Intertextuality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search Intertextuality is the shaping of a text meaning by another text. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche and parody.[1][2][3] An example of intertextuality is an authors borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a readers referencing of one text in reading another. The term intertextuality has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristevas original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence.[4]

Contents

1 Intertextuality and poststructuralism 2 Competing terms 3 Examples and history 4 References

o

4.1 Works cited

5 See also

Intertextuality and poststructuralism

Kristevas coinage of intertextuality represents an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussures semioticshis study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a textwith Bakhtins dialogismhis examination of the multiple meanings, or heteroglossia, in each text (especially novels) and in each word.[5] For Kristeva,[6] the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, codes imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. For example, when we read James Joyces Ulysses we decode it as a modernist literary experiment, or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other conversation, or as part of all of these conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation not only to the text in question, but also the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process. More recent post-structuralist theory, such as that formulated in Daniela Caselli's Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (MUP 2005), re-examines "intertextuality" as a production within texts, rather than as a series of relationships between different texts. Some postmodern theorists [7] like to talk about the relationship between "intertextuality" and "hypertextuality"; intertextuality makes each text a "living hell of hell on earth" [8] and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and

part of the whole World-Wide Web. Indeed, the World-Wide Web has been theorized as a unique realm of reciprocal intertextuality, in which no particular text can claim centrality, yet the Web text eventually produces an image of a community--the group of people who write and read the text using specific discursive strategies.[9] One can also make distinctions between the notions of "intertext", "hypertext" and "supertext". Take for example the Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavi. As an intertext it employs quotations from the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions. As a hypertext it consists of links to different articles within itself and also every individual trajectory of reading it. As a supertext it combines male and female versions of itself, as well as three minidictionaries in each of the versions.

Competing terms
Some critics have complained that the ubiquity of the term "intertextuality" in postmodern criticism has crowded out related terms and important nuances. Irwin (227) laments that intertextuality has eclipsed allusion as an object of literary study while lacking the latter term's clear definition.[10] Linda Hutcheon argues that excessive interest in intertextuality rejects the role of the author, because intertextuality can be found "in the eye of the beholder" and does not entail a communicator's intentions. By contrast, in A Theory of Parody Hutcheon notes parody always features an author who actively encodes a text as an imitation with critical difference.[11] However, there have also been attempts at more closely defining different types of intertextuality. The Australian media scholar John Fiske has made a distinction between what he labels 'vertical' and 'horizontal' intertextuality. Horizontal intertextuality denotes references that are on the 'same level' i.e. when books make references to other books, whereas vertical intertextuality is found when, say, a book makes a reference to film or song or vice versa.[citation needed] Similarly, Linguist Norman Fairclough distinguishes between 'manifest intertextuality' and 'constitutive intertextuality.'[12] The former signifies intertextual elements such as presupposition, negation, parody, irony, etc. The latter signifies the interrelationship of discursive features in a text, such as structure, form, or genre. Constitutive Intertextuality is also referred to interdiscursivity,[13] though, generally interdiscursivity refers to relations between larger formations of texts.

Examples and history

James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses bears an intertextual relationship to Homer's Odyssey.

While the theoretical concept of intertextuality is associated with post-modernism, the device itself is not new. New Testament passages quote from the Old Testament and Old Testament books such as Deuteronomy or the prophets refer to the events described in Exodus (though on using 'intertextuality' to describe the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, see Porter 1997). Whereas a redaction critic would use such intertextuality to argue for a particular order and process of the authorship of the books in question, literary criticism takes a synchronic view that deals with the texts in their final form, as an interconnected body of literature. This interconnected body extends to later poems and paintings that refer to Biblical narratives, just as other texts build networks around Greek and Roman Classical history and mythology. Bullfinch's 1855 work The Age Of Fable served as an introduction to such an intertextual network;[citation needed] according to its author, it was intended "...for the reader of English literature, of either sex, who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets...". Even the nomenclature "new" and "old" (testament) reframes the real context that the Jewish Torah had been usurped by followers of a new faith wishing to co-opt the original one. Sometimes intertextuality is taken as plagiarism as in the case of Spanish writer Luca Etxebarria whose poem collection Estacin de infierno (2001) was found to contain metaphors and verses from Antonio Colinas. Etxebarria claimed that she admired him and applied intertextuality.[citation needed] Some examples of intertextuality in literature include:

