Lee Morrissey

Department of English
Clemson University
lmorris@CLEMSON.EDU

 

More than thirty years after Jacques Derrida first read his essay “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” at the Johns Hopkins Conference on “The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man,” it may seem redundant to return to the “originary” moment of its spectacularly successful–and simultaneously remarkably simplified–American reception. However, now that, reportedly, “deconstruction… is dead in literature departments today”–as Jeffrey Nealon writes in Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction–it may be possible to reconsider its “birth,” particularly the commonly accepted notion that Derrida’s work avoids, overlooks, or prevents a relationship with history and/or politics (22). While the historicizing approach of this essay is made possible in part by the increasingly explicit treatment of historical and political questions in Derrida’s recent work, such as Spectres of Marx and Jacques Derrida, it is also made possible by a second “interpretation of interpretation” put forward by “Structure, Sign, and Play,” that which “affirms play” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 292). If, as “Structure, Sign, and Play” contends, “[b]eing must be conceived as presence or absence on the basis of the possibility of play and not the other way around,” I am revisiting this early essay to “play” with the possibility that the recent focus on politics, (presence), neglected though it was (absence), is part of its being (play), having been there from the “beginning.” Specifically, I consider Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1966), in terms of the relationship between Paris and Algeria or Francophone North Africa, what the recent History of Structuralismcalls “the continental divide of structuralism” (Dosse 264). By “playing” with Derrida’s essay in terms of the “liberation” of Algeria (c. 1962), what emerges is a Derridean argument much more politically and historically aware than his work is generally thought to be, especially in the earlier essays.

 

During the initial discussion after his reading of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Derrida stated, “I don’t destroy the subject; I situate it…. It is a question of knowing where it comes from” (Macksey and Donato 271). As he has discussed more frequently in his recent work, Derrida happens to come from Algeria, where he lived until he was 19 years old. He has recently described his experience of Algeria in part in terms of “Vichy, official anti-semitism, the Allied landing at the end of 1942, the terrible colonial repression of Algerian resistance in 1945 at the time of the first serious outbursts heralding the Algerian war” (Derrida and Attridge 38-9). The war in Algeria, which lasted eight years, “toppled six French prime ministers and the Fourth Republic itself,” with casualties of “an estimated one million Muslim Algerians and the expulsion from their homes of approximately the same number of European settlers” (Horne 14). Derrida returned to and lived in Algeria for two years during the war. Where “Structure, Sign, and Play” tentatively claims that “perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an event,” and answers the obvious question–“what would this event be then?”–with the cryptic claim that “its exterior form would be that of a rupture” (278), this essay, on the one hand, treats the Algerian liberation as that rupture, while on the other, considering the cryptic, tentative tone of “Structure, Sign, and Play” as symptomatic.

 

The fact that this context has not informed the typical response to “Structure, Sign, and Play” over the past thirty years probably has more to with American unfamiliarity with Francophone North Africa than with the famous opacity of Derrida’s writing. When, for example, the editors of the influential anthology Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America (1983) set out “to stimulate serious, careful assessment of [deconstruction] in relation to recent American criticism and to the critical tradition,” they argue that in order “to achieve this initial location, [they] had to refrain from pursuing other important current concerns, such as feminism, semiotics, and ethnic and regional studies” (Martin ix). It is not clear what remains when one excludes so many fields which address so many issues. This rather comprehensive list of exclusions turns out to have included issues that the recent work of Derrida, the key figure in the approach the editors of Yale Critics were trying to survey, indicates have been of central importance. Overlooking what they call “regional studies” means that they might have missed precisely the trans-Mediterranean context that Derrida’s recent work so directly discusses.

