What is post-structuralism anyway?

It doesn't help that different disciplines have different understandings of the term and how they operate in their field. It doesn't help when you do an interdisciplinary degree either, as no-one seems to be able to agree. Ho hum.

It's something to do with language. I can't be arsed to remember to be honest. I think Structuralism is a good theory for explaining the relativity of meaning and how language as a system works. Post-structuralism is better at explaining the lack of meaning in language. Maybe not though.

(Tim H to thread for v.funny pub explanation of Deconstruction)

It's cockrot.

There. That feels better. I feel like I've laid a ghost to rest. Viva Marx!

'Derrida can suck my cock'

I couldn't work out whether this was from an ardent poststructuralist or inveterate liberal humanist. Or just a perv with very odd fantasies.

a. the structural model of knowledge/experience will always undo itself into incoherence

b. meaning is often founded on illusory systems and further

c. often demonstates the point of incoherence in a text or whatever where it all goes wrong/ambivalent.

post structuralist theorists beg us to give up systematising and attempting to find a key or a point to the universe but instead surf merrily on ontological indeterminacies and attain an orgasmic knowledge-play state named "jouissance". Which doesn't seem like much fun, but then what do I know?

indeterminacies of ps have often been championed by essentialist feminists as a liberating way out of rigid male avenues of thought (phallocentrism) and less divisive destructive feminine modes of experiencing the world.

i think that most philosophers fall out of their chairs laughing when ps is broached, but i may be wrong.

Structuralism: is an analytical tool. Whatever it's analyzing it looks at the units of a system, and the rules that make that system work, without regard for any specific content. In language, for instance, structuralists (like Saussure) the units are words (or, actually, the 31 phonemes which make all the sounds of words in English) and the rules are the forms of grammar which order words. In different languages the grammar rules are different, as are the words, but the structure is still the same in all languages: words are put together within a grammatical system to make meaning.

Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organize units and rules into meaningful systems are generated by the human mind itself, and not by sense perception. As such, the mind is itself a structuring mechanism which looks through units and files them according to rules. This is important, because it means that, for structuralists, the order that we perceive in the world is not inherent in the world, but is a product of our minds. It's not that there is no "reality out there," beyond human perception, but rather that there is too much "reality" (too many units of too many kinds) to be perceived coherently without some kind of "grammar" or system to organize and limit them.

So structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, and works to uncover all the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel--in mathematics, biology, linguistics, religion, psychology, and literature, to name just a few disciplines that use structuralist analyses. Structuralist analysis posits these systems as universal.

Post-structuraliam: is a school of thought which emerged in the late 1970s, claiming to supersede - or at any rate to 'problematize' - the earlier structuralism. It is best understood as a French-inspired variant of the so-called 'linguistic turn', it is the idea that all perceptions, concepts, and truth-claims are constructed in language, along with the corresponding 'subject-positions' which are likewise (so it is argued) nothing more than transient epiphenomena of this or that cultural discourse. From Saussure post-structuralism takes the notion of language as a system of immanent relationships and differences 'without positive terms'; from Nietzsche, its outlook of extreme epistemological and ethico-evaluative relativism; and from Foucault, its counter-Enlightenment rhetoric of 'power/knowledge' as the motivating force behind talk of reason or truth. Such thinking is vulnerable to all the familiar criticisms - including forms of transcendental refutation - rehearsed against thoroughgoing sceptics and relativists down through the ages.

Does this help?

Structuralism = "wow, I think I can almost see how all of this stuff works!"

Post-structuralism = "no you can't, we made it all up!"

Oh, I can't explain post/structuralism, but I can make jokes about it: "I used to think that language was all a construct but now I'm not Saussure" and Q: Why doesn't Derrida like Christmas?" A: Because he never achieves presence!

Only Generativists believe in "underlying" anything, nowadays. Don't confuse those doofuses with structuralists.

Also 'takes from Foucault' is too generationally different from 'takes from Saussure / Nietzche'. Foucault is one of those who does the taking.

Pedantries.

I think Nabisco's summary not altogether misleading.

are deleuze and guattari PS or just re-evaluators of freud ?

"A bloke writes 28 pages of nonsense about why the key part of Wuthering Heights is the word 'the' at the bottom of page 221 before concluding that it is impossible to know what word 'the' means."

I liked it anyway...

