POSTSTRUCTURALISM

MICHEL FOUCAULT
• Poststructuralism: associated with the social eruptions of May 1968 in
Paris – a period of deep social unrest
• Beginning: the Paris university of Nanterre – the students’ protest
against the authoritarian structures of the university system – “All power
to the imagination”; ”Il est interdit d'interdire ("It is forbidden to forbid");
“Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible (Be realistic, demand the
impossible”)
• Workers joined in – extended strikes all over France
• Mixed feelings of euphoria and disillusionment – the radical attempt to
democratise the structures of established power failed ultimately –
however, there was reformation and modernisation of the French
educational system
• The origins of poststructuralism: in the academic milieu – in linguistics,
anthropology and philosophy.
• An epistemological and ontological position – concerned with the relationship
between language, knowledge, and power
• The most outstanding names associated with the beginnings of poststructuralism:
– Roland Barthes (the later work: e.g. “The Death of the Author,” 1968; S/Z,
1970; The Pleasure of the Text, 1973),
– Michel Foucault (The Order of Things, 1966; The Archaeology of Knowledge,
1969, The Order of Discourse, 1970; “What Is an Author?” 1969)
– Jacques Derrida (“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences,” 1966; Of Grammatology, 1967; Writing and Difference, 1967).
– Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Shizophrenia, 1972),
– Jean Baudrillard (Seduction, 1979; Fatal Strategies, 1983; The
Transparency of Evil, 1990; The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, 1991; The
Illusion of the End, 1992; )
– Julia Kristeva (Desire in Language (1980)
– Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,
1990).
Poststructuralism: an ambivalent relationship to structuralism – it
may be seen as:
A) the natural result of structuralism, its continuation and
development, to the last consequences;
B) a radical break with structuralism, as a rebellion against its
unfounded certainties and optimism.
It represents, in fact, the transcendence of all modes of thought
which could be called “structuralist” in a wider sense.
The main concern of poststructuralist thought remains language,
but it often branches off in the direction of psychoanalysis,
Western Marxism, Feminism, or other trends of thought
Post-structuralist perspectives: applied to a wide range of
contexts: literary theory, social theory (social practices and
institutions), education, law, the media, gender and sexuality
theory.
 Theoretical premises
• Structuralism: the confidence that objective knowledge is
attainable through reason and method, that its scientific, rational
procedures will establish reliable truths.
• Poststructuralism: completely sceptical concerning the possibility
of establishing firm truths or objective knowledge (cf. Nietzsche:
“There are no facts, only interpretations”)
• Distrust of reason and scepticism about method
• It carried to its extreme the structuralist conviction that language
not only reflects/describes reality, but shapes and creates it
• Jacques Derrida: “there is nothing outside the text” (“il n’y a pas
de hors-texte”) – i.e. our knowledge of the world is like a text
because there is no knowledge outside language.
• Reality itself appears as an immense text, since our access to it
is mediated by language – we actually construct the world and
ourselves through discourse.
• In a poststructuralist view, language and discourse are potentially
unreliable, essentially unstable – linguistic meaning: inherently
indeterminate
• Stable, certain meaning can only be instated by ignoring or suppressing a
host of attending implications and ambiguities.
• Anxiety about language – radical linguistic skepticism
• The obsessive imagery of liquidness: the “floating signifier,” the “spillage”
or “slippage” of meaning – language: an unpredictable instrument; we can
never be fully in control of it
• “Fixing” (i.e. reaching stable) meaning: by recovering the signified from
the “play” of the signifier – analogy with the human endeavour of attaining
the Truth
• This ultimate Truth/Meaning: the transcendental signified (Derrida)
• All Western systems of thought are organised around some such
transcendental principle or essence – e.g. eidos (ideal form; the
essential, immutable nature of a thing), archē (origin, source, beginning),
telos (end, goal, purpose), alētheia (truth), consciousness/intention,
God, Self, etc.
• Poststructuralism questioned all these “absolutes” – they were really
“constructions”, “effects” – relativity – the distrust of authority
• This belief in some ultimate Truth or Reality or Meaning (the Logos),
which constitutes the foundation of all thought and experience, including
linguistic experience: LOGOCENTRISM
• The whole Western philosophical tradition based on this belief:
logocentric metaphysics
• The individual self: not an autonomous, coherent, self-governing entity,
but a product of social and linguistic forces – a fictional construct – the
“constructed” or “dissolved” subjectivity – no single purpose, meaning or
