"STRUCTURALISM AND LITERARY CRITICISM"

1: The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of
the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer; it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur , working
with what is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary-critical thing
to do.

Genette then makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use,
it is in fact a metaliterature, a literature on a literature. Poststructuralists will challenge the
distinction between the two, and Genette here refers to Barthes distinctions to suggest that
some literary criticism may be literature.

He then defines literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is language
production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message -- something
one supposes like Jakobson's poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into
Jakobson's terms, the attention is on the poetic rather than on the referential function, on
medium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does not
degrade the meaning-function of the language.

Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the New Critical
understanding of ambiguity, the 'halt', the attention to the constitution of meaning under a
different aspect, that also characterizes the literary; so it is that there is only a literary
function , no literariness in any essential or material sense. Genette's sense of the ambiguity
of literature is similar to Jakobson's in "Linguistics and Poetics", in which essay he writes that
"Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a
corollary feature of poetry...Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee
become ambiguous." (pp 49-50 in Lodge).

2: The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer's
engineer, but in a position therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats
as signs what the writer is creating as concept: the attitude, the disposition is different. The
critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according
to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not
ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly encountered. (65T) Where
the post-structuralist will differ is in their denial that anything can be transparent: all concepts
are themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought is
social thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.

3: Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise. While structuralism historically (in

Europe) is a linguistic phenomenon, and it would seem reasonable th at structuralist criticism
would then be linguistic in its nature, this is too simple an assumption.

• First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain
function and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the
relationships of sounds and meaning in a particular way. The ends then are important.
As he writes on page 66, structuralist method as such is constituted at the very
moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of
the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices.
(Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.)
 • Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts
up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an
analogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in
language but because both deal with:
1. the relation between forms and meanings,
2. the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of
experience,
3. the cultural perception of reality, and
4. the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.

Genette writes on p. 67 of the idea of a table of concordance, variable in its details but
constant in its function: it is the function, not the detail, that concerns structuralist thought.
One of the elements of literature that Genette deals with later is genre, which segments
experience in certain ways, and controls the attitudes towards it. What is the place of this
individual work in the systems of representation? That is a key question.

4: Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form. Genette is at pains to point out
that structuralism is not just about form, but about meaning, as linguistics is about meaning. It
is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations
of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture. (67 ft) When Jakobson writes of
the centrality of tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart
of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say
something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning-
function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in #1 above. Finally in this section,
Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the
analysis of narratives, for instance -- "an analysis that could distinguish in them [that is,
larger units], by a play of superimpositions [and hence knowledge through difference],
variabvle elements and constant functions, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system,
familiar to Saussureanlinguistics, of syntagmatic relations (real connections of functions in
the continuity of a text) and paradigmatic relations (virtual relations between similar or
oposed functions, form one text to another, in the whole of the corpus considered)>"[68t]

5: Structuralism is a general tendency of thought (Cassirer) Structuralism is, however, not

necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; [68] structures
are"systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as
it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering
them" -- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what
they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. as we
can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of texts or events
in their own terms (as those terms are conceived), not in relation to external causes.

When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of meanings, and to the
coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally.
Structuralist reading abandons pyschological, sociological, and such explanations. One can
see New Criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural
analysis of theme, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes,
that is, of certain elements of filaments of the configuration, or network or matrix of, of social
meanings, which meanings constitute culture.
6: Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing
itself. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological criticism, in
which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeur
refers to this, Genette writes, as the hermeneutic method: the intuitive convergence to two
consciousnesses, the authors and the readers. This is a little confusing, because this is not
hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutics. When there is
hermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then
structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are
transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the
search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, becomes dominant -- literatures [71t]
distant in place and time, children's literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggest
that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical
position of the critic -- (between identity and distance, say). Structuralism is an intrinsic
reading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture (71).

7: Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture. (72)
Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to -- the
traditional subjects and forms of the culture (from the Greek topos, 'place'; I prefer to refer to
culturally-constucted sites of meaning as topoi, to try to retain the full meaning of the idea).
Topics, or topoi, are structural in that they underlie the way we talk and think about things in
our culture. They are in a sense psychological, Genette says [72], but collectively so, not
individually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides,
Genette has been suggesting that 'high' literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary,
location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.

8: Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light. Different genres predispose the
reader to different attitudes, different expectations [cf. the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that
life is a comedy to he who thinks and a tragedy to he who feels, which saying suggests a way
in which genres might look differently at experience]. Different genres lead to different
expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic
values. Without conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, the
reversals which mark the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sense
structural, as it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon.

9: Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning

system. Structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and reference
no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the
parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As
literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself
is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.

10: Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness.

Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section at
different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the
cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature, as the Russian formalists thought; what
the change registers is the alterations of the relations of meaning within the culture.
Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the history of literature, not as a series of
great works, or of influences of one writer upon another, but more structurally, more
systematically, as the way in which a culture's discourse with itself alters. The meaning of an
individual work is ultimately and inevitably only the meaning within a larger frame of
cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and
cultures. As well, the addition of other signifying systems, such as cinema, alter but do not
disrupt the system of literature. A structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning
can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the
meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being
read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.
Jacques Derrida – “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse
of the Human Sciences”

Derrida begins his essay by noting that structures have always informed Western thinking but
have not been paid sufficient attention due to the very nature of the structure themselves:
because they are essential to the very process of thought, they have been viewed as natural
and inevitable and therefore more or less unquestionable. Derrida takes up as his subject
matter the largely unexamined structurality of these structures, and he begins by noting that
“By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the centre of a structure permits
the play of its elements inside the total form… Nevertheless, the center also closes off the
play which is opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution
of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible” (196).

This notion of the center is essential for Derrida’s analysis of the structure of language
(which Derrida argues is the structure of all existence). However, because “the center, which
is by definition unique, constituted the very thing within a structure which while governing
the structure, escapes structurality,” Derrida asserts that, within classical thought, “the center
is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it… the totality has its center elsewhere.
The center is not the center” (196). Derrida pushes this destabilized notion of the center to the
point of a “rupture” in the history of thought on structurality where “it was necessary to begin
thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a
present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a
sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play” (197). This
rupture, this deconstruction of the center thus created a world where “the absence of the
transcendental signified extends the domain and the play of signification infinitely” (197). In
this move, Derrida has not just taken a new step in a known field but has invented a new way
to walk on a piece of land that is both undiscovered and omnipresent.

Therefore, even the most radical thinkers in the past – Derrida cites Nietzsche, Freud, and
Heidegger – have offered only limited critiques of operations within the traditionally centered
structure. Derrida asserts that “there are two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference
between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic way [of the aforementioned thinkers],
consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the sign
to thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into
question the system in which the preceding reduction functioned” (198). This second way is
ultimately characteristic of all of Derrida’s work in this excerpt: without fail, he seeks to
move to a new and entirely different mode of thinking instead of simply moving to new
thoughts within the same old system.

Derrida goes on to consider a number of areas in which this destabilization, this internal
decentering takes place. He first demonstrates how “the ethnologist accepts into his discourse
the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them” as a general
illustration of his principle that the application of his critique to the sciences “is a question of
explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows
from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself” (199). In
short, he seeks “to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes”
(201), which is exactly what Derrida has done with language and discourse (and in so doing
has done to every other field, scientific, linguistic, philosophical or otherwise, because, after
all, everything is discourse). Or, rather, what Derrida has shown language and discourse to be
doing to themselves: “No longer is any truth value attributed to [these old concepts of
empirical discovery]; there is a readiness to abandon them, if necessary, should other
instruments appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they
are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they
themselves are pieces. This is how the language of the social sciences criticizes itself” (201).

The remainder of the essay consists of Derrida explaining three key terms that flow from his
deconstruction of the structure of discourse: bricolage, play, and supplementary.

Bricolage is a technique that “uses ‘the means at hand’, that is, the instruments he finds at his
disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially
conceived with an eye to the operation for which that are to be used and to which one tries by
trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appear necessary, or
to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are heterogeneous – and so
forth” (202). That is, because any sort of concrete link between signifier and signified has
been shown to be impossible, one is therefore free to use whatever tools in whatever ways
and in whatever combination one wishes to discuss the matter at hand.

Bricolage is permitted by that which Derrida terms “play,” and which he explains in the
following quote: “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. The field is in effect
that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite… instead of
being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the
play of substitutions” (206). Play is Derrida’s way of simultaneously recognizing the infinite
range of deconstruction is possible not because there is an infinite range of information but
because the inherent quality of all information is to be lacking and for there to be no suitable
material (information) with which to fill that lack. This leads to the notion of the
supplementary: “The overabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the
result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented” (207).
Because positive, concrete definition is impossible for any term, every term necessarily
requires a supplement or supplements, something or some things which help(s) it exist and be
understood. Yet, at the same time, the object(s) which the supplement is (are) supplementing
is (are) (a) supplements itself. Extend this web in all directions and the relationship between
bricolage, play, and the supplementary begins to make sense. And there you have it:
discourse, destabilization, language critiquing itself, bricolage, play, the supplementary. Of
course, the discussion here barely begins to scratch the surface of the implications made by
Derrida, for within not even a full fourteen pages of text, has established the foundation of
one of the most significant revolutions in the history of thought. Of course, saying that
Derrida demonstrated how the history of thought contradicted itself and in so doing imploded
the foundation of Western philosophy would certainly fit better with a deconstructionist view
of the world. Yet, there is scant little chance of denying that Derrida himself holds some
special place in this development: if not as its father then at least as its catalyst.
TEXT

"Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences"

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an
"event," if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural-or
structuralist-thought to reduce or to suspect. But let me use the term "event" anyway, employing it
with caution and as if in quotation marks. In this sense, this event will have the exterior form of a
rupture and a redoubling.

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word "structure" itself are
as old as the episteme -that is to say, as old as western science and western philosophy-and that their
roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges
to gather them together once more, making them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement.
Nevertheless, up until the event which I wish to mark out and define, structure-or rather the
structurality of structure-although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or
reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin.
The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure-one cannot in
fact conceive of an unorganized structure-but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of
the structure would limit what we might call the freeplay of the structure. No doubt that by orienting
and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the freeplay of its
elements inside the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center represents
the unthinkable itself.

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible. Qua center, it is
the point at which the substitution of contents, elements, or terms is no longer possible. At the center,
the permutation or the transformation of elements (which may of course be structures enclosed within
a structure) is forbidden. At least this permutation has always remained interdicted (I use this word
deliberately). Thus it has always been thought that the center, which is by definition unique,
constituted that very thing within a structure which governs the structure, while escaping structurality.
This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, 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. The center is not
the center. The concept of centered structure-although it represents coherence itself, the condition of
the episteme as philosophy or science-is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in
contradiction expresses the force of a desire. The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept
of a freeplay based on a fundamental ground, a freeplay which is constituted upon a fundamental
immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the freeplay. With this
certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being
implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at
stake in the game. From the basis of what we therefore call the center (and which, because it can be
either inside or outside, is as readily called the origin as the end, as readily arché as telos), the
repetitions, the substitutions. the transformations, and the permutations are always taken from a
history of meaning [sens]-that is, a history, period-whose origin may always be revealed or whose end
may always be anticipated in the form of presence. This is why one could perhaps say that the
movement of any archeology, like that of any eschatology, is an accomplice of this reduction of the
structuralality of structure and always attempts to conceive of structure from the basis of a full
presence which is out of play.
If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure, before the rupture I spoke of, must be
thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain of determinations of the
center. Successively, and in a regulated fashion, 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-if you will pardon me for demonstrating so little and for being so elliptical in order to bring
me more quickly to my principal theme-is the determination of being as presence in all the senses of
this word. It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to
the I center have always designated the constant of a presence-eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia
(essence, existence, substance, subject) aletheia [truth], transcendentality, consciousness, or
conscience, God, man, and so forth.

