Poststructuralist Turn?

Jonathan Culler

Diacritics, Volume 47, Number 4, 2019, pp. 28-49 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2019.0033

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774742

[ Access provided at 12 Dec 2020 13:50 GMT from Linköpings universitet ]

POSTSTRUCTURALIST
TURN?

JONATHAN CULLER
The alleged poststructuralist turn is unusual among turns in that it is generally deemed Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Profes-
to have occurred at a precise place and time. In October 1966, Richard Macksey and sor of English and Comparative Lit-
erature, Emeritus, at Cornell University
Eugenio Donato organized a conference at Johns Hopkins University to “explore,” as and the author of many works of critical
they wrote in the introduction to the conference proceedings, “the impact of contempo- theory, including Structuralist Poetics
rary ‘structuralist’ thought on critical methods in humanistic and social studies.”1 They and On Deconstruction. His latest book
is Theory of the Lyric.
invited major figures associated with structuralism in France: the literary and cultural
Email: culler@cornell.edu
analysts Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, Lucien Goldmann, and René Girard, the
psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan and Guy Rosolato, the linguist Nicolas Ruwet, the clas-
sicist Jean-Pierre Vernant, and several others—fifteen speakers in all—who addressed an
audience of some one hundred scholars, young and old. While only a few of the papers
explicitly discuss structuralism as a methodological movement or theoretical frame-
work, they certainly offer pertinent examples of structuralist thinking, and they would
amply have fulfilled the goal, as the organizers put it, of offering for the first time in
America a consideration of structuralist thought as a cross-disciplinary phenomenon
and exploring its diverse currents for an American audience. But the paper that came
largely to define the legacy of the conference was Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and
Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” which offered in particular an exposi-
tion and critique of the methods and theoretical framework of Claude Lévi-Strauss. So
much so that while the conference proceedings were originally published in 1970 as The
Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, the volume was republished two years
later with the new title The Structuralist Controversy, since it had come to represent a
controversy about structuralism and its failings, and thus inaugurated a turn away from
structuralism. In French Theory, his history of French influences on modern American
critical thought, François Cusset notes that this encounter, “which everyone would later
reread as a liminal scene, a founding moment,” did not have immediate effects, and it
would be at least ten years before the lines of investigation adumbrated here would be
pursued and so-called poststructuralism could be constituted.2 But the conference was
taken, both by those who were there and especially by those who only heard about it, as
signaling that structuralism was in difficulty.
One could certainly argue that structuralism never got a fair shake in the United
States, since just as it was becoming known, news of Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss
at the Johns Hopkins conference started to spread, so that structuralism no longer
seemed even the latest thing. People could then feel that they need not pay attention
to it, especially if it was alleged to go wrong in various ways. They could attend to par-
ticular works of theory and criticism without concerning themselves with structural-
ism. The eventual result, in the United States though not in France, was to treat what
was interesting and innovative in French thinkers as belonging to poststructuralism,
which, for reasons to be explored, found a readier audience than structuralism ever
had.3 Chronicling the critical scene in 1980, Frank Lentricchia wrote:
Sometime in the early 1970s we awoke from the dogmatic slumber of our phenomenologi-
cal sleep to find that a new presence had taken absolute hold over our avant-garde critical

DIACRITICS Volume 47, number 4 (2019) 28–47 © 2020 Cornell University

30 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

imagination: Jacques Derrida. Somewhat startlingly, we learned that, despite a number of

loose characterizations to the contrary, he brought not structuralism but something that
would be called “post-structuralism.”4
The fact that Lentricchia posits, for criticism in the United States, an abrupt transition
from phenomenology to poststructuralism, is certainly odd. Vincent Leitch, a better-
informed analyst of the critical scene, opens his book Theory Matters with the observa-
tion that for many decades New Criticism was the ruling paradigm in America: “It was
not until the mid 1970s that this oppressive formalism gave way to ‘post-structuralism’
(as it was oddly called).”5 Setting aside, then, Lentricchia’s strange positing of a phenom-
enological slumber, we can pursue his other claim: that America was expecting structur-
alism and instead got something that would come to be called “poststructuralism.” How
could this happen?
It is a story worth exploring, for a number of reasons. First, although the major the-
oretical influences were French, the notion of poststructuralism never caught on in
France.6 This suggests that the differences presumed to be so important in the American
account may be the effect of some misprision. Second, even within the United States,
there was considerable confusion about what might count as structuralist and what as
poststructuralist. This is nicely reflected in two knowledgeable publications by Josué
Harari. His 1979 anthology of poststructuralist criticism, Textual Strategies: Perspec-
tives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, consists mainly of work by writers who already fea-
tured in his 1971 bibliography, Structuralists and Structuralisms: Roland Barthes, Gilles
Deleuze, Eugenio Donato, Michel Foucault, Gérard Genette, René Girard, Louis Marin,
Michael Riffaterre, and Michel Serres. The work of these authors had not changed, only
the label under which they were now to be grouped. Harari’s articulation of the field
effectively makes Claude Lévi-Strauss and Tzvetan Todorov the only true structuralists,
since they were not now counted as poststructuralists. On the other hand, in his 1980
discussion of “The State of Criticism,” The Partisan Review editor William Phillips takes
structuralism to designate recent theoretical criticism that rejects concern with history
and with authors to concentrate on the text and readers’ recreation of it (thinkers men-
tioned are Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Philippe Sollers, Todorov, and Foucault).7 Structural-
ism, broadly conceived (“poststructuralism” is not mentioned), seemed to consist of the
theoretically oriented criticism (with the exception of Marxist criticism) that had come
along after New Criticism. In 1982, in On Deconstruction, I noted that the charges leveled
at structuralism were amazingly varied yet specific: Some fault it for its scientific pre-
tentions, diagrams, taxonomies, neologisms, its alleged claims to master and chart the
elusive productions of the human spirit.8 Others charge it with relativism, irrationalism,
a self-indulgent love of paradox and bizarre interpretations, a taste for linguistic play
and a narcissistic relation to its own rhetoric.9 To some it meant rigidity, a mechanical
extraction of certain patterns or themes that made every work mean the same thing. To
others it seemed to allow the work to mean anything whatsoever, either by asserting
the indeterminacy of meaning or by defining meaning as the experience of the reader.
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 31

