Post-structuralism primarily encompasses the intellectual
developments of certain 20th-century French and continental
philosophers and theorists. The movement is difficult to define or
summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct
responses to structuralism, which argued that human culture may be
understood by means of a structure—modeled on language—that is
distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas or the
imagination—the "third order."[1] The precise nature of the revision or
critique of structuralism differs with each post-structuralist author,
though common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of
the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the
binary oppositions that constitute those structures.[2] Writers whose
work is often characterized as post-structuralist include Jacques
Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva.
The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with
structuralism, anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment
subject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a
significant influence; one commentator has argued that post-
structuralists might just as accurately be called "post-
phenomenologists."
Some have argued that the term "post-structuralism" arose in Anglo-
American academia as a means of grouping together continental
philosophers who rejected the methods and assumptions of analytical
philosophy. Further controversy owes to the way in which loosely-
connected thinkers tended to dispense with theories claiming to have
discovered absolute truths about the world.[4] Although such ideas
generally relate only to the metaphysical (for instance, metanarratives
of historical progress, such as those of dialectical materialism), many
commentators discredited the movement as relativist, nihilist, or
simply indulgent to the extreme. Many so-called "post-structuralist"
writers rejected the label and there is no manifesto.
Theory
General practices
Post-structural practices generally operate on some basic assumptions:
• Post-structuralists hold that the concept of "self" as a separate,
singular, and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an
individual comprises tensions between conflicting knowledge
claims (e.g. gender, race, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to
properly study a text a reader must understand how the work is
related to his or her own personal concept of self. This self-
perception plays a critical role in one's interpretation of meaning.
While different thinkers' views on the self (or the subject) vary, it
is often said to be constituted by discourse(s). Lacan's account
includes a psychoanalytic dimension, while Derrida stresses the
effects of power on the self. This is thought to be a component of
post-modernist theory.
• The author's intended meaning, such as it is (for the author's
identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is also
a fictional construct), is secondary to the meaning that the
reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary
text having a single purpose, a single meaning, or one singular
existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and
individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. To
step outside of literary theory, this position is generalizable to
any situation where a subject perceives a sign. Meaning (or the
signified, in Saussure's scheme, which is as heavily presumed
upon in post-structuralism as in structuralism) is constructed by
an individual from a signifier. This is why the signified is said to
'slide' under the signifier, and explains the talk about the
"primacy of the signifier."
• A post-structuralist critic must be able to use a variety of
perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a text,
even if these interpretations conflict with one another. It is
particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text
shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the identity
of the reader.
5. Structuralism and Post structuralism
Like the “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” sought to bring to literary
studies a set of objective criteria for analysis and a new intellectual
rigor. “Structuralism” can be viewed as an extension of “Formalism” in
that that both “Structuralism” and “Formalism” devoted their attention
to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical
content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put the
study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. “Structuralism” relied
initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like
Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as
arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it
referred. Within the way a particular society uses language and signs,
meaning was constituted by a system of “differences” between units of
the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the
underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself
possible, often expressed as an emphasis on “langue” rather than
“parole.” “Structuralism” was to be a metalanguage, a language about
languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of
signification. The work of the “Formalist” Roman Jakobson contributed
to “Structuralist” thought, and the more prominent Structuralists
included Claude Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Tzvetan Todorov, A.J.
Greimas, Gerard Genette, and Barthes.
The philosopher Roland Barthes proved to be a key figure on the divide
between “Structuralism” and “Poststructuralism.” “Poststructuralism”
is less unified as a theoretical movement than its precursor; indeed,
the work of its advocates known by the term “Deconstruction” calls
into question the possibility of the coherence of discourse, or the
capacity for language to communicate. “Deconstruction,” Semiotic
theory (a study of signs with close connections to “Structuralism,”
“Reader response theory” in America (“Reception theory” in Europe),
and “Gender theory” informed by the psychoanalysts Jacques Lacan
and Julia Kristeva are areas of inquiry that can be located under the
banner of “Poststructuralism.” If signifier and signified are both cultural
concepts, as they are in “Poststructuralism,” reference to an
empirically certifiable reality is no longer guaranteed by language.
