Deconstruction: Critique of Structure

• "Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique."
• Deconstructive criticism aims to show that texts undermine attempts to have determinate meaning.
• It licenses the reader to produce personal meanings out of it (semantic 'freeplay').

Critique of Structure

• Structure and the word "structure" have long histories.
• The function of structure's center is to orient, balance, and organize; it also limits the play of the structure.
• The concept of a structure lacking a center is considered unthinkable.
• The center closes off the play it opens by forbidding the substitution of contents at the center.
• Classical thought held that the center is paradoxically within and outside the structure.
• A centered structure, representing coherence, is contradictorily coherent.
• Coherence in contradiction expresses desire.
• Centered structure is based on fundamental immobility, providing reassurance but also mastered anxiety.
• Anxiety arises from being implicated in the game of structure.
• The center can be called the origin or end (arche or telos).
• Repetitions, substitutions, transformations are taken from history and meaning.
• Metaphysics, like Western history, is the history of metaphors/metonymies.

Being as Presence

• Matrix of metaphysics is the determination of Being as presence.
• Names related to fundamentals designate an invariable presence (eidos, arche, telos, energeia, ousia, aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man).
• Rupture occurs when the structurality of structure has to be thought (repeated).
• Necessary to think law of central desire for a center, the process of signification which subs for it.
• Substitute which never entirely existed; now necessary to think no center and no natural site

Language and Discourse

• Moment when language invaded the problematic.
• In absence of center/origin, everything became discourse.
• Cannot surpass opposition between sensible and intelligible.
• The concept of the sign is always determined by opposition.
• There are two heterogeneous ways of erasing the difference between the signifier/signified.
• One way is reducing the signifier, the other is questioning the system where the reduction functioned.
• Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger worked within inherited concepts.

Human Sciences and Ethnology

• Ethnology could have been born at a moment where European culture dislocated.
• Cannot criticize ethnocentrism systematically w/o destroying the history of metaphysics.
• Ethnology is a European science that employs traditional concepts.
• Ethnologist accepts premises of ethnocentrism when he denounces them.
• Need critical rigor in relation to history of metaphysics and inherited concepts.
• Explicitly pose the problem of the state of a discourse's need for a heritage (for resources for deconstruction).
• Consider the texts of Claude Lévi-Strauss for critique of language

Nature vs Culture

• Choose the opposition of nature vs culture as a guiding thread.
• This opposition is very old, and the definition is that which is universal/spontaneous/independent belongs to nature, while that which depends on a system belongs to culture.
• Lévi-Strauss encounters something scandalous in Elementary Structures (incest prohibition is universal, but also a prohibition).
• Incest prohibition erases/questions what has always been self-evident from nature vs culture.
• All philosophical conceptualization is designed to leave the origin of incest prohibition in the unthinkable.
• Conceptualization is systematic with nature vs culture.

Critique of concepts

• One could question systematically + rigorously the history of concepts.
• Undertaking work of the philologist isn't the same as deconstructing concepts.
• Conserv all old concepts, denote limits, and treat as tools to be used; no truth value attributed.
• The language of the social sciences criticizes itself.
• One can separate method and truth.
• Double intention: Preserve something's truth value while criticizing it.
• Continue to contest what is opposed to nature vs culture.
• Call "bricolage" the means at hand that the Lévi-Strauss discourse uses.
• The bricoleur adapts for operation, changes when "necessary"
• This is a critique of language/ critical language.
• One would need to construct their language, syntax, lexicon (totality).
• One who breaks all forms of bricolage is seen as "theological"

Method and myth

• Bricolage is mythopoetic.
• Abandon all references to center/subject.
• Lévi-Strauss says from the start the Bororo myth is one of special importance, when in truth, it might be considered improper.
• No focus or source of myth as starting inspiration.
• Discourse on acentric structure of myth cannot have absolute subjects/centers.
• Must forego philosophical discourse that requires absolute back to source/center so it can imitate mythological thought and respect its rhythm.

Mythopoetic Function

• At this point that ethnographic bricolage "deliberately" assumes its mythopoetic function.
• Function makes philosophical vs epistemological requirement appear mythological.
• Must consider itself scientific to avoid ignoring empiricism and the problems that brings; could end up with contradictions of discourse.

Critique of Empiricism

• Structuralism claims to be a critique of empiricism.
• Not a single study proposed as "empirical essay" and can be completed or invalidated new info because double postulation is language on language
• One way of conceiving limits of totalization vs it being useless (judged in classical style subject)
• No longer form finite finitude - from standpoint concept of play which excludes totalization
• There's overabundance of significance, movement of supplementarily which helps with the movement/lack of origin and is vicarious (the supplement)
• "Supplementary allowance" needs distribute signification for complimentarily.
• Floating signifier is servitude of all finite thought.
• All social phenomena must be assimilated into a language with a simple purpose, not to explain/define and therefore cannot be captured by reason. It is a contradiction.

Play and Finitude

• The concept of play is important; it helps people see it.
• Problem: Reducing history causes problems + has complications related to metaphysics/philosophy of presence.
• Thematic: Historicity always required by the determination of Being/Presence, so suspected history and falling back from it puts history in brackets
• Algebraic Formality: algebraic formality and algebraic specification

Thematic Dualities

• A new structure and new system happens from a rupture with prior/cause- what makes the form specific.
• Must omit to discuss the problem of transition in structural movements + between brackets/ outside context (moment = discontinuous).
• Chance and Discountinuity: Chance and discontinuity need to be accounted for the structure where no prior cause/origin is accounted for, because everything is born from the void/discontinuity of the biological/ psychological
• Slow process still helps but needs to "set aside the context".
• Needs to conceive of an "overturning on nature". + setting aside.

Play & Disruption

• Beside that, there is tension due to interruption.
• An element of presence = something signifying of a presence as system, always play of "absence" + "presence" but still before alternative.
• If done best, play needs to be made of base on possibility
• There's always ethical and nostalgic presence + remorse.
• Sad themes and feelings over broken immediacy of structures, as opposed to joy of becoming where a new interpretations given.
• Nietzsche pointed out to there is not a full truth; need the inspiration of humanism

Interpretations

• No choice to make due to current region of historicity
• Need to continue to the current labor/conception that everyone is only receiving a glimpse of.