Signs of Trouble: The "Problematics" of Postmodern Representation

This post is intended to develop some of the ideas in the previous post more fully, and explore how there are actually two fundamental sets of errors - at the semiotic and discursive levels -  at the heart of the Postmodern fallacy that representation can be substituted for reality.

William Blake, Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A Prophecy, 1794, metal relief etching, hand colored, approx. 24.1 x 17.2 cm. The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester

For the mystic Blake, the world was itself a "representation," an imperfect expression of the perfection of the divine will. This is why his creator holds a set of compasses, which symbolizes this fundamental act of creative mediation. It is up to us to read this divine discourse to reach the truth lying beyond the image. 

The political implications of the Postmodern assumption that representation is all there is are obvious; if reality is discursive, and discursive constructions are essentially the same in their lack of external meaning, whoever controls the discourse is all-powerful. 








The Postmodern aversion to categorical differences between things in favor of undifferentiated chaos or entropy, allows for important differences between knowledge domains, each with their refined hermeneutic methods, to be swept aside. 

Lee Lawrie, Wisdom, with Light and Sound (not shown), 1933, above the entrance of 30 Rockefeller Center, New York

Note how Lawrie's image of a higher power reflects Rockefeller's faith that human ingenuity and technological progress can usher in a Utopian future. We see the same creator, rendered in the Art Deco style of the time, only this being is charged with what looks like electric energy and the universe he creates with his compass resembles a mechanical abstraction. 

Without external reference, signs become whatever you want them to be, only it is more insidious than that. The Trace of the old meaning remains, to lend false credibility to the new usage. In Lowrie's vision, science is accorded a metaphysical status appropriate to an object of religious faith. This will prove devastating as science the empirical method becomes "Science" the discourse.






Philosophically, the Postmodern drive for empowering meaninglessness gave us "theory," where the full range of actual discursive  tools developed to extend human understanding can be reduced to empty pages of unreadable text. Politically, the wonder of human biodiversity was jettisoned for a soulless consumerist monoculture where you can “express yourself” by the color of your iPhone case. Look how Postmodernists responded to linguistic inteterminacy – not by calling for better hermeneutics, but by denying the possibility of meaning at all. How is this a normal, healthy reaction to the abstractions inherent in communications? Short answer: it isn't, but  leveling categories and blocking external verification is what empowers their Orwellian inversions of language:

https://www.xyz.net.au/quote-day-diversity-gun-violence/

  

There are at least two levels of displacement hiding beneath the notion of the discursive construction of reality that make the act of writing  Postmodern theory especially nonsensical, but also makes the nonsense harder to pin down. 

The first of these is the translation of reality into structures of discourse, which are the large categories or domains of all kinds that define human existence, such as “science,” languages, religions, social customs, disciplines like philosophy, and so on. This allows the “theorist” to claim mastery over the subject in question without actually knowing anything about it, and is the source the ludicrously ignorant critiques of things like logic being racist or sexist. One need not understand, or even be capable of understanding, the internal consistencies of symbolic logic to dismiss it “discursively.” Identity grievance narratives are excellent popular examples of how Postmodernism appeals to the simpleminded while empowering grifters and storytellers.

Ladies and gentlemen: Discourse. What could be more Postmodern than a quantitatively illiterate journalist quoting a quantitatively illiterate "professor' applying a non-existent conspiracy  theory to math? At least only one of them is on the taxpayer's dime.

The second displacement comes from the claim to meaningfully comment on the discursive construction of reality in a book, which, as written text, is itself a subset of discourse. As a signifier, text has been dismissed as arbitrary, imprecise, and bereft of external meaning since the structuralist movement of the early twentieth century. Yet how would people know that they are merely ampules in a vast system of endless representation if other ampules didn’t write daring and challenging tomes to tell them? This recent (Oct., 2017) offering "revives" poststructuralist theory "show how useful it is in the current century in opening the minds of students to the dangers of claiming to have a fixed identity." 

To summarize, subjectivity trumps biological reality because Derrida and friends claimed discourse is meaningless, but selective interpretations of an idiosyncratic reading list reveals a fundamental flaw in the human condition, while a clever take on Maya Angelou blazes a trail of personal restoration. 

