index Diagram Overview: protagonists and positions Introduction to Post/Structuralism Diagram: Post-War French Philosophy [back to top] Overview: protagonists and positions [back to top] Sartre: Humans are always to at least some extent capable of constituting a meaning of our own. They are historical agents, they make their own history. Lévi-Strauss: Sartre fails to realise that this conception of ourselves as historical agents is merely local and contingent, not a fundamental truth of human reality. Alhusser: The overall structure of a society is 'in the last instance' determined by the economic 'base'. Lacan: The Real is the truth that cannot be expressed because truth is always disturbing. The unconscious exists as a (metaphyssically) separate domain and has a structure/logic that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought and talk. Barthes: An effective myth 'naturalises' the mythological meaning: it is no longer merely a meaning, but rather a fact. Barthes' anaylsis of mythologies aim to reveal the intrest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning. 'Codes', sign systems that 'govern' a text, lead to the 'death of the author' but also to the explosion of the text into an endless succession of meanings. Foucault: The history of the human sciences has several fault lines wich separate basically three discursive formations or épistèmès: renaissance, classical and modern. But also: these should not be seen as totalities. Subjectivity is an effect of power, but it nevertheless 'posseses a reality'. Derrida: Différance: there is an illusory effect of meaning produced by neagation, but this effect is perpetually deffered because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning. Deleuze: How is it that subjectivities desire their own repression? But also anti-binarism (rhizome) and a-categorical thought: Foucault on Deleuze: "No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” Introduction to Post/Structuralism [back to top] In this presentation I will give an overview of French philosophy and its most important thinkers. I will try to draw some analogies between their thought and what we are doing in this course. Finally I will give my preliminary evaluation of the relation between the thought of the philosophers that I have presented, and the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy. My sketch of post-war philosophy is meant as a birds-eye-view. Many of you will probably more or less know the story and will thus notice that I go through it by means of huge simplifications, but it is beyond the goal of this presentation to give you the complete picture. I will only focus on the thinkers and concepts which might be useful for this course. The period directly following the second world war was dominated by Existentialism. Soon however this subject-centred school of philosophy, sometimes also called the philosophy of experience, which was popularised by writer-philosopher Sartre, is criticised by followers of another “school” of philosophy: the so called philosophy of the concept, of which Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem were important proponents. These latter “anti-foundational” thinkers pay special attention to the problem of objectivity. If there are no Cartesian certainties as grounding principles, can there be objectivity? Bachelard has a positive answer. It is not to be found in the individual self's intuition, but rather in considerations that convince all rational minds, thus not in the cogito (I think) but rather in the cogitamus (we think). It is this philosophy of the concept which offers an alternative to the phenomenology of Sartre and his Existentialism. It lies at the basis of the structuralist revolution of the 1960s. Structuralism is based on Ferdinand de Saussure's synchronic study of linguistics as laid out in the Cours de linguistique générale from 1916, based on the lecture notes of some of his students. Structuralism claims that a cultural phenomenon, like for instance literature, is a signifying system with an implicit systematic “grammar”. This is based on Saussure's distinction between parole, a specific utterance, and langue, which is the implicit system which underlies this utterance and which creates the possibility for members of a language community to understand each other's utterances. Lévi-Strauss was the first to take this idea from the realm of linguistics into the realm of the human sciences, in his specific case into anthropology. His example was followed many people but most prominently by Althusser, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault. I will deal with each of them shortly, and with only with respect to what I perceive to be relevant to our course. Althusser was an anti-humanist Marxist. Anti-humanist in the sense that he regarded the existentialist Marxism of Sartre as 'subjectivist mythology'. Individual experience is according to Althusser and other non-humanist Marxists a form of ideological distortion that cannot function as the basis of an objective theory of society. He does not deny the humanist inclinations of the earlier writings of Marx, but he focuses on the “mature” writings of Marx. Marx understood any society (or social formation) as made up of a “base” of economic forces (forces of production) and a “superstructure” of political, cultural, and intellectual objects and institutions. One of Althusser's important interventions is the relative autonomy of the superstructure for which he uses Freudian terminology. Despite this relative autonomy, however, the superstructures are ultimately determined by economic factors. Thus the underlying structure of society is economic. The structuralist assault on existentialism gave room for a further influence of Freud than this because Freud pointed towards the existence of mental realities outside the lived phenomenological consciousness. Lacan was the prime proponent of the merge between psychoanalysis and structuralism. For the purpose of this presentation it goes too far to delve deep into Lacan's reformulations of Freud, but I should try to give some overview of his thought, starting with his famous quote: “the unconscious is structured like a language”. This statement might be understood in the context of psychoanalytical therapy in which language is the only way to get to the unconscious. It does not mean that the unconscious is a language, it is like a language, a foreign language. The unconscious, we can learn from this analogy, is structured, not amorphous. It speaks, rhetorically, through dreams, mistakes and symptoms of the subject. This unconscious has priority in human existence, Lacan claims, thus he puts division, displacement, and alienation at the heart of human reality. The “I”, the conscious ego, only exists in relation to the “other”, the unconscious. This unconscious exists in a separate domain and has a 'logic' that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought or talk. Lacan distinguishes three dimensions in the psyche. It goes too far to define, and thus name all three of them, but I nevertheless want to name one of them: the real. The “Real” is what cannot be talked about. As soon as it is talked about it ceases to be the “Real”. It is the truth that we repress, says Lacan, because the truth is always disturbing. The real is Lacan's term for the inexpressible limit of language. It is the ultimate referent, the unatainable object of desire. It is this ultimate referent, which is not the penis as it is in Freud's rendering of the Oedipus-myth, but the phallus which in Lacan's reformulation of the Oedipus-complex ensures the stable relationship between the signifier and the signified. Thus, we could say, the phallus makes communication possible. This might all sound like a bit of mumbo-jumbo for those who have not heard it before but I reiterate it her because it contains some very important basic ideas for structuralist analysis and is has also provided the ground for the turn from Structuralism to poststructuralism to which I will come in a moment. The main thing that we need to remember is that whereas classical, Freudian, psychoanalysis aims to give the ego control over the unconscious and its drives and desires, Lacanian therapy aims towards the acceptance of the autonomy of the unconscious. It aims to show that it is an illusion to think that the ego and its objective world are realities. There is only the reality of the unconscious in which the world and the subject is constituted. Now we turn to two thinkers that both take a pivotal position in respect to the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism: Barthes and Foucault. They are seen as both structuralists ánd poststructuralists. What could be concluded is that the structuralist position does not hold. The passage form the one 'movement' towards the other can be situated somewhere around 1967, when Althusser notes in a foreword of a translation of an older book that the structure that he has build is to some extent reductive. In 1966 Foucault has writen Les Mots et les Choses which is still largely structuralist, but not long afterwards he also lets go of some of his