Decentering (of Subject, of Structure)

Postmodernist or poststructuralist writers in general argue that political theory and other discourses have reified people as particular types of monads: rational, instrumental, self-centered, and autonomous agents. In the Enlightenment discourse, these rational instrumental beings choose their actions given the environments in which they find themselves. These rational beings are the agents fashioning the world around them and reacting to that environment in terms of their objects and desires. The agents are the subjects of history and explanation revolves around them.

Decentering the subject is a process of recognition that what separates the physical form of a person and that person as a subject of inquiry is the linguistic cover that constitutes discourse. Different discourses about people constitute them as different subjects. People define their own beings within these different discourses, as mothers, as consumers, as workers, as political activists. There is no reason to suppose that these different discourses are complementary; they may contain many contradictions belying the person as a rational coherent agent. Rather, agents are fashioned by the dominant discourses in different domains. Predicating power to individual agents is an example of the centering of people as subjects: we need to decenter the subject to see the way in which discourses dominate human lives.

[Page 165]Decentering does not have to be applied to subjects, however. Rationalist approaches recognize that there is an interrelationship between agents as subjects and the structures around them. Structuralists make the opposite error of centering attention on structure and reifying that to give it rationality and coherence. In the same way that we must understand agents as subjects of discourse, so we must understand structures. The way in which we see environments, social processes, and interactions as constraints on the actions of rational beings can also be subject to decentering. Seeing social structure in terms of class relationships, networks of families or work colleagues, or institutions as conventions and norms are all also specific discourses, and we can decenter structures to recognize that these processes are themselves contradictory and self-defeating. In that sense, we should not see power in a structural manner, but rather as a process of discourse that leads us and the world into ways of behaving that have no center or focal point of rationality.