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Introduction
Post-structuralism is a development of several philosophers and critical theorists. It emerged after the period of structuralism when many theorists rejected the structuralism movement. Post-structuralism emerged in France in the early 1960s after the structuralism was criticized and rejected by philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Michael Foucault, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva. It became an extended and more defined version of the structuralism and it mainly emphasized on pluralism and post-modernism in France.
During the 1960s, critiques of structuralism started rebelling against the Government and there arose political anxiety as both workers and students fought against the state. There arose great interests in the new philosophies which advocated for the dominance of western norms and cultures. The philosophers justified the criticisms made against the western culture and with time, post-structuralism emerged and exposed the norms and cultures of the western society. It was seen as a step towards modernization and development (Jameson, 1991).
Key philosophers
The people that led to the emergence of post-structuralism were referred to as the critiques of the structuralism movement. The major philosophers that brought about the post-structuralism movement were Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They were later supported by Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was initially in support of the structuralism movement in the early 1910s. However, by the beginning of the year 1968, he began to change his philosophy to that of post-structuralism. He wrote articles that were meant to give people a different view of the events that were beginning to take place. Although many people in France had the great desire to move beyond structuralism, there was no clear measure on how it would happen. Most of the study of post-structuralism was based on the common critiques of structuralism and Barthes was committed to making his philosophy a success.
In his contribution to the post-structuralism theory, Barthes wrote a book in 1968 entitled the Elements of Semiology where he brought about the concept of meta-language . According to the book, meta-language is a systematic way of communicating beyond the old-fashioned and traditional way. In meta-language, symbols are used to communicate and they replace the traditional way of communicating by means of words and phrases.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was another key philosopher who contributed to the theory of post-structuralism. Jacques came up with a thesis referred to as Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science. In this thesis, she observed that human beings constantly need to change their way of thinking to overcome the everyday events. It brought out the limitations of the structuralism which she argued that did not give human beings the opportunity to take up change. She advocated for a new way of reasoning through the post-structural theory.
Michael Foucault later joined the two philosophers and he was followed by Gilles, Lacan and Kristeva. Foucault brought out the concept of social-constructionism which he argued helped to create social change among the different communities. According to him, there was need to strategize the social authority to create new power and capabilities among leaders.
Basically, many structuralists who argued that theories could only be interpreted based on cultural and social circumstances of the society later came to admit that the theorist culture and society could equally be used to interpret the work. Many structuralists initially argued that they could criticize an authors intention by close scrutiny. However they later realized that they had to interact with the society directly in order to identify the changes that were coming up and be able to identify what the post-structural theorists were establishing.
Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida was one of the great philosophers of post-structural theory. Initially, he supported structuralism and many people respected him for his ideas. His lecture on Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences which he presented in the 1960s mainly criticized structuralism and pointed out the limitations of the theory. It is from this lecture that he was able to derive concepts supporting post- structuralism.
In his study and contribution in post-structuralism theory, Derrida came up with the concept of deconstruction in the early 1960s. According to him, deconstruction involves a thorough reading of texts to come up with different meanings rather than one broad understanding. Deconstruction defines a text as information whose meaning and understanding can be seen through difference. This means that a text can only be explained if different readers are able to identify different meanings from their understanding. Deconstruction of a text means that the structure of the text has already deconstructed or dismantled itself and the meaning of it becomes indeterminate.
In his theory, Jacques argues that deconstruction allows readers to see beyond the actual meaning of a text. It gives readers an opportunity to create their own understanding and to enhance creativity in the language used. He first used the concept of deconstruction in the book Of Grammatology to come up with an understanding of the manner in which language with deconstructive text to make a theory clear. It changes the working of the language used and in turn changes the interpretation of the text. In this aspect, the users of language cannot be said to be in full control of the meaning of that language that they are using.
Derrida emphasizes on the nature and meaning of language, which according to him cannot be given a fixed explanation and its meaning can only be demonstrated by the use of the different words in the text. To him, a deconstruction of the text creates contradiction in the meaning between the author and the reader and it explains the inability of the text to mean what the author actually intended it to mean. The only way to create a clear understanding between the authors ideas and those of the reader is to pay close attention to the actual and all the details of the text and to relate them to the desired intentions of the author.
Deconstruction aims at understanding the philosophical concepts in terms of their structure and it also helps understand the consequences of the history of the philosophical concepts and ideas. Deconstruction operates both within the concepts of philosophy and also outside it in order to have a clear understanding of it. This way, it is able to challenge all the concepts of philosophy and identify the contradictory aspects of it.
