Download Structuralism and Post structuralism by John Storey and more Essays (high school) English in PDF only on Docsity!
6 Structuralism and
post-structuralism
Structuralism, unlike the other approaches discussed here, is, as Terry Eagleton (1983) points out, ‘quite indifferent to the cultural value of its object: anything from War and Peace to The War Cry will do. The method is analytical, not evaluative’ (96). Struc- turalism is a way of approaching texts and practices that is derived from the theoretical work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Its principal exponents are French: Louis Althusser in Marxist theory, Roland Barthes in literary and cultural studies, Michel Foucault in philosophy and history, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Pierre Macherey in literary theory. Their work is often very different, and at times very difficult. What unites these authors is the influence of Saussure, and the use of a particular vocabulary drawn from his work. It is as well, then, to start our exploration with a consideration of his work in linguistics. This is best approached by examining a number of key concepts.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Saussure divides language into two component parts. When I write the word ‘dog’ it produces the inscription ‘dog’, but also the concept or mental image of a dog: a four- legged canine creature. He calls the first the ‘signifier’, and the second the ‘signified’. Together (like two sides of a coin or a sheet of paper) they make up the ‘sign’. He then goes on to argue that the relationship between signifier and signified is completely arbitrary. The word ‘dog’, for example, has no dog-like qualities; there is no reason why the signifier ‘dog’ should produce the signified ‘dog’: four-legged canine creature (other languages have different signifiers to produce the same signified). The relationship between the two is simply the result of convention – of cultural agreement. The signifier ‘dog’ could just as easily produce the signified ‘cat’: four-legged feline creature. On the basis of this claim, he suggests that meaning is not the result of an essential cor- respondence between signifiers and signifieds; it is rather the result of difference and relationship. In other words, Saussure’s is a relational theory of language. Meaning is produced, not through a one-to-one relation to things in the world, but by establish- ing difference. For example, ‘mother’ has meaning in relation to ‘father’, ‘daughter’,
Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
‘son’, etc. For example, traffic lights operate within a system of four signs: red = stop, green = go, amber = prepare for red, amber and red = prepare for green. The relation- ship between the signifier ‘green’ and the signified ‘go’ is arbitrary; there is nothing in the colour green that naturally attaches it to the verb ‘go’. Traffic lights would work equally well if red signified ‘go’ and green signified ‘stop’. The system works not by expressing a natural meaning but by marking a difference, a distinction within a system of difference and relationships. To make the point about meaning being relational rather than substantial, Saussure gives the example of train systems. The 12.11 from Bochum to Bremen, for instance, runs every day at the same time. To each of these trains we assign the same identity (‘the 12.11 from Bochum to Bremen’). However, we know that the locomotive, the carriages, the staff, are unlikely to be the same each day. The identity of the train is not fixed by its substance, but by its relational distinction from other trains, running at other times, on other routes. Saussure’s other example is the game of chess. A knight, for example, could be represented in any way a designer thought desirable, provided that how it was represented marked it as different from the other chess pieces. According to Saussure, meaning is also made in a process of combination and selec- tion, horizontally along the syntagmatic axis, and vertically along the paradigmatic axis. For example, the sentence, ‘Miriam made chicken broth today’, is meaningful through the accumulation of its different parts: Miriam/made/chicken broth/today. Its meaning is only complete once the final word is spoken or inscribed. Saussure calls this process the syntagmatic axis of language. One can add other parts to extend its meaningfulness: ‘Miriam made chicken broth today while dreaming about her lover.’ Meaning is thus accumulated along the syntagmatic axis of language. This is perfectly clear when a sentence is interrupted. For example, ‘I was going to say that.. .’; ‘It is clear to me that Luie should.. .’; ‘You promised to tell me about.. .’. Substituting certain parts of the sentence for new parts can also change meaning. For example, I could write, ‘Miriam made salad today while dreaming about her lover’ or ‘Miriam made chicken broth today while dreaming about her new car’. Such substitu- tions are said to be operating along the paradigmatic axis of language. Let us consider a more politically charged example. ‘Terrorists carried out an attack on an army base today.’ Substitutions from the paradigmatic axis could alter the meaning of this sen- tence considerably. If we substitute ‘freedom fighters’ or ‘anti-imperialist volunteers’ for the word ‘terrorists’ we would have a sentence meaningful in quite a different way. This would be achieved without any reference to a corresponding reality outside of the sentence itself. The meaning of the sentence is produced through a process of selection and combination. This is because the relationship between ‘sign’ and ‘referent’ (in our earlier example, real dogs in the real world) is also arbitrary. It follows, therefore, that the language we speak does not simply reflect the material reality of the world; rather, by providing us with a conceptual map with which to impose a certain order on what we see and experience, the language we speak plays a significant role in shaping what constitutes for us the reality of the material world. Structuralists argue that language organizes and constructs our sense of reality – dif- ferent languages in effect produce different mappings of the real. When, for example, a
