Notes on Surber: "Poststructuralist and Postmodernist Discourses"

Poststructuralists "wish decisively and finally to reject all recourse to some privileged and ultimately ahistorical theoretical or methodological stance in favor of a historically embedded and constantly open process of radical critique....More specifically, poststructuralist and postmodernist discourses maintain that cultural practices and theories about them both have a common root in manifold, complex, and ever shifting configurations of power. It is not the task of radical critique to propose yet another theoretical discourse but rather to force the specific configurations of power underlying any and all existing cultural discourses to show themselves." [183]

Poststructural Discourses: Decentering the Metaphysical Tradition

While Nietzsche attempted to analyze the emerging nihilism and provided a critique of Christian values ("Platonism for the masses"), Heidegger saw this nihilism as inherent in Western metaphysics (going back to Plato and Aristotle) which covers over "the meaning of Being" itself. "What was required was not another philosophy or ideology, but new and more authentic ways of experiencing, speaking, and thinking than those dictated by logic, science, and the modern technological attitude." [186]

Culture is "the complex interplay of its discourses". [188]

Language is "a set of metaphors", not "a set of truth-bearing propositions". Thus, style is "an overriding and decisive issue".

"Rather than attempting to state some true theses about a text under consideration, the basic poststructuralist strategy employed stylistic devices, deflections, and deviations in order (ideally) to teach the reader how to read and critique the text for her or himself, not to convince the reader of some true or objective textual interpretation." [188]

Hegel and Poststructuralist Decentering [189]

There were three fundamental themes of Hegel's system that came under attack by poststructuralists in the '60s.

1. Beginning with the Cartesian cogito and culminating in the idealist ego of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling is self-consciousness, i.e. the "human consciousness or subjectivity becoming aware of itself as the source of all reality, truth, and being."
2. Culture reaches its highest expression in the philosophy of each historical period. All cultural productions were, for Hegel, philosophical and rational. They expressed the truth of the age in a "coherent, unitary, and rational" way.
3. History is the unitary, coherent, and "rational unfolding in time of the development of the self-conscious subject of modern philosophy...the coming to self-consciousness of a universal, transpersonal 'world spirit'." To view history correctly is to realize that "the real is the rational and the rational is the real". [190]

These views have had a lasting influence, albeit in modified form, from Marx to the present.

From Structuralism to Poststructuralism

In order to critique the entire tradition of Western metaphysics, French intellectuals in the '60s began with the dominant theoretical school of the time, viz. structuralism. They questioned the basic distinction between surface and deep structure, its ontological implications, and the privileging of the "deep" over the "surface" as just another arbitrary imposition which is based on a mere "play of signification" -- another metaphor used to perpetuate a set of power relations in service of the status quo. On the contrary, "the meaning of any text is not to be sought in some dimension of depth behind or beneath the text itself, but in the constantly shifting play of signification of the text's own elements." [191]

Poststructuralists replaced the structuralist metaphysics by challenging a number of theoretical features of structuralism.

• Signifier/Signified relation: This relation is not fixed but constantly shifting.
• Langue/Parole distinction: Meaning cannot be determined independent of use. Texts are polysemic and open. [192]
• Synchronic/Diachronic distinction: Language cannot be fully understood in isolation from the chronological shifts that occur in language ("play of signification") and the intertextuality of texts.
• Primacy of spoken language: To view writing as a representation of the more fundamental use of language as speech reinforces an essentialism, viz. that of the speaking subject and the suggestion that deep structures are an intrinsic feature of the mind. It also suggests that clarification of meaning can, in principle, be achieved by appeal to the intentional presence of the speaker, either in speech or in the text itself. [193]

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© T. R. Quigley, 1998