Pre-contributors of deconstruction theory:
- Edmund Husserls work on Phenomenology showed an understanding of Derridas earlier report on Genetic and structural description that led to the development of deconstruction. Husserls concept of Phenomenology is concerned with making the structures of that appear in the act of the objects of reflection and analysis. Husserl argued that phenomenology could create a basis for human knowledge and it is through the science developed by him that Derrida established his concept on deconstruction. Through the concept of Phenomenology Derrida developed ideas on Speech and Phenomena which was linked to the ideas of deconstruction on literacy writing.
- Martin Heidegger was another influence on Derridas ideas on deconstruction and his concept was derived from Edmund Husserls history of philosophy which argued that philosophy is a description of things that are happening, that is, a description of experience. Heidegger absorbed that concept in his analysis and explained the description of experience as a condition that already exists and from this, he explained that consciousness is an experience that is intended or focused towards something. According to him, to be able to describe experience one must observe the idea of being and time, which implies that the being in which a description is existing must always be taken into consideration. This was used by Derrida to explain his concept on the Meaning of Being as Presence in deconstruction theory.
- Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan were also important philosophers in the contribution of the development of Derridas deconstruction theory. Freud developed the concept of the unconscious mind which he argued that it exists in every human beings mind and it reasons through all aspects of experience. Many people are normally not aware of the fact that they have many thoughts in the unconscious mind because they keep these without actually knowing it. Lacan worked hand in hand with Freud to develop the concept of the unconscious mind which acted as a base for Derrida while explaining how different ideas are created as an individual goes through a text. Lacan also developed the literary theory which he defined as the systematic and organized study of literature and of the methods used to analyze literature.
- Other scholars were Friedrich Nietzsche who came up with ideas of deconstruction in spurs, Andrea Leroi-Gourhan with his concept of grammatology and formulation of deconstruction in respect to grammatology and Ferdinand de Saussure who supported the of structuralism and from which Derrida was able to develop concepts from the criticisms.
Roland Barthes
Barthes initially supported the structuralism theory and he worked hard to make the concepts grow together with his colleague Picard. His structure focused on bringing out the importance of literature mainly in the language. In his work, Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives, he tried to bring out the relationship between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger text like a narrative. He argued that a narrative could be seen along the sentences that make it up and in turn bring out the elements that make up the entire narrative.
In the late 1960s, however, Barthes found that the structural theorem in respect to literature could not bring out a strict scientific base. He began to support critics like Jacques Derrida and the development of post-structuralism theory was a breakthrough to new ideas for him. In 1968, he wrote an essay, The Death of the Author which identified the notion of the author as a forced projection towards the final meaning of a literary text.
Barthes argues that the main understanding of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the authors mind makes the final concept of the text unknowable. Hence, the entire idea of the knowable text in the structural theorem acts as an unrealistic misconception of theory. The idea of giving a book or text an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, that is, something that can be used up and replaced at any one time. Barthes work, The Death of the Author has therefore been considered a post-structuralist concept, since it goes beyond the conventions of trying to quantify literature.
Michel Foucault
Foucault, just like Barthes initially supported the structuralism concept, but later in the 1960s, he distanced himself from the concept and mainly incorporated the post-modernism in his theories. In 1969, he developed an article on The Archaeology of Knowledge which emphasized on those aspects that make propositions and speech acts meaningful. In contrast to the concept of structuralism, the Archaeology of Knowledge did not support that the meaning of semantic elements is determined before the articulation concept. According to Foucault, literary statements constitute a network of guidelines which are the preconditions of the speech acts to have a distinct meaning.
However, according to Foucault, literary statements can also be said to be events because, like other rules, they appear at specific periods. In this theory, a grammatically correct sentence may still lack meaning and at the same time, a grammatically incorrect sentence may still be meaningful. Literary statements depend on the conditions in which they emerge and exist in a particular context. The meaning of a particular statement depends on the succession of statements that come before it and those that come after in a particular text. Foucault focuses his ideas towards an organized set of statements.
In his latter work, Foucault borrowed from Friedrich Nietzsche the genealogical approach and also from Marx in the analysis of ideology. Foucault tried to show how the development of knowledge was combined with the concepts of political power. Foucault however did not believe in the structure of language which one could use to analyze discourse.
Pathways and Practices of Post-structuralism
Tompkins (1980) argues that post-structuralism theories work on the principle of de-construction. This means that it rejects the idea of the existing concepts in the hierarchy of work and rather chooses to identify new relations in this hierarchy and create independency in the way of bringing out concepts and ideas. According to the post-structural philosophers, the only way to develop and understand the meanings of the new concepts is to de-construct the prevailing assumptions and the systems of knowledge which produce new ideas with new and more elaborate meanings.
