SMT. KAMALAXI TADASAD. Ph.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE RANI CHANAMMA UNIVERSITY, BELAGAVI

Post-structuralism CLASS LECTURE

Post-structuralism As the general name of various theories or methods of analysis, including deconstruction and some psychoanalytic theories, post structuralism refers to those thoughts that deny the validity of structuralism's method of binary oppositions and maintain that meanings and intellectual categories are shifting and unstable.

From a literary & literary critical perspective, it is an approach to literature that, proceeding from the tenets of structuralism, maintains that, as words have no absolute meaning, any text is open to an unlimited range of interpretations.

In the second half of the twentieth century, schools of thought such as Structuralism, Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, all of which focus on language, have their origins in the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure ;(1857-1913).

Remembering structuralism...

From the perspective of structuralism; There is no absolute Platonic ideal "out there" to anchor meaning. There is no truth that is not constructed. There is nothing outside language. Language speaks (through) us. Language is thus a system of signs or a semiotic system, but merely one of many, all of which construct meaning, which does not exist outside the semiotic system.

In other words; Structuralism is concerned not so much with what things mean, but how they mean; it is designed to show that all elements of human language, culture, literature, etc. are understandable as parts of a system of signs. This science of signs is called "semiotics" or "semiology." The goal is to discover the codes, structures, and processes involved in the production of meaning.

Thus, Structuralism rejects the concept of human freedom and choice and focuses instead on the way that human behavior is determined by various structures. By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines.

Structuralism was criticized for being ahistorical and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of individual people to act. Whereas post-structuralism has been described as a ‘rebellion against’ structuralism. It may be more accurately understood as a critical and comprehensive response to the basic assumptions of structuralism.

While philosophy in Britain was heavily influenced by theories of language during the early years of the 20th. Century, this was not the case in France. It could be said that, in a way, structuralism is the delayed entry of language in French philosophy.

Saussure also stressed the point that each sigrtifier acquired its semantic value only by virtue of its differential position within the structure.

In post-structuralism, broadly speaking,the signified is demoted and the signifier made dominant. floating signifiers are pure and simple, with no determinable relation to any extra-linguistic referents at all.

It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, both are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.

Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, ...