The event I called a rupture, the disruption alluded to at the beginning of this paper, would
presumably have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to
say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word.
From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the
center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements
and its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself,
which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not
substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probably
necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of
a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort
of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that
in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or
origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, when
everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is
never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified
extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would be
somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate this occurrence. It is
no doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and
begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or two
"names," and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence has most nearly
maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean critique of
metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts
of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-presence,
that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-
possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of
the determination of being as presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are
trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the
history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing
without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language-no syntax
and no lexicon-which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which
has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks
to contest. To pick out one example from many: the metaphysics of presence is attacked with the help
of the concept of the sign. But from the moment anyone wishes this to show, as I suggested a moment
ago, that there is no transcendental or privileged signified and that the domain or the interplay of
signification has, henceforth, no limit, he ought to extend his refusal to the concept and to the word
sign itself-which is precisely what cannot be done. For the signification "sign" has always been
comprehended and determined, in its sense, as sign-of, signifier referring to a signified, signifier
different from its signified. If one erases the radical difference between signifier and signified, it is the
word signifier itself which ought to be abandoned as a metaphysical concept. When Levi-Strauss says
in the preface to The Raw and the Cooked that he has "sought to transcend the opposition between the
sensible and the intelligible by placing [himself] from the very beginning at the level of signs," the
necessity, the force, and the legitimacy of his act cannot make us forget that the concept of the sign
cannot in itself surpass or bypass this opposition between the sensible and the intelligible. The
concept of the sign is determined by this opposition: through and throughout the totality of its history
and by its system. But we cannot do without the concept of the sign, we cannot give up this
metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity,
without the risk of erasing difference [altogether] in the self-identity of a signified reducing into itself
its signifier, or, what amounts to the same thing, simply expelling it outside itself. For there are two
heterogenous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier and the signified: one, the classic
way, consists in reducing or deriving the signifier, that is to say, ultimately in submitting the sign to
thought; the other, the one we are using here against the first one, consists in putting into question the
system in which the preceding reduction functioned: first and foremost, the opposition between the
sensible and the intelligible. The paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needed the
opposition it was reducing. The opposition is part of the system, along with the reduction. And what I
am saying here about the sign can be extended to all the concepts and all the sentences of
metaphysics, in particular to the discourse on "structure." But there are many ways of being caught in
this circle. They are all more or less naive, more or less empirical, more or less systematic, more or
less close to the formulation or even to the formalization of this circle. It is these differences which
explain the multiplicity of destructive discourses and the disagreement between those who make
them. It was within concepts inherited from metaphysics that Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger
worked, for example. Since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from a
syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics. This is
what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally-for example, Heidegger considering
Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and misconstruction, as the last metaphysician,
the last "Platonist." One could do the same for Heidegger himself, for Freud, or for a number of
others. And today no exercise is more widespread.

What is the relevance of this formal schema when we turn to what are called the "human sciences"?
One of them perhaps occupies a privileged place-ethnology. One can in fact assume that ethnology
could have been born as a science only at the moment when a de-centenng had come about: at the
moment when European culture-and, in consequence, the history of metaphysics and of its concepts-
had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of
reference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or scientific discourse, it
is also a moment which is political, economic, technical, and so forth. One can say in total assurance
that there is nothing fortuitous about the fact that the critique of ethnocentrism-the very condition of
ethnology-should be systematically and historically contemporaneous with the destruction of the
history of metaphysics. Both belong to a single and same era.

Ethnology-like any science-comes about within the element of discourse. And it is primarily a
European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them.
Consequently, whether he wants to or not-and this does not depend on a decision on his part-the
ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he is
employed in denouncing them This necessity is irreducible; it is not a historical contingency. We
ought to consider very carefully all its implications. But if nobody can escape this necessity, and if no
one is therefore responsible for giving in to it, however little, this does not mean that all the ways of
giving in to it are of an equal pertinence. The quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps
measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and to
inherited concepts is thought. Here it is a question of a critical relationship to the language of the
human sciences and a question of a critical responsibility of the discourse. It is a question of putting
expressly and systematically the problem of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources
necessary of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy.

If I now go on to employ an examination of the texts of Levi-Strauss as an example, it is not only

because of the privilege accorded to ethnology among the human sciences, nor yet because the
thought of Levi-Strauss weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical situation. It is above all
because a certain choice has made itself evident in the work of Levi-Strauss and because a certain
doctrine has been elaborated there, and precisely in a more or less explicit manner, in relation to this
critique of language and to this critical language in the human sciences.

In order to follow this movement in the text of Levi-Strauss, let me choose as one guiding thread
among others the oppostion between nature and culture. In spite of all its rejuvenations and its
disguises, this opposition is congenital to philosophy. It is even older than Plato. It is at least as old as
the Sophists. Since the statement of the opposition - Physis/nomos, physis/techne [nature/culture,
nature/art or making] - it has been passed on to us by a whole historical chain which opposes "nature"
to the law, to education, to art, to technics - and also to liberty, to the arbitrary, to history, to society,
to the mind, and so on. From thebeginnings of his quest and from his first book, The Elementary
Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss has felt at one and the same time the necessity of utilizing this
opposition and the impossibility of making it acceptable. In the Elementary Structures, he begins from
this axiom or definition: that belongs to nature which is universal and spontaneous, not depending on
any particular culture or on any determinate norm. That belongs to culture, on the other hand, which
depends on a system of norms regulating society and is therefore capable of varying from one social
structure to another. These two definitions are of the traditional type. But, in the very first pages of the
Elementary Structures, Levi-Strauss, who has begun to give these concepts an acceptable standing,
encounters what he calls a scandal, that is to say, something which no longer tolerates the
nature/culture opposition he has accepted and which seems to require at one and the same time the
predicates of nature and those of culture. This scandal is the incest-prohibition. The incest-prohibition
is universal; in this sense one could call it natural. But it is also a prohibition, a system of norms and
interdicts; in this sense one could call it cultural.

Let us assume therefore that everything universal in man derives from the order of nature and is
charactenzed by spontaneity, that everything which is subject to a norm belongs to culture and
presents the attributes of the relative and the particular. We then find ourselves confronted by a fact,
or rather an ensemble of facts, which, in the light of the preceding definitions, is not far from
appeanog as a scandal: the prohibition of incest presents without the least equivocation, and
indissolubly linked together, the two characteristics in which we recognized the contradictory
attributes of two exclusive orders. The prohibition of incest constitutes a rule, but a rule, alone of all
the social rules, which possesses at the same time a universal character.

Obviously, there is no scandal except in the interior of a system of concepts sanctioning the difference
between nature and culture. In beginning his work with the factum of the incest-prohibition, Levi-
Strauss thus puts himself in a position entailing that this difference, which has always been assumed
to be self-evident, becomes obliterated or disputed. For, from the moment that the incest-prohibition
can no longer be conceived within the nature/culture opposition, it can no longer be said that it is a
scandalous fact, a nucleus of opacity within a network of transparent significations. The incest-
prohibition is no longer a scandal one meets with or comes up against in the domain of traditional
concepts; it is something which escapes these concepts and certainly precedes them--probably as the
condition of their possibility. It could perhaps be said that the whole of philosophical
conceptualization, systematically relating itself to the nature/culture opposition, is designed to leave in
the domain of the unthinkable the very thing that makes this conceptualization possible: the origin of
the prohibition of incest.

I have dealt too cursorily with this example, only one among so many others, but the example
nevertheless reveals that language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. This critique
may be undertaken along two tracks, in two "manners." Once the limit of nature/culture opposition
makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these
concepts. This is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither a
philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words. Concerning oneself with
the founding concepts of the whole history of philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertake
the task of the philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances, it is
probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy. The step
"outside philosophy" is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who
think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics
by the whole body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it.

In order to avoid the possibly sterilizing effect of the first way, the other choice-which I feel
corresponds more nearly to the way chosen by Levi-Strauss-consists in conserving in the field of
empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits,
treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there
is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the
meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to
which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces. Thus it is that the language of the human
sciences criticizes itself. Levi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth, the
instruments of the method and the objective significations aimed at by it. One could almost say that
this is the primary affirmation of Levi-Strauss; in any event, the first words of the Elementary
Structures are: "One begins to understand that the distinction between state of nature and state of
society (we would be more apt to say today: state of nature and state of culture). while lacking any
acceptable historical signification, presents a value which fully just)fies its use by modern sociology:
its value as a methodological instrument."

Levi-Strauss will always remain faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument that
whose truth-value he criticizes.

On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More
than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Mind faithfully echoes the text I have
just quoted: "The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seems
today to offer a value which is above all methodological." And this methodological value is not
affected by its "ontological" non-value (as could be said, if this notion were not suspect here): "It
would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a general humanity; this first
enterprise prepares the way for others . . . which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to
reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical
conditions."
On the other hand, still in The Savage Mind, he presents as what he calls bricolage what might be
called the discourse of this method. The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses "the means
at hand," that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there,
which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used
and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it
appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and their origin are
heterogenous -- and so forth. There is therefore a critique of language in the form of bricolage, and it
has even been possible to say that bricolage is the critical language itself. I am thinking in particular
of the article by G[erard] Genette, "Structuralisme et Critique litteraire," published in homage to Levi-
Strauss in a special issue of L'Arc, where it is stated that the analysis of bricolage could "be applied
almost word for word'' to criticism, and especially to "literary criticism."

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one's concept from the text of a heritage which is
more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engi~eer, whom
Levi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be one to construct the totality of his language, syntax,
and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who would supposedly be the absolute
origin of his own discourse and would supposedly construct it "out of nothing," "out of whole cloth,"
would be the creator of the verbe, the verbe itself. The notion of the engineer who had supposedly
broken with all forms of bricolage is therefore a theological idea; and since Levi-Strauss tells us
elsewhere that bricolage is mythopoetic, the odds are that thee engineer is a myth produced by the
bricoleur. From the moment that we cease to believe in such an engineer and in a discourse breaking
with the received historical discourse, as soon as it is admitted that every finite discourse is bound by
a cenain bricolage, and that the engineer and the scientist are also species of bricoleurs then the very
idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning decomposes.

This brings out the second thread which might guide us in what is being unraveled here.

Levi-Strauss describes bricolage not only as ;n intellectual activity but also as a mythopoetical
activity. One reads in The Savage Mind, "Like bricolage on the technical level, mythical reflection
can attain brilliant and unforeseen results on the intellectual level. Reciprocally, the mythopoetical
character of bricolage has often been noted."

But the remarkable endeavor of Levi-Strauss is not simply to put forward, notably in the most recent
of his investigations, a structural science or knowledge of myths and of mythological activity. His
endeavor also appears-I would say almost from the first-in the status which he accords to his own
discourse on myths, to what he calls his "mythologicals." It is here that his discourse on the myth
reflects on itself and criticizes itself. And this moment, this critical period, is evidently of concern to
all the languages which share the field of the human sciences. What does Levi-Strauss say of his
"mythologicals"? It is here that we rediscover the mythopoetical virtue (power) of bricolage. In effect,
what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated
abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an
absolute arche'. The theme of this decentering could be followed throughout the "Overture" to his last
book, The Raw and the Cooked. I shall simply remark on a few key points.

1. From the very start, Levi-Strauss recognizes that the Bororo myth which he employs in the book as
the "reference-myth" does not merit this name and this treatment. The name is specious and the use of
the myth improper. This myth deserves no more than any other its referential privilege: In fact the
Bororo myth which will from now on be designated by the name reference-myth is, as I shall try to
show, nothing other than a more or less forced transformation of other myths originating either in the
same society or in societies more or less far removed. It would therefore have been legitimate to
choose as my point of departure any representative of the group whatsoever. From this point of view,
the interest of the reference-myth does not depend on its typical character, but rather on its irregular
position in the midst of a group.

2. There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. The focus or the source of the myth are always
shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place.
Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this
acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center. In
order not to short change the form and the movement of the myth, that violence which consists in
centering a language which is describing an acentric structure must be avoided. In this context,
therefore, it is necessary to forego scientific or philosophical discourse, to renounce the episteme
which absolutely requires, which is the absolute requirement that we go back to the source, to the
center, to the founding basis, to the principle, and so on. In opposition to epistemic discourse,
structural discourse on myths- mythological discourse-must itself be mythomorphic. It must have the
form of that of which it speaks. This is what Levi-Strauss says in The Raw and the Cooked, from
which I would now like to quote a long and remarkable passage:

In effect the study of myths poses a methodological problem by the fact that it cannot conform to the
Cartesian principle of dividing the difficulty into as miany piarts as are necessiary to resolve it. There
exists no veritable end or term to mythical analysis, no secret unity which could be grasped at the end
of the work of decomposition. The themes duplicate themselves to infinity. When we think we have
disentiangled them from each other and can hold them separate, it is only to realize that they are
joining together again, in response to the attraction of unforeseen affinities. In consequence, the unity
of the myth is only tendential and projective; it never reflects a state or a moment of the myth. An
imaginary phenomenon implied by the endeavor to interpret, its role is to give a synthetic form to the
myth and to impede its dissolution into the confusion of contraries. It could therefore be said that the
science or knowledge of myths is an anaclastic, taking this ancient term in the widest sense authorized
by its etymology, a science which admits into its definition the study of the reflected rays along with
that of the broken ones. But, unlike philosophical reflection, which claims to go all the way back to its
source, the reflections in question here concern rays without any other than a virtual focus. . . . In
wanting to imitate the spontaneous movement of mythical thought, my enterprise, itself too brief and
too long, has had to yield to its demands and respect its rhythm. Thus is this book, on myths itself and
in its own way, a myth.

