Poststructuralism is a set of theoretical interruptions of the totalities erected by Structuralism, a systematic avoidance and attack on all forms of essentialism, a fragmentation of philosophy, a celebration of uncertainty, discontinuity, and ambiguity. It is also a positive articulation of... [more]

Poststructuralism is a set of theoretical interruptions of the totalities erected by Structuralism, a systematic avoidance and attack on all forms of essentialism, a fragmentation of philosophy, a celebration of uncertainty, discontinuity, and ambiguity. It is also a positive articulation of open systems, of possible relations between diverse discourses, of difference itself as an ultimate and irreducible element in all life, language, and thought. The movement began in the late '60s in France, engendered primarily by the work of Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and Deleuze. The possibility of a closed, self-consistent system of culture, language, or thought is persistently denied. Lyotard argues against the possibility of a single master narrative encompassing contemporary society's themes; society is a set of divergent discourses and practices that cannot be unified or reconciled, but must relate to each other through their differences or 'differends'. Derrida unravels philosophical and literary texts by repeating their oppositions to the point of collapse. Foucault conceives of social power as functioning from the bottom up through a set of dispersed 'micro-powers', discarding any notion of a power that emanates from a central agency. Deleuze does many different things; above all he conceptualizes difference as a kind of intensive engine or machine working at the center of ideas and things, developing internal differences into divergent but resonating series of events. Poststructuralism, then, is less a single school of thought than a set of different theoretical attempts to think without closing or totalizing what is thought, and at the same time an analysis of society that emphasizes the impossibility of such closure. [show less]