East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck: A retelling of the story of Genesis, set in the Salinas Valley of Northern California. Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce: A retelling of Homer's Odyssey, set in Dublin. The Dead Fathers Club (2006) by Matt Haig: A retelling of Shakespeare's Hamlet, set in modern England. A Thousand Acres (1991) by Jane Smiley: A retelling of Shakespeare's King Lear, set in rural Iowa. Perelandra (1943) by C. S. Lewis: Another retelling of the story of Genesis, also leaning on Milton's Paradise Lost, but set on the planet Venus. Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys: A textual intervention on Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre, the story of the "mad women in the attic" told from her perspective. The Legend of Bagger Vance (1996) by Steven Pressfield: A retelling of the Bhagavad Gita, set in 1931 during an epic golf game. Tortilla Flat (1935) by John Steinbeck: A retelling of the Arthurian legends, set in Monterey, CA during the interwar period. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) by Eugene O'Neill: A retelling of Aeschylus' The Oresteia, set in the post-American Civil War South.

Julia Kristeva

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search

Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva in Paris, 2008 Born 24 June 1941 (age 72) Sliven, Bulgaria

Residence France Nationalit French/Bulgarian y Alma mater University of Sofia and others

Philosopher, semiotician, literary Known for critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, novelist Influence Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Lacan, d by Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida Spouse(s) Philippe Sollers Awards Holberg International Memorial Prize, Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought Website

kristeva.fr
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Outside the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna). Concepts[show] Important figures[show] Important works[show] Schools of thought[show] Training[show]

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v t e

Julia Kristeva (Bulgarian: ; born 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She is now a Professor at the University Paris Diderot. Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotik in 1969. Her sizable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the

fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. Together with Roland Barthes, Todorov, Goldmann, Grard Genette, Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Greimas, and Althusser, she stands as one of the foremost structuralists, in that time when structuralism took a major place in humanities. Her works also have an important place in post-structuralist thought. She is also the founder and head of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.[1]

Contents

1 Life 2 Work
o o

2.1 The semiotic 2.2 Anthropology and psychology

3 Feminism
o

3.1 Denunciation of identity politics

4 Novels 5 Honors 6 Acclaim and criticism 7 Selected writings 8 Novels 9 See also 10 Notes 11 External links

Life
Born in Sliven, Bulgaria, Kristeva is the daughter of a church accountant. Kristeva and her sister were enrolled in a Francophone school run by Dominican nuns. Kristeva became acquainted with the work of Mikhail Bakhtin at this time in Bulgaria. Kristeva went on to study at the University of Sofia, and while a postgraduate there obtained a research fellowship that enabled her to move to France in December 1965, when she was 24.[2] She continued her education at several French universities. Kristeva is, or at least at one point in time was a Maoist.[3] Kristeva taught at Columbia University in the early 1970s, and remains a Visiting Professor.[4]

Work

After joining the 'Tel Quel group' founded by Philippe Sollers, Kristeva focused on the politics of language and became an active member of the group. She trained in psychoanalysis, and earned her degree in 1979. In some ways, her work can be seen as trying to adapt a psychoanalytic approach to the poststructuralist criticism. For example, her view of the subject, and its construction, shares similarities with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. However, Kristeva rejects any understanding of the subject in a structuralist sense; instead, she favors a subject always "in process" or "on trial".[5] In this way, she contributes to the poststructuralist critique of essentialized structures, whilst preserving the teachings of psychoanalysis. She travelled to China in the 1970s and later wrote About Chinese Women (1977).[6][7][8][9][10][11]
The semiotic

