POSTSTRUCTURALISM

CONTENTS

• Poststructuralism: an introduction
• Features of Structuralism
• Features of poststructuralism
• Historical background of poststructuralism.
• Jacques Derrida (1930-2004)
• Paul de Man (1919-83)
• Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
 POSTSTRUCTURALISM: AN INTRODUCTION

• Poststructuralism: a group of theories about language and its

relationships with other disciplines.
• It challenges earlier theories and reveals many inconsistencies in
them.
• It raises radical questions about language and other cultural
practices but does not lay any claim either to new theories or
solutions.
• It has It deeply influenced the course of humanities after the
1970s.
• Poststructuralism addresses the same issues that structuralism
talks about, but also ges beyond structuralism.
• It questions certain structuralist ideas and produces its own
methods of dealing with language and other cultural practices.
• It accepts the structuralist concept of language as system of
signs and its function of signification.
• But it redefines the concept of sign, reconsiders the relation
between language and reality and rejects the idea of
determinable meaning.
 FEATURES OF STRUCTURALISM

• Grammatical in approach. It tries to find out the codes

underlying all cultural practices.
• It sets a scientific aim to its analysis. Its broad aim is to out basic
codes, rules, structures common to all cultural practices.
• It against humanist and empiricist theories. It does not
Consider that the author owns meaning of a literary text
• challenges the idea that reality exists before its expression
and that literature reflects reality.
• It studies literature as a sign system like language. It tries
to reveal the rules or codes that unite and regulate literary
texts.
• It does not make use of traditional elements like plot,
character, theme, setting and tone etc.
• It believes in ‘structure’—a system of codes or rules that
are interrelated and that work together.
• It also assumes the presence of a centre that regulates the
working of the system and makes it stable and meaningful.
• It makes use of the notion of ‘binary oppositions.’
• It believes that meaning comes out of the arbitrary use of signs and
their differential position within a system. Convention and common
usage of signs and their difference from other signs offer meaning.
• It tries to discover unity, integrity and wholeness in a text by
discovering its structuring rules or codes.
• It defines language as a system of signs.
• Language is not referential but relational and differential.
• It does not refer to the objects in the world but to mental concepts.
• A signifier is kinked to a particular signified as a matter of social
convention.
 FEATURES OF POSTSTRUCTURALISM

• It is rhetorical in approach.
• It is persuasive and analytical.
• Does not try to find out the rules underlying any cultural practice.
• Does not have any particular aim because it is not definitive.
• It does not believe in any final, fixed or universal set of rules.
• It concentrates on the process behind cultural practices like
literature and not on their end result i.e. meaning.
• It is also against humanist and empiricist theories but it is radical in
its rejection.
• It completely dismisses the role of the author as the origin of the text
and source of meaning.
• It shows that the sign system and the discourses of theorists are not
free from inherent breaks and discontinuities.
• It challenges the structuralist claim to scientific study of literary texts by
revealing the problems involved in such study.
• It also does not make use of traditional elements.
• It uses its characteristic terms and methods like difference and
deconstruction and explains a literary text not as a stable structure with
determinable meaning, but as a peiece of writing that constantly
undergoes changes.
• It does not believe in any stable system with determinable
meaning.
• Actually, there is no center that regulates a system.
• It shows that binary oppositions are based on unequal and
privileged classification.
• It does not look for meaning in any text because it believes that text
does not contain a fixed and final meaning.
• Tries to show ambiguities and disruptions in each text.
• It criticizes the structuralist view of language. Language is not a
stable sign system but an endless game of signs.
• It rejects the view that a signifier is or can be related to a signified,
or the idea of the signified as meaning.
 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF
POSTSTRUCTURALISM
• Poststructuralism covers many different theories like Jacques Lacan’s
psychoanalytic theory, Michel Foucault's archaeological and
genealogical theory, Roland Barthes' semiological theory and
Jacques Derrida's deconstruction.
• But as a movement away from structuralism, it began with Derrida's
theory of deconstruction.
• starting point of poststructuralism: International Colloquium of October
1966 at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, where Derrida
presented his groundbreaking paper Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences.'
• He challenged structuralist ideas like objectivity, belief in a
scientific explanation behind the working of any system and faith
in reason.
• With this, he set the post structural movement in motion and
his method of analysis came to be known as deconstruction.’
• It is different from other methods because Derrida introduces
linguistic study of philosophical texts.
• He examines philosophical texts as constructs of language.
• Language is rhetorical, fluid and unstable, so any text using
language is necessarily Auid, unstable and rhetorical.
 JACQUES DERRIDA (1930-2004)
• a French philosopher who wrote extensively about
the hierarchical construction of knowledge by
Western philosophers
• His first work was Edmund Husserl's Origin of
Geometry: An Introduction (1962).
• Husserl was interested in how can a person propose
impersonal laws?
• Husserl's answer was in and through language.
• Derrida's is response to this was that language itself
not free from the problem it is supposed to solve.
• Language is not objective and impersonal and so
its use to state objective and impersonal laws is
problematic.
 DERRIDA’S MAJOR WORKS

