Poststructuralism

During the past 2 decades or so, poststructuralism has begun to influence the thinking in many fields [Page 778]in the humanities and the social sciences. Communication is no exception. Poststructuralism is a mode of thinking that is associated mainly with French thinkers and theorists; however, in recent times, it has begun to exert a profound impact on scholars the world over. As the name suggests, poststructuralism is a mode of thinking that succeeded structuralism. However, the relationship between structuralism and poststructuralism is complex and many-sided. At one level, it is a rejection of structuralism; at another level, it is an extension of the concerns and interests of structuralism.

Some use the two terms poststructuralism and postmodernism interchangeably because there is a great deal of overlap between the thinking of the proponents of both these modes of inquiry. However, although poststructuralism grew out of linguistics, anthropology, and literary studies and was largely French in origin, postmodernism grew out of architecture, film, and performance studies and is mainly associated with the United States. This is, of course, not to deny the fact that French thinkers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard have played an important role in defining postmodernism.

Structuralism, the idea that meaning resides in the structure or organization of language and other symbolic systems, is associated with a number of French thinkers who were influential in the 1950s and 1960s. Among them, Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropology), Roman Jakobson (language and literary studies), Roland Barthes (cultural analysis), Louis Althusser (Marxist studies), and Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis) are perhaps most important. Barthes, Lacan, and Michel Foucault were later associated with poststructuralism as well. The writings of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure on language had a deep influence on the rise of structuralism.

Structuralism and poststructuralism share many features in common. They are both extremely critical of such fields of inquiry as humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology that exercised considerable influence before the emergence of structuralism. Structuralists and poststructuralists repudiated humanism's notion of sovereign subject, or the importance of the individual human person, that had dominated Western thinking for centuries. Both structuralism and poststructuralism, then, are unyieldingly critical of humanism, which has been a cornerstone of Western thinking since the Renaissance. And both structuralism and poststructuralism place great emphasis on the determinative role of language in shaping self and meaning.

However, there are significant differences between structuralism and poststructuralism as well. Post-structuralists are extremely dubious of scientific pretensions. Structuralists were keen to come up with a science of the study of meaning; poststructuralists saw it as a misguided effort. Despite the critiques of humanism by structuralists, post-structuralists felt that there was a residual humanism in their thinking in view of the fact that they sought to posit a timeless human essence. Unlike the structuralists, poststructuralists placed great emphasis on the idea of historicity. Poststructuralists forcefully argued that questions of identity, signification, consciousness, and selfhood have to be understood in terms of the historical movements of society. In addition, some dominant theorists of poststructuralism, although not all, sought to call attention to the politics of culture and the political production of meaning. Furthermore, although both structuralists and poststructuralists recognized the centrality of language in the construction of meaning, the former believed in determinate and specific meanings while the latter thought that it was a mere illusion. In other words, poststructuralists placed far greater emphasis on the crucial role of the signifiers (symbols and language) as being intrinsic to the communicative act.

...