The false assumptions are so layered so thick there is nothing to engage. They are literally making this stuff up. 






Let's consider the two levels individually and identify the moments of deception.


Texts and Semiotics

Postmodern theory dismiss binary distinctions as artificial, but from the moment of entry into the world human existence is defined by a fundamental rupture between internal thoughts and sensations and an opaque external ebvironment:

Salvadore Dali, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943, oil on canvas, 44.5 x 52 cm, The Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida

Humanity enters the world with a fundamental binary rupture between secure self-containment and a harsh alien world filled with competing consciousnesses that are closed to us. The rest of one's life is spent trying to come to grips with this existential divide between self-awareness and the external world, however defined. No wonder babies are born crying. 

We build sign systems as a way of trying to bridge a gap that cannot be bridged because we can never bring the fullness of the outside world and the people in it into our consciousnesses. Yet at the same time, we must accommodate the reality that our environment shapes our development while our actions influence our surroundings in turn. We all know that these systems don't pretend to be what they represent; they are just abstract constructs to organize and make sense of the incomprehensible array of things that are not us.

Distinctions in the natural world are often indeterminate but meaningful. As this spectrum shows, the world doesn't fall into tidy categories. We can identify specific color bands, but the boundaries between them are vague and indeterminate. does this mean that "Blue" could be anything?

Why should human categories like self and other be expected to conform to a higher standard when they are realized materially in the natural world?

Postmodern attacks on independent (Cartesian) human consciousness are of a kind with their opposition to binary divisions and categorical systems in general. Individual writers vary widely, but the gist is that categorical distinctions are never absolute, so the categories are not meaningful, and they all share the same goal of destroying autonomous human agency:

Lacan was a forerunner of Postmodernism for his recognition that the self was actually constructed through social relations, rather than a self-contained consciousness, as Descartes held. His formulation was  too simple, because he was  unable to grasp that his socializing, identity-forming matrix of gazes and glances is in constant interaction, and  conflict, with a vast range of still poorly understood individual genetic drivers.





Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida. Funny how image-conscious these deniers of agency were. Almost as if their didn't entirely believe their own tripe...
Deleuze is a difficult figure because his work is so non-linear and fragmented; insanity as a metaphor for the Postmodern condition, and the self/world distinction merely endless, recursive inflections of the same essence. There may have to be a post on him.


The discourse/reality clash at the heart of Postmodern denials of subject-object relations is built on a fundamental misconception of the semiotic systems (sign systems, or things that mean things to people) that we use to mediate the gulf between our self-awareness and an "external" world that we do not have the same degree of mental access to. External is not in quotation marks as a Postmodern evasion, but to point out that even if one accepts self and reality to be inflections of the same discursive matrix, the inflection senses and feels what it understands as "self" differently from all else. This misunderstanding originates in a self-crippling logical inversion within the structualist origins of the Postmodern understanding of sign systems. In fact, one might call it another Trace that hollows out the foundation of the whole enterprise.

Structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure characterized the sign as a mediating element between viewer and world that is completely autonomous, meaning it has no essential connection to the thing that it represents. As the diagram shows, it is an arbitrary symbol or grapheme that triggers a thought in the mind of the reader or viewer.

While Saussure claimed to be writing a general semiotic theory, his concept was fundamentally linguistic in origin, and marked by his structuralist's adherence to rigid conceptual maps over lived experience. From this perspective, the difference between the sign and the thing it represents, or referent (not the signified, which is in the mind of the viewer) is "problematic," to use a Hall of Fame Postmodern adjective. In fact:

Let's look more closely at Saussure's sign. 

The diagram is helpful because it shows how the structuralist sign as an entity contains an arbitrary component (the word Tree) and a subjective component (the impression in the reader's mind), but no objective component, or reference (real trees). If sign systems develop to bridge the gap between ourselves and the world, there is no recognition of that within the concept of the sign vehicle itself. The mediator is absolutely detached from the mediated.

