Poststructuralism

Today our goal is to situate Michel Foucault within the larger context of his critical
theory peers to better understand the necessity of reading his works. Our main focus
will be to define postmodern and post-structural. Post-modern originally comes out of
the framework of aesthetics (such as abstract expressionism or existentialism as well
as modern architecture) and critique of nineteenth-century sensibilities about the
rational subject. Thus, it was an artistic movement that sought to transform the
stable positions enacted by the artist in a privileged position of knowledgethat
privileged position somehow understood the human mind / spirit. Thus, embedded in
modernist art (and philosophy) is an idea of an archetype of humanity. Taken outside
the framework of art, "modernism" as a philosophical model imposes certain "truths"
of humanity onto history. It is up to the historian / philosopher / critic to expose those
truths and explain human development and societal interactions. The critique against
modernism (by those called "postmodernists") in part is based on a belief that it is
impossible to find "the truth" to society. Embedded in this critique, they point to
specific intellectual trends within existentialism, Marxism, Freudianism and semiotics.
Most specifically, it has been argued that postmodern critiques attack Marxist
economic models of class struggle and the underlying social structures that develop
human societies (i.e. base / superstructure model).
Post-structuralism fits within this framework because it levies an attack against the
hegemony of western philosophy, especially that rooted in Enlightenment ideals. In
leveling this attack, it operates as critical theorythat is, as a radical philosophy
seeking social change. According to on literary discussion of the distinction between
modernism and postmodernism in literature:
But--while postmodernism seems very much like modernism in these ways, it differs
from modernism in its attitude toward a lot of these trends. Modernism, for example,
tends to present a fragmented view of human subjectivity and history (think of The
Wasteland, for instance, or of Woolf's To the Lighthouse), but presents that
fragmentation as something tragic, something to be lamented and mourned as a loss.
Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity,
coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what
other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesn't lament the
idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. The
world is meaningless? Let's not pretend that art can make meaning then, let's just
play with nonsense.
(Mary Klages, lecture on Postmodernism1)
Since the ideas of modernism coincide with ideas about the Enlightenment subject (or
the earlier ideas of humanism found from the Renaissance on), the basic premise of
its critique is situated in concepts of knowledge and truth. Hence, theories of
knowledge from the modern period (i.e. late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries) noted
a trajectory of human knowledge and social development.
Thus, the postmodern aesthetic seeks to unravel that order, to establish the
unmeaning in meaning, to shunt to the side the concepts of the subject and the
individual embedded in teleological stories of "modernization." How does it do so and
where does Foucault fit into all of this?
Courtesy of: Prof. Ali Raza Fahad Dept. of English Govt Postgraduate College, Gojra

Post-structuralism is intertwined with postmodern thought and is one of many

intellectual traditions working to dismantle the metanarrative of Western
historiography. Both terms and attitudes can trace a general lineage back to France
and specifically to the uprisings in French society resulting in the student and labor
protests of May and the summer of 1968. Anyone sitting in this class today should at
least understand the basic intellectual starting point of post-structuralismthe
semiotics of Fernand de Saussure and the anthropology of Claude Lvi-Strauss. Both
were STRUCTURALISTS who articulated a "closed system" (HOH 298) that is
formulaicreadily understood by a viewer and readily unpacked and applied to other
societies. Even though both Saussure and Lvi-Strauss critiqued certain frameworks
of universalism, their systems for understanding human communities reinforce ideas
of some universal truth "out there." Even with Saussure's recognition that signs have
their meaning only through community agreement, there is an element of
essentialism because those signs are fixed and in many respects get their meanings
by that which they are not (negative value). Post-structuralists argue against such
reductionism, and argue that meaning is not inherent or necessarily rational. In fact,
meaning is embedded in instability. For p/s language is the force that creates and
maintains the world (now, going back to the class struggle talked about above, you
can see how this might trouble those who argue that there is some material base
which uphold the intangible elements of society). As a result, meaning exists only in a
plurality, and loses its hegemonic position established by the modernists. Hence,
we're back to the need to undermine the grand narratives of total history. According
to Mary Klages, "Totality, and stability, and order, Lyotard argues, are maintained in
modern societies through the means of "grand narratives" or "master narratives,"
which are stories a culture tells itself about its practices and beliefs. A "grand
narrative" in American culture might be the story that democracy is the most
enlightened (rational) form of government, and that democracy can and will lead to
universal human happiness. Every belief system or ideology has its grand narratives,
according to Lyotard; for Marxism, for instance, the "grand narrative" is the idea that
capitalism will collapse in on itself and a utopian socialist world will evolve. You might
think of grand narratives as a kind of meta-theory, or meta-ideology, that is, an
ideology that explains an ideology (as with Marxism); a story that is told to explain the
belief systems that exist."
While there are many critical theorists, such as Francois Lyotard mentioned above,
who work in the business of destabilizing the grand narrative, Foucault is the one most
often associated with historians (see for example, HOH 301). In part this is because
the body of Foucault's work resonates with the concerns historians have traditionally
held of unraveling the power systems at work in post-IR society. By using Foucault's
roadmap of the "fissures" of society, historians have been able to articulate the
disjunctures (i.e. paradigm shifts from one episteme to another) present in the
transition from pre-modern to modern and CONSEQUENTLY to problematize the very
notion and understanding of modernity itself.
Discourse is perhaps most nicely defined in Joan Scott's "Deconstructing Equalityversus-Difference."2 In this article, Scott first goes through the major theoretical terms
(deconstruction, language, difference, discourse) defining their use by various
Courtesy of: Prof. Ali Raza Fahad Dept. of English Govt Postgraduate College, Gojra