“Deconstruction” argues that this loss of reference causes an endless
deferral of meaning, a system of differences between units of language
that has no resting place or final signifier that would enable the other
signifiers to hold their meaning. The most important theorist of
“Deconstruction,” Jacques Derrida, has asserted, “There is no getting
outside text,” indicating a kind of free play of signification in which no
fixed, stable meaning is possible. “Poststructuralism” in America was
originally identified with a group of Yale academics, the Yale School of
“Deconstruction:” J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartmann, and Paul de Man.
Other tendencies in the moment after “Deconstruction” that share
some of the intellectual tendencies of “Poststructuralism” would
included the “Reader response” theories of Stanley Fish, Jane
Tompkins, and Wolfgang Iser.
Lacanian psychoanalysis, an updating of the work of Sigmund Freud,
extends “Postructuralism” to the human subject with further
consequences for literary theory. According to Lacan, the fixed, stable
self is a Romantic fiction; like the text in “Deconstruction,” the self is a
decentered mass of traces left by our encounter with signs, visual
symbols, language, etc. For Lacan, the self is constituted by language,
a language that is never one’s own, always another’s, always already
in use. Barthes applies these currents of thought in his famous
declaration of the “death” of the Author: “writing is the destruction of
every voice, of every point of origin” while also applying a similar
“Poststructuralist” view to the Reader: “the reader is without history,
biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together
in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.”
Michel Foucault is another philosopher, like Barthes, whose ideas
inform much of poststructuralist literary theory. Foucault played a
critical role in the development of the postmodern perspective that
knowledge is constructed in concrete historical situations in the form of
discourse; knowledge is not communicated by discourse but is
discourse itself, can only be encountered textually. Following
Nietzsche, Foucault performs what he calls “genealogies,” attempts at
deconstructing the unacknowledged operation of power and
knowledge to reveal the ideologies that make domination of one group
by another seem “natural.” Foucaldian investigations of discourse and
power were to provide much of the intellectual impetus for a new way
of looking at history and doing textual studies that came to be known
as the “New Historicism.”
Key terms
Readerly and writerly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one
type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of
reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into
one's experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly
fleshed out in S/Z, while the essay "From Work to Text", from Image—
Music—Text (1977) provides an analogous parallel look at the active
and passive, postmodern and modern, ways of interacting with a text.
Readerly text
A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce"
his or her own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-
made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of text are "controlled
by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb
the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The
"readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous
mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of
"replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that
work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and]
safeguarded" (200).
Writerly text
A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to
make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4).
Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather
than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture
and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given
forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product,"
the "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the
world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular
system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of
entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). Thus
reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive
complement of a writing," but rather a "form of work" (10).
The Author and the scriptor
Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways
of thinking about the creators of texts. "The author" is our traditional
concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece
of writing by the powers of his or her original imagination. For Barthes,
such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of
modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered
the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world presents
us with a figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to
combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all
writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that
these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a
way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography
compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that
the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that,
in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of
a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active
reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the
reader.
AUTHOR: Roland Barthes proclaimed ‘the death of the author’ in a
1968 essay in which he questioned the traditional assumption that
a text is directly and solely traceable to a single author for
meaning and production, in short, for authority. Poststructuralist
critical practice contests the category of the ‘author’ as
omniscient or the single source of power in relation to a text.
Meaning is not fixed by or located in the author’s ‘intention’,
whatever that may be. As Terry Eagleton asks, “Even if critics
could obtain access to an author’s intention, would this securely
ground the literary text in a determinate meaning?” What
poststructuralist critics question is a text’s reliance on “a single
self-determining author, in control of his meanings, who fulfils his
intentions and only his intentions” For Eagleton, textual meaning
cannot be ascribed to authorial intention because it is “the
product of language, which always has something slippery about
it”.
