Derrida,+Jacques.++Structure+Sign+and+Play

//Purpose of Rhetoric:// To put all concepts into “play,” able to be critiqued, even if they have before been seen as essential Truths or the centers of our understanding.
 * Derrida, Jacques. “Structure Sign and Play.” //Writing and Difference.//**

//Keywords:// Play, center, bricoleur, (post)structuralism, Levi-Strauss, differance

//Quick Summary:// Derrida is trying to explain the paradox of a center (which stems from structuralism – ie Saussure). He demonstrates examples in which an unquestionable center (absolute sign, absolute signifier) is then outside the realm of what the center designates – therefore the center would be outside the structure, creating a paradox (if you can’t touch it, it doesn’t exist). He suggests examples like Levi-Stauss’ incest example that breaks from the binary by being both nature and culture simultaneously. Would have to change how we do ethnography because the driving framework is now questionable; however, he recognizes that a center must be used in order to question that center, and/or come to the best interpretation (utility). But it should be recognized or strategic when doing so. Levi-Strauss, the running example in this text attempts to reconcile some of these issues (though Derrida would probably say that reconciliation of these issues is impossible, unless it is simply an admittance that everything is play…(?)) by using “old concepts [European epistemology and culture] within the domain of empirical discovery while here and there denouncing their limits, treating them as tools which can still be used. No longer is any truth value attributed to them; 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. Levi-Strauss thinks that in this way he can separate method from truth. the instruments of the method and the objective significations envisaged by it” (284). Postcolonialism and deconstruction happened at the same time (which is not an accident) “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” pg 282. Breaking binaries – “something which is simultaneously seems to require the predicates of nature and of culture” (283). “whether the real center is to be found – and the answer is that it is impossible” (287)

//Response:// The idea of play and a post-structuralism is essential to current postcolonial and transnational rhetorics. I found it interesting to read this piece alongside the Shome piece, because I became more aware of these connections than I perhaps would have originally – his link to a simultaneous political, economic, technical moment, his assertions about Levi-Strauss’ attempts at separating method from truth – I see as being inextricably linked to the ideas of postcolonialism, and of course to my own projects. By breaking down the idea of a solid discursive structure, one that we can center somewhere (any “where”), Derrida allows for marginal groups to momentarily move to a centered position (though not “The Center”), while at the same time recognizing that their centrality is effectively marginalizing others. I guess that this sounds a bit hopeless when stated like this, suggesting that any gain by any group will necessarily be harmful to other groups, but I guess at least it offers the possibility for more egalitarianism. If every group, individual, idea, etc. where constantly shifting from margin to center and back, this perhaps wouldn’t create the same inescapable hierarchies that we have now. However, it is important to remember that there is a distinction between postcolonialism (political) and postmodernism (apolitical??) (engaging in a deconstructive practice does not necessarily involve decentering power structures and can, in fact, be Eurocentric)