This statement is repeated a little farther on: "Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (the
first-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of a
third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths. This is
why it would not be wrong to consider it a myth: the myth of mythology, as it were." It is by this
absence of any real and fixed center of the mythical or mythological discourse that the musical model
chosen by Levi Strauss for the composition of his book is apparently justified. The absence of a center
is here the absence of a subject and the absence of an author: "The myth and the musical work thus
appear as orchestra conductors whose listeners are the silent performers. If it be asked where the real
focus of the work is to be found, it must be replied that its determination is impossible. Music and
mythology bring man face to face with virtual objects whose shadow alone is actual. . . . Myths have
no authors."
Thus it is at this point that ethnographic bricolage deliberately assumes its mythopoetic function. But
by the same token, this function makes the philosophical or epistemological requirement of a center
appear as mythological, that is to say, as a historical illusion.

Nevertheless, even if one yields to the necessity of what Levi-Strauss has done, one cannot ignore its
risks. If the mythological is mythomorphic, are all discourses on myths equivalent? Shall we have to
abandon any epistemologica; requirement which permits us to distinguish between several qualities of
discourse on the myth? A classic question, but inevitable. We cannot reply-and I do not believe Levi-
Strauss replies to it-as long as the problem of the relationships between the philosopheme or the
theorem. on the one hand, and the mytheme or the mythopoem(e), on the other, has not been
expressly posed. This is no small problem. For lack of expressly posing this problem, we condemn
ourselves to transforming the claimed transgression of philosophy into an unperceived fault in the
interior of the philosophical field. Empiricism would be the genus of which these faults would always
be the species. Trans-philosophical concepts would be transformed into philosophical naivetes. One
could give many examples to demonstrate this risk: the concepts of sign, history, truth, and so forth.
What I want to emphasize is simply that the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning
the page of philosophy (which usually comes down to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read
philosophers in a certain way. The risk I am speaking of is always assumed by Levi-Strauss and it is
the very price of his endeavor. I have said that empiricism is the matrix of all the faults menacing a
discourse which continues, as with Levi-Strauss in particular, to elect to be scientific. If we wanted to
pose the problem of empiricism and bricolage in depth, we would probably end up very quickly with
a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in structural
ethnography. On the one hand, structuralism justly claims to be the critique of empiricism. But at the
same time there is not a single book or study by Levi-Strauss which does not offer itself as an
empirical essay which can always be completed or invalidated by new information. The structural
schemata are always proposed as hypotheses resulting from a finite quantity of information and which
are subjected to the proof of experience. Numerous texts could be used to demonstrate this double
postulation. Let us turn once again to the "Overture" of The Raw and the Cooked, where it seems
clear that if this postulation is double, it is because it is a guestion here of a language on language:

Critics who might take me to task for not having begun by making an exhaustive inventory of South
American myths before analyzing them would be making a serious mistake about the nature and the
role of these documents. The totality of the myths of a people is of the order of the discourse.
Provided that this people does not become physically or morally extinct, this totality is never closed.
Such a criticism would therefore be equivalent to reproaching a linguist with writing the grammar of a
language without having recorded the totality of the words which have been uttered since that
language came into existence and without knowing the verbal exchanges which will take place as long
as the language continues to exist. Experience proves that an absurdly small number of sentences . . .
allows the linguist to elaborate a grammar of the language he is studying. And even a partial grammar
or an outline of a grammar represents valuable acquisitions in the case of unknown languages. Syntax
does not wait until it has been possible to enumerate a theoretically unlimited series of events before
becoming manifest, because syntax consists in the body of rules which presides over the generation of
these events. And it is precisely a syntax of South American mythology that I wanted to outline.
Should new texts appear to enrich the mythical discourse, then this will provide an opportunity to
check or modify the way in which certain grammatical laws have been formulated, an opportunity to
discard certain of them and an opportunity to discover new ones. But in no instance can the
requirement of a total mythical discourse be raised as an objection. For we have just seen that such a
requirement has no meaning.
Totalization is therefore defined at one time as useless, at another time as impossible. This is no doubt
the result of the fact that there are two ways of conceiving the limit of totalization. And I assert once
again that these two determinations coexist implicitly in the discourses of Levi-Strauss. Totalization
can be judged impossible in the classical style: one then refers to the empirical endeavor of a subject
or of a finite discourse in a vain and breathless quest of an infinite richness which it can never master.
There is too much, more than one can say. But nontotalization can also be determined in another way:
not from the standpoint of the concept of finitude as assigning us to an empirical view, but from the
standpoint of the concept of freeplay. If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the
infinity 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. This field is in fact that of
freeplay, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble. This field
permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being an
inexhaustible field, as in the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large, there is something
missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the freeplay of substitutions. One could say-
rigorously using that word whose scandalous signification is always obliterated in French-that this
movement of the freeplay, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of
supplementarily. One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its
place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as a
supplement. The movement of signification adds something, which results in the fact that there is
always more, but this addition is a floating one because it comes to perform a vicarious function, to
supplement a lack on the part of the signified. Although Levi-Strauss in his use of the word
supplementary never emphasizes as I am doing here the two directions of meaning which are so
strangely compounded within it, it is not by chance that he uses this word twice in his "Introduction to
the Work of Marcel Mauss,'' at the point where he is speaking of the "superabundance of signifier, in
relation to the signifieds to which this superabundance can refer":

In his endeavor to understand the world? man therefore always has at his disposition a surplus of
signification (which he portions out amongst things according to the laws of symbolic thought-which
it is the task of ethnologists and linguists to study). This distribution of a supplementary allowance
[ration supplementaire]-if it is permissible to put it that way-is absolutely necessary in order that on
the whole the available signifier and the signified it aims at may remain in the relationship of
complementarity which is the very condition of the use of symbolic thought.

(It could no doubt be demonstrated that this ration supplementaire of signification is the origin of the
ratio itself.) The word reappears a little farther on, after Levi-Strauss has mentioned "this floating
signifier, which is the finite thought":

In other words-and taking as our guide Mauss's. precept that all social phenomena can be assimilated
to language-we see in mana, Wakau, oranda and other notions of the same type, the conscious
expression of a semantic function, whose role it is to permit symbolic thought to operate in spite of
the contradiction which is proper to it. In this way are explained the apparently insoluble 1 antinomies
attached to this notion. . . . At one and the same time force and action, quality and state, substantive
and verb; abstract and concrete, omnipresent and localized-mana is in effect all these things. But is it
not precisely because it is none of these things that mana is a simple form, or more exactly, a symbol
in the pure state, and therefore capable of becoming charged with any sort of symbolic content
whatever? In the system of symbols constituted by all cosmologies, manawould simply be a valeur
symbolique zero, that isto say, a sign marking the necessity of a symbolic content supplementary [my
italics] to that with which the signified is already loaded, but which can take on any value required,
provided only that this value still remains part of the available reserve and is not, as phonologists put
it, a group-term.

Levi-Strauss adds the note:

Linguists have already been led to formulate hypotheses of this type. For example: "A zero phoneme
is opposed to all the other phonemes in French in that it entails no differential chararacters and no
constant phonetic value. On the contrary, the proper function of the zero phoneme is to be opposed to
phoneme absence." (R. Jakobson and J. Lutz, "Notes on the French Phonemic Pattern" Word, vol. 5,
no. 2 [August, 1949], p. 155). Similarly, if we schematize the conception I am posing here, it could
almost be said that the function of notions like mana is to be opposed to the absence of signification,
without entailing by itself any particular signification.

The superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is
to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented.

It can now be understood why the concept of freeplay is important in Levi-Strauss. His references to
all sorts of games, notably to roulette, are very frequent, especially in his Conversations, in Race and
Histotory, and in The Savage Mind. This reference to the game or free-play is always caught up in a
tension.

It is in tension with history, first of all. This is a classical problem, objections to which are I now well
worn or used up. I shall simply indicate I what seems to me the formality of the problem: by reducing
history, Levi-Strauss has treated as it deserves a concept which has always been in complicity with a
teleological and eschatological metaphysics, in other words, paradoxically, in complicity with that
philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed. The thematic of historicity,
although it seems to be a somewhat late arrival in philosophy, has always been required by the
determination of being as presence. With or without etymology, and in spite of the classic antagonism
which opposes these significations throughout all of classical thought, it could be shown that the
concept of episteme has always called forth that of historia, if history is always the unity of a
becoming, as tradition of truth or development of science or knowledge oriented toward the
appropriation of truth in presence and self-presence, toward knowledge in consciousness-of-self.
History has always been conceived as the movement of a resumption of history, a diversion between
two presences. But if it is legitimate to suspect this concept of history, there is a risk, if it is reduced
without an express statement of the problem I am indicating here, of falling back into an anhistoricism
of a classical type, that is to say, in a determinate moment of the history of metaphysics. Such is the
algebraic formality of the problem as I see it. More concretely, in the work of Levi-Strauss it must be
recognized that the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure, compels a
neutralization of time and history. For example, the appearance of a new structure, of an original
system, always comes about-and this is the very condition of its structural specificity-by a rupture
with its past, its origin, and its cause. One can therefore describe what is peculiar to the structural
organization only by not taking into account, in the very moment of this description, its past
conditions: by failing to pose the problem of the passage from one structure to another, by putting
history into parentheses. In this "structuralist" moment, the concepts of chance and discontinuity are
indispensable. And Levi-Strauss does in fact often appeal to them as he does, for instance, for that
structure of structures, language, of which he says in the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss"
that it "could only have been born in one fell swoop":

Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance in the scale of animal
life, language could only have been born in one fell swoop. Things could not have set about
signifying progressively. Following a transformation the study of which is not the concern of the
social sciences, but rather of biology and psychology, a crossing over came about from a stage where
nothing had a meaning to another where everything possessed it.

This standpoint does not prevent Levi-Strauss from recognizing the slowness, the process of
maturing, the continuous toil of factual transformations, history (for example, in Race and History).
But, in accordance with an act which was also Rousseau's and Husserl's, he must "brush aside all the
facts" at the moment when he wishes to recapture the specificity of a structure. Like Rousseau, he
must always conceive of the origin of a new structure on the model of catastrophe -an overturning of
nature in nature, a natural interruption of the natural sequence, a brushing aside of nature.

Besides the tension of freeplay with history, there is also the tension of freeplay with presence.
Freeplay is the disruption of presence. The presence of an element is always a signifying and
substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain. Freeplay is
always an interplay of absence and presence, but if it is to be radically conceived, freeplay must be
conceived of before the alternativeof presence and absence; being must be conceived of as presence or
absence beginning with the possibility of freeplay and not the other way around. If Levi-Strauss,
better than any other, has brought to light the freeplay of repetition and the repetition of freeplay, one
no less perceives in his work a sort of ethic presence, an ethic of nostalgia for origins, an ethic of
archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence and self-presence in speech-an ethic, nostalgia,
and even remorse which he often presents as the motivation of the ethnological project when he
moves toward archaic societies-exemplary societies in his eyes. These texts are well known.

As a turning toward the presence, lost or impossible, of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of
broken immediateness is thus the sad, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauist facet of the thinking of
freeplay of which the Nietzschean affirmation-the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world and
without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation-would be the other side. This
affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays the game
without security. For there is a sure freeplay: that which is limited to the substitution of given and
existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic
indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace.

