Poststructuralism & 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.
Poststructuralism 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 poststructuralist 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
*Poststructuralists generally assert that poststructuralism 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, poststructuralist 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.*
Scholars between both movements
The uncertain distance between structuralism and poststructuralism is further blurred by the fact that scholars rarely label themselves as poststructuralists. Some scholars associated with structuralism, such as *Roland Barthes,* also became noteworthy in poststructuralism.
*LéviStrauss, Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault were the so-called "Gang of Four" of structuralism.* All but LéviStrauss became prominent poststructuralists. *The works of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva are also counted as prominent examples of poststructuralism.* These thinkers sought contradictions in texts that are supposedly inevitable. Those inconsistencies are used to show that the interpretation and criticism of any literature are 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 poststructuralist camp have questioned the rigor and legitimacy of the field. American philosopher *John Searle* 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* 1997 criticized "the postmodernist/ poststructuralist gibberish that is now hegemonic in some sectors of the American academy." Literature scholar Norman Holland argued that poststructuralism 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 signified, but only a handful that refers to *Chomsky.*"
History
Poststructuralism 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.
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 by the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the USSR contributed to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. Poststructuralism offered a means to justify these criticisms, by exposing the underlying assumptions of many Western norms. Two key figures in the early poststructuralist 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 center, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play."
Although Barthes was originally a structuralist, during the 1960s he increasingly favored post-structuralist 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.
Poststructuralist 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). Both movements rejected the idea that knowledge could be centered on the human knower, and sought what they considered a more secure foundation for knowledge. In phenomenology, this foundation is experiencing itself; in structuralism, knowledge is founded on the "structures" that make experience possible: concepts, and language or signs.
By contrast, poststructuralism argues that founding knowledge either on pure experience (phenomenology) or systematic structures (structuralism) is impossible. This impossibility was not meant as a failure or loss, but rather as a cause for "celebration and liberation."
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