In the labyrinth of poststructuralism
Poststructuralism is the name for a movement in philosophy that began in the 1960s. It remains an influence not only in philosophy, but also in a wider set of subjects, including literature, politics, art, cultural criticisms, history and sociology. This influence is controversial because poststructuralism is often seen as a dissenting position, for example, with respect to the sciences and to established moral values. The movement is best summed up by its component thinkers.
The first idea that allows for an answer to these points is that the limits of knowledge play an unavoidable role at its core. This is the common thread running through poststructuralism. It explains why structuralism had to be added to, since the structuralist project can be summed up as arriving at secure knowledge through the charting of differences within structures. According to poststructuralists, this security missed the troubling and productive roles of limits folded back into the structure. Knowledge cannot escape its limits: "It is not surrounded, but traversed by its limit, marked in its inside by the multiple furrows of its margin" So "limit" is not used in a specialist sense here, for example, in mathematical terms, or as the upper or lower limits of measurable quantities. Instead, it indicates relative security and stability within a given environment, where the boundaries are seen as less dependable than the centre. For poststructuralism, the core is not more reliable, significant and better known than its limits or outer boundaries. This is because the clear distinction of core and limit is not possible. The criticism of this distinction takes poststructuralism well beyond structuralist views, even though the former owes much to the latter. Structuralist knowledge is open to change when the observed structures change. However, despite this openness to change, in noting a repeated pattern of signs the structuralist scientist hopes to arrive at some secure understanding. For example, in charting the repeated patterns of daily life (wake–work–eat–sleep) we can begin to understand the relations between each element (their order and place). There could be limits to such patterns (sleep–sleep–play–sleep) but these would be exceptional moves away from a normal pattern. The idea is that knowledge should start with the norm and only then consider the exception. The norm implies a deviation in the definition of the exception. If there is an ethical and political side to this distinction, it is that truth and the good are in the norm, although many disagreements are possible as to what makes the norm.
Poststructuralism folds the limit back on to the core of knowledge and on to our settled understanding of the true and the good. It does this in a very radical way. That is, the limit is not compared with the core, or balanced with it, or given some kind of tempering role, in the sense, for example, of a majority listening to minorities. Rather, the claim is that the limit is the core.
What does this strange claim mean? It means that any settled form of knowledge or moral good is made by its limits and cannot be defined independently of them. It means also that any exclusion of these limits is impossible. Limits are the truth of the core and any truths that deny this are illusory or false. The truth of a population is where it is changing. The truth of a nation is at its borders. The truth of the mind is in its limit cases. But is the definition of a limit not dependent on the notion of a prior core? You only know that sleep–sleep–sleep–drink is deviant because of the dominance of wake–work–eat–sleep. No; the autonomous definition of the limit is the next most important common thread in poststructuralism. The limit is not defined in opposition to the core; it is a positive thing in its own right.
This definition is radical since it calls into question the role of traditional forms of knowledge in setting definitions. No poststructuralist defines the limit as something knowable (it would then merely become another core). Rather, each poststructuralist thinker defines the limit as a version of a pure difference, in the sense of something that defies identification. The exact terminology chosen for this difference varies greatly and is very controversial. We shall see that it also raises many serious problems. So, less controversially, the limit is an ungraspable thing that can only be approached through its function of disruption and change in the core. You cannot identify the limit, but you can trace its effects. Poststructuralists trace the effects of a limit defined as difference. Here, "difference" is not understood in the structuralist sense of difference between identifiable things, but in the sense of open variations (these are sometimes called processes of differentiation, at other times, pure differences). These effects are transformations, changes, revaluations. The work of the limit is to open up the core and to change our sense of its role as stable truth and value. What if life took on different patterns? What if our settled truths were otherwise? How can we make things different?
This definition of the limit as something open and ungraspable – except through its traces or expressions in more fixed forms of knowledge – leads to great variations between poststructuralists. They observe the effects in different places and follow different traces. They give different temporary and necessarily illusory characterizations of the limit.
Each of the great poststructuralist texts studied here gives a different account of the play of the limit at the core, but all share the definitions given above. Each text will have a chapter to itself where its main arguments and distinguishing features will be studied. Put simply, Derrida follows the play of the limit at the apparently more immediate and truthful core of language. Lyotard traces the effect of limit-events in language and sensation. Deleuze affirms the value of a productive limit between actual identities and virtual pure differences. Foucault traces the genealogy of the limit as the historical constitution of later tensions and problems. Kristeva follows the limit as an unconscious at work undoing and remaking linguistic structures and oppositions. Together, these works show poststructuralism as a thorough disruption of our secure sense of meaning and reference in language, of our understanding of our senses and of the arts, of our understanding of identity, of our sense of history and of its role in the present, and of our understanding of language as something free of the work of the unconscious.
Disruption should not be seen as a negative word. One aspect of poststructuralism is its power to resist and work against settled truths and oppositions. It can help in struggles against discrimination on the basis of sex or gender, against inclusions and exclusions on the basis of race, background, class or wealth. It guards against the sometimes overt, sometimes hidden, violence of established values such as an established morality, an artistic cannon or a fixed legal framework. We shall see that this does not mean that it denies them; rather, it works within them for the better.
In each of the great works to be read here, we find specific struggles and forms of resistance. Poststructuralist works cannot be abstract theoretical refl ections, since they can only show the work of the limits in the practical applications of core knowledge. They must take a given actual structure and deconstruct it, transform it, show its exclusions.
Thereby, they overturn assumptions about purity (in morals), about essences (in terms of race, gender and backgrounds), about values (in art and politics), about truth (in law and philosophy).
For poststructuralism, disruption must also be seen as a positive word. It is not only that there is a work against a settled core. It is rather that there is an affirmation of the power of the limit as a source of neverending production of new and worthwhile transformations and differences. Poststructuralism is not against this and for that – once and for all. It is for the affi rmation of an inexhaustible productive power of limits. It is for the resulting positive disruption of settled oppositions.