Also, where is the viewer? We can see their subjectivity in terms of a concept evoked, but the sign includes no more connection between the thought-picture and the thinker than between the word and real trees in the world. From this perspective, it is easy to characterize the signified as another element in a linguistic-type structure: the set of mental pictures and associations that you select to pair up with the signifier, or tree. Thought pictures and concepts are not as rigid as linguistic entities, but they still operate under the same structuralist logic of a closed system, cut off from any significant relation to an external referent, and distinguished only by their differences from each other. Rather than "mediating," Saussure's semiotics are purely arbitrary and subjective, hermetic sets of self-referential signs that have no way to offer any real connection with between individuals and the exterior world. This is the forerunner of the Postmodern obsession with subjective, meaningless discourse.

Yet from the moment of self-awareness, we have to make our way in and around things that are not ourselves.  

Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 1509-12, fresco, Sistine Chapel, Vatican

Nineteenth-century American Pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce proposed a more organic, empirical system that incorporates the process of mediation within the concept of the sign itself, and considers many more forms of signification. For Peirce, both the referent and the bebolder, or interpretant, who makes sense of the sign are included.

Rather than beginning with a top down structure like Saussure, Peirce built up by observing how people interact and interpret signs in reality, and while his system is an abstraction of his observations, it is secondary to the human experience it draws from. This allows him to look beyond linguistic models and consider semiotic relationships much more broadly. He actually identifies three types of sign:  

The structuralist concept of sign is limited to the symbolic category, or what Peirce calls arbitrary signifiers. Saussure completely misses Peirce's motivated signifiers, the icon, which represents by shared character or likeness, and the index, which, like a clue, is evidence of something that doesn't resemble the referent, but isn't arbitrary either. Icon and index can function without interactions with others, or the construction of abstract representational systems. Not touching a hot stove more than once is a fine example.

Comparing the models directly fully reveals the dehumanizing nature of Saussure’s formation:

 The structuralist removes mediation from any meaningful relationship from the things mediated; it is an autonomous system that abides by its own internal rules. But it is also the only way we have to understand the world and communicate with others.This means that everything we think, say, do, believe, understand, etc. is subordinate to the operations of an alien, mechanistic structure without meaning beyond itself. The system comes before the human. With Peirce, the world (referent) and beholder (interpretant) are instantiated within the sign-vehicle itself, and the "system" is relegated to its proper place as a human creation, not as the creator of the human. Saussure, in his desire for mastery, puts the cart before the horse. Pierce diagrams a process of making your way in the world, which is not a fixed structure, but an cumulative journey that is NECESSARILY incomplete and abstracted. Which more closely approximates human development, both on the individual and societal levels?

Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Childhood, 1842, oil on canvas, 134.3 × 195.3 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Unfortunately for the descendants of structuralism, we do have a broad understanding of the development of language, and all signs point to human experience coming first. There are two basic explanatory frameworks that I will call supernatural and evolutionary for simplicity. From a supernatural perspective, language was given by entity beyond our realm of experience. Religious accounts tend to land here, as do more outre fables of extraterrestrial or extra-dimensional intervention:

Adam Names the Animals, 12th century mosaic from the south cupola, west arm of atrium, Basilica di San Marco, Venice

'And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof." Genesis 2:19, KJV 

From an evolutionary perspective, humans gradually constructed more complex sign systems as their cognitive ability and social complexity developed. These began with simple positive associations, then gradually grew formalized over time, eventually coalescing into complex, flexible, abstract forms for poststructuralists to misinterpret.

The evolution of ancient Sumerian pictographic writing into cuniform.

Abstract language systems developed from mimetic, associative representations. The Sumerians were the first, but Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese pictographs followed a similar evolutionary patters not that long after. 

The history is not a secret, but is it easier to pontificate in ignorance from a theoretical safe space than to do the hard, and often unrewarding philological, archaeological, and historical research, where the reality of the limits of knowledge is humbling. 

Associative reference is the opposite of difference, and mimetic imagery predates writing by tens if not hundreds of thousands of years. It appears Peirce may have been on to something.

