Teachers' Resource Derrida Structure Sign and Play

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Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Playin the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

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Al Drake, Chapman U, E 456, Intro. to C20 Theory

Nietzsche's deconstructive analysis of the relation between words and the worldleads smoothly to Derrida's comments about the problem with the structuralistenterprise of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Structuralism, after all, has atleast partly borrowed its concepts from Saussurean linguistics. At base,Derrida's criticism is that the very concept of "structure" is a metaphor; it is nota given reality that might be said to ground the whole project of structuralism,guaranteeing order and intelligibility to its objects of study. (I am using the word"metaphor" in the Nietzschean sense that it is a word used to impose order andintelligibility on a world we cannot access directly.) If the system is based uponstructure as a ground or "center," how can one evade the philosophical baggagethat kind of term carries with it? To say that something is the "center" of thesystem and that this center is itself beyond analysis or "play" is more or less torepeat the gesture made by theologians and philosophers who made their centerconcepts like "the Forms," "God," "Reason," and so forth.

The way to begin dealing with Derrida's critique is to examine his statementsabout Levi-Strauss' use of the traditional binary opposition between "nature"and "culture." This aspect of Levi-Strauss' work shows both his astuteness as ananthropologist and the philosophical problems he ends up re-invoking in hisattempt to avoid certain road-blocks that his own subject throws up before him.Levi-Strauss himself is by no means simplistic or naïve: he is well aware of theproblem with the oppositional relation nature/culture. As he points out in apassage that Derrida cites at length, the practice of incest creates a scandal for

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the anthropologist in that it is both universal (which means incest should belongto the realm of "nature") and particular (which means that it ought to beconsidered an affair of "culture"). There are many different cultural ways ofprohibiting incest, and yet the prohibition in general appears to be somethinguniversal and thus natural. So as Levi-Strauss knows, the two terms "nature"and "culture" are not mutually exclusive and stable; they are instead somehowimplicated the one in the other. It is going to be difficult, then, to take such anopposition and use it as the solid foundation for one's anthropological project.

What is an anthropologist to do? Levi-Strauss' answer is practical: he fashionsan intellectual activity or discourse he calls "bricolage," with the one practicingit to be called a "bricoleur." The word is an interesting one—the French verb"bricoler" means "to do odd jobs," i.e. to serve as a handyman of sorts and makethings out of the materials one has lying about. This kind of activityLevi-Strauss opposes to the more systematic operations of an engineer whodraws up his plans with a sense of the whole and only afterwards goes to workon the specific tasks of construction. In essence, the bricoleur will use anopposition such as "nature/culture" as a tool while not accepting it asphilosophical truth.

The most important example of bricolage that Derrida examines is Levi-Strauss'analysis of the Bororo Myth. It has less to do with the above binary set of termsas with the notion of structure itself: Levi-Strauss, Derrida points out, is willingto take as his starting point a certain myth, but he admits that there is noparticular reason for treating this myth as a key to understanding how mythworks. Levi-Strauss, reflecting upon his own methodology, openlyacknowledges the need to abandon (in Derrida's words) "all reference to acenter, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin…. (1121).Levi-Strauss' way of explaining his methodology here is to say that his book onmyth "is itself a kind of myth" (1122). In other words, like myth, it does not tryto go back to the absolute source of the thing in question—there is no centralmyth, and no truly "centering" way of dealing with myth, which is after allprolific in its endless variations and anonymity of authorship. The main problemthat Derrida associates with this move on Levi-Strauss' part is that in his failureto pose questions of epistemology (literally "the theory of knowledge")—questions that would deal with the first principles or ground of


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anthropological discourse about myth—the anthropologist risks becoming amere empiricist in the specific sense of one who doesn't think through thereasons for which an activity is being undertaken and the methods by which it isto be undertaken. The validity of one's methods doesn't come into sharp enoughfocus, in other words, and one just goes about the practical tasks andexperiments called for by the field of anthropology or some other discipline.

But perhaps more important is Derrida's commentary about Levi-Strauss'semployment of variants on the term "supplementarity" because it gets to thebasis of Derrida's broader critique of structuralism. Levi-Strauss, as Derridacites him, seems not to be in despair over the inability to exhaust his subjectmatter, myth, to "totalize" it: "In his endeavor to understand the world, mantherefore always has at his disposal a surplus of signification. . . . Thisdistribution of a supplementary allowance . . . is absolutely necessary in orderthat on the whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remainin the relationship of complementarity which is the very condition of the use ofsymbolic thought" (1124). Yet this "supplementarity" is a curious andcontradictory movement, as Derrida points out on page 1123: it appears both torefer back to something lacking and to add something new. Levi-Strauss'thought, in attempting to follow this "overabundance" of signification, comes todepend heavily on concepts like "play," "discontinuity," and "chance." In asense, says, Derrida, Levi-Strauss is rightly rejecting the traditional alignmentbetween what Derrida (following Martin Heidegger) calls "the determination ofBeing as presence" and history, which latter endeavor is oriented toward "theappropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge inconsciousness-of-self" (1124). The above phrases would take much time toexplain adequately, but let's just remind ourselves from our previous readings instructuralism that it tends to put aside or bracket out notions of developmentthrough time, favoring rather the "synchronic" element of structure. If you studythe structure of something without concern for how it came to be structured as itis, you can't account for changes in the structure. Derrida's ultimate point aboutLevi-Strauss' endeavors as a structuralist is that he remains caught up in a kindof nostalgia for an absent center or origin or presence: "he must always conceiveof the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe" (1125). So even inhis advocacy of a structurality that may be analyzed by means of terms like"supplement" and "play," Levi-Strauss is compelled by the hidden complexities


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and contradictions within such terms to conceive of his project in nostalgicterms—a longing for an anterior and pure society motivates his researches intoancient cultures and their myths.

This nostalgia Derrida calls "the structuralist thematic of broken immediacy"and "the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinkingof play" (1125). So much for structuralism as a radical break with traditionalphilosophy. To this he opposes "the Nietzschean affirmation of a world of signswithout fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an activeinterpretation." This part of the essay is quite complex in that it seems Derrida isaligning himself, choosing, the second way of thinking about "play." But is he?Remember that one of the names he associates with the "rupture" in the thinkingabout structure is Nietzsche, the author of that remarkable deconstructive essaywe read in a previous class. In writing about this supposed rupture, Derridaplaces the word "event" (i.e. the rupture) in quotation marks and refuses todescribe it as a clean break with traditional philosophy. If there is one threadrunning all through the essay, it is that attempts to jettison traditional conceptslike that of the sign, the center, and so forth have always involved the attempterin traditional philosophical quandaries. Affirming a concept like "play," that is,over against rigid older ways of conceiving a thing, does not necessarily resultin perpetual affirmation of the "incredible non-centeredness of being" (to adapta phrase from a film title). For that matter, even the joyous Nietzscheanaffirmation of which Derrida writes would not necessarily come withoutconsequence or philosophical predicaments of its own. You cannot even offer acritique of, say, "structure" or "the sign" without making use of these concepts,which in fact open up the intellectual space within which the deconstructionistmust work. Note that the essay ends on anything but an affirmative note—itseems almost fearful of what may follow the "region of historicity" (the sixties,scandalously reductive though my use of such a standard historical term maybe) within which the piece is written.

*The reading selection is from Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schleifer.Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Fourth edition.New York: Longman, 1998. 100-14.


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Teachers' Resource Derrida Structure Sign and Play