poststructuralism

discourse

humanities

graduate school

Michel Foucault

is guilty of a kind of universalized aestheticization whereby 'truth' itself is finally reduced to one of the style effects of the discursive articulation.

As Habermas has already pointed out, in post-structuralism we have a kind of universalized aestheticization whereby 'truth' itself is finally reduced to one of the style effects of the discursive articulation (Habermas, 1985).

is problematic in that it is a convenient way of evading political questions such as vietnam, guatemala, and stalinism.

he called post-structuralism a convenient way of evading political questions such as Vietnam, Guatemala, and Stalinism.

is responsible for breaking epistemology and ontology down into a single concern.

One of the things post-structuralism did was to problematize the separation of ontology and epistemology as discourses and I inherit that breakdown' (Haraway 2000:78)

is grounded in a claim that consciousness is not the origin of the language we speak and the images we recognize, so much as the product of the meanings we learn and reproduce.

On the one hand, poststructuralists affirm, consciousness is not the origin of the language we speak and the images we recognize, so much as the product of the meanings we learn and reproduce. On the other hand, communication changes all the time, with or without intervention from us, and we can choose to intervene with a view to altering the meanings - which is to say the norms and values - our culture takes for granted. The question is just the one Humpty Dumpty poses: who is to be in control?

is grounded in the claim that the distinctions we make are not necessarily given by the world around us, but are instead produced by the symbolizing systems we learn.

Poststructuralism proposes that the distinctions we make are not necessarily given by the world around us, but are instead produced by the symbolizing systems we learn.

is grounded in the claim that our ideas are not the origin of the language we speak; rather, ideas are the effect of the meanings we learn and reproduce.

Are ideas the source of meaning, then? That was once the conventional view, but our ideas are not, poststructuralists believe, the origin of the language we speak. Indeed, the reverse is the case. Ideas are the effect of the meanings we learn and reproduce. We learned our idea of Humpty Dumpty (if we did) from nursery rhymes, Lewis Carroll, and John Tenniel, who illustrated the Alice books.

is the story of the way Saussure’s ideas (about meaning deriving from difference rather than representation) were taken up by later generations, especially in France, and particularly after the Second World War.

The simple inference that meaning is differential, not referential, has profound implications for our understanding of the relations between human beings and the world, and many of them remain controversial even now. The history of poststructuralism is the story of the way Saussure’s ideas were taken up by later generations, especially in France, and particularly after the Second World War, when the history of National Socialism - and of French collaboration with it - seemed to demand an explanation that existing theories of culture were unable to provide.

is grounded in the idea that language is not ours to possess, but always pre-exists us and comes from outside.

How can we decide which reading to settle for? Traditional criticism would say we should ask the author, and if the author is dead, as in this case, we should read biographies, diaries, or letters, until we can guess what the author might have intended. Poststructuralism, however, disagrees. If language is not ours to possess, but always pre-exists us and comes from outside, and if poems issue from language, not from the ideas which are language’s effect rather than its cause, there is no final answer to the question of what any particular example of language in action ultimately means.

poststructuralism, n.Memes

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