5/01/21

Poststructuralism


 Prof Abdelhamid Fouda 

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Poststructuralism

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Poststructuralists

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♣♣Jacques Lacan (1901-81) France (Ecrits1966)

♣♣Roland Barthes (1915-80) France (Mythologies 1957)(S/Z 1970)

♣Louis Althusser (1918-90)(Essay-Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus)

♣Jean-François Lyotard (1924-98)

(The Postmodern condition)

♣♣Michael Foucault (1926-84)

France

♣♣Jacques Derrida (1930- )Algeria (Of Gramatology 1967, Writing and difference1978)

♣♣Julia Kristeva (1941- ) Bulgaria (Revolution in Poetic Language 1974)

♣Slavoj Žižek (1949- ) Slovenia

Paul de Man

Geoffrey Hartman

Poststructuralist Views

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Poststructuralism is the general attempt to contest and subvert Structuralism and to formulate new theories regarding interpretation and meaning, initiated particularly by Deconstractors but also associated with certain aspects and practitioners of psychoanalytic, Marxist, cultural, feminist, and gender criticism. 

Poststructuralists have suggested that structuralism rests on a number of distinctions--between signifier and signified, self and language (or text), texts and other texts, and text and the world--that are overly simplistic, if not patently inaccurate, and they have made a concerted effort to discredit the oppositions. 

1. Language-

 Poststructuralists have viewed the self as the Subject, as well as the user, of language, claiming that although we may speak through and shape language, it also shapes and speak through us.

2. Signification-

 Poststructuralists have demonstrated that, in the grand scheme of signification, all 'signifieds' are also signifiers, for each word exits in complex linguistic matrix and has such a variety of denotations and connotations that no one meaning can be said to be final, stable, and invulnerable to reconsideration and substitution. Signification is unstable and indeterminate, and thus is so meaning. 

3. Text and intertexuality- Poststructuralists, who have generally followed their structuralist predecessors in rejecting the traditional concept of the literary "work" (as the work of an individual and purposeful author) in favour of the impersonal "text" , have gone structuralists one better by treating texts as "intertexts" : crisscrossed strands within the infinitely larger text called language, that networked system of denotation, connotation, and signification in which the individual text is inscribed and read and through which its myriad possible meanings are ascribed and assigned. (Poststructuralist Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality to refer to the fact that a text is a "mosaic" of preexisting texts whose meanings it reworks and transforms.)

4. Deconstruction (world as text)- Poststructuralists have even viewed the world itself as a text. The poststructuralist view of the world as  text has been set forth most powerfully and controversially by the deconstructive theorist Derrida in his book Of Gramatology (1967) , where he maintains that "there is nothing outside the text" . We know the world through language, and the acts and practices that constitutes the "real world" are inseperable from the discourses out of which they arise and as open to interpretation as any work of literature, Derrida is not alone in deconstructing the world/text opposition. Pal de Man viewed language as something that has great power in individual, social, and political life. Hartman went so far as to claim that "nothing can lift us out of language. "

Derrida rejected the structuralist presupposition that texts (or other structures) have self-referential centres that govern their language (or signifying system) without being in any way determined, governed, co-opted, or problematized by that language (or signifying system). Having rejected the structuralist concept of a self-referential Centre, Derrida also rejected its corollary:that a text's meaning is thereby rendered determinable (capable of being determined) as well as determinate (fixed and reliably correct).

5. Psychoanalysis (Lacan)

Lacan posited that the human unconscious is structured like a language. He treated dreams not as Freud treated them--as revelatory of symptoms of repression--but rather as a form of discourse. Lacan also argued that the "ego" , subject, or self that we think of as being necessary and natural (our individual human nature) is in fact a product of social order and its various and often conflicting symbolic system (especially, but not exclusively, language). The "ego-artifact, " produced during what Lacan called the "mirror stage" of human development, seems at once unified, consistent, and organized around a determinate centre. But the unified self, or ego, is a fiction, according to Lacan. The yoking together of fragments and destructively dissimilar elements takes its psychic toll, and it is the job of the Lacanian psychoanalyst to "deconstruct", as it were, the ego, to show its continuities to be contradictions as well. 

6. Psychoanalysis (Kristeva)

Kristeva, another psychoanalytic critic, explores the relationship between a number of binary oppositions, like normal/poetic, conscious/unconscious, and most importantly, semiotic/symbolic,  within Western culture. Kristeva associates the semiotic with the chaotic, the irrational, the fluid, and argues that the semiotic has the capacity to undermine the symbolic, which is associated with the coherent and the logical. 

Kristeva, by the way, hints at a possible association of the semiotic with the feminine and the symbolic with the masculine, an idea that laid the groundwork for the feminist concept of ecriture féminine : woman's writing. 

7. Study of cultures (Foucault)

Foucault refused to see power in terms of simple, binary oppositions (as something exercised by a dominant class over a subservient class). He argued that power is not simply repressive power, that is, a tool of conspiracy by one individual or institution against another. Rather, power is a complex of interwoven and often contradictory forces ; power produces what happens. Thus, tyrannical aristocrat does not simply wield power, for he is empowered by discourses (accepted ways of thinking, writing, and speaking) and practices that embody, exercise, and amount to power. 

8. Barthes

Barthes said that the author as an institution (that is, the author traditionally conceived as the source of knowledge, the controller of a text's meaning, and a chief object of critical interest) is dead. Along with Foucault and de Man,  Barthes views the author not as an original and creative master and manipulator of the linguistic system but , rather, as one of its primary vehicles, an agent through which it works out new permutations and combinations. These theorists even criticize humanism insofar as it views the human "subject" as a consistent, creative, and purposive entity. 

Other important poststructuralist ideas elaborated by Barthes include the French concepts of plaisir  (pleasure) and jouissance (which roughly translates as playful, ecstatic enjoyment) and the terms lisible and scriptable . Barthes argued that texts were either lisible ("readerly") or scriptible ("writerly"). Lisible indicates a certain dependence on convention, which facilitates interpretation. Scriptible implies a significant degree of experimentation, a flouting or modification of traditional rules that makes a text difficult to interpret and, occasionally, virtually incomprehensible. 

9. Conclusion

Even as the Poststructuralists have radically reduced the author's role, they have also diminished the role of the reader, whom they view not as a stable, coherent, and consistent subject or self but rather as a locus of competing and often contradictory discourses. 

Poststructuralists have radically revised the traditional concept of Theory even as they have elevated it to a position of prime importance. In their view, Theory has more than literature to account for, since everything from the unconscious to social and cultural practices is seen as functioning like a language;  thus the goal of poststructuralist theorists is to understand what controls interpretation and meaning in all possible systems of signification. 

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Distinctions between Structuralism and Poststructuralism

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(Separate article)


What Post-structuralist  critics do

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(Separate article)


Deconstruction

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(Separate article)

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