This philosophical movement, which received
its highpoint in the 1960s and 1970s, also left quite a considerable mark
on linguistics, anthropology and literary theory. It all really stems from
the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who believed that cultural
forms, belief systems and 'discourses' of every kind are best understood
by analogy with language or with properties of language when
considered from the pure objective viewpoint without subjective time; only
from that viewpoint can you analyse its immanent structures of sound and
sense. Language is not an accumulation of independent conventions but an
interlocking system. Every element is what it is only by virtue
of its relation to every other element in the system.
It's impact on literary criticism was profound. Mere interpretation of texts is fruitless; but the examination of structural features of the text puts it on a more sound footing when it comes to analysing a work. In fact, it provides a firmer methodological grounding for the discipline of literary criticism itself, although arguably this structural criticism within literary theory starts with Aristotle's Poetics. The real advance from the structuralists, however, is in its reatment of standard literary devices such as metaphor and metonymy (the placing of one word when meaning another), which are the structural axes of all linguistic communication, and they perhaps reach their highest expressive power in art forms such as poetry.
From Geneva, structuralism was adopted in France by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, the literary theorist Roland Barthes, the psychologist Jacques Lacan and the Marxist sociologist Louis Althusser. Into philosophy it continued with the celebrated thinkers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.
Lévi-Strauss concludes that there is nothing
really 'primitive' about so-called 'primitive' languages and the 'primitive'
people who speak them, since (obviously) any people that can establish
or allow to evolve an extremely complex system of signs and signifiers
to communicate with each other, and which we can look on with the rationalism
of the Western linguist and therefore project linguistic 'rules' back onto,
is not the 'primitive' culture that we think; it cannot be so trivialised.
Now I suppose this observation is within the orthodoxy of the politically
correct.
In addition, the surprising patterns of similar behaviour around the world, for example in ceremonies of rites de passage or the similarity of many African tribes and, say, Shintoism in ancient Japan in their ancestor worship, suggests a similarity of structure of the human mind, with so many common elements. This is a return to the idea of innate ideas which, if you have read about Déscartes and Locke (the old rationalism/empiricism debate) has been rather unfashionable, but in terms of structural linguistics is reinforced by Noam Chomsky. But the analysis of structure is not only mental, for Lévi-Strauss. There is also structure in his analyses of patterns of kinship, mythology, art, religion, ritual and even culinary traditions.
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Jacques Derrida wishes the school of deconstruction to be dissociated from any particular trademark method: it is not merely an analytic or critical tool, nor a method in itself, nor an operation performed on a text. Deconstruction, he thinks, resists both translation and interpretation. Which means that, to give you any idea of it on a web site is to encapsulate it. And this is something Derrida doesn't want. But I shall try anyway.
A great deal of the history of philosophy is concerned with finding some ultimate metaphysical certainties or sources of meaning which can characterize (Western) 'philosophy.' But the grounding of philosophy cannot be encapsulated in this historical, metaphysical context, he thinks. Instead, by reading philosophical texts in a particular way (called 'deconstruction') he can expose the metaphysical assumptions or presuppositions that philosophers use - even those who appear to be hostile or dismissive of so-called 'metaphysics.' But instead of offering a metaphysical doctrine of his own, he sought instead to analyse language and to provide a radical, alternative perspective in which even the notion of a 'philosophical' doctrine or thesis is questioned.
Derrida is concerned principally with the use of language in Western thought. He deconstructs Plato's Phaedrus, the father of Structuralism de Saussure, and Rousseau's work on language. Traditionally, speaking is seen as 'above' writing; writing is traditionally seen as being artificial or unnatural in its use of signs - whereas speech is more natural and there is less ambiguity because the speaker's intention is, in the majority of cases, obvious. In speaking, therefore, there is the idea of 'presence' - being bodily there, being mostly unambiguous because of bodily signifiers or whatever.
Why is speaking considered more superior? Perhaps because historically writing, of course, appears on the scene later. Speech is considered, then, traditionally to be a more direct expression of thought or logos, and writing to be a substitute for speech because in writing the intentions of the communicator are more likely to be betrayed.
Derrida, however, disagrees with this traditional view. He argues that the logic of the texts promotes its own refutation - he says the text turns against itself. Speech too, he says, communicates in arbitrary, system-relative and material signs; thus, he overturns the traditional view of speech being 'before' writing.
But, far from defining each in terms of its opposite, he subjects them to an internal critique which destabilizes them. He then asks the Kantian question of what makes these opposites possible in the first place, and this takes language and thought to its outermost limits. From this, Derrida posits new terminology, because the present language is inadequate: archi-writing, différence, textuality, and the trace.
But if, as I stated earlier, deconstruction wishes not to encapsulate things, then don't these new terms threaten to explain the unexplainable? No. Because Derrida purposefully acknowledges that they are inadequate and self-defeating (because they already presuppose existing linguistic structures) and therefore his new terminology is a move away from the structuralism that seeks to enclose things within a system.
This is according to Derrida's reading of Husserl, and here Derrida show the impossibility of Husserl's achieving what he set out to do - a rigorously theorized account of structures and modalities of internal time-consciousness; or of the relation between the meaning of the communicator and the language he uses as a network of differential signs. What Husserl wanted was, in effect, to find some base transcendental signifiers within consciousness, meaning or truth, something that would be a constant within consciousness, some 'logocentric' meaning. Derrida show that this is impossible, because of the endless play of differing/deferring.