Jacques
Derrida--Structure, Sign and Play...
Derrida, the
progenitor of what is now referred to as deconstruction,
seeks to explode the notion that there is any necessary, a
priori, transcendent "center" of any structure.
The notion of structure is, for Derrida, "as old as Western
science and Western philosophy." Derrida announces an
event which he terms a "rupture" in the concept of
structure. "Up to the event which I wish to mark out
and define, structure . . . has always been neutralized or
reduced . . . by a process of giving it a center . . . . The
function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and
organize the structure . . . but above all to make sure that the
organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might
call the play of the structure."
What is this
center? Before Derrida takes on the question of what, he
takes on the question of where. Where is this center
located? "It has always been thought that the center . . .
constituted that very thing within a structure which while
governing the structure, escapes structurality. This is why
classical thought concerning structure could say that the center
is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside
it. [Here it may be helpful to remember the paradoxical notion
of a divinity which is both immanent and transcendent,
present within creation yet not contained by it--within
the structure and outside it.] The center is at the
center of the totality, and yet, since the center does not
belong to the totality (is not part of the totality), the
totality has its center elsewhere." OK, what
does that mean? Behind the impressive pyrotechnical display of
verbiage and anti-metaphysics metaphysics lies this concept: the
"center," though it has long been thought to comprise
and determine the "totality" of a structure, is in
fact a posited entity with no necessary ontological status. Put
more simply, the center is a function of the way we perceive and
organize the data of the sensuous manifold (the universe). We
think, and in so doing, we organize. We posit structure. We
posit order and rationality. We create god and the cosmos in our
own image.
Derrida takes
this concept--the absence of any transcendentally conceived,
determined, and imposed center--and runs with it. "The
concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play
based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis
of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is
itself beyond the reach of play." This fundamental
immobility has been traditionally conceived of as the Divine,
the Unmoved Mover, the God who is eternal and whose attributes
do not change. The reassuring certitude has been the human
feeling of security grounded in a dependent and protected
relationship with this fixed, unmoveable, and permanently
reliable transcendent figure.
The concept of a
center, of a centrally determinative and constitutive reality,
has been long conceived of as a presence. Here the
theological and mythological grounding of Derrida's thought is
clear: "The entire history of the concept of structure .
. . must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center
for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the center.
Successively . . . the center receives different forms or names.
The history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the
history of these metaphors and metonymies. Its matrix . . . is
the determination of Being as a presence in all senses of
this word. It could be shown that all the names related to
fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always
designated an invariable presence--eidos, arche, telos,
energia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject) [the
Biblical term for presence--meaning the direct presence of
Divinity, and the indirect presence through the Scriptural
word--parousia, also fits here], aletheia,
transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth."
The
"rupture" of which Derrida speaks, came about
"when the strucurality of structure had to begin to be
thought . . . . It became necessary to think both the law which
somehow governed the desire for a center in the constitution of
structure, and the process of signification which orders the
displacements and substitutions for this law of central
presence." This "rupture" is, among other
things, a part of the long process of losing faith in the
traditional moralities, images of the Divine, and conceptions of
humanity's relationship to the universe which marked the
transition from Romanticism to Modernism. A universe which
had seemed ordered, cared for, and maintained by some
transcendent figure or principle, no longer seemed so. What
had once seemed a "total" experience of the cosmos now
seemed fragmentary, incomplete, and fictional.
Derrida writes
of an end to "totalization," an end to the concept
that we can contain the entire sensuous manifold in our
conceptual frameworks, or structures. "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."
Why does this field exclude totalization? Because there is
"something missing from it ; a center which arrests and
grounds the play of substitutions." If the infinite
sensuous manifold is not the field, but the finitude of language
is the field, then play, substitution, supplementarity, and differance
necessarily preclude a center to the field. Why? For precisely
the reason that Derrida earlier denied applicability in the
realm of language--infiniteness. No language--even one as
large and flexible as English, much less one as relatively small
and circumscribed as French--can contain within itself
the infinite richness of the sensuous phenomena available all
around each one of us. No language can completely structure
sensuous "reality"; therefore, no language is, on
those terms, capable of having a center which is necessarily,
transcendently and--in its most complete sense--ontologically present.
Derrida gives us
two choices at the end of his essay, two "interpretations
of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks
to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which
escapes play and the order of the sign [various versions of
acknowledged, or unacknowledged, seekings after God], and which
lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other,
which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and
tries to pass beyond man . . . that being who . . . has dreamed
of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the
end of play." The shadow and the echo of Nietszche hangs
over and reverberates in these last words. God is dead, and we
are his executioners. In banishing the dream of presence what
are we banishing? What kind of clarity are we gaining, and at
what cost? Perhaps we banish only the notion of a provided
center, thus reaffirming the notion of a self-created,
self-maintained, and necessarily provisional center. We cannot
do without myths, but we cannot survive long if we forget that
our myths are not ontological fact. If we forget that "all
Deities reside in the human breast," that all centers are
constructions, practically but not ontologically necessary, then
we are perhaps in as much danger from a surfeit of belief as we
would be from a lack of belief. This reminder is perhaps the
primary value of deconstruction. |
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