Science or irrationalism, rigidity or permissiveness, destruction of criticism or inflation

of criticism. The array of charges seemed to make structuralism an indeterminate radi-
cal force, upsetting traditional disciplinary assumptions and procedures. This confusion
makes it all the harder to understand the nature of the alleged poststructuralist turn.
Let me, therefore, briefly say a word about what in fact I take structuralism to be before
looking at Derrida’s critique of it at the Johns Hopkins conference—a critique to which
the turn is often attributed. Such pioneering structuralists as Lévi-Strauss and Barthes
emphasized the importance for structuralism of the linguistic model: Barthes defined
structuralism as “a mode of analysis of cultural artefacts that originates in the methods
of contemporary linguistics.”10 And Lévi-Strauss argues in his seminal article “L’analyse
structurale en linguistique et en anthro-
pologie” (“Structural Analysis in Linguis- A semiotic system, like a language, is a
tics and Anthropology”) that by following
the linguist’s example, the anthropologist fiction, but a fiction necessary to any
can hope to reproduce in his own disci-
pline the phonological revolution, which attempt to understand how meaning is
had succeeded in identifying the funda-
mental distinctions that the sound system produced and how understanding occurs.
of a language uses to produce meaningful
utterances—a system not consciously grasped by its users.11 Barthes’ formulation, “the
analysis of cultural artefacts,” is manifestly too narrow, since in anthropology and lin-
guistics it is clearly a matter of accounting for meaningful events as well as artifacts.
As Lévi-Strauss writes in his introduction to the works of Marcel Mauss, “particular
actions of individuals are never symbolic in themselves; they are the elements out of
which is constructed a symbolic system, which must be collective.”12 In modeling itself
on linguistics, structuralism seeks to analyze the structures or systems that make pos-
sible meaningful events.
One could then say that under the heading of structuralism could be grouped a range
of projects that resist the traditional humanistic enterprise of elucidating the meaning
of a literary work and celebrating it as the accomplishment of an author, and that seek
instead to describe the underlying systems of forces and conventions that make such
events possible. Such a structuralism could be seen as opposing both Anglo-American
New Criticism, which bracketed the author to focus on the individual work itself (rather
than the cultural practice), and a traditional “life-and-works” approach to literature,
which focused on authors and their achievements.
Structuralism sought instead to describe systems. A semiotic system, like a language,
is a fiction, but a fiction necessary to any attempt to understand how meaning is pro-
duced and how understanding occurs. There is an initial methodological positing of a
system to be described. And to get its analytical projects underway, structural analysis
needs to treat something as given. Following the linguistic model, this given is meaning
or, more precisely, difference of meaning. To determine what are the signifying contrasts
and thus the signs of a linguistic system, one employs the commutation test: p and b are
32 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

different phonemes of English because the passage from p to b in the context et or at

produces a change in meaning: pet versus bet or pat versus bat. To get the analysis of the
system underway, one needs information about difference of meaning and hence appeals
to the linguistic or cultural competence of speakers or members of a particular culture—
a positing that regularities in judgments of difference of meaning indicate a common
system that one can attempt to reconstruct.
Judgments about difference of meaning are always open to question, of course, as
are the delimitations that identify a system. Those undertaking description or analy-
sis know better than anyone the possibility of criticizing such judgments. Thus, in the
case of Saussurian linguistics, the critique of the methodological distinction between
synchronic and diachronic analysis of
Judgments about difference of meaning language is entirely legitimate—no one
knew better than Saussure that language
are always open to question, of course, as is historical through and through—but
precisely because a language is in constant
are the delimitations that identify a system. evolution, such a distinction is necessary
in order to analyze the system as it func-
tions at a particular moment. Certain methodological moves are contestable, and investi-
gators must be aware of the provisional and contestable character of the methodological
distinctions, and alert to the fact that any system is relative to what is deemed to lie out-
side it; but if we accept that communication does occur, we should attempt to account
for the systems that make it possible.
This linguistic model was generative for a wide range of semiotic/structuralist inves-
tigations, and in the early days of structuralism, its scientific ambitions were manifest.
Lévi-Strauss turns to linguistics as the only one of the social sciences “which can claim
the name of science,” and he speaks of its ability to discover general laws.13 Barthes imag-
ines the possibility of a poetics as a science of forms, and everyone defined semiology as
the science of signs. There is a problem of translation here that is responsible for some
of the criticism and much of the animus provoked by structuralism in the Anglophone
world. Science in French is systematic thought, not empirical, experimental thought, as
we take science to be in English. For us, “political science” expresses a hope—perhaps
a forlorn hope—rather than a reality, but in French les sciences humaines is not an oxy-
moron, as “the human sciences” would be in English (if the expression did not make us
think of biology).
In the field of literary studies, the hostility to the idea of a science of literature was
responsible for much antistructuralist feeling. Recall that the New Critics had largely
promoted the value of literature against science or scientific thought. In treating the
language of poetry as the language of paradox, Cleanth Brooks defines it in opposition
to the language of science, which, he says, would deprive us of the irony and wonder
of a poem, leaving us only with dry facts.14 But above all, New Criticism had succeeded
in establishing the presumption that the goal of literary studies is hermeneutics, the
production of interpretations of literary works, so that even its quarrels with historicist
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 33

