Post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build
upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it.[1]
Though post-structuralists all present different critiques of structuralism, common themes
among them include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an
interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-
structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established,
socially constructed structures.[2][3][4][5]

Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is
modeled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas
about reality on the other hand, and a "third order" that mediates between the two.[6] A post-
structuralist critique, then, might suggest that in order to build meaning out of such an
interpretation, one must (falsely) assume that the definitions of these signs are both valid
and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory is somehow above and apart
from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them. The
rigidity and tendency to categorize intimations of universal truths found in structuralist
thinking is a common target of post-structuralist thought, while also building upon
structuralist conceptions of reality mediated by the interrelationship between signs.[7]

Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include Roland Barthes,
Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, although many
theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected the label.[8]

Post-structuralism and structuralism

Structuralism, as an intellectual movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, studied
underlying structures in cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from
linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those structures.
Structuralism posits the concept of binary opposition, in which frequently-used pairs of
opposite-but-related words (concepts) are often arranged in a hierarchy; for example:
Enlightenment/Romantic, female/male, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signified/signifier,
symbolic/imaginary, and east/west.

Post-structuralism rejects the structuralist notion that the dominant word in a pair is
dependent on its subservient counterpart, and instead argues that founding knowledge on
either pure experience (phenomenology) or on systematic structures (structuralism) is
impossible,[9] because history and culture actually condition the study of underlying
structures, and these are subject to biases and misinterpretations. Gilles Deleuze and others
saw this impossibility not as a failure or loss, but rather as a cause for "celebration and
liberation."[10] A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (a text, for
example), one must study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced
the object.[11] The uncertain boundaries between structuralism and post-structuralism
become further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as post-
structuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as Roland Barthes and
Michel Foucault, also became noteworthy in post-structuralism.[12]

History

Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing

structuralism. According to J. G. Merquior, a love–hate relationship with structuralism
developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.[4] The period was marked by
the rebellion of students and workers against the state in May 1968.

In a 1966 lecture titled "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."

A year later, Roland 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.

Barthes and the need for metalanguage

In Elements of Semiology (1967), Barthes advances the concept of the metalanguage, 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 the 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 colloquium at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 titled "The Languages of Criticism and
the Sciences of Man", to which such French philosophers as Jacques Derrida, Roland
Barthes, and Jacques Lacan were invited to speak.

Derrida's lecture at that conference, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences", 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 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 play in the
sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. Many see the
importance of Foucault's work to be in its synthesis of this social/historical account of the
operation of power.

Criticism

Some observers from outside of the post-structuralist camp have questioned the rigour and
legitimacy of the field. American philosopher John Searle
suggested in 1990: "The spread of
'poststructuralist' literary theory is perhaps the best-known example of a silly but non-
catastrophic phenomenon."[13][14] Similarly, physicist Alan Sokal in 1997 criticized "the
postmodernist/poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the
American academy."[15]

Literature scholar Norman Holland in 1992 saw post-structuralism as 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 refers to
Chomsky."[16]

David Foster Wallace wrote:

The deconstructionists ("deconstructionist" and "poststructuralist"

mean the same thing, by the way: "poststructuralist" is what you call
a deconstructionist who doesn't want to be called a
deconstructionist) ... see the debate over the ownership of meaning
as a skirmish in a larger war in Western philosophy over the idea
that presence and unity are ontologically prior to expression. There's
been this longstanding deluded presumption, they think, that if
there is an utterance then there must exist a unified, efficacious
presence that causes and owns that utterance. The poststructuralists
attack what they see as a post-Platonic prejudice in favour of
presence over absence and speech over writing. We tend to trust
speech over writing because of the immediacy of the speaker: he's
right there, and we can grab him by the lapels and look into his face
and figure out just exactly what one single thing he means. But the
reason why poststructuralists are in the literary theory business at
all is that they see writing, not speech, as more faithful to the
metaphysics of true expression. For Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault,
writing is a better animal than speech because it is iterable; it is
iterable because it is abstract; and it is abstract because it is a
 function not of presence but of absence: the reader's absent when
the writer's writing and the writer's absent when the reader's
reading.

[17]

See also

Development criticism

Narrative therapy

Post-postmodernism

Post-structural feminism

Post-structuralist subject

Reader-response criticism

Semiotics

Social criticism

Social theory

Authors

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

period:

Kathy Acker Jacques Derrida Teresa de Lauretis

Jean Baudrillard Umberto Eco Sarah Kofman

Roland Barthes John Fiske Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Wendy Brown Michel Foucault Jean-François Lyotard

Judith Butler René Girard Chantal Mouffe

Rey Chow Félix Guattari Jean-Luc Nancy

Hélène Cixous Luce Irigaray Avital Ronell

Gilles Deleuze Julia Kristeva Bernard Stiegler

References
 1. Lewis, Philip; Descombes, Vincent; Harari, Josue V. (1982). "The Post-Structuralist Condition".
Diacritics. 12 (1): 2–24. doi:10.2307/464788 (https://doi.org/10.2307%2F464788) . JSTOR 464788
(https://www.jstor.org/stable/464788) .

