By Sheri Williams

A Tootsie Pop is a hard candy shell encasing a chewy chocolaty center – the merging of a lollipop with a Tootsie Roll. It was invented in 1931 by The Sweets Company of America, which changed its name to Tootsie Roll Industries, Inc. in 1966. The Tootsie Pop relies on its chocolate Tootsie Roll center for its allure. Its success as a unique, delicious treat is utterly dependent on the soft, cocoa-flavored middle that the candy shell encases. However, this dependent relationship is not mutual. The Tootsie Roll preceded the Tootsie Pop by roughly 35 years. It was a successful confection on its own, and its success is in fact what paved the way for the creation of the Tootsie Pop. Stripped of its center, the hard lollipop exterior is simply that – an empty shell of sugar. But stripped of its candy surroundings, the Tootsie Pop center is still a Tootsie Roll, and it can exist on its own, with its meaning and history remaining in tact. Thus the Tootsie Roll center is both immanent and transcendent, present within the candy shell and yet not contained by it, and located both within the lollipop as well as outside of it. “This is why classical thought concerning structure could say that the center is, paradoxically, within the structure and outside of it” (Derrida).

While Derrida’s concern lay not with delicious candy treats but rather, divinity, or, God, it is interesting that his notion of structure and the need for a center, as described in the quote, “…structure – or rather the structurality of structure – although it has always been involved, has always been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or referring it to a point of presence, a fixed origin,” is both visible and applicable to even the most simplistic concepts – such as the Tootsie Pop.

Derrida’s major concern, the “rupture” of our notion of centers, or rather, decentering, lies much in line with Nietzsche’s concepts of religion and loss of faith. (“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”) This disruption presumably came about; “…when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in all of the senses of this word. From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence” (Derrida).

Thus the loss of faith in the divine center, and the focus on the law and science that governs the structure, marks the shift Derrida discusses. Even in the case of the Tootsie Pop, science and the laws that govern structure emerge, with the famous commercial asking the question, “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop?” While in the past, people could simply enjoy the experience of eating a Tootsie Pop, the 1970 commercial featuring the wise owl counting and then biting into the Tootsie Pop, marked the shift in how we perceived the candy treat. The need for quantification and science, and then the inability to quantify due to the “cracking” of the candy shell allowing for the rapid and hedonistic devouring of the Tootsie Pop’s chewy core, are also indicative of the demystification of the center. Emerging from this is the consequent realization that the center, once analyzed and then devoured, no longer exists.