 

Jean Hyppolite, the first person to ask a question regarding “Structure, Sign, and Play” when it was first read, asked what remains the “central” question; recognizing that the “technical point of departure of the presentation” is Derrida’s discussion of the center, Hyppolite asked “what a center might mean” (Macksey and Donato 265). Hyppolite wondered, “is the center the knowledge of the general rules which, after a fashion, allow us to understand the interplay of the elements? Or is the center certain elements which enjoy a particular privilege with the ensemble?” (265). Derrida’s answer, “I don’t mean to say that I thought of approaching an idea of the center would be an affirmation,” echoes his essay’s claim that “this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 292). However, by doing to the word “center” what Derrida says the center does–making a “substitution of center for center” so that “the center receives different forms or names”–“Structure, Sign, and Play” can describe the complexity of Algeria’s decolonization (292).

 

For Derrida’s definitions of “the center” constitute abstracted definitions of a political center: “The center, which is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which while governing that structure escapes structurality” (279). The center “governs” and is “constituted”; the political implications of Derrida’s terms here are very important. We are all familiar with how centers manage to escape structurality: consider, for example, the South African National Party’s 1997 contention before the Truth and Reconciliation Committee that its leaders had no knowledge of what members of the army (“the structure”) were doing to black South Africans. When pressed, the center says that power was always elsewhere. In this sense, then, “the center is not the center” (279). Or, as Derrida also says, “the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside it” (279). Like a governmental center, the “center of a structure permits the freeplay of its elements inside the total form” (278-279), even as it also “closes off the freeplay it opens up and makes possible” (279). Some possibilities cannot be considered even by the freest of centers.

 

According to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” this comparative narrowness of possibilities is the result of centering: “The structurality of structure… has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin” (278). The center thus controls, in the sense of “containing,” the structurality of the structure, reducing it; the extremes are neutralized by the center. For many people (although “Structure, Sign, and Play” might say, for “the structure”), this containment is a good thing: “the concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude” (279). Limiting freeplay is reassuring, “and on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered” (279). The center, which governs, allows certain freedoms, and even if allowing these closes off others, it is considered preferable to the absence of centering because with it a reassuring certitude, through which anxiety can be reduced, is implied.

 

“Structure, Sign, and Play” emphasizes that the center is “not a fixed locus but a function” (280). In one sense, then, the governmental function need not be put in one place; the function can be distributed throughout the structure. This is another way of understanding that the center is not the center; the center of power need not be at the central place. Even decentralized power functions as power. Moreover, if the center is a function, not a place, then it is highly variable; not only can the function be fulfilled from different places, but different centers can fulfill the same function. “If this is so,” according to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” “the entire history of the concept of structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center” (278). In governmental terms, whatever fulfills the function of the center is itself just a substitute for a (previous) center; the function remains the same even if the center has moved, i.e., is not a fixed locus.

 

“Structural” conditions in Algeria made these issues all the more complicated and important. The Crémieux Decrees of 1870 automatically made Algerian Jews French citizens and left Algerian Muslims French “subjects,” with the option to apply for citizenship. However, legislation which permitted Algerian Muslims to be subjected to Islamic, rather than French, law “became in effect a prison, because Muslims wishing to adopt French citizenship had to renounce these [Islamic] rights, thereby virtually committing an act of apostasy,” according to Alistair Horne (35). Moreover, French was simultaneously made the official language of the land, Arabic being considered foreign, and with Koranic schools shut down, individuals who wanted an education would need to attend a French school, where they would learn about “their” French culture. As a consequence, “by 1946,” write David and Marina Ottaway, “about forty-six thousand Algerians out of a total population of seven and a half million had full French citizenship” (30). This, it seems to me, is an instance of the structurality of the structure.

 

According to Jacques Derrida, in 1942, when Derrida was 12 years old, the French government in Algeria, which had not been occupied by Germany, revoked the Crémieux Decrees; consequently, as it is put in one of the three accounts of it in Jacques Derrida, “they expelled from the Lycée de Ben Aknoun in 1942 a little black and very Arab Jew who understood nothing about it” (Bennington 58). In addition to being expelled from school, Derrida also lost his French citizenship. Overnight he was a Jew and was not French. Being both was seemingly no longer possible. A teacher said that day that “French culture is not made for little Jews” (326). In the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play,” Algeria had undergone a substitution of center for center, and in 1942, this new center neutralized a possibility for freeplay, mastering a certain anxiety; but the center, the structure, had repositioned Derrida: “thus expelled, I became the outside” (289). From the point of view of Algeria (perhaps especially the point of view of a schoolboy expelled for being Jewish), it could be said that Paris governs while escaping what is applied to the rest of the structure, the governed.