The Rosetta Stone, granodiorite, 112.3 × 75.7 × 28.4 cm, with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic script, and Greek script, 196 BC, discovered 1799, British Museum

If language systems lacked common referents, how is translation possible?

There is one final problem with the semiotic assumptions of Postmodernism: the false axiom that all signs are necessarily imprecise, and that internal concepts cannot be accurately transmitted between individuals. Remember Saussure's sign vehicle contained only the uncertain interaction of subjective thought pictures and arbitrary signs. When poststructuralists addressed the fact that structuralism is a static system and can't account for evolution in time, they kept the misconception that sign systems precede their creators and that difference, rather than analogy, is the basis of communication. Deconstruction was based on the idea that words are not transparent, and that even if you speak a common language, there is no way to be sure that you and your interlocutor are using a word or phrase in the exact same way.

No, it's not Foucault, it's Professor X, the popular telepath from Marvel's X-Men comics and movies. If Postmodern logic is correct, "true" communication, meaning a perfect transmission of something "external" between discursively constituted subjectivities, would require supernatural means. Because the communications and the subjectivities are built out of semiotic systems that ultimately signify only difference.

It is interesting that Postmodernists have little to say about mathematical notation, which is an abstract semiotic system with its own characters, grammar, syntax, and linear notation that is much closer to textual language than it is to the likes of Peirce's icon or index. However, numbers also have a very different sign-object relationship than linguistic signification. 

History’s greatest painter meets history’s greatest philosopher:

Raphael, Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens, 1509-11, fresco, Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace. 

Perhaps the most important thinker in history, Aristotle’s achievements and influence are too vast to summarize. He recognized the difference between mathematical entities and other categories over 2200 years before the first structuralist misunderstood his first semiotic relationship. 

One of Aristotle's insights was to divide the world of human experience into broad “categories” to better analyze and understand the seeming chaos of existence. He placed numbers under the category Quantity (in the subset Discrete Quantities), which he noticed were unique for being absolutely distinct (non-overlapping) elements that are complete and unchanging in themselves. Add any value, no matter how tiny, to a number, and the number becomes something different. Because of this, only quantities can predicate equality and inequality; only quantities can be determined to be precisely and absolutely equal or unequal to another quantity. Comparisons within other categories will always include the tiny variations that structuralist semiotics redefine as absolute difference. For example, two marriages (Category: Relation) or two stones (category: Substance) may be extremely similar, even practically the same, but not absolutely identical. Quantities are different; 10 is precisely 10 every single time, or it has no claim to being called 10 at all.

These are substantive observations about quantitative entities that Postmodernists ignore, but constitute the foundation of all subsequent developments of symbolic logic, including the mathematical sciences behind the appearance of this post on a computer screen. There are two main reasons for this disregard: quantity relationships represent a fundamental challenge to their Postmodern assumptions about the nature of sign systems, and math is hard. 

Like any arbitrary sign, the shape of a specific numeric character is unimportant; arbitrary signs are consensually determined. but once agreed upon, the relationships are absolute and unchanging. These signs all represent twenty-seven in (clockwise from top left) the Arabic, Babylonian, Roman, and Mayan systems. Two are base 10, the Mayan system is base 20 and the Babylonian base 60, but these four characters all represent exactly the same value, with no variation. They are perfectly translatable across vast historical and cultural divides.

Mathematical relations represent concepts that are abstract, but are perfectly knowable, replicable, and transmittable in themselves. The choice of signs is arbitrary, but they are transparent in ways that linguistic signs are not. Specifically, the polysemy, or multiple shades of meaning, that make words indeterminate or ambiguous does not appear to apply to numbers, nor do the shifts over time that cause languages to evolve.  

Oxyrhynchus papyrus (P.Oxy. I 29) fragment from Book II, Proposition 5 of Euclid's Elements, ca. 100 AD

Euclid determined his postulates, or axioms, in the 4th century BC. The first four hold today as written.

