Post-structuralism in France

The Ministry of Education of Republic of Belarus

Yanka Kupala State University of Grodno

Philological faculty

Linguistic and cross-cultural communication department

Essay

Post-structuralism in France

Performed:

student of the philological faculty,

4^th year, group 493,

Natalia Raiko

Grodno 2011

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 POST-STRUCTURALISM: EMERGENCE, MEANING, COMPARISON WITH STRUCTURALISM

1.1 The emergence of post-structuralism

1.2 The meaning of post-structuralism

1.3 Theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism

CHAPTER 2 MAJOR WORKS AND CONCEPTS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM

2.1 Derrida’s Deconstruction

2.2 Roland Barthes — `The Death of the Author'

2.3 Michel Foucault and post-structuralism

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

The end of the late 1960s was the period of disappointment, liberation and political anxiety in France. At this time a new philosophical movement emerged in French intellectual circles. It was post-structuralism. Post-structuralism originated as a reaction against structuralism. It generates the view that there is no system as a whole. Post-structuralism is a practice of critical analysis. It focuses on the peculiar uncertainty in our various systems of expression, beginning with language. In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry and, without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.), which are therefore never authoritative, and promise no consistency.

The aim of the essay is to discover the meaning and the main concepts of post-structuralism.

According to the aim, the essay has the following tasks:

1) to find out what post-structuralism is;

2) to describe the peculiarities of post-structuralism;

3) to compare post-structuralism with structuralism;

4) to study the key figures of post-structuralism and their theories.

The object of the essay is the post-structuralist movement in France.

The subject of the essay is the peculiarities of post-structuralism.

The following methods of research were used in the essay: the method of comparison, the method of analysis, the method of information classification and systematization, the inductive method, the method of text interpretation.

This essay consists of introduction, two chapters, conclusion and bibliography. In the first chapter we get information about the emergence, meaning and peculiarities of post-structuralism. Besides, some theoretical differences between post-structuralism and structuralism become clear. In the second chapter we pay attention to the key figures of post-structuralism and the main concepts of their theories.

CHAPTER 1. POST-STRUCTURALISM: EMERGENCE, MEANING, COMPARISON WITH STRUCTURALISM

1.1 The emergence of post-structuralism

Post-structuralism is a late-twentieth-century development in philosophy and literary theory, particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida and his followers. It originated as a reaction against structuralism, which first emerged in Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on linguistics. By the 1950s structuralism had been adapted in anthropology (Lйvi-Strauss), psychoanalysis (Lacan) and literary theory (Barthes), and there were hopes that it could provide the framework for rigorous accounts in all areas of the human sciences [3, p.828].

Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as an antinomian movement critiquing structuralism. The period was marked by political anxiety, as students and workers alike rebelled against the state in May 1968, nearly causing the downfall of the French government. At the same time, however, the support of the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the USSR contributed to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. As a result, there was increased interest in alternative radical philosophies, including feminism, western Marxism, anarchism, phenomenology, and nihilism. These disparate perspectives were all linked by being critical of dominant Western philosophy and culture. Post-structuralism offered a means of justifying these criticisms, by exposing the underlying assumptions of many Western norms.

Decisive for the emergence of post-structuralism was, undoubtedly, the rediscovery of Nietzsche’s writings by a group of French thinkers, along with their structuralist readings of Freud and Marx. Where Marx was seen to play out the theme of power in his work, and Freud gave a conceptual priority to the notion of desire, Nietzsche was read as a philosopher who did not prioritize or subordinate one concept over the other. His philosophy offered a way forward that combined an examination of both power and desire.

Nietzsche’s philosophy offered a critique of truth and an emphasis upon the plurality of interpretation; it stressed the idea of style and the way in which style is central both philosophically and aesthetically in overcoming oneself in a process of perpetual self-becoming; and it emphasized relations of power and knowledge through the concept of the `will to power' and its manifestations as will to truth and will to knowledge. The French post-structuralist adopted these themes experimented with them in novel ways [10, p.18].

Two key figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes. Although Barthes was originally a structuralist, during the 1960s he increasingly favored post-structuralist views. In 1968, Barthes published `The Death of the Author' in which he announced a metaphorical event: the `death' of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings, and that the author was not the prime source of the work’s semantic content. The `Death of the Author', Barthes maintained, was the `Birth of the Reader', as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text.

