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Madan Sarup

Madan Sarup. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism. Introduction Firstly, there is a critique of the human subject . 1

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Madan Sarup

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  1. Madan Sarup • An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism

  2. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Introduction • Firstly, there is a critique of the human subject. 1 • The term 'subject' helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as a product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious. 2 • The category of the subject calls into question the notion of the self synonymous with consciousness; it 'decentres' consciousness. 2

  3. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Secondly, both structuralism and post-structuralism make a critique of historicism. 2 • They have an antipathy to the notion that there is an overall pattern in history. 2 • We will see in later discussions that Foucault wrote about history without having the notion of progress, and that Derrida says there is no end point in history. 2 • Thirdly, there is a critique of meaning. 2 • In post-structuralism, broadly speaking, the signified is demoted and the signifier made dominant. 2

  4. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • This means there is no one-to-one correspondence between propositions and reality. 2 • Lacan, for example, writes of 'the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier'. 3 • The post-structuralist philosopher Derrida goes further; he believes in a system of floating signifiers pure and simple, with no determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referent at all. 3 • While structuralism sees truth as being 'behind' or 'within' a text, post-structuralism stresses the interaction of reader and text as a productivity. 3

  5. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • In other words, reading has lost its status as a passive consumption of a product to become performance. Post-structuralism is highly critical of the unity of the stable sign (the Sassurean view). 3-4. • It is argued that the human subject does not have a unified consciousness but is structured by language. Post-structuralism, in short, involves a critique of metaphysics, of truth. 4

  6. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Lacan and psychoanalysis • For Lacan there is no separation between self and society. 7 • Human beings become social with the appropriation of language; and it is language that constitutes us as a subject. 7

  7. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Thus, we should not dichotomize the individual and society. Society inhabits each individual. 7 • Lacan's writing, which exemplifies his views about language, is very allusive. 7 • His language fuses the theoretical and the poetic. 7 • His associative style is intended to slow the reader down.7

  8. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • He wants to resist the over-simplification of much psychoanalytic writing. 7 • He also wants so subvert the normalization that everyday language imposes. 7

  9. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Lacan's view is that biology is always interpreted by the human subject, refracted through language; that there is no such thing as 'the body' before language. 8 • It could be said that by shifting all descriptions from a biological-anatomic level to a symbolic one he shows how culture imposes meaning on anatomical parts. 8

  10. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Overview • Lacan's psychoanalitic theory is partly based upon the discoveries of structural anthropology and linguistics. 9 • One of his main beliefs is that the unconscious is a hidden structure which resembles that of language. 9 • Knowledge of the world, of others and of self is determined by language. 9

  11. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Language is the precondition for the act of becoming aware of oneself as a distinct entity. 9 • It is the I-Thou dialectic, defining the subjects by their mutual opposition, which founds subjectivity. 9 • But language is also the vehicle of a social given, a culture, prohibitions and laws. 9 • The young child is fashioned and will be indelibly marked by it without being aware of it. 9

  12. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The first articulation of the 'I' occurs in what Lacan calls the mirror stage. 9 • Lacan often refers to the mirror stage as it prefigures the whole dialectic between alienation and subjectivity. 10 • Self-recognition in the mirror is effected (somewhere between the ages of six and eight months) in three successive stages. 10 • At first, the child who is together with an adult in front of a mirror confuses his own reflection with that of his adult companion. 10

  13. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • In the second phase the child acquires the notion of the image and understands that the reflection is not a real being. 10 • Finally, in the third stage, he realizes not only that the reflection is an image, but that the image is his own and is different from the image of the other.10

  14. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Language • Lacan suggests that, thanks to human beings' metaphoric ability, words convey multiple meanings and we use them to signify something quite different from their concrete meaning. 11 • This possibility of signifying something other than what is being said determines language's autonomy from meaning. 11 • Lacan insists on the autonomy of the signifier. 11