And Pinefox, I agree with you completely. As Alex points out, post-structuralism only took the form of a recognised movement in the mid- to late seventies, it’s genesis (as in the writings of Derrida and Barthes, for example) was in the late sixties. Apologies if I was too ‘general’ in my approach. If people were looking for information on who adopted the philosophy they can refer to Foucault, who is perhaps a little more accessible than the others. Perhaps because he ‘takes’ from the movement as you suggested.

Did I miss the ‘in your own words’ clause?

Yes.

(Obviously J the N won not on foxiness but on that spirit of openness that distinguishes much of his thought)

http://www.le-cheval-bleu.com/telquel.jpg

This really is what I think, so if anyone can tell me what is wrong in this great story, they will be helping me.

(this might be dodgy)

My understanding ... 'Post-structuralism' came after World War II. People who had previously had great faith in a left wing revolution etc were left jaded and bitter by the results of totalitarianism. The 'men of 1968' opposed totalising ideologies that divided the world into good and bad, centre and external, upper and lower eg working class vs bourgeois, aryan vs Jew. People like Althusser and Derrida tried to use structuralism, with its thesis of the arbitrariness of form and language and ideology, to rid left wing thinking of totalising ideologies. They also took structuralism further and said that the person was a product of language and more importantly a product of ideology, because what else are you except your thoughts? And feminists used the ideas too, eg the structure of society with its gender biases etc creates a certain kind of person.

I think philosophers should just grow up!

Sounds like the base of all identity politics.

I think identity politics, and their bastard child political correctness are a big pile of crap.

Me myself I think the "materialist" view is the only thing worth basing any philosophy on. (Not the word that's used for greedy people who shop a lot, but the one that means "reality is based on the conditions you live in and not ideology.")

I don't read a whole lot of philsosophy except stuff that is tied into politics. But from what I understand the "materialist view" came out of the liberal-humanism tradition, specifically some dude called Hegel. Then Karl Marx came along and adapted it as a scientific base for explaining society and history from an economic point of view. Basically this point of view said that people need to take care of their material survival- how they eat and what work it takes- before doing any other form of human activity. So before there can be any ideology it has to be based on an economic system. If you could live for free it wouldn't be true but there's always a cost of living or work to be done for it.

The problem that happened with the materialist view was that it got twisted around by the "scientific socialists"- who said that if economic activity comes before all other human activity, than all human activity can be explained by the economics. Not a logical reversal! Still, without reversing the proposition, you can say that economics is the base of all society.

Identity politics has race, gender, ethnicity, whatever all the fuck as a base. From that you can say Bill Gates, a rich white guy, and Leroy Bumfuck Jr., a poor white guy working at Burger King, are more similar than Bill Gates and the King of Zambia, or Leroy Bumfuck Jr. and some poor migrant laborer from Mexico. Fuck that shit because regardless of how Bill Gates or Leroy Bumfuck were born, who's going to be serving who dinner or mopping their floor. Looking at things based on class might be "totalist" but I think it's safe to call it a law because people don't live on air, and people's jobs set them apart before any other kind of identity.

So anyways. Apart from that economic materialist view, we have all these other identity-based forms of structuralism, and then post-structuralism as a reaction to them: screw them all, they're baseless.

also "identity politics" is a sorta nasty term which gets thrown at things like "caring about racial and gender inequality".

also we have to ask, because something is made up does that mean its not true?

Dave, I studied it for about 10 minutes until my head hurt. The phrase 'obscurantist hogwash' is never far from my thoughts whenever this subject is discussed, no, sorry, typo, that should be 'discoursed'.

There is a quote by E.P. Thompson, a longish sentence which reads like could only have been composed by a PS. It contains a couple of words which I had to look for in the dictionary. I think I successfully translated the sentence as 'PS is exclusively self-referential, and like all such movements runs a real risk of in-breeding and disappearing up its own clacker.'

[reading cryptonomicon right now and its asshole rendition of academia is v. painful]

????? WTF? Althusser = probably fair to call him structuralist Marxist, in his most well-known work. Clearly later on he moves towards a more Deleuze-inspired position (which I still don't think it's useful to call post-structuralism) with the idea of 'aleatory materialism' (see the book on Machiavelli). Derrida is not indebted to structuralism at all: his position is pretty much fully formed in his early work on Husserl, and the engagement with structuralism is strategic. i.e. when he starts to take on the key figures currently getting influencing people's thought, Levi-Strauss and Saussure are obvious targets. The fact that their work reveals itself to be much less novel than advocates of structuralism claim, i.e. indebted to 'traditional' (another misleading word, gloss as 'regularly repeated in earlier thought) assumptions about language / thought / culture / nature etc., under his analysis, should in itself lead us to question any link to Derrida's arguments. 'Arbitrariness of form, language and ideology'? Are all these things the same? And what exactly does 'arbitrary' *mean* here?