existence
• In literary criticism and theory: the questioning of the concept of author
and of intended meaning – also fictional constructs
• A text situates its reader in a multiplicity of positions/perspectives –
every reading is a partial interpretation – it prevents a totalising approach
• The authorial instance: not a person but language itself – meaning does
not derive from a particular consciousness
 Roland Barthes: ‘The Death of the Author’ (1968)
 “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that
neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative
where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.
 We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological'
meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.
 Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To
give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final
signified, to close the writing.
 The space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits
meaning to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In
precisely this way literature, by refusing to assign a 'secret', an ultimate meaning,
to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-
theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix
meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law”.
• The analytical strategy by which poststructuralist thought strives to
uncover the radical instability of meaning: DECONSTRUCTION – its
aim: to expose hidden contradictions under the surface of logical
coherence – it will seize on marginal, apparently insignificant elements,
and focus on blind spots, or aporias (instances of self-contradiction,
gaps, silences, paradoxes).
• Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation corresponds to the
postmodern suspicion of all forms of fixed identity.
• The poststructuralists envisage a de-centered universe – the distrust
and questioning of all values taken for granted – the rejection of all
essences as mere metaphysical illusions.
• This attitude: seen in two ways:
a) as liberating, a promise of freedom, a revolutionary potential of
change – it exposes the complicity between discourse and power
(associated with the work of Foucault
b) as reactionary; indifferent to history and politics – it debunks all
authority that can validate meaning, creating thus radical uncertainty
and deep relativism – this removes all possibility of meaningful
intervention (associated with the work of Derrida)
 MICHEL FOUCAULT
(1926–1984)
• Born in Poitiers in 1926;
• Studied at École Normale Supérieure – three degrees:
• 1949: philosophy
• 1949: psychology
• 1952: psychopathology
• During the 1950s: works in a psychiatric hospital; 1955: teaches
at the University of Uppsala, Sweden.
• First major book: Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge
classique (Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the
Classical Age) – published in 1961 after having been presented
as a doctorat d’état.
• In 1970, Foucault was elected to the new chair of “History of
systems of thought” at the Collège de France – his first course:
“The will to truth” – the study of discursive practices.
• For Foucault, history is always written from the
perspective of a present interest – it fulfils a need of
the present – it is the present that imposes problems to
be studied historically.
• The present determines the historian’s themes of
interest, but the present is always in a process of
transformation – therefore the past is continually re-
evaluated.
• The past takes on new meanings in light of new events.
This renders problematic the relationship of causality
which traditional history sees between past and
present.
• No past era can be understood purely in its own terms
– history is, in a sense, always a history of the
present.
Two periods in Foucault’s work – this distinction: a
matter of analytical priorities
A) the “archaeological” period:
 Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in
the Classical Age, 1961;
 The Order of Things, 1966;
 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1969
B) the “genealogical” period:
 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the
Prison,1975;
 History of Sexuality, 1976-1984
 Foucault the “archaeologist”
• Foucault’s archaeology refers to the analysis of the
unconscious rules of formation which regulate the emergence of
the discourses of the human sciences
• The study of discursive formations, i.e. the body of
statements which form an episteme. This concept is used by
Foucault to refer to the conditions of possibility of
knowledge, be they of a theoretical or practical nature:
[An episteme represents] the strategic apparatus which permits
the separating out from among all the statements which are
possible those that will be acceptable within […] a field of
scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The
episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the
separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from
what may not be characterised as scientific.
(Power/Knowledge,1980)
• Foucault’s main interest in the works belonging to
this category: “the general system of the formation
