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Poststructuralism
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Poststructuralism is the name for a movement in philosophy that began in the 1960s. It remains an influence not only in philosophy, but ... in a wider set of subjects, including literature, politics, art, cultural criticisms, history and sociology. This influence is controversial because poststructuralism is often seen as a dissenting position, for example, with respect to the sciences and to established moral values. The movement is best summed up by its component thinkers. Therefore, this book seeks to explain it through a critical study of five of the most important works by five of the movement’s most important thinkers (Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva). The principle aim is to respond to two powerful criticisms of poststructuralism: first, that it is willfully and irretrievably difficult; secondly, that it takes on positions that are marginal, inconsistent and impossible to maintain.
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Poststructuralism is a broad term for a loose agglomeration of theorists and ideas which arose in the mid-sixties as a reaction to the prevailing intellectual approach of structuralism. The structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, was itself a reaction to the subject-centered philosophies of phenomenology and existentialism. Structuralism is a social scientific method which uncovers the universal individual and social structures that people unconsciously enact in their everyday behavior. For example, the myths told within given societies can be broken down into their elemental parts and the relationship between the parts mapped. These maps can then be compared cross-culturally and the deep structures of the psyche of humanity revealed.
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Poststructuralism refers to the ideas and works, developed since the 1960s, of a number of mainly French intellectuals; Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, the later Barthes, and Kristeva are some of the most prominent names. Roots reach back into Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Freud and Marx. The main currents of structuralist thought are extended and, arguably, radicalised, in this disparate body of thought, first in relation to language, identity and meaning, and second in relation to the human subject. Derrida, notably, argues against the totalising and fixed character of a structuralist analysis of language and texts, holding that the relations between signified and signifier (within the sign) are indeterminate and that meaning is slippery and irreducible to structures of difference (the classic structuralist premise). The notion of a unified and rational subject self has been replaced with a subjectivity in process and the product of discourses; much poststructuralism opposes the notion of any essential self, or indeed any sense of the real outside of cultural systems of discourse. Foucault’s investigations of the history of discourses extended into social power, conceptions of the human body and self, sexuality, architecture, and the spatial organisation of society.
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As readers can expect from Mark Poster's writings, Critical Theory and Poststructuralism provides a detailed explication of an array of complex philosophical questions bearing directly on current conceptions of critical discourse and practice. Among these are the problematics of critical social theory, particularly as developed by the Frankfurt School, and the interrelationships between this theory and "poststructuralism," a term whose validity "derives from certain vicissitudes of intercontinental intellectual history in the past two decades" (4). However, as this book's subtitle indicates, Poster seeks to ascertiain what poststructuralism might offer to a reconstruction of critical theory within the sociocultural -context- of developments of the late twentieth century. Foremost among these is what Poster designates as the "mode of information," i.e. the "social relations mediated by electronic communication systems, which constitute new patterns of language" (126) as well as new ways in which the subject is constituted within society (128).
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Poststructuralism[1] is defined in its essentials by its problematization of the real and by its anti-humanism. It problematizes the real by arguing that statements are not true because they correspond with reality but are so because they come to pass for true according to conditions which are internal to the discourses within which they are made. Reality is not only unimportant for poststructuralism, it is impossible to make statements about it. Poststructuralism's anti-humanism consists in the proposition that individuals are constituted as subjects by social practice grounded in discourse. Two of the troubling consequences of poststructuralism for historians are the idea that History is not in any way a veridical account of the past, nor can it be, and that the human agency which historians often take to be the engine of history is neither original nor authentic.
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In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to recent French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is ... a piece of intellectual history, emphasising how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida, and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett’s work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history.
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