Catherine Belsey POSTSTRUCTURALISM A Very Short Introduction OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2002 | ISBN 0-19-280180-5 13579 10 8642 Contents List of illustrations viii 1 Creatures of difference l 2 Difference and culture 23 3 Difference and desire 48 4 Difference or truth? 69 5 Dissent 89 References 109 Further reading 111 Glossary 113 List of illustrations 1 Alice and Humpty Dumpty, 1871 2 Illustration by John Tenniel in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (Macmillan, 1940) 2 The Interpretation of Dreams by Rene Magritte 14 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002. Collection of Jasper Johns. Photo © Jim Strong 3 Aliens turned, my son into a fish finger by Jacky Fleming 30 © Jacky Fleming. From What's the Big Idea? The Media (1998) by Belinda Hollyer and Jacky Fleming. Reproduced by permission of Hodder and Stoughton Ltd. 4 Greta Garbo as Queen Christina 45 bfi Collections 5 Audrey Hepburn 46 bfi Collections 6 Venus Blindfolding Cupid, c.1565, by Titian 60 Galleria Borghese, Rome / Bridgeman Art Library 7 Glas by Jacques Derrida 75 © Jacques Derrida (University of Nebraska Press, 1986) 8 Fountain by Marcel Duchamp 85 Succession Marcel Duchamp/ ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2002. © Tate, London, 2002 9 Courtyard of a House in Delft by Pieter de Hooch 101 National Gallery, London Chapter 1 Creatures of difference A question of meaning When Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty discusses the question of meaning with Alice in Through the Looking Glass, which of them is right? Humpty Dumpty engages Alice in one argument after another, just as if dialogue were a competition. Having demonstrated to his own satisfaction, if not Alice’s, that unbirthday presents are to be preferred because people can have them more often, he adds triumphantly, “There’s glory for you!’ Torn between the desire to placate him and good common sense, Alice rejoins, ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”.’ So Humpty Dumpty explains: ‘I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’” ‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument’’,’ Alice objected. ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether yon can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be Master -that’s all.’ Alice’s scepticism is surely justified? Meaning is not at our disposal, or we could never communicate with others. We learn our native language, and in the process learn to invoke the meanings other people use. Small children find out from those who already know how to distinguish ducks from squirrels: ducks are the ones that fly. And children make mistakes: aeroplanes fly, but they are not ducks. Glory is not a nice knock- down argument. . 1. Alice and Humpty Dumpty. Which of them is right? Language makes dialogue possible, but only on condition we use it appropriately, subscribing to the meanings already given in the language that always precedes our familiarity with it. As this exchange demonstrates, there is no such thing as a private language. Humpty Dumpty has to ‘translate’ his before he can communicate with Alice. Language and knowledge Language, understood in the broad sense of the term to include all signifying systems, including images and symbols, gives us access to information. Command of a new knowledge very often amounts to learning the appropriate use of a new vocabulary and syntax. To the extent that anyone understands economics, they demonstrate the fact by using its terms and arranging them in an appropriate order. A grasp of psychoanalysis means the ability to exchange words such as ‘unconscious’, ‘repression’, or ‘transference’ effectively. Mathematics, science, and logic have their own symbolic systems, and qualified practitioners of these disciplines know how to inhabit them. The examination system is above all a way of policing the profession, making sure that those who qualify to join it understand how its language or symbols are conventionally employed. Film directors and advertisers, meanwhile, know the meanings conveyed by pictures of vulnerable children or sleek sports cars. Language in this broad sense is also a source of social values. In learning to use words like ‘democracy’ and ‘dictatorship’ appropriately, for instance, Western children find out about political systems, but they also absorb as they do so the value their culture invests in these respective forms of government. For better or worse, Western children learn early on, without having to be explicitly taught, that dictatorship is oppressive and democracy so precious that it is worth fighting for. In many cultures, the flag is the visual indicator of a national identity that must be defended - by force, if necessary. Language and cultural change If language, in other words, transmits the knowledges and values that constitute a culture, it follows that the existing meanings are not ours to command. And yet is it possible that the disdainful Humpty Dumpty has a point after all? To reproduce existing meanings exactly is also to reaffirm the knowledges our culture takes for granted, and the values that precede us - the norms, that is, of the previous generation. Examination papers in Economics, Mathematics, or Film Studies are set and marked by existing practitioners, experts in the field, whose job it is to mark down misunderstandings and misuses of the conventional vocabulary. In this sense, meanings control us, inculcate obedience to the discipline inscribed in them. And this is by no means purely institutional or confined to the educational process. A generation ago campaigners for women’s rights recognized (not for the first time) the degree to which ‘woman’ meant domesticity, nurturing, dependence, and the ways in which anti-feminist jokes, for instance, reproduced the stereotypes of the helpless little girl or the ageing harridan. The question feminists confronted was precisely who was to be Master, as Humpty Dumpty puts it. In this particular case, however, his formulation was self- evidently not one we could adopt: the term ‘Master’ would hardly help the feminist cause, but ‘Mistress’ would not easily take its place, since it carried sexual connotations that detracted from the authority we were looking for. The right word in a new situation does not always readily present itself. Language sometimes seems to lead a life of its own. Words are unruly: “They’ve a temper, some of them,’ Humpty Dumpty goes on to observe. In this case, the masculine and feminine values were not symmetrical - and nor, of course, was the culture. Without supposing this was the only change necessary, we none the less set out to modify the language, annoying conservatives with coinages like ‘chairperson’ and ‘s/he’. We refused to laugh at misogyny, and ignored the taunts that we had no sense of humour. For a time, dialogue did indeed become the kind of competition Humpty Dumpty’s conversation exemplifies. Perhaps in a way it always is. Language is not in any sense personal or private. But individuals can alter it, as long as others adopt their changes. What, after all, do great poets, philosophers, and scientists do, but change our vocabulary? Shakespeare invented hundreds of words. New disciplines do the same. In the course of the 20th century, science successively named ‘electrons’, ‘protons’, ‘neutrons’, and ‘quarks’. Poststructuralism is difficult to the extent that its practitioners use old words in unfamiliar ways, or coin terms to say what cannot be said otherwise. This new vocabulary still elicits some resistance, but the issue we confront is how far we should let the existing language impose limits on what it is possible to think. Poststructuralism and language Poststructuralism names a theory, or a group of theories, concerning the relationship between human beings, the world, and the practice of making and reproducing meanings. On the one hand, poststructuralists affirm, consciousness is not the origin of the language we speak and the images we recognize, so much as the product of the meanings we learn and reproduce. On the other hand, communication changes all the time, with or without intervention from us, and we can choose to intervene with a view to altering the meanings - which is to say the norms and values - our culture takes for granted. The question is just the one Humpty Dumpty poses: who is to be in control? This Very Short Introduction will trace some of the arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture, and with them traditional accounts of what it is possible to know, as well as what it is to be a human being. Poststructuralism offers a controversial account of our place in the world, which competes with conventional explanations. The importance of language Most of the time the language we speak is barely visible to us. We are more concerned with what it can do: buy us a train ticket; persuade the neighbours to keep the noise down; get us off the hook when we’ve done something wrong. And yet few issues are more important in human life. After food and shelter, which are necessary for survival, language and its symbolic analogues exercise the most crucial determinations in our