and transformation of statements” existing in a
particular society at a certain moment,
• Interest in establishing what statements or
discourses are regarded as valid, questionable, or
invalid;
• Interest in the relation between present statements
and those of the past, between the discourses of
native and foreign cultures; in the access of
individuals, groups or classes to particular kinds of
discourses.
• The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969): Foucault’s
major book of this period – an analysis of systems of
discourse / régimes of discourse, or discursive
practices
• He relies on such concepts as discontinuity, rupture,
threshold, limit, series, and transformation.
• He insists on the need to eliminate several notions
which “diversify” the “theme of continuity”, which he
defines as “ready-made syntheses”, as they offer a false
coherence to historical analysis.
• Among the notions and concepts that should be
abandoned, he includes tradition, influence,
development and evolution, spirit (the latter allowing
“the sovereignty of collective consciousness to emerge
as the principle of unity and explanation”).
• The analysis of discursive practices is, as Foucault
points out, the province of parole, not langue;
• A discursive practice is the regularity emerging in the
very fact of its articulation – it is not prior to this
articulation.
• He questions the belief that “all manifest discourse is
secretly based on an 'already-said'; and that this
'already said' is not merely a phrase that has already
been spoken, or a text that has already been written,
but a 'never-said', an incorporeal discourse, a voice as
silent as a breath, a writing that is merely the hollow of
its own mark. […]” (he refers to the Saussurean
concept of langue as the virtual system of rules that
enable meaningful utterances).
• Foucault eliminates the structuralist dichotomy langue/parole
– the analysis of discursive formations / events or
statements is different from linguistic analysis – the events of
discourse require a different approach than the facts of
language:
• A linguistic system can be established (unless it is
constructed artificially) only by using a corpus of statements,
or a collection of discursive facts; but we must then define, on
the basis of this grouping, which has value as a sample, rules
that may make it possible to construct other statements than
these: even if it has long since disappeared, even if it is no
longer spoken, and can be reconstructed only on the basis of
rare fragments, a language (langue) is still a system for
possible statements, a finite body of rules that authorises an
infinite number of performances.
The field of discursive events, on the other hand, is a
grouping that is always finite and limited at any moment to the
linguistic sequences that have been formulated; they may be
innumerable, they may, in sheer size, exceed the capacities of
recording, memory, or reading: nevertheless they form a finite
grouping. The question posed by language analysis of some
discursive fact or other is always: according to what rules has
a particular statement been made, and consequently
according to what rules could other similar statements be
made? The description of the events of discourse poses a
quite different question: how is it that one particular statement
appeared rather than another?
In Foucault’s view, it is important to question the familiar
divisions and groupings by which we designate
categories, forms, or genres of discourse, – e.g.
literature, philosophy, religion, history, fiction, etc.
Such categories may be shown to have different contents
along the ages: “neither literature, nor politics, nor
philosophy and the sciences articulated the field of
discourse, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, as
they did in the nineteenth century”.
Moreover, categories of discourse such as “literature” or
“politics”, which are familiar to us, did not even exist in the
medieval or classical period, and we apply them with
reference to those ages “only by a retrospective
hypothesis”.
• In delimiting various groups of discursive practices, the main
question to be asked is: What ensures the unity of a certain group
of statements? How do we define the object of a discursive
formation?
• According to Foucault, this object is not a given; it is constituted by
discursive practices.
• E.g. investigating madness as the object of psychopathology,
Foucault reaches the conclusion that “mental illness was constituted
by all that was said in all the statements that named it, divided it up,
described it, explained it, traced its developments, indicated its
various correlations, judged it, and possibly gave it speech by
articulating, in its name, discourses that were to be taken as its own.”
• Foucault reaches the conclusion that the unity of a discourse, its
identity, is based not so much on the permanence of the object
(madness, for instance, has been defined differently in various ages
and in various contexts), but on the interplay of rules that make
possible the appearance and transformation of objects during a
given period of time.
 Foucault as “genealogist”