Euclid calls attention to the mathematical learning process, which is discursive, in that it relies on an arbitrary semiotic system, but seems to progress in mysterious, almost mystical, leaps as explanation suddenly becomes insight. Mathematical referents, or Quantities, in Aristotle's terms, are abstract, or conceptual, in that they do not exist as tangible objects in the material world, but they are clearly "real' in that they can consistently predict material outcomes. The moment when a math student "gets it" is unpredictible, and will occur at a different instant for each member of a class. 

Raphael, The School of Athens; detail, Euclid and his Students, 1509-11, fresco, Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace. 

In this passage from perhaps his most famous work, Raphael demonstrates the mathematical learning process with his characteristic compositional brilliance. Here Euclid, modeled after Raphael's friend, the great architect Bramante (the collection of artistic talent in Renaissance Rome is literally mind-boggling) demonstrates a proof to a group of students. We trace the arc of dawning realization in a sweeping, fluid curve from the engrossed boy in pale blue first struggling to understand, to the boy in green who looks up as he begins to "see" (note the almost mystical expression), through the self-assured boy leaning in who now understands, and into the celestial globe that signifies the abstract universal knowledge conferred by Euclid's teachings. Meanwhile, the confident student in the green tunic who leans in has clearly already mastered the lesson, and follows along, ready to offer a helping hand to his junior fellows like a classical TA. The fluid grace of the composition masks the strict geometric structure, making what is essentially a conceptual diagram seem as natural as a conversation.

A leap to abstract knowledge that can be perfectly replicated and endlessly retransmitted  essentially disproves the semiotic foundations of the Postmodern concept of discourse, if that mattered in a world where logic, like math, can be written off as sexist or racist, discursively. Perhaps mathematical notation can further "problematize" the notion that difference precludes a meaningful relationship:

An average is a repeatable process within an arbitrary semiotic system that simplifies a group of numbers into a single term that may be different from all of them, but is intrinsically connected to them as a group in a  meaningful way. No matter how large the group becomes, the average retains this connection. It is abstract and incomplete (all semiotic mediation is) but it is neither random nor autonomous.

It is obvious that the very building blocks of Postmodern discourse are rotten to the foundation.

Semiotics and Discourse

At this point I want to look more closely at the second displacement noted at the beginning of this post: the replacement of reality with discourse, but the semiotic/language issue proved lengthy enough, so I will deal with discourse more thoroughly in the next post. It is worth taking the time to address these foundational issues closely before moving on.

In the meantime, some deep questions from Judith Butler, both as a reminder of where the slippery slope of discourse leads, and as an insight into the torments I've endured acquiring the background to write these posts. Because when Luce Irigaray poses the question...

Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Secular Transcendence and False Consciousness

Postmodernism is often confused with poststructuralism, a roughly contemporary development in linguistic and literary studies that overlaps with it in significant ways. It would be incomplete, but not inaccurate, to call poststructuralism a postmodern linguistic philosophy, and sometimes the two terms appear to be used interchangeably. While this is not the place to attempt a full accounting of the murky details of their differences, it is possible to sketch out a rough distinction that is suitable for our purposes, so long as it is not taken as more definitive than it is. Postmodernism carries an implicit historical dimension within its name, as the period or era that comes after modernity, although this raises problems of its own that will be addressed in a later entry. Poststructuralism also contains the temporal adjective “post”, but what is being followed in this case is a system of thought or theoretical approach rather than a specific historical period. The former is connected in  significant ways to the particular conditions of contemporary life, while the latter is development of what was presented as a universally applicable model of knowledge and communication.

Thomas Cole, The Dream of the Architect, 1840, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art

Cole depicts architecture as a succession of historical period styles. Postmodernism fits uncomfortably at the end of historical timelines such as this. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, is universal in its claims about language and representation.

Poststructuralism, as the name implies, developed in reaction to structuralism, a twentieth-century intellectual movement in linguistics, the social sciences, and philosophy, and it shares important assumptions with its predecessor. Structuralists viewed all human action and understanding as products of broad patterns or structures rather than collections of random, individualized activities. For example, pioneering figures in structuralist anthropology such as Claude Levi-Strauss and James Frazier, observed similar myths and rituals in very different cultures. The obvious problem with this approach – promoting broad, hopelessly oversimplified “structural interpretations” that ignore meaningful distinctions – meant little next to the siren song of hidden insights. Because structuralism was not simply pattern recognition, but a claim to grasp the true nature of human experience beneath the appearances of everyday life. The structures are what constitute the fundamental level of reality, while what we take for the real world, including our existences as autonomous, free-willed individuals, are merely an illusion. Ironically, this places structuralism within a larger “structure” of intellectual movements peddling secret knowledge into “the true nature of things” that stretches back to the dawn of history.

