Base and Superstructure
Identify
The base/superstructure model is a theoretical framework that charts the different parts of society proposed by Marx and Engels. It is a model that regards the base as the economic foundation of society. The cultural, political and social forms of life are, then, superstructures which are created out of the base and also serve to develop and extenuate the economic base. Although Marx may have posited that the base influences the superstructure in only one direction, Gramsci is convinced that there is a “necessary reciprocity” (193) between the two.
Define
The base refers to the means of production of society; tools, equipment, buildings and technologies. The superstructure is formed on top of the base, and comprises of society’s ideology, legal system, political system, and religions. Since the base creates and influences the superstructure according to Marx ideology—how we think, what we take to be true—is determined by material things, our economic conditions; that our consciousness simply reflects material conditions that are already there. This model would say the French Revolution occurred not because of a social or political factors but because of economic factors which were reflected in the social factors.
Signifiers and the Signified
Identify
In Saussure‘s theory of linguistics signifier and signified are terms used in literary criticism to describe the components of a sign: the signifier is the word or sound, and the signified is the thing or idea it represents.
Define
A 5 dollar bill is a signifier, because its meaning is culturally derived. There is no “thing” that a 5 dollar bill is, save a piece of paper that has more cultural importance than other pieces of paper. The buying power of that 5 dollar bill is its signified. The relationship of the 5 dollar bill (exchange value) to its buying power (use value) is the relationship of the signifier to the signified. Or the sound of the word “tree” is the signifier while the concept of the “tree” which it represents is the signified.
Mutability / Immutability
Identify
These terms are from Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” where he discusses the mutability and immutability of signs. Mutability points to the characteristics of a sign, therefore language, to evolve and change while immutability points towards the limitations of this change.
Define
Saussure discusses the simultaneous mutability and immutability of the signs meaning that signs are mutable since there is no intrinsic reason why the sounds (signifier) “dog” should represent the actual (signified) dog. An example is how time changes the relationship between signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept), therefore the sign. Example once “mouse” only meant a furry rodent but now it also signifies a component of a computer. However signs are immutable because a consensus of the whole society is needed to change the meaning of a sign, or what the signifier signifies, and this is tied to language which is overly complex and so change is very unlikely to happen.
Langue/Parole
Identify
Ferdinand de Saussure originally made the distinction between language and parole. Langue is the system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users while parole is the individual’s speech act itself. Thus langue is the knowledge and parole is the performance based on that knowledge.
Define
In the chess analogy langue would be the knowledge of the rules of the game that will allow a player to play the game while parole is the actual playing of the game, i.e. moving the chess pieces and making moves.
Deconstruction
Identify
Associated with the writings of Jacques Derrida it is a method of reading and theory of language that seeks to subvert, dismantle, and destroy any notion that a text or signifying system has any boundaries, margins, coherence, unity, determinate meaning, truth, or identity.
Define
Deconstruction, unlike structuralism; which privileges structure over event, insists on the paradox of structure and event. Deconstruction’s central point is that total context is unmasterable. Though meaning is context-bound, context is boundless. Deconstruction challenges the idea of a frozen structure and advances the notion that there is no structure and a direct relationship between signifier and signified is no longer tenable and instead we have infinite shifts in meaning relayed from one signifier to another; play.
Play
Identify
A concept from Jacque Derrida’s essay titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”. Derrida asserts that words and their meanings are produced in the play of differences.
Define
Derrida argued against, in essence, the notion of a knowable center a structure that could organize the differential play of language or thought but somehow remain immune to the same “play” it depicts
Transcendental Signifier
Identify
Jacque Derrida argued that dominant ideological discourse relies on the metaphysical illusion of a transcendental signified – an ultimate referent at the heart of a signifying system which is portrayed as ‘absolute and irreducible’, stable, timeless and transparent – as if it were independent of and prior to that system.
Define
A “transcendental signified” is a signified which transcends all signifiers, and is a meaning which transcends all signs. All other signifieds within that signifying system are subordinate to this dominant central signified which is the final meaning to which they point. Derrida noted that this privileged signified is subject to historical change, so that Christianity focused on God, Romanticism focused on consciousness and so on. Without such a foundational term to provide closure for meaning, every signified functions as a signifier in an endless play of signification.
Autotelic
Identify
A term adopted by New Critics, of which Cleanth Brooks is one of them. New Critics call for a more ‘objective’ criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context.
Define
New Criticism tends to emphasize the text as an autotelic artifact, something complete with in itself, written for its own sake, unified in its form and not dependent on its relation to the author’s life or intent, history, or anything else. A term used to distinguish the self-referential nature of literary art from didactic, philosophical, critical, or biographical works. These were works that were looked at without attention to their origins or effects.
Centripetal force
Identify
A term introduced by M.M Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel” it is one of two forces in operation whenever language is used. Centripetal force (and he gets this term/idea from physics) tends to push things toward a central point.
Define
Bakhtin says that monologic language operates according to centripetal force: the speaker of monologic language is trying to push all the elements of language, all of its various rhetorical modes into one single form or utterance. Monologia is a system of norms, of one standard “official” language that everyone would have to speak and centripetal force is the one acting upon it. This is the opposite of Heteroglossia where instead of one central way of speaking there are many.
Heteroglossia
Identify
A term introduced by M.M Bakhtin in “Discourse in the Novel”. Heteroglossia is the idea of a multiplicity of languages all in operation in a culture. Heteroglossia tends to move language toward multiplicity, not as with the poststructuralist theorists in terms of multiplicity of meaning for individual words or phrases, but by including a wide variety of different ways of speaking, different rhetorical strategies and vocabularies.
Define
It is the collection of all the forms of social speech, or rhetorical modes, that people use in the course of their daily lives. An example is all the different languages an individual uses in the course of a day. People talk to friends in one way, to their professor in another way, to their parents in a third way, and to a waiter in a restaurant in a fourth way, etc.
Ideal I
Identify
Ideal-I is the Freudian term meaning the ideal identity in light of which one measures one’s actual ego. Lacan also utilizes this concept in his mirror stage.
Define
In the mirror stage, the encounter with the imago of a whole, stable, autonomous self presents the infant with an ideal image of him- or herself that does not correspond with the infant’s present experiential reality. In making a “connection” to this ideal image through identification, the infant enters a lifelong quest to correspond wholly with this Ideal-I. According to Lacan, this quest can never be fulfilled, because human existence is in essence a striving for a never-attainable perfection. Lacan does not put a positive spin on this observation: while the mirror stage allows human individuals to come to know themselves as “I”, by establishing a permanent split within the subject’s self-image, this process also lays the foundation for forms of psychic distress such as anxiety, neurosis, and psychosis.