POST STRUCTURALISM

INTRODUCTION

Post structuralism is a body of work that followed in the wake of

structuraslism, and sought to understand a world irrevocably dissected
into parts of systems, as in deconstruction.Post structuralism unlike
structuralism is a philosophy having no absolute truth. It has a radical
view because there is no fixed landmark, no certain standard by which to
measure anything. It is like a gravity free space, where meanings are
floating and gives us the sense of decentered universe. It is an attitude
of mind than a practical method of criticism.
 INTRODUCTION

It is engaged in deconstruction of the text. It is engaged as reading

against the grain or as Terry Eagleton says, “reading the text itself with
the purpose of learning the text as it cannot know itself”. Post
structuralism is known for its efforts to offer a critical review of
normative concepts in classical philosophy, and it makes use of the
LINGUISTIC TURN. It stresses the interaction of reader and text as a
productivity while structuralism sees the truth behind or within a text. It
is highly critical of the unity of stable sign. It is shift from the signified to
signifier.
 BACKGROUND

It’s foundation lies in the weak point of structuralism. Sturucturalist

says that language is arbitrary and works in binary oppositions. They
further say that language constitutes our world. If look deeply to these
points we can the contradiction lies in these in these points. If
sructuralists claim that language works in binary oppositions and has
ambiguity in it then how can it constitute our world. This urged Roland
Barthes to review his ideology.
 BACKGROUND

What distinguished structuralism from post structuralism is not always

easy to identify, but as a general rule post structuralist see their theories
as based on strucruralism’s philosophy of language (Saussure) and
anthropology (Levi-Strauss), but they apply those insights to a wider
range of topics and radicalize some of structuralism’s premises. The
transition structuralism to post structuralism is also reflected in the
works of Michel Foucault, and specially in his method of genealogy.
Among his various historical (genealogical) works, “The Order of Things
“ and “The Births of The Clinic” stand out. Foucault tried to develop a
new understanding of historical developments as process of rapture,
deviation, and contingency.
 BEGINNING

It is a continental philosophy that developed in the later half of the 20th

century in a fashion parallel to certain developments in analytical
philosophy. At some point in the late 1960s, structuralism gave birth to
“poststructuralism”. When structuralism was reaching its apex as an
influential theory of language, alongwith a new wave of philosophers
intent on subjecting it to a rigorous and sustained critique Some
commentators believe that the later developments were already
inherent in the earlier phase. One might say that poststructuralism is
simply a fuller working out of the implications of structuralism, but this
information is not quite satisfactory because it is evident that
poststructuralism tries to deflate the scientific pretentions of
structuralism.
 BEGINNING

Deconstruction, based on the work of Derrida aims to show that any and
every text inevitably undermines its own claims to determine a definite
meaning. Thus, the lack of meaning sabotages any attempts to form a
definite conclusion within a text. This raises the concept of the lack of
closure within the text. This in turn emphasized the role of the reader in
the process of determining meaning in text, which led Roland Barthes to
propose the four main points that comprise The Death of the Author
(1968).
 POST-STRUCTURALISM IS SUCCESSION OF
STRUCTURALISM

Post-structuralism, as a general term for recent developments in literary

theory and criticism, became common the 1970s. Is the relation to
Structuralism one of succession or supercession? - that is, do we see
post-structuralism as simply later than its predecessor, or is it in some
sense in advance? Both usages can be found; and poststructuralism
covers so many practices that it is impossible to define. But it can be
approached as a working through, in various fields of inquiry, of some
implications of Deconstruction.
 POST-STRUCTURALISM IS SUCCESSION OF
STRUCTURALISM

Derrida's influential lecture on 'Structure, sign and play in the discourse

of the human sciences' proposed a disruption in the very concept of
structure as a stable system, mischievously quoting Lévi-Strauss
against himself. The effects of deconstruction, though, were not
confined to a critique of structuralism. They rather emphasized a
methodological shift, a move away from explanation by origin, order by
opposition, fixed or closed signification and the person as a unified
subject.
 ROLAND BARTHES

What might be called Barthes’ poststructuralist period is best

represented by his short essay ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968). He
rejects the traditional view that the author is the origin of the text, the
source of its meaning, and the only authority for interpretation. At first,
this sounds like a restatement of the familiar New Critical dogma about
the literary works independence (autonomy) from its historical and
biographical background. The New Critics believed that the unity of a
text lay not in its author’s intention but in its structure. His work “The
Stylistic Analysis of Narrative” (1960) and “The Pleasure of Life”(1973)
are also the shifts from structuralism to post structuralism.
 ROLAND BARTHES

In which he says that we are not fully in control of the medium of

language. Meaning cannot be placed in set places, they can only be
randomly scattered or decentered. Meanings of the words can never be
guaranteed one hundred percent pure. They are contaminated by their
opposites. Actually death of the author is the birth of the reader. The
interpretation of Saussure’s categories is most obvious in the work of
Roland Barthes, who published two well received introductions to
structuralism. As a structuralist, Barthes had belief in the existence of
underlying structures, and considered them necessary for the
explanation of sign process, but then Barthes did away with such
idealistic fiction.
 ROLAND BARTHES

He rejected the ontological thesis of a prexisting sign system and

regarded the sign complex of the text concerned as the decisive
instance. According to Barthes we not have to learn rules to use texts,
instead we practice the production of meaning directly by using existing
signal complexes.
 DERRIDA AND POST STRUCTURALISM