As for the politics stuff, there is a BIG difference between Althusser and Derrida. Althusser remained the philosopher of the French communist party until well into the seventies, a calculated risk, given that many French intellectuals had quit much earlier over issues such as Algeria and support for Stalinism. Althusser's marxist 'science' (see Ranciere's subsequent criticisms) must be explicitly totalising, and he is a party / (ie. would-be state philosopher). Derrida, while allied to Althusser in an educational context (within the Ecole Normale Superieure, eg. over Lacan's displacement) could not agree with him politically (see the long interview with Michael Sprinker, republished in Derrida's _Negotiations_) and certainly would never have joined the PCF. And yes, Derrida does warn us about 'totalising' theories, but he also teaches us that (to put it crudely) we're always going to be 'totalising', so it's not simply a case of avoiding 'totalising' thought, but seeing how all our ways of understanding the world involve a totalising tendency, so developing new ways of thinking which acknowledge that without claiming to have got beyond it. Hence the big distinction between Derrida, for whom the claim to have got outside or beyond metaphysics is meaningless, and analytic-inspired philosophers in the English-speaking world, and Habermasians, who think they are, or would like to be, beyond metaphysics.

Habermas always ends up the whipping boy, doesn't he?

Not without good reason of course, but he definitely sticks out like a sore thumb among both the post-Marxists and the post-structuralists.

He's not the only German philosopher to have turned to analytical philosophy for inspiration (obv. his pal Apel is the other big name) but this also looks suspect from the English-speaking perspective (ie the only angle from which the Continental / analytic pseudo-distinction has much currency) where self-proclaimed continentalists are out to keep their project pure(-ish).

But I was actually thinking about some interesting work done by a friend of mine, who always assimilates Derrida to Habermas as trying to do something like think without metaphysics, even though I think he knows better than that! He defines his position against both (back to some modified version of Adorno crossed with Gramsci) when really I think he could benefit from recognising his proximity to Derrida, the way I read him.

As for Althusser -- he doesn't deserve anything like the attention of Derrida et al. It's very dangerous to call his staying in the PCF 'a calculated risk' -- this guy was basically a Stalinist. The problem wasn't that his theory was totalizing: the problem was that it was total bollocks -- the idea of history as 'a process without a subject' is Kautsky-Stalinist anyway, and mechanistic in the extreme.

But he did have an interest and Lacan and (I think) was Foucault's tutor (whose conception of history was, at any rate, Althusserian), so he was part of what you might call ps, even if he was less concerned with what concerned the autres.

Since I don't find the terms useful, I don't think it's worth arguing about whether he's a structuralist or post-structuralist (although my reply might be 'at what point in his work?). For convenience, in my own map of the period he belongs to an early generation (Sartre, Bataille, Lacan, Levinas) who learnt from Kojeve and the early Heidegger, rather than the later generation (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida) who get a much more sophisticated philosophical grounding via Hyppolite.

No idea. Will bow to yr superior knowledge though, I don't know how useful finding philosophical precedents is. Althusser as neo-Platonist (ie capitalism as immanent, actual history simply providing 'instances' etc -- I don't know how far that takes you). But Foucault's conception of history which has less room for the individual even than Marx... In any case, history has no room for 'epistemological breaks' -- unless you belive in history as a process without a subject, I suppose.

I think you're probably right -- I'm not approaching him from a philosophical but from an historical perspective (also film theory perspective) and his influence there on base/superstructure debates has been I think lamentable.

As for the PCF -- the publication / public statement agenda is heavily driven by his commitment to the party -- well the point isn't that political commitment is wrong by any means, it's just that virtually every serious thinker left the Party after Suez/Algeria/56 also because of a) its deadening economistic effect on the French labour movement and b) its conception of socialism which looks inadequate next to eg the situationists or the socialisme ou barbarie group (or indeed yer Brit left).

I know little of phenomenology, etc -- I wd say that Sartre had no love for Althusser, or even for Foucault, because of their historical methodology, which is what interests me. Bataille & Lacan I would lump in (obv). Lacan is useful in certian contexts -- to understand movies I think it's been overused, but is still essential.

Blimey, our old mate Terry should get royalties on every time this line comes up! (which is not to say there's no truth in it, for once.)

It was my supervisor that told me the mythologies = structuralist, S/Z = post. Then she told me a bunch of terry eagleton books to read, i've not done it yet though because not working is so much more fun than working.

