Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is most easily understood as a loose, historical term that captures broad, major shifts in both Continental Philosophy or Critical Theory and Anthropology.

It sometimes used to designate methods of textual and cultural interpretation that emerged in France in the 1960s as a critique of structuralism. Major contributors included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Post-structuralism was a precursor to postmodernism. deconstructivism could be said to be a part of Post-structuralism. It should be noted, however, that many thinkers labelled post-structuralists had serious disagreements with each other and sometimes even held contradictory ideas, making the notion of a single post-structuralist movement questionable.

In direct contrast to structuralism's claims of culturally independent meaning, post-structuralism views culture as integral to every textual work. Essential elements of this cultural context include author(s), location, format, audience, and myriad social and economic factors. A typical post-structuralist position holds that the meaning of any work is itself a cultural phenomenon.

History

Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as an antinomian movement critiquing structuralism. The period was marked by political anxiety, as students and workers alike rebelled against the state in May 1968, nearly causing the downfall of the French government. The rising influence of "subjugated knowledges" (as Foucault later termed them), including feminism, sparked major interest in critical views of dominant Western philosophy and culture. Post-structuralism offered a means of justifying these criticisms by exposing the underlying assumptions of many Western norms.

Two key figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In a 1966 lecture "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science", Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectualism. Derrida interpreted this event as a "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play."

Though originally a structuralist, Barthes' work during the 1960's grew increasingly favorable to post-structural views. In 1968, Barthes published “The Death of the Author” in which he declared a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that the meaning of any literary text was multiplicitous and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," i.e. of the proliferation of meanings of the text.

In his 1976 lecture series, Michel Foucault briefly summarized the general impetus of the post-structuralist movement:

Theory

General practices

Post-structural practices generally operate on some basic assumptions:

Post-structuralists hold that the concept of "self" as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual is composed of conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to properly study a text the reader must understand how the work is related to their own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one's interpretation of meaning.

The meaning the author intended is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having one purpose, one meaning or one singular existence.

A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted (perhaps even conflicting) interpretation of a text. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables (usually involving the identity of the reader).

Destabilized Meaning

In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or "decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a central fixation on the author, and disregarding an essentialist reading of the content, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g. readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never authoritative and promise no consistency. In his essay "Signification and Sense", Emmanuel Lévinas remarked on this new field of semantic inquiry:

Deconstruction

A major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed that there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy, which structure a given text. Such binary pairs could include male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional.

Post-structrualism categorically rejects the notion that there is a consistent structure to texts, specifically the theory of binary opposition. Instead, post-structuralists advocate deconstruction, the premise of which claims that the meanings of texts and concepts constantly shift in relation to myriad variables. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems which produce the illusion of singular meaning.

Structuralism vs. Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism has been described as a ‘rebellion against’ Structuralism. It may be more accurately understood as a critical and comprehensive response to the basic assumptions of Structuralism. Structuralism proposed itself as a study of the underlying structures inherent in cultural products (such as texts) utilizing analytical concepts from linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields. Although the movement fostered critical inquiry into these structures, there was an unmistakable emphasis on logical and scientific results. Many Structuralists sought to integrate their work into pre-existing bodies of knowledge. This was observed in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics, Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology, and many early 20th century psychologists.

The general assumptions of Post-structuralism derive from a emerging critique of Structuralist premises. Specifically, Post-structuralism typically holds that the study of underlying structures is itself a cultural product and therefore subject to myriad biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge which coordinated to produce the object. In this way, Post-structuralism positioned itself as a study of how knowledge is produced.

Historical vs. descriptive view

Post-structuralists generally assert that Post-structuralism is historical and classify Structuralism as descriptive. This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts. For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes to madness. The theme of history in modern Continental thought can be linked to such influences as Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.

Scholars between both movements

The uncertain distance between Structuralism and Post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars generally do not identify themselves with the label of "post-structuralist." In some cases (e.g. Claude Lévi-Strauss), scholars associated with Structuralism became noteworthy in Post-structuralism as well. In fact, prominent structuralists are often credited with the genesis of Post-structuralism. Along with Lévi-Strauss, three of the most prominent post-structuralists were first counted among the so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism par excellence: Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. The works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva are also counted as prominent examples of post-structuralism.

Major works and concepts

Barthes and the need of metalanguage

Although many may have felt the necessity to move beyond structuralism, there was clearly no consensus on how this was to take place. Much of the study of post-structuralism is based on the common critiques of structuralism. Roland Barthes is of great significance with respect to post-structuralist theory. In his work Elements of Semiology (1967) he conceptualised the "metalanguage", which is a higher-order language , that is necessary to explain a first or lower-order language. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, therefore deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny. Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts.

Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins

The occasional designation of post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States. This interest led to a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins University that invited scholars thought to be prominent structuralists, including Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan. Derrida's lecture at that conference "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences" often appears in collections as a manifesto against structuralism. Derrida's essay was one of the earliest to designate some theoretical limitations to structuralism and, while giving it due credit, attempted to theorise on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist.

The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously taken to be play in a linguistic sense based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while social constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault is said to create a sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. The importance of Foucault's work is seen by many to be in its synthesis of this social historical account of the operations of power, see governmentality.

It is also often claimed that "post-structuralists" are also more or less self-consciously "post-modernists", but no small number of those so designated have expressed consternation at these terms or even consciously identified themselves as modernists. It is beyond dispute that arguments between those said to be post-structuralists were at least as strident as their objections to structuralism so the term at the very least is not very specific. Contemporary trends in usage seem to employ the term less rather than attempting to engage with a specific scholarship (as there is no unified post-structuralist position with which to engage). The term is also used as a shorthand for what is seen as a radicalisation of the French academic left and its American cousins following the failure of the May 1968 student protests in France to produce a much-hoped-for revolution. This aspect also has some institutional context: many figures associated with post-structuralism were associated with the Centre universitaire expérimental de Vincennes - Saint-Denis in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, established as part of the reorganisation of the French university system in general and the Sorbonne in particular, either serving on its faculty or as formal and informal advisors on matters of faculty and pedagogy.

Other authors

In addition to those discussed above, the following are often said to be post-structuralists or to have had a post-structuralist period:

References

Barry, P. Beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002.
Barthes, Roland. Elements of Semiology. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.
Cuddon, J. A. Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory. London: Penguin, 1998.
Eagleton, T. Literary theory: an introduction Basil Blackwell, Oxford,1983.
Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended. (Trans. David Macey). Bertani, Mauro & Fontana, Alessandro (eds.). Picador, NY 2003.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Humanism of the Other. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. p. 11-12.
Ryan, M. Literary theory: a practical introduction Blackwell Publishers Inc, Massachusetts,1999.
Wolfreys, J & Baker, W (eds). Literary theories: a case study in critical performance. Macmillan Press, Hong Kong,1996.

External links

Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences - Jacques Derrida
"Some Post-Structural Assumptions" - John Lye
Talking pomo: An analysis of the postmodern movement, by Steve Mizrach
Information on Michel Foucault, including an archive of writings and lectures
poststructuralism.info - A collaborative web site that aims to allow users not only to describe poststructuralist ideas, but to create new ideas and concepts based on poststructuralist foundations.
http://www.indiana.edu/~reading/ieo/digests/d104.html Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English Classroom, by HK Bush]

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