Poststructuralism

The term poststructuralism came into use in the 1960s and related to a response to the dominant intellectual movement in France of structuralism, which is common in semiology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and sociology. Poststructuralism's very nature is to defy definition, because it was concerned with negativity—the ability to recognize and engage with that which escapes efforts to represent it—yet is necessary for representation to work, even at the perennial “just-out-of-focus” periphery of peripheral vision, the abject and the sublime. It was also concerned with the underlying fluidity of apparently stable systems, which those systems effectively suppress yet on which they depend to function. Poststructuralism, though neither a theory nor a movement as such (Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault disagreed on this point and were estranged for 15 years, although they eventually reconciled), demonstrated in various ways the fragility and paradox of representational systems, especially their effects in creating appearances of truth and objectivity and the dangers inherent in deploying existing unificatory classification schemes and concepts. Rejecting both the abstract determinism of structuralism refracted through the work of both Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and the humanisms of the previously dominant phenomenology and existentialism developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, poststructuralism drew particularly on Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche to initiate a “linguistic turn” in response to the perceived crisis of representation in the social sciences. It was particularly concerned with revealing how [Page 704]the subjects of representational systems, such as writing, discourse, and painting (including the authors of those representations), were themselves products of signifying processes, and how unity, order, and identity were themselves effects of systems that unified, ordered, and disciplined, rather than being their origins. Subjects, including psychological subjects, were seen as sites of meaning rather than its source, where traces of other signifying systems, texts, or discourses interleaved in an assemblage of subjectivity. Analytically, it shifted attention from the interpretation of phenomena to the representation of phenomena and the constructive reading of those phenomena, with a corresponding redistribution of “authority” toward readers. Accordingly, it was associated with revealing paradox, contradiction, and fragmentation within apparently cohesive signifying systems and was assigned both negative (nihilistic) and positive (creative, opportunistic) appellations, despite its own criticisms of the restrictions of binary thinking. From its origins in the humanities, philosophy, history, and literary and art criticism in particular, this concern with subjectivity and representation impacted Anglo-Saxon sociology, psychology, and politics in the 1970s and 1980s and business and management studies in the 1980s and 1990s. It was responsible for breaking down disciplinary boundaries and what Clifford Geertz called “blurring genres,” inaugurating transdisciplinary practices of theory and criticism, stimulating the growth to maturity of the nascent field of media and cultural studies and a general shift from structure to process concerns.