112
Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
Manchester United and Bayern Munich. What would they witness? Two groups of men in different coloured costumes, one red, the other in silver and maroon, moving at dif- ferent speeds, in different directions, across a green surface, marked with white lines. They would notice that a white spherical projectile appeared to have some influence on the various patterns of cooperation and competition. They would also notice a man dressed in dark green, with a whistle which he blew to stop and start the combinations of play. They would also note that he appeared to be supported by two other men also dressed in dark green, one on either side of the main activity, each using a flag to support the limited authority of the man with the whistle. Finally, they would note the presence of two men, one at each end of the playing area, standing in front of partly netted structures. They would see that periodically these men engaged in acrobatic routines that involved contact with the white projectile. The visiting aliens could observe the occasion and describe what they saw to each other, but unless someone explained to them the rules of association football, its structure , the Champions League Final, in which Manchester United became the first team in history to win the ‘treble’ of Champions League, Premier League and FA Cup, would make very little sense to them at all. It is the underlying rules of cultural texts and practices that interest struc- turalists. It is structure that makes meaning possible. The task of structuralism, there- fore, is to make explicit the rules and conventions (the structure) which govern the production of meaning (acts of parole ).
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Will Wright and the American
Western
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1968) uses Saussure to help him discover the ‘unconscious foun- dations’ (18) of the culture of so-called ‘primitive’ societies. He analyses cooking, man- ners, modes of dress, aesthetic activity and other forms of cultural and social practices as analogous to systems of language; each in its different way is a mode of commun- ication, a form of expression. As Terence Hawkes (1977) points out, ‘His quarry, in short, is the langue of the whole culture; its system and its general laws: he stalks it through the particular varieties of its parole ’ (39). In pursuit of his quarry, Lévi-Strauss investigates a number of ‘systems’. It is, however, his analysis of myth that is of central interest to the student of popular culture. He claims that beneath the vast heterogene- ity of myths, there can be discovered a homogeneous structure. In short, he argues that individual myths are examples of parole , articulations of an underlying structure or langue. By understanding this structure we should be able to truly understand the meaning – ‘operational value’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1968: 209) – of particular myths. Myths, Lévi-Strauss argues, work like language: they comprise individual ‘mythemes’, analogous to individual units of language, ‘morphemes’ and ‘phonemes’. Like morphemes and phonemes, mythemes only take on meaning when combined in
114
particular patterns. Seen in this way, the anthropologists’ task is to discover the under- lying ‘grammar’: the rules and regulations that make it possible for myths to be mean- ingful. He also observes that myths are structured in terms of ‘binary oppositions’. Dividing the world into mutually exclusive categories produces meaning: culture/ nature, man/woman, black/white, good/bad, us/them, for example. Drawing on Saussure, he sees meaning as a result of the interplay between a process of similarity and difference. For example, in order to say what is bad we must have some notion of what is good. In the same way, what it means to be a man is defined against what it means to be a woman. Lévi-Strauss claims that all myths have a similar structure. Moreover, he also claims
- although this is by no means his primary focus – that all myths have a similar socio- cultural function within society. That is, the purpose of myth is to make the world explicable, to magically resolve its problems and contradictions. As he contends, ‘mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution.... The purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcom- ing a contradiction’ (224, 229). Myths are stories we tell ourselves as a culture in order to banish contradictions and make the world understandable and therefore habitable; they attempt to put us at peace with ourselves and our existence. In Sixguns and Society , Will Wright (1975) uses Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist methodo- logy to analyse the Hollywood Western. He argues that much of the narrative power of the Western is derived from its structure of binary oppositions. However, Wright dif- fers from Lévi-Strauss in that his concern ‘is not to reveal a mental structure but to show how the myths of a society, through their structure, communicate a conceptual order to the members of that society’ (17). In short, whereas Lévi-Strauss’s primary concern is the structure of the human mind, Wright’s focus is on the way the Western ‘presents a symbolically simple but remarkably deep conceptualisation of American social beliefs’ (23). He contends that the Western has evolved through three stages: ‘classic’ (including a variation he calls ‘vengeance’), ‘transition theme’ and ‘professional’. Despite the genre’s different types, he identifies a basic set of structuring oppositions, shown in Table 6.1. But, as he insists (taking him beyond Lévi-Strauss), in order to fully understand the social meaning of a myth, it is necessary to analyse not only its binary structure but its narrative structure – ‘the progression of events and the resolu- tion of conflicts’ (24). The ‘classic’ Western, according to Wright, is divided into sixteen narrative ‘functions’ (see Propp, 1968):
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Will Wright and the American Western 115
Table 6.1 Structuring oppositions in the Western.