ideas. The thought of Roland Barthes will point out the limits of structuralism. He introduces the term 'mythology' for a use of language or other signs to express a second-level meaning, one beyond the meaning primarily expressed by the sign. His analysis of mythologies aims to reveal the interest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning, thus what we would call agency. Barthes follows Saussure in that he regards a sign a composed of a signifier and a signified and stretches this concept out of pure linguistic boundaries as to include also non-linguistic signs. Think of a rose which signifies someone's passion for a loved one. The rose is the signifier and the passion the signified. This sign, Barthes says, can in turn be a the signifier in another sign. Think of the rose as a signifier for sentimentality. Barthes distinguishes between two levels, level of the linguistic system and the level of the mythological system. On this first level Barthes calls the sign a 'meaning', on the second, mythological, level, he calls it a 'form'. Thus what is on a linguistic level a sign, a unit of meaning, is on the mythological level “reduced” to the empty form, the signifier, which needs completion by a signified to have meaning. An effective myth, says Barthes, makes the reader unaware of the fact that a mythological meaning is just a meaning, just an interpretation out of myriad possible meanings/interpretations, but rather as part of nature, a fact. Thus the mythological meaning becomes reality. Something is no longer taken as a sign, but rather as a fact. Myth is particularly effective in capitalist societies because capitalism itself has taken on the mask of the natural: it is successfully presented as the way human beings are naturally rather than just as a contingent historical development. In his search for structures Barthes coins the term 'code'. A code is a sign system. What he has in mind are previous writings and practices of a culture that 'govern' a literary work. These codes in the end lead to Barthes' famous dictum “the death of the author”. In fact, he concludes, a text is “written” by the codes that underlie its production, than by an author. The author is unconsciously immersed in the codes embedded in the text. But here Barthes is forced to introduce the reader, because the reader, with his or her knowledge of the codes, has to construct the meaning of the text. Furthermore, he claims that behind a text, more than one code can be at work. An these different codes can also lead to conflicts and such. Thus rather than unifying a text, or finding an objective scientific structure that controls the text, the text comes to have multiple meanings. Thus as a result of using the structuralist method for textual interpretation, he discovers that there is no ultimate truth behind a text, but rather there is an endless succession of meanings. And as a result from the rise of the interest in Nietzsche, there is no longer one meaning that is more true than another. But we'll come to that. Foucault more or less makes the same movement from structuralism to poststructuralism. His Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things) of 1966 is regarded as one of the most important structuralist texts. In his 'archeological' history of the human sciences he postulates three, and tentatively four, discursive formations, the “épistèmès”, which could be characterised as the 'thought' system that 'rules' a certain era. In his consequent writings he uses these épistèmès again, but stresses that they should not be thought of as self-enclosed totalities, but rather as regional 'unities' of discursive strategies which are bound up with strategies of power. He no longer calls his historical method an archeology, but calls it, following Nietzsche, a genealogy. Nietzsche is, I believe, very important in the turn form structuralism to poststructuralism because he philosophised in opposition to the traditional ideal of absolute philosophical truth. To rephrase Deleuze: “Nietzsche frees thought from the element of truth and falsity.” He turns thought into interpretation and evaluation. So something like the marxist concept of 'false consciousness', which we have seen in various articles that we have read for this course, is no longer pertinent after Nietzsche. Rather, Foucault would say, that 'consciousness', be it false or not, is an effect of ideology, of power. It is an illusion, but it nevertheless is also a reality, or to be exact 'it possesses a reality' (Discipline and Punish). This is where Foucault brings the subject back into the structures, but in such a way that it is still governed by 'objective' rules, because it is unconsciously governed by a complex of power and knowledge. It is not a 'knowing' subject, it is rather subjectivity, but we should rather wait to go into that until I come to Deleuze. We can now turn to the terrain of the poststructuralists. I will shortly deal with Derrida and Deleuze. Derrida returns to Saussure and subverts his linguistic system from within. He builds his alternative conception of the radically undecidable play of linguistic meaning (by the way, we should note that the idea of 'play' is also derived from Nietzsche) primarily on Saussure's claim that the signifier, which is as we have seen before the actual spoken or written utterance, and the signified, their conceptual meaning, owe their seeming identity to their differences for other signifiers and signifieds. As an example: a dog is not a cat and not a wolf. Derrida now claims that, strictly spoken, signified meanings are neither 'present' to us in their own identity, nor 'absent'. He introduces the famous term 'différance', it's spelling indicating the double sense of the French verb 'différer', meaning both to be different and to defer, to capture the paradox that on the one hand there is an illusory 'effect' of meaning produced by negation, but on the other hand this 'effect' is perpetually deferred because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning (thus also not for an 'underlying' structure or ultimate truth). This is basically what has become famous as 'deconstruction'. Thus Derrida shows, just like Foucault and Barthes, that structuralism explodes form within. He has also written beautiful articles about Lévi-Strauss, and the well known 'Le facteur de la vérité' about Lacan. And there's my bridge, my last one: we can now turn to Deleuze. Deleuze has, especially in his Anti-Oedipus (1972), which he has written together with Félix Guattari, extensively criticised Lacan. They write somewhere in Anti-Oedipus that Lacan has blown up the pylon (of psychoanalysis), but when it fell back in the earth it got stuck even more severely. The subtitle of Anti-Oedipus is 'capitalism and schizophrenia', and in it he addresses many of the questions that we have also posed during this course. How is it that subject, or rather subjectivities, desire their own repression? They find causes in Lacanian psychoanalysis and, of course, capitalism, and they pay special attention to how to get out of the stranglehold. Capitalism, they write, creates artificial territorialities. But again, as with Foucault, there are also many differences. Deleuze gives a materiality to phantasms and to unconsciousness. There is not simply one reality, rather there are several realities, false and true realities, which originally do not stand in a hierarchical relationship but are rather given a place in this system by Plato and those who want to maintain the existing social order. Furthermore Deleuze coined the now famous term 'rhizome', referring to grass-roots which spread like 'rhizomatic' networks, as opposed to the binary tree-root. Deleuze is strongly opposed to binary oppositions and thus to dichotomies, like our Tatamae-Honne-dichotomy, although he himself especially in his earlier work also conceptualises several binary oppositions. There is a reductive aspect to categories: they create a space for the operation of truth and falsity. As Foucault writes on Deleuze's work: “No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” I have presented some points that can implicitly or explicitly be linked to the phenomenon we are studying in this course. On the basis of these links I have for myself, and for my paper, developed a hypothesis: The concept of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy is in need of some poststructuralist scrutinising if it wants to stand strong. I am not suggesting on mere analogies between structuralism and the idea of an institutionalisation of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy that this dichotomy is a structuralist conceptualisation. I would say, though, that there are many points of convergence, for instance that it is a universal structure which can be brought to bear upon phenomena. My point, however, is that the same arguments that have been brought to bear upon structuralist ideas can be levied upon this dichotomy. I believe, just as structuralism offers some valuable insights, the vocabulary which is offered to us in the form of a dichotomy between Tatamae and Honne does offer clear an valuable insights. However, just as Althusser notes that his 'structure' tend to become somewhat reductive, I believe the conceptualisation that we are working with could, in the long run, work as a reductive structure. By seeking a post-structuralist enquiry of our conceptualisation we might escape this possible reductiveness. I do not have an answer, not even a preliminary one, as to how to do this, or whether this is possible, that would be way beyond the reach of this presentation, or even beyond the scope of a paper. (c)2003 Raymond van de Wiel | www.raymondvandewiel.nl
