Deconstruction and Interpretation
One of the most insightful readings of the fate of structuralism in the aftermath of deconstruction is found in “Beyond Interpretation,” the lead essay in Jonathon Culler’s 1980 The Pursuit of Signs.
In the hands of its best practitioners, such as Paul de Man and Barbara Johnson, deconstruction is an interpretive method of unusual power and subtlety. [Culler footnotes this referring specifically to de Man’s Allegories of Reading and Johnson’s Défiguations du langage poetique]
In other hands there is always the danger that it will become a process of interpretation which seeks to identify particular themes, making undecidability, or the problem of writing, or the relationship between the performative and the constantive, privileged themes of literary works. [this seems to pretty much summarize about 90% of the literary criticism of the 1990s, as far as I’m concerned]
But there is a hopeful note in Culler’s appraisal of the use of other general methods. While I have little interest in Marxist criticism, what he has to say about the fate of structuralism engages me.
It seems that just because it easily becomes a method of interpretation, deconstruction has succeeded in America in a way that Marxism and Structuralism have not. Marxism is committed to the immense and difficult project of working out the complicated processes of mediation between base and superstructure. When enlisted to interpret a particular work it is bound to seem, as we say, “vulgar.” [I prefer to believe that Culler means this in the sense of “popular” or attributable to the masses. Marxist criticism always deals in sweeping generalities which are ill suited to specific interpretations—I for one couldn’t care less about class structures in Hardy’s Wessex.]
Structuralism is also committed to large-scale projects, such as elaborating a grammar of plot structure or the possible relations between story and discourse, and has seemed irrelevant except in so far as its concepts and categories can be “applied” in the activity of interpretation. The possibility of pursuing these larger projects depends on our ability to resist the assumption that interpretation is the task of criticism.
The last bit there is the most crucial to me. I keep reading applications of semiotics and/or narrative theory to the photo-texts of the early twentieth century. Without fail, the task at hand is to interpret the “hidden” meanings of these books. I have no interest in that. I think that the surface of these texts has been left largely untouched. A project which examines the relationships between image and text (rather than interpreting them) might lead to a better understanding of how the visual and textual combine.
Being in a “practical” discipline, I can see as contributing to how such combinations might be taught as an extension of user-centered design. How are visual elements on a page “read” compared to the textual elements? I think it goes far beyond the simple matter of coherent color coding of design elements. Picture impact our reaction to a page; they can no longer be thought of sovereign entities, separate and apart from discourse as a whole. I believe that the “concepts and categories” of structuralism are essential tools for the task of figuring out how they work.
I think there has been far too much “post” and far too little “structuralism.” In his later work, Eco admits that we may never have a “general” theory of semiotics. However, this does not preclude the usefulness of very specific applications of structuralist concepts—applications that have little to do with interpretation.
