>structuralism
>post-structuralism
What's the deal with people's sudden obsession with this? In the last two years I keep seeing it all the time on 4chan. And I heard it in real life a few times too, used by "hipsters" (it's a meaningless buzzword, but I don't know what to call them) and nerdy suburban white teenagers. Seems like ever since this Derrida guy got more popular and acknowledged, all the kids have been talking about this and name-dropping this "le epic structuralism" and "post-structuralism". Is (post-)structuralism an epic new meme?
Why do people keep using this so much? Is it to show that they know a new word or something? To seem cultured? Can someone explain this to me? And what exactly are these terms? Why are they being mentioned so often? And is it somehow related to "deconstruction" (and what is that?, I read that no one knows, not even the guy who coined the term)? And what do people usually refer to when they mention structuralism or post-structuralism? What areas/activities or studies? Is it related to philosophy? Is it a movement in philosophy? Is it related to arts? Literature? Sociology? Psychology? What is it? Is it somehow related to modernism and metamodernism?
What books should I read to learn more about it?
Am I first supposed to start with the Greeks, all le ancient philosophers, then all the relevant philosophers in the last 1000 years, you know, Kant, Heidegger Foucault, Saussure, Descartes, Locke, Marx, Hegel, Sartre and everyone else? If that's the case then forget about it. But I doubt any of you actually read works from all of them and are still capable of understanding (post-)structuralism.
>>7846223
Post-structuralism influences many fields in the social science, including philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology etc. It basically rejects structuralist ideas, deconstructing them.
From Amazon:
You Can (Not ) Interpret
Structuralism sought to explain what the elements of human culture were by analyzing the structures surrounding those cultures. Ultimately, language is the structure of culture (i.e., culture is socially-constructed by language). However, Post-Structuralism argues that language, in and of itself, has a dichotomous contradiction. Simply stated, words can be "ambivalent," as Derrida pointed out, showing how meaning could be deferred by these embedded differences (i.e., "differance"). In other words, we can't understand cultures by interpreting their language since the language itself is (1) open to interpretation and (2) contradictory to itself by nature. Like combining matter and anti-matter (or like mixing yin with yang), words nullify their own existence. This is "deconstructionism." Each word is like this. You can interpret a word as being matter or you can interpret it as anti-matter. But this would only be a result of you seeing one side of a two-sided coin. You can interpret the text anyway you want. However, you must also understand that when you see both sides of the same coin (the matter and anti-mater), they conflict with each other. Thus, you will have two different interpretations that are each other's exact opposite. This makes interpretation rather pointless and futile since the different interpretations cancel each other out, destroying and quashing the concept of interpretation altogether. Restated: interpretation is only an end result of seeing one side of a two-sided word. Furthermore, the ambivalence of a word nullifies our ability to interpret anything.
>>7846223
>am i supposed to learn about structuralism and post structuralism by reading structuralists and post structuralists?
Triggered
>>7846238
This is the problem with throwing out empiricism wholesale.
>>7846223
>Am I first supposed to start with the Greeks, all le ancient philosophers, then all the relevant philosophers in the last 1000 years, you know, Kant, Heidegger Foucault, Saussure, Descartes, Locke, Marx, Hegel, Sartre and everyone else?
>If that's the case then forget about it
Go back to /r9k/ and keep watching anime and playing 'vidya'.
>>>/r9k/
Idiots misread something and say they take a poststructuralist approach to meaning, so more rigorous folks have to say back up a minute misreader, there are universal absolute signifiers entrenched in the structure of the work you are butchering with your agenda ...or the building we live in would collapse, because the foundations plans dont mean to me what they mean to you (except they do, you poststructuralist jackals!)
>>7846243
Too many idiots saying blah blah no meaning but a sign thay says "no peanut products allowed" means just that ... no interpretation, no ambivalence in meaning. Dont bring peanut products there, and we can guess with some certainty someone there has an allergy. Nothing ambiguous at all even if we are wrong in our assumption ... we have a good chance of being right. Because we arent stupid.
>>7846253
so no oreos either?
>>7846246
Tbqh senpai i agree or at least i don't think derrida did enough work to firmly prove that difference is even a thing.