and biographical critics became disagreements about which approach could yield bet-
ter, truer interpretations. Structuralism, on the other hand, is in principle not herme-
neutics but poetics. Like linguistics, it does not seek to discover new meanings but to
understand the codes and systems of convention that enable works to have the mean-
ings they do for readers. The question American literary scholars and critics most often
asked of structuralism was whether this whole apparatus of categories and concepts,
and often of jargon and neologisms, could actually yield new and better interpretations
of literary works. Unfortunately, practitioners and defenders of structuralism failed to
reject the question, as they should have—the results might have been better. Instead of
denouncing the question as based on a misunderstanding of their goals, structuralists
often attempted to answer it, implicitly or explicitly, and did in their writings often turn
to interpretation. Thus, in S/Z, Barthes begins by declaring that his analysis will explore
the codes that underlie and are responsible for the intelligibility of Honoré de Balzac’s
novella, and that there will be no synthesis or recomposition of the text, no discovery of
a hidden meaning; but in the end the temptations of interpretation are too strong for him
and he concludes by declaring that the text is ultimately about the semiotic apparatus on
which it relies. Barthes concludes, “it is fatal, the text says, to remove the dividing line,
the paradigmatic slash mark which permits meaning to function (the wall of Antith-
esis), life to reproduce (the opposition of the sexes), property to be protected (rule of
contract).”15 His attempt at poetics issues, after all, something that sounds suspiciously
like a new interpretation of this novella. And Genette’s Discours du récit (Narrative Dis-
course), the most systematic and comprehensive work of structuralist narratology, pres-
ents itself as a study of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
Even though Proust is there for exemplification, Genette’s study could be seen as a neol-
ogistic, pseudo-scientific interpretation of the novel. Structuralism viewed from the per-
spective of hermeneutics often seems like a jargon-ridden harping on what goes without
saying, belaboring what we unconsciously grasp. The failure of structuralists working on
literature to articulate repeatedly and emphatically the rationale of an anti-hermeneutic
poetics, must, I think, bear some of the responsibility for the resistance to structuralism
as an allegedly “scientific” approach to literary works—as if structuralism aspired to be
a science of interpretation. In these circumstances, writing that identified the aporias
of an aspiring science of language or signs or texts found a welcome reception and was
swiftly hailed as poststructuralist—moving us beyond a scientistic structuralism before
it had really been tried.
In “Semiology and Rhetoric,” for instance, Paul de Man offers a critique of “literary
semiology as it is practiced today, in France and elsewhere,” for using grammatical struc-
tures “conjointly with rhetorical structures, without apparent awareness of a possible
discrepancy between them.”16 Though de Man does not use the terms poetics and herme-
neutics, his claim is that the attempt to follow the model of linguistics and produce a
“grammar” of literature (in fact, poetics) assumes that the rhetorical structures at work
in literature can be assimilated to a grammatical model and treated as code (for her-
meneutical decipherment). De Man praises the demystifying power of semiology in the
34 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

context of French historical and thematic criticism and speaks of the complexity of the
problem, which, he says, “puts its concise theoretical exposition beyond my powers.”17
He offers instead two examples where the grammatical structure of a question is open to
radically incompatible interpretations, depending on whether we take it as a rhetorical
question or a serious one. First, the question “What’s the difference?” from the TV show
All in the Family:
Asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under,
Archie Bunker answers with a question: “What’s the difference?” Being a reader of sublime
simplicity, his wife replies by patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lac-
ing under, whatever that may be, but provokes only ire. “What’s the difference?” did not ask
for difference but means instead “I don’t give a damn what the difference is.”18
“What’s the difference?” can be a real question or a dismissive expression of exaspera-
tion denying that there is any relevant difference. The second example is the question
“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” from Yeats’s “Among School Children”:
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?19
This question can be a serious inquiry or, as it is commonly interpreted, an assertion of
the fusion or indissociability of actor and act. (De Man suggests that in fact we do better
to take the question seriously: “the literal reading leads to greater complication of theme
and statement.”20) In both these examples, “a perfectly clear syntactical paradigm (the
question), engenders a sentence that has at least two meanings, of which the one asserts
and the other denies its own illocutionary mode.”21 The issue confronting the reader is
rhetorical rather than grammatical; deciding between meanings is not a matter of decod-
ing but of interpretation. Despite de Man’s warnings about the complexity of the issue
and about the difficulty of distinguishing the epistemology of grammar from the episte-
mology of rhetoric, these examples have been taken to show that a linguistically-based
grammar of literature cannot get at the meaning of a literary work, because there will
always be something over and above the grammar-like conventions that requires inter-
pretation. This perfectly plausible conclusion is then taken to constitute a critique of
structuralism and semiology as hermeneutically naïve and inadequate. Although de Man
does not draw this conclusion—he claims, rather, that semiology is a regression from the
sophistication about grammar and rhetoric found in Roman Jakobson, Kenneth Burke,
and Charles Sanders Peirce22—his argument is taken to illustrate the superiority of a
poststructuralist hermeneutics which can generate a complex interpretation of the self-
deconstructive power of Archie Bunker’s utterance and Yeats’s poem.
But of course, a structuralist poetics does not aim to tell us what Yeats’s poem means.
It would identify the grammatical structure of the question as open to both interpreta-
tions and stress the role of the convention that poems should be thematically coherent
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 35