Inside society Outside society Good Bad Strong Weak Civilization Wilderness (49)
Although, according to Wright, the last ‘transition theme’ Western was Johnny Guitar in 1954, it appears clear, using his own binary oppositions and narrative functions, that Dances with Wolves , made in 1990, is a perfect example of the form. A cavalry officer, decorated for bravery, rejects the East (‘civilization’) and requests a posting to the West (‘wilderness’) – as the film publicity puts it, ‘in 1864 one man went in search of the frontier and found himself’. He also found society among the Sioux. The film tells the story of how ‘he is drawn into the loving and honourable folds of a Sioux tribe... and ultimately, the crucial decision he must make as white settlers continue their vio- lent and ruthless journey into the lands of the Native Americans’ (Guild Home Video, 1991). His decision is to fight on the side of the Sioux against the ‘civilization’ he has rejected. Finally, considered a traitor by the cavalry, he decides to leave the Sioux, so as not to give the cavalry an excuse to butcher them. The final scene, however, shows his departure as, unbeknown to him or the Sioux, the cavalry close in for what is to be undoubtedly the massacre of the tribe. If we accept Dances with Wolves as a ‘transition theme’ Western, it raises some inter- esting questions about the film as myth. Wright (1975) claims that each type of Western ‘corresponds’ to a different moment in the recent economic development of the United States:
the classic Western plot corresponds to the individualistic conception of society underlying a market economy.... [T]he vengeance plot is a variation that begins to reflect changes in the market economy.... [T]he professional plot reveals a new conception of society corresponding to the values and attitudes inherent in a planned, corporate economy (15).
Each type in turn articulates its own mythic version of how to achieve the American Dream :
The classical plot shows that the way to achieve such human rewards as friendship, respect, and dignity is to separate yourself from others and use your strength as an autonomous individual to succor them.... The vengeance variation... weakens the compatibility of the individual and society by showing that the path to respect and love is to separate yourself from others, struggling individually against your many and strong enemies but striving to remember and return to the softer values of marriage and humility. The transition theme, anticipating new social values, argues that love and companionship are available at the cost of becoming a social outcast to the individual who stands firmly and righteously against the intolerance and ignorance of society. Finally, the professional plot... argues that companion- ship and respect are to be achieved only by becoming a skilled technician, who joins an elite group of professionals, accepts any job that is offered, and has loy- alty only to the integrity of the team, not to any competing social or community values (186–7).
Given the critical and financial success of Dances with Wolves (winner of seven Oscars; fifth most successful film in both the UK and the USA, grossing £10.9 million
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Will Wright and the American Western 117
Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
and $122.5 million in the first year of release in the UK and USA respectively), it may well (if we accept Wright’s rather reductive correspondence theory) represent a ‘transition theme’ Western that marks the beginning of a reverse transition, back to a time of less mercenary social and community values – back in fact to a time of society and community.
Roland Barthes: Mythologies
Roland Barthes’s early work on popular culture is concerned with the processes of signification, the mechanisms by which meanings are produced and put into circula- tion. Mythologies (1973) is a collection of essays on French popular culture. In it he dis- cusses, among many things, wrestling, soap powders and detergents, toys, steak and chips, tourism and popular attitudes towards science. His guiding principle is always to interrogate ‘the falsely obvious’ (11), to make explicit what too often remains implicit in the texts and practices of popular culture. His purpose is political; his target is what he calls the ‘bourgeois norm’ (9). As he states in the ‘Preface’ to the 1957 edi- tion, ‘I resented seeing Nature and History confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying , the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there’ (11). Mythologies is the most significant attempt to bring the methodology of semiology to bear on popular culture. The possibility of semiology was first posited by Saussure (1974):
Language is a system of signs that express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the alphabet of deaf mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals, etc.... A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable... I shall call it semiology (16).