This is now an unpopulated opinions thread
>deconstruction is nonsense on stilts
>>7846253
>>7846253
>being this pleb
>>7846238
Where did you find that
People want the power to uncover profound, contrarian meanings to novels, poems, political/historical events, films, TV shows, and entire philosophies without having to do the work necessary for understanding these things. Instead of remaining in semi-ignorance during the years while you are developing your aesthetic sense and worldview by doing a tremendous amount of research and using your judgment to develop non-conceptual modes of understanding, it is easier to filter these various events and types of media through an easy-to-understand, pseudo-scientific system that uses obscure terminology and concepts. With these obscure terms and concepts, you not only have to not think for yourself but you can delude yourself into thinking that you hold the skeleton key to existence and you, and only you, are euphoric because you are enlightened by your own intelligence.
>>7846269
Underrated post
>>7846307
Overrated insight
>>7846307
post pic of ur asshole
>>7846223
Thuy Johnston (a name that (like Phuc Stevenson (named (by me, not his parents (government attorneys (I know what you(Katrina?)’re thinking, how did lawyers raise a postman and under what kind of class system does this novel operate?))) after the 2011 NBA champion Deshawn Stevenson)) implies (to assumption-prone readers) that Mrs. Johnston was pro-trad enough to take her husband’s (we’re being implicitly socially conservative (by not acknowledging the likelihood that she’s gay (or adopted or a pop star with a stage name)) for the sake of space (yes le parentheses man is economical as fuck with space)) last name but still asserted enough cultural dominance to give her child a decidedly ethnic (to Americans (UT didn’t stand for U of Tel Aviv or what have you)) first name. Marv “Yellow Fever” Johnston’s dainty Asian bride has the cultural steering wheel (or maybe they’re sticks for her (that’s too absurd to be earnestly racist (also I’m Asian (half (I mean Obama can make black jokes (is that the same thing? Yellow peril and Jim Crow Seattle but look at China’s GDP compared to every country in West Africa (which is to say we’re not in the same boat (which is to say I’m sorry for all the ching-chong jokes (but I still get the appropriation pass to name my characters Phuc and Thuy and Trang (oh shit you haven’t met her yet (“Trang West is an 11 year-old Nepali yak-milking enthusiast at George W. Bush (Honor the Texas flag (“just like you like it”)) Middle School …”)))))))))))) is a grad student at UT. She’s with Wynn despite a 7-year age gap and the murky (is it murky if she’s a woman? (yes)) ethics of a TA fucking a freshman undergrad. She’d actually be a rapist in a few states since Wynn is only 17 (due to an error in which the Spanish 1 credit-by-exam packet (Wynn’s last name is Hernandez) the school district gave him in 9th grade also had tests and scantrons for six more courses, resulting in accidental early graduation) but thanks to some handy Texas AOC laws (at least we’re not Thailand (see page 1)) she’s in the clear (Martin Scorsese doesn’t judge his characters but my name isn’t Martin so I think we’re tied (it’s these Grantland-tier jokes that are sinking my parentheticals)).
>>7846341
forced meme
Talking about critical theory for free on the internet. Not a chance.
>Start with the Greeks!
Structuralism and post-structuralism are opposites. Structuralism tends to be obsessed with tradition and duality while Post-structuralism seeks to deconstruct everything.
For instance, structuralists will say the male/female conflict is an important theme of human society, while a post-structuralist will say gender doesn't exist.
continental philosophy is unfalsifiable rubbish used by leftists to justify their SJW behaviour
continental philosophy is simply a unified perspective that destroys dichotomies and dualities.
it understands how language creates culture (and vice versa) and tries to deconstruct that linguistic dialectic. when you deconstruct dialects, though, nothing can really be successfully said. no one-sided statements can ever be made.
when you read continental philosophy, think of it in taoist of zen buddhist terms.
watch this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we6cwmzhbBE
>>7846223
pic related
Structuralism stresses the significance of social structures, like laws, institutions, environment, etc., in the development of ideas, individuals, societies, theoretical validity and soundness, production of scientific knowledge, etc. Post-structuralism says that these structures are unintelligible for one reason or another. deconstruction seeks to find the lack of meaning in a text by psychoanalyzing the author and examining the circumstances of the writing of the text. It's identical to Heideggerianism, if I'm to believe people on 4chan.
Or something.
It's all native to France and French academic discourse. Honestly, just read The Poverty of Theory by Thompson.
>>7846307
Strawmanning so hard. You're missing the point of >>7846238 about the two sided coin. You can be as reductive as you like about deconstructionism as a 'filter', or as somehow requiring less effort than other studies (which is simply false given the amount of prerequisite knowledge to make sense of it) but the vague alternative you posit of 'using your judgement to develop non-conceptual modes of understanding' is just as much of a distortion of truth as the thing you're condemning. hell, that alternative could be used to describe deconstructionism in itself, seeing as its primary aim is to disestablish the centrality of the thinking subject and its supposedly authoritative claim to truth via conceptualisation.