Overview: protagonists and positions [back to top] Sartre: Humans are always to at least some extent capable of constituting a meaning of our own. They are historical agents, they make their own history. Lévi-Strauss: Sartre fails to realise that this conception of ourselves as historical agents is merely local and contingent, not a fundamental truth of human reality. Alhusser: The overall structure of a society is 'in the last instance' determined by the economic 'base'. Lacan: The Real is the truth that cannot be expressed because truth is always disturbing. The unconscious exists as a (metaphyssically) separate domain and has a structure/logic that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought and talk. Barthes: An effective myth 'naturalises' the mythological meaning: it is no longer merely a meaning, but rather a fact. Barthes' anaylsis of mythologies aim to reveal the intrest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning. 'Codes', sign systems that 'govern' a text, lead to the 'death of the author' but also to the explosion of the text into an endless succession of meanings. Foucault: The history of the human sciences has several fault lines wich separate basically three discursive formations or épistèmès: renaissance, classical and modern. But also: these should not be seen as totalities. Subjectivity is an effect of power, but it nevertheless 'posseses a reality'. Derrida: Différance: there is an illusory effect of meaning produced by neagation, but this effect is perpetually deffered because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning. Deleuze: How is it that subjectivities desire their own repression? But also anti-binarism (rhizome) and a-categorical thought: Foucault on Deleuze: "No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” Introduction to Post/Structuralism [back to top] In this presentation I will give an overview of French philosophy and its most important thinkers. I will try to draw some analogies between their thought and what we are doing in this course. Finally I will give my preliminary evaluation of the relation between the thought of the philosophers that I have presented, and the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy. My sketch of post-war philosophy is meant as a birds-eye-view. Many of you will probably more or less know the story and will thus notice that I go through it by means of huge simplifications, but it is beyond the goal of this presentation to give you the complete picture. I will only focus on the thinkers and concepts which might be useful for this course. The period directly following the second world war was dominated by Existentialism. Soon however this subject-centred school of philosophy, sometimes also called the philosophy of experience, which was popularised by writer-philosopher Sartre, is criticised by followers of another “school” of philosophy: the so called philosophy of the concept, of which Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem were important proponents. These latter “anti-foundational” thinkers pay special attention to the problem of objectivity. If there are no Cartesian certainties as grounding principles, can there be objectivity? Bachelard has a positive answer. It is not to be found in the individual self's intuition, but rather in considerations that convince all rational minds, thus not in the cogito (I think) but rather in the cogitamus (we think). It is this philosophy of the concept which offers an alternative to the phenomenology of Sartre and his Existentialism. It lies at the basis of the structuralist revolution of the 1960s. Structuralism is based on Ferdinand de Saussure's synchronic study of linguistics as laid out in the Cours de linguistique générale from 1916, based on the lecture notes of some of his students. Structuralism claims that a cultural phenomenon, like for instance literature, is a signifying system with an implicit systematic “grammar”. This is based on Saussure's distinction between parole, a specific utterance, and langue, which is the implicit system which underlies this utterance and which creates the possibility for members of a language community to understand each other's utterances. Lévi-Strauss was the first to take this idea from the realm of linguistics into the realm of the human sciences, in his specific case into anthropology. His example was followed many people but most prominently by Althusser, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault. I will deal with each of them shortly, and with only with respect to what I perceive to be relevant to our course. Althusser was an anti-humanist Marxist. Anti-humanist in the sense that he regarded the existentialist Marxism of Sartre as 'subjectivist mythology'. Individual experience is according to Althusser and other non-humanist Marxists a form of ideological distortion that cannot function as the basis of an objective theory of society. He does not deny the humanist inclinations of the earlier writings of Marx, but he focuses on the “mature” writings of Marx. Marx understood any society (or social formation) as made up of a “base” of economic forces (forces of production) and a “superstructure” of political, cultural, and intellectual objects and institutions. One of Althusser's important interventions is the relative autonomy of the superstructure for which he uses Freudian terminology. Despite this relative autonomy, however, the superstructures are ultimately determined by economic factors. Thus the underlying structure of society is economic. The structuralist assault on existentialism gave room for a further influence of Freud than this because Freud pointed towards the existence of mental realities outside the lived phenomenological consciousness. Lacan was the prime proponent of the merge between psychoanalysis and structuralism. For the purpose of this presentation it goes too far to delve deep into Lacan's reformulations of Freud, but I should try to give some overview of his thought, starting with his famous quote: “the unconscious is structured like a language”. This statement might be understood in the context of psychoanalytical therapy in which language is the only way to get to the unconscious. It does not mean that the unconscious is a language, it is like a language, a foreign language. The unconscious, we can learn from this analogy, is structured, not amorphous. It speaks, rhetorically, through dreams, mistakes and symptoms of the subject. This unconscious has priority in human existence, Lacan claims, thus he puts division, displacement, and alienation at the heart of human reality. The “I”, the conscious ego, only exists in relation to the “other”, the unconscious. This unconscious exists in a separate domain and has a 'logic' that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought or talk. Lacan distinguishes three dimensions in the psyche. It goes too far to define, and thus name all three of them, but I nevertheless want to name one of them: the real. The “Real” is what cannot be talked about. As soon as it is talked about it ceases to be the “Real”. It is the truth that we repress, says Lacan, because the truth is always disturbing. The real is Lacan's term for the inexpressible limit of language. It is the ultimate referent, the unatainable object of desire. It is this ultimate referent, which is not the penis as it is in Freud's rendering of the Oedipus-myth, but the phallus which in Lacan's reformulation of the Oedipus-complex ensures the stable relationship between the signifier and the signified. Thus, we could say, the phallus makes communication possible. This might all sound like a bit of mumbo-jumbo for those who have not heard it before but I reiterate it her because it contains some very important basic ideas for structuralist analysis and is has also provided the ground for the turn from Structuralism to poststructuralism to which I will come in a moment. The main thing that we need to remember is that whereas classical, Freudian, psychoanalysis aims to give the ego control over the unconscious and its drives and desires, Lacanian therapy aims towards the acceptance of the autonomy of the unconscious. It aims to show that it is an illusion to think that the ego and its objective world are realities. There is only the reality of the unconscious in which the world and the subject is constituted. Now we turn to two thinkers that both take a pivotal position in respect to the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism: Barthes and Foucault. They are seen as both structuralists ánd poststructuralists. What could be concluded is that the