  15. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Self and Language • Lacan's theory cannot be presented coherently without a discussion of the function of language. 12 • He has a complete theory of language, which he links with subjectivity. 12

  16. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • There is no subject independent of language. 12 • While Saussure implied that we can somehow stand outside language, Lacan insists that we are immersed in everyday language and cannot get out of it. 12 • There is no such thing as metalanguage. We all have to represent ourselves in language. 12 • In a Lacanian view of language a signifier always signifies another signifier; no word is free from metaphoricity (a metaphor is one signifier in the place of another). 13

  17. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Lacan talks of glissement (slippage, slide) along the signifying chain, from signifier to signifier. 13 • Since any signifier can receive signification retrospectively, after the fact, no signification is ever closed, ever satisfied. 13 • From anything that is said it cannot be predicated what is going to be said. 13 • Any 'sentence' can always be added to. No sentence is ever completely saturated. 13

  18. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Self and Identity • What is it to be conscious of oneself? 14 • How do we recognize the self? 14 • What is the 'something' that reflects consciousness back onto itself? 14 • In self-consciousness the subject and the object are identical; but can I reflect on the self and reflect on that reflection? 14

  19. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • When we see ourselves we see only a look. We do not get nearer to what we are. 14 • This is called 'the infinity of reflection'. 14 • Lacan stresses the point that there is no subject except in representation, but that no representation captures us completely. 15 • I can neither be totally defined nor can I escape all definition. 15

  20. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • There is an inherent tension, a feeling of threat, because one's identity depends on recognition by the other. 16

  21. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The Unconscious • Lacan proclaims that the unconscious is implicit in everything we say and do. 17 • However, in trying to grasp the unconscious is that which we can never know, but this does not mean that the effort is not worth while. 17 • For Lacan, the Real is out there but impossible to grasp in a pure state because it is always mediated through langauge. 18

  22. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The Unconscious • For Lacan language constitutes the unconscious. Language and desire are related. 19

  23. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • THE DESIRE FOR DESIRE • Desire is directed towards another Desire, another greedy emptiness, another 'I'. • Desire is human only if one desires not the body but the Desire of the other; that is to say, if one wants to be 'desired' or. rather, 'recognized' in one's human value. • To desire the Desire of another is really to desire 'recognition'. 21 • Desire is a sense of loss.

  24. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • THE SENSE OF LOSS • Three Order: Imaginary, Symbolic, the Real • It begins with birth and then moves in turn through the territorialization of the body, the mirror stage, access to language and the Oedipus complex. 25 • Lacan situates the first loss in the history of the subject at the moment of birth. (imaginary order) 25 • Loss is not realized until the separation of the child from the mother at birth. 25

  25. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The second loss suffered by the subject occurs after birth but prior to the acquisition of language. (symbolic Order) • Within the Lacanian scheme it not only precedes (the imaginary) the symbolic order, which introduces the subject to language and Oedipal triangulation (it, father, mother), but continues to coexist with it afterwards. 27

  26. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • (Imaginary-Symbolic) • ‘Imaginary' is the term used by Lacan to designate that order of the subject's experience which is dominated by identification and duality. (it and the mother are one) 26 • The imaginary order is best exemplified by the mirror stage. 27

  27. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Lacan believes that once the subject has entered the symbolic order (language) its organic needs pass through the 'defiles' or narrow network of signification and are transformed in a way which makes them thereafter impossible to satisfy. 27 • It is clear that the Imaginary - a kind of pre-verbal register whose logic is essentially visual- precedes the symbolic as a stage in the development of the psyche. • Its moments of formation (of the symbolic) has been named the 'mirror stage'.

  28. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The Real • The Real is the unconscious, implicit in everything we say and do. 17 • The unconscious is that which we can never know. 17 • The Real is out there but is impossible to grasp it in a pure state because it is always mediated through language. 18

  29. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The reality which we can never know is the Realitlies beyond language [...] the reality we must assume although we can never know it. • Reality always mediated through discourse, is nothing but the pretension to grasp the Real.

