Study Notes: These notes are largely cribbed from other sources. Most sources are referenced at the bottom of the page.

Poststructuralism builds on the tenets of structuralism articulated by Levi Strauss - that meanings are derived from relations of difference, that these are largely subconscious, and that they form a structure - but emphasizes the gaps and ambiguities in the structure of meanings and questions the fixity of the relationship between the signifier and the signified.

Deconstruction

For Jacque Derrida linguistic meaning is determined by the “play” of differences between words. Derrida coined the term différance, meaning both a difference and an act of deferring. Because the meaning of a word is always a function of contrasts with the meanings of other words, and because the meanings of those words are in turn dependent on contrasts with the meanings of still other words, it follows that the meaning of a word is not something that is fully present to us; it is endlessly deferred in an infinitely long chain of meanings, each of which contains the “traces” of the meanings on which it depends.

The differences between words are often “binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and sensible, and form and meaning. To “deconstruct” a text is to explore the tensions and contradictions inherent in these hierarchical orderings.

In the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, society and culture are described as corrupting and oppressive forces that gradually develop out of an idyllic “state of nature”. For Rousseau, then, nature is prior to culture. Yet there is another sense in which culture is certainly prior to nature since what counts as “nature” or “natural” at any given historical moment will vary depending upon the culture of the time.

For Derrida, the most telling opposition is the one that treats writing as secondary to speech. According to this opposition, speech is a more authentic form of language, because in speech the ideas and intentions of the speaker are immediately “present” (spoken words directly express what the speaker “has in mind”), whereas in writing they are more remote or “absent” from the speaker and thus more liable to misunderstanding. As Derrida argues, however, spoken words function as linguistic signs only to the extent that they can be repeated in different contexts, in the absence of the speaker who originally utters them. Speech qualifies as language only to the extent that it has characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as “absence,” “difference” (from the original context of utterance), and the possibility of misunderstanding.

Derrida contends that the opposition between speech and writing is a manifestation of the “logocentrism” of Western culture — i.e., the general assumption that there is a realm of “truth” existing prior to and independent of its representation by linguistic signs. The logocentric conception of truth as existing outside language derives in turn from a deep-seated prejudice in Western philosophy. This is the tendency to conceive fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as presence, essence, identity, and origin — and in the process to ignore the crucial role of absence and difference.

Foucault

For Michel Foucault, the central question of poststructuralism is how knowledge can become possible under specific historical conditions. Under what circumstances can a discourse — existentialism, structuralism or practice theory — be received as correct, useful, intelligible? How does any one discourse become convincing and at what price?

I tried to explore scientific discourse not from the point of view of the individuals who are speaking, nor from the point of view of the formal structures of what they are saying, but from the point of view of the rules that come into play in the very existence of such discourse: what conditions did Linnaeus (or Petty, or Arnauld) have to fulfill, not to make his discourse coherent and true in general, but to give it, at the time when it was written and accepted, value and practical application as scientific discourse. (Foucault 1970:xiv).

There are unconscious, but shared rules that scientists from different disciplines converge on during a period. These common rules are a code, a language, an episteme. “It is these rules of formation, which were never formulated in their own right, but are to be found only in widely differing theories, concepts, and objects of study, that I have tried to reveal” (1970:xi).

Foucault suggests knowledge is embodied not only in writing but also in disciplinary and professional organizations, in institutions, and in social relationships. 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 (Joan Scott).

In a highly self-reflexive move, Foucault recognized that his link to structuralism was in part brought about by his having to place his own discourse within contemporary debate. Just as Linnaeus had to fulfill specific conditions to make his thought intelligible, Foucault also had to deploy current discursive practices to make his case. “It would hardly behoove me, of all people, to claim that my discourse is independent of conditions and rules of which I am very largely unaware, and which determine other work that is being done today” (Foucault 1970:xiv). In other words, he recognized that his writings too were shaped and framed in part by the episteme of his epoch, which is in large part a structuralist idea. He was, in this sense, caught in a structuralist framework.

https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=public_law_and_legal_theory