Why not? Barthes differs/transcends (oho!) the lot by being a good (ow!) writer in contrast to most of the rest.

yeah, that's what I thought -- part of TE's Intro. to Lit Theory that has now entered into folklore (or even the Law(?)). Like I say, there may be truth in it, but it only works if you value that distinction.

hey Sterling-

-------also "identity politics" is a sorta nasty term which gets thrown at things like "caring about racial and gender inequality".---------

Sure and I think "racial/gender inequality" is also a term with nasty uses. It gets thrown at people in an invented group labelled "opressor" without regard for class or whether they have anything to do with it.

------------also we have to ask, because something is made up does that mean its not true?-----------------

For "baseless" see "bourgeois". The kind of philosophy where a made-up idea supercedes the material conditions that make it possible. Like, supposedly capitalism is meritocratic, but if you're living hand-to-mouth you don't have the choice to quit your job for a better one, because the reality is you will die (or in less black and white terms get a dead end choice of welfare or something), so that's not true.

the need to explain the mechanism for this supersession was a primary reason for the initial rise of identity politics (out of a variety of ideas, esp. gramsci's hegemony)

that and the fact that in 1968, the old (class-defined) left either sat on its hand or actively supported the status quo, while the identity warriors (students, cult-nats, feminists, the trannies at stonewall) actually went out in the streets and fought for change

(also: "i or my close friends might soon be drafted and have to go and kill people" is or was then a basis for a compelling identity politics...)

Qt from Godard: we are making a revolutionary cinema in a country without a revolutionary party.

Pasolini: them students, they're all posh, not like the police -- it's a *counter* revolution, y'all.

The twat.

If: ooh synchronicity
Lindsay Anderson == getting down with the kids.

I am TRES excited by nu Bert O'Lucci film.

cf eg ellen willis's 1968-ish piece on the extreme cultural dissonance between middleclass anti-war marchers and working-class anti-march police (willis = pioneer rad left feminist whose dad WAS an nyc policeman).

can i recommend kristen ross' book on may '68 in france; may 68 and its afterlives. though i think it reifies authority in france (she's informed a lot by ranciere, who i haven't read, in his writings on the function of sociology and police), with a definite post-althusserian rsas/ isas leaning, i think it is successful in problematising the worker/ protestor binary which informs much of post 68 scholarship. plus, there's a terrific section on the disconnect between third worldism and humanitarianism.

tangentially: what's lefebvre's stance on politics? i've only read most of his book on space, which i found an incredibly productive, though frankly materialist read (against merleau ponty?)

Also, there is a possibility that it is not eleven o'clock on a Monday night everywhere in the world. Is this what they call 'virtual reality'?

1. providing an escape route between economic determinism and Hegelian totality with overdetermination.

2. His emphasis on ideology and its omnipresence and necessity as a subjectifying process. His own explanation for it is clumsy and doomladen though and I guess I like Althusser more if I refract him through Zizek (and against Habermas).

(anyway back to something i understand -- zionism was a made up idea which came true, or perhaps better put a made up idea which was the form of something real coming into being. or perhaps even better put just because it was a made up idea didn't mean that it didn't matter. flipside was that anti-semitism was a made-up idea which also came true -- i.e. the holocaust. hegelianism as the science of made-up ideas aware of both how they are made up and how they nonetheless exist?)

sometimes i look at this crit-theory stuff and get the feeling that much of it rests on partial understanding of the past, i.e. solving problems that weren't problems to hegin with but became so because the readings of prior texts transformed over time. (i.e. confronting prior texts with a fixity that never existed, a combination of historicizing society but not theory?) which is not to say that progress can't (or doesn't even mainly) happen this way.

Part of the trouble is that, and I'll fight anyone who wants to take me on on this, is that people aren't listening to the deconstructionists. Not the lit-crit side, but the more philosophical ones -- Hamacher, Gasche, Fenves, Duttmann -- the writers who are re-reading Heidegger, Hegel etc. with a genuinely critical eye. There has been a real post-Derrida uncertainty whereby the 'radical' or surprising ideas Derrida locates in other writers must begin to look like stuff that's been there a lot longer. When Gillian Rose reads Hegel, and says 'this is more radical than post-structuralism', her appeal to the past is overdetermined -- was it *really* there in Hegel, before someone turned Hegel upside-down? Derrida reviewed Catherine Malabou's _The Future of Hegel_ (forthcoming in translation) and begins to draw a line -- ie. not all this stuff about an opening to the 'future' which runs through Heidegger, Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida *can* be found in Hegel too.