The second key figure in the development of post-structuralism in the late 1960s is the philosopher Jacques Derrida. Indeed, the starting point of post-structuralism may be taken as his 1966 lecture `Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences'. In this paper Derrida sees in modern times a particular intellectual `even' which constitutes a radical break from past ways of thought, loosely associating this break with the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger and the psychoanalysis of Freud. The event concerns the `decentring' of our intellectual universe. Prior to this event the existence of a norm or centre in all things was taken for granted: thus `man', as the Renaissance slogan had it, was the measure of all other things in the universe: white Western norms of dress, behaviour, architecture, intellectual outlook, and so on, provided a firm centre against which deviations, aberrations, variations could be detected and identified as `Other' and marginal. In the twentieth century, however, these centres were destroyed or eroded; sometimes this was caused by historical events — such as the way the First World War destroyed the illusion of steady material progress, or the way the Holocaust destroyed the notion of Europe as the source and centre of human civilisation; sometimes it happened because of scientific discoveries — such as the way the notion of relativity destroyed the ideas of time and space as fixed and central absolutes; and sometimes, finally, it was caused by intellectual or artistic revolutions — such as the way modernism in the arts in the first thirty years of the century rejected such central absolutes as harmony in music, chronological sequence in narrative, and the representation of the visual world in art [1, p.64].

In the resulting universe there are no absolutes or fixed points, so that the universe we live in is `decentred' or inherently relativistic. Instead of movement or deviation from a known centre, all we have is `play'. 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.

Post-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].

Post-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 distinguished by a shared social agreement. Post-structuralism thus clarifies the function of choice in human action. It asserts that the author of a classic literary novel loses authority and centrality to the equally valid perspectives of the reader. As such, the novel is no longer a self-contained, predestined narrative constructed by a god-like author, but rather is a multidimensional production in which the reader plays the critically active role in determining meaning.

Post-structuralism serves as a way to identify the ethical and cultural choices that we make when we move from uncertainty to certainty in our efforts to understand and shape our world.

Post-structuralism is importantly different from postmodernism, although the two are often considered one and the same by the general subject. Although there are certain areas of overlap, thinkers from one school almost never identify themselves with the other school of thought. Postmodernism importantly seeks to identify a contemporary state of the world, the period that is following the modernist period. Postmodernism seeks to identify a certain juncture, and to work within the new period. Post-structuralism, on the other hand, can be seen as a more explicitly critical view, aiming to deconstruct ideas of essentialism in various disciplines to allow for a more accurate discourse.

In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry and, without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.), which are therefore never authoritative, and promise no consistency. A reader’s culture and society, then, share at least an equal part in the interpretation of a piece to the cultural and social circumstances of the author.

Some of the key assumptions underlying post-structuralism include [13]:

1. The concept of `self' as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct, and an individual rather comprises conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc). The interpretation of meaning of a text is therefore dependent on a reader’s own personal concept of self.

2. An author’s intended meaning (although the author’s own identity as a stable `self' with a single, discernible `intent' is also a fictional construct) is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives, and a literary text (or, indeed, any situation where a subject perceives a sign) has no single purpose, meaning or existence.

3. It is necessary to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multi-faceted interpretation of a text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another.

1.3 Theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism

The development of structuralism and post-structuralism in France in the 1950s and 1960s and rapid global transmission of books and ideas contributed to the development of an interdisciplinary mode of theory that became prevalent in the humanities. Structuralism is often associated with the French anthropologist Claude Lйvi-Strauss, whose studies of myth, culture, and language discerned a binary structure in myth, for example, between nature and culture or the raw and the cooked. For Lйvi-Strauss, culture was articulated into systems that could be described with the precision and force of a science.

Structuralism spread through the human sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, moving from Lйvi-Strauss's anthropology and study of myth, to structuralist theories of language (often combined with semiotics), to structuralist Marxism that produced structuralist accounts of the capitalist economy (Louis Althusser) and state (Nicos Poulantzas).

The human sciences were conceptualized by structuralists as self-contained systems with their own grammar, rules, and structuring binary oppositions. Texts were seen as structured networks of signs determined not by what they referred to so much as through their differential relation to other signs. Structuralism understood that the world was formed in the system of objects known to a culture, and that this world of objects corresponded to the social relations with which a people made their living in the world. Thus, structuralism introduced a kind of valid relativism — the world is formed by a culture, and the truth of the subject-object relation is given in the practical life of that culture.