Also, 'aestheticism' is the privilege of classical form, which is in itself a conceptualisation of how art and literature functions and develops over the course of history. To say aesthetic appreciation is 'non-conceptual' is retarded.
TL;DR: maybe do a 'tremendous amount of research' on deconstructionism instead of making such hollow and misguided attacks on it.
This travesty of a thread could have been avoided if the OP had just looked up what these terms meant himself.
Is Barthes' The Death of the Author somehow related to structuralism or post-structuralism?
>>7847786
Conceptualizing aesthetic appreciation does not make aesthetic appreciation conceptual. I am sure it takes a great deal of effort tangle your mind up in all of that nonsense, but I INSTINCTIVELY trust my INSTINCT that some things are not worth reading or talking or thinking about. I am sorry for hollowly and misguidedly attacking whatever it is that you are referring to (?) but I am not convinced that it is worth the time and effort to read Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze, Lacan, or Baudrillard when a) there are hundreds and hundreds of more interesting and important writers and b) we die. What I am saying has to be true because everything I believe is true and I have never been and will never be wrong about anything. The fact that I say those dudes are not worth reading makes them not worth reading.
>>7848086
You're awesome.
>>7848086
>>7848098
No, no, both of you are awesome. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
>>7846307
>non-conceptual modes of understanding
dude how is this not what you're criticizing
>>7848120
This message will self-destruct in 3, 2, 1 ...
>>7846223
think of 'post-structuralism' not as temporally after 'structuralism' (although it is) but rather in opposition to. structuralism vs post-structuralism can be best understood in relation to sensualism vs anti-sensualism. it is useful to analyze this dichotomy via proxy because sensualism concerns solely the being qua being and does not penetrate the 'structure' that mediates phenomena (e.g. objects and events as they are understood by human consciousness) and the realm of platonic forms. Watch this brief video for an explanation-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPt8kAL7vTY
Hope that helped.
Structuralism and Post Structuralism refer to broad approaches to the study of language and society. Structuralism clung to the scientific goal of finding universals by catalogueing common features of different societies and languages. Poststructuralism by and large abandoned the search for universals in favour of exhaustive analysis of the particular on its own terms. They are influential perspectives in several fields such as Literature, Anthropology, Linguistics, and Sociology.
An example of structuralism would be Saussure's linguistics in which "langue" is the structure or framework in which using language is possible, and "parole" is the motivating factors of each utterance and the nature of its message. At root, however, all language has a comprehensible structure.
An example of Poststructuralism would be the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which claims that language has a determining effect on thought. Certain thoughts that Mandarin makes possible are unlikely in English. Evidence of this resides in those words that have no equivalent in a different language (schadenfreude, litost, etc).
post anything = circular mental gymnastics
there is no post anything, ideas are distinct and living principles that manifest in different ways.
>>7848331
the prefix 'post' in its most general terms is a reactionary movement against whatever preceded it. That isn't to say that structuralism and post-structuralism aren't 'distinct and living principles' in themselves, rather, its to say that the relationship between the two is antagonistic. I agree with you the prefix is quite misleading, however; Derrida himself was against the term because deconstruction actively required a structuralist conceptual framework to be deconstructed in the first place. post-structuralism can never truly be 'post'-structuralism because then there would simply be nothing to deconstruct.
>>7846223
>Like combining matter and anti-matter (or like mixing yin with yang), words nullify their own existence.
So in essence, if you take this 'post-structuralistic'-stance, thoughts, words, concepts have no meanding...And how is this philosophy applicable to real-life situtations?
>>7847569
That's actually completely wrong. Continental philosophy is hardly a unified perspective, it's a geographically and temporally defined school of thought.