in guiding either the choice of interpretation or the attempt to maintain the ambiguity of
the question. Structuralism does not assume the seamless continuity between grammar
and rhetoric (and de Man presents no evidence that it does) but does treat them both,
despite the indeterminacies of rhetoric and the need for interpretation, as part of a gen-
eral semiotic apparatus by which meaning is generated. In fact, in retrospect de Man’s
interpretations of the two examples seem relatively predictable in terms of the conven-
tions of rhetorical reading. De Man’s hermeneutical work on Yeats’s poem and on a pas-
sage from Proust, which occupies the better part of the essay, generates new, complex,
fascinating, and self-undermining readings, but that is not the task of the structuralist
project, and it seems evident (I think de Man’s precautions in approaching the question
make this clear) that he has not refuted the project of a poetics but only illustrated that
it is not hermeneutics.
But let me turn to a key moment in the critique of structuralism, often held to inaugu-
rate the turn. Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,”
delivered at the Johns Hopkins conference in 1966, is usually cited as a Nietzschean
embrace of the infinite play (or “free play”) of signification and a damning critique of Lévi-
Strauss’s use of the notion of structure, and
hence of structuralism in general.23 For Derrida does not claim to be turning the
instance, even François Cusset, in his gen-
erally knowledgeable French Theory, writes page on structuralism; on the contrary, he
that Derrida programmatically declares
it urgent to embrace the Nietzschean begins with the announcement that an
option.24 In fact, what we find is rather
more nuanced. Derrida does not claim to be event has occurred in the thinking of
turning the page on structuralism; on the
contrary, he begins with the announcement structure, which until recently had always
that an event has occurred in the think-
ing of structure, which until recently had been tied to a center, to the notion of origin
always been tied to a center, to the notion of
origin (and hence to a metaphysics of pres- (and hence to a metaphysics of presence),
ence), an origin that founds and makes pos-
sible the play of substitutions and variation. an origin that founds and makes possible
With structuralism, it has now become pos-
sible, Derrida maintains, to think of the cen- the play of substitutions and variation.
ter as a function rather than as a given or an
origin; so that we now can conceive of “a system in which the central signified, the original
or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences.”25
For this new thinking of the structurality of structure that has occurred Derrida cites the
legacy of Nietzsche and Freud but his principal exhibit is Lévi-Strauss, and he is manifestly
thinking of structuralism in general.
Although this event in the thinking of structure is momentous and involves a critique
of metaphysics (the metaphysics of presence which hitherto determined the center as
36 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

presence), Derrida stresses that there is no way of doing without the concepts of meta-
physics when one’s goal is to disrupt metaphysics. We have no categories, syntax, lexi-
con that are not caught up in this system of thought.26 Therefore, Nietzsche, Freud, and
Heidegger can be shown to be complicitous with the metaphysics they seek to evade.
Heidegger treats Nietzsche in this fashion; “one could do the same for Heidegger him-
self, for Freud, or for a number of others. And today no exercise is more widespread.”27
Derrida is usually thought to have performed this exercise of demonstrating complicity
on Lévi-Strauss in turn, but his casual reference to this widespread exercise certainly
suggests that this is not what he sees himself doing and that a demonstration of complic-
ity with metaphysics would certainly not constitute a devastating critique. What, then,
are the implications of Derrida’s reading of Lévi-Strauss?
Derrida’s lengthy discussion of Lévi-Strauss praises ethnology as the privileged
example of a structuralist science, based on its self-decentering. Western culture no
longer treats itself as the center, but of course it cannot escape its character as a West-
ern science: “Consequently, whether he wants to or not—and this does not depend
upon a decision on his part—the ethnologist accepts into his discourse the premises
of ethnocentrism at the very moment when he denounces them. This necessity is irre-
ducible; it is not a historical contingency.” But there are different ways of yielding to it,
and the “the quality and fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical
rigor with which this relation to the history of metaphysics and to the inherited con-
cepts is thought.”28
In pursuing this thesis, Derrida takes up Lévi-Strauss’s engagement with the opposi-
tion between nature and culture. Here, Lévi-Strauss reveals the breakdown of the oppo-
sition in the prohibition of incest, which is both natural, because apparently universal,
and yet obviously cultural. Lévi-Strauss thus discovers that the language of conceptual
categories bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. But, Derrida argues, there
are two ways of carrying out this critique: “Once the limit of the nature/culture oppo-
sition makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the
history of these concepts”29 This is one option: “To concern oneself with the founding
concepts of the entire history of philosophy, to deconstitute them, is not to undertake the
work of the philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. Despite appearances, it is
probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy.”30
The other option is to preserve these concepts, treating them as tools within the domain
of empirical investigation, while denouncing their limits or inadequacies, “in order to
avoid the possibly sterilizing effects”31 of the first option. Lévi-Strauss adopts the sec-
ond strategy: he exploits the “relative efficacity” of these categories and uses them “to
destroy the old machinery to which they belong . . . This is how the language of the social
sciences criticizes itself.” In sum: “to preserve as an instrument something whose truth
value he criticizes.”32
Derrida shows that from Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté (The Elementary
Structures of Kinship) to Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss is committed to this “double inten-
tion.” But it does not seem too far-fetched to relate this double move to Derrida’s own
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 37

