The post of structuralism

A genius colleague of mine (Sand Avidar-Walzer) has been talking with me about several aspects of the structuralism/post-structuralism distinction. His thesis, to which I most definitely subscribe, is that post-structuralism should not be conceived as a homogenous discourse opposed to structuralism (as a similarly homogenous discourse), but that post-structuralism is the precise deployment of structural tendencies and devices in a particular way.

If we take his thesis and run with it (and the running with it here is entirely my own--Sand's position with respect to the following is much more subtle and moves along different lines), what is produced is an uncannily accurate resituation of the current American reading of "Structure, Sign, and Play," considered to be the seminal text of post-structuralism, or at least that text which marks most clearly a break between the two ways of thinking, provoking the addition of "post-" to structuralism. This new reading understands extremely well the precise thrust of structuralist thinking that Derrida is trying to bring to the fore in the essay.

This, as I tried to bring out in another (unfinished) post, is essentially that the hypothesis of the bricoleur is not a mere patching-up of structuralism that Lévi-Strauss effectuates in order to cover the supposed flaws in structuralism, but the specifying of an operation that much of our thinking continuously engages in, insofar as it employs a particular conceptual apparatus that is not its own (or proper to it), that is other (composed of others' discourses), and requires the extensive organization of that apparatus. In other words, the provisionality characteristic of the use of another discourse--"I'm just using this concept now, this organization of data, these signifiers, to get at the real, underlying phenomenon; they are essentially inessential to my task, because they're not my own, or are not designed for my hermeneutical endeavor"--is a part of bricolage not because discourse needs to be provisional, not because structuralism as discourse is hypocritical with respect to its discursive

 provisionality (positing and referring to a center where it claims to empty out the center, to use the overused terms of that essay).

I once read that the character of MacGyver is a perfect example of the bricoleur: he uses what he finds around him to get out of sticky situations. On this reading, the use of the various pieces or fragments of equipment around MacGyver treats these pieces only as provisional things inessential to the real task: to create a device that will get one out of the room before it explodes, etc. But one must understand the existence of these provisional tools or fragments not as provisional in the sense that they are not owning up, somehow, to their own real nature as a totally provisional tool, as devices that exactly and only fit the task at hand, so that one can immediately just get out, without worrying about using the tools at all. In other words, one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional or completely inessential to the task. It should be obvious that MacGyver isn't somehow a guru primarily because he doesn't find some dedicated device that will immediately release him from the trouble he is in. However, this is in effect how one faults the bricoleur all across America in introductory classes in theory. In other words, this is the reading operative as the current situation stands. And we can see that this is a reading that reads structuralism already from the perspective of a post-structuralism. This can be seen in the absurd structure of our sentence above ("one must not understand the provisionality of these tools to be a function of their failure to be totally provisional"), which is almost unintelligible, yet duplicates this reading exactly in that it assumes provisionality is something both to be sought by a discourse that breaks with the center or origin (which would include post-structuralism), and is something not adequately formulated by structuralism. This reading, it is obvious, cannot conceive provisionality as the product of something other than provisionality (and one should note that this inconceivability is the essence of the humor in the "MacGruber" parodies of Will Forte currently on Saturday Night Live).

And this "something other," I am asserting, is exactly what causes provisionality. In the MacGyver example, this "something other" is precisely the fact that the tools he uses, in their otherness, in their just-found and yet not-appropriate essence, are set up as things external to him and his intentions, but which ultimately can be turned around to help him out. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is not his, because it is set up as against his use only at the most basic level of it being able to be turned around towards his use. In other words, the bricoleur's discourse is provisional because it is conceived as neutral--as merely the site where two different intentions (McGyver's and the tool's proper use) are fought out. This is why MacGyver is a bricoleur: the tool can be turned around to his use because it is set up as against him, as not originally appropriate for him, and this makes the tool effectively--in the use itself--a "neutral" thing. We put "neutral" in quotes, because it is obvious that it isn't (and I should note that I'm not using this concept in the way Barthes formulates it). It has only the appearance of neutrality. Why? Because the tool was never sufficiently used against its ownmost, proper use, but only was used insofar as it was handy to get McGyver out of the situation. In this way new dimensions of the tool are opened up as uses (one understands how to use a hammer as a makeshift bazooka or something crazy like that), but the tool itself is not turned around completely to be used both as the tool that it is (a hammer) and the tool that it has become (bazooka), such that all hammers will thenceforth be possibly seen as bazookas and vice versa. To depart from the McGyver example (which has become more complicated perhaps than it was meant to be), think about how you think of a problem with the aid of a particular set of theoretical concepts: you pick up a thinker (Heidegger for example--let's say you are Derrida, or, to avoid confusion, another eminent thinker, like Sam Weber) and think in certain ways against him. The resulting reading of something (Sam Weber's essays on television, in Mass Mediauras for example) only uses Heidegger, you would say, provisionally: Heidegger is not essential to the thing you are trying to get at by way of the use of his outline of the stages of Seinsgeschichte or whatever (which Weber uses). Using Heidegger, therefore, does not make you (or Sam Weber, or Derrida) a Nazi--this would be absurd to say. Heidegger gets opened up to a new dimension of applicability: one understands a new way that the problematic Heidegger addresses in outlining stages of being history can be used. It is in this way that Heidegger himself uses thinkers like Kant, Descartes, Hegel, etc. to think about this very history of being (and to do so in a Nazi way--but one that is particular to this application of them): think of Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which precisely thinks against Kant to show how being is making its appearance veiled within the discourse of Kant. The result is that the Kant, insofar as it was used, was effectively neutral: able to be turned around such that Kant was suddenly a thinker of being (amenable to Nazism), like Heidegger.