One of Kristeva's most important propositions is the semiotic, as distinct from the discipline of semiotics founded by Saussure. As explained in The History of Women in Philosophy by Augustine Perumalil, Kristeva's "semiotic is closely related to the infantile pre-Oedipal referred to in the works of Freud, Otto Rank, Melanie Klein, British Object Relation psychoanalysis, and Jacques Lacan's pre-mirror stage. It is an emotional field, tied to the instincts, which dwells in the fissures and prosody of language rather than in the denotative meanings of words. Furthermore, according to Birgit Schippers' 2011 book Julia Kristeva and Feminist Thought, the semiotic is a realm associated with the musical, the poetic, the rhythmic, and that which lacks structure and meaning. It is closely tied to the "feminine", and represents the undifferentiated state of the pre-Mirror Stage infant. Upon entering the Mirror Stage, the child learns to distinguish between self and other, and enters the realm of shared cultural meaning, known as the symbolic. In Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva describes the symbolic as the space in which the development of language allows the child to become a "speaking subject," and to develop a sense of identity separate from the mother. This process of separation is known as abjection, whereby the child must reject and move away from the mother in order to enter into the world of language, culture, meaning, and the social. This realm of language is called the symbolic and is contrasted with the semiotic in that it is associated with the masculine, the law, and structure. According to Schippers (2011), where Kristeva departs from Lacan is in her belief that even after entering the symbolic, the subject continues to oscillate between the semiotic and the symbolic. Therefore, rather than arriving at a fixed identity, the subject is permanently "in process". Because female children continue to identify to some degree with the mother figure, they are especially likely to retain a close connection to the semiotic. This continued identification with the mother may result in what Kristeva refers to in Black Sun (1992) as melancholia (depression), given that female children simultaneously reject and identify with the mother figure. It has also been suggested (e.g., Creed, 1993) that the degradation of women and women's bodies in popular culture (and particularly, for example, in slasher films) emerges because of the threat to identity that the mother's body poses: it is a reminder of time spent in the undifferentiated state of the semiotic, where one has no concept of self or identity. After abjecting the mother, subjects retain an unconscious fascination with the semiotic, desiring to reunite with the mother, while at the same time fearing the loss of identity that accompanies it. Slasher film thus provide a way for audience members to safely reenact the process of abjection by vicariously expelling and destroying the mother figure. Kristeva is also known for her adoption of Platos idea of the chora, meaning a nourishing maternal space (Schippers, 2011). Kristevas idea of the chora has been interpreted in several

ways: as a reference to the uterus, as a metaphor for the relationship between the mother and child, and as the temporal period preceding the Mirror Stage. In her essay "Motherhood According to Giovanni" from Desire in Language (1980), Kristeva refers to the chora as a non-expressive totality formed by drives and their stases in a motility that is full of movement as it is regulated. She goes on to suggest that it is the mother's body that mediates between the chora and the symbolic realm: the mother has access to culture and meaning, yet also forms a totalizing bond with the child. Kristeva is also noted for her work on the concept of intertextuality.
Anthropology and psychology

Kristeva argues that anthropology and psychology, or the connection between the social and the subject, do not represent each other, but rather follow the same logic: the survival of the group and the subject. Furthermore, in her analysis of Oedipus, she claims that the speaking subject cannot exist on his/her own, but that he/she "stands on the fragile threshold as if stranded on account of an impossible demarcation" (Powers of Horror, p. 85). In her comparison between the two disciplines, Kristeva claims that the way in which an individual excludes the abject mother as a means of forming an identity, is the same way in which societies are constructed. On a broader scale, cultures exclude the maternal and the feminine, and by this come into being.[clarification needed]

Feminism
Kristeva was regarded as a key proponent of French feminism together with Simone de Beauvoir, Hlne Cixous, and Luce Irigaray.[12][13] Kristeva had a remarkable influence on feminism and feminist literary studies[14][15] in the US and the UK, as well as on readings into contemporary art[16][17] although her relation to feminist circles and movements in France was quite controversial. Kristeva made a famous disambiguation of three types of feminism in "Women's Time" in New Maladies of the Soul (1993); while rejecting the first two types, including that of Simone de Beauvoir, her stands are sometimes considered to reject feminism altogether. Kristeva proposed the idea of multiple sexual identities against the joined code[clarification needed] of "unified feminine language".
Denunciation of identity politics

