cull er on gramma to logy saussure

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Structuralism and GrammatologyAuthor(s): Jonathan CullerSource: boundary 2, Vol. 8, No. 1, The Problems of Reading in Contemporary AmericanCriticism: A Symposium (Autumn, 1979), pp. 75-86Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303140 .

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Structuralismand Grammatology

Jonathan CullerIn organizing this conference the editors of boundary 2 haveasked us to consider the situation of contemporary American criticism, inwhich, as they say, various methods and rhetorics have been competing toreplace the New Criticism. As one of the opening speakers, my job is to

utter some debatable propositions so that they can be debated: I'm goingto make tendentious remarks about the relationship between some ofthese competing modes of discourse. I chose my title because I had in-tended to concentrate on two competing discourses, which can be calledroughly the structuralist and deconstructionist, and to look at a point ofintersection, a moment of competition: Derrida's reading of Saussure inDe la grammatologie. Though I shall do this briefly in order to discuss therelationship between structuralism and deconstruction, I respond to myplace on the program by casting my net a bit wider and addressing thelarger topic which the organizers call "The Question of Formalism: FromAesthetic Distance to Difference." In the competition among modes ofdiscourse to replace the New Criticism, what has happened to formalism?I think I can report that it is alive and well, doing very nicely.

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Back in 1970 Geoffrey Hartman published a book entitled BeyondFormalism-hoping, perhaps, that everyone who was disenchanted withthe New Criticism would buy it. But it turned out that what lay beyondformalism was more formalism. Indeed, as he argued in the title essay, thefaults of those who have been called formalists "are due not to theirformalism as such but rather to their not being formalistic enough." Andhe concluded that "to go beyond formalism is as yet too hard for us andmay even be ... against the nature of understanding."1This is not a surprising conclusion. One might even say that to asophisticated formalist, to one interested in the form of his own criticalactivity, it should be apparent in advance that beyond formalism lie onlyother formalisms (and perhaps one could also argue that before or in frontof formalism there lies, already, formalism: "toujours ddj/.") Now what isinteresting about this situation is not the paradox itself-that beyondformalism there lies only more formalism (though for many of us thisparadox may be a small erotic fillip)-but the fact that this paradoxicalsituation can be explained in two different ways. Let me briefly sketchthese two accounts of why it might be impossible to go beyond formalismand then reflect on their implications.The first account would say that formalism is the desire to ex-plore the relations within a work or group of works, the desire to continuethat exploration and to postpone for as long as possible the move whichtreats the work as means to some end. Since criticism inevitably makesthat move and tells us what the work is an example of, what experience itproduces or what truths it embodies-since criticism inevitably does this,this move does not lie beyond formalism, as an alternative to it, but is, onthe contrary, a telos for formalist discourse. What lies beyond any givenformalism are new ways of exploring an order of relations and of post-poning the move which designates the closure of that order.By this way of thinking, the New Criticism was not formalisticenough in that it restricted the relations it would consider to those be-tween parts or features of a single work. Making the unity of the individualwork its goal-what criticism had to demonstrate-it closed off the investi-gation of relations and interplay at a certain point to produce a thematicstatement. While denouncing what he called the "Heresy of Paraphrase,"Cleanth Brooks argued that the "characteristic unity of a poem lies in theunification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total andgoverning attitude." The poet "comes to terms with experience;" thepoem is a resolution of conflicts.2 The formalism of the New Critics wasdesigned to bring readers to the point at which a mimetic claim could bemade for the poem: that it evoked a unification of experience: The poet'stask, says Brooks, "is finally to unify experience. He must return to us theunity of experience itself as man knows it in his own experience."3

Now in the perspective of the first account of formalism oneobjects to the limitation imposed by the New Critics on the investigation

