an> . In the lecture Derrida embraces this decentred universe of free play as liberating, just as Barthes in The Death of the Author celebrates the demise of the author as ushering in an era of joyous freedom. The consequences of this new decentred universe are impossible to predict, but we must endeavour not to be among those who ... turn their eyes away in the face of the as yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself [8, p.154]. This powerful, quasi-religious appeal to us not to turn our eyes away from the light is typical of the often apocalyptic tone of post-structuralist writing. If we have the courage, the implication is, we will enter this new Nietzschean universe, where there are no guaranteed facts, only interpretations, none of which has the stamp of authority upon it, since there is no longer any authorative centre to which to appeal for validation of our intepretations [1, p.64].
In a 1976 lecture series, Foucault briefly summarized the general impetus of the post-structuralist movement:
... For the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and local critiques, the facts were also revealing something ... beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of subjugated knowledges [6, p.6-7].
1.2 The meaning of post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a way of thinking which originated in French intellectual circles, but which has become something of a fashion in English-speaking countries as well. The post-structuralist point of view applies to nearly all areas of human activity. Among other thing it generates quite definite views about the nature of art, history, and the human individual, views which agree perfectly with the so-called postmodern sensibility: the past is dead; the future is closed; the present is fragmented into an indefinite number of monadic language-games; science, politics and religion as collective norms have lost their meaning; people deal with things as external appearances to which they are free to attach any meanings they please.structuralism was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was1968. Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to subvert the structures of language. Nobody, at least, was likely to beat you over the head for doing so. The student movement was flushed off the streets and driven underground into discourse. The only forms of political action now felt to be acceptable were of a local, diffused, strategic kind: work with prisoners and other marginalized social groups, particular projects in culture and education. The women's movement, hostile to the classical forms of left-wing organization, developed libertarian, decentred alternatives and in some quarters rejected systematic theory as male. For many post-structuralists, the worst error was to believe that such local projects and particular engagements should be brought together within an overall understanding of the working of monopoly capitalism, which could only be as oppressively total as the very system it opposed. Power was everywhere, a fluid, quicksilver force which seeped through every pore of society, but it did not have a centre any more than did the literary text. The system as a whole could not be combated, because there was in fact no system as a whole . You could thus intervene in social and political life at any point you liked. It was not entirely clear how one knew that there was no system as a whole, if general concepts were taboo; nor was it clear that such a viewpoint was as viable in other parts of the world as it was in Paris [5, p. 123-124]. structuralism is a practice of critical analysis. It focuses on the intrinsic uncertainty in our various systems of expression, beginning with language. Post-structuralism features a critique of the assumption of meaning in language when meaning is no longer di...
