Re: Post Structuralism And Postmodernism Pdf 18
Julia Heaslet
From Postmodernism - Wikipedia, I think that postmodernism and post-structuralism are basically the same, and are used when you want to talk about the movement in philosophy, and deconstruction is only used when you analyse a text. Is this understanding correct?
tl;dr - deconstruction is something specific (usually from Derrida less commonly from Heidegger). Post-structuralism is a near synonym for late 20th century French philosophy and is a type of "post-modernism." Post-modernism is a term which means anything after modernity -- no idea what it means without context.
Postmodernism is a grab bag term that applies to many different things that come ... after modernism. It's hard to know what someone means when they say this term as it gets bantered about (usually by people who are opposed to something they call "postmodernism" or by people who thinks it's the best thing ever). One reason it's hard is that what is modernism is not as easy to answer as it appears. In general, in philosophy, modernism refers to the period from Descartes and Locke down to the period of Kant ... and maybe Hegel, and further maybe Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche (depending on the speaker and their interpretations of these philosophers).
Post-structuralism is one of the things that comes after modernism. The name "post-structuralism" gives it a firmer meaning than "post-modernism" and locates it within a French tradition. It's in many ways quite similar to the project of structuralism. Structuralism is a project that says meaning exists in systems ("structures") not in sentences or individuals. Post-structuralists keep the structures but often drop out the idea that there are meanings beneath this that could be found or could exist. It's hard to articulate quite what they mean by this (because part of their point is to attack both "they" and "mean"), but the basic idea is that our naive concept of things where speakers are subjects that have wills, intentions, thoughts, and values is wrong and what's actually happening is that ideas move in their own force.
For this reason, it's not really clear if the people called post-structuralists (e.g., Foucault, Lacan, Butler, Kristeva, Derrida, and others) are engaged in a fundamentally different project or just an extension of the original structuralist agenda. This is because they accept the main point of the structuralists -- that the structures are primary; they reject or possibly amplify the structuralists diminishing of the subject. (How exactly and what exactly will vary depending on who we are talking about).
Deconstruction is a term for a method that appears originally (not necessarily meaning "first" but meaning as the origin of the method) in Heidegger that refers to showing how the concepts we have doesn't work the way we often think they do (see this answer). For Heidegger, Destruktion (unlike it's English counterpart destruction) means both a tearing down of the old and a building up of the new (SEP; n.b. my German is not good enough to judge whether Heidegger's usage of the term is normal or singular). Derrida is probably most famous for this both as a method and as a name for a type of post-structuralism. Derrida also uses the term Bricolage for the same basic idea with the meaning that when we tear down concepts we think are clear, we will discover they are not so clear. The wikipedia articles in English and German are helpful here.
To put it in very bare terms,Postmodernism is a way of being, a socio-cultural practice, whereas,Poststructuralism is a way of knowledge, a academic practice. AndDeconstruction is a way that poststructuralist philosophy functions using the slippage of meaning as its base to question existing linguistic structure and the values and consequent power, considered inherent in language.
In the 1980s there was a lot of excitement about postmodernism, deconstruction, structuralism and post-structuralism. This flood of theory appeared to offer a radical new perspective for understanding and experiencing the world. It was an enlightenment which left all those who rejected it cursed with still being stuck in the murky mire of the old ways of thinking which had dominated western thought for 2000 years and which at last we could escape. Such religious fervour with its condemnation of heretics and establishment of new messiahs has softened, and it is now possible to look quietly and calmly at what was going on.
Moving on from the structuralists we come to Derrida and deconstruction. I come to Jacques Derrida next since his first three important books were published in 1967, which is ahead of the main post-structuralist book Anti-Oedipus which came out in the early 1970s.
Derrida can be called a post-structuralist in a sense, since he moves on from structuralism, taking some of it for granted, and challenging other parts of it. Where the structuralists constructed a system, a structure, Derrida deconstructs it, that is, he takes it apart. However, the disconcerting thing is that he does so from the inside. His technique of deconstruction shows how structures or systems of thought contain the seeds of their own downfall.
As a result of these criticisms, some of the excesses of post-structuralism and deconstruction are now over. Currently there appears to be a more sober mood among Continental philosophers as they try to re-position these intellectual movements within the fight for human rights, and to create better human values.