structuralist position does not hold. The passage form the one 'movement' towards the other can be situated somewhere around 1967, when Althusser notes in a foreword of a translation of an older book that the structure that he has build is to some extent reductive. In 1966 Foucault has writen Les Mots et les Choses which is still largely structuralist, but not long afterwards he also lets go of some of his ideas. The thought of Roland Barthes will point out the limits of structuralism. He introduces the term 'mythology' for a use of language or other signs to express a second-level meaning, one beyond the meaning primarily expressed by the sign. His analysis of mythologies aims to reveal the interest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning, thus what we would call agency. Barthes follows Saussure in that he regards a sign a composed of a signifier and a signified and stretches this concept out of pure linguistic boundaries as to include also non-linguistic signs. Think of a rose which signifies someone's passion for a loved one. The rose is the signifier and the passion the signified. This sign, Barthes says, can in turn be a the signifier in another sign. Think of the rose as a signifier for sentimentality. Barthes distinguishes between two levels, level of the linguistic system and the level of the mythological system. On this first level Barthes calls the sign a 'meaning', on the second, mythological, level, he calls it a 'form'. Thus what is on a linguistic level a sign, a unit of meaning, is on the mythological level “reduced” to the empty form, the signifier, which needs completion by a signified to have meaning. An effective myth, says Barthes, makes the reader unaware of the fact that a mythological meaning is just a meaning, just an interpretation out of myriad possible meanings/interpretations, but rather as part of nature, a fact. Thus the mythological meaning becomes reality. Something is no longer taken as a sign, but rather as a fact. Myth is particularly effective in capitalist societies because capitalism itself has taken on the mask of the natural: it is successfully presented as the way human beings are naturally rather than just as a contingent historical development. In his search for structures Barthes coins the term 'code'. A code is a sign system. What he has in mind are previous writings and practices of a culture that 'govern' a literary work. These codes in the end lead to Barthes' famous dictum “the death of the author”. In fact, he concludes, a text is “written” by the codes that underlie its production, than by an author. The author is unconsciously immersed in the codes embedded in the text. But here Barthes is forced to introduce the reader, because the reader, with his or her knowledge of the codes, has to construct the meaning of the text. Furthermore, he claims that behind a text, more than one code can be at work. An these different codes can also lead to conflicts and such. Thus rather than unifying a text, or finding an objective scientific structure that controls the text, the text comes to have multiple meanings. Thus as a result of using the structuralist method for textual interpretation, he discovers that there is no ultimate truth behind a text, but rather there is an endless succession of meanings. And as a result from the rise of the interest in Nietzsche, there is no longer one meaning that is more true than another. But we'll come to that. Foucault more or less makes the same movement from structuralism to poststructuralism. His Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things) of 1966 is regarded as one of the most important structuralist texts. In his 'archeological' history of the human sciences he postulates three, and tentatively four, discursive formations, the “épistèmès”, which could be characterised as the 'thought' system that 'rules' a certain era. In his consequent writings he uses these épistèmès again, but stresses that they should not be thought of as self-enclosed totalities, but rather as regional 'unities' of discursive strategies which are bound up with strategies of power. He no longer calls his historical method an archeology, but calls it, following Nietzsche, a genealogy. Nietzsche is, I believe, very important in the turn form structuralism to poststructuralism because he philosophised in opposition to the traditional ideal of absolute philosophical truth. To rephrase Deleuze: “Nietzsche frees thought from the element of truth and falsity.” He turns thought into interpretation and evaluation. So something like the marxist concept of 'false consciousness', which we have seen in various articles that we have read for this course, is no longer pertinent after Nietzsche. Rather, Foucault would say, that 'consciousness', be it false or not, is an effect of ideology, of power. It is an illusion, but it nevertheless is also a reality, or to be exact 'it possesses a reality' (Discipline and Punish). This is where Foucault brings the subject back into the structures, but in such a way that it is still governed by 'objective' rules, because it is unconsciously governed by a complex of power and knowledge. It is not a 'knowing' subject, it is rather subjectivity, but we should rather wait to go into that until I come to Deleuze. We can now turn to the terrain of the poststructuralists. I will shortly deal with Derrida and Deleuze. Derrida returns to Saussure and subverts his linguistic system from within. He builds his alternative conception of the radically undecidable play of linguistic meaning (by the way, we should note that the idea of 'play' is also derived from Nietzsche) primarily on Saussure's claim that the signifier, which is as we have seen before the actual spoken or written utterance, and the signified, their conceptual meaning, owe their seeming identity to their differences for other signifiers and signifieds. As an example: a dog is not a cat and not a wolf. Derrida now claims that, strictly spoken, signified meanings are neither 'present' to us in their own identity, nor 'absent'. He introduces the famous term 'différance', it's spelling indicating the double sense of the French verb 'différer', meaning both to be different and to defer, to capture the paradox that on the one hand there is an illusory 'effect' of meaning produced by negation, but on the other hand this 'effect' is perpetually deferred because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning (thus also not for an 'underlying' structure or ultimate truth). This is basically what has become famous as 'deconstruction'. Thus Derrida shows, just like Foucault and Barthes, that structuralism explodes form within. He has also written beautiful articles about Lévi-Strauss, and the well known 'Le facteur de la vérité' about Lacan. And there's my bridge, my last one: we can now turn to Deleuze. Deleuze has, especially in his Anti-Oedipus (1972), which he has written together with Félix Guattari, extensively criticised Lacan. They write somewhere in Anti-Oedipus that Lacan has blown up the pylon (of psychoanalysis), but when it fell back in the earth it got stuck even more severely. The subtitle of Anti-Oedipus is 'capitalism and schizophrenia', and in it he addresses many of the questions that we have also posed during this course. How is it that subject, or rather subjectivities, desire their own repression? They find causes in Lacanian psychoanalysis and, of course, capitalism, and they pay special attention to how to get out of the stranglehold. Capitalism, they write, creates artificial territorialities. But again, as with Foucault, there are also many differences. Deleuze gives a materiality to phantasms and to unconsciousness. There is not simply one reality, rather there are several realities, false and true realities, which originally do not stand in a hierarchical relationship but are rather given a place in this system by Plato and those who want to maintain the existing social order. Furthermore Deleuze coined the now famous term 'rhizome', referring to grass-roots which spread like 'rhizomatic' networks, as opposed to the binary tree-root. Deleuze is strongly opposed to binary oppositions and thus to dichotomies, like our Tatamae-Honne-dichotomy, although he himself especially in his earlier work also conceptualises several binary oppositions. There is a reductive aspect to categories: they create a space for the operation of truth and falsity. As Foucault writes on Deleuze's work: “No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” I have presented some points that can implicitly or explicitly be linked to the phenomenon we are studying in this course. On the basis of these links I have for myself, and for my paper, developed a hypothesis: The concept of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy is in need of some poststructuralist scrutinising if it wants to stand strong. I am not suggesting on mere analogies between structuralism and the idea of an institutionalisation of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy that this dichotomy is a structuralist conceptualisation. I would say, though, that there are many points of convergence, for instance that it is a universal structure which can be brought to bear upon phenomena. My point, however, is that the same arguments that have been brought to bear upon structuralist ideas can be levied upon this dichotomy. I believe, just as structuralism offers some valuable insights, the vocabulary which is offered to us in the form of a dichotomy between Tatamae and Honne does offer clear an valuable insights. However, just as Althusser notes that his 'structure' tend to become somewhat reductive, I believe the conceptualisation that we are working with could, in the long run, work as a reductive structure. By seeking a post-structuralist enquiry of our conceptualisation we might escape this possible reductiveness. I do not have an answer, not even a preliminary one, as to how to do this, or whether this is possible, that would be way beyond the reach of this presentation, or even beyond the scope of a paper. (c)2003 Raymond van de Wiel | www.raymondvandewiel.nl