In the analysis of texts based on the approach of the post-structural theorists, the reader normally takes the author as an objective source of information and is able to identify various other means of obtaining similar information as that in the text. This way the reader is free to use other sources for to retrieve the same information and hence the text may change to cater for the new information that the reader obtains. It gives readers an opportunity to identify alternative sources for the same information that they are dealing with. Post-structuralism is therefore different from the structuralism strategy because it allows an in-depth analysis without having to rely only on what the author of text has provided (Sarup, 1993).
According to Tompkins (1980), post-structuralism is based on the following aspects and ideas:
- The post-structural philosophers argue that the concept of self-perception is an indefinite way of establishing knowledge. An individual ought to take into consideration the effects of groups of people on the self image. Jacques Lacan argues that the power of self works well towards bringing out new concepts of the society. An understanding of the self-concept helps the scholar to be able to understand the meaning of other peoples existence. Therefore, while a reader is going through a text, he/she must understand how that text is related to his/her personal concept.
- The philosophers also argue that to make a text clear, the authors must create a meaning to every of its intended readers. The text should allow readers to create a new purpose for the text depending on their knowledge and understanding. Every individual reader ought to be able to create a new understanding and purpose to a particular text. This way the authors will be enhancing a greater understanding and will enhance the need for any change that comes up.
- The post-structural scholars must also be able to utilize the different ideas brought out in order to create a greater understanding of the text. This means that they ought to be able to clearly understand the perspectives of different readers of a text and hence come up with a multi-faceted interpretation of the text depending on the views of the different readers.
These have been the aspects that the post-structural philosophers use to bring out their concepts and systems of knowledge. These aspects bring out the distinction between the structural theories with those of post-structural. Post-structuralists are therefore concerned with the way in which a text is constructed and the way in which the contents of the text can be used by different readers to bring out their own ideas. Post-structuralists read a text in a comprehensive manner and then look at the value and intended benefit. They are able to come up with the unintended meanings in the text which may be contradictory to the outer meaning. They bring out the detailed meanings of words and ideas in the text and they are also able to argue against what the author may have intended to convey and therefore establish new meanings that may not have been identified by other readers (Sarup, 1993).
The tactic of post-structuralism
The post-structural theorists base their survival on the concept of determination. It can be argued that through over-determination, post-structuralists have gone beyond the ideas of the structural theorists. They have been able to incorporate theory with the reality of events such that theory goes hand in hand with the facts as they are in the actual sense. Post-structuralism therefore allows theory to shape the reality and be able to bring out or disclose ideas of fiction and objects that are inexistent in the real aspect (Foucault, 1980).
According to Harland (1987), there have been criticisms that have arisen with development of post-structuralism and philosophers had to develop tactics of handling the criticisms and coming up with answers to the questions that were arising. The two major criticisms that came up in the early 1970s were:
- That the methodology was very difficult to implement in the modern society.
- That the models developed are impossible to maintain taking into consideration the prevailing situation.
The main argument that defended the questions was that the system of knowledge plays an important role in developing concepts. The post-structural philosophers were able to explain that the knowledge produced by all the people making use of the different texts provided security to any concepts that were likely to fail. According to the philosophers, security enhanced the ideas in the structure and provided stability within the area of study. In post-structuralism, the core of ideas is not as reliable and significant as the external boundaries. This is because the distinction between the core concepts and the limits or the outer figure is not possible. This has resulted in criticism and post-structuralism have tried to secure their knowledge to bring out the benefits of their theories (Jaaware, 2001).
According to Jaaware (2001), post-structuralism knowledge allows change when the observed concepts and objects change with time. However, despite this freedom to change, the post-structural philosophers need to identify the pattern of change and take up that which is relevant to the object in study. There is need to secure their knowledge to prevent the change from consuming the real aspects of life. The theories used in post-structuralism need to consider first the norms of an element or behavior and then come up with all the changes that may be taken without deviating from the norm.
Therefore, the tactic used in post-structuralism should be that knowledge begins with the norm and then later, the possible exceptions be taken. The norm means that, ideas and the entire knowledge is deviating from the definition of the exception, which is to allow for change and this is what makes the core of the system of knowledge.
Critical analysis of post-structuralism in todays world
The post-structuralism movement has resulted in a number of criticisms due to its controversial reasoning. This has led to the philosophers to critically establish a greater understanding to the movement to support their ideas. The post-structural philosophers have been criticized of destroying the traditional cultural way of life and the knowledge identified by earlier philosophers and this has led the philosophers to look into the core of their knowledge as well as its outer boundaries, which are the limits of what was produced. This way, they were able to support their concepts and give understanding to their system of knowledge (Barry, 2002).