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.

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 (e.g. 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.

Post-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.

Structuralists 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.

The 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.

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.

2. 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.

Post-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 writing fixes on some `material' aspect of language, such as a metaphor used by a writer, or the etymology of a word. Overall it seems to aim for an engaged warmth rather than detached coolness.

3. Attitude to language. Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we do not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium. All the same, it decides to live with that fact and continue to use language to think and perceive with. After all, language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realising our dependence upon it need not induce intellectual despair.

By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist in insisting upon the consequences of the view that, in effect, reality itself is textual. Post-structuralism develops what threaten to become terminal anxieties about the possibility of achieving any knowledge through language. The verbal sign, in its view, is constantly floating free of the concept it is supposed to designate. Thus, the post-structuralist's way of speaking about language involves a rather obsessive imagery based on liquids — signs float free of what they designate, meanings are fluid, and subject to constant `slippage' or `spillage'. This linguistic liquid, slopping about and swilling over unpredictably, defies our attempts to carry signification carefully from `giver' to `receive'' in the containers we call words. We are not fully in control of the medium of language, so meanings cannot be planted in set places, like somebody planting a row of potato seeds; they can only be randomly scattered or `disseminated', like the planter walking along and scattering seed with broad sweeps of the arm, so that much of it lands unpredictably or drifts in the wind.

Likewise, the meanings words have can never be guaranteed one hundred per cent pure. Thus, words are always `contaminated' by their opposites — you can’t define night without reference to day, or good without reference to evil. Or else they are interfered with by their own history, so that obsolete senses retain a troublesome and ghostly presence within present-day usage, and are likely to materialise just when we thought it was safe to use them. Thus, a seemingly innocent word like `guest', is etymologically cognate with `hostis', which means an enemy or a stranger, thereby inadvertently manifesting the always potentially unwelcome status of the guest.

Likewise, the long-dormant metaphorical bases of words are often reactiviated by their use in philosophy or literature and then interfere with literal sense, or with the stating of single meanings. Linguistic anxiety, then, is a keynote of the post-structuralist outlook.

4. Project. Here `project' means the fundamental aims of each movement, what it is they want to persuade us of. Structuralism, firstly, questions our way of structuring and categorising reality, and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorisation, but it believes that we can thereby attain a more reliable view of things.

Post-structuralism is much more fundamental: it distrusts the very notion of reason, and the idea of the human being as an independent entity, preferring the notion of the `dissolved' or `constructed' subject, whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces — that is, not an essence at all, merely a `tissue of textualities'. Thus, its torch of scepticism burns away the intellectual ground on which the Western civilisation is built.

So, we can draw a conclusion that post-structuralism is a late 20^th century movement in philosophy and literary criticism, which generally defines itself in its opposition to structuralism. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s, a period of political disorder, rebellions and disappointment with traditional values, accompanied by a revival of interest in feminism, Western Marxism, phenomenology and nihilism. Two main figures in the early post-structuralist movement were Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes.

The focus of post-structuralism is on the inherent 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 distinguished by a shared social agreement. Post-structuralism thus clarifies the function of choice in human action.

Post-structuralism offers a study of how knowledge is produced and a critique of structuralism. It doesn’t approve of the study of underlying structures. To understand an object (e.g. 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.

From the point of view of textual analysis post-structuralism doesn’t focus on the author, but on the reader. The reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. And without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.), which are therefore never authoritative, and promise no consistency.

There are some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism:

1. Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics. It inherits this confidently scientific outlook: it too believes in method, system, and reason as being able to establish reliable truths. Post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy. It inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it. It regards any confidence in the scientific method as naive, and proclaims the idea that we can’t know anything for certain.

2. Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation: it aims for a detached, `scientific coolness' of tone. Post-structuralist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. It seems to aim for an engaged warmth rather than detached coolness.

3. Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we do not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium. Post-structuralism argues that reality itself is textual. People are not fully in control of the medium of language, so meanings cannot be planted in set places. That’s why linguistic anxiety is a keynote of the post-structuralist outlook.

