Concept

Post-structuralism

Overview

Post-structuralism is a philosophical movement that questions the objectivity or stability of the various interpretive structures that are posited by structuralism and considers them to be constituted by broader systems of power. Although different post-structuralists present different critiques of structuralism, common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of structuralism, as well as an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute its structures. Accordingly, post-structuralism discards the idea of interpreting media (or the world) within pre-established, socially constructed structures.

Structuralism proposes that human culture can be understood by means of a structure that is modeled on language. As a result, there is concrete reality on the one hand, abstract ideas about reality on the other hand, and a "third order" that mediates between the two.

A post-structuralist response, then, might suggest that in order to build meaning out of such an interpretation, one must (falsely) assume that the definitions of these signs are both valid and fixed, and that the author employing structuralist theory is somehow above and apart from these structures they are describing so as to be able to wholly appreciate them. The rigidity and tendency to categorize intimations of universal truths found in structuralist thinking is a common target of post-structuralist thought, while also building upon structuralist conceptions of reality mediated by the interrelationship between signs.

Writers whose works are often characterised as post-structuralist include Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean Baudrillard, although many theorists who have been called "post-structuralist" have rejected the label.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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But, if such be the case, the successive states of matter cannot be perceived from the outside any more than our own psychic states; the hypothesis of pre-established harmony must be introduced in order to explain how these inner states are representative of one another. Thus, with our second conception of the relation of causality we reach Leibniz, as with the first we reached Spinoza.
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
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Even the readiness with which our cleverest contemporaries get lost in wretched corners and alleys, for example, in Vaterländerei (so I designate Jingoism, called _chauvinisme_ in France, and "_deutsch_" in Germany), or in petty æsthetic creeds in the manner of Parisian _naturalisme_ (which only brings into prominence and uncovers _that_ aspect of nature which excites simultaneously disgust and astonishment—they…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom
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Yet his ideas were speculative in spirit; whereas the system of Wolf, who carried the method out to the height of pedantry, was even in subject-matter a metaphysic of the understanding. The abuses which these methods with their formalism once led to in philosophy and science have in modern times been followed by the abuses of what is called 'Construction.' Kant brought into vogue the phrase that mathematics…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
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Post-structuralism

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