:: Zoals jullie gemerkt hebben lag ie er weer even uit. Excuses.
:: Zes pints is twaalf amsterdammers/vaasjes.
:: Mijn essay is af! (En nog doorgelezen door iemand die dit veel beter vond dan het vorige. Hieronder te lezen voor de ge?nteresseerden.)
:: Als beloning nieuwe sneakers! Bruin met gele Gola’s.
:: Vanavond Ladytron concertje. Joepie.

i introduction
One could argue that the twentieth century started with the foundation for the notion that everything is text. But what is everything? And what is text?
The linguistic turn, caused by the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, finally directed the attention of literary critics and philosophers from the world onto the text, or in fact, onto language. What in fact was a founding program for modern linguistics, has had a crucial influence on, as well as crucial implications for nearly all philosophical and literary movements in the twentieth century. Key points in De Saussure?s theory are that there is an arbitrary relation between signifier and signified, and that every ?language is a system of differences? , which means that ?each language is a system of concepts as well as forms: a system of conventional signs that organizes the world.?
Structuralism built on this idea, and claimed that every (literary) text is part of, and can be understood as part of a wider structure; and in doing so, the signification process can be started: ?The structuralist method [?] assumes that meaning is made possible by the existence of underlying systems of conventions which enable elements to function individually as signs.?
Post-structuralism could never have developed without structuralism, but it reproaches its predecessor not to have driven the linguistic turn to its ultimate and for post-structuralists unavoidable conclusions. These ultimate conclusions are being theorized about in post-structuralist texts, but become mainly visible in what could be called the practice of post-structuralism, i.e. deconstruction.
The far-fetched implication of De Saussure?s remarks about language, could be interpreted as everything is text. But again, what is everything and what is text? Also, I do not think that it is a coincidence that Jacques Derrida?s most quoted sentence is ?there is no outside text? . Although this sentence is often wrongly understood, and ripped from its context , the mere fact is that it is quoted, which points at the direction in which literary theory had developed at that time.
In this essay, I shall examine the notion that everything is text and go into what it meant for structuralism, as well as for post-structuralism. This seemingly simple sentence could be applied in different ways (meanings?) on both theoretical movements.
ii structuralism and everything is text
As I said, structuralism builds further on the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, who already argued ?that our knowledge of the world is inextricably shaped and conditioned by the language that serves to represent it.? Structuralist theory was aware of that and posed that there a ?metalanguage? had to be constructed in which one should be able to discuss, signify and interpret texts. Especially, because structuralism takes the way in which language operates in a network, a structure of established significations, as an example for other discourses.
For the structuralist, the culture we are part of can be ?read? like a language, using these principles, since culture is made up of many structural networks which carry significance and can be shown to operate in a systematic way. These networks operate through ?codes? as a system of signs.
Considering each system of signs working as language, one could already claim that everything is text, the more because every discourse in the world (everything) can be approached as a system of texts, and in a certain constructed metalanguage (text). Everything consists of meaning carrying signs, and as a result semiotics, the general science of signs, comes into practice:
In short, now that semiology exists it is easy to see that Cassirer?s [the one who claimed that the linguistic turn had had an influence as big as the discovery of Galileo ? JH] statement implicitly predicts what semiotics explicitly does: that we come to think of our social and cultural world as a series of sign systems, comparable with language. What we live among and relate to are not physical objects and events; they are objects and events with a meaning.
iii from structuralism to post-structuralism
Constructing a structuralist metalanguage, implies that there is a certain point where language ?ends?, and that there is an origin of language, or at least a language that differs from the language which is spoken about. The fact that texts can be given signification, reveals an origin of the text as well. An origin in a sense that meaning is already established in the words of the given text, and that meaning can be produced by research of these as part of a significance carrying network. Both assumptions involve that there is present meaning, and objective knowledge.
Post-structuralism came into practice when these assumptions of stucturalist theory were questioned and therefore problematized. And this actually happened, when Saussurean principles were radically carried through. How can there be a metalanguage if this language is the same as the one it is talking, writing about? ?There is no language so vigilant or self-aware that it can effectively escape the conditions placed upon thought by its own prehistory and ruling metaphysic.? And, the assumption about the already established meaning, shows ?that both traditional and structuralist criticism seek an interpretation from ?within? the work. They both hold that the work will reveal its secret, its ?myth of interiority? and its nebulous origins.?
Post-structuralism is not something that should be called a revolution. The critique on structuralism slightly grew and was often self-critique. In this respect, for example, Roland Barthes, first considered a structuralist, could argue in 1963 that a metalanguage was straightforwardly possible, and reversed this opinion in 1970, and was henceforth, earlier on considered a post-structuralist. It is not easy to summarize briefly the ideas of post-structuralism. As Robert Young states it in his introduction to his post-structuralist reader:
Theory has now become precisely that which prevents the formation of a stable metalanguage by a constant self-subversion. As a self-reflexive discourse, which constantly divides itself against itself and transgresses its own systems, post-structuralist criticism avoids becoming fixed, avoids becoming an established method.
iv post-structuralism and everything is text
First, I would like to discuss a poem, which represents a few of the ideas of post-structuralism that are inevitably important to assess the significance of everything is text in this sense. This is the opening poem from Pornschlegel en andere gedichten (?Pornschlegel and other poems?) by the Flemish poet, Dirk van Bastelaere.