frequent evocation of a double procedure, a double game—formulations with doubling

or doubleness often surface when he tries to explain his own procedure, which can-
not simply scrap the old concepts but must operate with them. Deconstruction must, he
writes in “Signature Event Context,” “by means of a double gesture, a double science, a
double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a general displace-
ment of the system.”33 It must work within the terms of the system in order to affect it;
using the categories of the system in order to displace it. Derrida needs signifier and
signified to critique the notion of sign, for instance—and the same is true for all of the
binary oppositions of philosophy and of structuralism that are subjected to deconstruc-
tive analysis. There is no doing without them. There is no stepping outside; the systems
must be breached from within.
Derrida goes on to characterize what he sees as the inadequacy of Lévi-Strauss’s form
of self-critique, in Mythologiques in particular, where in admitting that his construction
may be but a myth of mythology, Lévi-Strauss offers the very seductive “abandonment of
all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin.”34 More than
anyone else, he has “brought to light the play of repetition and the repetition of play.”35
The lack of center, origin, end, the assertion of the primacy of structure and thus of play,
which should be conceived as prior to presence and absence, are nonetheless accompa-
nied in Lévi-Strauss, Derrida argues, by “a sort of ethic of presence, an ethic of nostalgia
for origins, an ethic of archaic and natural innocence, of a purity of presence,”36 which
is even presented as the motivation of the ethnological project of recovering archaic
societies and the lost value they represent or embody. Derrida calls this ethics and this
nostalgia “this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy,” the “negative, nostalgic,
guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play,” of which the Nietzschean affirmation
of the joyful “play of the world and of the innocence of becoming”37 is the other side. It
is here that comes the famous passage contrasting two interpretations of interpretation,
of structure, sign, and play:
There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one
seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play (échappe
au jeu) and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile.
The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play (affirme le jeu) and tries
to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who,
throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—in other words, throughout his
entire history—has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the
end of play.38
The implication seems to be (this is how people have taken this passage) that Lévi-Strauss
and structuralism belong to the guilty, nostalgic side of interpretation, while something
new—call it “poststructuralism,” as people would come to do—is turned towards the
future, affirming play and trying to pass beyond man and humanism. The choice seems
clearly outlined. Francois Cusset, in his account of the conference, claims that
38 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

between “the two interpretations of interpretation” it is urgent to substitute, Derrida con-

cludes in a programmatic tone, for the one that “dreams of deciphering a truth . . . which
escapes play,” one that, on the contrary, “affirms play and attempts to pass beyond man
and humanism.” The point is clear: this lofty structuralism with its rarefied stakes, which the
American university knew only in its narratological version (Genette and Todorov), was
something that should be left behind in order to move toward a more playful (réjouissant)
poststructuralism. The word will not make its appearance until the beginning of the 1970s, but
all the Americans present at Johns Hopkins in 1966 realized that they had just attended the
live performance of its public birth. 39
The opposition between the two interpretations of interpretations is aggravated, aggran-
dized, by the fact that in the original translation of “La structure, le signe, et le jeu . . . ,”
the term jeu, in the text though not in the title, is often translated as “freeplay,” though
nowhere does Derrida’s thinking of meaning and interpretation justify such a choice.
Although there are no limits that can be prescribed in advance, the play of meaning is
never “freeplay,” but is always a product of numerous factors, always depends on prior
structures.40 But I am not the first to notice that while Derrida deliberately, dramatically,
creates the impression of a stark choice between a nostalgic humanism and a forward-
looking affirmation of freedom—while he seems to offer this choice between apparently
distinct alternatives, calling “these two interpretations of interpretation . . . absolutely
irreconcilable, even if we live them simultaneously and reconcile them in an obscure
economy”41— he then makes it clear that in fact there can be no question of choosing.
Je ne crois pas pour ma part, bien que ces deux interprétations doivent accuser leur dif-
férence et aiguiser leur irréductibilité, qu’il y ait aujourd’hui à choisir. D’abord parce que nous
sommes là dans une région—disons encore, provisoirement, de l’historicité—où la catégorie
de choix paraît bien légère. Ensuite parce qu’il faut essayer d’abord de penser le sol commun,
et la différance de cette différence irréductible.
For my part, although these two interpretations must acknowledge and accentuate their dif-
ference 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 us 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 différance of this
irreducible difference.42
Given these two interpretations of interpretation, one cannot effectively choose: we
cannot for instance, embrace the “freeplay” of meaning since meaning always depends
on prior structures or associations; nor can we escape play by fixating on origins; lan-
guage, with its play, always supervenes. To give a bit more concreteness to Derrida’s
entirely appropriate disclaimer, one cannot, for example, choose to make meaning
either the original intention of the speaker or the creation of the reader, even if one
claims to do so. Such claims are very insubstantial, ineffective, masking a reintroduction
of the internal division of meaning under some other guise. We cannot just reject one
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 39