Mythologies concludes with the important theoretical essay, ‘Myth today’.^22 In the essay Barthes outlines a semiological model for reading popular culture. He takes Saussure’s schema of signifier/signified = sign and adds to it a second level of signification. As we noted earlier, the signifier ‘dog’ produces the signified ‘dog’: a four-legged canine creature. Barthes argues that this indicates only primary signification. The sign ‘dog’ produced at the primary level of signification is available to become the signifier ‘dog’ at a second level of signification. This may then produce at the secondary level the signified ‘dog’: an unpleasant human being. As illustrated in Table 6.3, the sign of pri- mary signification becomes the signifier in a process of secondary signification. In Elements of Semiology , Barthes (1967) substitutes the more familiar terms ‘denotation’ (primary signification) and ‘connotation’ (secondary signification): ‘the first system [denotation] becomes the plane of expression or signifier of the second system [con- notation].... The signifiers of connotation... are made up of signs (signifiers and signifieds united) of the denoted system’ (89–91).
118
120 Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
Photo 6.1 Black soldier saluting the flag.
Match ’s attempt to produce a positive image of French imperialism. Following the defeat in Vietnam (1946–54), and the then current war in Algeria (1954–62), such an image would seem to many to be of some political urgency. And as Barthes suggests, ‘myth has... a double function: it points out and it notifies, it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us’ (265). What makes this a possibility are the shared cultural codes on which both Barthes and the readership of Paris Match are able to draw. Connotations are therefore not simply produced by the makers of the image, but activated from an already existing cultural repertoire. In other words, the image both draws from the cultural repertoire and at the same time adds to it. Moreover, the cul- tural repertoire does not form a homogeneous block. Myth is continually confronted by counter-myth. For example, an image containing references to pop music culture might be seen by a young audience as an index of freedom and heterogeneity, whilst to an older audience it might signal manipulation and homogeneity. Which codes are mobilized will largely depend on the triple context of the location of the text, the his- torical moment and the cultural formation of the reader. In ‘The photographic message’ Barthes (1977a: 26) introduces a number of further considerations. Context of publication is important, as I have already said. If the photo- graph of the black soldier saluting the flag had appeared on the cover of the Socialist Review , its connotative meaning(s) would have been very different. Readers would have looked for irony. Rather than being read as a positive image of French imperialism, it would have been seen as a sign of imperial exploitation and manipulation. In addition to this, a socialist reading the original Paris Match would not have seen the image as a positive image of French imperialism, but as a desperate attempt to project such an image given the general historical context of France’s defeat in Vietnam and its pend- ing defeat in Algeria. But despite all this the intention behind the image is clear:
Myth has an imperative, buttonholing character... [it arrests] in both the physical and the legal sense of the term: French imperialism condemns the saluting Negro to be nothing more than an instrumental signifier, the Negro suddenly hails me in the name of French imperiality; but at the same moment the Negro’s salute thickens, becomes vitrified, freezes into an eternal reference meant to establish French imperiality (2009: 265–6).^23
This is not the only way French imperialism might be given positive connotations. Barthes suggests other mythical signifiers the press might use: ‘I can very well give to French imperiality many other signifiers beside a Negro’s salute: a French general pins a decoration on a one-armed Senegalese, a nun hands a cup of tea to a bed ridden Arab, a white schoolmaster teaches attentive piccaninnies’ (266). Barthes envisages three possible reading positions from which the image could be read. The first would simply see the black soldier saluting the flag as an ‘example’ of French imperiality, a ‘symbol’ for it. This is the position of those who produce such myths. The second would see the image as an ‘alibi’ for French imperiality. This is the position of the socialist reader discussed above. The final reading position is that of the ‘myth-consumer’ (268). He or she reads the image not as an example or as a symbol,
Roland Barthes: Mythologies 121
Formerly, the image illustrated the text (made it clearer); today, the text loads the image, burdening it with culture, a moral, an imagination. Formerly, there was reduction from text to image; today, there is amplification from one to the other. The connotation is now experienced only as the natural resonance of the funda- mental denotation constituted by the photographic analogy and we are thus con- fronted with a typical process of naturalisation of the cultural (Barthes, 1977a: 26).