According to Debord (2006), the following objections were raised by the post-structural critics. The objections helped the philosophers to identify a different perspective of handling their knowledge:
- There was controversy on the limits of the post-structural system of knowledge. According to the critics, there was no clear understanding of what the outer boundary of their knowledge was based on. They argued that the limit or the boundary must be defined in terms of the core concepts.
- The critics also argued that the post-structural philosophers brought out differences of issues without looking at the real object first. According to them, the philosophers were only showing the differences of issues without identifying the issue in question first.
- The post-structuralists believed in change in all aspects of knowledge. However, critics argued that in the logical sense of living any true facts ought to be consistent and therefore the idea of change makes objects and ideas unreal.
- Post-structural theorists believed in relativity of all aspects of life and hence the reason why knowledge could be subject to change. Controversy arose among the critics as they reasoned that the core of knowledge was not supposed to be relative because it would not bring out the difference between the different ideas. Extreme values of life could not be identified if all the aspects were taken to be relative.
- Relativism was also criticized in respect to the moral cultural; values. To the critics, morals depended on the core aspects of knowledge and when there was relativity in this core aspect, the moral values would be misinterpreted. Moral values were meant to be absolute and not relative.
These criticisms have strengthened the philosophers way of thinking. They have enabled the post-structural scientists identify new and critical ideas towards enhancing their theories. The philosophers have identified that the criticisms have captured reasonable concepts about the nature of truth and morality in the social well-being. They also put together arguments concerning the relationship between knowledge, justice and morality (Barry, 2002).
The concepts brought out by the philosophers following these criticisms were as follows (Debord, 2006):
- The philosophers identified that to establish a system of knowledge the limit or the outer boundary must come before the core concepts. There must be an established limit to knowledge before the concepts can be made.
- They also argued that something does not have to exist to be able to study about it. According to them, making sense of their concepts is more important than having the knowledge of the particular object. There are things that are important even when they cannot actually be identified.
- They reasoned that truth is real when there is consistency in facts but, there is even greater truth when the facts change to incorporate new ideas. Therefore change in the concepts does not mean that the philosophers will be altering the truth.
- Differences in concepts must arise and according to the post-structural philosophers this does not mean that the ideas become unreal. Differences keep arising and absolute facts cannot operate in reality.
- The core of knowledge may hide differences but it does not deny the ethics associated with it. Therefore, differences in the core do not affect the required ethics nor does it deny the morality.
Summary
The recent scientific theories and the more detailed discoveries from science dominate our own views about our existence and about the world we are living in today. They guide us on the way we reason and we create means of survival by providing us with facts of our life. Science also enables us to forecast the future events and it guides us towards making proper plans for the future. Post-structuralism is not solely focused on the current model of empirical science and with the recent changes; most scientists have opted for other scientific models other than the post-structural model. Post-structural theorists argue that the dominance of science in our knowledge ought to be restricted. This has resulted to greater controversies with more scientists opting for the empirical scientific methods (Bapty, 1990).
Recent scholars have argued that by ignoring or restricting the use of scientific methods, there is no possibility of deriving facts about events that take place in the day to day life. Evidence of facts may not be derived if the scientists were to follow the post-structural ideas. Post-structural theorists are aware of the existence and dominance of the scientific theories, methods and concepts. However, they are more critical of this dominance because they feel that ways of life go beyond the empirical science.
According to Foucault (1980) and other post-structural philosophers, life and the ways of living are not defined by science alone but also by the historical events that took place and the future creations that will be likely to occur. This means that science does not look into the broader perspective of life and post-structuralists defend their ideas by the knowledge they derive and not by the scientific theories that have been established. Post-structural theorists are therefore establishing their new perspectives independent of the scientific theories and any individual aiming at following the post-structural system of knowledge would have to place their dimensions towards the future and also put into consideration the historical events. The post-structuralists argue that science cannot operate as an independent entity and it is important that both the past and future events are implemented in coming up with new theories. This way, even the technological changes would be put into consideration in developing analysis and the results obtained would be a relative representative of the real events of life.
In this aspect, the post-structural theorists in todays world can develop new perspectives of looking at issues where they would have to incorporate ideas related to science and the technological changes that are taking place. By taking alternative methods to pure science, they will be able to define truths based on scientific facts. Scholars intending to implement the post-structural theories would work towards enabling change in their ideas and taking the theories in a different perspective from that seen by science alone. Scholars would be required to take their acquired knowledge in terms of the extra-scientific models and theories. The truth and facts of life can be identified by the post-structural ideas and not by science alone (Baudrillard, 1990).
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