I guess the other issue is just the availability of texts: as we all know who Marx 'is' changes every decade of the 20th century, depending on which texts have just been rediscovered -- another way of looking at Althusser is in the way he severs the early / late Marx (I think I'm on top of this). I assume he's trying to make Marx non-Hegelian, but probably non-Kojeve-ian Hegel or the very idealist Hegel of general caricatures. So when we get a different account of Hegel, we have to revise our account of Marx / Hegel, and of Althusser / Marx / Hegel etc.

But thinking about this is a lifetime's task... Especially if we were to be able to pass the history of ideas through historical events as well.

Thanks for the 68 book recommendations above, people, I must take a look at the Ross one. (I'm big on Ranciere: a charming and generous man as well as a true scholar.)

Name-dropping? Well, it's my job to know this stuff in this kind of detail. Names are the signposts saying 'go find out more here'. And as I've repeated, I don't think the question can be answered in the form posed, and as the first run of the thread suggests, 'post-structuralism' is really a term used to tie together and (to some extent) neutralise something like the disruptive effect which can be induced by certain big names. (i.e. very often the myth is bigger than the person, so no-one reads what they read, just recyclings of the myth. Dragging a discussion back to proper names is one approach. Really we need to read some stuff together if we really wanted to 'get' what people want to call 'post-structuralism'; but 'getting' it would mean understanding why the term itself fails...)

But thinking about this is a lifetime's task... Especially if we were to be able to pass the history of ideas through historical events as well.

So what is the point of the thought if it takes a lifetime to understand? The point is to change it...? Althusser wanted to strip Marx of idealism, humanism, Hegelianism, yes. So what? Does it bring us any closer to socialism knowing what this appalling Stalinist wanted? if we were to be able to pass the history of ideas through historical events as well. If? Well, this is the Marxist project, isn't it? This is what is necessary. And if Althusser proves inadequate, then the hell with him. There's no intrinsic good in just knowing about these things -- they were intended to be revolutionary!

So what is the point of the thought if it takes a lifetime to understand?

TS: thinking vs. kneejerk sloganising.

Althusser is king-reifier if you like, absolutely zero sense of how history works (cf EP Thompson on Althusser's misundertanding of the word 'empirical') -- it's worrying stuff. I'm happier with Debord, he doesn't drone on the word 'rigorous' or make out that what he does is 'science'. The greatest synthesis of all time might be a worthy goal, I don't know who for, though.

(structuralism and pomo and the "turn to language' all in general strike me as a sincere - if yes sometimes big bad bosh - shot at facing this issue)

marx in a sense deals w.this empirically/pragmatically (ie he wz a journalist and a good writer, stylistically), but isn't the issue of jargon and dead language and whatever MORE than just a happenstance deformation?

Or this?

Different indeed, November 5, 2003
Reviewer: momomomus (see more about me)
I must say this is a bold change of direction for Mark Currie after his previous book, 'Rough Framing Carpentry' (1993, also available through Amazon), which described 'quick, efficient ways to frame residential and commercial buildings... how to save time and eliminate errors when detailing lumber to be assembled... how to spot information missing on the plans.'

In 'Difference' Mr Currie seems to be placing the accent more on the intellectual and -- dare I say -- spiritual aspects of carpentry, and turning his attention to the tricky problem of how to take things down. I was a little mystified by the statement that 'anything which is is itself by virtue of not being something else, by differing, and that which it differs from remains as a trace, that whose absence is necessary for it to be'. But when I put the theory to the test with two offcuts of ply, all made sense.

One small step for Mark Currie, perhaps, but a giant leap for carpentry.

NB: 'Reading Capital' -- the emphasis is on the process, not the results.

If the established existentialist Marx in France had proved a non-starter as far as Althusser and his friends were concerned can't we forgive them for indulging in a bit of polemic to distinguish their own position (and precisely as a *political* not theoretical strategy) and enable clearer battlelines to be drawn? The idea of anti-humanism is generally a big red herring. A more sophisticated understanding of subjectivity is not an attack on subjectivity.

Enrique, isn't there a contradiction between what you say about Marx (not supposed to be set in stone / treated as holy writ / echo down the ages) and what you say about Marx (we need to go back to Marx, and do some bloody acting not so much thinking like he does)? As soon as we insist too strongly on a division between theory and practice we're on a slippery slope towards valorising action, whatever it is and whatever the consequences. There isn't really an opposition between the two anyway, they're different dimensions of the same thing -- but the theoretical side can be more rather than less systematic (read -- 'coherent within its own frame of reference') and more rather than less well-informed.