READER: Structuralism and poststructuralist theory has incorporated
the reader and the act of reading as elements needed for a text to
constitute itself. Roland Barthes goes so far as to theorize about
the ‘death of the author’ and assign a ‘writing’ role to the reader.
A text which is ‘writerly’ or scriptible engages the reader in a
process that enables the production of meaning(s) from the ‘open’
play of possibilities inherent in the text. By contrast, a text which
is ‘readerly’ or lisible is that to which the reader’s response is
passive. Many poststructuralist critics contend, however, that all
texts are in theory ‘writerly’, their ‘open play of possibilities’
dependent on the reader’s commitment to engage with them. The
complex negotiation with the text entailed by the act of reading
will further require awareness of the reader’s positionality
“through culture, history, education, and do on“and of the fact
that “every text has a singularity for which the act of reading
should be responsible, and to which the act of reading should
respond.”
6. New Historicism and Cultural
Materialism
“New Historicism,” a term coined by Stephen Greenblatt, designates a
body of theoretical and interpretive practices that began largely with
the study of early modern literature in the United States. “New
Historicism” in America had been somewhat anticipated by the
theorists of “Cultural Materialism” in Britain, which, in the words of
their leading advocate, Raymond Williams describes “the analysis of all
forms of signification, including quite centrally writing, within the
actual means and conditions of their production.” Both “New
Historicism” and “Cultural Materialism” seek to understand literary
texts historically and reject the formalizing influence of previous
literary studies, including “New Criticism,” “Structuralism” and
“Deconstruction,” all of which in varying ways privilege the literary text
and place only secondary emphasis on historical and social context.
According to “New Historicism,” the circulation of literary and non-
literary texts produces relations of social power within a culture. New
Historicist thought differs from traditional historicism in literary studies
in several crucial ways. Rejecting traditional historicism’s premise of
neutral inquiry, “New Historicism” accepts the necessity of making
historical value judgments. According to “New Historicism,” we can
only know the textual history of the past because it is “embedded,” a
key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Text and
context are less clearly distinct in New Historicist practice. Traditional
separations of literary and non-literary texts, “great” literature and
popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged. For the “New
Historicist,” all acts of expression are embedded in the material
conditions of a culture. Texts are examined with an eye for how they
reveal the economic and social realities, especially as they produce
ideology and represent power or subversion. Like much of the
emergent European social history of the 1980s, “New Historicism”
takes particular interest in representations of marginal/marginalized
groups and non-normative behaviors—witchcraft, cross-dressing,
peasant revolts, and exorcisms—as exemplary of the need for power to
represent subversive alternatives, the Other, to legitimize itself.
Louis Montrose, another major innovator and exponent of “New
Historicism,” describes a fundamental axiom of the movement as an
intellectual belief in “the textuality of history and the historicity of
texts.” “New Historicism” draws on the work of Levi-Strauss, in
particular his notion of culture as a “self-regulating system.” The
Foucaldian premise that power is ubiquitous and cannot be equated
with state or economic power and Gramsci’s conception of
“hegemony,” i.e., that domination is often achieved through culturally-
orchestrated consent rather than force, are critical underpinnings to
the “New Historicist” perspective. The translation of the work of Mikhail
Bakhtin on carnival coincided with the rise of the “New Historicism”
and “Cultural Materialism” and left a legacy in work of other theorists
of influence like Peter Stallybrass and Jonathan Dollimore. In its period
of ascendancy during the 1980s, “New Historicism” drew criticism from
the political left for its depiction of counter-cultural expression as
always co-opted by the dominant discourses. Equally, “New
Historicism’s” lack of emphasis on “literariness” and formal literary
concerns brought disdain from traditional literary scholars. However,
“New Historicism” continues to exercise a major influence in the
humanities and in the extended conception of literary studies.