Though she is often seen as one of the architects of postmodern feminism which partly gave rise to what is known to be political correctness, multiculturalism, and identity politics, Kristeva said her writings had been misunderstood by American feminist academics. This is because she claimed it was not enough simply to dissect the structure of language in order to find its hidden meaning. Language should also be viewed through the prisms of history and of individual psychic and sexual experiences. This post-structuralism approach enabled specific social groups to trace the source of their oppression to the very language they used. She believes that it is harmful to posit collective identity above individual identity, and this political assertion of sexual, ethnic, and religious identities is "totalitarian".[18]

Novels

In the past decade, Kristeva has written a number of novels that resemble detective stories. While the books maintain narrative suspense and develop a stylized surface, her readers also encounter ideas intrinsic to her theoretical projects. Her characters reveal themselves mainly through psychological devices, making her type of fiction mostly resemble the later work of Dostoevsky. Her fictional oeuvre, which includes The Old Man and the Wolves, Murder in Byzantium, and Possessions, while often allegorical, also approaches the autobiographical in some passages, especially with one of the protagonists of Possessions, Stephanie Delacoura French journalistwho can be seen as Kristeva's alter ego. Murder in Byzantium deals with themes from orthodox Christianity and politics and has been described by Kristeva as "a kind of anti-Da Vinci Code."[19]

Honors
For her "innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture and literature", Kristeva was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004. She won the 2006 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought.

Acclaim and criticism

Roman Jakobson said that "Both readers and listeners, whether agreeing or in stubborn disagreement with Julia Kristeva, feel indeed attracted to her contagious voice and to her genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."[20] Roland Barthes comments that "Julia Kristeva changes the place of things: she always destroys the last prejudice, the one you thought you could be reassured by, could be take pride in; what she displaces is the already-said, the dja-dit, i.e., the instance of the signified, i.e., stupidity; what she subverts is authority -the authority of monologic science, of filiation."[21] But Ian Almond criticizes Kristeva's ethnocentrism. He cites Gayatri Spivak's conclusion that Kristeva's book About Chinese Women "belongs to that very eighteenth century [that] Kristeva scorns" after pinpointing "the brief, expansive, often completely ungrounded way in which she writes about two thousand years of a culture she is unfamiliar with".[22] Ian Almond notes the absence of sophistication in Kristeva's remarks concerning the Muslim world and the dismissive terminology she uses to describe its culture and believers. He criticizes Kristeva's opposition which juxtaposes "Islamic societies" against "democracies where life is still fairly pleasant" by pointing out that Kristeva displays no awareness of the complex and nuanced debate ongoing among women theorists in the Muslim world, and that she does not refer to anything other than the Rushdie fatwa in dismissing the entire Muslim faith as "reactionary and persecutory".[23] And in Intellectual Impostures, two professors of physics, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, devote a chapter to Julia Kristeva's use of mathematics in her writings. They conclude "the main problem summarized by these texts is that she makes no effort to justify the reference of these mathematical concepts to the fields she is purporting to study - linguistics, literary criticism, political philosophy, psychoanalysis - and this in our opinion, is for the very good reason that there is none. Her sentences are more meaningful than those of Lacan, but she surpasses even him for the superficiality of her erudition."[24]

A feminist criticism is directed toward Kristeva's idea that the mother of early childhood must be abjected and rejected (footnote 12).