Sartre: Humans are always to at least some extent capable of constituting a meaning of our own. They are historical agents, they make their own history. Lévi-Strauss: Sartre fails to realise that this conception of ourselves as historical agents is merely local and contingent, not a fundamental truth of human reality. Alhusser: The overall structure of a society is 'in the last instance' determined by the economic 'base'. Lacan: The Real is the truth that cannot be expressed because truth is always disturbing. The unconscious exists as a (metaphyssically) separate domain and has a structure/logic that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought and talk. Barthes: An effective myth 'naturalises' the mythological meaning: it is no longer merely a meaning, but rather a fact. Barthes' anaylsis of mythologies aim to reveal the intrest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning. 'Codes', sign systems that 'govern' a text, lead to the 'death of the author' but also to the explosion of the text into an endless succession of meanings. Foucault: The history of the human sciences has several fault lines wich separate basically three discursive formations or épistèmès: renaissance, classical and modern. But also: these should not be seen as totalities. Subjectivity is an effect of power, but it nevertheless 'posseses a reality'. Derrida: Différance: there is an illusory effect of meaning produced by neagation, but this effect is perpetually deffered because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning. Deleuze: How is it that subjectivities desire their own repression? But also anti-binarism (rhizome) and a-categorical thought: Foucault on Deleuze: "No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” Introduction to Post/Structuralism [back to top] In this presentation I will give an overview of French philosophy and its most important thinkers. I will try to draw some analogies between their thought and what we are doing in this course. Finally I will give my preliminary evaluation of the relation between the thought of the philosophers that I have presented, and the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy. My sketch of post-war philosophy is meant as a birds-eye-view. Many of you will probably more or less know the story and will thus notice that I go through it by means of huge simplifications, but it is beyond the goal of this presentation to give you the complete picture. I will only focus on the thinkers and concepts which might be useful for this course. The period directly following the second world war was dominated by Existentialism. Soon however this subject-centred school of philosophy, sometimes also called the philosophy of experience, which was popularised by writer-philosopher Sartre, is criticised by followers of another “school” of philosophy: the so called philosophy of the concept, of which Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem were important proponents. These latter “anti-foundational” thinkers pay special attention to the problem of objectivity. If there are no Cartesian certainties as grounding principles, can there be objectivity? Bachelard has a positive answer. It is not to be found in the individual self's intuition, but rather in considerations that convince all rational minds, thus not in the cogito (I think) but rather in the cogitamus (we think). It is this philosophy of the concept which offers an alternative to the phenomenology of Sartre and his Existentialism. It lies at the basis of the structuralist revolution of the 1960s. Structuralism is based on Ferdinand de Saussure's synchronic study of linguistics as laid out in the Cours de linguistique générale from 1916, based on the lecture notes of some of his students. Structuralism claims that a cultural phenomenon, like for instance literature, is a signifying system with an implicit systematic “grammar”. This is based on Saussure's distinction between parole, a specific utterance, and langue, which is the implicit system which underlies this utterance and which creates the possibility for members of a language community to understand each other's utterances. Lévi-Strauss was the first to take this idea from the realm of linguistics into the realm of the human sciences, in his specific case into anthropology. His example was followed many people but most prominently by Althusser, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault. I will deal with each of them shortly, and with only with respect to what I perceive to be relevant to our course. Althusser was an anti-humanist Marxist. Anti-humanist in the sense that he regarded the existentialist Marxism of Sartre as 'subjectivist mythology'. Individual experience is according to Althusser and other non-humanist Marxists a form of ideological distortion that cannot function as the basis of an objective theory of society. He does not deny the humanist inclinations of the earlier writings of Marx, but he focuses on the “mature” writings of Marx. Marx understood any society (or social formation) as made up of a “base” of economic forces (forces of production) and a “superstructure” of political, cultural, and intellectual objects and institutions. One of Althusser's important interventions is the relative autonomy of the superstructure for which he uses Freudian terminology. Despite this relative autonomy, however, the superstructures are ultimately determined by economic factors. Thus the underlying structure of society is economic. The structuralist assault on existentialism gave room for a further influence of Freud than this because Freud pointed towards the existence of mental realities outside the lived phenomenological consciousness. Lacan was the prime proponent of the merge between psychoanalysis and structuralism. For the purpose of this presentation it goes too far to delve deep into Lacan's reformulations of Freud, but I should try to give some overview of his thought, starting with his famous quote: “the unconscious is structured like a language”. This statement might be understood in the context of psychoanalytical therapy in which language is the only way to get to the unconscious. It does not mean that the unconscious is a language, it is like a language, a foreign language. The unconscious, we can learn from this analogy, is structured, not amorphous. It speaks, rhetorically, through dreams, mistakes and symptoms of the subject. This unconscious has priority in human existence, Lacan claims, thus he puts division, displacement, and alienation at the heart of human reality. The “I”, the conscious ego, only exists in relation to the “other”, the unconscious. This unconscious exists in a separate domain and has a 'logic' that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought or talk. Lacan distinguishes three dimensions in the psyche. It goes too far to define, and thus name all three of them, but I nevertheless want to name one of them: the real. The “Real” is what cannot be talked about. As soon as it is talked about it ceases to be the “Real”. It is the truth that we repress, says Lacan, because the truth is always disturbing. The real is Lacan's term for the inexpressible limit of language. It is the ultimate referent, the unatainable object of desire. It is this ultimate referent, which is not the penis as it is in Freud's rendering of the Oedipus-myth, but the phallus which in Lacan's reformulation of the Oedipus-complex ensures the stable relationship between the signifier and the signified. Thus, we could say, the phallus makes communication possible. This might all sound like a bit of mumbo-jumbo for those who have not heard it before but I reiterate it her because it contains some very important basic ideas for structuralist analysis and is has also provided the ground for the turn from Structuralism to poststructuralism to which I will come in a moment. The main thing that we need to remember is that whereas classical, Freudian, psychoanalysis aims to give the ego control over the unconscious and its drives and desires, Lacanian therapy aims towards the acceptance of the autonomy of the unconscious. It aims to show that it is an illusion to think that the ego and its objective world are