Post-structuralism in France
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n what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges [6, p.6-7].
1.2 The meaning of post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a way of thinking which originated in French intellectual circles, but which has become something of a fashion in English-speaking countries as well. The post-structuralist point of view applies to nearly all areas of human activity. Among other thing it generates quite definite views about the nature of art, history, and the human individual, views which agree perfectly with the so-called postmodern sensibility: the past is dead; the future is closed; the present is fragmented into an indefinite number of monadic language-games; science, politics and religion as collective norms have lost their meaning; people deal with things as external appearances to which they are free to attach any meanings they please.structuralism was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was1968. Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least, was likely to beat you over the head for doing so. The student movement was flushed off the streets and driven underground into discourse. The only forms of political action now felt to be acceptable were of a local, diffused, strategic kind: work with prisoners and other marginalized social groups, particular projects in culture and education. The womens movement, hostile to the classical forms of left-wing organization, developed libertarian, decentred alternatives and in some quarters rejected systematic theory as male. For many post-structuralists, the worst error was to believe that such local projects and particular engagements should be brought together within an overall understanding of the working of monopoly capitalism, which could only be as oppressively total as the very system it opposed. Power was everywhere, a fluid, quicksilver force which seeped through every pore of society, but it did not have a centre any more than did the literary text. The system as a whole could not be combated, because there was in fact no system as a whole. You could thus intervene in social and political life at any point you liked. It was not entirely clear how one knew that there was no system as a whole, if general concepts were taboo; nor was it clear that such a viewpoint was as viable in other parts of the world as it was in Paris [5, p.123-124].structuralism is a practice of critical analysis. It focuses on the intrinsic uncertainty in our various systems of expression, beginning with language. Post-structuralism features a critique of the assumption of meaning in language when meaning is no longer distinguished by a shared social agreement. Post-structuralism thus clarifies the function of choice in human action. It asserts that the author of a classic literary novel loses authority and centrality to the equally valid perspectives of the reader. As such, the novel is no longer a self-contained, predestined narrative constructed by a god-like author, but rather is a multidimensional production in which the reader plays the critically active role in determining meaning [7].structuralism serves as a way to identify the ethical and cultural choices that we make when we move from uncertainty to certainty in our efforts to understand and shape our world.structuralism is importantly different from postmodernism, although the two are often considered one and the same by the general subject. Although there are certain areas of overlap, thinkers from one school almost never identify themselves with the other school of thought. Postmodernism importantly seeks to identify a contemporary state of the world, the period that is following the modernist period. Postmodernism seeks to identify a certain juncture, and to work within the new period. Post-structuralism, on the other hand, can be seen as a more explicitly critical view, aiming to deconstruct ideas of essentialism in various disciplines to allow for a more accurate discourse [14].the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry and, without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.), which are therefore never authoritative, and promise no consistency. A readers culture and society, then, share at least an equal part in the interpretation of a piece to the cultural and social circumstances of the author.of the key assumptions underlying post-structuralism include [13]:
.The concept of self as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct, and an individual rather comprises conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc). The interpretation of meaning of a text is therefore dependent on a readers own personal concept of self.
2.An authors intended meaning (although the authors own identity as a stable self with a single, discernible intent is also a fictional construct) is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives, and a literary text (or, indeed, any situation where a subject perceives a sign) has no single purpose, meaning or existence.
.It is necessary to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multi-faceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another.
.3 Theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism
The development of structuralism and post-structuralism in France in the 1950s and 1960s and rapid global transmission of books and ideas contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary mode of theory that became prevalent in the humanities. Structuralism is often associated with the French anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, whose studies of myth, culture, and language discerned a binary structure in myth, for example, between nature and culture or the raw and the cooked. For Lvi-Strauss, culture was articulated into systems that could be described with the precision and force of a science.tructuralism spread through the human sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, moving from Lvi-Strausss anthropology and study of myth, to structuralist theories of language (often combined with semiotics), to structuralist Marxism that produced structuralist accounts of the capitalist economy (Louis Althusser) and state (Nicos Poulantzas).human sciences were conceptualized by structuralists as self-contained systems with their own grammar, rules, and structuring binary oppositions. Texts were seen as structured networks of signs determined not by what they referred to so much as through their differential relation to other signs. Structuralism understood that the world was formed in the system of objects known to a culture, and that this world of objects corresponded to the social relations with which a people made their living in the world. Thus, structuralism introduced a kind of valid relativism - the world is formed by a culture, and the truth of the subject-object relation is given in the practical life of that culture [7].
The sacrifice structuralism made was adherence to the law of identity, that is, in order to do theoretical work on the conception of a system, the system was abstracted from its materiality and reified into a self-identical object of mathematics. On this basis of identity, structuralism was able to perceive regularity in history, to talk of periods, influence, the impact of events on whole social structures, and so on and so forth.
Whereas structuralism had ambitions of attaining the status of a super science, which could arbitrate among competing truth claims and provide a foundational discipline, post-structuralism challenged any single disciplines claim to primary status and promoted more interdisciplinary modes of theory. Post-structuralism turned to history, politics, and an active and creative human subject, away from the more ahistorical, scientific, and objectivist modes of thought in structuralism.
Post-structuralism offers a study of how knowledge is produced and a critique of structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures it is subject to biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (e.g. one of the many meanings of a text), a post-structuralist approach argues, it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and classify structuralism as descriptive. This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussures 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. For example, Michel Foucaults Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness.also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.structuralist view of an individuals coherent identity and singular free will are rejected by post-structuralists, who view the individual as incoherent, a mixture of various cultural constructs produced by organized power in a given society.
Peter Barry in his book