Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Poststructuralism · Acedra
Home
Explore
Philosophy
Poststructuralism
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
41 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:00
Hi, my name's Tom. Welcome back to my channel and to another episode of What the Theory, my ongoing series in which I provide accessible introductions to key theories in cultural studies and the wider humanities. Today, we're looking at poststructuralism. Poststructuralism's central thesis is that language (and all other forms of communicative system such as images and video) are less perfect at expressing our thoughts and ideas than we might initially want to think they
0:28
are. Rather than replicating our thoughts in the mind of a reader or viewer perfectly, most modes of communication are prone to misrepresenting us or to encouraging alternative interpretations of what we were trying to express when we first said, wrote or recorded something. Poststructuralism asks what this means for the practice of analyzing cultural texts and questions whether it is ever possible to arrive at a definitive interpretation of a given
1:02
film, book or other cultural text. Beyond this, it also asks whether, in a society in which much of our thinking about the world is done through language, it is ever possible to arrive at objective truth, or whether the implicit biases surrounding race, gender and other concepts present in our linguistic and other communicative systems might shape our understanding of the world too. Before we get going, if you have any thoughts or questions as we go along
1:33
then please do feel free to pop those down below in the comments and, if you're new around here and this seems like your kind of thing, please do consider subscribing and hitting that notification bell. Finally, if you really like what I do and would like to support me to make more videos, then I would be so grateful if you would check out my patreon page at patreon.com/tomnicholas. With that out of the way, however, let's crack on with Poststructuralism: What the Theory?
2:16
The first thing one likely notices about poststructuralism is that that, as with postmodernism or postcolonialism, the term itself implies a relationship with something called "structuralism". Now, if you'd like a complete overview of structuralism itself then I'd recommend checking out my video dedicated to that very topic. For today's purposes, however, it's enough to know that structuralism refers to a way of thinking about cultural texts
2:42
which prioritizes systematic inquiry. Drawing on the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, it asks us to view different forms of culture such as literature, film, theatre, visual arts and also culture in the all-encompassing sense as a kind of language system. It thus asks us to consider not only how an individual book, film, performance or artwork infers meaning on its own terms but also its reliance upon tropes and conventions prevalent throughout the
3:12
wider "language" of human culture. A structuralist analysis of Jordan Peele's Get Out, for instance, might focus on how it employs or subverts certain narrative devices present in other films. Does it, as Robert McKee would likely suggest, adhere to the "language" or perhaps "grammar" of Hollywood storytelling in having an 'inciting incident', a moment of 'crisis', a 'climax' and a 'resolution'? Furthermore, how does it employ or subvert the language of the wider horror
3:43
genre? Peele himself has been fairly open about borrowing certain conventions from The Shining, Halloween and North by Northwest. Structuralism foregrounds the presence of such shared conventions and tropes across multiple texts in order to gain a better understanding of the language of individual cultural forms, and perhaps human culture in its entirety. Neither narrative structure nor genre, however, are natural phenomena. Both are human creations. And so, too, is
4:17
language itself. Structuralist analysis is generally aware of this fact yet mostly decides not to question it too much, it holds that language (or, again, the "language" of film or literature etc) is all we have so we're best off just compiling the best understanding of it we can. Poststructuralism, however, does go that step further in encouraging us to consider whether the fact that language is a human creation might mean that, like any other human invention, it
4:45
might have certain flaws and biases. It encourages us to ask whether language (and, again, other forms of communication) might sometimes fail us and communicate something altogether different than what we initially intended. Furthermore, it asks us to consider whether those languages might be subject to many of the same ideological biases of, for example, gender, race and class as other human institutions. Let's start with the notion that language might be imperfect.