Have not read M.Currie I'm afraid so cannot comment. But I hear his carpentry is excellent.

Yeah, I hear that, but I don't think Althusser was 'taking positions' so much as digging foxholes during the power struggles in the French left. The problem is the big wrong turn that the french left took. I'm not absolutely valorizing action over thought of course BUT it's been a very bad 30 years for the left, and you gotta find yr scapegoats somewhere. I don't think we shd treat Marx as inviolable at all -- I was saying that Althusser's Marx is a certain portion of Marx made inviolable -- which is worse anyway. I dunno about Spinoza, but in terms of Marx I guess the 'immanence' comes in with Althusser reckoning that Marx's conceptual categories were somehow 'immanent' as justification for his crude notions of ISAs etc.

I am also glad to see that JtN's best gag of June 2000 has finally made into electronic text.

Naturally I am usually thinking about literary theory at 11 o'clock on a Monday night; that or football theory, or what is the best flavour of Horlicks.

I swear I read a book on sociology that ran out of useful things to say, so had a whole theory about the problem with using MAPS!

ha ha last time I engaged with ILX 'theory' debates I guess. Now I have postgrads to harangue instead and have decided that 'theory' is the problem not the solution... I read that kristin ross book -- it's like a hymn to Ranciere though. He's a nice dude, but the more I read the more I see where he gets his ideas from.

hahahah. i saw this revive and thought a) i wonder if alex is on it, and b) i wonder if alex remembers me ringing him at 11pm one evening, not long before our finals, and asking him THIS VERY QUESTION?

IIRC we went down the earl and you gave me an answer that was nowhere near as succinct as yr first response on this thread ;)

In those days I might have thought that the word meant something! We should go for a drink in the Earl. SESH reunion time!

Great thread.

it is now.

also:

We should go for a drink in the Earl. SESH reunion time! fucking anywhere, it's been way too long.

fixed.

I'm taking a course on semiology right now. "I have a vague idea that it is French and stupid" is pretty much how I feel at the moment but I'm willing to believe that it might just be that I don't understand it.

Saussure pointed out that the only really important thing about the form we use to impose order on the flux was that there was a difference between the terms in it. So it wasn't important that 'cat' is the word for the object cat, it could have been any old sound so long as it was different to other words like 'dog' and 'mouse'. And that made very clear what 'form' was all about and that it really, really didn't have any connection to the flux at all. Which Nietzsche and Bergson and others hadn't really seemed to be sure of. And then people like Levi-Strauss took Saussure's point and tried to apply it to anthropology and things, and that's 'structuralism'. Like Levi-Strauss's book 'The Raw and The Cooked' is about how our idea of what's okay to eat is arbitrary, just like the words are arbitrary and not connected to the real world. You can tell that because say some cultures think dogs aren't food and some do, or something. And then post-structuralism is something.

This is the part I get but it just seems, like, the sort of thing that should be obvious to a middle-schooler.

haha I actually used "like" in a way that didn't require commas there!

And then people like Levi-Strauss took Saussure's point and tried to apply it to anthropology and things

this is the bit where you may as well tune out. think about it for a second.

(The problem might be that it's a course that tries to apply this junk to music.)

This is the part I get but it just seems, like, the sort of thing that should be obvious to a middle-schooler.

Yeah, I get that feeling too sometimes, but I think that's just a byproduct of growing up in the "post-structuralist"/"post-modernist"/"last action hero" era where this kind of thinking is basically just taken for granted.

which is a bit of a problem.

my main thing now with po-stru is that it's bred two generations of eng lit students to think of linguistics as saussure and psychoanalysis as lacan. as if these fields were static repositories of knowledge for liberal arts types to ransack. saussure is at least a respected elder, i suppose, but if that shit's obvious to a middle-schooler, in a sense that should send danger signals. iow the conclusions drawn from the arbitrariness of the sign (a not uncontentious notion) are pretty shaky. *especially* when applied to totally separate areas of the world. there is no reason whatever that conclusions drawn from linguistics can be taken as metaphysical truths about anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, etc.

iow the conclusions drawn from the arbitrariness of the sign (a not uncontentious notion) are pretty shaky. *especially* when applied to totally separate areas of the world.

my understanding is that this is more typical of structuralist thinking than "post-structuralist" thinking

yeah, that was what sundar was talking about, saussure and whatnot.