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of formal relations. Thus Hartman's attempt to go beyond Brooks's formal-ism involved, as he said, "a formalistic exercise in literary history."4 Thequestion of whether Wordsworth's Lucy poems return to us the unity ofexperience is postponed and they are read as critical revisions or trans-formations of 18th century lyrics. Nor is there any reason to stop here.One can have recourse to a wider intertextuality, attempting to relate thepoem or poems to the institution of literature in general: its conventions,its most common structural models, its figurative modes. At this point, ofcourse, one has a program which in one version has been called RussianFormalism and in another Structuralism, where a work can be submittedto extended formal analysis, studied in relation to the various properties ofliterary discourse which it exemplifies. The moment or point of total-ization may be postponed for a very long time. Indeed, in works of poeticswhich explicitly seek to avoid interpretation, the strategy may be simplyto label the work as an example of literary discourse. This is a very ab-stract totalization, but it still functions as a non-formal telos commandingthe activity of formal analysis. That is to say, it imposes a closure bypositing a content: the work can be seen as exploring, modifying, and thuscommenting upon the systems of language and literature. There is always acontent, even if it be only "I am a work of literature."5 By this viewwhich I have been sketching, the New Critics stopped too soon, ignoringvast orders of formal relationships, which structuralism, for example, setout to explore.

The second account of why one can not go beyond formalismwould take a different tack, arguing that whenever criticism tries toidentify a content conveyed by a form, it deludes itself and ends upreproducing a form. When one thinks one has isolated a content all one hasin fact done is to translate one form or structure into another. One of themore familiar versions of this argument is deployed against Marxist criticsand others committed to notions of representation: that what they appealto as History, the solid content which a work represents, is as problematica narrative construct as that from which they were appealing, and theyhave not moved out of the order of textuality at all. A more complexversion of this argument would be that any attempt to escape formalismby asserting what a text really means is an allegorization which, in general,can be shown to have been deconstructed by the text itself, so that themove which asserts a determinate referentiality is not a move beyondformalism but a predictable move within the orbit of formalism.

I have left these two lines of argument very abstract because I amnot at the moment trying to convince anyone of the truth or falsity ofeither. I am interested in the fact that there are two different ways ofarguing that one can not go beyond formalism and in the different assump-tions which mark these two lines of argument. The first made use of anotion of content (though a very relativistic one) as a kind of boundarywhich made formal analysis possible. The second, on the other hand,

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claimed that anything which was identified as content could be shown tobe just more form. The first treated the distinction between form andcontent as a variable one but insisted on the importance of making it,whereas the second insisted that the variability of the distinction made itinappropriate and vitiated any conclusions based on it. As is doubtlessapparent, one can identify these two modes of argument with structural-ism and deconstruction respectively, and it is perhaps easier to show theappropriateness of these identifications if we change terms and instead oftalking about form and content talk about signifier and signified.Structuralism insists on the difference between signifier and signi-fied: indeed, the radical difference and then arbitrary association of signi-fier and signified is the basis of its account of the sign. Deconstruction, onthe other hand, demonstrates that any signified is itself a signifier and thatthe signifier is already a signified, so that signs cannot be authoritativelyidentified and isolated. However, by approaching the problem in terms ofform and content rather than signifier and signified, one can see thesemovements as part of the larger "question of formalism" and one canexplicate, in part, an apparently anomalous situation: structuralism anddeconstruction seem in various ways opposed to one another; each ofthem is opposed to the New Criticism (whose faults are usually said toinvolve excessive formalism); nevertheless both can be identified with theimpossibility of going beyond formalism.