Selected writings

Smitik: recherches pour une smanalyse, Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1969. (English translation: Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980.) La Rvolution Du Langage Potique: L'avant-Garde La Fin Du Xixe Sicle, Lautramont Et Mallarm. Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1974. (Abridged English translation: Revolution in Poetic Language, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.) About Chinese Women. London: Boyars, 1977. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. The Kristeva Reader. (ed. Toril Moi) Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Nations without Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. "Experiencing the Phallus as Extraneous." parallax issue 8, 1998. Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other Press, 2000. Reading the Bible. In: David Jobling, Tina Pippin & Ronald Schleifer (eds). The Postmodern Bible Reader. (pp. 92101). Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. Female Genius: Life, Madness, Words: Hannah Arendt, Melanie Klein, Colette: A Trilogy. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press,1991 Hannah Arendt: Life is a Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Hatred and Forgiveness. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. The Severed Head: Capital Visions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Other books on Julia Kristeva:

Jennifer Radden, The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva , Oxford University Press, 2000. Megan Becker-Leckrone, Julia Kristeva And Literary Theory, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Sara Beardsworth, Julia Kristeva, Psychoanalysis and Modernity, Suny Press, 2004. (2006 Goethe Award for Psychoanalytic Scholarship for the best book published in 2004) Kelly Ives, Julia Kristeva: Art, Love, Melancholy, Philosophy, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis, Crescent Moon Publishing dition, 2010. Kelly Oliver, Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing , Routledge dition, 1993. Kelly Oliver, Reading Kristeva: Unraveling the Double-bind , Indiana University Press, 1993. John Lechte, Maria Margaroni, Julia Kristeva: Live Theory , Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd, 2005. Nolle McAfee, Julia Kristeva, Routledge, 2003. Griselda Pollock (Guest Editor) Julia Kristeva 1966-1996, Parallax Issue 8, 1998. Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement , Palgrave Macmillan, 1996. David Crownfield, Body/Text in Julia Kristeva: Religion, Women, and Psychoanalysis, State University of New York Press, 1992

Novels

The Samurai: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. The Old Man and the Wolves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Possessions: A Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Murder in Byzantium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

See also

List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction Luce Irigaray Hlne Cixous criture fminine French feminism

Post-structuralism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Poststructuralism) Jump to: navigation, search

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Criticism of postmodernism

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Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and critical theorists who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s.[1][2][3] A major theme of poststructuralism is instability in the human sciences, due to the complexity of humans themselves and the impossibility of fully escaping structures in order to study them. Post-structuralism is a response to structuralism. Structuralism is an intellectual movement developed in Europe from the early to mid-20th century. It argued that human culture may be understood by means of a structuremodeled on language (i.e., structural linguistics)that differs from concrete reality and from abstract ideasa "third order" that mediates between the two.[4] Post-structuralist authors all present different critiques of structuralism, but common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.[5] Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard, and Julia Kristeva, although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected the label.[6] The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, antihumanism is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; Colin Davis has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called "post-phenomenologists".[7] Some commentators have criticized poststructuralism for being radically relativistic or nihilistic; others have objected to its extremity and linguistic complexity. Others see it as a threat to traditional values or professional scholarly standards.

Contents

1 Theory o 1.1 General practices

o o

1.2 Destabilized meaning 1.3 Deconstruction

2 Post-structuralism and structuralism

o o

2.1 Historical vs. descriptive view 2.2 Scholars between both movements

3 History 4 Major works

o o o o

4.1 Eco and the open text 4.2 Barthes and the need for metalanguage 4.3 Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins 4.4 Judith Butler and Gender Trouble

5 See also
o

5.1 Authors

6 References 7 Sources 8 External links

Theory
General practices

The author's intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Also the author's identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is a fictional construct. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. To step outside of literary theory, this position is generalizable to any situation where a subject perceives a sign. Meaning (or the signified, in Saussure's scheme, which is as heavily presumed upon in post-structuralism as in structuralism) is constructed by an individual from a signifier. This is why the signified is said to 'slide' under the signifier, and explains the talk about the "primacy of the signifier."