In other words, image does not illustrate text, it is the text which amplifies the con- notative potential of the image. He refers to this process as ‘relay’. The relationship can of course work in other ways. For example, rather than ‘amplifying a set of connota- tions already given in the photograph... the text produces (invents) an entirely new signified which is retroactively projected into the image, so much so as to appear denoted there’ (27). An example might be a photograph taken in 2007 (see Figure 6.1) of a rock star looking reflective, and originally used to promote a love song: ‘My baby done me wrong’. In late 2008 the photograph is reused to accompany a newspaper account of the death by a drug overdose of one of the rock star’s closest friends. The photograph is recaptioned: ‘Drugs killed my best friend’ (see Figure 6.2). The caption would feed into the image producing (inventing) connotations of loss, despair, and a certain thoughtfulness about the role of drugs in rock music culture. Barthes refers to this process as ‘anchorage’. What this example of the different meanings made of the same photograph of the rock star reveals, as noted earlier, is the polysemic nature of all signs: that is, their potential for multiple signification. Without the addition of a lin- guistic text the meaning of the image is very difficult to pin down. The linguistic mes- sage works in two ways. It helps the reader to identify the denotative meaning of the image: this is a rock star looking reflective. Second, it limits the potential proliferation of the connotations of the image: the rock star is reflective because of the drug over- dose by one of his closest friends. Therefore, the rock star is contemplating the role of drugs in rock music culture. Moreover, it tries to make the reader believe that the con- notative meaning is actually present at the level of denotation.
Roland Barthes: Mythologies 123
Figure 6.1 Rock-a-day Johnny ‘My baby done me wrong’ from the album Dogbucket Days.
Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
What makes the move from denotation to connotation possible is the store of social knowledge (a cultural repertoire) upon which the reader is able to draw when he or she reads the image. Without access to this shared code (conscious or unconscious) the operations of connotation would not be possible. And of course such knowledge is always both historical and cultural. That is to say, it might differ from one culture to another, and from one historical moment to another. Cultural difference might also be marked by differences of class, race, gender, generation or sexuality. As Barthes points out,
reading closely depends on my culture, on my knowledge of the world, and it is probable that a good press photograph (and they are all good, being selected) makes ready play with the supposed knowledge of its readers, those prints being chosen which comprise the greatest possible quantity of information of this kind in such a way as to render the reading fully satisfying (29).
Again, as he explains, ‘the variation in readings is not, however, anarchic; it depends on the different kinds of knowledge – practical, national, cultural, aesthetic – invested in the image [by the reader]’ (Barthes, 1977b: 46). Here we see once again the analogy with language. The individual image is an example of parole , and the shared code (cul- tural repertoire) is an example of langue. The best way to draw together the different elements of this model of reading is to demonstrate it. In 1991 the Department of Education and Science (DES) produced an advertisement that they placed in the popular film magazine Empire (see Photo 6.2). The image shows two 14-year-old schoolgirls: Jackie intends to go to university; Susan intends to leave school at 16. The poster’s aim is to attract men and women to the teaching profession. It operates a double bluff. That is, we see the two girls, read the caption and decide which girl wants to go to university, which girl wants to leave at 16. The double bluff is that the girl who wants to leave is the one convention – those without the required cultural competence
124
Figure 6.2 Rock-a-day Johnny ‘Drugs killed my best friend’.
Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralists reject the idea of an underlying structure upon which meaning can rest secure and guaranteed. Meaning is always in process. What we call the ‘meaning’ of a text is only ever a momentary stop in a continuing flow of interpretations follow- ing interpretations. Saussure, as we have noted, posited language as consisting of the relationship between the signifier, signified and the sign. The theorists of post- structuralism suggest that the situation is more complex than this: signifiers do not pro- duce signifieds, they produce more signifiers. Meaning as a result is a very unstable thing. In ‘The death of the author’, the now post-structuralist Barthes (1977c) insists that a text is ‘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 innumer- able centres of culture’ (146). Only a reader can bring a temporary unity to a text. Unlike the work that can be seen lying in apparent completion on library shelves and in bookshops, the text ‘is experienced only in an activity of production’ (157). A text is a work seen as inseparable from the active process of its many readings.