4. Structuralism questions our way of structuring and categorising reality, and inspires us to break free of habitual modes of categorisation, but it believes that we can thereby attain a more reliable view of things. Post-structuralism distrusts the very notion of reason, and the idea of the human being as an independent entity, preferring the notion of the `constructed' subject, whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces.

post structuralism derrida barthes foucault

CHAPTER 2. MAJOR WORKS AND CONCEPTS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM

2.1. Derrida’s Deconstruction

Jacques Derrida is a central figure in the development of post-structuralism. He believed that at the root of Western philosophical thought is a fundamental distinction between speech (logos) and writing. Speech is privileged as the expression of what is immediate and present, the source, accordingly, of what is real, true and certain. Writing, on the other hand, is derogated as an inferior imitation of speech, the residue of speech that is no longer present and, therefore, the locus of appearance, deceptions and uncertainty. Derrida finds the distinction pervading Western philosophy and regards it as not just a preference for one form of communication over another but the basis for the entire set of hierarchical oppositions that characterize philosophical thought. Speech offers presence, truth, reality, whereas writing, a derivative presentation employed in the absence of living speech, inevitably misleads us into accepting illusions.

Derrida’s critiques of the speech/writing opposition — and of all the hierarchical oppositions that attend it — proceed by what he calls the method of `deconstruction'. This is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how such oppositions are contradicted by the very effort to formulate and employ them [3, p.829−830].

In his book `Of Grammatology' (1967) Jacques Derrida introduced the term `deconstruction', when discussing the implications of understanding language as writing rather than speech. In describing deconstruction, Derrida observed that `there is nothing outside the text'. That is to say, all of the references used to interpret a text are themselves texts, even the `text' of reality as a reader knows it. There is no truly objective, non-textual reference from which interpretation can begin. Deconstruction, then, can be described as an effort to understand a text through its relationships to various contexts.

Derrida’s method consisted in demonstrating all the forms and varieties of this originary complexity, and their multiple consequences in many fields. His way of achieving this was by conducting thorough, careful, sensitive, and yet transformational readings of philosophical and literary texts, with an ear to what in those texts runs counter to their apparent systematicity (structural unity) or intended sense (authorial genesis). By demonstrating the aporias and ellipses of thought, Derrida hoped to show the infinitely subtle ways that this originary complexity, which by definition cannot ever be completely known, works its structuring and destructuring effects.

Deconstruction denotes the pursuing the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the supposed contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is founded. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, literary analysis, or other fields. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point.

Derrida initially resisted granting to his approach the overarching name `deconstruction', on the grounds that it was an exact technical term that could not be used to characterize his work generally. Nevertheless, he eventually accepted that the term had come into common use to refer to his textual approach, and Derrida himself increasingly began to use the term in this more general way.

So, the main propositions of Derrida’s Deconstruction are [12]:

1. A text can be read as something quite different from what it appears to be saying. In short a text may possess so many different meanings that it cannot have a meaning (i.e. there is no guaranteed essential meaning to a text).

2. The priority since the time of Plato was given to speech over writing, as it was believed that there is a gap in writing, which speech does not possess. But Derrida’s theory argued that both speech and writing are lacking in `presence'. In short previously the meaning conveyed by (or signified by) speech was considered as instable and writing was considered to have a fix stable meaning. But Derrida’s theory that a text can’t have a meaning, stressed that writing is equally unstable.

3. Derrida’s theory suggested that there can’t be `binary opposition' in a language system or any code. As Derrida believed that a text does not have a single meaning of any kind and as there is only the text and no meaning, then it cannot have a centre, to which there can exist a binary opposition. Hence, he discarded presence of any binary opposition in a text. Moreover, he has mentioned that in the place of binary opposition there exist `disseminations', the various meanings spread over one another and hence betray any center.

4. Derrida proposed the concept of `diffйrance', which he used to oppose `logocentrism'. In French language `differer' means to `postpone, to delay' and also it means `to differ or be different from'. The word itself illustrates Derrida’s point that writing doesn’t copy speech. Thus meaning is continuously and endlessly postponed as each word leads us on to yet another word in the system of signification. So, Derrida sees a text as an endless sequence of signifiers, which has no ultimate signifier.

