The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 15
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Althusser, and especially Foucault, only really felt it necessary to explicitly point out their distance from structuralism once the movement was on the wane. As F. Scott Fitzgerald might have
put it, by the end of the 1960s it was clear to those intellectuals involved that the structuralist plate had cracked, and the only thing left for it was to consummate a clean break as best one can, and quickly (Fitzgerald 1945:
81–4). In light of this, although structuralism during this period was reaching the summit of institutional and popular success, at the ground level of academic work structuralism was in severe decline, if not already extinct:
structuralism in this period, to put it one way, was like an exploding star that shines forth most brightly long after it has ceased producing new light.
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The list of academics at Vincennes confirms this shift. While there was
certainly a strong structuralist presence at Vincennes, including some of
the movement’s recognised superstars, the majority of academics were not
card-carrying structuralists, and many of those who were so tainted were
beating a fast retreat. Among the intellectuals who walked the corridors
of Vincennes during the late ’60s and early ’70s (at one point or another)
were Barthes, Dumézil, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Derrida, Lyotard,
Irigaray, Cixious, Poulantzas, Negri, de Certeau, Balibar, Badiou,
Rancière, Judith Miller (Lacan’s daughter) and her husband Jacques-
Alain Miller. Despite their debt to structuralism, this roster of thinkers
did not collectively promote a classical structuralist agenda. In fact, if
anything, what they all shared was a tendency to push beyond the previous
established parameters of structuralism in order to inhabit its margins and address its blind spots. Vincennes, as such, was not exactly structuralist, but poststructuralist.
This, however, raises the crucial problem mooted at the start of this
investigation: if even the crowning institution of structuralism was more
accurately poststructuralist, where does one end and the other begin? And
more significantly; from what position do we determine this problematic, let alone its resolution?
From Structuralism to Poststructuralism: The Problem
of Transformation
Just as Derrida questioned Foucault in 1963, we must ask ourselves
now: in the name of what authority does this history of the transforma-
tion from structuralism to poststructuralism proceed? Given that other
thinkers associated with poststructuralism, such as Gilles Deleuze, pose
similar sorts of questions,3 we might consider this to be a pre-eminently
poststructuralist problematic. As it happens, ‘problem’ is precisely the
right word when it comes to Deleuze. During the 1950s and ’60s, Deleuze
produced a series of monographs on individual thinkers, including Hume,
Bergson, Proust, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Kant. As established scholars
from the academic field of each thinker would concur, Deleuze’s readings
of these thinkers are highly idiosyncratic and at times perverse. This is
because in each case Deleuze attempts to elicit what he believes are the
critical problems articulated by the oeuvre of each thinker – problems
that may not always be explicitly apparent in the text, but traverse them
throughout and provide the source of their vitality. As a consequence,
Deleuze is never that interested in debating points of contention with his
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contemporaries. His intention is to rather distil the problematic of each
great thinker that produces something worth knowing. As he explains in
an interview of 1968:
When you are facing such a work of genius, there’s no point saying you
disagree. First you have to know how to admire; you have to rediscover
the problems he poses, his particular machinery. It is through admiration that you will come to genuine critique. The mania of people today is not
knowing how to admire anything: either they’re ‘against’, or they situate
everything at their own level while they chit-chat and scrutinize. That’s
no way to go about it. You have to work your way back to those problems
which an author of genius has posed, all the way back to that which he does not say in what he says, in order to extract something that still belongs to him, though you also turn it against him. You have to be inspired, visited
by the geniuses you denounce. (Deleuze 2004: 139)
There are clear resonances here between Deleuze’s problematic approach
to the history of philosophy and Althusser’s interpretation of Marx’s method of reading: ‘To understand this necessary and paradoxical identity of non-vision and vision within vision itself is very exactly to pose our problem
(the problem of the necessary connexion which unites the visible and the
invisible), and to pose it properly is to give ourselves a chance of solving it’
(Althusser and Balibar 1970: 21). But while Marx’s problematic philosophy
is no doubt influential on Deleuze, the emergence of Deleuze’s concern for
the problem can be traced to another source: Henri Bergson. In his book
Bergsonism (1966), Deleuze contends that Bergsonian intuition – the concept in Bergson’s philosophy that was notoriously parodied by Bertrand Russell
for its vagueness – is a supremely rigorous and precise method (Deleuze
1991: 13). This method, moreover, is ‘an essentially problematizing method’
(Deleuze 1991, 35). Drawing heavily from an essay in Bergson’s Creative Mind (‘Introduction II: Stating of the Problems’), Deleuze notes that from an early age people are trained to search for solutions to problems that they have been given – problems that are, in other words, ‘ready made’. Many
of these problems, however, are false, either because they are ‘nonexistent’
or ‘badly stated’. This is to say that such inherited problems no longer
fit the circumstances in which they find themselves, and are thus in need
of restating in a manner that is more appropriate. Because solutions are
always respective to the problems they are solutions of, Bergson argues that a ‘problem is solved as soon as it is properly stated’ (Bergson 2007: 37).