Jacques Derrida
Post-structuralism is virtually synonymous with the work of Jacques Derrida. The sign, as we noted already, is for Saussure made meaningful by its location in a system of dif- ferences. Derrida adds to this the notion that meaning is also always deferred, never fully present, always both absent and present (see discussion of defining popular cul- ture in Chapter 1). Derrida (1973) has invented a new word to describe the divided nature of the sign: différance , meaning both to defer and to differ. Saussure’s model of difference is spatial, in which meaning is made in the relations between signs that are locked together in a self-regulating structure. Derrida’s model of différance , however, is both structural and temporal; meaning depends on structural difference but also on temporal relations of before and after. For example, if we track the meaning of a word through a dictionary we encounter a relentless deferment of meaning. If we look up the signifier ‘letter’ in the Collins Pocket Dictionary of the English Language , we discover it has five possible signifieds: a written or printed message, a character of the alphabet, the strict meaning of an agreement, precisely (as in ‘to the letter’) and to write or mark letters on a sign. If we then look up one of these, the signified ‘[a written or printed] message’, we find that it too is a signifier producing four more signifieds: a commun- ication from one person or group to another, an implicit meaning, as in a work of art, a religious or political belief that someone attempts to communicate to others, and to understand (as in ‘to get the message’). Tracking through the dictionary in this way confirms a relentless intertextual deferment of meaning, ‘the indefinite referral of
126
signifier to signifier... which gives the signified meaning no respite... so that it always signifies again’ (1978a: 25). It is only when located in a discourse and read in a context that there is a temporary halt to the endless play of signifier to signifier. For example, if we read or hear the words ‘nothing was delivered’, they would mean some- thing quite different depending on whether they were the opening words of a novel, a line from a poem, an excuse, a jotting in a shopkeeper’s notebook, a line from a song, an example from a phrase book, part of a monologue in a play, part of a speech in a film, an illustration in an explanation of différance. But even context cannot fully con- trol meaning: the phrase ‘nothing was delivered’ will carry with it the ‘trace’ of mean- ings from other contexts. If I know the line is from a song, this will resonate across the words as I read them in a shopkeeper’s notebook. For Derrida, the binary opposition, so important to structuralism, is never a simple structural relation; it is always a relation of power, in which one term is in a position of dominance with regard to the other. Moreover, the dominance of one over the other (a matter of, say, priority or privilege) is not something which arises ‘naturally’ out of the relationship, but something which is produced in the way the relationship is con- structed. Black and white, it could be argued, exist in a binary opposition, one always existing as the absent other when one of the terms is defined. But it is not difficult to see how in many powerful discourses, white is the positive term, holding priority and privilege over black. Even leaving aside racism, there is a long history of black connot- ing negatively and white connoting positively. The DES advertisement I discussed ear- lier contains what Derrida (1978b) would call a ‘violent hierarchy’ (41) in its couplet: ‘good’ girl, who is interested in electromagnetism, genetics and Charles Dickens; and ‘bad’ girl, who prefers music, clothes and boys. Derrida (1976) refers to the ‘strange economy of the supplement’ (154) to point to the unstable interplay between such binary oppositions. In his analyses of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s ‘confessional’ and linguistic writings, Derrida deconstructs the binary opposition between speech and writing. Rousseau considers speech as the natural way to express thought; writing, he regards as a ‘dangerous supplement’. However, when presence is no longer guaranteed by speech, writing becomes a necessary means to protect presence. But for Rousseau writing can only be a ‘supplement to speech’: ‘it is not natural. It diverts the immediate presence of thought.... [It is] a sort of artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent. It is a violence done to the natural destiny of the language’ (144). To supplement means both to add and to substitute. Writing is therefore both an addition to speech and a substitute for speech. But speech itself is a supplement. It does not exist outside culture. Speech cannot therefore play Edenic nature to writing’s fallen culture , both always already belong to ‘the order of the supplement’ (149). For, as Derrida insists, ‘the indefinite process of supplementarity has always already infiltrated presence, always already inscribed there the space of repetition and the splitting of the self [from pure self-presence]’ (163). Nature may have preceded culture, but our sense of nature as pure presence is a product of culture. Writing is not the fall of language, it is inscribed in its origins. Rousseau, in a sense, already knows this: according to Derrida, he ‘ declares what he wishes to say ’, but he also ‘ describes that which
Jacques Derrida 127