A post-structuralist critic must be able to use a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another. 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 (for example: class, racial, or sexual identity)

Destabilized meaning
See also: Meaning (philosophy of language) 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, 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 Levinas remarked on this new field of semantic inquiry: ...language refers to the position of the listener and the speaker, that is, to the contingency of their story. To seize by inventory all the contexts of language and all possible positions of interlocutors is a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless semantic rivers. Experience, like language, no longer seems made of isolated elements lodged somehow in a Euclidean space... [Words] signify from the "world" and from the position of one who is looking. Levinas, Signification and Sense, Humanism of the Other, tr. Nidra Poller[8]

Deconstruction
Main article: 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 human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary. Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce the illusion of singular meaning.[clarification needed]

Post-structuralism and structuralism

Structuralism was an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from

linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results. Post-structuralism offers a way of studying how knowledge is produced and critiques structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

Historical vs. descriptive view

Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they classify structuralism as descriptive.[citation needed] 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. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, poststructuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness. The theme of history in modern Continental thought can be linked to such influences as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time. Structuralists also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.

Scholars between both movements

The uncertain distance between structuralism and post-structuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars generally do not label themselves as post-structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes, also became noteworthy in poststructuralism. Lvi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault were the so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism.[9] All but Lvi-Strauss became prominent post-structuralists. The works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva are also counted as prominent examples of post-structuralism. The critical reading carried out by these thinkers sought to find contradictions that an author includes, supposedly inevitably, in his work. Those inconsistencies are used to show that the interpretation and criticism of any literature is in the hands of the reader and includes that reader's own cultural biases and assumptions. While many structuralists first thought that they could tease out an author's intention by close scrutiny, they soon argued that textual analysis discovered so many disconnections that it was obvious that their own experiences lent a view that was unique to them. Some observers from outside the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle[10] argued in 1990 that "The spread of 'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best known example of a silly but noncatastrophic phenomenon." Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal[11] in 1997 criticized "the postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy." Literature scholar Norman Holland argued that post-structuralism was

flawed due to reliance on Saussure's linguistic model, which was seriously challenged by the 1950s and was soon abandoned by linguists: "Saussure's views are not held, so far as I know, by modern linguists, only by literary critics and the occasional philosopher. [Strict adherence to Saussure] has elicited wrong film and literary theory on a grand scale. One can find dozens of books of literary theory bogged down in signifiers and signifieds, but only a handful that refer to Chomsky."[12]

History
Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing structuralism. According to J.G. Merquior[3] a lovehate relationship with structuralism developed amongst many leading French thinkers in the 1960s. 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. At the same time, however, the support of the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the USSR contributed to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. As a result, there was increased interest in alternative radical philosophies, including feminism, western Marxism, anarchism, phenomenology, and nihilism. These disparate perspectives, which Michel Foucault later labeled "subjugated knowledges," were all linked by being critical 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 Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. In a 1966 lecture "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", Jacques Derrida presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. 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." Although Barthes was originally a structuralist, during the 1960s he increasingly favored poststructuralist views. In 1967, Barthes published "The Death of the Author" in which he announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, 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," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text. In a 1976 lecture series, Foucault briefly summarized the general impetus of the poststructuralist movement: ...For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something... beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges. Foucault, Society Must be Defended, 7th January 1976, tr. David Macey[13]

Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a self-conscious group, but each responded to the traditions of phenomenology and structuralism. Phenomenology, often associated with two German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, rejected previous systems of knowledge and attempted to examine life "just as it appears" (as phenomena).[14] Both movements rejected the idea that knowledge could be centred on the human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge.[15] In phenomenology this foundation would be experience itself; in structuralism, knowledge is founded on the "structures" that make experience possible: concepts, and language or signs. Post-structuralism, in turn, argues that founding knowledge either on pure experience (phenomenology) or systematic structures (structuralism) is impossible. This impossibility was meant not a failure or loss, but a cause for "celebration and liberation."[15]