There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of freeplay. The one seeks to
decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay and from the order of
the sign, and lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation. The other, which is no longer turned
toward the origin, affirms freeplay and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name man being
the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology-in other words,
through the history of all of his history-has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the
origin and the end of the game. The second interpretation of interpretation, to which Nietzsche
showed us the way, does not seek in ethnography, as Levi-Strauss wished, the "inspiration of a new
humanism" (again from the "Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss").

There are more than enough indications today to suggest we might perceive that these two
interpretations of interpretation-which are absolutely irreconcilable even if we live them
simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure economy-together share the field which we call, in
such a problematic fashion, the human sciences.

For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their difference and
define their irreducibility, I do not believe that today there is any question of choosing-in the first
place because here we are in a region (let's say, provisionally, a region of historicity) where the
category of choice seems particularly trivial; and in the second, because we must first try to conceive
of the common ground, and the difference of this irreducible difference. Here there is a sort of
question, call it historical, of which we are only glimpsing today the conception, theformation, the
gestation, the labor. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the business of childbearing-
but also with a glance toward those who, in a company from which I do not exclude myself, turn their
eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is
necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the non-species, in the formless,
mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.

Paul de Man’s “Semiology and Rhetoric”

Form and Content

The main argument of de Man’s seminal essay can be stated as follows: The grounds of literary
meaning (and by extension all meaning) must be located in rhetoric rather than in any of the other
possible dimensions (form, content, reference, grammar, logic etc.). But a rhetorical reading cannot
guarantee authority over interpretations. Therefore there is no authority that can guarantee a reading.
This doesn’t license us to read a text just anyway we want to. Rather it commits us to readings that
take full account of the possibilities and limits of reading (and writing) generally. One name for these
possibilities and limits might be deconstruction.

de Man begins by noting a decline in what he calls “formalist and intrinsic criticism.” And he
accounts for this by observing an increasing interest in reference amongst literary critics. What is at
stake? By “formalist and intrinsic criticism” he designates a wide range of practices that we find
dominating literary criticism throughout the middle of the twentieth century from the thirties and
forties into the sixties. Notice that his article is written in 1973. So what distinguishes these
practices? The word formalism implies a rather conventional but nonetheless very powerful
distinction (because it appeals to common sense) between form and content. Those of us who have
read our Ferdinand de Saussure know the distinction in terms of the difference between signifier
(form) and signified (content). How do you make the form your object? To study the form of a work
you study how it gives rise to its meaning. Imagine we meet each other at breakfast and take turns at
giving an account of the party we all attended the night before. We will have a lot of different
accounts of one event, a lot of forms for only one content. In the same way anyone could have
written a poem about school children dancing but only W. B. Yeats could have written “Among
School Children.” The poem is unique not because of its content—what it is about—but because of
its form. The “New Criticism” of the thirties and forties established certain techniques of close
reading, especially in the work of its figurehead I. A. Richards, whose Principles of Literary Criticism
is now a modern classic.

Now Richards would perhaps have been surprised to hear his idea of form described in terms of the
metaphor of inside and outside. How does the metaphor work? Imagine a nut. A nut has a shell that,
once removed, yields a nutritious centre. This is what de Man means by the following statement:
“when form is considered to be the external trappings of literary meaning or content, it seems
superficial and expendable.” The formalists, on the other hand, taught that it is the shell, rather than
its content, that is important in literature. So when de Man observes that the trend in literary criticism
has moved from form to reference, what interests him is the underlying metaphor that governs how
we have up until now always—without thinking about it too much—imagined meaning to come
about. That is, before we interpret a text we have already accepted an interpretation—based upon a
metaphor—of what interpretation is. It is this unwitting interpretation of interpretation that interests
de Man. He obviously has less concern about whether formalism, structuralism, historicism or author
criticism is right or wrong. Rather he is more interested in the unwitting assumptions that these
approaches all share, i.e., the metaphor of inside and outside. There is more at stake in this than you
might have at first realized. Think about it: most of us (but not all) will have had some experience in
what we call close reading. First year English students at NUS as well as some school students will
already have learned to do what we call practical criticism (after I. A. Richards and his school). This
means that we read the texts according to literary forms like figures (metaphors, similes, symbols),
narrative structures (first or third person narrators, point of view, character, plot, action, etc.), formal
aspects of genre (meter, rhythm and rhyme) and themes (non-referential but thematic constants like
death, love, the struggle of good and evil, etc.). Here form is related to meaning “intrinsically” and no
reference to the context of an outside world is necessary. One might have asked, justifiably: “what is
the purpose of it?” Arguments about how the ability to evaluate a literary text is good for you, even at
their most ingenious, ultimately fail to satisfy (and there have been many seemingly persuasive
answers of this kind). Undoubtedly this kind of knowledge counts as a skill and those of us who can
do it derive a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it, but the question still remains—what good
does it do? How does it apply, if at all, beyond literature?

Perhaps then it would follow that criticism should start looking outside the text to the extra-textual
world of real references. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a parodic critique of the communist
revolution (and by association, all such revolutions). Shakespeare’s King Lear is a not so subtle
warning to King James (it was first played to him and his small court) not to lose his throne. What we
have come to understand as historicism develops as a way of extending the reach of our literary
knowledge so that we can talk about its relation to historical events and processes. This is what we
might call extrinsic criticism. The text now has its meaning located outside itself. What
fundamentally we are left with is a defining distinction—that is not itself fully explicable—between
fiction or, more generally, rhetoric and reality. An example of what often happens in literary
criticism would bear this out. A text by an Asian-American author like Russell Leong features
characters who are migrant Chinese in the USA very often reflecting on and getting into situations of
the kind Asian-Americans get into. You might then want to argue that 1) the text in some sense
translates the experience of the author; and 2) the text can be read as an engagement with actual
situations that Asian-Americans find themselves in and, by extension, as a critique of ideological and
historical conditions that help to determine those situations.

So the rejection of “pure” formalism is not a rejection after all but a repetition that takes the form of a
reversal: “The polarities of inside and outside have been reversed, but they are still the same polarities
that are at play: internal meaning has become outside reference, and the outer form has become the
intrinsic structure.” The text is regarded either as something that has its meaning inherent in it
(formalism) with no need to refer outwards to contexts or other texts, or it has its meaning outside
itself, in the reference to author, period, history, social relation, reader or culture (etc.). What all these
approaches to texts share is the unwitting assumption that meaning can be understood on the model of
inside and outside, whether the content is outside and the form inside or the form outside and the
content inside.

At this stage in the article de Man provides a very important clue as to his approach. He says he
wants to avoid using the terms of the old metaphor (now we know that’s what it is) and instead
relocate the problem of literary meaning by examining a couple of terms that, as he says, are “less
likely to enter into chiasmic reversals.” Chiasmus is a rhetorical term (from the Greek: Chiasmus, “a
diagonal arrangement”) meaning the repetition of ideas in inverted order. Shakespeare’s got a good
one:

But O, what damned minutes tells he o’er

Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strong loves. (Othello 3.3)

So instead of this endless repetition of a powerful yet clearly awkward notion of interpretation and
meaning, de Man gets his alternative terms “pragmatically from the observation of developments and
debates in recent critical methodology.” What’s he saying? He will get his new explanation of
reading from reading. Notice that there is no attempt offered to formulate yet another original theory.
The “new” terms are “as old as the hills” and they are to be derived from current critical theory texts.

Semiology, Grammar and Rhetoric

He’s right of course to observe that his alternative terminology is “as old as the hills.” What should
be instructive is that it allows considerable rigor in his textual and theoretical analysis. Notice, again,
that he is not proposing a new theory. He is analyzing a simultaneously theoretical and practical
situation as he finds it. It is simultaneously theoretical and practical because he refuses to read the
theory as if it was a simple meta-language (a vocabulary to be used for discussing language). He
reads it as if it too needs reading. This is how he was able to tease out the metaphor that lies
unheeded at the grounds of most notions of meaning and interpretation. And he deals with the
problems of reading by reading texts that deal with the problems of reading (but which text doesn’t?).

We don’t, I hope, have to spend too much time on the question of semiology. Semiology establishes
some basic tenets: the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the system of differences that gives the sign
its value, and the conventional codes that operate as prompts for signification, sometimes making it
seem rather culture bound. (What is it that frees language from cultural specificity? The arbitrariness
of the sign and its repeatability: ah, bold and italics, must be important). Remember this: a sign does
not simply refer to its referent (on the model of re-presentation). A sign is coded according to its
system and that’s how it comes to have its particular meanings. Notice that in passing de Man
observes that French writers (poets and novelists) seem always to have been aware of this, while only
since structuralism have French critics twigged to it: a first definitive instance of the affirmation of the
explanatory power of literature itself.

Now, grammar. After de Saussure, whose structural linguistics aims to derive general laws of
language, the grammatical laws (which are as structural as anything) tended to become a rather
privileged object of structuralist analysis. A simple grammatical structure (sentence: noun
phrase/verb phrase/noun phrase) can generate increasingly complex structures both at the level of the
sentence and beyond to the paragraph, the chapter, the book even. At the level of the sentence alone
some complexity is possible. See the first sentence from the paragraph of Proust (Wolfreys 336),
which has four lines of phrases all generated from the model: noun phrase/verb phrase/noun phrase.

In literary structuralism, especially in France, the analysis of deep grammatical structures went hand
in hand with the analysis of rhetorical tropes (figures of discourse). What this means is that the two
axes of language, the syntagmatic (at the level of the generated sentence) and the paradigmatic (the
axis of substitutions) can be read as operating together in a discourse. We can thus explain what de
Man means by “assimilations of rhetorical transformations or combinations to syntactical,
grammatical patterns” with reference to the coexistence in structuralist theory of patterns of both
metonymy (which is syntagmatic) and metaphor (which is paradigmatic). The syntagmatic axis is
composed of the marks (words to you and I) that we find (or put) together in a given text:

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

In this example, which I’ve stolen from de Man, all the elements that we find in the four lines are to
be regarded as belonging together only syntagmatically—they are found together because that’s
where they’ve been put. When we think about what they mean, then we inevitably turn to the
paradigmatic axis, which we cannot see because it belongs to the system (and not to the parole). We
cannot see it, that is, because it is the axis of possible substitutions (imagine I re-write Yeats’s verse:
“O banana tree, little-rooted flourisher,” and you can see what kinds of substitutions are possible).
However to understand metaphor now no longer as just a kind of substitution but more as a kind of
combination we find that a possible substitution is given in the third and fourth lines, where the
question about the dancing body seems to be a kind of repetition of the question about the tree, thus
making the dancer in some metaphorical sense equivalent to the tree. Here, then, we have a
metaphorical substitution on a metonymic axis. de Man’s point is that we might in this way have
chosen to include the metaphor within (and thus subordinate to) the grammatical, linear unfolding
without acknowledging that there may be tensions between the two modes of signification in the
discourse itself. That is, the assimilation operates as a kind of smoothing over device to help us finish
off the interpretation.

Remember: de Man deals with the problems of reading by reading texts that deal with the problems of
reading. Perhaps its not that obvious to us that “Among School Children” is a text about reading—but
does it matter? de Man can read it as if it was and certainly, then, it would seem to be.

So what is at stake? The difference between metaphorical substitutions and metonymic combinations
(rhetoric and grammar) can be seen as a kind of repetition of a deeper and older opposition: between
rhetoric and logic. But (a big, big but) metonymy is not a grammatical category. It is no less
figurative than metaphor. The predicative structure of a sentence (noun/verb/phrase) cannot guarantee
its meaning—as the example of Archie Bunker’s rhetorical question shows. In that case, as de Man
says, “the same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal
meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning.” The
question, “what’s the difference?” actually means “there’s no difference.” Now the point—as de Man
points out in the next paragraph—is this: the only way out of the confusion engendered by this
paradox is through an intention that cannot be reduced to the grammar of the statement. What Archie
Bunker means by the question is not contained by the question’s grammar. And nor is it contained by
any other verifiable aspect of the statement. This is the meaning of rhetoric. When the meaning of a
statement cannot be established through an analysis of its grammar we call it rhetorical. So when de
Man says that, “rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential
aberration,” he is drawing attention to the fact that meaning (intentions people have when they make
statements or when they read statements) cannot not be based on firm logical grounds. Rhetoric is
abyssal and aberrant. You can hope to be understood but you cannot guarantee it. Once we recognize
that grammar is subordinate to rhetoric we are in the realm of interpretive decisions. The structuralist
dream of a fully analyzable language is now lost. But there’s more at stake than that. The logical
grounds of interpretation have gone entirely—especially when we deal with the literary text, which is
“above the norm” in rhetorical meaning. Both logic and grammar are questionable when we read a
literary text. Grammar assumes a simple logical one-to-one relationship between language unit
(word, sentence, etc.) and meaning. Rhetoric contests that assumption. Logic postulates the
possibility of universal truth (a concept that independently of its objects remains unchangeable,
eternal and unaffected by rhetoric). We know from de Saussure that such a concept has no place in a
system like the language system, which provides meaning only through the values that the differences
between signifiers allow. In other words, when we make meaningful statements we do so by acting
on the combined resources of difference and rhetorical substitution. This gives us considerable
freedom but at a cost—we can no longer hope to control or to limit the structures of linguistic
meaning and the multiple possibilities of confusion that always threaten. But please pay attention to
the implications of this last point. If as readers of literature we can no longer guarantee a fully
controllable text, then so long as we can show where these limitations reside—as de Man has done
with his examples—we have won considerable interpretive freedom for our rhetorical readings.