yeah but you seem to be taking a trait of structuralist thinking and using it to undermine or take exception to "post-structuralist" thinking? or are you just pointing out the problematic assumptions of structuralism?

the second one. it's not so much a trait as the underlying principle of the whole enterprise, for levi-strauss, barthes, lacan, althusser. i think i've forgotten what post-structuralism is tho : /

yes "foundation" would be a much better word than "trait."

structuralism has been pretty well taken apart (de-structured as it were), by derrida (in "structure sign & play") among others in other places, and i think youd be pretty hard-pressed to find any left in academia. most hardcore structuralists (barthes and althusser in particular) disavowed their own structuralism later in their careers (barthes's introduction to the fashion system, as i recall, was written after the rest of the book had been written and also after barthes had begun to move away from structuralism)...

as for "post-structuralism"... well, its what came after structuralism, innit?

yeah i'm familiar with barthes's moves, and kind of with althusser's, though his change wasn't much to do with derrida. and i agree you won't exactly find many in academia now! it's interesting that sundar is being taught the history of it though, and certainly in film and eng lit strong traces remain of it. there was obviously a lot of continuity between structuralism and post-structuralism -- lacan seems popular with post-structuralists, at any rate -- kristeva, sollers. that lot.

In all seriousness, I've always thot of post-structuralism as akin to structuralism's dirty hangover.

I've just started reading that kristin ross book

xxp--my thesis advisor is an "althusserian" (tho hed never describe himself as such!) and there are traces of "structuralist thought" in some of the work he does; u can still see and read a lot of structuralist thinkers in the englist dept where i am, tho in my experience theyre often co-taught w/ "structure sign & play" as a general history of 20th century continental philosophy. "post-structuralism" is a sort of meaningless term anyway, a catchall for ppl who want to push all the french thinkers from the last 50 years together for anthologies and course summaries (and polemics against "relativism"), despite the fact that not a single one would label him or herself a "poststructuralist" (or "postmodernist" for that matter) and many (while having similar intellectual forebears and topics of study) hold widely different opinions

It's kind of the day-after-the-decade-before's guilty backlash seeming to say (both simultaneously and impossible) that

A) structuralism is bullshit, attempts to create a philosophical GUT of language/culture are definitionally impossible and foolhardy, and that ethical, moral, and social certitudes are all bunk, given that they are basically all dependent upon experience anyway

B) You might as well take it as a philosophical GUT that works of art, culture, writing ... are beyond authoritative human manipulation and understanding and are thusly wholly unimportant in themselves, except w/r/t what they demonstrate, which is incredibly significant as it tells us in a large way about the human condition, but only incidentally.

"structure sign & play" kinda seems like an intellectualized sequel to freudian "fecal play"

followed up by the post-post-structualist response, "kid 'n play"

'attempts to create a philosophical GUT of language'

excuse my virtual complete ignorance of lit theory but I presume youre not talking about formal logic, can you explain what this attempt was about?

What is it that post structualists purport to demonstarte is "incredibly significant"? Is that the "impossible" part of the backlash, ie asserting that words themselves are trivial and then asserting that meaning is important?

it was a joke, you dingbat

http://img27.picoodle.com/img/img27/9/10/14/f_zingbahm_b751941.png

dag HOOS

I think the problem with philosophy now is that we've achieved the level of scientific sophistication to make most philosophy utterly pointless (and often completely wrong) as explanations of human phenomenon.

Neuroscience, biochemistry, anthropology, genetics ... there you can find answers behind language, ego, society, and humanity. Philosophy and theory are vestigial functions that act as entertainment for certain kinds of weirdos... if you really want answers to questions about humanity and society, just turn to science.

ahahahaha

oh stop it xpost

burt you're killing us over here.

which is the kristin ross book? 'anti-americanism'?

am reading the afterlives of may '68 one that people were talking about

also have an emergence of social space commune/rimbaud one that I am not reading

oh i should maybe read that, the 68 one. i have forgotten everything i knew about ranciere.

I'm not real certain that saussure's schtick is "obvious to any middle schooler," That One Guy

That one guy that hit it and quit it, do you have any idea where I could see or get or see chris marker's le joli mai and/or le fond de l'air est rouge?

J0hn D. -- i was quoting sundar. i don't entirely agree, but then i don't even know what middle school is.

RJG -- 'le joli mai' i have seen broken up into bits on youtube. 'le fond...' i have torrented. it may have been from c1nema 0bscura:

http://www.c1nema-0bscura.com/index.php (degoogleproofed obv)

or less likely

http://fr3akyflicks.tk/

he is a bit 'funny' about his older films.