Let me now consider more directly the relationship betweenthese competing discourses by focusing on a situation of competition,Derrida's reading of Saussure in De la grammatologie.6 The main lines ofDerrida's argument are by now, I imagine, well-known: he reveals inSaussure a powerful logocentrism and phonocentrism on the one hand,and on the other the elements of a powerful critique of logocentrism andphonocentrism. On the one hand, Saussure is adamant in his condem-nation of writing as derivative and corrupt-both inessential and danger-ous. He privileges voice. Yet when he tries to explain the nature oflanguage he is led to draw his illustrations from writing, and he asserts,unequivocally, that in the linguistic system there are only differences,without positive terms-a principle that sorts ill with the logocentric privi-leging of voice. It is, as I say, well known that Derrida's reading revealsthese contradictory strains in the Cours de linguistique ge'nrale, which isthe founding text for structural linguistics and structuralism. What isperhaps less well understood are the implications of Derrida's brilliant andscrupulous reading. Indeed, it is often taken as an attack on Saussure, justas John Searle has taken Derrida's reading of Austin as an attack onAustin.7 We think of a deconstructive reading as an attack because weassume that self-contradiction (the self-deconstruction which a decon-structive reading reveals in a text) invalidates any intellectual enterprise.But one of the effects of deconstructive readings is to have shown us thatthe power and pertinence of a text is not inconsistent with the presence in

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it of a self-deconstructive movement. On the contrary, the power andpertinence of a text may depend to a considerable extent on the fact thatit deconstructs the philosophy in which it is implicated.In saying this, what am I saying about Saussure? First, I amsaying, as Derrida shows, that the presence in Saussure of two motifs orlines of argument is not merely fortuitous: the result of accident or error.They are in a relationship of solidarity (albeit of solidarity that can lead tono synthesis), the solidarity of an aporia. It is important to understandwhy one line of thought implies the other.

In Saussure's argument, the further and the more rigorously hepresses his investigation of the nature of linguistic units, the more he is ledto deny that the linguistic signifier is in any way phonic, that sound itself,as material element, can belong to the linguistic system; he is led to theconclusion that in the linguistic system there are only differences with nopositive terms.8 It does not follow from this analysis, however, thatSaussure's privileging of voice-his designation of writing as a represen-tation of a representation which distorts that which it represents-is anunfortunate error which might have been avoided. The theory of the sign,which makes possible the Saussurian and post-Saussurian analysis oflanguage, requires a privileging of voice. Why is this so? Because linguisticanalysis (and by extension, semiological analysis, structural analysis)depends on the possibility of identifying signs-on the possibility of de-termining, for example, that bet is one sign and pet is another. The identi-fication of signs cannot be carried out on the plane of the signifier alone,because the question is what portions of the signifying plane count assignifying units. To identify signs, then, one must be able to identifysignifieds. A sequence is a signifier only if it is correlated with a concept ofsignified. We know bet and pet are different signifiers because each hasassociated with it a different signified. And if we ask how we know this, atwhat place or moment this association is given, the answer will ultimatelyrefer to the moment of speech, the moment of utterance, when signifierand signified seem simultaneously present, unequivocally associated. WhenI speak, my words are not external, material objects which I first hear andthen interpret. At the moment of utterance my words seem transparentsignifiers which do not separate me from my thought; at the moment ofspeech consciousness seems present to itself; concepts present themselvesdirectly, as signifieds which my words will express for others. Voice, asDerrida says, "is the unique experience of the signified producing itselfspontaneously, from within the self, and nevertheless, as signified concept,in the element of ideality or universality."9Since the possibility of grasping or identifying signifieds is neces-sary to the semiotic and structuralist project, it is no accident that struc-turalist theory should find itself implicated in phonocentrism and logo-centrism. It is neither an accident nor, I want to insist, a mistake-anincorrect move. Let me quote another passage from the Grammatology:

