First off, let me apologize for the lateness of this post. I hope this didn’t screw with anyone’s schedule or cause any general sense of unease.
Both essays by Eagleton and Said seem to suggest a material quality of a text, questioning the binary relation of speech to writing. According to Eagleton, the text has been treated as the shadow of the spoken word since Plato, considered in Western thought as a tool to approximate the presence of experience. In response to the structuralists who had constructed scientific methods of interpretation based on a model of representation, E and S attempt to unground the referents that stand before them (e.g. God or Truth), claiming that a fiction’s will can be felt directly in the creation of its own contexts. To these authors, there is something deeply political at work in a writing. With this in mind, how do E and S constitute meaning as a system of power relations?
6 responses so far ↓
zzzzz // 30 September 2008 at 8.34 pm
I was definitely most intrigued by some of the statements Eagleton made regarding the ideas of Roland Barthes. It had never occurred to me, but the arbitrary nature of language is in a way very comparable to the arbitrariness of an authoritarian regime. It is to be accepted without question and without any thought that what is presented might be in fact anything but purely natural. As Eagleton paraphrases Barthes, these arbitrary rules “offer themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world.” In this way he is certainly saying something about the limitations of language, but on a broader scale he is commenting on the ability for arbitrary language to control political and cultural ideology. He even ventures to say that realism in fact “tends to conceal the socially relative of constructed nature of language: it helps to confirm the prejudice that there is a form of ordinary language which is somehow natural.” Clearly, the sentiment reflected in this statement is the idea that labeling something as “realism” only serves to thrust an idea of what is “natural” onto readers. Interestingly, though, Eagleton finally comes to say that it is the reader and his knowledge of language, not the writer, that brings meaning to texts. In that way all of his arguments of “authoritarian” ideology in language are not pinned on an actual person, but on the abstract idea of language.
sprinkles // 30 September 2008 at 9.36 pm
The idea that language is arbitrary is so simple and obvious, yet so comlex. The idea that “a cat is a cat because it is a cat” is an interesting one. There is truly no correlation between a word that was chosen to symbolize an object and the object itself, yet cat gives everyone a very similar picture. So it would seem that language itself is not nearly as important as a widespread understanding of what the language represents. As Eagleton argues, this seemingly arbitrary language has so much power. Language comes with the assumption that there will be understanding of what it represents.Our culture has taken language to a new level, where a word that represents something is used to represent an entirely different thing. In other words, slang is possible because the people involved understand its meaning in its context. In common conversation, slang is used constantly.
I also want to point out that these writers also try to account for the reader in literary interpretation, just as the others did. The believe that a reader’s understanding of language creates meaning.
spotofbother // 1 October 2008 at 12.01 am
One of the most interesting arguments about power structures is how deconstruction can take a feminist outlook on the binary opposition of structuralism. That is, because every idea is defined by what it is not, “woman is the excluded opposite of man, and as long as such a distinction is tightly held in place the whole system can function effectively.” What a post-structuralist can then do is undermine this idea of direct opposites by looking, as Derrida does, at ’surplus meanings’ in the texts. In this way, the critic can constitute his or her own meaning and effectively change the power structures. Of course, this can go on infinitely, and serve to bring down every structure. However, in feminist reading, post-structuralism seems to me to be a very powerful tool.
sfbull5 // 1 October 2008 at 12.44 am
Although I agree with a lot of the points made in Eagleton’s “Post-Structuralism” essay, I really didn’t like his claim that “language is something I [or, people in general] am made out of, rather than merely a convenient tool I use” (112). I disagreed with Derrida’s idea (brought up in Eagleton’s essay and the B&R piece) that everything is inherently made up of language; that language precedes, or at least occurs simultaneously with all conscious and even unconscious thoughts. I think I believe that although language is finite, there is some infinite entity that precedes language, something that I would define as thought or even “essence,” a word mentioned at least once by Eagleton. The claim that we “are” language implies that our consciousness(es) and our utilization of our native language are closely linked and, more importantly, occur simultaneously. Although I like the way Eagleton embeds his argument in Derrida’s ideas, I don’t agree with that basic philosophy.
sparkling_bears47 // 1 October 2008 at 12.56 am
I was very intrigued by these papers, especially the deconstruction aspect inherent in them. The idea of taking apart a piece of writing and rebuilding it around your own point of view is compelling, to say the least. I suppose what interests me is that deconstructing pieces can lead literary critics to the same trap that, in a way, the formalists fell into: there’s only one meaning to be found.
spotofbother, above, mentioned how post-structuralism, and deconstruction, can support feminist ideology by giving feminist readers the opportunity to find feminist readings in any text. this kind of gets into the problems of subjectivity. say, for example, I was a feminist critic. as a feminist critic, I want to find feminist readings. well, if I deconstruct a piece well enough, I can find more than enough support for my theory. and that leads to a situation where everyone, every critic with his or her agenda/bias, can find support in the most unlikely of places. and that way, their reading becomes, in their minds, the one reading to be found.
bbug8 // 1 October 2008 at 10.09 am
Reading sfbull5’s post made me realize that I felt the same way about the point Eagleton made, without even knowing it. For me, there is a problem with saying that we are language, because that would imply that everything we say, do, think, feel, etc, is made up of language, and somehow, I can’t support that idea. It is not really a concrete concept that is behind my disagreement, only the thought that there are some entitities, for lack of a better term, such as feelings, that have no language. I believe that I, and all other humans, have the capacity to feel things that are too complex even for the most highly-evolved language to express.
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