Metaphor and Metonymy

It remains for me to say a few words about de Man’s reading of Proust. He has chosen the example
for a simple reason: it thematizes reading (“the most striking aspect of this passage is the juxtaposition
of figural and meta-figural language”). The role of the meta here is very, very, important. When
some faculty (language, consciousness, experience, thought) takes itself as its own topic or object we
can identify a self-reflexive or auto-referential role. Such a role always exhibits—in the form of
paradox or contradiction—irrevocable limits to logical, formal or empirical analysis. Ask me about
this—there are many examples of the self-reflexive paradox and each of them can be revealing in
different ways. Now, in the case we have before us, the paradox reveals itself in two different ways.
First we have a meta-figurative discourse and, second, we have a meta-reader-ly discourse, which
thematizes reading.

First we have a passage of fiction (and figurative discourse), which thematizes the role of figurative
discourse. This is the text in its two dimensions overlapping. The two dimensions of a text are as
follows: it is composed first of what we might call its statement. This is the level of content (whether
considered extrinsic or intrinsic). It is what the text is about. But all texts are composed of a second
dimension, that of their enunciation, the writing or speaking (the “how”) of the text. In traditional
terms this would be its form. But in de Man’s “new” terminology form would not do, because the
word suggests empirical and analyzable elements, and, as we’ve, seen this would miss the rhetorical
aspects of meaning and intention. Here instead of form we can talk about performance. In this way
we can actually make sense of the difference between Archie Bunker’s intention and his wife’s
interpretation. The subject of the statement changes when the subject of its enunciation changes. The
“image repertoire” that Roland Barthes writes about occurs at the level of enunciation. When you
read a text, the subject of (its) enunciation is you. So reading is just as much a kind of performance as
writing, which is why de Man maintains that the difference between literature and criticism is
delusive. (Student: “Are we doing criticism or literature?” Teacher: “What’s the difference?”).

The second way that a paradox of self-reflexivity is revealed is in the fact that a reader (Paul de Man)
is reading a text in terms of the way it thematizes the problems of reading. In this way de Man can
read the text as rigorously as possible in terms of what the text itself—as a rhetorical entity—makes
possible, even necessary. In other words the text makes a claim (at the level of its statement) on
behalf of the value of presence, according to which the most essential figurative tropes are
metaphorical as opposed to metonymical. But in the performance the text reveals a praxis (the Greek
word for action or practice in the sense of something that one habitually does)—i.e., it achieves its
effects—through metonymic combinations, which ground the metaphorical substitutions. The
metaphorical substitutions of the terms presence, essence, action, truth and beauty are grounded in a
metonymic chain (i.e., they are brought together by proximal and thus accidental association). What
this does is to lessen—at the very least—the authority of the rhetorical mode. But it doesn’t replace
that authority with a new one. Rather it opens up the space of reading as something that cannot be
closed, that remains open, undetermined and exposed to chances of its future that no authority could
determine or calculate in advance. It does not do this after the fact but as the very possibility of its
own mode of existence (as a rhetorical entity). This is what de Man means when he points out that
Proust’s text cannot simply be reduced to the mystical assertion of the superiority of metaphor over
metonymy. He writes:

The reading is not “our” reading, since it uses only the linguistic elements provided by the text itself;
the distinction between the author and the reader is one of the false distinctions that the reading makes
evident. The deconstruction is not something we have added to the text but it constituted it in the first
place. A literary text simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical mode, and
by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come closer to being as rigorous a reader as the
author had to be in order to write the sentence in the first place. (339).

Please pay special attention to the meaning of the word deconstruction in this passage. It doesn’t
matter what you want to say about writing because when you write the conditions and possibilities of
writing alone determine the limits and possibilities of your statement. And those conditions and
possibilities are revealed when anybody writes about writing or reads a text in terms of the way it
thematizes reading. You could always make counter-factual claims about it but the writing itself
would in each case reveal the lie. So deconstruction is the name that de Man gives for the
possibilities and limits of rhetoric (texts, statements and communicative events of all kinds).

Where does it leave us? After watching the new Spielberg production, AI, I have a fresh example.
Here is a cinema production that thematizes the relationships between cinema and its audiences. In
this sense it is a very clever film indeed as it is able to include a narrative about narratives (telling
stories); the role of mass culture for individuals (the claims in the film are that it is fundamentally
benign); the role of the spectator in making the illusion “real”; the persistence and permanence of
cinema as a cultural product; (etc., etc.,). It takes a spectator (like me), who is looking for the figure
of the spectator in the film, to begin to see what is going on and, thus, to construct a critique—which I
will leave in absentia here but we will come back to it anon.
 Towards a Feminist Poetics

In this essay ELAINE SHOWALTER presents critical essay "Towards A Feminist poetics." Human
beings are more respected then in any other country. In England women were treated as cattle, they
were not allowed to unit enter the library.

"All the literature almost produced by men." Merely a handful of women we have as writer. The
women were forced to consume male produced literature; as a result there is no chance to know the
article. The female inferiority was deep-rooted for centuries in the world and has been perpetuated by
major thinkers.

Saint Thomas called women "An imperfect man and an incidental being."

Aristotle is of the view that the female by nature of certain lack of qualities. The Holy Bible also says,
"she is made for man, but man is not meant for women."

Every since Simon de Beavoir a French woman wrote "The Second Sex" regarding justice to women,
as a result of patriarchal how women were made to take a secondary place. The society is made of
fifty of men and 50% of women. It represents economic and financial freedom, so women must have
sufficient freedom, women badly requires social recognition. They were discouraged for writings. If
they start writings; "Blue stocking with an itch for scribbling." Feminist Criticism can be divided into
two distinct varieties. The first type is concerned with woman as reader and the second type is woman
as writer.

WOMAN AS READER: His analysis of woman as reader that light upon the images and stereo types
of women in literature, the omissions and mis-conceptions about women in criticism. Here woman is
considered as the consumer of the productions, the structural meaning analysis of woman in symbolic,
system. It is the way in which the female readers changes the generation and awakening us to the
significance of its sexual codes.

WOMAN AS WRITER: With the women as they produced the textual meaning with the history,
themes, genres and structures of literature. Here female language refers the gynocritics. In contrast to
this analysis the programmed of the gynocritics is to contrast a female framework for the analysis of
women's literature. This programme also includes the development of new models based on the study
of female experience.

Later Showalter, in her work, "A literature of their own" branched off the evolution of a female
tradition into three phases and named them as the famine, the feminist and the female stages. During
the famine phase dates from about 1840 to 1880. In this period women wrote in an effort to equal the
intellectual achievements of the male culture and they also internationalized of its assumption a
female nature. Women wrote as women people used to raise their pseudonym not adopted to unite.
But written in the name male pseudonym. The feminist Phase dates from 1880-1920, in this phase
women were historically enabled to reject the accommodating postures of feminity. In Female stage
on going since women have rejected both imitation and protest. Instead they turn to female experience
as the source of autonomous art. Showalter believes that the current theoretical impasse in feminist
criticism is more than a problem of finding exacting definitions and suitable terminology. She says, it
comes from own divided consciousness the split in each of us. The women writers are both daughters
and sisters of male tradition and of a new women's movement, which demands to renounce the pseudo
success of taken women hood. Finally she concludes her essay by saying that feminist criticism is not
visiting. It is here to stay and we must make it a permanent.
Feminist criticism has often been attacked by those who do not understand it. Detractors have
described it as "women's lib propaganda masquerading as literary criticism" (qtd. in Showalter 1375).
In "Toward a Feminist Poetics," Elaine Showalter suggests that such attacks have result from a failure
or unwillingness of feminist critics to articulate clearly a theory for their practice. Showalter sets out
to offer an introduction to feminist criticism by comparing two types: the feminist critique and
gynocritics. (GYNOCRITICS/GYNOCRITICISM: Term coined by Elaine Showalter for feminist
criticism focusing on literary works written by women. Such criticism challenges the traditionally
patriarchal literary canon by retrieving and reassessing texts by women, thus tracing a female
tradition in literature. Gynocriticism frequently emphases the evolving female consciousness reflected
in literature and explores the ways in which women writers have comprised and aided "a world of
their own" (Showalter's phrase)

The feminist critique focuses on the woman as a reader of male-produced and male-oriented texts. As
"a historically grounded inquiry," the feminist critique probes the engendered "ideological
assumptions" of literature (1377). It evaluates the "sexual codes" of the literary text and explores how
"the hypothesis of a female reader" effects an assessment of meaning (1377). Such criticism is
"essentially political and polemical," but Showalter concludes it is still male-oriented (1377). The
subject being studied is not a woman's experience, but "what men have thought woman should be"
(1378).

Showalter argues that the focus of feminist criticism should not be delineated by male perceptions and
assumptions. Rather, it should be on the woman's experience. Literature written by women inevitably
contains just that. Because of their "educational, experiential, and biological handicaps," women
develop their "sympathy, sentiment, and powers of observation" to bring the substance and
significance of the female experience to readers (1382). In women's literature, these qualities become
what Virginia Woolf termed the "'precious specialty,' [of] a distinctly female vision" (1383).

Showalter identifies the "precious specialty" as the essential focus of gynocritics. Concerning itself
with woman as a writer, gynocritics approaches woman as "the producer of textual meaning" (1377).
From this view, literary criticism must create and elucidate new models that are based on female
experiences. The "precious specialty" of feminist criticism is in part a result of the relationships that
women have with one another. By describing and evaluating this female subculture, a framework for
the new models of analysis can be built. Gynocritics is based upon "research in history, anthropology,
psychology, and sociology, all of which of developed hypotheses of a female subculture" (1379).

Emerging from this research, one focal point of criticism has been the mental suffering of women in
inhospitable social environments. Another has been "the alienation from and rejection of the mother
that daughters have learned under patriarchy" (1382). In recent years, however, the evolution of the
female subculture has noted as "the death of the mother as witnessed and transcended by the daughter
has become one of the most profound occasions of female literature" (1382).

Yet another important focus of gynocritics has been the recovery of a female literary history and
tradition. Gynocritics seek "to rediscover the scores of women novelists, poets, and dramatists whose
work has been obscured by time, and to establish the continuity of the female tradition" (1383). The
seek to "re-create the chain of writers [ . . .] the patterns of influence and response from one
generation to the next" (1383).

According to Showalter, there have been three phases of female literary evolution: the Feminine
phase, the Feminist phase, and the Female phase. During the Feminine phase (1840-1880), women
wrote in attempt to "equal the intellectual achievements of the male culture" (1383). One sign of this
stage was the popularity among women writers of the male pseudonym. Female English writers such
as George Eliot used masculine camouflage beyond the name itself. The tone, structure, and other
literary elements were also affected by the method of dealing with a double literary standard.
American writers, too, used pseudonyms. These women, however, chose superfeminine names, such
as Fanny Fern, in order to disguise their "boundless energy, powerful economic motives, and keen
professional skills" (1383).

During the second stage of literary evolution, the Feminist phase (1880-1920), women rejected "the
accommodating postures of femininity" and used literature "to dramatize the ordeals of wronged
womanhood" (1384). Writing from this period often dramatizes the social injustice suffered by
women. Other texts fantasize about the utopian possibilities of female societies.