I can burn you a copy of 'Le fond de l'air...' if you can't find it, Jack... (I also have 'Chats perchés')

Hey, you dudes may think it's hilarious, but belief in philosophy makes as much sense as belief in religion - explaining the phenomenon of the world through metaphysical, rather than scientific, means.

If these philosophers can show rigorous data and sound methods to back up their ideas against a long process of peer review, then maybe philosophy would be a valid way of explaining the world.

i don't think philosophy is about the belief that it solves/explains anything, it's just nice to read/hear big thoughts well expressed.

i heard the jury's still out on science.

xpost

science does NOT, and CANNOT, prove anything.

how it can "explain" a damn thing beyond itself is then sort of problematic.

i was half-kidding. i think you're both wrong, ryan and burt.

no poppero but yeah, science* can prove things insofar as anything can.

but on the other hand, it* can't 'explain the world'.

*obviously a bit of a problem referring to "it" in this way, but you get the idea.

what, exactly, can it prove? and HOW does it prove?

induction leads to hypotheses....not proofs...

i said "can prove things insofar as anything can" because i expected douchebaggy point such as yours.

if you can only reach hypotheses with science, can there be such a thing as "proof" for you?

The reason why analytic philosophers (and similarly mathematicians and cognitive scientists) have a difficult time dressing themselves or dress poorly is that the satisfaction of any sentence involving the "goes with" relation is not finitely decidable. There is no algorithm by which one can in a finite amount of time, much less in the morning before you are too late for class, decide with deductive certainty whether an outfit is sharp and properly accessorized. Now, there are rules which by which we can rule out entire classes of ordered pairs, e.g., let x be a member of the class of checked clothing and y be a member of the class of striped clothing, it is fairly trivial to show that for all such x and all such y, Gxy must be false (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to provide a proof). But for the general case there is no finitely executable decision procedure such that for any two arbitrary articles of clothing one may determine the satisfaction of G.

tl;aiwcw*

'assumed it was custos-worthy'

is this the same ryan that was so depwessed on the dawkins thread?

did anybody see that documentary on young mathematical geniuses last night, then? because that's the first thing i thought of when i read Hoos's last post.

river wolf -- probably! i think i posted on that a LONG time ago.

i wasnt intending to be douchebaggish, btw, sorry if i came across that way.

i am writing my dissertation on american pragmatism, so redefining things like "truth" and "proof" without casting ourselves into the post-structuralist abyss are sorta urgent and key for me.

how would you prove no WMD'S?

haha...ok yeah i was a bit OTT on the dawkins thread...i probably just finished reading E.M. Cioran or something...

thanks, That one guy that hit it and quit it, will check out the youtube--had a torrent file for le fond de l'air but it wouldn't start

stevie! that would be really useful! the other sounds like it'd be v good, too!

!

we're going to be in london, the weekend after next, actually. if PF is available, we'd go out w/ him on sat, anyway. it would be good to see you, too, if you're around!!

hahaha burt made this thread awesome

x-post
The weekend of the 27-28? I think I will be in Glasgow that weekend :/

oh no!

Surely it is better to say what post-structuralism isn't?

"dingbat"

ahhhhhhhh, shit how could i have got that so wrong! i could feign ironic briliance but ha whoops i get it now, and a zing, of sorts, from hoos,of all people, lordy.

I only just found out about these guys when Gmail linked it for me:

http://www.semiotics.co.uk/?gclid=CMDQ5JbX450CFSENDQodwGxbPQ

I don't know if I should be surprised or not.

wow. Barthes would be so proud.

(I've opted for surprised.)

wasn't there a period in the late 90s where ad agencies were seeking semiotics majors? i vaguely remember some NYT article about this that my mom forwarded me in her ongoing attempt to turn me into a more lucratively employed person.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch_OgoR0WPs&feature=plcp

steigler was great on that heidegger movie, he used to rob banks!

*THIS* is post-structuralism (jonathan culler, remembering the early or mid-60s, stolen from an account i don't follow on bsky) :

https://i.imgur.com/5adJUgK.jpeg

i don't think that's what foucault meant by power-knowledge

we all know that the ternary British plug can produce a kind of infinite semiotic slippage that the binary French plug could only dream of

Godard himself holds court as Professor Pluggy, a prophetic mumbler who has a mess of cables and audi-visual leads for hair

king lear decoded at last