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The privilege of the phone does not depend on a choicethat could have been avoided. It responds to a momentof economy (let us say of the 'life' of 'history' or ofbeing-as-self-relationship'). The system of 's'entendre-parler' through the phonic substance-which presentsitself as the non-exterior, non-mundane and thereforenon-empirical or contingent signifier-has necessarilydominated the history of the world during an entireepoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, theidea of world-origin that arises from the differencebetween the worldly and the non-worldly, the outsideand the inside, ideality and non-ideality, universal andnon-universal, transcendental and empirical, etc.10These are large claims. They may become more comprehensible ifone notes that oppositions such as inside/outside, worldly/non-worldly,

transcendental/empirical depend on a point of differentiation, a line ofdivision where, for example, inside and outside meet: a point from whichor with reference to which the difference between inside and outside canbe conceived. The claim is that the moment of speech, where signifier andsignified seem given together, where inner and outer are for a momentjoined, serves as the point of reference in relation to which all thesedistinctions can be posited. The privileging of speech is thus the basis ofour "logocentric" metaphysics.Derrida does not argue that Saussure was mistaken in assertingthe primacy of voice and founding linguistic analysis on the necessarilylogocentric notion of the sign. On the contrary, Derrida's analyses of theubiquity of logocentrism-even Georges Bataille can be shown ultimatelyto be a Kantian-show that analysis is necessarily logocentric, that even themost rigorous critiques of logocentrism cannot escape, since the conceptsthey must use are part of the system being deconstructed. There are, ofcourse, various ways of resisting or playing with this system that onecannot escape, but it would be an error to suggest that Derrida and decon-struction had provided us with an alternative to structuralism and logo-centrism. Grammatology, Derrida has said, is not a new discipline whichcould replace a logocentric semiology; "it is the name of a question."111Indeed, Derrida's discourse is a series of strategic manoeuvres and displace-ments in which he modifies his terms, producing a chain of related butnon-identical operators-differance, supplement, trace, hymen, espace-ment, greffe, parergon, etc.-to prevent any of them from becoming con-cepts of a new science.

Derrida's reading of Saussure is an exploration of the self-deconstruction of linguistics and semiotics. Indeed, in the interview inPositions entitled "Semiologie et grammatologie" he identifies his doublescience or double reading not with a mode of discourse which would lie

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outside or beyond semiology but with a special practice or attention withsemiology: "One can say a priori that in every semiotic proposition orsystem of research metaphysical presuppositions will cohabit with criticalmotifs, by virtue of the fact that up to a certain point they inhabit thesame language. Grammatology would doubtless be less another science, anew discipline charged with a new content or a new and delimited domainthan the vigilant practice or exercise of this textual division ('la pratiquevigilante de ce partage textuel')."1 2In order to make apparent the implications for literary criticismof what I have been saying, I ought to explain the polemical thrust of myargument and identify the line of thought that I am rejecting. I think thereare two positions which my account of the relationship between structu-ralism and deconstruction is implicitly criticizing. The first general po-sition is one with which boundary 2 often flirts. If I were to give it a namefor ease of reference, I might call it "lhab Hassan," or perhaps "The PostPosition." This is a form of historical optimism which says-naively in myview-"we're post-structuralist, post-modernist, post-historical, post-logocentric; we're rid of all those old scientific and logocentric hang-ups,beyond it all." Proponents of "lhab Hassan" believe, as Eugenio Donatorecently put it, though he does not himself endorse this position, that forthem "language sheds the burden of nostalgia and on the contrary accent-uates its own playfulness, proclaiming unashamedly its incapacity tocontrol its tropology."13 Against "lhab Hassan" one would cite Derridahimself, whose analyses are the best argument against the possibility ofgoing beyond logocentrism. Attempts to escape may be extremely interest-ing or very boring; what is certain is that to believe one has escaped isnaive.

The other position I am opposing is one I take more seriously.Since it's more diffuse and anonymous I will call it "George." "George"says that we need not take note of structuralism any more because it hasbeen superseded by deconstruction, which has shown, among other things,that structuralists were wrong to think they could work out a science ofliterature. Deconstructionists use a lot of jargon, refer to too many philo-sophers, especially Germans, and go too far in their interpretations, but atleast they see that their job is to interpret texts. "George" is, I suppose, asort of native American know-nothing version of the position put forwardby Hillis Miller in 1976 when he argued that critics influenced by conti-nental criticism could be divided into the