2.2 Roland Barthes — `The Death of the Author'

Barthes was a prominent post-structuralist who believed that there are two orders of signification: iconic and connotative. According to him, the idea of second-order signification is a myth. In myth there are two semiological systems, one of which is staggered in relation to the other: a linguistic system, the language, which Barthes calls language-object, because it is the language which myth gets hold of in order to build its own system; and myth itself, which Barthes calls metalanguage, because it is a second language in which one speaks about the first. When he reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only as this term lends itself to myth. This is why the semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures: what he retains from them is the fact that they are both signs and they constitute a language-object. He believes that a sign has a signifier and a signified which are related to each other through an unending chain of signifiers because there is not one signifier for a signified but many.

In 1968 Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay `The Death of the Author'. Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author’s mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible.

In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author’s identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author’s work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive `explanation' of the text. Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny. Each piece of writing contains multiple layers and meanings. In a well-known quotation, Barthes draws an analogy between text and textiles, declaring that a `text is a tissue (or fabric) of quotations', drawn from `innumerable centers of culture', rather than from one, individual experience. The essential meaning of a work depends on the impressions of the reader, rather than the `passions' or `tastes' of the writer; a text’s unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination, or its audience.

Barthes, in his essay, `The Death of The Author', states: «…writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body of writing» [8, p.120].

Like all the post-structuralists and the Deconstructionists, Barthes gives importance to the context of which the text is a product. At the end of his essay, `The Death of The Author', he says: «…it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author» [8, p.123].

The Author is always in the past of the text; whereas the Writer is simultaneous with it. Writing always occurs now, in the act of reading it, enunciating it, unpacking its structure. There is no single theological meaning but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings blend and clash. Assigning the text an author is equal to imposing a limit on this mesh. In the multiplicity of writing — everything is to be disentangled rather than deciphered. The structure is to be followed at every point, rather than reduced to a single angle. The unity of a text is in its destination — the reader; though the reader too is inscribed, not personal. Hence, the birth of reader begins with the death of the author.

Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. `The author' is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of their original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world presents us with a figure Barthes calls the `scriptor', whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which we must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer’s biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an `author-God' to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader, because according to Barthes the death of the author is the birth of the reader.

2.3 Michel Foucault and post-structuralism

Michel Foucault (1926;1984) is a famous French philosopher who is known as one of the founders of post-structuralism. Foucault was an active member of French Communist Party in the early 1950's but his disillusionment with Marxism directed him to form new theories. Foucault is well known for his critiques of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine and the prison system and also for his ideas on the history of sexuality. Foucault analyzed power relations in different social institutions and criticized enslaving discourses. Although Foucault said that he never intended to create a discourse by his post-structuralist approach, we can claim that together with his friends like Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, etc., he established his own school of thought.

With the emergence of post-structuralism, we see a shift from ideology to discourse in social theory. There are two main tendencies in post-structuralism: textuality and discursivity. Textuality refers to a movement within literary, cultural theory and in philosophy emphasizing the revaluation and revalorization of text as text. Textual researches focus on language as a producer of meaning rather than a pale reflection of some prior reality (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, etc). Jacques Derrida even rejects such things as summary and translation and thinks that there are only other texts. In accordance with textuality wave, historical legal and medical records are analyzed as producers of their own right rather than a pale reflection of some prior reality. Discursivity on the other hand, has an area of research much broader than textual analyses. Foucault’s discourse contains all traditions, norms, rules, texts, symbols, words and expressions where hierarchical power relations could be found. Discursivity unlike textuality, not only deals with the `text', but also with the `context'. Discursive researches focus on the question of `how' rather than `why'. They do not look for causal explanations but instead, they try to understand the working of an incredibly complex mechanism that creates subordinations and produces hierarchical power relations. Foucault analyzes different institutions (prison, clinic, hospital, etc.) and other discursive unities (book, traditions, genre or discipline) to detect power relations.

According to Michel Foucault, the historical social reality should be given consideration before and beyond the investigation of the closed linguistic structure.

The evolution of language is functional. It is an outcome of a system of control producing a variety of subjects (as well as means for knowing them) for defined purposes and functions. Historical (diachronic) analysis is restored, but in relation to the evolution of functions within a (changing) system.

Presence is a sign of power. The presence of the Author function in Western social discourse is a sign of the power attributed to it and to its representation.

The questions to be asked are what allowed the Author to exist? What social function (and status) does it serve as an institution? What are the conditions in which these functions are realized? How does it contribute to and fit within society’s distribution of roles and power?

The Author’s name is an act. It performs within a certain social dynamic, and serves as a means of classification, grouping, exclusion and canonization of texts.