 

From 1870 on, whether one were “Muslim” or “Jewish” had a significant impact on one’s relationship with the center; but whereas “Muslim” could include a variety of origins–Kabyle, Chaoui, M’zabite, Mauretanian, Turkish, and Arab, for example–to simply refer to all these peoples as “Muslim” was itself a distortion that says something about the structural possibilities for freeplay at the center. The marker of difference was Islam, to which all other differences were relegated. Even the phrase “pieds noirs” could refer to French, Spanish, Italian, and Maltese immigrants. As for how these questions worked in practice, consider the following transaction from the Algerian Assembly in 1947, seven years before the War:

 

M. Boukaboum–“Don’t forget that I’m an Algerian, first and foremost!”

 

M. Louvel–“That’s an admission!”

 

From several benches, in the center–“You are French, first and foremost!”

 

M. Boukaboum–“I am a Muslim Algerian, first and foremost!”

 

M. Musmeaux–“If you consider the Muslim Algerians as French, give them all the rights of the French!”

 

M. Louvel--"Then let them declare they're French." (Horne 70)

 

From this example, we can see that it was understood that the structure demands/asks people to “be” one thing, and then treats them in different ways if/once they “are.”

 

This argument can be read in relation to a famous passage from “Structure, Sign, and Play,” according to which “the history of metaphysics, like the history of the West, is the history of these metaphors and metonymies” (282). Although “Structure, Sign, and Play” is usually read in terms of “the history of metaphysics,” this analogy between metaphysics and the history of the West works both ways, relating to the history of the West as much as it does to the history of metaphysics. After all, as “Structure, Sign, and Play” points out, “we have no language–no syntax and no lexicon–which is foreign to this history” of metaphysics (280). In claims such as “I am an Algerian,” and “I am a Muslim,” it is metaphors and metonymies that posit existence, or, in the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play” would seem to be the “determination of Being as presence in all the senses of this word” (279). Although metaphors claim to state that this is that, or while metonymies, as the root indicates, make possible changes of names, in fact, they are nothing but descriptions with reference to some center. Their power is rhetorical, and, granted, such power is substantial and real. But words do not necessarily establish what the object is; they instead participate in “a history of meanings” (279). Moreover, because saying that you are somebody, or something, takes the form of both a metaphor (x=y) and a metonymy (a name change, “I” am “something else”), what you are may still be different from what either the metaphor or the metonymy can suggest. “We live in and of difference,” according to Derrida (“Violence and Metaphysics” 153). We are not who we say (we are). In fact, we cannot be, because when we say who we are we are only using metaphors and metonymies.

 

Insofar as there is a difference between Being and a metaphor, we live in difference. Those metaphors and metonymies only have meaning in relation to some center which contains the freeplay of the structure so as to master a certain anxiety, probably the anxiety of difference, which is also the anxiety of similarity. The “rupture,” with which “Structure, Sign, and Play” begins, “comes about when the structurality of the structure had to begin to be thought” (278). Once people begin to recognize that the structure is a structure, and nothing else, a rupture can occur; prior to that, when people believe that the structure is something other than a structure (e.g., “the way things are”), they have instead fallen for metaphor. Once people become conscious of how the structure structures them, then there can be an event, which, when considered externally, could be called a rupture. To some extent, by the mid-1960s this thinking the structurality of the structure had begun to be thought in Algeria, temporarily suspending the usual substitution of center for center, resulting in what is called a “rupture.” “Structure, Sign, and Play’s” word “rupture” is used by others to describe the results of the Algerian civil war: Jacques Soustelle, for example, refers to the “rupture between the Sahara and France” (126), and the entry “Algerie: Les Intellectuels Avant La Decolonization,” in Dictionaire des intellectuels français: Les Personnes, Les Lieux, Les Moments, refers several times to “les ruptures” (Yacine 51-2). While both examples suggest an “Algerian,” and 1960s, usage of the word “rupture,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” claims that it is only “before the rupture of which we are speaking” that the entire history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center (278). The rupture, which might “be called an ‘event,’ if this loaded word did not entail a meaning which it is precisely the function of structural–or structuralist–thought to reduce or to suspect” (278), has changed that pattern of substitution.