DARWIN
The reef is alive.
Its own memory
Holds a reef to its beginning.
It seems the palace floor
Of another Troy
But is a colony of the sea
In the sea. The surrounding ships
And the walkers in themselves,
It must have forgotten.
Never, however,
represented than by itself,
the heart of a reef will again be found:
Spread in the field, the
Vowels of dozens of sentences.
The duration of your life
Is a hartshorn coral
That has not really
Started.
Hardly anybody here occurs.
On the Beagle, it was
In 1836, April,
That over Darwin?s log Darwin himself,
A fragment of a cloud moved.
Darwin evaporated,
The reef continues reef building.
In his famous essay ?The Death of the Author?, which is often considered the starting point of post-structuralism, Roland Barthes already said that ?writing is the destruction of every point of voice, of every point of origin.? This twofold destruction is exactly, which Van Bastelaere is pointing at.
The reef is the innumerable amount of texts. A reef consists of circles of coral, growing endlessly, but this growing is scarcely perceptible for the human eye. Every human comes across the reef being in a certain state, at a certain point in time, but if he is trying to catch it (in an image, in a text, in words) and thus tries to represent it, it has already changed again. An origin once had to be there, but it has become invisible, because it is no longer there. There is nothing like a core or a heart. In the span of thousands of years, the reef has been flourishing. This poem is itself an argument for its idea: after being written, it immediately takes part in this network of texts, referring to innumerable other texts, which are transforming the meaning of this text as soon as they are linked to each other.
This metaphor is, according to Van Bastelaere, translatable to the working of texts and their meanings. He says that ?the reef is, among other things, a metaphor for the continuous growth of the text and the meanings of a text, so that the interpretation can never be ended?? Or, to use Christopher Norris: ?Writing is the endless displacement of meaning which both governs language and places it for ever beyond the reach of a stable, self-authenticating knowledge.? The reef itself denies the possibility of literal meaning; the way the reef is changing, that is the way words and their meanings are changing, there is no absolute self-presence of meaning.
The destruction of voice becomes clear, when Van Bastelaere mentions Darwin. Darwin as an author doesn?t exist anymore (?Darwin evaporated?). His journal is the only thing that rests, purely text. This writing became part of the reef as soon it had been finished, in 1836, and kept on changing in meanings because the reef kept on growing (just as this poem from now on is part of the reef). The influence of any human being (author) is denied (?The surrounding ships / And the walkers in themselves, / It must have forgotten? and ?Hardly anybody here occurs?) as a subject that can influence the reef. Even Darwin himself doesn?t appear in the poem, it is only his log, his textual body.
For him [the scriptor ? JH], on the contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin ? or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.
In this view, one could consider the sentence everything is text as the working principle behind the total network of texts and its denial of an origin (as opposed to the possibility of a metalanguage and meaning carrying signs). But, where can the reader be situated, if Barthes announces the birth of the reader at the same time as he claims the death of the author?
And if criticism recognises its own status as ?text?, so its regard may be said to shift from the model [structuralism - JH] ?behind? or ?within? the text to the signifying surface of the text it criticises. At the same time, whereas the model implies an already constituted product, the more the surface of the text is analysed the more it can be seen in terms of ?textuality? ? the interaction of reader and text as a productivity, the production of a multiplicity of signifying effects.
The moment has come to make the distinction between a work and a text, as Barthes does in his essay ?Theory of the text?? . As in the quote from Young, Barthes sees ?text? as the productivity caused by a work. There is nothing to get out of the work, the work is getting text out of itself. This can only happen, if a reader reads or criticizes. In this sense then, the reader himself becomes in this view a writer himself.
I think that the famous ?il n?y a pas de hors-texte? could understood in this sense as well. Derrida is discussing Rousseau?s ?Essay on the origin of languages?. But as the deconstruction nature ?prescribes? ? be aware that there is no metalanguage! ?, he is questioning his own writing at the same time. This writing can be seen, according to Derrida, as a supplement ? the French word also means replacement ?, ?in the sense that language replaces or stands in for reality.? Language cannot represent reality. In this sense, ?diff?rance? has to be understood as well. The sign differs from other signs, and defers the presence of the signified, precisely because the sign has no fixed meaning and is in essence not able to represent. Because the reader cannot establish a meaning, every new produced presence, every new produced text is the moment at which presence is deferred again. I would argue that every deferring implies a supplement.