This "Feminist Socialist Realism" has given way to the Female phase in progress since 1920. Writers
of the Female phase reject what those of the Feminine and Feminist stages promote because these
both depended on masculinity and were ironically male-oriented. Literature of the Female phase
"turn[s] instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist
analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature" (1384).

In discussing these three phases, Showalter notes that some feminist critics have tried to adopt and
adapt the methods of Marxism and Structuralism to accommodate their own needs, "altering their
vocabularies and methods to include the variable of gender" (1384). Showalter, however, seeks to
steer feminist criticism from this path. Marxism and Structuralism label themselves as "sciences" and
"see themselves as privileged critical discourses" (1385). As such, these methodologies have tended to
impose intellectual concepts and categories upon human experience. Mature feminist criticism, on the
other hand, explores experience. Indeed, feminist criticism asserts "The Authority of Experience"
(1386).

For Showalter the job of feminist criticism is to rediscover and articulate the female experience. The
only "roadblock" that Showalter foresees for gynocritics is "our own divided consciousness, the split
in each of us" between the desire for analytic detachment and social engagement (1386). "The task of
feminist critics," then, is to bridge this female self-division by finding "a new language, a new reading
that can integrate our intelligence and our experience, our reason and our suffering, our skepticism
and our vision" (1386). In order to find this new language, both the feminist critique and gynocritics
are needed, "for only the Jeremiahs of the feminist critique can lead us out of the 'Egypt of female
servitude' to the promised land of the feminist vision" (1377).

STUART HALL “CULTURAL IDENTITY AND DIASPORA”

In this essay, Hall considers the nature of the “black subject” (392) who is represented by “film and
other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) ‘blacks’ of the diasporas of the
W est” (392). “Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak?”
(392). Referring to the seminal work of Émile Benveniste (signalled by the gesture towards
“enunication” [392]), he contends that what recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we
speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who
speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. (392)

Hall’s thesis is that rather than thinking of identity as an “already accomplished fact, which the new
cultural practices then represent” (392), we should think instead of “identity as a ‘production’ which
is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation”
(392).

Hall points out that there are two principal ways of thinking about (cultural) identity. The traditional
model views identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside
the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history
and ancestry hold in common. . . . This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial
differences, is the truth, the essence of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. It is this identity
which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express. . . . (393)

Hall acknowledges that the “rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once
called a ‘passionate research’” (393) and that such a “conception of cultural identity played a crucial
role in all postcolonial struggles” (393). However, he questions whether such a view merely entails
“unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid” (393). For him, it is better to
envision a “quite different practice” (393), one based on “not the rediscovery but the production of
identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past” (393). Such a
viewpoint would entail acknowledging that this is an “act of imaginative rediscovery” (393), one
which involves “imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation,
which is the history of all enforced diasporas” (394) and leads to the restoration of an “imaginary
fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past” (394). Africa, he stresses, is the
“name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives
it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked” (394).

The second model of (cultural) identity (which Hall favours) acknowledges the “critical points of
deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather--since history has
intervened--’what we have become’” (394). From this point of view, cultural identity is a matter of
‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something
which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from
somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant
transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the
continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in mere ‘recovery’ of the
past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into
eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position
ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (394) Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and
Edward Said, Hall argues that cognizance must be taken of the “ways in which black people, black
experiences, were positioned and subject-ed in the dominant regimes of representation” (394), these
latter being the “effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalisation. Not only, in Said’s
‘Orientalist’ sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of
the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’”
(394). Hall stresses that it is one thing to “position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a
dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’, not only as a matter
of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to
the norm” (394). Hence, from this perspective, it must be acknowledged that cultural identity is not a
fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and
transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not
once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute
Return. (395)

Cultural identities are the “unstable points of identification . . . which are made, within the
discourses of history and culture” (394).

The foregoing raises an indispensable question: if “identity does not proceed, in a straight
unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation?” (395). In
response, Hall offers his model of Caribbean identity. He suggests that we should think of
“black Caribbean identities as “‘framed by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the
vector of similarity or continuity [the first model of identity]; and the vector of difference and
rupture” (395). Employing a Bakhtinian metaphor, he contends that these two axes exist in a
“dialogic relationship” (395): paradoxically, “what we share is precisely the experience of a
profound discontinuity” (395). To be precise, the uprooting of slavery and transportation and
the insertion into the plantation economy (as well as the symbolic economy) of the Western
world . . . ‘unified’ these peoples across their differences, in the same moment as it cut them
off from direct access to their past. (396)

Firstly, Africa and India are not monolithically united entities. Moreover, each island is
profoundly different from the others. What is more, we do not stand in quite the same
relationship of ‘otherness’ to the metropolitan centres. “Difference, therefore, persists--in and
alongside continuity” (396), Hall stresses. The task for Hall is, therefore, how to “describe
this play of ‘difference’ within identity” (396). While he acknowledges that a common
history has unified us across our differences, this common history “does not constitute a
common origin, since it was, metaphorically as well as literally, a translation” (396).
Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Hall contends that such “cultural ‘play’ could not
be represented . . . as a simple binary opposition--‘past/present’, ‘them/us’. Its complexity
exceed this binary structure of representation. At different places, times, in relation to
different questions, the boundaries are re-sited” (396). Hall finds Derrida’s notion of
‘différance’ particularly useful to describe that “special and peculiar supplement which the
black and mulatto skin adds to the ‘refinement’ and sophistication” (397) of European
culture. Différance “challenges the fixed binaries which stabilise meaning and representation
and show how meaning is never fixed or completed, but keeps on moving on to encompass
other, additional or supplementary meanings” (397). The question is: where “does identity
come in to this infinite postponement of meaning?” (397). Hall contends, gesturing towards
the Derridean view that people arrest signifying play in a Procrustean fashion, that meaning
“depends upon the contingent and arbitrary stop” (397). Such a view does not contradict the
view that meaning is potentially infinite: it “only threatens to do so if we mistake this ‘cut’ of
identity--this positioning, which makes meaning possible--as a natural and permanent, rather
than an arbitrary and contingent ending. . . . Meaning continues to unfold . . . beyond the
arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible. . . There is always something left
over” (396).

Drawing upon Derrida’s notion of différance, Hall posits that it is possible to “rethink the
positioning and repositioning of Caribbean cultural identities in relation to at least three
‘presences’, to borrow Aimé Césaire’s and Léopold Senghor’s metaphor: Présence Africaine,
Présence Européene, and Présence Américaine” (398), none of which can ever be fully
present (presence is deferred). (The last of these is Hall’s term for the New World, the
“juncture-point where the many cultural tributaries m eet” [400], the “primal scene” [401]
where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West” [401]). Drawing
upon both the spatial and temporal metaphors which Derrida employs, Hall is implicitly and
simultaneously comparing Caribbean society to a sign within a wider sign-system, a signifier
located along the chain of signification and, by extension, a text which is linked
‘intertextually’ to other region-texts*. (*The first philosopher to think of culture as if it were
a text was the Structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss whose work was very
influenced by Saussure’s model of the sign. See his “The Principles of Kinship” in his The
Elementary Structures of Kinship.) Drawing upon the notions of both displacement and
deferral, Hall insinuates that the Caribbean is neither an isolatable and autonomous place
which exists in a social and historical vacuum nor is the past separable from the present.
Rather, the Caribbean as we know it today is a dynamic entity produced by its relation to
those other socio-historical entities whose inhabitants migrated to and came to form the
region. Interestingly, in an omission as grave as those exclusions for which he would not fail
to censure European racists, Hall fails to make any mention of that very ‘Présence Indienne’
to which he himself had alluded and whose influence is very marked in countries such as
Trinidad and Guyana.

By far the most important region-sign-signifier-text in this regard is evidently, in the light of
what Hall writes earlier, the African ‘presence.’ (Europe’s legacy is an undeniable,
ineluctable but troubling one for most Caribbean persons to confront. “For many of us, this is
a matter not of too little but of too much” [399], he writes. The question is, can we ever
“recognise its irreversible influence, whilst resisting its imperialising eye?” [400], he asks.)
Africa is the “site of the repressed” (398), the “signified which could not be represented
directly in slavery” (398) but which “remained and remains the unspoken unspeakable
‘presence’ in Caribbean culture” (398). Gesturing to the early work of thinkers like
Brathwaite (e.g. “Timehri”), Hall is at pains to stress that it is not a question of ever
recovering a lost Africa per se: whether it is . . . an origin of our identities, unchanged by four
hundred years of displacement, dismemberment, transportation, to which we could in any
final or literal sense return, is . . . open to doubt. The original ‘Africa’ is no longer there. It
too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible. We must not collude with the
West which, precisely, normalizes and appropriates Africa by freezing it into some timeless
zone of the primitive and unchanging past. Africa must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean
people, but it cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered. (399)

Rather, Hall is gesturing to the new texts of all kinds, literary, filmic, etc., even the new
social texts of Africa which Caribbean persons have managed to fashion in their quest for
nationhood. Writing with reference to Jamaica, Hall argues that an “Afro-Caribbean identity
became historically available” (398) to Caribbean persons only in the 1970's through an
“indigenous cultural revolution” (398), through the “impact on popular life of the post-
colonial revolution, the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism and the music of
reggae” (398). These and related factors made possible or became the “metaphors, the figures
or signifiers of a new construction of ‘Jamaican-ness” (398). These and similar cultural
endeavours “signified a ‘new’ Africa of the New World, grounded in an ‘old’ Africa: . . . this
Africa, as we might say, . . . as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor” (398): this is the
“Africa we must return to--but by ‘another route’: what Africa has become in the New World,
what we have made of ‘Africa’: ‘Africa’--as we retell it through politics, memory and desire”
(399). From this point of view, Africa “‘has acquired an imaginative or figurative value that
we can name and feel’. Our belongingness to it constitutes what Benedict Anderson calls an
‘imaginary community’” (399). This ‘Africa’ is a necessary part of the “Caribbean
imaginary” (399): the displacement which has marked the region has given rise to a “certain
imaginary plentitude, recreating the endless desire to return to ‘lost origins’, to be one again
with the mother, to go back to the beginning” (402).

Hall’s notion of diasporic identity is one based upon différance and hybridity. It rejects old
“imperialising” (401) and “hegemonising” (401) forms of “‘ethnicity’” (401). Gesturing to
the ongoing problem of the Palestinian homeland, he argues that his model does not
conceptualise the securing of identity solely “in relation to some sacred homeland to which
they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other peoples into the sea” (401). It is
“defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and
diversity . . . hybridity” (402). Hall claims to offer a “different way of thinking about cultural
identity” (402) by theorising identity “as constituted, not outside but within representation”
(402) and hence of cinema or literature “not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what
already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of
subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak” (402). Hall ends by
citing the relevance to his model of identity of Benedict Anderson’s redefinition of the
community as “distinguished, not by their falsity/genuiness, but by the style in which they are
imagined” (402).

TEXT
Cultural Identity and Diaspora - STUART HALL

A new cinema of the Caribbean is emerging, joining the company of the other 'Third Cinemas'. It is
related to, but different from the vibrant film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-
Caribbean (and Asian) 'blacks' of the diasporas of the West - the new post-colonial subjects. All these
cultural practices and forms of representation have the black subject at their centre, putting the issue
of cultural identity in question. Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does
he/she speak? Practices of representation always implicate the positions from which we speak or write
- the positions of enunciation. What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak,
so to say 'in our own name', of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and
the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. Identity is not as
transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already
accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of
identity as a 'production', which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within,
not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the
term, 'cultural identity', lays claim.

We seek, here, to open a dialogue, an investigation, on the subject of cultural identity and
representation. Of course, the 'I' who writes here must also be thought of as, itself, 'enunciated'. We all
write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What
we say is always 'in context', positioned. I was born into and spent my childhood and adolescence in a
lowermiddle-class family in Jamaica. I have lived all my adult life in England, in the shadow of the
black diaspora - 'in the belly of the beast'. I write against the background of a lifetime's work in
cultural studies. If the paper seems preoccupied with the diaspora experience and its narratives of
displacement, it is worth remembering that all discourse is 'placed', and the heart has its reasons.

There are at least two different ways of thinking about 'cultural identity'. The first position defines
'cultural identity' in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self', hiding inside the
many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves', which people with a shared history and
ancestry hold in common. Within the terms of this definition, our cultural identities reflect the
common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as 'one people', with
stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions
and vicissitudes of our actual history. This 'oneness', underlying all the other, more superficial
differences, is the truth, the essence, of 'Caribbeanness', of the black experience. It is this identity
which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express through
cinematic representation.

