34.Structuralism bad—ignores the plurality of contingency within language, which either eclipses individual phenomena or is auto-referential
Lundberg ’12 (Christian, Associate Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC Chapel Hill, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” University of Alabama Press, November, 2012, pp. 89-90)
What are the characteristics of and problems with a structuralist account in Reugg, Derrida, and Robinson?Structuralism is flawed because it overdetermines fields of action and signification—put differently, structure eclipses contingency, a category that is at the very heart of rhetorical theorizing. The basis of this criticism is that structuralism reads specific phenomena as epiphenomenal, in that individual phenomena are meaningful only because they reveal and are determined by the underlying logic of the structure. Here, structuralism implies a kind of overdetermining automaticity to individual phenomena,and therefore it endorses both a form of determinism and centers a new form of unicity on the concept of structure.Reconstituting unicity around structure poses both an ontological and an interpretive problem. The ontological problem is that there is nothing thatgrounds a conception of structure in most structuralist accounts—structure is presumed to be autopoetic.The interpretive problem is that individual phenomena are always read through the frame of the self-generating structure, so that there is a kind of non-falsifiability built into a structuralist account. Structuralist readings may even be tropologically inflected, but a structuralist account of trope necessarily operates at the expense of an account of contingencyin figuring tropological operations as automatic extensions of a structuring logic. This criticism repeats the basic Popperian charge against psychoanalysis that there is no criteria for testing it because it generates an all encompassing and ubiquitous set of general explanations that are not amenable to empirical testing.
Zizek
35.Žižek’s insistence on materiality ignores that discourse is the condition of possibility for the object as such. Objects are sites of rhetorical articulation, not the other way around.