• In 1967, he published three books:

• Speech and Phenomena
• Of Grammatology
• Writing and Difference
• He also wrote Glass (1974).
• He examines Marx's texts and Marxis1m in his work Specters of
Marx (1993).
• Derrida does not take any position that is consistent and definite or
propose any alternative theory.
• He discovers patterns of hierarchies in traditional methods of
philosophy and criticism.
• In order to explain such Western hierarchies, he invents new terms.
• He also shows that all types of texts are full of inconsistencies and
contradictions.
• Derrida explains patterns of hierarchies and terms of opposition in texts.
• he shows that texts are not stable, certain and definitive.
• he shows that there can be nothing permanently true, fixed and
definite in the given pairs of elements because all elements have all
the features present in them.
• we know everything through terms of opposition. For example: the
black and white binary.
• The white depends on the black as it is defined against the black.
Every concept Consists of and defined by its opposite concept.
• Language contains everything-our consciousness, our self, world. It
constructs the world for us. Our experience does not create
language but language creates experience for us. This view was
proposed earlier by structuralism. It regarded language as
arising out of the innate stable structure of the human mind.
The structuralist view of language is based on the concept of
binary opposition. lt considers one element of a pair superior and
the other, secondary.
• This oppositional view gives language a stable, structured and
communicable form. In the structuralist view, then, language becomes
a well-founded, stable and orderly system of signs.
• Derrida criticises this view. He shows the internal contradictions and
hierarchies in the structuralist concept of structure. He argues that this
is applicable to the entire Western philosophy.
• Logocentrism is a belief in one focal point which guarantees stable and
fixed meaning in a system. For example, the author is a logos that works as
the center or foundation of his/her work.
• This can be applied to phonocentrism where speech becomes a logos.
• Speech is privileged over writing, because writing is deemed to be a
secondary, imitative and fleeting activity,
• Derrida criticizes the logocentric worldview. Example of a tree.
• Structuralism taught us that if we learn about the center, we can learn
everything about the system.
• Derrida's deconstructive theory shows that we cannot say anything
firmly and assuredly; we are merely ambiguous and doubtful.
• Language is by nature contradictory and ambiguous so the thought
articulated using language it is bound to be contradictory and
ambiguous.
• Derrida analyses two examples to prove his point.
• His first example is of the French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's
logic of supplement.
• Derrida's second example is of Saussure's prioritising speech over
writing.
• Western philosophy and humanities have created certain systems of
knowledge. These systems try to establish knowledge of the self and
knowledge of the world in a methodical and scientistic way, through
opposition of elements like nature and culture.
• But the Differential play of language challenges the attempts of these
systems.
• Language frustrates any intellectual attempt to interpret the self and the
world in a systematic and comprehensive way
• It undermines any attempt to establish order and hierarchy, and reverses
the established order of things.
• If the order is reversed its aim for stable and sure knowledge of the things
becomes futile.
• Language, thus, disrupts unity, stability and foundation of any system
of knowledge.
 DERRIDA'S THEORY OF LANGUAGE

• Language is not a transparent medium of meaning or thought.