side of this double conception of interpretation and embrace the other but must, Der-
rida insists, attempt to think “common ground and the différance (difference, differing,
deferring) of this irreducible difference.”43 And he concludes by situating himself not as
leading the movement towards a joyful Nietzschean future of free play, but as someone
looking towards operations of birth but also in the other direction, towards those who,
in a society from which he does not exclude himself, turn away from a birth that can
only be monstrous.44
At the very least, then, this is not a repudiation of structuralism and celebration of a
future alternative.45 Let me add also that the eloquence of this conclusion is made pos-
sible above all by an appeal to the undeniable thematics of nostalgia and of humanism in
Lévi-Strauss. If Derrida were writing about other structuralists—Genette, Jakobson, or
Todorov, for instance—he would find it hard to speak of a nostalgia for origins or a guilty,
Rousseauistic thematics of immediacy disrupted.
But still, there is a specific critique here that is easy to lose sight of in the rheto-
ric of the conclusion, which has the strange effect of heightening the opposition even
though the evocation of monstrosity ought logically to render the supposed alterna-
tive to structuralism less attractive, rather than make structuralism itself seem passé.
I quoted earlier Derrida’s distinction between two different ways of pursuing the cri-
tique of the categories that organize both research and thought in general: on the one
hand, the undertaking of a rigorous questioning of the history of concepts, as opposed
to, on the other hand, a use of concepts as tools for research while articulating their con-
testable character, in a double operation. I noted then that Derrida often characterizes
his deconstructive readings as a double operation that employs traditional concepts—
speech and writing, for instance, signifier and signified, inside and outside—in order to
criticize and displace them. But the major difference between the two modes of critique
might hinge on a term that comes up a couple of times in his discussion of Lévi-Strauss:
empiricism. Lévi-Strauss is said to conserve these categories, not because he needs to do
so in order to criticize them, but for “la découverte empirique” (empirical discovery).46
He is studying some particular phenomenon (kinship systems, totemism, mythology,
etc.) and wants to understand the systems. The rigorous questioning of the history of
concepts, for which Derrida is known, yields a reading of texts—that is the form that
Derrida’s enterprise takes—but not an account of particular cultural systems. In the end,
given Derrida’s claim that Lévi-Strauss seeks to dispense with the center, arche, and
telos, but inhabits that quest in the wrong way, the crucial difference may be between
the following orientations: on the one hand, a thought that does not seek to study any
cultural activity or system but only to produce, through a reading of theoretical texts,
a critique and displacement of concepts that have been used in such enterprises, and
on the other hand a thought actively seeking to understand cultural phenomena while
subjecting the necessary concepts to critique. We may have here above all a difference
between a hermeneutics turned away from center or origin, a transcendental signified,
while it reads a text of some sort in a hermeneutics of suspicion, as we have come to say
(Derrida’s enterprise could be described in this way), and another enterprise, which is
40 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

not a hermeneutics nostalgic for an origin or transcendental signified but a poetics, and
which is not seeking to interpret at all but trying to understand the conditions of pos-
sibility of signification in a particular cultural domain.
Such a distinction helps to explain why it is that Derrida’s subtle and complex critique
of the structuralism he hailed as an event and continued to inhabit might have caught on
and given rise to a so-called poststructuralist turn. Cusset claims that in poststructural-
ism America invented an open-ended successor, “a far more malleable one, with two dis-
tinct advantages: it had a much looser and therefore more accommodating definition, and
it did not exist as a homogeneous category on the Old Continent.”47 But there are more
precise reasons for its success. Given the underlying presumption in Anglo-American
literary studies that the task of the analyst is to produce richer, superior interpretations
of texts, Derrida’s critique had the appeal of encouraging forms of interpretation that
included a critique of fundamental philosophical categories, with a new vocabulary and
some new assumptions about the goals of interpretation: No longer was it to be assumed
that an interpretation should demonstrate the organic unity of a work, for instance. This
sort of critical activity seemed at once more radical and more in keeping with the tradi-
tions of literary study than a structuralist enterprise that attempted to advance an under-
standing of the cultural systems and conventions that make meaning possible and that in
principle did not seek to provide interpretations of texts. If this more difficult enterprise
of poetics could be represented as in some way deluded, all the more reason to convince
oneself that the world had moved beyond structuralism onto something else.
This distinction between an enterprise devoted to the critique of fundamental concepts
and one seeking to use these concepts (while critiquing them) to understand some partic-
ular domain also helps to explain why it is that Michel Foucault, despite his disclaimers,
was always identified as a structuralist.48 He sought to reconstruct the underlying systems
of disciplinary thought, the conditions of possibility of various historical forms of knowl-
edge, and at one point even claimed to be happy to be called a positivist.49 On the other
hand, once we were thought to have taken a poststructuralist turn, Foucault’s critique of
the subject and focus on the role of power in the constitution of knowledge enabled him
to be treated as a leading poststructuralist devoted above all to the critique of concepts
rather than research into the conditions of possibility of various discourses.
As my On Deconstruction amply demonstrates, I have vast admiration for Derrida’s
brilliant readings of the texts of philosophy and other discourses. Yet I do find his astute
critique of structuralist projects (whether Saussure’s or J. L. Austin’s, or Foucault’s, or
Lévi-Strauss’s) to be, in general terms, a critique of the possibility of a poetics from the
viewpoint of a specialized, self-critical hermeneutics. It is a critique that declines to
object openly to the project of trying to work out the principles of the functioning of lan-
guage or of mythology, or fashion, or literature, but instead offers an insightful critique
of the terms and procedures that seem necessary (and that he deems necessary) to the
conduct of such investigations.
This makes it sound as if I am defending a scientific structuralism against a critical
deconstruction, which is determined to show the impossibility of systematic projects.
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 41

