Post-Structuralism

As regards the study of consumers and the consumption of everyday culture, post-structuralism signifies a significant departure from the structuralist analyses that it succeeded. Whereas in a structuralist analysis of consumption the patterns of consumption are ascertained through the revelation of some deep structure, in post-structuralist analyses of consumption, emphasis is placed on the minutiae of socially produced meanings, habits, practices, and normative common sense that govern consumption. Indeed, a post-structuralist analysis of consumers will necessarily place emphasis on the position of the consumer as a “subject” who is endlessly reconstructed by his or her particular historical, social, and cultural environs. For consumption, post-structuralism meant that the consumer, advertiser, marketer, seller, retailer, or producer could no longer be considered in a static, autonomous, and decontextualized way as per structuralism.

Post-structuralism is the label given to a loose collective of thinkers and theories that originated in continental Europe, especially in France, during the middle and latter half of the twentieth century. As its name implies, post-structuralist analyses depart from the order of structuralist analyses by bringing features of cultural specificity, subjective engagement, metalanguage, and metaphysics to the fore. In the middle of the twentieth century, a variety of French thinkers were grouped under the label of post-structuralism, particularly by the American scholarly journal Yale French Studies, and some of these thinkers included Roland Barthes, Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva. Post-structuralism is sometimes seen as an intellectual attempt to respond to the concerns that were borne out by the student and worker riots in Paris [Page 1132]during May 1968 that were, in some ways, targeted at the prevailing discourse of structuralism in the universities.

Post-structuralist analyses initially drew on the critique of ideology, Marxism, phenomenology, semiotics (the study of meaning/s), and the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure to emphasize the critical rereading of texts and make the claim that no text could be read the same way twice. This link to Saussure shows that post-structuralism has its genesis in the study of language, linguistics, and the study of literature, literary studies. Yet as a method of critique, post-structuralism has emerged in the methodological and epistemological debates of other disciplines and fields such as philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, various feminisms, ethnography, the critical philosophy of science, and audience research to name but a few. Some critics suggest that post-structuralism is distinct from post-modernism despite both emphasizing a common cultural and subjective relativism in their analyses of the subject of discourse that makes all “meaning” relative to one's cultural immersion and status or individually held beliefs. Other critics note that post-structuralism signals a “loss of nerve” in contemporary thought, opting for the interminable torment of relativism wherein one never “gets the whole story” because all truths and meanings are “half full,” always partial to cultural constructions and/or subjective interpretation. Whatever the criticism, it is undeniable that post-structuralism has always retained what Barthes, at his 1977 inauguration to the chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France, called “a certain individual labor, the adventure of a certain subject” (Barthes 1999, 471, emphasis added).

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