Another point criticized in de Saussure’s theory was his usage of the

term “system” understood as a closed totality that somehow organizes
language. De Saussure says that: “language is both a self-contained
whole and the principle of classification. Later on that: A linguistic
system is a series of phonetic differences matched with a series of
conceptual differences. But this matching of a certain number of
auditory signals and a similar number of items carved out of the mass
of thought gives rise to a system of values. It is this system which
provides the operative bond between phonic and mental elements
within each sign. According to Derrida, “the notion of structure refers
only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and
sites.
 DERRIDA AND POST STRUCTURALISM

This conception faces two major problems. The first one, connected
with the closure of structure, consists in the recognition that the pas-
sage from one structure to another may only take place by way of a
catastrophe or pure chance. The second one, linked with the existence
of the center, concerns the change which may effectuate within a
structure: it will always be the result of its internal logic. The fusion of
these two topics clearly points to the contradictory nature of the idea of
the structure and calls for post structuralism. Post structuralism can be
conceived of as textual labour in the form of a double reading.
 DERRIDA AND POST STRUCTURALISM

The 1ST reading is a faithful attempt to follow the dominant

interpretation of the text, its assumptions, concepts and arguments. The
second reading consists in tracing its excluded, repressed and inferior
interpretation that forms an undercurrent in the text of two
interpretations can demonstrate that the dominant interpretation is
dependent on what it excludes. Consequently, the relation between the
two interpretations becomes more important than the dominant
intepretation. Derrida argues that it is so because of the supplementary
character of the second interpretation which fills in the original lack in
the dominant one
 PAUL DE MAN

 He found romantic poetry and open invitation to deconstruction,

because romantics actually deconstruct their own writing by showing
that the presence they desire is always absent, always in the past and
future.

 Blindness and Insight (1917): it gives the idea of Paradox that

critics only achieve insight through a certain blindness. This insight
blindness is facilitated by an unconscious slide.

 Allegories of Reading (1979): This becomes the criticism of

ambiguity by this ambiguous poetic language. In Allegories of
Reading be man develop rhetoric type of deconstruction always begin
in blindness and sight.
 LACAN AND THE DISCURSIVE FOUNDATION OF SUBJECTIVITY

Another important thinker on the historical map of the discourse theory

is Jacques Lacan in whose works the problems of discourse are
inextricably connected with the reflection on the nature of human
subjectivity. There are two ways of interpreting the relation between
subjectivity and discourse in Lacan. The first interpretation – the post-
structuralist one – regards subjectivity as dependent on discourse and
puts emphasis on the examination of the discursive systems in which it
is involved, claiming that they play an essential role in the constitution of
the subject’s identity. The second interpretation, appreciating Lacan’s
psychoanalytical practice, contradicts the post-structuralist stance and
asserts that it is the subject – construed in opposition to the essentialist
philosophical tradition – that plays the essential role in the constitution
 LACAN AND THE DISCURSIVE FOUNDATION OF SUBJECTIVITY

it is the subject – construed in opposition to the essentialist

philosophical tradition – that plays the essential role in the constitution
of the discursive system. Lacan is interested in figures of speech and
how speech, creating systems of desire and identification, moves the
subject. On the one hand, this analysis is highly theoretical: Lacan is fully
engaged in all the conceptual resources formulated by post-structuralist
thought. But on the other hand, Lacan’s analysis is highly practical. As an
analyst, Lacan confronted subjects who resisted, denied and displaced
linguistic effects. This forced him to formulate a description of a subject
much more active and resistant than the subject imagined by post-
structuralist thought
 BARBARA JOHNSON

In her essay “Writing,” Barbara Johnson grapples with many of the

paradoxes of the medium as exposed by the theoretical movements of
1960s France. Describing and leaning on the works of Barthes, Saussure,
Lacan, and Derrida, Johnson shows that within this order of thought
writing is more than a simple “transcription of the spoken word,”
Johnson finds the latter of these more useful and goes on to describe
the beginnings of this concept in terms of Saussurean linguistics.
Saussure sees language as a system, the basic unit of this system being
the sign, which is composed of two parts, the “signified” and the
“signifier,” the “mental image or concept” referred to and the phonic or
graphic vehicle” used to express it.
 BARBARA JOHNSON

This two part structure of the sign is handy as is it shows the arbitrary
nature of the signifier across languages and the inconsistent nature of
the signified. Because of these ambiguities, language is intelligible only
when taken as a system, with meaning in the system derived from signs
“not as independently meaningful units corresponding to external
objects but as elements whose value is generated by their difference
from neighboring elements in the system” (342). Thus, “difference”
becomes the origin of meaning, not identity, as in a thing’s “thingness.”
 BARBARA JOHNSON

With this mind, Johnson turns to the work of Derrida. In the three
volumes that Johnson discusses, Derrida’s main goal is the
“reevaluation” of the binaries that dominate Western metaphysic. For
Johnson in light of these multiple meanings, it is our task as readers
then “to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit what
might have been meant”.
 APPLICATION OF POST STRUCTURALISM ON LITERATURE

A post structuralist sees the language of the text in a way that:

 There are no facts in the text only interpretation.

 As the theory is based on philosophy instead of scientific rules so,

there is nothing outside the text. Text is everything.

 Its origin lies in the habits of skepticism and uncertainity.

 The tone and style of post structuralism is emotive, urgent and

euphoric.

 Titles may have puns and allusions.

 Signs in the text float free of what they designate.

 APPLICATION OF POST STRUCTURALISM ON LITERATURE

 There is no centre and theme around which text revolve. Text is

decentered incoherent and disunified.

 Decentralization of the text involves multiplicity of interpretations.

 Multiple interpretation are connected with free discourse. Discourse

analysis can be done through the lens of psychology, sociology etc.

 Text comprises a chain of signifiers which appears to evoke a

singular meaning, but which upon investigation can be shown to
contradict itself .
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