5:17
Peter Barry forwards an evocative example of how we might have experienced this in his book Beginning Theory in which he asks us to 'think of any slightly less straightforward language situation like writing to your bank, writing an essay, striking up a friendship with a stranger at a party, or sending a letter of condolence. In these cases, and many more, there is an almost universally felt anxiety that the language will express things we hadn't intended, or
5:46
convey the wrong impression or betray our ignorance, callousness or confusion. Even when we use a phrase like "if you see what I mean" or "in a manner of speaking" there is the same underlying sense that we are not really in control of the linguistic system'. Though, for the most part, language seems like a pretty good system of communicating, then, it as often leads to miscommunication as it does to a perfect articulation of the
6:14
thing we wanted to express. Furthermore, if you've ever found yourself trying to soothe over a personal or professional relationship after having had a letter, text or answerphone message interpreted differently to how it was intended, you'll likely have found yourself wrestling with the fact that language is a closed system and thus all you have at your disposal to explain your previous words is more words which are themselves open
6:43
to alternate interpretations. Such an anxiety about the imperfect nature of language is at the core of poststructuralism. And, just as did structuralism, it extends this view to the "languages" of art and culture. Perhaps the most famous text which develops this notion is Roland Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author in which he questions previous scholars' obsession with analyzing cultural texts with the goal of identifying what it was the
7:13
author intended it to mean. In such approaches, Barthes argues, 'the explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author, "confiding" in us'. Yet, if language is an imperfect communicator, Barthes continues by asking, is it ever possible to arrive at an understanding of a text that is 100% accurate to that intended by the
7:44
author? Furthermore, he asks, even if we could, would that be the most useful goal to aim for? For, most people who encounter a given text likely do not come to it with an extended knowledge of the author's life and artistic priorities. Thus, to try to look through the text to see the intentions of the author behind it ultimately involves ignoring the rich, meaningful possibilities of the text itself. Poststructuralism, then, is almost entirely disinterested in what an author
8:15
might have originally intended a text to mean. In fact, it's sceptical that any text has any objective or "final" meaning at all but, instead, is overflowing with possible interpretations. Therefore, as Terry Eagleton argues, 'the reader or critic shifts from the role of consumer to that of producer [of potential meanings of a text]. It is not exactly as though "anything goes" in interpretation, for Barthes is careful to remark that the work cannot be got to
8:47
mean anything at all; but literature is now less an object to which criticism must conform that a free space in which it can sport'. Poststructuralism encourages us not to pursue some kind of definitive meaning but to celebrate the many and multiple meanings that a given book, film, painting or other form of cultural text might invite. Now, in so doing, poststructuralism is often accused of failing to show enough deference to the text itself and as positioning the critic or scholar or
9:21
reader (you or I) as more important than the person or people who sweated to create that text in the first place. And there are no doubt examples of individuals doing both of these things. Nevertheless, a more sympathetic view would be that poststructuralism in fact returns our attention, which previously might have been obsessed with the life and opinions of the author behind the text, to the text in front of us itself and embraces the surface of meaning present within it.
9:53
This celebration of the text itself is perhaps best articulated by Jacques Derrida who famously declared in his 1967 book Of Grammatology that "il n'y a pas de hors-texte" which, though difficult to translate directly, translates roughly as either "there is nothing outside the text" or "there is no outside-text". In perhaps a further vindication of the imperfections of language, there exists a great deal of scholarly discussion surrounding what Derrida actually meant by this sentence
10:25
fragment. Even Michel Foucault has been accused of misinterpreting Derrida on this statement. Does he mean that, when critiquing a given book, film or artwork, that we should take into account nothing but the text in front of us? Or does he, in fact, mean that there is "nothing outside the text" in the sense that the text in front of us subsumes everything around it and thus we should take into account all possible contexts that might inform the
10:55
interpretation of it? Today, the consensus generally swings towards the latter understanding. For Derrida was interested in how the meaning a given text infers might be as reliant upon what is absent from it as much as what is present. See, as we explored in my video on structuralism, individual words only come to mean a certain thing because they do not mean something else. The term "high", for instance, doesn't mean all that much until we have the opposite concept, "low", to compare it
11:28
to. Derrida thus argued that any use of a given term always carries with it the "trace" of its opposite. In short, wherever the word "high" is used in a piece of writing, the concept "low" is always implicitly there too, lurking in the background. And this has implications not only for individual words but for an entire text. For, although a given book, film etc might be presented as having a single, unquestionable meaning, the
12:00
presence of countless "traces" behind every single term or concept invoked within it means that there are always alternate possible interpretations hiding there waiting to be discovered Derrida thus developed a methodology for textual analysis called deconstruction whic,h as Jack Reynolds explains, 'contends that in any text, there are inevitably points of equivocation and "undecidability" that betray any stable meaning that an author might seek
12:31
to impose upon his or her text. The process of writing always reveals that which has been suppressed, covers over that which has been disclosed, and more generally breaches the very oppositions that are thought to sustain it'. Deconstruction does not necessarily contend, then, again, that a text can mean anything at all. Instead, it seeks to draw out the hidden meanings beneath its surface and, in particular, to question the binaries of meaning which a less
13:03