  30. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • This is the most problematic of the three orders of registers since it can never be experienced immediately, but only by way of the mediation of the other two: 'the Real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolization absolutely'. 32 • 'It is the world of words which creates the world of things'. 33

  31. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • DERRIDA AND DECONSTRUCTION • 1967 Of Grammatology, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference. • THE INSTABILITY OF LANGUAGE • Derrida argues that meaning is not immediately present in a sign. 35 • Since the meaning is always in some sense absent from it too. • Meaning is scattered or dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers;

  32. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • [meaning] it cannot be easily nailed down, it is never fully present in any one sign alone, but is rather a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together. 35-36 • Meaning will never stay quite the same from context to context; • the signified will be altered by the various chains of signifiers in which it is entangled. 36 • Meaning is never identical with itself; because a sign appears in different contexts it is never absolutely the same. 36

  33. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Not only my meaning, indeed, but I myself; since language is something I am made out of, rather than a convenient tool I use, the whole idea that I am a stable, unified entity must also be a fiction. 37 • PHONOCENTRISM-LOGOCENTRISM • (deconstruction) This is method of reading a text so closely that the author's conceptual distinctions on with the text relies are shown to fail on account of the inconsistent and paradoxical use made of these very concepts within the text as a whole. 37

  34. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • The method of deconstruction is connected with what Derrida calls the 'mataphysics of presence'. 37 • The expression, linked to the intention of the speaker, is what we might call the pure meaning of the sign, and as such is distinguished from indication, which has a pointing function and could occur without any intentional meaning. 38

  35. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Now, it is because of the assumption of presence that a priority has been given to speech over writing. • Derrida calls this phonocentrism. • Speech has been regarded as prior because it is closer to the possibility of presence. • It is closer because speech implies immediacy (of two speakers). 38 • Thus unlike writing, which is hopelessly mediated, speech is linked to the apparent moment and place of presence and for this reason has had priority over writing. 38

  36. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • FOUCAULT AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES • Foucault often uses the term genealogy to refer to the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today. 64 • Genealogies focus on local, discontinuous, disqualified, illegitimate knowledges against the claims of a unitary body of theory which would filter, hierarchize and order them in the name of some true knowledge. 64

  37. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • REASON AND UNREASON • Throughout his life Foucault has been interested in that which reason excludes: madness, change, discontinuity. 65 • One of the characteristics of his work is the tendency to condense a general historical argument into a tracing of the emergence of specific institutions. 70

  38. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • An apparatus is a structure of heterogeneous elements such as discourses, laws, institutions, in short, the said as much as the unsaid. 71 • What interests him, of course, is how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false. 87

  39. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand. 88 • In his view the method of genealogy involves a painstaking rediscovery of struggles, an attack on the tyranny of what he calls 'totalizing discourses' and a rediscovery of fragmented, subjugated, local and specific knowledge. 88

  40. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • It is directed against great truths and grand theories. • But he provides no grounds for distinguishing between different struggles and does not seen to be able to commit himself to a conception of the human good. 88 • History does not reveal the gradual triumph of human rationality, nor does if fulfil an ultimate goal. • History is uncontrolled and directionless. 90

  41. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Power is not an institution, a structure, or a certain force with which certain people are endowed; • (power) it is a name given to a complex strategic relation in a given society. 92 • For Foucault power is necessary for the production of knowledge. 94 • Power is dispersed in any discursive activity en society

  42. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • CONCLUSION • If one looks at the work of the post-structuralist, such as Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard and others, one can see the influence of Nietzsche's philosophy. • They share with him an antipathy to any 'system'. 115

  43. An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism • Secondly, they reject the Hegelian view of history as progress. 115 • Thirdly, they are ware of the increasing pressure towards conformity and are highly critical of this tendency. 115 • Fourthly, their obsession with the subjective and the 'small story' has led them to affirm the anti-political individual. 115

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