The craving for a deeper meaning behind the random and chaotic world of appearances seems as old as humanity. It is certainly at the heart of any religious system that posits a divine order behind our own, and can likewise be seen in the contemporary notion of biological determinism, which holds that our genes are the true source of our natures. While you can’t get much further apart than the inner depths of the genome and the outer reaches of the heavens, both postulate a relationship in which our conscious impression of the world is merely a flawed expression of an invisible primal substructure. Western philosophy began with the Pre-socratics offering up various `candidates for ultimate reality before Plato devised his concept of the Forms, timeless, ideal essential versions of the shoddy, superficial world that our bodies inhabit. Plato’s philosophy is dualistic, meaning that is considers the human to be made up of two parts: body and soul, matter and spirit, with the latter being the source of knowledge. The notion of the soul striving to escape the bonds of the material world and rejoin its divine source is an essentially religious perspective, and Plato’s ideas became the foundation of a mystical philosophy known as Neoplatonism in late antiquity, before profoundly influencing the development of Christianity. Eastern philosophy began with sages such as Gautama Buddha and Mahavira abandoning worldly attachments for meditative unity with the infinite oneness behind visible reality. Desire for some higher meaning or purpose behind the chaos and decay of the everyday life is so ubiquitous throughout human history that it seems reasonable to assume some sort of innate human drive for transcendence. Structuralism would appear to be one answer to the question of what happens to this impulse in a culture where metaphysical beliefs such as religion or mystical enlightenment have become unfashionable. 

Seated Buddha, 1st to mid-2nd century AD, Gandhara, bronze with traces of gold leaf, 16.8 cm high, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The affinities between ancient Greek and Buddhist thought are apparent in the remarkable Greco-Buddhist artworks that appeared in Gandhara on the border of the Indian and Hellenistic worlds.

The idea of secular transcendence, of a higher order behind experience that is entirely material in nature is paradoxical, but its appeal reaches far beyond the structuralists. Higher, “special” understanding without the humility of subordinating the ego to a greater power, or the grinding years of hard mental work and self-abnegation, is intoxicating to the poseurs and careerists in our intellectually diminished institutions. Spiritual matters fall outside the scope of empirical evidence and logical interpretation, which is why this blog will leave specifically religious questions to the realm of faith. It does, however, require an almost pathological degree of narcissism to seriously think that the clever insight of a single, finite, historically limited human subject could provide a precise, actionable summary of the fundamental nature of reality. 

The Flammarion engraving, from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère météorologie populaire, 1888.

This famous anonymous print captures the seductive allure of secret knowledge. Unfortunately, structuralist "transcendence" is relatively lacking in splendor.

No system of thought more closely resembles pathology than Marxism, a blood-drenched abattoir of a philosophy that has claimed more lives than any other ideology and is an important precursor to both structuralism and Postmodernism. On its face, its enduring popularity is difficult to believe. Marx allowed for no transcendence or divinity in his materialist world view yet saw no problem with positing a comically oversimplified economic relationship as the deepest substructure of human society on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. One would think the fact that he was simply mistaken would have dampened his popularity, but the opposite is true. His followers have continually attempted to implement his absurd misconceptions of human reality with two universally consistent outcomes: inevitable failures, and increasingly murderous frenzy as the failures mount.

Big fun in the People's Paradise, Soviet style.

