Structuralism and Poststructuralism

POSTSTRUCTURALISM: FROMSYSTEM TO SUBVERSION

Beginning in the late 1960s a group of theorists led by Jacques Derrida began to challenge the very basic assumptions that had informed structuralist thought, starting with its cornerstone, Saussurean semiotics. These attacks followed once the initial enthusiasm for structuralism began to wane. Less a theory than an interpretive attitude, poststructuralism in its broadest sense refers to an attention towards those elements unexplained, excluded, or repressed by structuralism's tidy systems, as well as a general distrust in systematicity in general. There is debate among scholars as to whether poststructuralism should be seen as an extension of structuralism or whether it constitutes a negation, a kind of antistructuralism. Some argue it is not antistructural since many poststructuralists used the semiotic terminology that informed structuralist thought. In its most general sense, poststructuralism—linked to thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan, to Barthes's later work, and above all to Derrida—is characterized by a suspicion of totalizing systems and a radical skepticism towards theories which attempt to explain human activity, such as Marxism, Christianity, and even structuralism. If structuralism set out to erect systems of binary oppositions, for instance, poststructuralists concerned themselves with instances in which systems break down or are subverted.

For poststructuralists, a "text" was no longer a finished, self-contained object that could be "explained" by the analyst, thereby rejecting the assumption under which structuralists had operated. Rather, according to Derrida, the text—whether literature, film, advertisement, or any cultural form—is first produced in the act of "reading," or interpretation. Although poststructuralists still deployed semiological terminology (sign, signifier, signified), they did so to criticize notions of stable signifying systems (although many poststructuralists were in fact Marxists).

Poststructuralism took film studies in new and often disparate directions. Unlike literary studies, Derridean deconstruction did not typically exert an immediate influence; film scholars tended to apply Derrida's subversive spirit to their interpretations, rather than organize their thoughts around any of his ideas. One strain, found above all in French journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Cinétique , latched onto structuralist-Marxist Louis Althusser's concept of ideology in an effort to "demythologize" or "denaturalize" film—that is, to reveal the hidden cultural and ideological codes which underpin cinematic (especially Hollywood) signification. One famous example is the 1972 collective Cahiers du cinéma on John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which "read" or "rescanned" the film for moments where the director's "inscription" of a unique "writing" created spaces in the text which escaped the dominant ideology. This brand of analysis, sometimes referred to as a "deconstructive reading," essentially looked for what Derrida called "play"—the space in which structure is transformed and decentered—as an alternative approach to auteurist criticism. Another poststructuralist offshoot, Lacanian psychoanalysis, offered a further alternative to classic structuralist film analysis. Figures such as Christian Metz connected Lacan's reinterpretation of Sigmund Freud's theories to structural linguistics for the way in which both deal directly with signification. Metz called this hybrid theoretical matrix the "semio-psychoanalysis of the cinema."

Some scholars did attempt to apply Derrida directly. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier's work, in particular Le Texte divisé (1981), extends to the cinema Derrida's notion of écriture (a conception of signification based on unfixable rather than stable signs). For Ropars-Wuilleumier, the Derridean hieroglyph (composed of both graphic representations of speech and pictorial elements) resembles Sergei Eisenstein's montage theory. Both make meaning based on juxtapositions which disrupt the image itself. Peter Brunette and David Wills's Screen/Play: Derrida and Film Theory (1989) imagines an "anagrammatical" film analysis. On facing pages they "read" François Truffaut's La Mariéeétait en noir ( The Bride Wore Black , 1967) and David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) in order to demonstrate textual "undecidabilities" and "fissures," moments where the stability of the texts' meaning breaks down. In so doing they seek to expose deconstruction as less a specific theory that can be applied to interpret a film than a questioning attitude or suspicion with which one approaches a text.

The support for cinema studies' "linguistic turn" has eroded in recent years. Critics have opined that semiotic language has been abused as a jargon used to supply a facade of scientific sophistication. For them, structuralism is essentialist, and its focus on form obscures thematic content and ideological superstructures; structuralism's claim that objects exist only in their relation to one another causes its analyses to be synchronic (ahistorical) rather than diachronic (historical). This absence of history is troubling to many. Poststructuralism, too, has come under attack for its own contradictions. Some critics have noted that a mode supposedly devoted to discovering moments where unities and systems break down has itself become a totalizing system. In general, film scholars have been particularly keen to depart from a theoretical paradigm based in linguistics; rather, film studies should develop a vocabulary appropriate to discussing the medium on its own terms. Despite these criticisms, however, one must acknowledge the lasting effects of structuralism and poststructuralism on the process of interpretation in the field of film studies. Structuralism's scientific method helped advance film studies beyond the discourse of film appreciation. Poststructuralism, for its part, leaves behind a critical climate which encourages long-held assumptions to be challenged, invigorating our understanding of the medium.