Post-structuralism
deconstruction · poststructuralism
The body of French thought that accepted structuralism’s insight that meaning is relational and rejected its assumption that systems are stable, closed or analyzable from outside.
Post-structuralism is less a school than what several French thinkers did after concluding that structuralism's method undermined its own ambitions.
It keeps the central insight — meaning is relational, produced by difference — and denies the rest: that structures are stable, that they can be described from a position outside them, and that analysis is neutral.
Derrida
Derrida argued that a structure requires a center to organize it, and that the center is always exempted from the very play of differences it is supposed to govern. No such exemption holds up.
His différance combines differing and deferring: meaning arises from difference and is never fully present, always postponed along a chain of signs. Deconstruction is the practice of showing how a text's own commitments undo the oppositions it depends on.
Foucault
Foucault rejected the label but shares the suspicion. His work traces how categories we take as natural — madness, delinquency, sexuality — were assembled historically, and how knowledge and power produce each other rather than opposing each other.
His genealogies aim to show that a present arrangement is contingent, and therefore open to being otherwise. See ideology.
Others
Deleuze, with Guattari, opposed hierarchical models of knowledge with the rhizome — organization with no center, where any point connects to any other. Lyotard characterized the postmodern condition as incredulity toward grand narratives. Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler extended the analysis to subjectivity and gender.
The standing objections
Self-refutation. If no position is outside the systems it describes, that applies to post-structuralism, and critics press the point hard.
Obscurity. The prose is difficult, sometimes beyond what the argument requires, and the Sokal hoax of 1996 made the charge stick in public.
Political consequence. If categories are contingent and knowledge is bound up with power, critics ask what grounds a claim that any arrangement is unjust. Defenders reply that showing an arrangement to be made rather than natural is precisely what makes changing it thinkable.
Questions
What is post-structuralism?
The French thought that followed structuralism, keeping its insight that meaning is relational while rejecting the assumptions that structures are stable, closed, or analyzable from outside.
How does it differ from structuralism?
Structuralism sought stable underlying systems describable from a neutral standpoint. Post-structuralism denies that systems close, that a center can be exempt from them, or that analysis stands outside.
What is the main objection to post-structuralism?
Self-refutation: if no position stands outside the systems it describes, the claim applies to itself. Critics also object to the difficulty of the prose and ask what grounds a charge of injustice.