There are actually several reasons that account for the sanguinary appeal of Marxism, beyond innate human depravity. Superficially, it aligns with a naïve impression of fairness, while tapping into the understandable anger and resentment of the disadvantaged. The childish simplicity of its basic precepts is within the grasp of the most ignorant, while the loathsome notion of false consciousness – the accusation that those rejecting the dismal, dishonest, two-dimensional characterizations are deluded – offers the dopamine rush of secret wisdom to those who submit. There is a similarity between the acceptance of Marxist fantasy and the way in which cults require their members to affirm obvious falsehoods as a sign of surrendering the self. Observing the behavior of these fantasists supports the hypothesis that they are disengaged from reality in ways that makes them especially vulnerable to manipulation and potentially prone to atrocities. Marxism is also a centrally planned and administrated system, which creates nodes of control that are easily leveraged by sociopaths who steer the useful idiots to their destruction with false blandishments and propaganda. The true danger in such a system is in the application it to real lived experience. The facile "theorizings" of a Marx or a Marcuse are easily ignored when confined to the world of philosophical thought experiment. But when the full force of state power imposes their barbarous “solutions” on the complexities and compromises on human society? 

Big fun in the People's Paradise, Venezuela style. 

It's almost like there's a pattern lying beneath the surface...

Structuralism follows Marxism in positing a deeper, though still purely material, level of reality beneath a false consciousness but recognizes that the structures of the former are much more complex than Marx’s foolish “means of production”. In other words, it maintains the form of secular transcendence while refining the quality of analysis. Whereas Marx proposed a crude economic relationship as the ultimate basis of reality, structuralism grew out of linguistic theory; particularly the speculations of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure devised a new characterization of language as a self-contained system or structure, rather than an accumulation of individual symbols that are paired with and signify some concept(s) or thing(s). In both cases signs are arbitrary – tree and δέντρο appear different but refer to more or less the same thing – but the latter is essentially positive in that it treats each word as pointing to something or things other than itself. Saussure, on the other hand, sees language as a structuralist system, complete in itself and not pointing to anything external. This is not a surprising leap; language has rules of grammar and syntax and a network of informal conventions around connotation and figurative language that all suggest a systematic rule set. Even the assemblage of linguistic communications from letters to words to sentences and beyond reflects a structural operation. Yet for Saussure, these operations represent the sole ground upon which linguistic meaning happens.

Consider the following two sentences:

One is clearly literal and the other figurative, but the important question is how we determine in what sense the word is being used.  

He actually isn't wrong here.

In each case, we judge the meaning of the word on the basis of their role in the larger sentence. One pairing is literally incorrect and the other is not, so it is the role in a larger structure rather than anything inherent in the words themselves that determines how they are working in each instance. While it is true that this distinction is based on the truth-value of references to something outside the system, this can be set aside for the moment while we consider the primary enduring legacy of structuralist thought: If linguistic signs are arbitrary elements within a closed system, then the only sources of meaning are the operations of the system itself, or whatever it is that distinguishes one particular sign from all the other elements in the structure. In other words, meaning is transformed, on an essential level, from a positive association into an expression of difference. At heart, it is merely a void, or lack of similarity to anything else (within the system), rather than any sort of identifiable quality or essence. Any concept of “meaning” based on a positive identity is therefore illusory, a false consciousness masking a fundamental state of separation. 

  

Structural linguistics are like a spherical maze: a nearly endless array of structured paths and choices leading nowhere.

While there is value in systematic analyses of linguistic function, structuralism, like “theory” in general, manages to transform interesting observations into ossified, simplistic formulae that fail to capture the complexity and nuance of that they purport to theorize. It is simply not smart enough to account for the fullness of human reality, which is why in invariably fails miserably whenever implemented in real life. The world is infinitely complex, an aggregate of countless unpredictable actions and reactions, and yet patterns are visible within this chaos that enable understanding and even prediction. Structuralist thought, like secular transcendence in general, is sensitive to patterns (or, more accurately, a pattern) but is incapable of accounting for the complexity that necessarily limits the applicability of any theoretical abstraction. It's not a square peg that it is trying to jam into a round hole, as much as a flock of butterflies. Nevertheless, these structures were awarded the unearned truth value and almost totemic reverence that is given to any system of secular transcendence. In fact, slavish adherence to the structuralist model actually led educated individuals to claim, straight faced, that works of literature do not originate in an author but are aspects of the structure expressing themselves through a certain person. Were this the case, perhaps I would be the system expressing an antidote to shoddy thinking.  