• There is nothing outside language. It does not refer to any reality that exists
before the moment of utterance of signs.
• Language used in any form and for any purpose is not free from
contradictions. Language in ordinary use and in literary use is equally
contradictory and ambiguous.
• Derrida accepts Saussure's idea of sign and its differential nature. But he
extends it to suggest its dual function- differing and deferring. He terms this as
differance.
• Derrida's term trace is a theoretical advance, and negates
the Saussurean concept of sign.
• This is because the sign finally arrives at a certain meaning
in the process of signification.
• The term trace docs not refer to anything outside the chain
of signs and thus it differs and defers.
• Unlike Saussure's signihed it is not fxed and original.
 HOW DERRIDA’S THEORY OF LANGUAGE
CHALLENGED THE IDEA OF LITERATURE ?
• traditional notion of literature as a pure, specific, original and purposeful
entity gets challenged.
• But according to Derrida, It does not communicate any message and is
written with no particular intention.
• A literary work does not express an experience or a reality that is original
because it is only a reconstruction or rearrangement of words that already exist
and have been used before.
• It, according to Derrida, all kinds of language reverse the hierarchy and unsettle
our understanding, then the idea of literature as a creative and communicative
discipline becomes ineffective.
 PAUL DE MAN (1919-83)
• most notable practitioner of Derrida's
deconstruction theory in America
• He wrote Blindness and Insight (1971)
under Derrida's influence
• He discusses the case of New Critics who
were inspired by Coleridge's concept of
organic form.
• In Allegories of Reading (1979) de Man
dealt with 'tropes.’
• Language is full of tropes and because of
their shifting nature they destabilize direct
or literal meaning.
MICHEL FOUCAULT (1926-1984)
 HIS THEORIES

• He constituted another influential strand of poststructuralist thought

that was different from Derrida's theory of language and textuality.
• He concentrated on the relation between power and knowledge
which together give rise to discourse.
• Foucault extensively dealt with the history of different institutions
like madness, prison, medicine and sexuality but his method was
anti-historical.
• He was interested in exploring power and its role in bringing
discontinuities and interruptions in discursive formations.
• His archaeological method is evident in his seminal work the Archaeology
of Knowledge (1969), which was an attempt to offer impersonal history-
how people come to think and live the way they do and the internal history
of social practices--how things work.
• His genealogical method is used in his masterpiece Discipline and
Punish (1975), which focused on non-discursive practices and explored
the links between non-discursive practices and minor events.
• He turned away from great and the spectacular events in history to
discontinuous, discredited and illegitimate knowledge that have been
denied space in history.
• In his important essay What is an Author? (1969), he expresses his views
about writing and authorship more explicitly.
• Like Barthes, Foucault also rejects the idea of the individual author as the
foundation or origin of a literary discourse.
 KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Poststructuralism is a set of theories which examine language, its nature
and function.
• Prominent post structural theories include Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic
theory, Michel Foucault's archaeological and genealogical theory, Roland
Barthes’ semiological theory and Jacques Derrida's deconstruction.
• Deconstruction is an examination of philosophical texts as constructs of
language. Derrida demonstrated the unstable, fluid and inconsistent nature of
language. He reversed commonly accepted oppositional pairs in language to
show that hierarchies are made and are not inherent, and proposed that no
element from the binary opposition is marginal and/or central.
• His radical views about language can be summed up in the
following points a) language does not merely communicate one
meaning, b) it does not lead its users to meaning but to
another set of words, c) language is not just differential but
self-referential as well
• Paul de Man argued that the critic's awareness of the
multidimensional nature of language was necessary to destabilize
established meanings and hierarchies.
• Michel Foucault, who proposed the archaeological and
genealogical method, argued against classical status being
bestowed upon a work of literature or an author destabilize
established meanings and hierarchies.
THANK YOU