Post-Structuralism
Post-Structuralism is a philosophical and literary criticism movement that emerged in the late twentieth century as a response to structuralism, which sought to explain human culture through underlying structures. Unlike structuralism, Post-Structuralism argues that culture and meaning are inseparable and emphasizes the fluidity of relationships that shape social reality. Key figures, such as Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, critique the notion of fixed meanings and the idea of an authoritative author, proposing instead that the reader plays a central role in interpreting texts. This movement challenges binary oppositions (e.g., male/female, rational/emotional) and highlights the interdependence of these concepts, urging a deconstruction of established knowledge systems.
Post-Structuralism posits that meaning is not singular but rather constructed and reconstructed by individual readers, influenced by their identities and contexts. As such, it is concerned with how meanings evolve over time and how cultural perceptions can shift. The movement has roots in the political and intellectual upheavals of the mid-twentieth century and intersects with broader ideas in post-modernism. Although Post-Structuralism remains an influential framework, contemporary discourse often reflects a move away from rigid categorization, recognizing the complexity and variability inherent in understanding texts and cultural phenomena.
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Post-Structuralism
Post-structuralism is a late twentieth-century movement in philosophy and literary criticism, defined by opposition to structuralism, an intellectual European movement from the early to mid-twentieth century that argued that human culture may be understood through a structure that differs from concrete reality and abstract ideas. Post-structuralism considers culture as inseparable of meaning and intends to go beyond the structuralism of theories that imply an inflexible inner logic to relationships that shape any aspect of social reality. Post-structuralist writers present various 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. Post-structuralism is closely related to post-modernism, although the two concepts are not synonymous. Notable post-structuralist authors are Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva.
Background
By the mid-twentieth century, several structural theories sought to explain the truth of human existence. Among them were Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory on structural linguistics, Marx’s theory of economic structures, and the psychoanalytic theory describing the structure of the psyche in terms of the unconscious. During the 1960s, the structuralist movement based in France attempted to integrate these ideas. However, some authors, most notably Michel Foucault, disagreed with structuralist theories, asserting that there were no precise underlying structures that could explain the human condition and that it is not possible to step outside of rhetoric and evaluate its insights objectively. The period was marked by political turmoil, and the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Prague were important moments that determined the movement to rethink the dynamics by which history is made.
Interest increased in alternative radical philosophies, including feminism, Western Marxism, phenomenology, and nihilism. Post-structuralism offered a means of justifying the criticisms by exposing the hidden premises of many Western norms. Two key figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. In the famous 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 and became one of the first to propose some theoretical limitations to structuralism.
Like Foucault, Barthes was originally a structuralist, but during the 1960s, he increasingly favored post-structuralist views. In his book The Death of the Author (1967), he announced a symbolic event, namely the "death" of the author as a legitimate source of meaning for a given text. He claimed that any literary text has multiple meanings and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. Post-structuralist philosophers like Derrida and Foucault did not form a programmatic group, but each responded to the discourses of phenomenology and structuralism. Both movements sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge: in phenomenology, this foundation was represented by experience itself, and in structuralism, knowledge was founded on "structures" such as concepts, language, or signs that make experience possible.
Overview
Post-structuralism is concerned with the relationships between human beings, the world, and the practice of making and reproducing meanings. One of the basic assumptions that post-structuralism operates with is that the concept of "self" as a unique and rational entity is a fictional construct, the individual being a plurality of tensions and knowledge claims. In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of analysis. To study a text, a reader must figure out how the work relates to themselves, the self-perception playing a critical role in one’s interpretation of meaning.
The meaning the author intended is secondary to the meanings identified by the reader. 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 personal purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. 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-structuralism examines other sources for meaning (e.g., readers, cultural norms, other literature). A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of contexts to create a versatile interpretation of a text, even if the interpretations are sometimes opposite. It is particularly relevant to analyze how the meanings of a text change in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity of the reader.
Another important contribution brought by Roland Barthes to post-structuralist theory is the concept of the "metalanguage" described in Elements of Semiology (1967) as a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of language, with symbols replacing words and phrases. 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.
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 (e.g., 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 multiplicity, the illusion of singular meaning.
Post-structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and they 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. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. Contemporary trends seem to employ the term post-structuralism less, as there is no consistent post-structuralist position with which to engage.
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