Poststructuralism

Category: Theoretical approaches

Poststructuralism arose as a reaction to the linguistic structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and the anthropological structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both Saussure and Lévi-Strauss saw language and culture as a system of signs that form a well defined and cohesive system of meanings that can be mapped through structural analysis. Poststructuralists reject that view and stress that any system of signs is in a constant process of change.
Sings and their signifiers only make sense through the interpretation of their users and that interpretation varies between individuals and across time. Because there is a constant change in the interpretation of signs and cultural meanings it is impossible to create a detailed map of signs and their structural relations. The most important poststructuralists are: Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, and Richard Rorty.

Jacques Derrida

French philosopher Jacques Derrida created his poststructuralist approach that he named "deconstruction". Derrida introduced this term in his book Of Grammatology (1994, in French 1967a). Deconstruction seeks to reveal instabilities and inconsistencies in Western intellectual traditions. Western culture tends to seek absolute truths and meanings, and it is deconstruction that tends to challenge that absolute knowledge, as a philosophical and literary method of criticism. Derrida calls the search for absolute truths and meanings "transcendental signified" because such knowledge is presented as universal knowledge, which can be translated into any language and context. The desire to discover absolute truths is also called "logocentrism", which is associated with "phonocentrism", the practice of valuing speech more than the written word. Derrida believes that all the processes of signification represent the form of the written word, and that fact undermines the presumed unity of language and meaning in speech. The subject of deconstruction is also the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure believed that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is stable and that the signified always has a strictly defined relationship with a concept. Derrida believes that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is always open and that the meaning contained in the signified is always arbitrary, so the signified cannot represent an objective reality. Structuralism presupposes the existence of a unity in a language, a unity with organized elements that stand in stable relations, while deconstruction abandons such a rigid image. If signs do not have inherited stability, then meaning alone cannot have such stability. Meaning is a function of the differences between terms. A game of infinite differences within the text produces the possibility of multiple meanings.

Deconstruction breaks down absolute truths, reveals key binary oppositions in the text, and then reveals the dependence and hierarchical relationship of those oppositions, while the next step shows that these relationships are relative, revealing the absurdity of absolute truth/knowledge itself. It is necessary to find instabilities, ambiguities in meaning, contradictions, and excluded elements from the structure of the text. His analysis of language and literature represents a radical view of writing. Derrida believes that each text contains the seeds of its own destruction. He believes that writing does not reproduce a single reality, but produces multiple realities. Deconstruction takes place at the level of the text, but also in the very interpretations of the text. After the end of the deconstruction, what remains, in the end, is the text itself. This opens up a space for constant reflection and creative thinking, which allows us to "play" with the text. Derrida advocates an open text in which reality is in a constant state of linguistic fluidity.

Jean Baudrillard

French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard abandoned Marxist theory and celebrates postmodernity as a signal of a decisive break with modernity itself. In his early works The System of Objects (1968) and The Consumer Society (1970), he criticizes Marxism from a structuralist and semiological perspective. He denies the crucial role that the “base” has in Marxism and the reduction of the superstructure to a mere reflection of material infrastructure. Modern society is increasingly structured with signs and symbols. All objects can be analyzed in the context of binary oppositions that reveal the rules and internal relationships that structure objects. Marxism overlooked that goods are a sign that gives individuals a cultural identity. The sign constitutes a special material reality that is used for prestige, status, and thus for social differentiation. In premodern (symbolic) societies, social relations are organized around symbolic exchanges at festivals, rites, and rituals that strengthen the social order. Here the sign had a purely reference function.

Industrial societies have a fixed and stable hierarchy of the sign that clearly distinguishes the real from the unreal, so the sign and reality are truly equivalent, and goods reflect social statuses. Culture is organized around a social world in which words, sounds, and images have a direct relationship with object and reality: code produces coherent meanings and provokes precisely defined answers.

With the emergence of postmodern culture, the sign and its code become autonomous, producing their own inner meanings without reference to objective reality. The reference value is destroyed and replaced with total relativity, combinations, and simulation so that the signs are exchanged with other signs, rather than with the real things. The sign becomes liberated from the archaic obligation to mean something and finally becomes free, indifferent, and indefinite, in a structural and combinatorial game that overcomes the rule of a certain equivalence. In the new "semiurgical" society, the code functions as an organizational principle that creates new forms of communication and social order.

