|
|
|
|
|
|
|
lable echoing: a mad round of verbal associations'26 as reading becomes 'absorbed in a kind of metonymic skid, each synonym adding to its neighbour some new trait, some new departure'.27 One particular aspect of post-structuralist reading that has challenged both classical philology and traditional literary criticism is the desire to take at full value what is often treated merely as a piety the need to determine meaning in context. For context is an ever expanding frame, or series of frame(s) on frame(s) . . . When we turn to drama and speech act theory with its performatives borrows much vocabulary at least from drama the (social) frame of performance the stage, the audience(s), collectively and individually, the theatre, democracy, Athens . . . is equally kaleidoscopic. When Derrida writes 'Il n'y a pas d'hors-texte', he is in part stressing that each context, each frame, becomes the content, the text, of another frame: context offers, as Austin shows, not the comfort of the secure control or determination of meaning, so much as equivocations and worries about relative fixedness. Context spreads and stains the integrity of meaning. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Post-structuralist critics have focused on this dissemination of meaning, the openness that is produced by reading the network of signifiers that make up (con)text(s). Not a drift towards, nor (even) a celebration of 'meaning-lessness', but an awareness of the excess of meaning produced by reading; not 'anything goes' that constant fantasy (or nightmare) of bourgeois social control but a question of how far to go, of where to bring the end to the 'uncontrollable echoing'; not (just) 'playfulness', but a scrupulous attention to the 'vols de langage', the 'flights/thefts of language'. Such an awareness of the indeterminacy and excess of language is peculiarly difficult for the authoritative voice of the critic and his/her writing. Much of the difficulty of style that is associated with post-structuralist writing is a result of or response to in part at least the necessary attempt to negotiate the self-reflexive tension between the authoritative pronouncement of the critic and the claims of the indeterminacy or excess of language. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
My first example of writing about examples, then, has emphasized the difficulty that stems from the process of framing, crucial to exemplification. Derrida refers to the problematic interplay between frame and content, generalization and example, as the 'logic of the parergon' and argues that 'the structure of framing effects is such that no totalization of the border is even possible. The frames are always framed: thus, by some of their content'28 as we saw with my framed example of Austin's discussion of circumstance. Rather than introduce a rigid delimitation of inside and outside, argument and example, framing functions as a source and site of difference that undermines the rigid delimitation of the boundaries of sense |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
26 Hartman (1981) 111. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
27 Barthes (1975) 92. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
28 Derrida (1975) 99. |
|
|
|
|
|