Collateral ideas swarm around trendy intellectual movements like ants around a drop of honey. In the case of Poststructuralism, word has it that we are nothing but products of discourse, condemned to be socio-linguistic constructs. One must be cautious of this... [more]

Collateral ideas swarm around trendy intellectual movements like ants around a drop of honey. In the case of Poststructuralism, word has it that we are nothing but products of discourse, condemned to be socio-linguistic constructs. One must be cautious of this ubiquitous word "discourse," however, for within Poststructuralism itself lies an idea that defies, or at least disturbs, this image of the discursive automaton: the idea of the event. Foucault has perhaps been inappropriately credited as the theorist who reduced us to static slaves to discourse, because in a sense he actually speaks of nothing but events; after all, discourse is nothing outside the moments in which it is enacted, and these very enactments cannot help but reconfigure discourse itself. Gilles Deleuze insists on this: structure is always immanent in an event, in that structure only exists through the events that create, transform, and engage it. Furthermore, an event always exceeds its conditions; it differs from whatever precedes it; a pre-existing form cannot define it. Michel de Certeau refuses to think of subjects as ideologically duped or mystified by insidious structures of discourse. According to de Certeau, every subject engages and exploits multiple systems of action and understanding; within the event itself, every subject combines and configures a complex aggregate of cultural practices and ideas. The other side of Poststructuralism needs to get its message out: one is not comprised and controlled by overarching systems of discourse, but created by events, the singular points of which one partakes in and contributes to. [show less]