  

Giotto, The Exorcism of the Demons at Arezzo, 1297-99, fresco, 270 x 230 cm, from the Legend of St Francis series, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi

History is replete with dishonest peddlers of secret knowledge into the true nature of things. The forms vary, but the cure remains constant. 

This detour through structuralism is necessary to properly contextualize poststructuralism, an approach most often connected to Jacques Derrida, who is a legitimate handful to deal with, and the subject of more than one future post. Unlike many Postmodern heroes, Derrida is devilishly clever and very hard to pin down, but the structuralist notion that meaning is fundamentally an absence/void/aporia defined only by difference, is one unifying theme throughout his work. One problem with structuralism is that is cannot account for change, and it is well known historically that language evolves rather than remaining in fixed structures. Derrida imagines a system that remains essentially cut off from any external reference but is fluid and evolving. A philosophical oversimplification, though not an unfair one, would be to say he marries Saussure to Heidegger's notion of being as something constantly unfolding, rather than a fixed state, in our time-bound world. However, where Heidegger imagines some sort of transcendence or ultimate reality beyond the range of our understanding or representation (in the later stages of his career, Heidegger recalls Plotinus, or even Eckhart, for the mystical cast to his thought), for Derrida, the recursive, structuralist notion of language is all there is. It is not transcendence hiding behind our flawed apprehension, but an endless, self-referential chain that ultimately leads to nowhere.   

Luca Signorelli, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, detail, 1499-1504, S. Brixio Chapel, Orvieto Cathedral

There is something diabolical in the way Derrida weaves complicated textual webs that hint at meaning, but are, at the end of the day, purely self-referential. The jury is out on whether or not he invalidated "meaning" in general, but it is clear that his work at least manages to remain resolutely solipsistic.

By setting structuralism in motion, Derrida was able to account for some of other shortcomings in the older system. Returning, for a moment, to the comparison between the two sentences made earlier, we will recall that we differentiated between literal and figurative language on the basis of their references to things or subjects outside the system. This is a problem, since the very concept of structuralist difference depends on the complete lack of external associations. Derrida maneuvered around this with something he called “the Trace,” a ghostly hint of positive reference based on previous associations and usages, despite those earlier references being no more than false assumptions or illusions. While there is no outside the text in reality, as he famously remarked,  the Trace preserves the illusion of external meaning to enable the functional interactions that make up society. 

There is a sinister genius in this formation, since it accounts for the sense of meaning we feel in lived experience, while retaining the notion that reality as we assume it to be is fundamentally empty. This right here is a primary root of all the attacks on culture and knowledge associated with poststructuralist thought, which differ wildly in detail but a common form:

A closer glance reveals a familiar pattern: a false consciousness of the way things are that masks and interacts with the hidden true nature of reality. In other words, a secular transcendence; a top down system where highly speculative, and quite often spurious readings of various phenomena enjoy a toxic, unearned reverence. Derrida’s obsessive insistence on the primacy of language in human communication alone ought to disqualify his speculations from serious consideration for real world guidance. 

Wall Painting With Horses, Rhinoceroses, and Aurochs, c. 32,000-30,000 BC, Chauvet Cave. Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche Gorge, France

This painting is over 32,000 years old and greatly predates complex language development. Historical and archaeological indicate that mimetic representation, or imitative associations with external objects, is the primary human basis for interacting with the world. This is exactly the sort of developing factual picture that totalizing ideologies ignore. It is true that this knowledge post-dates Saussure, but any modern thinker who proposes a linguistic foundation for understanding without addressing human cognition is deliberately dishonest. 

At the same time, Derridean thought has spawned some useful critical tools that are highly effective in the appropriate circumstances. The most famous of these is commonly known as deconstruction for its use of internal contradictions within a text to undermine its assertions, rather than attacking it from the outside with competing facts and arguments. The next post will adapt a  deconstructive method to lay bare the fundamental incoherence and hypocrisy at the heart of Postmodern theory.