• Foucault’s “genealogical” period (the ‘70s) represents

another version of poststructuralism, although it mounts
the same campaign against science and humanism. In
an interview published in Power/Knowledge (1980), he
defines this term in the following way:
• Genealogies […] are precisely anti-sciences. […]
Genealogy [is] a form of history which accounts for the
constitution of knowledges [savoirs], discourses,
domains of objects, etc., without having to refer to a
subject.
• The main difference between archaeology and
genealogy in Foucault’s work: the emphasis put on
language and knowledge, in the former, vs. the
emphasis on power and practices, in the latter.

• “One’s point of reference should not be to the great

model of language [langue] and signs, but to that of
war and battle. The history which bears and
determines us has the form of a war rather than that
of a language: relations of power, not relations of
meaning.” (Power/Knowledge).
• In his “genealogical” analyses, Foucault introduces the
concept of apparatus (French: “dispositif”) – a
heterogeneous assemblage of discursive and non-
discursive elements (not simply a discursive
assemblage, as he had conceived the episteme).
• The apparatus may consist of “discourses, institutions,
architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws,
administrative measures, scientific statements,
philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions”,
etc.; more exactly “the system of relations... established
between these elements.”
• In his new emphasis on power, Foucault pays attention
to the connection between power and discourse, and
to that between power and knowledge.
• Another one of his major concerns in this phase: the relation of
power to bodies:
“What I am after is to try to show how the relations of power are
able to pass materially into the very density of bodies without even
having to be relayed by the representation of subjects.” (Power,
Truth, Strategy, 1979).
• He analyses the way in which relations of power manifest
themselves in the treatment of bodies, with the body as a political
field
• In modern times, power over the body manifests itself no longer
as an external force, which punishes and tortures, but is
“incorporated” into the bodies of the individuals.
• The control of acts and attitudes takes place from within, through
language and signs
• Foucault speaks of a veritable technological take-off in the
productivity of power” (Power/Knowledge, 1980).
• Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (1975; 1977 in
English) – Foucault’s major work of the “genealogical” period – an
analysis of the the way in which the body has been used in the
production of power.
• The book outlines a history of the penal system in Western
Europe and focuses on its changes in modernity – the shift away
from torture, from the body’s public mutilation and execution, to
the disciplining of the body by its confinement within a system of
surveillance.
• The model for this system is the Panopticon, designed by
Jeremy Bentham in 1785 – the ideal building for modern legal
punishment.
• Its main novelty: the cellular prison, in which the prisoners were to
be constantly in the range of vision of an unverifiable power –
the prisoner’s consciousness of the existence of this invisible
power was sufficient to determine obedient and submissive
behaviour.
Stateville Correctional Center, Crest Hill, Illinois (2002)
Panopticon Prison – Arnhem, The Netherlands
(1994)
Presidio Modelo, Cuba
– built 1926-28, closed
1976
• Humanitarian reforms in the prison system at the end of the 18th
century – the “softening” of the punishment, the displacement of
the punishment of the body by the “cure” of the soul
• The criminal’s solitary incarceration was meant to reform
consciousness
• Foucault’s argument: this apparent softening, the replacement of
torture by solitary confinement, was meant to institute more
thorough methods of control.
• For Foucault, Western society has gradually become a
disciplinary society
• The Panopticon: the symbol of a society preoccupied with
techniques of disciplining the body.
• All major institutions: the school, the army, the factory, even the
hospital, are organised on the basis of disciplinary routines and
surveillance techniques which are meant to “normalise”
individuals.
• Foucault points out the failure of the modernised penal
system to eradicate crime – he argues that in fact it seems
to encourage recidivism and that its survival is due to the
success of its unstated aim: the production of
delinquency, by means of a strategy of social disorder,
necessary for the continual production of power.

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one

should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has
succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a
specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous –
and, on occasion, usable – form of illegality […] in
producing the delinquent as a pathologised subject.
(Discipline and Punish)
• Foucault finds that there is a perpetual imbalance
between the power over the body and the power of the
body.
• There is an analogy between his perspective in this
matter and Derrida’s conception of the signifier, which is
the “seat” of signifying force, but also of destabilizing
movement.
• What interests Foucault is not the body as idea
(signified?), not even the “solidity” of the body (signifier?),
but the power of the body as force – the body’s own
force of Will and Desire.
• This force can oppose the power over the body, and this
is a source of all revolution. Foucault sees this possibility
in materialist terms, as not necessarily determined by
epistemic (i.e. discursive) frameworks.
• Mastery and awareness of one's own body can be acquired only
through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics,
exercises, muscle-building, nudism, glorification of the body
beautiful. All of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of
one's own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work
of power on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies.
But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the
responding claims and affirmations, those of one's own body
against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure
against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly,
what had made power strong becomes used to attack it. Power, after
investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed to a counter-attack in
that same body. Do you recall the panic of the institutions of the
social body, the doctors and politicians, at the idea of non-legalised
cohabitation (l'union libre) or free abortion? But the impression
that power weakens and vacillates here is in fact mistaken; power
can retreat here, re-organise its forces, invests itself elsewhere ...and
so the battle continues. (Interview, 1980)
• Both power over the body and power of the body
represent, for Foucault, power in a political sense.
• For Foucault, politics is not restricted to the level of
class relations, but permeates all kinds of relationships –
e.g. domestic, educational, familial, sexual, etc.
• He is interested in the capillary form of existence of the
mechanisms of power, “the point where power reaches
into the very grain of the individuals, touches their bodies
and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their
discourses, learning processes and everyday lives”.
(Discipline and Punish).