theorists, then explores those theories through the lens of the Sears Case regarding
women's equal employment opportunities. She states:
a discourse is not a language or a text but a historically, socially, and institutionally
specific structure of statements, terms, categories, and beliefs. Foucault suggests that
the elaboration of meaning involves conflict and power, that meanings are locally
contested within discursive 'fields of force,' that (at least since the Enlightenment) the
power to control a particular field resides in claims to (scientific) knowledge embodied
not only in writing but also in disciplinary and professional organizations, in
institutions (hospitals, prisons, schools, factories), and in social relationships
(doctor/patient, teacher/students, employer/worker, parent/child, husband/wife).
Discourse is thus contained or expressed in organizations and institutions as well as in
words; all of these constitute texts or documents to be read (Scott 35).
The question may remain in some minds: "what does this have to do with
history?" The answer is easy for those who accept theory's position within historical
thinking. It is important to recognize that Foucault's work, like most work in critical
theory, is not constrained by one discipline, but is profoundly, inherently
interdisciplinary. This can be disconcerting for historians used to the traditional "grand
narrative." How can someone who writes about deviant psychological behavior have
any relevance to history? There is, believe it or not, a rather large sub-field called
"psycho-history" that explores psychological issues in history.
Michel Foucault postulated numerous ways to re-think and resituate the past that
destabilize our preconceived concepts of boundaries and "change over time." His
History of Sexuality, volume 1 clearly articulates HOW we can use his particular
concepts of "the gaze", "power" and the "repressive hypothesis" to better understand
the particular society that existed in nineteenth-century Europe. He states that some
call it "bourgeois society" (p. ); whatever we choose to call it, he argues, there were
mechanisms they put in place to assert their own positions--a hygienic world that
controlled populations--and consequently established an empire at the fin de siecle. In
other words, the intersection of a certain kind of discourse (scientific--that lent itself to
a kind of "truth is out there" phenomenon) with economic development put in motion
a society radically different from the one preceding it (Classiscal Age). Historians have
taken Foucault's theories as methods for their own examination of the past--the field
increasingly explored the past on its own terms and not in some teleological fashion.
Historians can thank Foucault in large part for this remapping of the past. Additionally,
ideas of self-discipline and the gaze--of being conscious that we are always under
surveillance even in the confines of our own privacy--shapes how we interact with
others and how we develop policies.
In the end, we study Foucault because to not study Foucault is to ignore some of the
basic foundational components of cultural history. If we are to truly understand the
cultural umbrella, if we are to be responsible historians, we need to accept
poststructuralism as transformative in our perceptions of the problems of modernity,
the problems of the whiggish interpretation of the past, the problems of the terminal
ends of power arguing that they are power itself. You need at least to be conscious of
philosophies that posit radical transformation both of society and the historical
method if you are going to be able to substantiate your own methodological positions.
Courtesy of: Prof. Ali Raza Fahad Dept. of English Govt Postgraduate College, Gojra

Major works / authors we will not cover:

Jacques Derrida (deconstruction)(1930-2004)Of Grammatology (1967)in this
work, Derrida put forth the idea of difference (this is not difference, btw). Diffrance
was built from rereading Saussure's Course in General Linguistics and locating the
connections that Saussure unconsciously made between spoken and written
language. While spoken language was the focus of Saussure's work, written language
also played a pivotal role in establishing meaning. He plays off of Saussure's idea of
Diffrence and shows Saussure's problems very literally on the written page. Both are
pronounced exactly the same way, but can only be truly distinguished through the
written word. We can only know the meaning of that word in contextthus the
meaning is "deferred" until the entire syntagm (how we understand language) is
constructed. Derrida takes his syntagmatic discussion of the traces that each
syntagm holds to entire texts and argues that they bare traces of other texts whether
we consciously recognize them or not.
Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis)(1901-1981) Lacan put forth a new way of
understanding the human self, especially one's particular sex-role. In Lacanian
psychoanalysis, we are constituted as subjects through representation of ourselves
within an already extant system. Our unconscious, onto which we build our identities
and self-referential frameworks, closely resembles language, and language "is the
precondition for the act of becoming aware of oneself as a distinct entity" (Sarup 8).3

Courtesy of: Prof. Ali Raza Fahad Dept. of English Govt Postgraduate College, Gojra