But in fact, one of the great oddities of the critique of structuralism as scientistic is that
in practice these systematizing ambitions usually lead to the identification of anomalies
and indeterminacies. Meanwhile, Derrida’s deconstructive readings seem particularly
concerned with regularities, with structures that inexorably appear in discourses of all
sorts, whatever the ostensible preoccupations of these discourses: structures that cannot
be avoided by attempts at choosing.
If structuralist writings repeatedly appeal to linguistic models, it is because structural-
ism shifts the focus of critical thinking from subjects to discourse: structural explanation
appeals not to the consciousness of agents but to structures and systems of convention
operating in the discursive field of a social practice. Meaning is the effect of codes and
conventions, often the result of foregrounding, flouting, parodying, or subverting these
conventions. To describe the conventions,
various sciences are posited—of literature, If structuralist writings repeatedly appeal
of mythology, a general science of signs—
which serve as a methodological horizon to linguistic models, it is because
for a range of analytical projects. Within
each project, interest characteristically structuralism shifts the focus of critical
comes to focus on marginal or anomalous
phenomena, which reveal the operative thinking from subjects to discourse:
conventions by resisting or playing with
and against them. Genette’s systematic structural explanation appeals not to the
structuralist narratology, Discours du récit,
is actually most interested in such anoma- consciousness of agents but to structures
lies as the pseudo-itératif in Proust: events
narrated as happening repeatedly (every and systems of convention operating in
Thursday) but in such specific detail that
logically their exact repetition would be the discursive field of a social practice.
impossible.50 Structuralist literary stud-
ies have shown more interest in avantgarde works that resist conventions (the nouveau
roman, the Marquis de Sade, Stéphane Mallarmé) than in well-formed works of the tradi-
tion. When they focus on the traditional novel, for example a work by Balzac, it is to show
how it plays with and ultimately comments on the codes that make it possible.51
The same is true in other areas: The notion of a science or grammar of forms serves
as a methodological horizon for research that often stresses the ungrammatical or the
deviant, as in Foucault’s studies of madness or anthropological studies of pollution and
taboo. In general, one might observe that, ironically, as structuralist studies of rules and
codes may focus on irregularities, so the deconstructive critique of methodological con-
cepts reveals inescapable structures: structuralist science unearths surprising anoma-
lies, while deconstructive interpretation brings out inexorable regularities.52
Now, I stressed at the beginning of this essay that structuralist projects involve the
positing of a system to be explained and what might be called an empirical use of evidence
of difference of meaning as a way to determine the functional units of these systems, but
42 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

with an intense interest in what lies at the margins of these systems and in anomalies
that help to identify the operative distinctions and conventions. This way of inhabiting
the necessity of critique of the categories one deploys is what Derrida has been taken to
criticize in Lévi-Strauss. Yet as I have suggested, his appeal to Lévi-Strauss’s humanistic
thematics of loss and nostalgia (as well as
There is, these days, no danger of Derrida’s own cagey rejection of the pos-
sibility of choice) prevents his argument
complacency: hyperalert critics will from counting as an effective rejection of
other structuralist projects, which cannot
readily pounce on illicit presumptions easily be charged with a nostalgia for lost
origins. The methodological requirement
and point out exceptions to every of evidence of difference of meaning as a
starting point for the analysis of meaning
attempt at systematization. is another matter—contestable, certainly,
but indispensable if the project of a lin-
guistics or a poetics is to get underway at all. There is, these days, no danger of compla-
cency: hyperalert critics will readily pounce on illicit presumptions and point out excep-
tions to every attempt at systematization.
The strange result of the American positing of poststructuralism is that the vocabu-
laries, procedures, and results of structuralist thinkers are preserved and celebrated but
the frameworks of systematic projects are often bracketed or set aside, as if they had been
discredited. Yet, as I have argued, the intervention by Derrida that was seen, retrospec-
tively, as constitutive of poststructuralism, does not in fact call for a movement beyond
structuralism but offers two ways of proceeding within this framework; and it is unfor-
tunate that the attractions of a negative hermeneutics have eclipsed the combination of
systematizing projects with the necessary critique of the concepts they employ, which
might advance our understanding of what is undeniable—the production of meaning in
social and cultural activities.
Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 43

Notes
1 Macksey and Donato, The Structuralist Contro- 7 Phillips, “The State of Criticism,” 372–75, 379.
versy, xv.
8 For a general discussion, see Culler, On Decon-
2 Cusset, French Theory, 32. struction, 17–30.

3 “While structuralism was often reduced to 9 Since we have become accustomed to a distinc-
a caricature, poststructuralism rapidly became an tion between structuralism and poststructuralism, it
umbrella term designating various strands coming may be difficult to recall that, for instance, Raymond
from Continental Europe” (Angermuller, Why There Is Picard’s 1965 Nouvelle critique ou nouvelle imposture?
No Poststructuralism in France, 16). (New Criticism or New Fraud?) attacked Barthes’
explicitly structuralist Sur Racine (1963) (which Barthes
4 Lentricchia, After the New Criticism, 159. It is
presents as an “anthropology” of “Racinian man”)
scarcely clear what Lentricchia has in mind in speaking
not for seeking to be scientific or systematic but for
of “the dogmatic slumber of our phenomenological
neglecting the plain meaning of words and the certi-
sleep,” as if American criticism had been dogmati-
tudes of genre and for indulging in anachronism and
cally yet unthinkingly phenomenological. In fact,
willful distortions of the text.
there was little explicitly phenomenological criticism
around. In Lentricchia’s own chapter on phenomenol- 10 Barthes, “Science versus Literature,” 897. For
ogy, before discussing continental theorists such as discussion, see Culler, “The Linguistic Foundation” in
Husserl, Sartre, and Heidegger, he mentions only the Structuralist Poetics, 3–31.
French critic Georges Poulet, and then J. Hillis Miller.
11 Lévi-Strauss, “L’analyse structurale,” 39–41.
Miller’s books The World of Charles Dickens (1958),
The Disappearance of God: Five 19th Century Writers 12 Lévi-Strauss, “Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel
(1963), and Poets of Reality: Six 20th Century Writers Mauss,” xvi.
(1965) study the imaginative world of these authors,
adopting the methods of the Geneva School critics 13 Lévi-Strauss, “L’analyse structurale,” 37.
(Poulet, Marcel Raymond, Jean-Pierre Richard et. 14 Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn, 201, 210.
al.), who conceived of criticism as identification with
the imaginative experience of the author. But Miller’s 15 Barthes, S/Z, 215. It is important to stress that in
was a lonely voice: phenomenology was neither a Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth, 56–75), Barthes
dominant critical position nor a dogmatic one. In makes very clear the distinction between criticism,
France, where phenomenology was much more of a which seeks to discover meaning, and poetics or, as
presence, it was generally contrasted with structural- he calls it, the science of literature, which explores the
ism, not poststructuralism. conditions of meaning.