critical reading of that text might ignore. Although not focused on an individual cultural text, in looking to explain how deconstruction can be applied in practice, I'd like to take a look here at Derrida's 1985 essay Racism's Last Word in which he seeks to critique "Western" (and in particular European) discourses on apartheid, the white supremacist regime which ruled over South Africa until 1994. Early on, Derrida comments that 'no tongue has ever translated this name [apartheid]—as if all
13:38
the languages of the world were defending themselves, shutting their mouths against a sinister incorporation of the thing by means of the word'. And, continuing this line of thought, Derrida foregrounds the manner in which European governments' condemnations of apartheid, though welcomed in pursuit of ending the repressive regime, often sought to present racism as something which always happened "over there". And a binary is thus drawn between the non
14:07
racist nations of Europe, "here", and the barbarous apartheid regime, "over there". Yet, argues Derrida, 'the judicial simulacrum and the political theatre of this state racism would have no meaning and would have had no chance outside of a European "discourse" on the concept of race'. In short, the underlying racist belief system which gave birth to apartheid, Derrida contends, was a European invention, exported to South Africa through settler colonialism. Derrida
14:43
sees that the invocation of the "over there" of South Africa carries with it the trace of "here", Europe. And, by following that trace, he identifies an interpretation of apartheid which European governments' discourses on the topic were actively trying to seclude and ultimately contests that the underlying binary which suggests that racism is something which only happens "over there" is false. Cultural texts themselves can engage in such an act of
15:14
deconstruction too. To return to the example of Get Out, the film regularly seeks to foreground the reliance of the horror genre on binaries of race. The author Zadie Smith, for example, has highlighted the manner in which the film subverts the tendency of horror films to present white people as inherently innocent and black people inherently threatening. Get Out, she argues, 'flips the script, offering a compendium of black fears about white folk'. More than this, however,
15:45
the film critiques the manner in which many rich white liberals seek to present their love of black culture as a way of assuring the world that they are in some way anti-racist. Smith argues that 'in place of the old disgust, a new kind of cannibalism. The white people in Get Out want to get inside the black experience. They want to wear it like a skin and walk around in it'. Blackness, to the white characters in the film, is merely an aesthetic and so, too, is their politics.
16:19
For while they might detest blatant, interpersonal racism, or the police's hostile treatment of black people, they are quite clearly happy to benefit from deep, structural racial inequalities. The white characters in the film seek to present the fact that they like basketball, for instance, as a way of creating a binary between them and those, like the police officer towards the beginning of the film, who engage in explicit, interpersonal racism. Yet, pointing to
16:49
other ways in which those characters are complicit in racist systems, Get Out questions how meaningful that binary really is. Both Racism's Last Word and Get Out are useful examples here because they point to the somewhat larger implications of the poststructuralist observation that language is highly flawed. For, alongside not always successfully expressing the meanings we intended, the foregrounding of language as a human creation asks us to consider
17:21
whether it might be open to the same biases of race, gender, class (to name but a few) as other human institutions. Think of the use of the term "man" to describe all of humanity for example, or the use of the suffix "ess" in "actress", "waitress" and "princess". Not only do such terms create a clear binary between men and women as two distinct and uniform categories of people, even when doing the exact same job, but the application of the root term (say, actor)
17:53
to men and the adjusted term (actress) to women clearly presents men as a kind of norm and women as a sort of deviation. And, to some, this might seem like a trivial observation. Yet, for the most part, language is the medium through which we think and talk about the world and so a binary in language helps to sustain a binary (and an unequal binary at that) in our way of thinking about a certain topic. Poststructuralism desired intension to foreground and
18:25
deconstruct such binaries has led to it being a key influence in, for example, feminist studies. In her 1990 book Gender Trouble (which I plan to discuss in a future video), for instance, Judith Butler draws on the work of Derrida and others to consider how a binary between men and women sustained by language but also by many other aspects of our society encourages us to conform to hegemonic modes of masculinity or femininity before encouraging us to deconstruct
18:56
this binary entirely. Where poststructuralism begins with the fairly basic proposition that language is a flawed means of communication, then, it comes to have fairly large implications for human society. For its core methodology, deconstruction, can not only be used to critique individual cultural texts but also far-reaching concepts that have a huge sway on our society. When the University of Cambridge considered awarding Jacques Derrida an
19:27
honorary degree in 1992, a group of 19 academics wrote an open letter advising against the move and accusing Derrida of, among other things, 'attacking the values of reason, truth and scholarship'. This was meant as an insult. Yet one wonders whether Derrida might have quite liked such a description of his overall project and whether it might serve as a useful articulation of the goal of poststructuralism as a whole. For, in a society in which language is
19:59
the medium through which we reach consensus on what counts as "reason", "truth" and "scholarship", poststructuralism ultimately does ask us to question whether such things can ever be objectively decided upon once and for all. For, if language is as flawed as the poststructuralists suggest, then the conclusions we reach through it will always be similarly flawed and biased. Thank you very much for watching this video, I hope it's given you a bit of an
20:30
insight into poststructuralism. And thanks as always to my top patrons: Ash, Michael V Brown and J Fraser Cartwright. If you would like to join them in supporting what I do here, and get your hands on copies of the scripts to these videos, then you can check out my Patreon page at patreon.com/tomnicholas. Other than that, a like on this video is always much appreciated or sharing it somewhere where you think other people might find it useful. With
20:56
that out of the way however, thank you so much for watching once again and have a great week!
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat