> The sacrifice structuralism made was adherence to the law of identity , that is, in order to do theoretical work on the conception of a system, the system was abstracted from its materiality and reified into a self-identical object of mathematics. On this basis of identity, structuralism was able to perceive regularity in history, to talk of periods, influence, the impact of events on whole social structures, and so on and so forth.
Whereas structuralism had ambitions of attaining the status of a super science, which could arbitrate among competing truth claims and provide a foundational discipline, post-structuralism challenged any single discipline's claim to primary status and promoted more interdisciplinary modes of theory. Post-structuralism turned to history, politics, and an active and creative human subject, away from the more ahistorical, scientific, and objectivist modes of thought in structuralism. p align="justify"> Post-structuralism offers a study of how knowledge is produced and a critique of structuralist premises. It argues that because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures it is subject to biases and misinterpretations. To understand an object (eg one of the many meanings of a text), a post-structuralist approach argues, it is necessary to study both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.structuralists generally assert that post-structuralism is historical, and classify structuralism as descriptive. This terminology relates to Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between the views of historical (diachronic) and descriptive (synchronic) reading. From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze descriptive concepts. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, post-structuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the present. For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an inspection of cultural attitudes about madness.also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.structuralist view of an individual's coherent identity and singular free will are rejected by post-structuralists, who view the individual as incoherent, a mixture of various cultural constructs produced by organized power in a given society.
Peter Barry in his book Beginning theory: an introduction to literary and cultural theory proposes to list differences and distinctions between structuralism and post-structuralism under the four following headings [1, p.62-63]:
1. Origins. Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics. Linguistics is a discipline which has always been inherently confident about the possibility of establishing objective knowledge. It believes that if we observe accurately, collect data systematically, and make logical deductions then we can reach reliable conclusions about language and the world. Structuralism inherits this confidently scientific outlook: it too believes in method, system, and reason as being able to establish reliable truths. p align="justify"> By contrast, post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things. Philosophy is, so to speak, sceptical by nature and usually undercuts and questions commonsensical notions and assumptions. Its procedures often begin by calling into question what is usually taken for granted as simply the way things are. Post-structuralism inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it. It regards any confidence in the scientific method as naive, and even derives a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain that we can't know anything for certain, fully conscious of the irony and paradox which doing this entails. p align="justify">. Tone and style. Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation: it aims for a detached, scientific coolness of tone. Given its derivation from linguistic science, this is what we would expect. The style is neutral and anonymous, as is typical of scientific writing.structuralist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. Often the tone is urgent and euphoric, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may well contain puns and allusions, and often the central line of the argument is based on a pun or a word-play of some kind. Often deconstructive w...
