 15

“What is an Author?” (1969) 382/1628

• “The author’s name manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of this discourse within a society and a culture”
• “The author function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.”

Question 16

Discursive practices

Answer 16

“What is an Author?” (1969) 387/1632

• “in the course of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Europe another, more uncommon, kind of author, whom one should confuse with neither the ‘great’ literary authors, nor the authors of religious texts, nor the founders of science. In a somewhat arbitrary way we shall call those who belong in this last group ‘founders of discursivity’… They have produced something else: the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts”
• Uses Marx and Freud as examples “because I believe them to be both the first and the most important cases”
• discursivity “contains characteristic signs, figures, relationships, and structures that could be reused by others”

Question 17

The author

Answer 17

“The Death of the Author” (1967) 1467-69

• “The removal of the author… is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text… The modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text… is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now.”
• “To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing”

Question 18

The text

Answer 18

“The Death of the Author” (1967) 1468
-“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the author-God) but 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 innumerable centres of culture.”

Question 19

The reader

Answer 19

“The Death of the Author” (1967) 1469

• “the true place of writing, which is reading” [signs only become writing if they can be read]
• “the reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”

Question 20

Transcendental signifier

Answer 20

Finds term that limits/produces produces all others

E.g.
Heidegger- Being
Levinas- the Other
Lacan- the Phallus
Irigaray- space
Blanchot- oevre
Derrida- différance
de Man- resistance
Kristeva- the semiotic
Foucault- Power
Lyotard- the differend