Major works
Eco and the open text
When The Open Work was written by Umberto Eco (1962) it was already in many (or all) senses post-structuralist. The main thesis is that a work of art, and especially of contemporary art, has un undefined meaning, and the will of the artist was exactly that of producing such indeterminacy or openness. The open works (Eco cites Luciano Berio's musical compositions, among many others) have then to be completed by the interpreter, according to his or her knowledge. Such idea, that today is considered to be true by many philosophers and critics (and was popularized by reader-response theories as well as by hermeneutically informed theories, such as those by Jauss or Iser), was considered to be "heretical" at the time, and received a very strong opposition, notably by Levi-Strauss and by the writer Eugenio Montale in Italy, whose attacks were documented by Eco himself in the prefaces of later editions of this text. The Open Work is seen by some to be the very first post-structural book, and considered as a classic in semiotics and (continental) aesthetics. In 1968 Eco published La struttura assente (literally from Italian: The Absent Structure), another book that had a great impact on the transition between structuralism and poststructuralism. Eco suggests that structures are not entities existing de facto, ontologically, but formal instruments and representations by which scholars can understand cultural concepts, articulating various systems of differences. In 1968, when structuralism was the main theorical reference for many, this book received massive criticism in France and abroad. Later, several structuralists used to define themselves as either "nominalists", if following Eco's path, or "realists", if following Levi-Strauss's and others's interpretations of what a structure is. In his later works, especially in A Theory of Semiotics (1975), The Role of the Reader (1979) and Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1984), Eco defined a semiotic theory taking into account the post-structural innovations, with concepts like encyclopedia, symbolic mode or model reader.

Barthes and the need for metalanguage

Although many may have felt the necessity to move beyond structuralism, there was clearly no consensus on how this ought to occur. 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 advanced the concept of the "metalanguage". A metalanguage is a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. 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, and 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, which invited scholars thought to be prominent post-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 propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist. The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted as "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. Many see the importance of Foucault's work as in its synthesis of this social/historical account of the operations of power (see governmentality).[citation needed]

Judith Butler and Gender Trouble

A major American thinker associated with post structuralist thought is Judith Butler. Trained in Continental philosophy and published on Hegel, Butler is better known for her engagement with feminist theory and as the 'mother' (along with English literature scholar Eve Sedgwick) of Queer Theory. In Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Butler explored the persistence of biological sex in feminist theory as the source and cause of the unequal social treatment and status of women. Using ideas about power and subjectification first broached by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish,[16] and the linguistic theories of J. L. Austin, Butler argued that sex was an effect rather than the cause of social gender difference, and that the fiction of a stable core gender identity was maintained through socially coerced performances of gender. Butler's ideas depend greatly on the notion of "performativity" and she is widely credited with introducing the term into gender studies. Austin described performative words as those that both describe and produce a thing. The classic example is a minister's statement, "I now pronounce you husband and wife," which both describes and produces two people as married. Similarly, Butler argued that repetitive socially coerced gender performances, which aspire to replicate a normative gender ideal, actually produce the sexed body and gender identity.

In Gender Trouble, Butler also relied on deconstructionist language theory and Freudian psychoanalysis to argue that heterosexuality is structured in an ongoing series of losses stemming from a repudiation of homosexuality; as such homosexuality can be seen as constitutive of heterosexuality, necessitating its repeated repudiations. Butler embraced the Foucauldian notion that there is no "outside" to culture, and therefore resistanceeven consciousness, volition, the selfto forms of oppression is always already structured in terms of that oppression. Therefore, resistance can only take the form of failed imitations of social norms, whose very failure reveals the structures of power that often masquerade as natural or inevitable. For this reason, Butler's work has been taken up by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people because it re-imagines sexual and gender non-conformitynot to mention the way that heterosexual and cisgender norms are often reproduced in gay and lesbian culture and relationshipsas a form of resistance to a heteronormative society that attempts (but always fails) to naturalize the relationships among sex, gender, and sexual orientation.[17]

See also

Development criticism Narrative therapy Postmodernism Reader-Response Semiotics Social criticism Social theory Structuralism contrast with Tarski's undefinability theorem

Authors
The following are often said to be post-structuralists, or to have had a post-structuralist period:

Kathy Acker Jean Baudrillard Judith Butler Rey Chow Hlne Cixous Gilles Deleuze Jacques Derrida Umberto Eco

John Fiske (media studies) Michel Foucault Flix Guattari Ren Girard Luce Irigaray