Foucault’s goal — analysis of the author’s function, the way in which it is transferred, circulated, attributed, appropriated and operates within a variety of types of discourses.

The subject should not be abandoned but reconsidered: understood in its functions, intervention, and system of dependencies.

Michel Foucault marks out the following characteristics of the function/discourse [2]:

1. Object of appropriation. Originally — discourse (text) was an action, a gesture, not a thing. Since the end of the 18th century it has been caught within the economic structures of property, ownership, copyrights. It is tied to legal and institutional systems that regulate and determine the realm of discourse.

2. The author function is not universal or constant. For instance, in the Middle Ages it served to guaranty validity of scientific writings, whereas today an agreed upon system of conventions provides validation for a scientific text. While in literary discourse meaning depends on the attribution of the text to an author, a dependence which only evolved and crystallized in recent time.

3. The function is not formed spontaneously, but is rather constructed through a complex operation and a defined set of procedures, based on similarity in quality, style, ideology and range of time. It evolves out of and confirms the assumption of unity.

4. The text bears signs referring to the author (vs. speaker), such as personal pronouns or adverbs of time and place. These produce a multiplicity of positions (in time and place) and of points of view, a plurality of egos/ subjective positions characteristic of the Author function.

Michel Foucault is one of the most important names that made a contribution to social sciences in 20^th century. Foucault’s method of binary oppositions and discourse analysis can be used by different ideological movements, researches. Marxists have chance to revise their theory and make the discursive analysis of the capitalist discourse. Discriminated social groups have chance to criticize the official ideology by looking at the sovereign discourse that works in their disadvantage. Foucault opened a lot of new in social sciences, by creating a very strong and valid method for social theory.

So, the key figures of post-structuralist movement in the late 1960s were French philosophers Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. In his book `Of Grammatology' (1967) Jacques Derrida introduced the term `deconstruction', when discussing the implications of understanding language as writing rather than speech. Deconstruction is the process of showing, through close textual and conceptual analysis, how such oppositions are contradicted by the very effort to formulate and employ them. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point.

In 1968 Roland Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay `The Death of the Author'. In his essay, Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author’s identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author’s work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive `explanation' of the text. Readers must thus separate a literary work from its creator in order to liberate the text from interpretive tyranny. The unity of a text is in its destination — the reader; though the reader too is inscribed, not personal. Hence, the birth of reader begins with the death of the author.

Michel Foucault always insisted that he was not a post-structuralist critic but rather a genealogist. But a lot of scholars consider him to be one of the founders of post-structuralism. Foucault shows how discourses regulate what can be said, what can be thought, and what is considered true or correct. However, there were many other propositions that were neither true nor false but fell outside the discursive system altogether. Anyone who tried to think outside the system would not have been respected or accorded a voice in the conversation about bodies. Discourse is thus the medium through which power is expressed and people and practices are governed. Foucault also argued that `the history of thought' is a misnomer, as it implied a continuous evolution of ideas. Rather, he used the terms genealogy or archeology of knowledge, focusing on the breaks between one era’s discourse and another’s.

CONCLUSION

Post-structuralism is a late 20^th century movement in philosophy and literary criticism, which generally defines itself in its opposition to structuralism. Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s, a period of political disorder, rebellions and disappointment with traditional values, accompanied by a revival of interest in feminism, Western Marxism, phenomenology and nihilism.

Post-structuralism offers a study of how knowledge is produced and a critique of structuralism. It doesn’t approve of the study of underlying structures. To understand an object (e.g. 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.

From the view point of textual analysis post-structuralism doesn’t focus on the author, but on the reader. The reader replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. And without a central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.), which are therefore never authoritative, and promise no consistency.

There are some theoretical differences between structuralism and post-structuralism:

1. Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics. It inherits this confidently scientific outlook: it too believes in method, system, and reason as being able to establish reliable truths. Post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy. It inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it. It regards any confidence in the scientific method as naive, and proclaims the idea that we can’t know anything for certain.

2. Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation: it aims for a detached, `scientific coolness' of tone. Post-structuralist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. It seems to aim for an engaged warmth rather than detached coolness.

3. Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we do not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium. Post-structuralism argues that reality itself is textual. People are not fully in control of the medium of language, so meanings cannot be planted in set places. That’s why linguistic anxiety is a keynote of the post-structuralist outlook.