 

According to “Structure, Sign, and Play,” “this affirmation then determines the non-center otherwise than as loss of the center” (292). On the one hand, the non-center (either the “margins,” or “the rupture”) is not necessarily a loss; perhaps in the case of Algeria the decolonizing rupture is not a loss. But of course, on the other hand, the extraordinarily qualified, tentative tone of this affirmation clearly mitigates against celebrating the rupture that “Structure, Sign, and Play” suggests has occurred. There are several reasons for such reserved appreciation of the rupture. First, it is not clear that there is ever such a thing as a “rupture,” a total break. For example, as Said explains, “imperialism did not end, did not suddenly become ‘past,’ once decolonization had set in motion the dismantling of the classical empires” (Culture and Imperialism 282). Describing change as a rupture, as a break, suggests that all that came before has stopped, that there has been an ending, or a new beginning, a claim which must, of course, overlook continuities, or traces. Lyotard’s claim–made as early as 1958–that “there is already no longer an Algerie française, in that ‘France’ is no longer present in any form in Algeria” (Lyotard 202), for example, replays the dichotomizing logic of the center, by overlooking what persists (including, most obviously, the French language, although that too has recently become an issue). Or as “Structure, Sign, and Play” puts it, “one can describe what is peculiar to the structural organization only by not taking into account… the problem of the transition from one structure to another, by putting history between brackets” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 291).

 

With reference to his own experience in Algeria, Derrida has recently spoken about what persists despite (or through) change, about what survives the brackets. Although Derrida “always (at least since 1947) condemned the colonial policy of France in Algeria,” during the emigration of Jews from Algeria “he even put pressure on his parents not to leave Algeria in 1962. Soon afterwards recognized his illusions on this matter” (Bennington 330). Although he describes these “illusions” as “his ‘nostalgeria'” (Bennington 330), to see how nostalgeric Derrida was, and/or how controversial it is to claim that the rupture was not a rupture, it is important to note that of an estimated 140,000 Jews in Algeria before the outbreak of the war in 1954, only 10,000 remained by 1962, and by 1970, that number had dropped to 1,000 with only one talmus torah in the entire country. And this drop, in most cases, was precipitous as Independence approached: “whereas in 1961 as many as 22,000 Jews lived in Oran, during the summer of 1962 only 1,000-5,000 remained” (Laskier 334, 344, 338). Moreover, the social circumstances in “the Algerian Jewish scene [were] totally different from that in either Morocco or Tunisia,” according to Michael Laskier’s study of North African Jewry (40). Algerian Jews were more Francophilic; only 10,000 emigrated to Israel between 1954 and 1962; most of the rest went to France. Of course, in his ambivalence over how to respond to decolonization, Derrida is not alone: Francine Camus, for example, admitted, “I feel divided… half-French and half-Algerian, and, in truth, dispossessed in both countries which I no longer recognize, since I never imagined them separated” (Horne 542).