Such a conception of cultural identity played a critical role in all the post-colonial struggles which
have so profoundly reshaped our world. It lay at the centre of the vision of the poets of 'Negritude',
like Aimee Ceasire and Leopold Senghor, and of the Pan-African political project, earlier in the
century. It continues to be a very powerful and creative force in emergent forms of representation
amongst hitherto marginalised peoples. In post-colonial societies, the rediscovery of this identity is
often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a
passionate research ... directed by the secret hope of discovering
beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation and
abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence
rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others.

New forms of cultural practice in these societies address themselves to this project for the very good
reason that, as Fanon puts it, in the recent past,

Colonisation is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and
emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted
logic, it turns to the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and
destroys it.1
The question which Fanon's observation poses is, what is the nature of this 'profound research' which
drives the new forms of visual and cinematic representation? Is it only a matter of unearthing that
which the colonial experience buried and overlaid, bringing to light the hidden continuities it
suppressed? Or is a quite different practice entailed - not the rediscovery but the production of
identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the
re-telling of the past?

We should not, for a moment, underestimate or neglect the importance of the act of imaginative
rediscovery which this conception of a rediscovered, essential identity entails. 'Hidden histories' have
played a critical role in the emergence of many of the most important social movements of our time -
feminist, anti-colonial and anti-racist. The photographic work of a generation of Jamaican and
Rastafarian artists, or of a visual artist like Armet Francis (a Jamaican-born photographer who has
lived in Britain since the age of eight) is a testimony to the continuing creative power of this
conception of identity within the emerging practices of representation. Francis's photographs of the
peoples of The Black Triangle, taken in Africa, the Caribbean, the USA and the UK, attempt to
reconstruct in visual terms 'the underlying unity of the black people whom colonisation and slavery
distributed across the African diaspora.' His text is an act of imaginary reunification.

Crucially, such images offer a way of imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal
and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas. They do this by representing or
'figuring' Africa as the mother of these different civilisations. This Triangle is, after all, 'centred' in
Africa. Africa is the name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural
identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked. No one who looks at these textural
images now, in the light of the history of transportation, slavery and migration, can fail to understand
how the rift of separation, the 'loss of identity', which has been integral to the Caribbean experience
only begins to be healed when these forgotten connections are once more set in place. Such texts
restore an imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past. They are
resources of resistance and identity, with which to confront the fragmented and pathological ways in
which that experience has been reconstructed within the dominant regimes of cinematic and visual
representation of the West.

There is, however, a second, related but different view of cultural identity. This second position
recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and
significant difference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather - since history has intervened -
'what we have become'. We cannot speak for very long, with any exactness, about 'one experience,
one identity', without acknowledging its other side - the ruptures and discontinuities which constitute,
precisely, the Caribbean's 'uniqueness'.

Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the
future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time,
history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything
which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some
essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture and power. Far from
being grounded in a mere 'recovery' of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found,
will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways
we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.

It is only from this second position that we can properly understand the traumatic character of 'the
colonial experience'. The ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and
subjected in the dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical exercise of cultural
power and normalisation. Not only, in Said's 'Orientalist' sense, were we constructed as different and
other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make
us see and experience ourselves as 'Other'. Every regime of representation is a regime of power
formed, as Foucault reminds us, by the fatal couplet, 'power/knowledge'. But this kind of knowledge
is internal, not external. It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a
dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that 'knowledge', not only as a matter
of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to
the norm. That is the lesson - the sombre majesty - of Fanon's insight into the colonising experience in
Black Skin, White Masks.

This inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms. If its silences are not resisted, they
produce, in Fanon's vivid phrase, 'individuals without an anchor, without horizon, colourless,
stateless, rootless - a race of angels'.2 Nevertheless, this idea of otherness as an inner compulsion
changes our conception of 'cultural identity'. In this perspective, cultural identity is not a fixed essence
at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit
inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed
origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. Of course, it is not a mere phantasm
either. It is something - not a mere trick of the imagination. It has its histories - and histories have
their real, material and symbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses
us as a simple, factual 'past', since our relation to it, like the child's relation to the mother, is always-
already 'after the break'. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.
Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which
are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence, there
is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an
unproblematic, transcendental 'law of origin'.

This second view of cultural identity is much less familiar, and more unsettling. If identity does not
proceed, in a straight, unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation?
We might think of black Caribbean identities as 'framed' by two axes or vectors, simultaneously
operative: the vector of similarity and continuity; and the vector of difference and rupture. Caribbean
identities always have to be thought of in terms of the dialogic relationship between these two axes.
The one gives us some grounding in, some continuity with, the past. The second reminds us that what
we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity: the peoples dragged into slavery,
transportation, colonisation, migration, came predominantly from Africa - and when that supply
ended, it was temporarily refreshed by indentured labour from the Asian subcontinent. (This
neglected fact explains why, when you visit Guyana or Trinidad, you see, symbolically inscribed in
the faces of their peoples, the paradoxical 'truth' of Christopher Columbus's mistake: you can find
'Asia' by sailing west, if you know where to look!) In the history of the modern world, there are few
more traumatic ruptures to match these enforced separations from Africa - already figured, in the
European imaginary, as 'the Dark Continent'. But the slaves were also from different countries, tribal
communities, villages, languages and gods. African religion, which has been so profoundly formative
in Caribbean spiritual life, is precisely different from Christian monotheism in believing that God is so
powerful that he can only be known through a proliferation of spiritual manifestations, present
everywhere in the natural and social world. These gods live on, in an underground existence, in the
hybridised religious universe of Haitian voodoo, pocomania, Native pentacostalism, Black baptism,
Rastafarianism and the black Saints Latin American Catholicism. The paradox is that it was the
uprooting of slavery and transportation and the insertion into the plantation economy (as well as the
symbolic economy) of the Western world that 'unified' these peoples across their differences, in the
same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past.

Difference, therefore, persists - in and alongside continuity. To return to the Caribbean after any long
absence is to experience again the shock of the 'doubleness' of similarity and difference. Visiting the
French Caribbean for the first time, I also saw at once how different Martinique is from, say, Jamaica:
and this is no mere difference of topography or climate. It is a profound difference of culture and
history. And the difference matters. It positions Martiniquains and Jamaicans as both the same and
different. Moreover, the boundaries of difference are continually repositioned in relation to different
points of reference. Vis-a-vis the developed West, we are very much 'the same'. We belong to the
marginal, the underdeveloped, the periphery, the 'Other'. We are at the outer edge, the 'rim', of the
metropolitan world - always 'South' to someone else's El Norte.
At the same time, we do not stand in the same relation of the 'otherness' to the metropolitan centres.
Each has negotiated its economic, political and cultural dependency differently. And this 'difference',
whether we like it or not, is already inscribed in our cultural identities. In turn, it is this negotiation of
identity which makes us, vis-a-vis other Latin American people, with a very similar history, different -
Caribbeans, les Antilliennes ('islanders' to their mainland). And yet, vis-a-vis one another, Jamaican,
Haitian, Cuban, Guadeloupean, Barbadian, etc ...

How, then, to describe this play of 'difference' within identity? The common history —
transportation, slavery, colonisation – has been profoundly formative. For all these societies, unifying
us across our differences. But it does not constitute a common origin, since it was, metaphorically as
well as literally, a translation. The inscription of difference is also specific and critical. I use the word
'play' because the double meaning of the metaphor is important. It suggests, on the one hand, the
instability, the permanent unsettlement, the lack of any final resolution. On the other hand, it reminds
us that the place where this 'doubleness' is most powerfully to be heard is 'playing' within the varieties
of Caribbean musics. This cultural play' could not therefore be represented, cinematically, as a simple,
binary opposition - 'past/present', 'them/us'. Its complexity exceeds this binary structure of
representation. At different places, times, in relation to different questions, the boundaries are re-sited.
They become, not only what they have, at times, certainly been - mutually excluding categories, but
also what they sometimes are - differential points along a sliding scale.

One trivial example is the way Martinique both is and is not 'French'. It is, of course, a department of
France, and this is reflected in its standard and style of life, Fort de France is a much richer, more
'fashionable' place than Kingston - which is not only visibly poorer, but itself at a point of transition
between being 'in fashion' in an Anglo-African and Afro-American way - for those who can afford to
be in any sort of fashion at all. Yet, what is distinctively 'Martiniquais' can only be described in
terms of that special and peculiar supplement which the black and mulatto skin adds to the
'refinement' and sophistication of a Parisian-derived haute couture: that is, a sophistication
which, because it is black, is always transgressive.

To capture this sense of difference which is not pure 'otherness', we need to deploy the play
on words of a theorist like Jacques Derrida. Derrida uses the anomalous 'a' in his way of
writing 'difference' - differance - as a marker which sets up a disturbance in our settled
understanding or translation of the word/concept. It sets the word in motion to new meanings
without erasing the trace of its other meanings. His sense of differance, as Christopher Norris
puts it, thus
remains suspended between the two French verbs 'to differ' and 'to
defer' (postpone), both of which contribute to its textual force but
neither of which can fully capture its meaning. Language depends on
difference, as Saussure showed ... the structure of distinctive
propositions which make up its basic economy. Where Derrida breaks
new ground ... is in the extent to which 'differ' shades into 'defer' ... the
idea that meaning is always deferred, perhaps to this point of an endless
supplementarity, by the play of signification.3

This second sense of difference challenges the fixed binaries which stablise meaning and
representation and show how meaning is never finished or completed, but keeps on moving
to encompass other, additional or supplementary meanings, which, as Norris puts it
elsewhere,4 'disturb the classical economy of language and representation'. Without relations
of difference, no representation could occur. But what is then constituted within
representation is always open to being deferred, staggered, serialised.
Where, then, does identity come in to this infinite postponement of meaning? Derrida does
not help us as much as he might here, though the notion of the 'trace' goes some way towards
it. This is where it sometimes seems as if Derrida has permitted his profound theoretical
insights to be reappropriated by his disciples into a celebration of formal 'playfulness', which
evacuates them of their political meaning. For if signification depends upon the endless
repositioning of its differential terms, meaning, in any specific instance, depends on the
contingent and arbitrary stop - the necessary and temporary 'break' in the infinite semiosis of
language. This does not detract from the original insight. It only threatens to do so if we mistake this
'cut' of identity - this positioning, which makes meaning possible - as a natural and permanent, rather
than an arbitrary and contingent 'ending' - whereas I understand every such position as 'strategic' and
arbitrary, in the sense that there is no permanent equivalence between the particular sentence we
close, and its true meaning, as such. Meaning continues to unfold, so to speak, beyond the arbitrary
closure which makes it, at any moment, possible. It is always either over- or under-determined, either
an excess or a supplement. There is always something 'left over'.

It is possible, with this conception of 'difference', to rethink the positionings and repositionings of
Caribbean cultural identities in relation to at least three 'presences', to borrow Aimee Cesaire's and
Leopold Senghor's metaphor: Presence Africaine, Presence Europeenne, and the third, most
ambiguous, presence of all – the sliding term, Presence Americain. Of course, I am collapsing, for the
moment, the many other cultural 'presences' which constitute the complexity of Caribbean identity
(Indian, Chinese, Lebanese etc). I mean America, here, not in its 'first-world' sense - the big cousin to
the North whose 'rim' we occupy, but in the second, broader sense: America, the 'New World', Terra
Incognita. Presence Africaine is the site of the repressed. Apparently silenced beyond memory by the
power of the experience of slavery, Africa was, in fact present everywhere: in the everyday life and
customs of the slave quarters, in the languages and patois of the plantations, in names and words,
often disconnected from their taxonomies, in the secret syntactical structures through which other
languages were spoken, in the stories and tales told to children, in religious practices and beliefs, in
the spiritual life, the arts, crafts, musics and rhythms of slave and post-emancipation society. Africa,
the signified which could not be represented directly in slavery, remained and remains the unspoken,
unspeakable 'presence' in Caribbean culture. It is 'hiding' behind every verbal inflection, every
narrative twist of Caribbean cultural life. It is the secret code with which every Western text was 're-
read'. It is the ground-bass of every rhythm and bodily movement. This was - is - the 'Africa' that 'is
alive and well in the diaspora'.5

When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a child in Kingston, I was surrounded by the signs,
music and rhythms of this Africa of the diaspora, which only existed as a result of a long and
discontinuous series of transformations. But, although almost everyone around me was some shade of
brown or black (Africa 'speaks'!), I never once heard a single person refer to themselves or to others
as, in some way, or as having been at some time in the past, 'African'. It was only in the 1970s that
this Afro-Caribbean identity became historically available to the great majority of Jamaican people, at
home and abroad. In this historic moment, Jamaicans discovered themselves to be 'black' - just as, in
the same moment, they discovered themselves to be the sons and daughters of 'slavery'.