Highlighting the inextricable link between thinking about the world and acting in it, between analysis and action, and theory and practice, poststructural/postmodern IR seeks to elucidate how the interrelation between these two terms is mediated through different forms of representational practices. Denying the possibility of making value-neutral, objective claims independent of subjectivity, they bring into focus the politics of writing and the ethics of scholarship (Zehfuss, 2013).
While it would hardly do justice to subsume the multiplicity of positions within poststructural/postmodern thought, it is nevertheless possible to point out some common assumptions and themes that characterize their agenda. Foremost among them are the radical questioning of ontological essentialism and epistemological foundationalism in social and political thought and analysis (Torfing, 1999). Rejecting the notion that the nature of things are defined by universal, atemporal qualities, poststructuralism/postmodernism asserts the impossibility of a pre-given, self-determining essence. It contests the possibility of providing universal grounds and absolute justifications for the truth of claims made about knowledge and value. Abandoning the Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of achieving objective knowledge of phenomena through the use of reason, poststructural/postmodern approaches claim that knowledge constructs its own object of study. They foreground language not only as a distinguishing feature of human beings, but also as the constitutive dimension of human relationships. Emphasizing the contingent, undetermined nature of reality, they exhibit a general aversion to metanarratives (total explanations) of social reality. Contra modernist interpretations, they argue that history is not a linear, progressive, uniform process of the unfolding of a single essence (human reason). Instead, they emphasize the contingency, openness of time, and variety of historical trajectories.
Poststructuralism/postmodernism problematize the relations between violence and politics, force and law that are found in hegemonic accounts of world politics. While Realist accounts project violence to the anarchical realm outside and figure it as a strategical instrument deployed to advance state interest in an arena constantly prone to violence, Liberal international theory commits itself to the possibility of eliminating violence from political life through the development of liberal institutions and practices globally (Frazer & Hutchings, 2011). In contrast, poststructural/postmodern approaches suggest that being less an antidote to violence as it is generally supposed, modern political reason is itself implicated in the violence it is expected to cure (Campbell & Dillon, 1993). Making central the idea that violence is constitutive of modern subjectivity and modern political freedom is a lethal affair (Dillon, 2013), they examine strategic and security discourses to expose the ways in which the modern state constitutes political life as militarized life (Campbell, 1998; Chaloupka, 1992; Klein, 1994).
I'm wondering what big ideas like these have come along since the 90s-ish, I'm interested in kind of catching up to contemporary philosophy. I've heard of postpostmodernism, metamodernism, things like that, but they don't seem to be taken seriously (though I'm not sure how popular existentialism, structuralism, and post-structuralism were/are either).
Nursing Theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, and Foucault critiques mainstream American nursing theory and its use of post-structural theory, comparing and contrasting how postmodern and post-structural ideas have been used fruitfully in nursing research and theorizing elsewhere.
In the late 1980s, references to post-structuralism and Michel Foucault started to appear in nursing journals. Since then, hundreds of nursing publications have cited postmodernism and key post-structural ideas such as power/knowledge, discourse, and de-centring the human subject. In Nursing Theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, and Foucault, Olga Petrovskaya argues that the application of these ideas is markedly different in American nursing theory scholarship compared to nursing theoretical scholarship generated outside the canon of "unique" nursing theory. Analysing relevant literature from the late 1980s through 2010s, she demonstrates this difference, arguing that American nursing theory calcified into a matrix of dogmas built on logical positivism, wary of "borrowed" theory, and loyal to a "unique nursing science." Post-structural ideas that fit the matrix, such as criticism of medicine, are sanctioned, whereas ideas sceptical of humanistic agendas including those that challenge American nursing theory are rendered meaningless. In contrast, other nurse scholars from Britain, Australia, Canada, and what the author calls the American enclave group engaged with postmodern and post-structural perspectives to enrich their research and invite readers to rethink nursing practice. The book showcases examples of their intelligent, creative theorizing. Arguing that American nursing theory enervated nursing theorizing, Petrovskaya calls for opening this matrix to theoretical and methodological creativity, less rigid categories of scholarship, and healthy self-examination.
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