constrain, and constitute. Table 6.4 outlines the different ways film may be studied. Each discipline speaks about film in a particular way and in so doing it enables and constrains what can be said about film. But they do not just speak about film; by con- structing film as a specific object of study, they constitute film as a specific reality (‘the real meaning of film’). The game of netball is also a discourse: to play netball (regard- less of individual talent), you must be familiar with the rules of the game; these both enable and constrain your performance. But they also constitute you as a netball player. In other words, you are only a netball player if you play netball. Being a netball player is not a ‘given’ (i.e. expression of ‘nature’): it is enabled, constrained and con- stituted in discourse (i.e. a product of ‘culture’). In these ways, discourses produce sub- ject positions we are invited to occupy (member of a language community; student of film; netball player). Discourses, therefore, are social practices in which we engage; they are like social ‘scripts’ we perform (consciously and unconsciously). What we think of as ‘experience’ is always experience in or of a particular discourse. Moreover, what we think of as our ‘selves’ is the internalization of a multiplicity of discourses. In other words, all the things we are, are enabled, constrained and constituted in discourses. Discursive formations consist of the hierarchical criss-crossing of particular dis- courses. The different ways to study film discussed earlier produces a discursive forma- tion. In The History of Sexuality , Foucault (1981) charts the development of the discursive formation of sexuality. In doing this, he rejects what he calls ‘the repressive hypothesis’ (10); that is, the idea of sexuality as something ‘essential’ that the Victorians repressed. Instead he follows a different set of questions:
Why has sexuality been so widely discussed and what has been said about it? What were the effects of power generated by what was said? What are the links between these discourses, these effects of power, and the pleasures that were invested by them? What knowledge (savoir) was formed as a result of this linkage? (11)
He tracks the discourse of sexuality through a series of discursive domains: medicine, demography, psychiatry, pedagogy, social work, criminology, governmental. Rather than silence, he encounters ‘a political, economic and technical incitement to talk
Discourse and power: Michel Foucault 129
Table 6.4 Film as an object of study.
Economics = commodity Literary studies = artistic text similar to literary text History = historical document Art history = example of visual culture Cultural studies = example of popular culture Film studies = textual object of study Media studies = particular type of media
Chapter 6 Structuralism and post-structuralism
about sex’ (22–3). He argues that the different discourses on sexuality are not about sex- uality, they actually constitute the reality of sexuality. In other words, the Victorians did not repress sexuality, they actually invented it. This is not to say that sexuality did not exist non-discursively, but to claim that our ‘knowledge’ of sexuality and the ‘power–knowledge’ relations of sexuality are discursive. Discourses produce knowledge and knowledge is always a weapon of power: ‘it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together’ (Foucault, 2009: 318). The Victorian invention of sexuality did not just produce knowledge about sexuality, it sought to produce power over sexuality; this was knowledge that could be deployed to categorize and to organize behaviour; divide it into the ‘normal’ and the unacceptable. In this way, then, ‘power produces knowledge... power and knowledge directly imply one another... there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations’ (1979: 27). Power, however, should not be thought of as a negative force, something which denies, represses, negates; power is productive.
We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact, power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth (194).
Power produces reality; through discourses it produces the ‘truths’ we live by: ‘Each society has its own regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth – that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true’ (Foucault, 2002a: 131). One of his central aims, therefore, is to discover ‘how men [and women] govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth (... the establishment of domains in which the practice of true and false can be made at once ordered and pertinent)’ (2002b: 230). What Foucault calls ‘regimes of truth’ do not have to be ‘true’; they have only to be thought of as ‘true’ and acting on as if ‘true’. If ideas are believed, they establish and legitimate particular regimes of truth. For example, before it was discovered that the earth is round, thinking the earth was flat was to be in the regime of truth of contem- porary of science and theology; saying it was round could get you tortured or killed. In Chapter 8 we will examine Orientalism as a powerful regime of truth. Discourse is not just about the imposition of power. As Foucault (2009) points out, ‘Where there is power there is resistance’ (315).
Discourses are not once and for all subservient to power or raised up against it, any more than silences are. We must make allowances for the complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also an hindrance, a stumbling block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy. Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines it and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it (318).
130