In his later works Simulacra and Simulation (1981) and Fatal Strategies (1983), Baudrillard describes the social world as dominated by the media and the explosion of the image. In modernity, copies or models represented real objects or events, while in the postmodern era, that is, in the era of "simulacrum", copy or simulacrum produces reality, objects, and events. The performance of the representation is abandoned. Television and marketing are invading all the intimate processes of our social life, while reality collapses into hyperreality. "Dedifferentiation" means that there is no difference between news and entertainment, marketing and culture. Society consists of a large, phantasmagoric superstructure of signs and images with which the individual has neither an objective nor an alienated relationship.

Michael Foucault

French philosopher, historian, and sociologist Michel Foucault considered himself, above all, a historian of the systems of thought. Various authors classify Foucault as a postmodernist, structuralist, or poststructuralist, while he called his method the archeology of knowledge (in the first period of his work) and the genealogy of knowledge (in the later period).

Foucault's second book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1965, in French 1961), is an abridged version of his doctoral dissertation. In this book, he described the history of the social attitudes towards madness, from the end of the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. At the end of the Middle Ages, people who were seen as insane were a part of everyday life and walked the streets freely. In the nineteenth century, attitudes toward insanity changed completely, and "insane people" began to be seen as a threat, and mental hospitals were built to separate insane people from the normal population. In his next book, The Birth of the Clinic (1973, in French 1963), Foucault documents how the French Revolution and the ideas of rationality and enlightenment transformed medicine into a precise and empirical science. After the Revolution, the body was anatomically mapped, and diseases were classified. All these changes have affected our understanding of health, disease, life, and death. Foucault believes that the structure of medical knowledge continues to be regulated in a similar, arbitrary way.

In both aforementioned books, Foucault presents his "archaeological" method, which is based on the ideas of French structuralism by Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. Archeology, as an epistemological approach and an empirical and theoretical method, seeks to unravel the history of discourse that is institutionalized and that organizes knowledge. The goal is to discover the hidden structures and rules that organize discourse and knowledge. The archeology of knowledge seeks to rediscover the micro elements of discontinuous and disqualified knowledge. Modernity produces societies based on discipline, oversight, and normalization of practice through discourse. Discourse is spread and controlled by institutions and their specialists, teachers, judges, and psychiatrists. Discourse is analyzed as historical and specific to a particular social group and its practice. In addition, Foucault seeks to discover how these discursive formations, over time, come to be seen as natural and common sense.

Foucault expanded his field of research and further developed his structuralist-inspired method in The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (1970, in French 1966). Foucault's goal is to discover the structural codes of knowledge that govern various scientific fields - biology, philology, political economy, etc. He seeks to show how classification systems in different cultures and different historical periods are equally arbitrary and strange. Western culture has gone through three distinct historical periods: the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and Modernity. Each epoch is governed by a unique "episteme" - an implicit internal structure that structures the way people think. Epistemes organize knowledge, not in relation to some objective and rational criteria, but in relation to the arbitrary structural codes of knowledge. Foucault seeks to unravel discursive knowledge that regulates the way of thinking and speaking, that gives rules of what is right and what is not, and what is generally considered to be knowledge. The key to the production of epistemes are the actions of institutions because they produce and control access to knowledge. This kind of discourse is fluid, but still stable enough during one epoch that it can be viewed as a structure. Foucault does not want to use the archaeological method to determine some "quasi-continuity" between different epochs but to reveal how each epoch, in its own way, organizes knowledge and turns human subjects into objects of knowledge.

In the book Archeology of Knowledge (1971, in French 1969), Foucault, to a large extent, breaks with his earlier method, as well as with structuralism in general. While he used to view discourse and episteme as autonomous areas, he now closely connects discourse with the relations of power and domination. This theoretical and epistemological change was influenced by real-life events and processes, primarily the failure of the 1968 student movements, as well as the rise of new social movements - feminist, environmental, and other minority rights movements.