It is to against this neutrality that Derrida objects. And it is this objection that my reading here seeks to unlock from underneath the morass of comments on Derrida's essay that see the bricoleur as someone who wants to create a totally provisional discourse--when the bricoleur simply wants to think against someone or use a concept within a limited context until a more rigorous and valid concept can be found that can justify his primary aim better. For Kant, in Heidegger's reading, like Heidegger himself in Sam Weber's (or Derrida's) use of him, is not neutral. To repeat, this is because, in the first case, Kant has not been taken up as Kant. Kant has only been taken up as useful in the various places in which he addressed being and being-history. In the second, Heidegger has only been taken up by Weber in the places where he is not a Nazi. If Kant in the first case or Heidegger in the second were truly neutral, more of both of these thinkers would be able to be addressed. But because they are merely thought against (and Weber does more than merely this, but we're just using him as an example), they become places where provisionality gets performed or enacted rather than essentially constituted. The project of "Structure, Sign and Play" is to make this enactment more explicit. So this provisionality qua supposed neutrality is what is attacked in the post-structuralist attack of structuralism. The site of provisionality, then, is made again into the place where forces are taking place and need to be delineated or defined. It isn't--in the end--a simple point or place, or as simple as it looked to Lévi-Strauss (or McGyver).

So the project of post-structuralism, as I am suggesting, is to employ structures, even like a bricoleur, except render the sites on which they struggle to be used this way more responsibly as explicit and regulated, so they do not end up as wholly destructive loci in any discourse. It isn't to dispense with structures altogether (though Derrida might move closer to actually carrying out this project than others). "Structure, Sign, and Play" does not wish to transcend structuralism. It wishes to think with structures more rigorously, to account for the point at which their limited context (again, the goal is not that of a totally coherent provisional discourse, but one only coherent in certain conditions) in which they function becomes more permanently presupposed than it should--in short, where its limits get naturalized despite their resistance to this very naturalism as a tool. With Foucault, the goal is to make this realm of explicitness more and more supple, less rigid, and more determinable by analysis--that means particularly defining the limits in more complicated ways such that they can regulate the naturalizing tendency to a degree (this is largely Bourdieu's general task as well). With Lacan, the task is similar, yet it focuses more on the particular ways this regulation (or lack thereof) can be caused (this is what I get at in my recent post on Lacan, below).

Thus, the "post-" of post-structuralism is more fraught than we might think it would be. And, as we have seen, this is precisely because the notion of structure and its use as exemplified in the bricoleur is more complicated and more diversified than we are willing to admit. We might do well to display a quote of Foucault's as he turns towards his last, most amazing period--in short, that which we might call the most post-structuralist--and witness the ambiguity that the term structuralism has for him as he announces his the direction his teaching will take to the Collège de France:

And now, let those who are weak on vocabulary, let those with little comprehension of theory call all this--if its appeal is stronger than its meaning for them--structuralism...

-The Archaeology of Knowledge, "The Discourse on Language," 234.

If the notion of structure can, at this point (and several years after Derrida's essay) still apply somehow to what Foucault is doing; if it can do so such that Foucault could remain indifferent to the name itself; if only fools would assume that it were able to be transcended by virtue of the simple addition of a "post-," we would have to revisit the notion of structure as such and show precisely how it is amenable to post-structuralism as this field on which structures can appear and be made more rigorously analyzable. In other words, we have to revisit and relive the frame of mind in which Foucault can adopt this tone, this unbelievable nonchalance or ease with respect to structuralism, which would entail both a loosening up of the term itself and a loosening up of our current ways of understanding.

The first step in doing this would perhaps be to attempt to detach the notion of structure from semiotics. For what is evident, if we take my friend's reading and run with it, is that structuralism has something different to offer than just the notion of the sign. Or rather, much more is invested in the sign than perhaps can be exclusively analyzed by a solely linguistic semiotics (that is, even concerned with langue). It is the project of Barthes, for example, to invest the notion of the sign and traditionally linguistically analyzed semiotic structures with precisely these more complicated lines of force, such that the sign expands into areas where its operation is fundamentally less semiotic and more structural. The understanding of Barthes as a structuralist, and not passing him off as either merely a semiotician or a popularizer of Derrida (as is so often done in the American academy), would do much for an understanding of why structuralism is not reducible to semiotics and the other way around (semiotics may have unknown virtues apart from its structuralist use, too).