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GENESIS In France during the 1960’s, Structuralism began to be replaced by the antinomian movement known as Poststructuralism, later, Poststructuralism would become known as Postmodernism. Indivisible from the political affairs of 1968, students and workers alike rebelled against the state and nearly caused the downfall of the French government; poststructuralism itself allegorises a drastic dismantling of some of the key hypothesis underlying Western culture and philosophy. Two key figures in the emergence of poststructuralism were Roland Barthes (1915-1980) and Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004). Towards the end of the 1960’s Barthes work had begun to change from a structuralist nature to that of poststructuralism. In 1968 Barthes released The Death of the Author in which he declares that the death of the author is a metaphorical way of affirming the autonomy of the literary text and its imperviousness to the likelihood of being united or restricted by any concept of what the author might have intended. By this he was saying that the death of the author was the birth of the reader. However, various people argue that the beginning of poststructuralism may well have been Jacques Derrida’s 1966 lecture Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science. In this thesis Derrida observes a certain intellectual ‘happening’ which constitutes a drastic rupture from previous ways of thinking. The event is in relation to the ‘decentring’ of our intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified centre all we have is ‘play’. THEORY By the direct sense of the word, “Post-Structuralism” has moved past “Structuralism.” Post-Structuralism, in turn, rejects binary opposition (which is famous within Structuralism) and concludes that meanings within text are unstable and always shifting. According to Bush, post-structuralism is generally considered to have three main features. 1. Every critic must be able to theorize every position and critical practice to have an understanding. By studying different styles of theory, it creates an understanding of different meanings and interpretations thereby contributing to a greater understanding of the text and the shifting meaning. 2. Post-Structuralism questions the grounding of human beings by calling into question our perception. The post-structuralist view of subjectivity regards the “self” as being separated and illogical which makes us “Decentered.” This rejects the idea of the traditional view of a coherent identity. This has created many different view and standing points on what exactly a human being is. 3. The importance has been shifted from the meaning of the author to the meaning of the reader interprets from the text. Post-Structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having one purpose, one meaning or one singular existence. For example, a writer could have written a single word like “dog” with his image of a strong German Shepard but due to the reader’s experience, the reader may envisage a small frightened Chihuahua. Although there are many other aspects of post-structuralism, it is these three characteristics that are the foundations of this style of criticism. STRUCTURALISM/POST-STRUCTURALISM DIFFERENTIATION Post-Structuralism has been described as a ‘rebellion against’ Structuralism, as it was believed Structuralism did not go far enough in its ideas.Structuralism was based on linguistics and focus on texts where they were structured by language. Although Structuralism did encourage questioning these structures, its approach remained more logical and scientific, using observation and reason to come to what they would call the ‘right’ conclusions. On the other hand Post-Structuralism took a more philosophical approach where everything including Linguistics could be questioned. Also focusing on a more emotional approach and in a sense begins to show some ideas of Modernism and Post-Modernism. Post-Structuralism can be described as being influenced by both the Liberal Humanism and Structuralism movements that went before it, adopting and adapting some of each movements ideas and combining them with others. Post-Structuralism reflected that in the past Liberal Humanists focus too much on the authority and meanings of the author, while Structuralism focused too much on the structure of the text, and not enough on the message. WHAT POST-STRUCTURALISTS DO Poststructuralists are concerned with the way a text is constructed by criticism and concerned with struturation. They read a text in a reflective and self-conscious way looking at its values and motivations. Poststructuralists find in the text unconscious and unintended meanings, which may be directly contrary to the surface meaning. They bring to the foreground the root meanings of words and similarities in sound. Poststructuralists affirm a texts plurality and they fragment and disperse it, instead of unifying it. They go against their grains of what common sense is and show how a text comes to embarrass its own ruling system of logic. Poststructuralist critics identify a unit, such as a phrase, a sentence or a couple of sentences and analyse it so intensively that the language produces multiplicities of meaning and become impossible to sustain a univocal reading. Lastly, poststructuralists look for fault-lines, which are shifts and breaks hidden within a text. PROMINENT FIGURES The term is troublesome because relations between the work of scholars generally held to be post-structuralists (as, virtually without exception, they do not identify themselves as such) are often contentious, and there is not a common set of works to which they all refer as shared doctrine (rather unlike structuralism, where the work of , Roland Barthes , and Michel Foucault . The works of Jacques Derrida , Gilles Deleuze , and Julia Kristeva are also counted as prominent examples of post-structuralism. DERRIDA'S LECTURE AT JOHNS HOPKINS
BARTHES AND THE NEED OF METALANGUAGE Although many may have felt a necessity to move beyond structuralism, there was clearly no consensus on how this was to take place. Much of the study of post-structuralism is based on the common critiques of structuralism. Roland Barthes is of great significance with respect to post-structuralist theory. In his work ''Elements of Semiology'' (1967) he conceptualised the "metalanguage", which is a higher-order language , that is necessary to explain a first or lower-order language. Insofar as one Metalanguage is required for one explanation of first-order language, another may be required, so Metalanguage s may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, therefore Deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny. Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts. HISTORICAL VERSUS DESCRIPTIVE VIEW Where structuralism attempted to find a level of generalisable and self-sufficient Metalanguage capable of describing configurations of elements variously anthropological, literary, linguistic, historical, or psychoanalytic and analyse their relations without being mired by the identity of these elements as such , post-structuralism is said to share a concern for identifying and challenging Hierarchies implicit in identification of Binary Opposition s which generally characterise not only structuralism but Western metaphysics, see Deconstruction . Re-evaluation of the structuralist interpretation of Ferdinand De Saussure's distinction between the Historical (diachronic) and the Descriptive (synchronic) views is the most that can be credited as a common point of critique which generally led post-structuralists to assert that structural analyses are generally synchronic and thereby suppress historical or diachronic analyses. It has accordingly been claimed that post-structuralism has been concerned with reasserting the importance of history, and in so doing, developing new theoretical understandings of the subject. Not entirely apart from this are claims that post-structuralism consists in an emphasis on reinterpreting the work of Sigmund Freud , Søren Kierkegaard , Karl Marx , Friedrich Nietzsche , and Martin Heidegger (e.g. Nietzschean genealogy serves as a reference point for theoretical history in Foucault's work in the 1970s, including his critical remarks about his structuralist work). CHARACTERIZATIONS The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously taken to be play in a linguistic sense based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while Social Constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault is said to create a sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change . The importance of Foucault's work is seen by many to be in its synthesis of this social historical account of the operations of power, see Governmentality . It is also often claimed that "post-structuralists" are also more or less self-consciously "post-modernists", but no small number of those so designated have expressed consternation at these terms or even consciously identified themselves as modernists. It is beyond dispute that arguments between those said to be post-structuralists were at least as strident as their objections to structuralism so the term at the very least is not very specific. Contemporary trends in usage seem to employ the term less; rather than attempting to engage with a specific scholarship (as there is no unified post-structuralist position with which to engage). The term is also used as a shorthand for what is seen as a radicalisation of the French academic left and its American cousins following the failure of the in the northern Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, established as part of the reorganisation of the French university system in general and the Sorbonne in particular, either serving on its faculty or as formal and informal advisors on matters of faculty and pedagogy. OTHER AUTHORS In addition to those discussed above, the following are often said to be post-structuralists or to have had a post-structuralist period:
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