Post-Structuralism

POST-STRUCTURALISM

POST-STRUCTURALISM is an eclectic school of thought that significantly influenced literary and cultural theory in the 1970s and 1980s. It emerged as a reaction against the claims of 1960s French structuralism to scientific rigor, objectivity, and universal validity. Structuralism convinced many theorists that the key to under-standing culture lay in the linguistic systemization of interrelationships in language. Building on the theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Russian Formalism, the structuralists found the clue to literary and cultural analysis in the phoneme, a unit of sound meaningful only because of its differences from other phonemes. Phonemes exemplify the elements in a cultural system that derive meaning from relations and contrasts with other elements. Structuralists determine meaning not by correlation to external reality but by analyzing its functions within a self-contained, culturally constructed code. Linguistic meaning is often established through binary opposition, or the contrast of opposites, such as cold versus hot and nature versus culture. A critic who under-stands the underlying rules or "language" determining individual utterances will understand meaningful combinations and distinctions.

Post-structuralism was in part a reaction to structuralism's claim to comprehensive and objective exploration of every cultural phenomenon. This countermovement denied the objectivity of linguistic and cultural codes, language, and categories of conceptualization. It emphasized the instability of meanings, categories, and the inability of any universal system of rules to explain reality. The result was a radically nonhierarchical plurality of indeterminate meanings. Central to post-structuralist thought is Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism. Influential among literary critics at Yale University in the 1970s and 1980s, deconstructionism indicts the Western tradition of thought for ignoring the limitless instability and incoherence of language. The dominant Western logocentric tradition sought a transcendent center or primal guarantee for all meanings. Logocentric thinking, common since Plato, attempts to repress the contingency and instability of meaning. Thus, any privileging of some terms as central to truth is denied as being merely arbitrary. For example, consider male over female and white over black. In the United States, literary critics used post-structuralist analysis to challenge the boundary between criticism of literature's subjectivity and objectivity, while elevating figurative language and interpretation. For post-structuralists there is no God, Truth, or Beauty, only gods, truths, and beauties. In the early 1990s, post-structuralism under-went an intense critique from a range of social critics. Aside from the obscurantism of the movement, it seemed ahistorical, dogmatic, willfully nihilistic, and unable to provide a critique of moral and social injustice. Perhaps a part of the hedonistic flight from social responsibility of previous years, the movement seemed to slow down. The trend away from post-structuralism has continued into the twenty-first century, as the gradual tapering off of publications on the topic from its height in the mid-1980s clearly indicates.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Caputo, John D., ed. Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 1997.

Kearney, Richard, ed. Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Deconstruction and Pragmatism. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Raman, Selden, and Peter Widdowson, eds. A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. 3d ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Alfred L. Castle / a. e.

See also Anthropology and Ethnology ; Assimilation ; Linguistics ; Philosophy .