http://breaktheirhaughtypower.org/ontological-difference-and-the-neo-liberal-war-on-the-social-deconstruction-and-deindustrialization/
>Following in the same vein, one might just as succinctly counterpose middle-class radicalism and Marxian socialism as follows: middle-class radicalism conceives of freedom as “trangression”, as the breaking of laws, the “refusal of all constraints”, as the Situationist International put it more than 30years ago, whereas the Marxian project of communism conceives of freedom, as the practical solution of a problematic which evolved theoretically from Spinoza and Leibniz to Kant, Hegel and Feuerbach as the transformation of laws, up to and including the physical laws of the universe, man’sunique “Promethean” capacity. More than 150 years ago, Marx, in his critique of the middle-class radicalism of the Young Hegelians, said that for Bauer, Hess, and Stirner, science, technology and the human history of practical activity in nature was only “mass, mere mass” (to use the jargon ofthe day) and one can truly say that for most of the Western left, far-left and ultra-left which emerged from the 1960′s, these phenomena are shown the door with the updated (and essentially Weberian) Frankfurt School mantra “domination, mere domination”. For the middle-class radical,”negation of the negation” view, the problems are “hierarchy”, “authority”, “domination” and “power”; for the Marxian communist view, the problems are the project of the abolition of value, commodity production, wage labor and the proletariat (the latter being the commodity form of labor power within capitalism). From these latter the “negation of the negation” problematic is entirely recast, reformed and superceded, and itsheavy overlay of bourgeois ideology–freedom conceived without the transformation of necessity– discarded.
>>7849932
>What is truly appalling today in large swaths of the left and far-left in the West is the willful illiteracy in the critique of political economy. Perhaps even more appalling, and closely related, is the willful illiteracy, boredom and hostility where science and nature are concerned. It is certainly true that the “critique of political economy” can sometimes be almost as boring as political economy itself, better known today under its still more ideologically contemporary name of “economics”. We recall Marx writing to Engels (in 1857!) saying that he hoped to have done with the “economic shit” within 1-2 years. I myself have studied “economic questions” for years, and have also spent years in recovery from thenovicained, ashes- in- the mouth feeling brought on by excessive exposure to the “dismal science”, or even to its critique.
>But this is something rather different than a certain “mood” of the past 35 years, a mood whose culmination to date is the “post-modern”, “cultural studies” scene that has filled up bookstores with its nihilist punning , its “white males never did anything but rape, pillage and loot” theory of history, and its ignorant, revealing “everything and everyone is tainted” projections onto everything and everyone in some potted notion of the Western “tradition”. This is the world view of demoralized upper middle-class people ensconced in fashionable universities, largely ignorant of thereal history of the failure (to date) of the communist project for a higher organization of society, assuming that the historical and intellectual backwater engulfing them is the final product of human history.
currently doing an essay on poststructural feminism and rape in the united states military
quite interesting Tbh
Post-structuralism is just communist subterfuge in an era when the Establishment was conservative.
>Communism fails because the real world filters for bullshit
>communist intellectuals: "hmm, what if we attack reality itself? Maybe communism will become viable that way"
Notice how, as the Establishment is becoming increasingly leftist, they are abandoning their distrusts of grand metanarratives and going full "YOU DON'T WANT TO BE ON THE WRONG SIDE OF HISTORY, DO YOU? IT'S 2016"
We really need to understand that nothng, absolutely nothing that comes from the pen of left-wing intellectuals in sincere. Even their breathing is done in the name of revolutionary praxis.
>>7851385
The "distrusts of grand metanarratives" hurts the right just as much as the left.
Marxism is itself cited as a grand meta-narrative in the post-modern field.
We really need to understand that nothng, absolutely nothing that comes from the pen of /pol/-wing anti-intellectuals is sincere. Even their breathing is done in the name of ranting-about-imagery-Marxist-conspiracies praxis.
>>7851157
postructural rape, you say?
To understand Derrida you only need Plato, Hegel, Saussure and Heidegger.
While his ideas are certainly complex the main gist of deconstruction is not really that complex and is somewhat outdated in current philosophical circles.
American academics are always 30 years behind continental Europe and will masturbate to everything that comes out of France for at least another decade.
Proof of this is Judith Butler, her though isn't really that complex yet you see her everywhere. Yet it took Zizek only one chapter on one of his books about Lacan to demolish her.
>>7846223
Take the word 'Structuralism' and weigh it in your hands.. Quite heavy isn't it. Then take the word post-structuralism and weigh it. Doesn't feel so heavy does it?
However, if the word post-structuralism is to be understood by itself in it's meaning then it invalidates itself since the word 'post' and 'structure' compose a structure. If it has a structure it also has an idea or ideology.
So "post" structuralism isn't really "past"(as the latin word means) anything in reality, it is simply another ideology masking itself as a non-ideology, the final ideology. Ideologies pretending to be the be-all end-all of ideologies are totalitarian in nature and should be viewed soberly.
>structuralism
>post-structuralism
>bitching whenever someone uses "good" or "bad"
>asking people to first define the terms before being allowed to use them
>context matters
>context doesn't matter
post-structuralism is cancer, fucking ivory tower bullshit
so unnecessary