 

If it is possible to understand Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” in terms of this historical “event,” it is nonetheless still a question as to

 

why, despite the revolutionary rhetoric of his circa 1968 writings, and despite the widespread, taken-for-granted assumption that he is "of the left," Derrida so consistently, deliberately and dexterously avoided the subject of politics. Why, for example, has he danced so nimbly around the tenacious efforts of interviewers to pin him down on where he stands vis-a-vis Marxism? (Fraser 127)

 

Precisely because this hesitant relationship with Communism is thought to represent Derrida’s hesitancy with the left in general, it is important to remember how the Algerian and French Communist Parties responded to the Algerian War. In Algeria, the Communist Party, “which tended to support petits blancs rather than the Muslims,” “strongly condemned the Sétif Uprising, and was actually reported to have taken part in the reprisals” (Horne 136). The French Communist Party, “by granting the Guy Mollet-Lacoste government full power for its North African policy, the vote of the French Communist Party not only resulted in the escalation of the colonial war, but also caused a schism in the traditional Left” (Marx-Scouras 34). “Knowing where it comes from” makes Derrida’s mistrust of the Communist Party in Algeria seem politically progressive (Macksey 271).

 

Regardless, Thomas McCarthy is not alone in believing that “Derrida’s discourse, it seems to me, lives from the enormous elasticity, not to say vagueness and ambiguity, of his key terms” (McCarthy 118). But that elasticity moves his writing beyond the categorical imperative that might be placed on it by a “metaphysics of presence” (“Structure, Sign, and Play” 281). Derrida has recently said, “I’d like to escape my own stereotypes,” meaning, in a sense, he’d like to substitute an absence for a presence (Derrida and Attridge 34). With its “elasticity,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” can be as hybrid, as multiple, as his work suggests identity is. “I absolutely refuse,” writes Derrida, “a discourse that would assign me a single code, a single language game, a single context, a single situation; and I claim this right not simply out of caprice or because it is to my taste, but for ethical and political reasons” (Derrida, “Remarks” 81). Readers have long wondered how it could be “ethical,” not to mention “political,” to refuse a single code. Ernesto Laclau recently pointed out “this does not sound much like an ethical injunction but ethical nihilism” (Laclau 78).

 

However, the point is not that no position will be taken, but rather that the code that marks positions will be refused, precisely because of how it has been centered, a point that may make more sense when considered in the post-colonial situation represented by Algeria. For example, in his influential article and subsequent book, Samuel P. Huntington contends that “culture and cultural identities… are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world” (20). Huntington’s claim, that “world civilizations” predating Cold War alignments are reshaping the world, is the type of assumption that “Structure, Sign, and Play” challenges, for ethical reasons. Huntington, and others, would, on one level, reduce the complexity of identity to a single code, a single language game, etc., and, on another level, would perform the same centering operation on the structure that Derrida’s essay describes. They would be, as even Huntington admits, “groping for groupings” (125). “Structure, Sign, and Play” asks us to examine how those “groupings” are claims to identity, rather than identity itself.¹ (With “Structure, Sign, and Play,” it can be seen that recent arguments over the so-called “third way” also run the risk of simply recentering within a new structure.)

 

“As an adolescent,” Derrida has recently said, “I no doubt had the feeling that I was living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed” (Derrida and Attridge 38). In its “elasticity,” or its “refusal of a single code,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” entails both of those perceptions: the difficult conditions, and the interdiction against speaking. The essay could be understood as part of what Hal Foster describes as “a shift in conception” “from reality as an effect of representation to the real as a thing of trauma,” as a traumatic response to an event (Foster 146). In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth describes trauma “in terms of its indirect relation to reference” (7), according to which both the violent event and the violence of that event cannot be fully known. This traumatic indirect relation to reference may account for the oft-noted elasticity, obscurity, generalization, a-historicism of Derrida’s work; it could be the result of a traumatic incomprehension or of the incomprehensibility of the traumatic event. For the problem of reference that haunts the reception of Derrida’s work is in fact the problem of reference that is indicative of a response to trauma, i.e., having the feeling of living in conditions where it was both difficult and therefore necessary, urgent, to say things that are not allowed. Derrida’s recent discussion of wanting “to render both accessible and inaccessible” could thus be read as the traumatized wish to speak, but not speak too much or too directly, about the trauma (Derrida and Attridge 35).

