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The author's intended meaning is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives.
Also the author's identity as a stable "self" with a single, discernible "intent" is a
fictional construct. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having a single
purpose, a single meaning, or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader
creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text. To step
outside of literary theory, this position is generalizable to any situation where a
subject perceives a sign. Meaning (or the signified, in Saussure's scheme, which is as
heavily presumed upon in post-structuralism as in structuralism) is constructed by an
individual from a signifier. This is why the signified is said to 'slide' under the
signifier, and explains the talk about the "primacy of the signifier."
Destabilized meaning
In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader replaces the author as the
primary subject of inquiry. This displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or
"decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the text itself. Without a
central fixation on the author, post-structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g.,
readers, cultural norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are never
authoritative, and promise no consistency.
In his essay "Signification and Sense," Emmanuel Levinas remarked on this new field of
semantic inquiry:
...language refers to the position of the listener and the speaker, that is, to the contingency of
their story. To seize by inventory all the contexts of language and all possible positions of
interlocutors is a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of countless
semantic rivers. Experience, like language, no longer seems made of isolated elements lodged
somehow in a Euclidean space... [Words] signify from the "world" and from the position of
one who is looking.
Levinas, Signification and Sense, Humanism of the Other, tr. Nidra Poller[8]
Deconstruction
Main article: Deconstruction
A major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition. This theory proposed
that there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy,
which human logic has given to text. Such binary pairs could include
Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing, rational/emotional, signifier/signified,
symbolic/imaginary.
Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the
hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant term
on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly understand these
meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge systems that produce the illusion
of singular meaning.[clarification needed]
From this basic distinction, post-structuralist studies often emphasize history to analyze
descriptive concepts. By studying how cultural concepts have changed over time, poststructuralists seek to understand how those same concepts are understood by readers in the
present. For example, Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization is both a history and an
inspection of cultural attitudes about madness. The theme of history in modern Continental
thought can be linked to such influences as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich
Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals and Martin Heidegger's Being and Time.
Structuralists also seek to understand the historical interpretation of cultural concepts, but
focus their efforts on understanding how those concepts were understood by the author in his
or her own time, rather than how they may be understood by the reader in the present.
History
Post-structuralism emerged in France during the 1960s as a movement critiquing
structuralism. According to J.G. Merquior[3] a lovehate relationship with structuralism
developed amongst many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.
The period was marked by political anxiety, as students and workers alike rebelled against the
state in May 1968, nearly causing the downfall of the French government. At the same time,
however, the support of the French Communist Party (FCP) for the oppressive policies of the
USSR contributed to popular disillusionment with orthodox Marxism. As a result, there was
Major works
Eco and the open text
Umberto Eco's (1962) The Open Work satisfies the criteria of a post-structuralist work. Eco's
thesis is that a work of art, and especially of contemporary art, has an undefined meaning,
and that the will of the artist was exactly that of producing such indeterminacy or openness.
These "open works" (Eco cites Luciano Berio's musical compositions, among many others)
have then to be completed by the interpreter, according to that particular interpreter's
knowledge. This ideanow accepted by many philosophers and critics (and was popularized
by reader-response theories as well as by hermeneutically informed theories, such as those by
Jauss or Iser)was considered "heretical" at the time, and received a very strong opposition,
notably from Claude Lvi-Strauss and the writer Eugenio Montale in Italy. These attacks
were documented by Eco himself in the prefaces of later editions of this text. The Open Work
is seen by some to be the very first post-structural book, and considered as a classic in
semiotics and continental aesthetics.
In 1968 Eco published La struttura assente (literally from Italian: The Absent Structure),
another book that had a great impact on the transition between structuralism and poststructuralism. Eco suggests that structures are not entities existing de facto, ontologically, but
formal instruments and representations by which scholars can understand cultural concepts,
articulating various systems of differences. In 1968, when structuralism was the main
theorical reference for many, this book received massive criticism in France and abroad.
Later, several structuralists used to define themselves as either "nominalists", if following
Eco's path, or "realists", if following Lvi-Strauss's and others' interpretations of what a
structure is.
In his later works, especially in A Theory of Semiotics (1975), The Role of the Reader (1979)
and Semiotics and Philosophy of Language (1984), Eco defined a semiotic theory taking into
account the post-structural innovations, with concepts like encyclopedia, symbolic mode or
model reader.