Structure, Sign & Play

Derrida first gave the lecture 'Structure, Sign & Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' to an audience at John Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1966 and it was first published (in French) the following year in the collection L'écriture et la différence, at the heart of what Derrida referred to in an interview given that same year (later published in Positions) as "the grammatological opening" (in reference to the book De la Grammatologie also published in 1967 – Derrida explained in the same interview how his three publications of that year formed a variously interlocking whole). However, in addition to this personal philosophical context, the lecture not only announced Derrida onto the international scene, but launched him into the middle of a heated debate on the question of "structuralism", which the conference at John Hopkins had been convoked in order to address (other contributors included Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov and Jacques Lacan). The lecture was first published in English in 1970 in the conference proceedings, The Structuralist Controversy, and it was in these terms that much of Derrida's work during this period was understood within the English-speaking world, despite his tendency to reject either the structuralist or post-structuralist designations.

Derrida opened the essay with a discussion of an "event", which he described as "a rupture and a redoubling". This event had directly to do with the question of structure in the intellectual discourse of the day, "the structurality of structure". Before this event structure had "always been neutralized or reduced ... by a process of giving it a centre or of referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin". The purpose of this reduction of structure to a "centre", Derrida explained, had been to "limit ... the play of the structure". However, adopting a now-familiar deconstructive idiom, he argued that the old form of structuralism only achieved this limitation by making the centre, "paradoxically, [both] within the structure and outside it" - ie. "contradictorily coherent". Play was therefore only possible "on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude" and structure had to be considered "as a series of substitutions" or "a linked chain of determinations".

The event, on the other hand, was the thinking of structure (its "repetition") and the rejection of the centre – in Derrida's words, "the moment when language invaded the universal problematic". More specifically, Derrida referred to three thinkers, "as indications only", of this moment in "its most radical formulation": Nietzsche ("critique of ... truth"), Freud ("critique of consciousness") and Heidegger ("destruction of ... presence"). However, in an extremely important passage Derrida was careful to point out that any discourse of this type remains "trapped in a kind of circle" wherein it must adopt the very language of that which it seeks to destroy:

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.

As an illustration Derrida discussed the concept of "sign", "as sign-of, a signifier referring to a signified, a signifier different from its signified". The problem he identified was that if we reject the "transcendental or privileged signified", as is the temptation, we undermine the concept of the sign in its very formation. The "opposition" between signifier and signified can be understood "first and foremost" as the metaphysical "reduction" of the "sensible" signified into the "intelligible" signifier, but if we undo that relation, thus making the signified synonymous with its signifier, meaning itself (and therefore critique) becomes impossible. Of course, there are a number of ways of engaging in this kind of critique (what we might call tenses), which explains why the event has lasted so long and adopted a variety of forms, but that fact serves only to demonstrate the necessity of this "paradox".

At this stage Derrida sought to extend this general overview into an analysis of the contemporary "human sciences" by focusing on the work undertaken by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the field of "ethnology". As Derrida explained, ethnology provides a practical example of "the destruction of the history of metaphysics", which he tied closely to "the critique of ethnocentrism" (ie. "European culture"). Nevertheless, ethnology remains "a European science employing traditional concepts, however much it may struggle against them", and can thus be seen as the "discourse" with the closest "critical relation" to its tradition. Likewise, Lévi-Strauss proves an intriguing figure given that his work "weighs heavily on the contemporary theoretical situation". For example, throughout his career Lévi-Strauss sought to make use of "the opposition between nature and culture" while at the same time refusing to accept it outright, as in the case of his analysis of "the incest prohibition".

What is clear is that "language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique" and that this critique has two possible strategies: (1) "systematic and historical questioning" of its oppositional "concepts"; (2) "conserving all these old concepts within the domain of empirical discovery" and thus "treating them as tools" rather than absolutes. The second of these strategies is what Lévi-Strauss called "bricolage", which Derrida described as "the necessity of borrowing one's concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined" (the disjunction between the terms "coherent" and "ruined" being manifest). In effect, bricolage is not only the impossibility of totalisation as such, but also the rejection of "reference to a centre", which Derrida demonstrated in his analysis of The Raw and the Cooked, wherein the mythical structure is marked by "shadows and virtualities which are elusive, unactualizable, and nonexistent in the first place". In other words, in order to do justice to its subject matter "structural discourse on myths ... must have the form of that of which it speaks". Yet this self-referential discourse leads us to the "inevitable question" of the "epistemological requirment", which "cannot be answered" without problematising the relationship between theories and mythologies that Lévi-Strauss took for granted.

The particular theoretical consequence of this unthinking assumption in the work of Lévi-Strauss was an uncertain relationship between "structural schemata" and "experience", which Derrida traced via the concept of "totalization" as it appeared in The Raw and the Cooked. According to Lévi-Strauss, totalization is defined either as "useless" or as "impossible": on the one hand, "the empirical endeavour" encounters "a finite richness which it can never master", while, on the other, "the nature of the field ... excludes totalization". In this latter case, the finite field is determined by that which is "missing" – "a centre which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions" – and functions instead through "the movement of supplementarity". Here Derrida defined supplementarity, in much the same sense as in Of Grammatology, as "a vicarious function" – what Lévi-Strauss called "overabundance". The result is a concept of "play" that "is always caught up in a tension" (the term "play" is sometimes translated as "freeplay", but I think this covers over the important reference to gaming that Derrida intended and which he considered so central to the work of Lévi-Strauss).

The first kind of tension is "with history", which is viewed, "paradoxically, in complicity with that philosophy of presence to which it was believed history could be opposed". History is shown to have been incorporated within a "classical" metaphysics as the idea of "a diversion between two presences" and thus cannot be deployed unproblematically in any effort to go beyond metaphysics. In the case of Lévi-Strauss and the particular version of that event which Derrida was attempting to analyse in the human sciences ("this 'structuralist' moment") the tension with history derives from "the respect for structurality, for the internal originality of the structure". In this sense, it is only through "the concepts of chance and discontinuity" that change occurs. "Like Rousseau [and Husserl], [Lévi-Strauss] 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."

Following on from this tension with history, play also finds itself opposed to "presence" as its "disruption", as "play of absence and presence". However, Derrida also asserted a more radical conception of play "before the alternative of presence and absence" and recognised both of these senses of play in the work of Lévi-Strauss and in structuralism more generally. In an evocative passage, he described their philosophical features:

Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, this structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is thus the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the non-centre otherwise than as loss of the centre. And it plays the game without security. For there is a sure play: 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.

Instead of an "interpretation" that "dreams of deciphering the truth", Derrida instead advocated an understanding that "affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism" and with it "metaphysics" and "ontotheology". Nevertheless, he refused to see this as a choice between the two strategies, partly because, as we have seen, this movement beyond remains provisional and uncertain, subject to the whims of "differance", but also because at the moment that Derrida gave his lecture the "birth" towards which he was hinting was "as yet unnamable" and still only "in the offing". Perhaps, then, the question which this poses for us concerns the form which this "monstrosity" has taken in the intervening half-century.