This profound cultural discovery, however, was not, and could not be, made directly, without
'mediation'. It could only be made through the impact on popular life of the post-colonial revolution,
the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism and the music of reggae - the metaphors, the
figures or signifiers of a new construction of'Jamaican-ness'. These signified a 'new' Africa of the
New World, grounded in an 'old' Africa: - a spiritual journey of discovery that led, in the Caribbean,
to an indigenous cultural revolution; this is Africa, as we might say, necessarily 'deferred' – as a
spiritual, cultural and political metaphor.

It is the presence/absence of Africa, in this form, which has made it the privileged signifier of new
conceptions of Caribbean identity. Everyone in the Caribbean, of whatever ethnic background, must
sooner or later come to terms with this African presence. Black, brown, mulatto, white - all must look
Presence Africaine in the face, speak its name. But whether it is, in this sense, an origin of our
identities, unchanged by four hundred years of displacement, dismemberment, transportation, to
which we could in any final or literal sense return, is more open to doubt. The original 'Africa' is no
longer there. It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible. We must not collude
with the West which, precisely, normalises and appropriates Africa by freezing it into some timeless
zone of the primitive, unchanging past. Africa must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean people, but
it cannot in any simple sense by merely recovered.

It belongs irrevocably, for us, to what Edward Said once called an 'imaginative geography and
history', which helps 'the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatising the difference
between what is close to it and what is far away'. It 'has acquired an imaginative or figurative value
we can name and feel'.7 Our belongingness to it constitutes what Benedict Anderson calls 'an
imagined community'.8 To this 'Africa', which is a necessary part of the Caribbean imaginary, we can't
literally go home again.

The character of this displaced 'homeward' journey - its length and complexity - comes across vividly,
in a variety of texts. Tony Sewell's documentary archival photographs, Garvey's Children: the Legacy
of Marcus Garvey, tells the story of a 'return' to an African identity which went, necessarily, by the
long route-through London and the United States. It 'ends', not in Ethiopia but with Garvey's statue in
front of the St Ann Parish Library in Jamaica: not with a traditional tribal chant but with the music of
Burning Spear and Bob Marley's Redemption Song. This is our long journey' home. Derek Bishton's
courageous visual and written text, Black Heart Man – the story of the journey of a white
photographer 'on the trail of the promised land' - starts in England, and goes, through Shashemene, the
place in Ethiopia to which many Jamaican people have found their way on their search for the
Promised Land, and slavery; but it ends in Pinnacle, Jamaica, where the first Rastafarian settlements
as established, and 'beyond' - among the dispossessed of 20th-century Kingston and the streets of
Handsworth, where Bishton's voyage of discovery first began. These symbolic journies are necessary
for us all - and necessarily circular. This is the Africa we must return to - but 'by another route': what
Africa has become in the New World, what we have made of 'Africa': 'Africa' - as we re-tell it through
politics, memory and desire.

What of the second, troubling, term in the identity equation – the European presence? For many of us,
this is a matter not of too little but of too much. Where Africa was a case of the unspoken, Europe was
a case of that which is endlessly speaking - and endlessly speaking us. The European presence
interrupts the innocence of the whole discourse of 'difference' in the Caribbean by introducing the
question of power. 'Europe' belongs irrevocably to the play' of power, to the lines of force and
consent, to the role of the dominant, in Caribbean culture. In terms of colonialism, underdevelopment,
poverty and the racism of colour, the European presence is that which, in visual representation, has
positioned the black subject within its dominant regimes of representation: the colonial discourse, the
literatures of adventure and exploration, the romance of the exotic, the ethnographic and travelling
eye, the tropical languages of tourism, travel brochure and Hollywood and the violent, pornographic
languages of ganja and urban violence.

Because Presence Europeenne is about exclusion, imposition and expropriation, we are often
tempted to locate that power as wholly external to us - an extrinsic force, whose influence can
be thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin. What Frantz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin,
White Masks, is how this power has become a constitutive element in our own identities.

The movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there,
in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was
indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart.
Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.9
This 'look', from - so to speak - the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and
aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire. This brings us face to face, not simply with the
dominating European presence as the site or 'scene' of integration where those other presences which
it had actively disaggregated were recomposed - re-framed, put together in a new way; but as the site
of a profound splitting and doubling - what Homi Bhaba has called 'the ambivalent identifications of
the racist world ... the 'otherness' of the self inscribed in the perverse palimpsest of colonial
identity.'10

The dialogue of power and resistance, of refusal and recognition, with and against Presence
Europeenne is almost as complex as the 'dialogue' with Africa. In terms of popular cultural life, it is
nowhere to be found in its pure, pristine state. It is always-already fused, syncretised, with other
cultural elements. It is always-already creolised - not lost beyond the Middle Passage, but ever-
present: from the harmonics in our musics to the ground-bass of Africa, traversing and intersecting
our lives at every point. How can we stage this dialogue so that, finally, we can place it, without terror
or violence, rather than being forever placed by it? Can we ever recognise its irreversible influence,
whilst resisting its imperializing eye? The engima is impossible, so far, to resolve. It requires the most
complex of cultural strategies. Think, for example, of the dialogue of every Caribbean filmmaker or
writer, one way or another, with the dominant cinemas and literature of the West – the complex
relationship of young black British filmmakers with the 'avant-gardes' of European and American
filmmaking. Who could describe this tense and tortured dialogue as a 'one way trip?

The Third, 'New World' presence, is not so much power, as ground, place, territory. It is the juncture-
point where the many cultural tributaries meet, the 'empty' land (the European colonizers emptied it)
where strangers from every other part of the globe collided. None of the people who now occupy the
islands - black, brown, white, African, European, American, Spanish, French, East Indian, Chinese,
Portugese, Jew, Dutch - originally 'belonged' there. It is the space where the creolisations and
assimilations and syncretisms were negotiated. The New World is the third term – the primal scene -
where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West. It also has to be understood
as the place of many, continuous displacements: of the original pre-Columbian inhabitants, the
Arawaks, Caribs and Amerindians, permanently displaced from their homelands and decimated; of
other peoples displaced in different ways from Africa, Asia and Europe; the displacements of slavery,
colonisation and conquest. It stands for the endless ways in which Caribbean people have been
destined to 'migrate'; it is the signifier of migration itself- of travelling, voyaging and return as fate, as
destiny; of the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad,
continually moving between centre and periphery. This preoccupation with movement and migration
Caribbean cinema shares with many other 'Third Cinemas', but it is one of our defining themes, and it
is destined to cross the narrative of every film script or cinematic image.

Presence Americaine continues to have its silences, its suppressions. Peter Hulme, in his essay on
'Islands of Enchantment' 11 reminds us that the word 'Jamaica' is the Hispanic form of the indigenous
Arawak name - 'land of wood and water' – which Columbus's re-naming ('Santiago') never replaced.
The Arawak presence remains today a ghostly one, visible in the islands mainly in museums and
archeological sites, part of the barely knowable or usable 'past'. Hulme notes that it is not represented
in the emblem of the Jamaican National Heritage Trust, for example, which chose instead the figure
of Diego Pimienta, 'an African who fought for his Spanish masters against the English invasion of the
island in 1655' - a deferred, metonymic, sly and sliding representation of Jamaican identity if ever
there was one! He recounts the story of how Prime Minister Edward Seaga tried to alter the Jamaican
coat-of-arms, which consists of two Arawak figures holding a shield with five pineapples, surmounted
by an alligator. 'Can the crushed and extinct Arawaks represent the dauntless character of Jamaicans?
Does the low-slung, near extinct crocodile, a cold-blooded reptile, symbolise the warm, soaring spirit
of Jamaicans?' Prime Minister Seaga asked rhetorically.12 There can be few political statements which
so eloquently testify to the complexities entailed in the process of trying to represent a diverse people
with a diverse history through a single, hegemonic 'identity'. Fortunately, Mr Seaga's invitation to the
Jamaican people, who are overwhelmingly of African descent, to start their 'remembering' by first
'forgetting' something else, got the comeuppance it so richly deserved.
The 'New World' presence - America, Terra Incognita – is therefore itself the beginning of diaspora,
of diversity, of hybridity and difference, what makes Afro-Caribbean people already people of a
diaspora. I use this term here metaphorically, not literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered
tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at
all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea. This is the old, the imperialising,
the hegemonising, form of 'ethnicity'. We have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the hands of
this backward-looking conception of diaspora – and the complicity of the West with it. The diaspora
experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary
heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite,
difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing
themselves anew, through transformation and difference. One can only think here of what is uniquely
- 'essentially' - Caribbean: precisely the mixes of colour, pigmentation, physiognomic type; the
'blends' of tastes that is Caribbean cuisine; the aesthetics of the 'cross-overs', of 'cut-and-mix',
to borrow Dick Hebdige's telling phrase, which is the heart and soul of black music. Young
black cultural practitioners and critics in Britain are increasingly coming to acknowledge and
explore in their work this 'diaspora aesthetic' and its formations in the post-colonial
experience:
Across a whole range of cultural forms there is a 'syncretic' dynamic
which critically appropriates elements from the master-codes of the
dominant culture and 'creolises' them, disarticulating given signs and
re-articulating their symbolic meaning. The subversive force of this
hybridising tendency is most apparent at the level of language itself
where Creoles, patois and black English decentre, destabilise and
carnivalise the linguistic domination of 'English' - the nation-language of
master-discourse - through strategic inflections, re-accentuations and
other performative moves in semantic, syntactic and lexical codes.13

It is because this New World is constituted for us as place, a narrative of displacement, that it
gives rise so profoundly to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to
return to 'lost origins', to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning. Who can
ever forget, when once seen rising up out of that blue-green Caribbean, those islands of
enchantment. Who has not known, at this moment, the surge of an overwhelming nostalgia
for lost origins, for 'times past? And yet, this 'return to the beginning' is like the imaginary in
Lacan - it can neither be fulfilled nor requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, of
representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery -
in short, the reservoir of our cinematic narratives.

We have been trying, in a series of metaphors, to put in play a different sense of our
relationship to the past, and thus a different way of thinking about cultural identity, which
might constitute new points of recognition in the discourses of the emerging Caribbean
cinema and black British cinemas. We have been trying to theorise identity as constituted, not
outside but within representation; and hence of cinema, not as a second-order mirror held up
to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us
as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak.
Communities, Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities are to be distinguished,
not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.14 This is the
vocation of modern black cinemas: by allowing us to see and recognise the different parts and
histories of ourselves, to construct those points of identification, those positionalities we call
in retrospect our 'cultural identities'.
We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a people in order to find
coherent elements which will counteract colonialism's attempts to falsify and harm ... A
national culture is not a folk-lore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover a
people's true nature. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the
sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has
created itself and keeps itself in existence.15

Notes
1 Frantz Fanon, 'On National Culture', in The Wretched of the Earth, London 1963, pl70.
2 Ibid., pl76.
3 Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, London 1982, p32.
4 Christopher Norris, Jacques Derrida, London 1987, pl5.
5 Stuart Hall, Resistance Through Rituals, London 1976.
6 Edward Said, Orientalism, London 1985, p55.
7 Ibid.
8 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Rise of
Nationalism, London 1982.
9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, London 1986, pl09.
10 Homi Bhabha, 'Foreword' to Fanon, ibid., xv.
11 In New Formations, no.3, Winter 1987.
12 Jamaica Hansard, vol.9, 1983-4, p363. Quoted in Hulme, ibid.
13 Kobena Mercer, Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination', in M. Cham and C.
Watkins (eds), Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, 1988, p57.
14 Anderson, op.cit., pl5.
15 Fanon, op.cit., 1963, pl88. This piece was first published in the journal Framework
(no.36) and is reproduced by kind permission of the editor, Jim Pines.