 

Recently, Derrida has stated that “what interests me… is not strictly called either literature or philosophy,” but something for which “‘autobiography’ is perhaps the least inadequate name” (Derrida and Attridge 34). And there is a way in which, by trying “to read philosophers in a certain way” (as “Structure, Sign, and Play” describes it), “Structure, Sign, and Play” could be considered an autobiography (288). But “autobiography” is the least inadequate name because there is more to the essay than what it says about Derrida’s biography. When read with “play,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” is like Derrida’s recent definition of literature: “in principle [it] allows one to say everything” (Derrida and Attridge 36). As that rhetorical strategy whereby one says more than one has said, literature (and, perhaps more specifically, metaphor) allows one to say one thing and mean many things. Like literature, “Structure, Sign, and Play” need not, and does not, say everything in order to convey more than it actually does say–about metaphysics, about the history of the West, or, perhaps, about nostalgeria.

 

In La Mésentente, Jacques Ranciere provides a name for the paradox of saying more than one has said: “a determinate type of speaking situation: where one of the speakers at the same time intends and does not intend” (12). Neither a “misreading” nor a “misunderstanding”–for “the concept of misunderstanding assumes that one or the other of the speakers, or both of them… may not know what one or other says” (12)–in la mésentente conversants know what is being said, even if it strikes them as a contradiction. For Ranciere, this knowing the contradiction makes la mésentente the image of politics: la mésentente “concerns, in the highest degree, politics” (14), which he also describes as “the art of the local and singular construction of the universal case” (188). Although “Structure, Sign, and Play” could describe a decolonizing experience in Algeria, that word, “Algeria,” is but a metonymy for a confluence of factors, larger than, and also visible elsewhere besides, Algeria. Like literature or la mésentente, more is said here than just references to metaphysics or the history of the West. What Derrida says in Spectres of Marx concerning Apartheid could also apply to his own experience in Algeria: “one can decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world” (Spectres of Marx xv). Algeria, like Apartheid, is an example of what is going on in many places; it is a local and singular example of the universal case.

 

Although Derrida has claimed that if “one has an interest in this, it is very easy to know where my choices and my allegiances are, without the least ambiguity” (“Almost Nothing” 84), the ambiguity, the traumatic elasticity of terms give “Structure, Sign, and Play” its political charge. As a “mésentente,” “Structure, Sign, and Play” is intrinsically political, although not in the narrow sense of liberal or conservative, but rather in the much more significant sense of what Slavoj Zizek calls “the struggle for one’s voice to be heard and recognized” (“Leftist Plea” 999). The fact that in this literary-political struggle for recognition every injustice could potentially represent a universal wrong means that “Structure, Sign, and Play” is applicable without reference to the context of its origin. This “playful” universality has been taken to mean that Derrida’s work is not political, or, in Eagleton’s memorable phrase, “is as injurious as blank ammunition” (Literary Theory 145).

 

At the same time, however, with a universalizing reading, or with what Zizek describes as “the possibility of the metaphoric elevation of her specific wrong,” the uniqueness and singularity may be overlooked (“Leftist Plea” 1002). It may simply be recentered within a new structure, rather than being recognized in itself. If, as Zizek contends, “politics proper designates the moment at which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more” (1006), then the elasticity of the terms of “Structure, Sign, and Play” aims at something more. The consequent play, by facilitating “the movement of signification,” “excludes totalization” (Structure, Sign, and Play” 289). As “Structure, Sign, and Play” points out, “there is always more” (289). This “something more” represents the uniqueness of the situation which would be lost in re-structuring it as universal. Instead of such a polarized, universal–and then “recentered” structure–“Structure, Sign, and Play” can be seen as part of Derrida’s on-going argument that “in order to recast, if not rigorously refound a discourse on the ‘subject’… one has to go through the experience of deconstruction” (Derrida and Attridge 34).

 

Notes

 

1. Homi K. Bhabha makes a similar point in The Location of Culture: “The taking up of any one position, within a specific discursive form, in a particular historical conjuncture, is thus always problematic–the site of both fixity and fantasy. It provides a colonial ‘identity’ that is played out–like all fantasies of originality and origination–in the face and space of the disruption and threat from the heterogeneity of other positions” (77).

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