5 Leitch, Theory Matters, 3. 16 De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 6.

6 “In France the label ‘poststructuralism’ as used 17 “To distinguish the epistemology of grammar
in international intellectual discourse is unknown’” from the epistemology of rhetoric is a redoubtable
(Angermuller, Why There Is No Poststructuralism, 20). task” (De Man, 7).
He also reports that a search in the Harvard Library
18 De Man, 9.
catalogue “for the ‘poststru’ syntagma yields 234 titles,
of which 82 percent are English” and none French (6). 19 Yeats, “Among School Children,” 214.
44 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

20 De Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” 11. 40 For a discussion of this complex topic, see
Culler, On Deconstruction, 110–56.
21 De Man, 10.
41 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 427/293.
22 De Man, 8.
42 Derrida, 427–28/293.
23 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 411/280.
In this and all following citations of this work, the 43 Derrida, 428/293.
first number corresponds to the original French text
44 Derrida somewhat grandiloquently concludes
in L’Écriture et la différence and the second to the
the essay by situating himself among those who “turn
English translation published in Writing and Difference
their eyes away when faced with the as yet unnam-
(which is more accurate than that published earlier in
able which is proclaiming itself and which can do so,
The Structuralist Controversy).
as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only
24 Cusset, French Theory, 31. For further discussion under the species of the nonspecies, in the form-
of Cusset’s presentation of the issue, see below. less, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity
(la forme informe, muette, infante et terrifiante de la
25 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 411/280.
monstruosité)” (429/293).
26 Derrida, 412/280.
45 In “Force et signification” (“Force and Significa-
27 Derrida, 413/281-2. tion”), Derrida declares: “Comme nous vivons de la
fécondité structuraliste, il est trop tôt pour fouetter
28 Derrida, 414/282. notre rêve” (“Since we take nourishment from the
29 Derrida, 417/284. fecundity of structuralism, it is too soon to dispel our
dream”) (Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence, 11/4).
30 Derrida, 416/284.
46 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 417/284.
31 Derrida, 417/284.
47 Cusset, French Theory, 31.
32 Derrida, 417/284.
48 When Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (The
33 Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” 329. Order of Things) became a bestseller, a famous
cartoon by Maurice Henry in the Quinzaine Littéraire
34 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 419/286.
(July 1, 1967) depicted Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss,
35 Derrida, 426–27/292. As in other such passages, and Barthes as “Natives” wearing grass skirts sitting in
jeu was originally translated as freeplay: “the freeplay a circle in the jungle: the circle of structuralists.
of repetition and the repetition of freeplay” (Macksey
49 Foucault writes that if “by substituting the analy-
and Donato, The Structuralist Controversy, 264). I
sis of rarity for the search for totalities, the descrip-
discuss this problem below.
tion of relations of exteriority for the theme of the
36 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 427/292. transcendental foundation, the analysis of accumula-
tions for the quest of the origin, one is a positivist,
37 Derrida, 427/292.
then I am quite happy to be one” (The Archaeology of
38 Derrida, 427/292. Knowledge, 125).

39 Cusset, French Theory, 31. 50 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 121–23.

Poststructuralist Turn? >> Jonathan Culler 45

51 See Barthes’s Essais critiques, which contain

several essays on the nouveau roman and its successful
outplaying of the conventions of the novel. His S/Z is
an analysis of Balzac’s “Sarrazine.”

52 The most notable of these regularities is the way

texts subvert the meanings they affirm or the assump-
tions on which they rely.
46 DIACRITICS >> 2019 >> 47.4

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IMAGE (next pages): Cai Guo-Qiang

PRIMEVAL FIREBALL: THE PROJECT FOR PROJECTS,
1991
Seven gunpowder drawings. Gunpowder on paper, mounted
on wood as folding screens.
These gunpowder drawings are, from left to the right, front to
the back: Fetus Movement II: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 9
(1991), Rebuilding the Berlin Wall: Project for Extraterrestrials
No. 7 (1991), Inverted Pyramid on the Moon: Project for
Humankind No. 3 (1991), Reviving the Ancient Signal Towers:
Project for Extraterrestrials No. 8 (1990), A Certain Lunar
Eclipse: Project for Humankind No. 2 (1991), The Vague
Border at the Edge of Time/Space Project (1991) and Bigfoot’s
Footprints: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 6 (1990).

Installation view at P3 art and environment, Tokyo, 1991

Photo by Yoshihiro Hagiwara, courtesy Cai Studio