Socratic, theoretical, or canny critics, on the one hand,and Apollonian/Dionysian, tragic, or uncanny critics, onthe other. Socratic critics are those who are lulled by thepromise of a rational ordering of literary study on thebasis of solid advances in scientific knowledge aboutlanguage.... For the most part these critics share the

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Socratic penchant, what Nietzsche defined as "theunshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic,can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and thatthought is capable not only of knowing but even ofcorrecting it".... Opposed to these are the critics whomight be called "uncanny".... These critics are nottragic or Dionysian in the sense that their work is wildlyorgiastic or irrational. No critic could be more rigorouslysane and rational, Apollonian, in his procedure, for ex-ample, than Paul de Man. . ... Nevertheless the thread oflogic leads . . . into regions which are alogical,absurd. ... Sooner or later there is the encounter withan "aporia" or impasse .... In fact, the moment whenlogic fails in their work is the moment of their deepestpenetration into the actual nature of literary language,or of language as such.14These are only the salient moments of an extended description ofthe two modes of criticism, but the point is clear: the canny and theuncanny critics both pursue a rigorously logical enquiry, but while theuncanny critics, who have no faith in logic, are rewarded with "deeppenetration" into the nature of literary language, the canny, with theirunshakable faith, are rebuffed. Miller's description makes the differencebetween structuralism and deconstruction primarily a matter of faith: ofinwardness, of intention. Both follow logic but those who have no faith inlogic are rewarded while those who have faith are punished for their confi-dence and, one presumes, pride-whose modern name, among literaryscholars, is "science."Leaving aside the question of faith, it is not hard to see that suchan account re-enacts the favorite New Critical battle between poetry orhumanism and science, and the history of this battle ought to make onesuspicious of a critical move in which science once again plays the villain.

One of the virtues of structuralism, after all, was to have called intoquestion that opposition between scientific and humanistic discourse, bothby analysing sciences as semiotic practices and by insisting that rigor andexplicitness had their place in all forms of enquiry. Deconstruction hascontinued the questioning of the opposition between scientific discourseand other sorts of discourse and has shown that literary discourse can havethe logical power and complexity that was previously thought the prero-gative of philosophy and the sciences.Miller sees structuralists as lulled by the promise of science into

an unshakable faith that thought can penetrate the deepest abysses ofbeing. It's hard to direct that accusation at Barthes and Genette, whomMiller mentions. The only description he offers of a critic deceived bythought is this: "a critic like Culler, with his brisk common sense and his

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reassuring notions of literary competence and the acquisition of con-ventions, his hope that all right-thinking people might agree on the mean-ing of a lyric or a novel, or at any rate share a 'universe of discourse' inwhich they could talk about it."15 There is again the question of faith:the hope that right-thinking people will agree.Since I'm accused of having an unshakable faith, let me proveMiller wrong by confessing that my faith has been shaken. Let me confess,more specifically, that my "faith in reason" has been shaken by Derrida'sarguments. For those interested in faith this may settle the matter, but Iwould prefer to argue about critical practice rather than faith and in-tention, and here I can say with confidence that structuralism need nothope that right-thinking people will agree on the meaning of a novel, alyric, or even on the meaning of a word. Structuralism can start fromwhatever effects it happens to observe: if it seems to be the case thatreaders disagree radically about the meaning of a lyric or a word, that iswhat requires explanation. Since no one has ever maintained that readingand interpretation were completely random processes, since on the con-trary it is our experience that these are social activities which do involve acertain learning, then in principle there are facts to be explained: in parti-cular, there are effects of communication to be accounted for. In de-scribing codes, conventions, and logics, structuralism and semioticsattempt to identify the structures necessary to account for events.This mode of explanation is a Saussurian legacy: confronted withspeech events, the analyst describes a system to account for the events ofparole. This is the primary mode of explanation in the human sciences andto it we owe much of our understanding. But as Saussure recognized, thismode of explanation leads ultimately to a paradox, for the system which iscited by way of explanation is not something given but is itself a result, aproduct of events. And when Saussure attempts to describe the relation-ship between historical events and the system, he specifies, on the onehand, that events do lead to modifications of the system but he mustmaintain, on the other hand, that "a diachronic fact is an event with itsown rationale; the synchronic consequences which may follow from it arecompletely foreign to it."'16 We reach, in fact, an aporia in which Saussuremust simultaneously assert and deny the causal connection between langueand parole. The logic of langue and parole, of synchronic and diachronic,of system and event, leads to the identification of a relationship whichthat logic cannot admit. We have here a version of the aporia of Derridiandifftrance: diff6rance is a difference always ready in place which makesmeaning possible and an act or event of differing which produces thedifferences that it presupposes.17It is another version of this aporia which Miller identifies as theinsight of his first uncanny critic, Paul de Man: "The aporia betweenperformative and constative language is merely a version of the aporiabetween trope and persuasion that both generates and paralyses rhetoricand thus gives it the appearance of a history."18 Indeed, Miller recognizes