The book Discipline and Punish (1977, in French 1975) brings into full light an elaboration of Foucault's new approach. He now calls his approach "genealogy" and takes the term from Friedrich Nietzsche's book Genealogy of Morals (1887). In Discipline and Punish Foucault shows how there transpires a huge change in the way society monitors and punishes criminals. While, until the end of the eighteenth century, the punishment of criminals was public and very brutal - public torture, humiliation, and the death penalty using the cruelest methods - in the nineteenth century the element of the public spectacle of punishing criminals disappeared. Instead, states started building prisons in which, far away from the eyes of the public, criminals are locked and isolated. The expression of social (state) power is no longer done through a direct and open spectacle of punishing criminals, but power start being expressed through strict supervision and isolation of criminals. Jeremy Bentham's proposal to build a perfect prison, which Bentham called a "panopticon", is, for Foucault, the best example of such a change concerning punishing criminals. In the panopticon, the surveillance of criminals was supposed to be constant and total. Although imprisoning criminals is considered a more rational and humane procedure today, Foucault believes that both ways of treating criminals are arbitrary and cruel, and are not proof of any progress. The key change that has taken place is in the techniques that the state uses to express and consolidate its power. Instead of spreading the public message with brutal public punishment, the state now emphasizes surveilling and disciplining citizens.

Foucault continues to deal with the relationship between power and knowledge in the multi-volume book The History of Sexuality, 4 vols (1978-2021, in French 1976-2018). He believes that the Victorian period was not marked by the repression of any conversation about sex and sexuality. On the contrary, in that period, medicine and psychiatry began to deal intensively with sexuality. Since then, the trend of increasing scientific classification of sexuality has continued, and this contributes to the increase of social control over that sphere. Another type of social control and expression of power in the sphere of sexuality was in the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church used confessions in front of a priest to encourage people to talk about sex and thus gain control over sexual behavior. He believes that every society, as well as those who dominate it, strives to gain control over sexual behavior. However, this control cannot be based only on punishment, but also requires the active cooperation of ordinary subjects. Popular psychology and psychotherapy are the main ways of taking control over the discourse on sexuality in the twentieth century.

Foucault's view of the manifestation of power, control, and domination is a serious critique of the Marxist view of power. While for Marx power serves to achieve the class domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, to achieve economic exploitation, Foucault believes that power functions in different ways in different fields and in different types of relations. Foucault studies how power manifests itself on a micro level and in everyday practices and comes to the conclusion that power is localized and fragmented. Foucault believes that society does not have a center, but multi-layered microcosms. Society represents a large impersonal system of monitoring, mobility, and diffusion, which operates through circulation chains. Discourse is never strictly divided between dominant and dominated, and accepted and excluded discourses. Instead, discourse goes through complex and unstable processes and can be an instrument, and also a consequence of power, as well as a point of resistance around which the opposition strategy can be built.

Gilles Deleuze

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze criticized essentialism and rationalism in philosophy and significantly contributed to the development of poststructuralism and postmodernism. He is best known for two books, Anti-Oedipus: (1977, in French 1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1987, in French 1980), which he co-wrote with Felix Guattari, and which share a common subtitle - Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In these two books, the authors reject the idea of the unconscious as a "theater", a place of implanted but repressed desires, as Sigmund Freud saw it. For them, the unconscious is a "factory" that produces desires. The authors thus reject what they call "Freudian Marxism" and claim that the unconscious is essentially connected with socio-geographical, historical, and collective factors.

Luce Irigaray

Belgian-French psychoanalyst and feminist theorist Luce Irigaray deals with the relationship between language and the female and male body, as well as masculinity and femininity in language. Irigaray believes that throughout the history of Western thought, female and femininity have been excluded from language, representation, and culture. Language is organized around the male subject and defined by its criteria. The exclusion of the female aspect from language is the basis for the creation of patriarchy and "phallocentric" social relations. Although she accepts the psychoanalytic perspective of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray criticizes their approach as phallocentric. Phallocentric thought defines male sexuality as primary, because the penis is visible, while female sexuality is defined as lack or deficit (of the penis). She wants to build psychoanalysis and philosophy that will make women and femininity visible. Irigaray bases femininity, in philosophy and psychoanalysis, on the female experience of sexuality and the female body, and especially focuses on the "two lips" experience, which is multiple. She sees writing and speaking from a woman's perspective and women's experience as a subversive activity, which has the potential to transform the dominant "male" culture.

Books:

Baudrillard, Jean. The System of Objects (2020, in French 1968);

- The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (2016, in French 1970);

- For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (2019, in French 1972);

- The Mirror of Production (1975, in French 1973);

- Symbolic Exchange and Death (2016, in French 1976);

- Simulacra and Simulation (1983, in French 1981);

- Fatal Strategies (1990, in French 1983);

Deleuze, Gilles. Anti-Oedipus (1977, in French 1968);

- A Thousand Plateaus (1987);

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (1994, in French 1967);

Foucault, Michael. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1988, in French 1961);