2. Bensmaïa, Réda. 2005. "Poststructuralism." Pp. 92–93 in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century
French Thought (https://books.google.com/books?id=bREQibN9i-sC) , edited by L. Kritzman.
Columbia University Press.

3. Poster, Mark. 1988. "Introduction: Theory and the problem of Context." pp. 5–6 in Critical theory and
poststructuralism: in search of a context (https://books.google.com/books?id=-OnWAAAAMAAJ) .

4. Merquior, José G. 1987. Foucault, (Fontana Modern Masters series). University of California Press.
ISBN 0-520-06062-8.

5. Craig, Edward, ed. 1998. Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, vol. 7 (Nihilism to Quantum
mechanics). London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-18712-5. p. 597.

6. Deleuze, Gilles. [2002] 2004. "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?" Pp. 170–92 in Desert Islands
and Other Texts 1953–1974, translated by D. Lapoujade, edited by M. Taormina, Semiotext(e) Foreign
Agents series. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). ISBN 1-58435-018-0. pp. 171–73.

7. Harcourt, Bernard E. (12 March 2007). "An Answer to the Question: "What Is Poststructuralism?" " (htt
ps://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=public_law_and_legal
_theory) . Chicago Unbound - Public Law and Legal Theory. 156: 17–19.

8. Harrison, Paul (2006). "Poststructuralist Theories" (https://freegeobook.files.wordpress.com/2009/0

1/0761942637.pdf) (PDF). In Aitken, Stuart; Valentine, Gill (eds.). Approaches to Human Geography.
London: SAGE Publications. pp. 122–135. doi:10.4135/9781446215432.n10 (https://doi.org/10.413
5%2F9781446215432.n10) . ISBN 9780761942634.

9. Colebrook, Claire (2002). Gilles Deleuze (https://books.google.com/books?id=dDi6guWdpfIC) .

Routledge Critical Thinkers. Routledge. p. 2. ISBN 9781134578023. "Post-structuralism responded to
the impossibility of founding knowledge either on pure experience (phenomenology) or systematic
structures (structuralism)."

10. Colebrook, Claire (2002). Gilles Deleuze (https://books.google.com/books?id=dDi6guWdpfIC&pg=P

A2) . Routledge Critical Thinkers. Routledge. p. 2. ISBN 9781134578023. "In Deleuze's case, like
many other post-structuralists, this recognised impossibility of organising life into closed structures
was not a failure or loss but a cause for celebration and liberation."

11. Raulet, Gerard (1983). "Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault".
Telos. 1983 (55): 195–211. doi:10.3817/0383055195 (https://doi.org/10.3817%2F0383055195) .
S2CID 144500134 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144500134) .

12. Williams, James (2005). Understanding Poststructuralism. Routledge.

doi:10.1017/UPO9781844653683 (https://doi.org/10.1017%2FUPO9781844653683) .
ISBN 9781844653683.

13. Searle, John. (1990). "The Storm Over the University (http://www.ditext.com/searle/searle1.html) ."
The New York Review of Books, 6 December 1990.
14. Searle, John (6 December 1990). "The Storm Over the University" (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/
1990/12/06/the-storm-over-the-university/) . The New York Review of Books. New York. ISSN 0028-
7504 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/0028-7504) . Retrieved 6 June 2020.

15. Sokal, Alan. 1997. "Professor Latour's Philosophical Mystifications (http://www.physics.nyu.edu/facul

ty/sokal/le_monde_english.html) ." (Originally published in French in Le Monde, 31 January 1997;
translated by the author.)

16. Holland, Norman N. (1992) The Critical I, Columbia University Press, ISBN 0-231-07650-9, p. 140.

17. Biblioklept (22 December 2010). "David Foster Wallace Describes Poststructuralism" (https://bibliokle
pt.org/2010/12/22/david-foster-wallace-defines-poststructuralism/) . Biblioklept. Retrieved 25 May
2017.

Sources
Angermuller, J. (2015): Why There Is No Poststructuralism in France. The Making of an Intellectual
Generation. London: Bloomsbury.

Angermuller, J. (2014): Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis. Subjectivity in Enunciative Pragmatics.

Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

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.

Matthews, E. Twentieth-Century French Philosophy. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.

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 Wikimedia Commons has
Sciences - Jacques Derrida (http://hydra.humanities.uc media related to Post-
structuralism.
i.edu/derrida/sign-play.html)

Smith, Richard G., ed. (2010). The Baudrillard Dictionary (https://books.google.com/books?i

d=DyCrBgAAQBAJ) . Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748639229.
JSTOR 10.3366/j.ctt1g09vw4 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctt1g09vw4) .

"Some Post-Structural Assumptions" - John Lye (https://web.archive.org/web/2005072812

5303/http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/poststruct.html)
 Talking pomo: An analysis of the post-modern movement, by Steve Mizrach (https://web.ar
chive.org/web/20110523082835/http://www2.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/pomo.html)

Information on Michel Foucault, including an archive of writings and lectures (https://fouca

ult.info/)

poststructuralism.info (https://web.archive.org/web/20091206043349/http://poststructur
alism.info/) - A collaborative website that aims to allow users not only to describe post-
structuralist ideas but to create new ideas and concepts based on post-structuralist
foundations

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