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that structuralism leads to the same aporias as deconstruction. Arguingthat the crucial moment in the writings of the uncanny critics is the"encounter with an 'aporia,' " he writes, "In fact, the moment when logicfails in their work is the moment of their deepest penetration into thenature of literary language or of language as such. It is also the place whereSocratic procedures will ultimately lead if they are carried far enough."19If the point of arrival is the same in both cases, what is thedifference between the canny and the uncanny critics? Miller puts it interms of faith in reason, but it is also possible to argue, without raisingsuch difficult questions as whether Roland Barthes has more faith inreason than Paul de Man, that structuralists do not seek the aporias as suchor treat them as the primary insights. For structuralism, aporias are theresult of methodological distinctions, as between langue and parole,synchronic and diachronic, performative and constative, literal and figura-tive, which are indispensable to an analytical program but which turn outto be undermined by the results of the program which they made possible.Structuralists are interested in what can be done with concepts that proveto be both necessary and problematic. Though Miller praises uncannycritics for insights into the nature of literary language (which is whatcanny critics are seeking), uncanny critics usually present their work asinterpretations of individual texts, as a teasing out of its aporias. It is thecanny critic-in this case Miller-who moves from interpretation to poeticsby drawing the lessons about literary language and making the uncannycanny, transforming a "failure of logic" into an exemplary insight or amethodological concept. There is a relationship of interplay and solidarityhere, between structuralist and deconstructionist discourse, which is moreimportant for the present and the future of criticism than their allegeddiscontinuities.

Cornell University

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NOTES1 Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970),p. 42.2 Cleanth Brooks, The Well-WroughtUrn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947),p. 207.3 Brooks, The Well-WroughtUrn, p. 213.4 Hartman, Beyond Formalism, p. 49.5 The most obvious example of this move in structuralist writings is Levi-Strauss's contention that myths ultimately signify the human mind whichproduces them.6 De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), pp. 46-108. Of Grammatology,trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976), pp. 30-73.7 See J. Derrida, "Signature, Event, Context" and John Searle "Reiterating theDifferences: A Reply to Derrida," in Glyph I, (1977). Derrida's reply,"Limited Inc." is in Glyph II, (1977).8 For detailed exposition of Saussure's argument, see my Ferdinand de Saussure(New York: Penguin, 1977), pp. 10-48.9 Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 20.

10 Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 7-8.11 Derrida,Positions (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 22.12 Derrida,Positions, pp. 49-50.13 Eugenio Donato, "The Idioms of the Text," Glyph 2 (1977), p. 12.14 J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," The Georgia Review30 (Summer, 1976), 335-38.15 Miller, "Stevens' Rock," p. 335.16 Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique gdndrale (Paris: Payot, 1967),p. 121.17 See Derrida, "La Diffirance," in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit,1972), pp. 3-29.18 Miller, "Stevens' Rock," pp. 338-39.19 Miller, "Stevens' Rock," p. 338.

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