Post-structuralism





Post-Structuralism is a body of work that is a response to structuralism; it
rejects structuralism yet for various reasons still defines itself in
relation to it. So the best way to understand post-structuralism is to
understand structuralism.

There are many definitions. Most broadly, structuralism is any theory that
follows Immanuel Kant's notion that the mind actively structures perceptions
(Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky are structuralists in this sense), or any
theory that follows Durkheim's attention to social structure (e.g.
classifying societies as mechanical or organic). More narrowly,
structuralism is inspired by the work of the linguists Roman Jakobson and
Ferdinand de Saussure. Their main point is that language is not just a set
of words (abstract) that refer to things (concrete). In other words, the
word "rock" does not have sense, or meaning, simply because we identify it
with real rocks. Rather, language consists of a system of meaning; that is,
the meaning of any one word is determined by its relationship with other
words (thus, a dictionary doesn't juxtapose words with pictures of things;
rather, it defines words in terms of other words). When looking solely at
language or systems of meaning that function linguistically, this approach
is called semiotics. When looking at other phenomena, it is structuralism.
In short, any approach that sees the meaning of something as subordinate to
its place within a system is structuralism. The most important
structuralists were French scholars who tried to adapt these principles to
other fields of study: the psychoanalyst Lacan, the philosopher Louis
Althusser, and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss.

Note: structuralism is in many ways opposed to humanism, because it
privileges "structures" and "systems" rather than the specific parts of
these systems (e.g. actual humans).

Note: structuralism requires some space between the "system" and the person
studying the system -- in other words, structuralism is a way of studying
structures "objectively."

"Post"-structuralists are quite simply all people who take structuralism
very seriously and recognize its importance, yet on some level profoundly
disagree with or even actively reject it. This ambivalence echoes a deeper
ambivalence towards the whole Enlightenment project (not surprising, given
the importance of Kant). Like Kant and his contemporaries and successors,
they believe in the importance of critical thinking (the philosopher Jurgen
Habermas is probably the most important heir to Kant today -- not that he is
strictly speaking a "Kantian", but in a more general sense that he believes
that through reason we can understand the world and achieve enlightenment).
Unlike Kant and his successors, they are highly skeptical of progress. You
might say they take Kant's critical approach one step further by turning it
against itself, and thus criticizing the Enlightenment assumptions that
objectivity is possible and good, and that the positive accumulation of
objective knowledge is possible and good. They are so true to this critical
spirit that, unlike post-modernists, they do not whole-heartedly celebrate
the demise of the Enlightenment project. (In this ambivalent turn they are
something like contemporary heirs to Nietzsche, and many explicitly refer to
Nietzsche for inspiration, even if they do not agree with everything he wrote.)

Other than a disagreement with the tenets of structualism, many
post-structuralists are sharply critical of one another. This is one reason
why a group with such divergent views are called "post-structuralists" and
not something else - once you get beyond their debt to structuralism and the
fact that they nevertheless are not structuralists, there is nothing else to
define them as a group. The most famous post-structuralists - although they
express often fundamentally divergent views - are the philosopher Jacques
Derrida, the historian Michel Foucault, and the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu
and Bruno Latour.