realities. There is only the reality of the unconscious in which the world and the subject is constituted. Now we turn to two thinkers that both take a pivotal position in respect to the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism: Barthes and Foucault. They are seen as both structuralists ánd poststructuralists. What could be concluded is that the structuralist position does not hold. The passage form the one 'movement' towards the other can be situated somewhere around 1967, when Althusser notes in a foreword of a translation of an older book that the structure that he has build is to some extent reductive. In 1966 Foucault has writen Les Mots et les Choses which is still largely structuralist, but not long afterwards he also lets go of some of his ideas. The thought of Roland Barthes will point out the limits of structuralism. He introduces the term 'mythology' for a use of language or other signs to express a second-level meaning, one beyond the meaning primarily expressed by the sign. His analysis of mythologies aims to reveal the interest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning, thus what we would call agency. Barthes follows Saussure in that he regards a sign a composed of a signifier and a signified and stretches this concept out of pure linguistic boundaries as to include also non-linguistic signs. Think of a rose which signifies someone's passion for a loved one. The rose is the signifier and the passion the signified. This sign, Barthes says, can in turn be a the signifier in another sign. Think of the rose as a signifier for sentimentality. Barthes distinguishes between two levels, level of the linguistic system and the level of the mythological system. On this first level Barthes calls the sign a 'meaning', on the second, mythological, level, he calls it a 'form'. Thus what is on a linguistic level a sign, a unit of meaning, is on the mythological level “reduced” to the empty form, the signifier, which needs completion by a signified to have meaning. An effective myth, says Barthes, makes the reader unaware of the fact that a mythological meaning is just a meaning, just an interpretation out of myriad possible meanings/interpretations, but rather as part of nature, a fact. Thus the mythological meaning becomes reality. Something is no longer taken as a sign, but rather as a fact. Myth is particularly effective in capitalist societies because capitalism itself has taken on the mask of the natural: it is successfully presented as the way human beings are naturally rather than just as a contingent historical development. In his search for structures Barthes coins the term 'code'. A code is a sign system. What he has in mind are previous writings and practices of a culture that 'govern' a literary work. These codes in the end lead to Barthes' famous dictum “the death of the author”. In fact, he concludes, a text is “written” by the codes that underlie its production, than by an author. The author is unconsciously immersed in the codes embedded in the text. But here Barthes is forced to introduce the reader, because the reader, with his or her knowledge of the codes, has to construct the meaning of the text. Furthermore, he claims that behind a text, more than one code can be at work. An these different codes can also lead to conflicts and such. Thus rather than unifying a text, or finding an objective scientific structure that controls the text, the text comes to have multiple meanings. Thus as a result of using the structuralist method for textual interpretation, he discovers that there is no ultimate truth behind a text, but rather there is an endless succession of meanings. And as a result from the rise of the interest in Nietzsche, there is no longer one meaning that is more true than another. But we'll come to that. Foucault more or less makes the same movement from structuralism to poststructuralism. His Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things) of 1966 is regarded as one of the most important structuralist texts. In his 'archeological' history of the human sciences he postulates three, and tentatively four, discursive formations, the “épistèmès”, which could be characterised as the 'thought' system that 'rules' a certain era. In his consequent writings he uses these épistèmès again, but stresses that they should not be thought of as self-enclosed totalities, but rather as regional 'unities' of discursive strategies which are bound up with strategies of power. He no longer calls his historical method an archeology, but calls it, following Nietzsche, a genealogy. Nietzsche is, I believe, very important in the turn form structuralism to poststructuralism because he philosophised in opposition to the traditional ideal of absolute philosophical truth. To rephrase Deleuze: “Nietzsche frees thought from the element of truth and falsity.” He turns thought into interpretation and evaluation. So something like the marxist concept of 'false consciousness', which we have seen in various articles that we have read for this course, is no longer pertinent after Nietzsche. Rather, Foucault would say, that 'consciousness', be it false or not, is an effect of ideology, of power. It is an illusion, but it nevertheless is also a reality, or to be exact 'it possesses a reality' (Discipline and Punish). This is where Foucault brings the subject back into the structures, but in such a way that it is still governed by 'objective' rules, because it is unconsciously governed by a complex of power and knowledge. It is not a 'knowing' subject, it is rather subjectivity, but we should rather wait to go into that until I come to Deleuze. We can now turn to the terrain of the poststructuralists. I will shortly deal with Derrida and Deleuze. Derrida returns to Saussure and subverts his linguistic system from within. He builds his alternative conception of the radically undecidable play of linguistic meaning (by the way, we should note that the idea of 'play' is also derived from Nietzsche) primarily on Saussure's claim that the signifier, which is as we have seen before the actual spoken or written utterance, and the signified, their conceptual meaning, owe their seeming identity to their differences for other signifiers and signifieds. As an example: a dog is not a cat and not a wolf. Derrida now claims that, strictly spoken, signified meanings are neither 'present' to us in their own identity, nor 'absent'. He introduces the famous term 'différance', it's spelling indicating the double sense of the French verb 'différer', meaning both to be different and to defer, to capture the paradox that on the one hand there is an illusory 'effect' of meaning produced by negation, but on the other hand this 'effect' is perpetually deferred because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning (thus also not for an 'underlying' structure or ultimate truth). This is basically what has become famous as 'deconstruction'. Thus Derrida shows, just like Foucault and Barthes, that structuralism explodes form within. He has also written beautiful articles about Lévi-Strauss, and the well known 'Le facteur de la vérité' about Lacan. And there's my bridge, my last one: we can now turn to Deleuze. Deleuze has, especially in his Anti-Oedipus (1972), which he has written together with Félix Guattari, extensively criticised Lacan. They write somewhere in Anti-Oedipus that Lacan has blown up the pylon (of psychoanalysis), but when it fell back in the earth it got stuck even more severely. The subtitle of Anti-Oedipus is 'capitalism and schizophrenia', and in it he addresses many of the questions that we have also posed during this course. How is it that subject, or rather subjectivities, desire their own repression? They find causes in Lacanian psychoanalysis and, of course, capitalism, and they pay special attention to how to get out of the stranglehold. Capitalism, they write, creates artificial territorialities. But again, as with Foucault, there are also many differences. Deleuze gives a materiality to phantasms and to unconsciousness. There is not simply one reality, rather there are several realities, false and true realities, which originally do not stand in a hierarchical relationship but are rather given a place in this system by Plato and those who want to maintain the existing social order. Furthermore Deleuze coined the now famous term 'rhizome', referring to grass-roots which spread like 'rhizomatic' networks, as opposed to the binary tree-root. Deleuze is strongly opposed to binary oppositions and thus to dichotomies, like our Tatamae-Honne-dichotomy, although he himself especially in his earlier work also conceptualises several binary oppositions. There is a reductive aspect to categories: they create a space for the operation of truth and falsity. As Foucault writes on Deleuze's work: “No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” I have presented some points that can implicitly or explicitly be linked to the phenomenon we are studying in this course. On the basis of these links I have for myself, and for my paper, developed a hypothesis: The concept of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy is in need of some poststructuralist scrutinising if it wants to stand strong. I am not suggesting on mere analogies between structuralism and the idea of an institutionalisation of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy that this dichotomy is a structuralist conceptualisation. I would say, though, that there are many points of convergence, for instance that it is a universal structure which can be brought to bear upon phenomena. My point, however, is that the same arguments that have been brought to bear upon structuralist ideas can be levied upon this dichotomy. I believe, just as structuralism offers some valuable insights, the vocabulary which is offered to us in the form of a dichotomy between Tatamae and Honne does offer clear an valuable insights. However, just as Althusser notes that his 'structure' tend to become somewhat reductive, I believe the conceptualisation that we are working with could, in the long run, work as a reductive structure. By seeking a post-structuralist enquiry of our conceptualisation we might escape this possible reductiveness. I do not have an answer, not even a preliminary one, as to how to do this, or whether this is possible, that would be way beyond the reach of this presentation, or even beyond the scope of a paper. (c)2003 Raymond van de Wiel | www.raymondvandewiel.nl
