Post-structuralism in France
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ed up considerably for the active reader, because according to Barthes the death of the author is the birth of the reader [11].
2.3 Michel Foucault and post-structuralism
Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is a famous French philosopher who is known as one of the founders of post-structuralism. Foucault was an active member of French Communist Party in the early 1950s but his disillusionment with Marxism directed him to form new theories. Foucault is well known for his critiques of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine and the prison system and also for his ideas on the history of sexuality. Foucault analyzed power relations in different social institutions and criticized enslaving discourses. Although Foucault said that he never intended to create a discourse by his post-structuralist approach, we can claim that together with his friends like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, etc., he established his own school of thought.the emergence of post-structuralism, we see a shift from ideology to discourse in social theory. There are two main tendencies in post-structuralism: textuality and discursivity. Textuality refers to a movement within literary, cultural theory and in philosophy emphasizing the revaluation and revalorization of text as text. Textual researches focus on language as a producer of meaning rather than a pale reflection of some prior reality (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, etc). Jacques Derrida even rejects such things as summary and translation and thinks that there are only other texts. In accordance with textuality wave, historical legal and medical records are analyzed as producers of their own right rather than a pale reflection of some prior reality. Discursivity on the other hand, has an area of research much broader than textual analyses. Foucaults discourse contains all traditions, norms, rules, texts, symbols, words and expressions where hierarchical power relations could be found. Discursivity unlike textuality, not only deals with the text, but also with the context. Discursive researches focus on the question of how rather than why. They do not look for causal explanations but instead, they try to understand the working of an incredibly complex mechanism that creates subordinations and produces hierarchical power relations. Foucault analyzes different institutions (prison, clinic, hospital, etc.) and other discursive unities (book, traditions, genre or discipline) to detect power relations [9].to Michel Foucault, the historical social reality should be given consideration before and beyond the investigation of the closed linguistic structure.evolution of language is functional. It is an outcome of a system of control producing a variety of subjects (as well as means for knowing them) for defined purposes and functions. Historical (diachronic) analysis is restored, but in relation to the evolution of functions within a (changing) system.is a sign of power. The presence of the Author function in Western social discourse is a sign of the power attributed to it and to its representation.questions to be asked are what allowed the Author to exist? What social function (and status) does it serve as an institution? What are the conditions in which these functions are realized? How does it contribute to and fit within societys distribution of roles and power?Authors name is an act. It performs within a certain social dynamic, and serves as a means of classification, grouping, exclusion and canonization of texts.s goal - analysis of the authors function, the way in which it is transferred, circulated, attributed, appropriated and operates within a variety of types of discourses.subject should not be abandoned but reconsidered: understood in its functions, intervention, and system of dependencies.Foucault marks out the following characteristics of the function/discourse [2]:
1.Object of appropriation. Originally - discourse (text) was an action, a gesture, not a thing. Since the end of the 18th century it has been caught within the economic structures of property, ownership, copyrights. It is tied to legal and institutional systems that regulate and determine the realm of discourse.
2.The author function is not universal or constant. For instance, in the Middle Ages it served to guaranty validity of scientific writings, whereas today an agreed upon system of conventions provides validation for a scientific text. While in literary discourse meaning depends on the attribution of the text to an author, a dependence which only evolved and crystallized in recent time.
.The function is not formed spontaneously, but is rather constructed through a complex operation and a defined set of procedures, based on wordsity in quality, style, ideology and range of time. It evolves out of and confirms the assumption of unity.
.The text bears signs referring to the author (vs. speaker), such as personal pronouns or adverbs of time and place. These produce a multiplicity of positions (in time and place) and of points of view, a plurality of egos/ subjective positions characteristic of the Author function.
Michel Foucault is one of the most important names that made a contribution to social sciences in 20th century. Foucaults method of binary oppositions and discourse analysis can be used by different ideological movements, researches. Marxists have chance to revise their theory and make the discursive analysis of the capitalist discourse. Discriminated social groups have chance to criticize the official ideology by looking at the sovereign discourse that works in their disadvantage. Foucault opened a lot of new in social sciences, by creating a very strong and valid method for social theory [9]., the key figures of post-structuralist movement in the late 1960s were French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. In his book Of Grammatology (1967) Jacques Derrida introduced the term deconstruction, when discussing the implications of understanding language as writing rather than speech. Deconstruction is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how such oppositions are contradicted by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point.1968 Roland Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay The Death of the Author. In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the authors identity - his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes - to distill meaning from the authors work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive explanation of the text. Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny. The unity of a text is in its destination - the reader; though the reader too is inscribed, not personal. Hence, the birth of reader begins with the death of the author.Foucault always insisted that he was not a post-structuralist critic but rather a genealogist. But a lot of scholars consider him to be one of the founders of post-structuralism. Foucault shows how discourses regulate what can be said, what can be thought, and what is considered true or correct. However, there were many other propositions that were neither true nor false but fell outside the discursive system altogether. Anyone who tried to think outside the system would not have been respected or accorded a voice in the conversation about bodies. Discourse is thus the medium through which power is expressed and people and practices are governed. Foucault also argued that the history of thought is a misnomer, as it implied a continuous evolution of ideas. Rather, he used the terms genealogy or archeology of knowledge, focusing on the breaks between one eras discourse and anothers.
CONCLUSION
Post-structuralism is a late 20th century movement in philosophy and literary criticism, which generally defines itself in its opposition to structuralism. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s, a period of political disorder, rebellions and disappointment with traditional values, accompanied by a revival of interest in feminism, Western Marxism, phenomenology and nihilism.
Post-structuralism offers a study of how knowledge is produced and a critique of structuralism. It doesnt approve of the study of underlying structures. 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.
From the view point of textual analysis post-structuralism doesnt focus on the author, but on the reader. 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.are some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism:
.Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics. It inherits this confidently scientific outlook: it too believes in method, system, and reason as being able to establish reliable truths. Post-str