Poststructurism

Poststructurism  The first premise

It remains to the sign to be legible, even if the moment of its production is irredeemably lost, and even if I do not know what its alleged author-scriptor meant consciously and intentionally at the moment he wrote it, that is, abandoned it to its essential drifting.

As soon as I speak, the words I have found ... no longer  belong to me ... Henceforth, what is called the speaking subject is no longer the person himself... The speaking subject discovers his irreducible secondarity, his origin that is already eluded; for the origin is always already eluded on the basis of an organized field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing. This organized field ... is ... the cultural field from which I must draw my words and syntax.

The subject ... is inscribed in language, is a "function" of language, becomes a speaking subject  only by making its speech conform ... to the system of rules of language as a system of differences".

A text is on its own. Beardsley and Wimsatt wrote in "The intentional fallacy" that "the poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend or control it)". In very much the same language Derrida writes:

To write is to produce a mark which constitutes in its turn a kind of productive mechanism, which my absence will not ... prevent from functioning and provoking reading ... For writing to be writing it must continue to act and be readable even if what we call the author of the writing be provisionally absent or no longer uphold what he has written, what he appears to have signed... This situation of the writer or underwriter is, with respect to the writing fundamentally the same as that of the reader. This essential drift ... a structure cut off from any absolute responsibility, orphaned and separated since birth from the support of the father, is indeed what Plato condemned in the Pheaedrus.

Second Premise
The second premise of the argument for indeterminacy of meaning is that no structure of rules of grammar and meaning determine or close down the meaning of an utterance.

De Saussure writes: "Just as the game of chess consists entirely in the combination of the different chess pieces, language is characterized as a system based entirely on the opposition of its concrete units".
"In language", de Saussure writes, "everything boils down to differences". A term acquires its value as a separate element of language "only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes and follows it".

Of the two signs "father" and "mother" he writes:
Between them there is only opposition. The entire mechanism of language ... is based on opposition of this kind and on the phonic and conceptual differences that they imply ... When isolated, neither Nacht nor nachte is anything: thus everything is in opposition ... Language, in a manner of speaking, is a type of algebra ... Some of its oppositions are more significant than others; but units and grammatical facts are only different names for designating diverse aspects of the same general facts: the functioning of linguistic oppositions.

In  the absence of determinate meaning the traditional project of criticism that was "to determine a meaning through a text, to pronounce a decision on it, to decide that this or that is a meaning" cannot be accomplished. "The life of the signifier is produced within the anxiety and the wandering of language always richer than knowledge, the language always capable of movement that takes it further than peaceful and sedentary certitude".