In this presentation I will give an overview of French philosophy and its most important thinkers. I will try to draw some analogies between their thought and what we are doing in this course. Finally I will give my preliminary evaluation of the relation between the thought of the philosophers that I have presented, and the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy. My sketch of post-war philosophy is meant as a birds-eye-view. Many of you will probably more or less know the story and will thus notice that I go through it by means of huge simplifications, but it is beyond the goal of this presentation to give you the complete picture. I will only focus on the thinkers and concepts which might be useful for this course. The period directly following the second world war was dominated by Existentialism. Soon however this subject-centred school of philosophy, sometimes also called the philosophy of experience, which was popularised by writer-philosopher Sartre, is criticised by followers of another “school” of philosophy: the so called philosophy of the concept, of which Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem were important proponents. These latter “anti-foundational” thinkers pay special attention to the problem of objectivity. If there are no Cartesian certainties as grounding principles, can there be objectivity? Bachelard has a positive answer. It is not to be found in the individual self's intuition, but rather in considerations that convince all rational minds, thus not in the cogito (I think) but rather in the cogitamus (we think). It is this philosophy of the concept which offers an alternative to the phenomenology of Sartre and his Existentialism. It lies at the basis of the structuralist revolution of the 1960s. Structuralism is based on Ferdinand de Saussure's synchronic study of linguistics as laid out in the Cours de linguistique générale from 1916, based on the lecture notes of some of his students. Structuralism claims that a cultural phenomenon, like for instance literature, is a signifying system with an implicit systematic “grammar”. This is based on Saussure's distinction between parole, a specific utterance, and langue, which is the implicit system which underlies this utterance and which creates the possibility for members of a language community to understand each other's utterances. Lévi-Strauss was the first to take this idea from the realm of linguistics into the realm of the human sciences, in his specific case into anthropology. His example was followed many people but most prominently by Althusser, Lacan, Barthes and Foucault. I will deal with each of them shortly, and with only with respect to what I perceive to be relevant to our course. Althusser was an anti-humanist Marxist. Anti-humanist in the sense that he regarded the existentialist Marxism of Sartre as 'subjectivist mythology'. Individual experience is according to Althusser and other non-humanist Marxists a form of ideological distortion that cannot function as the basis of an objective theory of society. He does not deny the humanist inclinations of the earlier writings of Marx, but he focuses on the “mature” writings of Marx. Marx understood any society (or social formation) as made up of a “base” of economic forces (forces of production) and a “superstructure” of political, cultural, and intellectual objects and institutions. One of Althusser's important interventions is the relative autonomy of the superstructure for which he uses Freudian terminology. Despite this relative autonomy, however, the superstructures are ultimately determined by economic factors. Thus the underlying structure of society is economic. The structuralist assault on existentialism gave room for a further influence of Freud than this because Freud pointed towards the existence of mental realities outside the lived phenomenological consciousness. Lacan was the prime proponent of the merge between psychoanalysis and structuralism. For the purpose of this presentation it goes too far to delve deep into Lacan's reformulations of Freud, but I should try to give some overview of his thought, starting with his famous quote: “the unconscious is structured like a language”. This statement might be understood in the context of psychoanalytical therapy in which language is the only way to get to the unconscious. It does not mean that the unconscious is a language, it is like a language, a foreign language. The unconscious, we can learn from this analogy, is structured, not amorphous. It speaks, rhetorically, through dreams, mistakes and symptoms of the subject. This unconscious has priority in human existence, Lacan claims, thus he puts division, displacement, and alienation at the heart of human reality. The “I”, the conscious ego, only exists in relation to the “other”, the unconscious. This unconscious exists in a separate domain and has a 'logic' that is radically different from that of ordinary conscious thought or talk. Lacan distinguishes three dimensions in the psyche. It goes too far to define, and thus name all three of them, but I nevertheless want to name one of them: the real. The “Real” is what cannot be talked about. As soon as it is talked about it ceases to be the “Real”. It is the truth that we repress, says Lacan, because the truth is always disturbing. The real is Lacan's term for the inexpressible limit of language. It is the ultimate referent, the unatainable object of desire. It is this ultimate referent, which is not the penis as it is in Freud's rendering of the Oedipus-myth, but the phallus which in Lacan's reformulation of the Oedipus-complex ensures the stable relationship between the signifier and the signified. Thus, we could say, the phallus makes communication possible. This might all sound like a bit of mumbo-jumbo for those who have not heard it before but I reiterate it her because it contains some very important basic ideas for structuralist analysis and is has also provided the ground for the turn from Structuralism to poststructuralism to which I will come in a moment. The main thing that we need to remember is that whereas classical, Freudian, psychoanalysis aims to give the ego control over the unconscious and its drives and desires, Lacanian therapy aims towards the acceptance of the autonomy of the unconscious. It aims to show that it is an illusion to think that the ego and its objective world are realities. There is only the reality of the unconscious in which the world and the subject is constituted. Now we turn to two thinkers that both take a pivotal position in respect to the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism: Barthes and Foucault. They are seen as both structuralists ánd poststructuralists. What could be concluded is that the structuralist position does not hold. The passage form the one 'movement' towards the other can be situated somewhere around 1967, when Althusser notes in a foreword of a translation of an older book that the structure that he has build is to some extent reductive. In 1966 Foucault has writen Les Mots et les Choses which is still largely structuralist, but not long afterwards he also lets go of some of his ideas. The thought of Roland Barthes will point out the limits of structuralism. He introduces the term 'mythology' for a use of language or other signs to express a second-level meaning, one beyond the meaning primarily expressed by the sign. His analysis of mythologies aims to reveal the interest of a particular social class behind an expression of second-level meaning, thus what we would call agency. Barthes follows Saussure in that he regards a sign a composed of a signifier and a signified and stretches this concept out of pure linguistic boundaries as to include also non-linguistic signs. Think of a rose which signifies someone's passion for a loved one. The rose is the signifier and the