Chapter Jacques Derrida of Critical Theory 4: Deconstruction by Literary Criticism

talks a lot about ways you might get rid of, or explode, the signifier / signified relation, i.e. the sign. There is no need to concern oneself with this.

The Universal and the Particular

On p. 86 he switches gears a little, and talks about ethnology as an example of a decentring system. Ethnology (or anthropology) began as a way for Western European societies to proclaim themselves as the "centres" of civilization - to compare all other cultures to what Western Europe had accomplished. That's called "ethnocentrism" (to assume your culture is the measure or standard of all other cultures). But then ethnologists started seeing other cultures as autonomous, as existing on their own terms, and not necessarily in relation to Western European culture as the "centre." They started to see relative value of each culture, not its relational value. This moment is the equivalent, in ethnology, to the "rupture" Derrida talks about in philosophy. Mostly Derrida uses this introduction of ethnology as a way to get to his main topic, which is Claude Levi-Strauss' structural view of the opposition between nature and culture. Remember, Levi-Strauss as a structuralist saw the basic structures of myth (and hence of all aspects of culture) as binary oppositions, pairs of ideas that gave each other value: light / dark (light has value or meaning because it's not darkness, and vice versa), male / female, culture / nature, etc. In looking at the nature / culture dichotomy, Levi-Strauss defines "natural" as that which is universal, and "cultural" as that which is dictated by the norms of a particular social organization. The rule of binary opposites is that they have to be opposites, so nature / culture, or universal / specific, have to always be absolutely separate.

And here Levi-Strauss discovers what Derrida calls a "scandal" - an element of social organization that belongs to both categories. The prohibition against incest is universal - every culture has one. But, it's also specific - every culture works out the laws of incest prohibition in its own way. So how can something be both universal and particular, both nature and culture? As I said in the last lecture, this is the heart of deconstruction. In a nutshell, deconstruction looks for binary pairs of oppositions - things that are supposed to stay neatly on their own side of a slash. Then they look for places, or examples, where something disrupts that neat slash - something that fits on both sides of the slash, or an opposition where there's one thing on one side and more than one thing on another side (or a blank, something without an opposition). These things are good, according to deconstructionists, because they deconstruct a structure. If the stability of a structure depends on these binary oppositions, if you shake those oppositions and make them unstable, you shake up the whole structure. Or, in Derrida's terms, you put the elements into "play."