For Derrida, reading is writing, as Barthes sees reading as producing ?text?. For Derrida, reading cannot ?legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, [?] toward a signified outside the text, whose content could take place, could have taken place [?] outside of writing in general.? It is at this moment that Derrida writes down, what he probably became the most famous for.
Everything is text in these extreme post-structuralist terms, means that next to all, let?s use, ?works?, there can be only new texts, and not representations, explanations, or interpretations at all, for they claim to be a representation. Every reading of works involves production; ?the signifier belongs to everybody; it is the text which, in fact, works tirelessly,? as became visible in the metaphor of the reef. Every reading involves signification again and again, as the signifier has become a ?loose? concept. Everything in this sense means the whole world, as Barthes states: ?All signifying practices can engender text: the practice of painting pictures, musical practice, filmc practice, etc. The works, in certain cases, themselves prepare the subversion of the genres, of the homogeneous classes to which they have been assigned.?
v conclusion
Trying to explain the seemingly simple notion that everything is text has proved not easy at all. I showed that it could be done in several ways, and that it is impossible to utter this sentence without any understanding of the theories it could be applied to. The two nouns are given different meanings. It is not a stable sentence at all to summarize twentieth century literary theory. The significance as ?meaning? of the sentence can not be exactly clear; regarding this fact, it is an argument itself for post-structuralist theories about the unstable, never establishing meaning of language. This is the paradox about this essay: to assess a meaning of something, arguing that the establishment of meaning is an illusion. But, as Jonathan Culler argues,
Acts of signification are necessary to create signifying differences. But this perspective gives rise to no discipline; it is not a position that can be maintained because if one tries to discuss acts of signification one immediately is led to describe the oppositions which enable an act to signify; one inevitably finds oneself back in the semiotic perspective, describing a system.
But if we are, after being acquainted with post-structuralist and deconstruction theories, still reading texts and trying to interprete them, what then is the significance ? in the meaning of importance ? of the discussed sentence? I think it is clear that in the first instance, post-structuralism had to reveal unavoidably the assumptions of structuralism and in the second instance provided literary criticism with its own conclusions of this revelation. Although it seems that this theory developed too much in itself, ?[d]econstruction does not remove ?the world?, but it demands that we rethink the terms in which we formulate it.? I think that the rise of post-colonial, feminist, queer theories and even translation studies surely has a strong connection with post-structuralist theory. It seems as if the latter opened up new perspectives as its deconstruction of oppositions freed the path for eye-opening research, which deconstructed the working constructs, before post-structuralism accepted as the ?truth?, in all of the mentioned theories. ?Above all, deconstruction works to undo the idea ? according to Derrida, the ruling illusion of Western metaphysics ? that reason can somehow dispense with language and arrive at a pure, self-authenticating truth or method.? There is no such thing as the ?one? truth. There is an innumerable amount of different truths, and there can only be more. As Van Bastelaere puts it more literary: ?The world extends itself, extends itself.?
A second importance is probably a more abstract one. It is often claimed that twentieth century culture can not be understood with a notion of what modernism involves, immediately followed by mentioning its successor postmodernism. That it is not always transparent what the difference is between the two, seems to be connected with the not always clear differences between the discussed theories. Modernism involves fragmentation, eclecticism, subjectivism, the experiment, self-reflexivity of the work of art, and a vaguer distinction between genres. And actually, all these features are apparent in postmodernist works as well. So what then, is the difference? Peter Barry argues, amongst others, that postmodernism differs from modernism in its tone and mood. In short, modernism regrets the fragmented world and want to reunite it, as it was the case in an earlier stage in history. Postmodernism celebrates fragmentation and plurality; it just can?t get enough of it.
Is not an obvious connection visible with the development in twentieth century theory? Was it not structuralism that was desperately searching for meaning and truth? And was it not post-structuralism that revealed the illusion of truth and struggled for the endless plurality of meaning? Implicitly, everything is text directs us not only to an understanding of structuralism and post-structuralism, but provides also a way to understand modernism and postmodernism.
vi bibliography
Barthes, Roland, ?Theory of the text?, in: Untying the text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston/London/Henley, 1981, p. 31-47
Barthes, Roland, ?The death of the author?, in: Modern Criticism and Theory ? a reader (second edition), ed. David Lodge, Longman United Kingdom, 2000, p. 146-150
Barry, Peter, Beginning Theory ? an introduction to literary and cultural theory (second edition), Manchester University Press, Manchester/New York, 2002
Bastelaere, Dirk van, Pornschlegel en andere gedichten, De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, 1988
Bastelaere, Dirk van, Wwwhhoooosshhh ? Over po?zie en haar wereldse inbedding, Vantilt, Nijmegen, 2001
Culler, Jonathan, The pursuit of signs, Routledge, London, 1981
Culler, Jonathan, Literary Theory ? a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 1997
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, (trans./pref. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore/London, 1974
Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction ? Theory & practice, Methuen, London/New York, 1982