passion the signified. This sign, Barthes says, can in turn be a the signifier in another sign. Think of the rose as a signifier for sentimentality. Barthes distinguishes between two levels, level of the linguistic system and the level of the mythological system. On this first level Barthes calls the sign a 'meaning', on the second, mythological, level, he calls it a 'form'. Thus what is on a linguistic level a sign, a unit of meaning, is on the mythological level “reduced” to the empty form, the signifier, which needs completion by a signified to have meaning. An effective myth, says Barthes, makes the reader unaware of the fact that a mythological meaning is just a meaning, just an interpretation out of myriad possible meanings/interpretations, but rather as part of nature, a fact. Thus the mythological meaning becomes reality. Something is no longer taken as a sign, but rather as a fact. Myth is particularly effective in capitalist societies because capitalism itself has taken on the mask of the natural: it is successfully presented as the way human beings are naturally rather than just as a contingent historical development. In his search for structures Barthes coins the term 'code'. A code is a sign system. What he has in mind are previous writings and practices of a culture that 'govern' a literary work. These codes in the end lead to Barthes' famous dictum “the death of the author”. In fact, he concludes, a text is “written” by the codes that underlie its production, than by an author. The author is unconsciously immersed in the codes embedded in the text. But here Barthes is forced to introduce the reader, because the reader, with his or her knowledge of the codes, has to construct the meaning of the text. Furthermore, he claims that behind a text, more than one code can be at work. An these different codes can also lead to conflicts and such. Thus rather than unifying a text, or finding an objective scientific structure that controls the text, the text comes to have multiple meanings. Thus as a result of using the structuralist method for textual interpretation, he discovers that there is no ultimate truth behind a text, but rather there is an endless succession of meanings. And as a result from the rise of the interest in Nietzsche, there is no longer one meaning that is more true than another. But we'll come to that. Foucault more or less makes the same movement from structuralism to poststructuralism. His Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things) of 1966 is regarded as one of the most important structuralist texts. In his 'archeological' history of the human sciences he postulates three, and tentatively four, discursive formations, the “épistèmès”, which could be characterised as the 'thought' system that 'rules' a certain era. In his consequent writings he uses these épistèmès again, but stresses that they should not be thought of as self-enclosed totalities, but rather as regional 'unities' of discursive strategies which are bound up with strategies of power. He no longer calls his historical method an archeology, but calls it, following Nietzsche, a genealogy. Nietzsche is, I believe, very important in the turn form structuralism to poststructuralism because he philosophised in opposition to the traditional ideal of absolute philosophical truth. To rephrase Deleuze: “Nietzsche frees thought from the element of truth and falsity.” He turns thought into interpretation and evaluation. So something like the marxist concept of 'false consciousness', which we have seen in various articles that we have read for this course, is no longer pertinent after Nietzsche. Rather, Foucault would say, that 'consciousness', be it false or not, is an effect of ideology, of power. It is an illusion, but it nevertheless is also a reality, or to be exact 'it possesses a reality' (Discipline and Punish). This is where Foucault brings the subject back into the structures, but in such a way that it is still governed by 'objective' rules, because it is unconsciously governed by a complex of power and knowledge. It is not a 'knowing' subject, it is rather subjectivity, but we should rather wait to go into that until I come to Deleuze. We can now turn to the terrain of the poststructuralists. I will shortly deal with Derrida and Deleuze. Derrida returns to Saussure and subverts his linguistic system from within. He builds his alternative conception of the radically undecidable play of linguistic meaning (by the way, we should note that the idea of 'play' is also derived from Nietzsche) primarily on Saussure's claim that the signifier, which is as we have seen before the actual spoken or written utterance, and the signified, their conceptual meaning, owe their seeming identity to their differences for other signifiers and signifieds. As an example: a dog is not a cat and not a wolf. Derrida now claims that, strictly spoken, signified meanings are neither 'present' to us in their own identity, nor 'absent'. He introduces the famous term 'différance', it's spelling indicating the double sense of the French verb 'différer', meaning both to be different and to defer, to capture the paradox that on the one hand there is an illusory 'effect' of meaning produced by negation, but on the other hand this 'effect' is perpetually deferred because it can never come to rest in actual presence. Therefore there is no ground for attributing determinate meaning (thus also not for an 'underlying' structure or ultimate truth). This is basically what has become famous as 'deconstruction'. Thus Derrida shows, just like Foucault and Barthes, that structuralism explodes form within. He has also written beautiful articles about Lévi-Strauss, and the well known 'Le facteur de la vérité' about Lacan. And there's my bridge, my last one: we can now turn to Deleuze. Deleuze has, especially in his Anti-Oedipus (1972), which he has written together with Félix Guattari, extensively criticised Lacan. They write somewhere in Anti-Oedipus that Lacan has blown up the pylon (of psychoanalysis), but when it fell back in the earth it got stuck even more severely. The subtitle of Anti-Oedipus is 'capitalism and schizophrenia', and in it he addresses many of the questions that we have also posed during this course. How is it that subject, or rather subjectivities, desire their own repression? They find causes in Lacanian psychoanalysis and, of course, capitalism, and they pay special attention to how to get out of the stranglehold. Capitalism, they write, creates artificial territorialities. But again, as with Foucault, there are also many differences. Deleuze gives a materiality to phantasms and to unconsciousness. There is not simply one reality, rather there are several realities, false and true realities, which originally do not stand in a hierarchical relationship but are rather given a place in this system by Plato and those who want to maintain the existing social order. Furthermore Deleuze coined the now famous term 'rhizome', referring to grass-roots which spread like 'rhizomatic' networks, as opposed to the binary tree-root. Deleuze is strongly opposed to binary oppositions and thus to dichotomies, like our Tatamae-Honne-dichotomy, although he himself especially in his earlier work also conceptualises several binary oppositions. There is a reductive aspect to categories: they create a space for the operation of truth and falsity. As Foucault writes on Deleuze's work: “No sooner do we abandon the organizing principle of the categories than we face the magma of stupidity.” I have presented some points that can implicitly or explicitly be linked to the phenomenon we are studying in this course. On the basis of these links I have for myself, and for my paper, developed a hypothesis: The concept of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy is in need of some poststructuralist scrutinising if it wants to stand strong. I am not suggesting on mere analogies between structuralism and the idea of an institutionalisation of the Tatamae-Honne dichotomy that this dichotomy is a structuralist conceptualisation. I would say, though, that there are many points of convergence, for instance that it is a universal structure which can be brought to bear upon phenomena. My point, however, is that the same arguments that have been brought to bear upon structuralist ideas can be levied upon this dichotomy. I believe, just as structuralism offers some valuable insights, the vocabulary which is offered to us in the form of a dichotomy between Tatamae and Honne does offer clear an valuable insights. However, just as Althusser notes that his 'structure' tend to become somewhat reductive, I believe the conceptualisation that we are working with could, in the long run, work as a reductive structure. By seeking a post-structuralist enquiry of our conceptualisation we might escape this possible reductiveness. I do not have an answer, not even a preliminary one, as to how to do this, or whether this is possible, that would be way beyond the reach of this presentation, or even beyond the scope of a paper. (c)2003 Raymond van de Wiel | www.raymondvandewiel.nl
(c)2003 Raymond van de Wiel | www.raymondvandewiel.nl