When this is done, false problems evaporate (rather than become ‘solved’)
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and the problems that remain are ones that we truly deserve – they are our problems, not someone else’s.4
Deleuze’s Bergsonism, in a way, perfectly illustrates what our problem
is at present: while innovative social scientists and philosophers/historians attentive to their developments were busy during the 1950s promoting the
new intellectual vogue that was structuralism, Deleuze was off studying
philosophers such as Bergson and Hume – philosophers that were hardly
fashionable in Parisian coffee houses at the time. Deleuze therefore did not take part in the structuralist wave in the same manner that many of his contemporaries did, such as Foucault and Derrida. This little fact, as Bergson would say, is big with meaning. How are we to understand the contribution
of a figure such as Deleuze to the problematic of poststructuralism and its relation to structuralism? For instance, it is not uncommon for Deleuze to
be categorised as a ‘new’ or ‘late’ poststructuralist (as opposed to ‘early’ ones like Derrida).5 On one level – the factual level – such descriptions are simply false: Deleuze did not come ‘after’ Derrida in time or in conceptual progression. Indeed, many of Deleuze’s most enduring and critical ideas (such
as the theory of multiplicity developed from Bergson) were already fully
formed in the 1950s, and are thus contemporaneous with structuralism, let
alone ‘early’ poststructuralism. But on another level, such descriptions are not necessarily the product of a false problem. If Deleuze is presented as
coming ‘after’ Derrida, it is not only because the wider public became aware of Deleuze after Derrida,6 but also because the problematic of poststructuralism, according to the manner in which it was first constructed, demands
that this is the case.
Deleuze is therefore an interesting figure for our analysis of the trans-
formation from structuralism to poststructuralism for he complicates our
chronology and requires that we consider the problematic through which we
perceive his work. As with most other French intellectuals who lived through the age of structuralism, Deleuze was hardly unaffected by the movement.
His The Logic of Sense and Anti-Oedipus, for example, contain crucial engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis, while he references nearly all the other major structuralists at some point in his career. Deleuze even wrote an essay in 1967 titled ‘How do we recognise structuralism?’7 But as this essay reveals, it is difficult to articulate Deleuze’s relationship to structuralism. Much like his treatment of individual philosophers in previous works, the essay
on structuralism does not summarise or provide a description of a widely
recognisable classical image of structuralism. Instead, it attempts to extract a novel and creative force that has an uncanny similarity to Deleuze’s own
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to be more poststructuralist than structuralist, or at least structuralism ‘in a very radical guise’ (Williams 2005: 53). But if this is so, and if Deleuze’s approach to the essay and indeed many of the concepts expressed in it are
contiguous with his monographs of the 1950s, then we would have to say
that those monographs are also poststructuralist. If this were the case,
what would it mean to suggest that some poststructuralist works, such as
Deleuze’s Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953) and his groundbreaking essays on Bergson in the mid 1950s, predate the publication of some of the major
structuralist works, such as Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology (1958) and Foucault’s History of Madness (1961)? Such a suggestion is only rendered sensible when directed through the problematics of structuralism,
poststructuralism and the transformation between them. Deleuze’s early
concepts that are propelled throughout his later works can then, at best, be described as untimely – the sign of a ‘time to come’ (Nietzsche 1983: 60),
since they do not sufficiently align with the structuralist sign of the times.
The problematic is then restated to incorporate the following: what is the
relation between an untimely rupture, the time in which it occurs, and the
time in which it is retrospectively recognised as untimely?
Nevertheless, in the case of some thinkers other than Deleuze whose
careers spanned structuralism and poststructuralism, the transformation
between the two paradigms is arguably much more straightforward. Unlike
Foucault and Althusser, who would come to downplay their involvement
with structuralism, or Derrida, who could claim with some legitimacy that
he was always on the edge of the paradigm (the limit within the centre),
Barthes’ fidelity to the structuralist programme during the 1950s and early
’60s was most explicit and undeniable. So too was the moment that he
abandoned the classical structuralist programme. In 1970, the publication
of Barthes’ S/Z heralded a new phase in his career that markedly deviated from his previous classical structuralist positions. In its opening passage, S/Z derides those analysts who would ‘see all the world’s stories (and there have been ever so many) within a single structure’, for such an approach
disregards the irreducible difference in and of each text – the ‘difference of which each text is the return’ (Barthes 1974: 3).8 This new direction, as Barthes acknowledged, was heavily influenced by a set of thinkers that would later be called poststructuralist.9 Julia Kristeva, in particular, was largely responsible for this change in tack by Barthes. As a recent Bulgarian émigré in Paris, Kristeva brought with her fresh ideas about language and literary analysis that would radically challenge aspects of the existing structuralist doctrine. In 1966 she delivered a lecture that employed the work of Mikhail Bakhtin – a largely unknown figure in France at the time – for the purposes Untitled-2 101
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of reconfiguring structuralism. Her goal, as with Derrida, was to give ‘dynamism to structuralism’,10 and thus replace the staid and synchronic nature
of classical structuralism with a genuinely dynamic model that imbued
perpetual genesis. Upon hearing this lecture, Barthes reassessed his position and almost immediately adopted elements of Kristeva’s approach, such as
her ‘intertextual’ methodology.11
A relatively clear case, such as Barthes’, can tell us much about the ‘on
the ground’ theoretical issues that indicate a shift from structuralism to
poststructuralism. Meticulous analysis of the relevant texts and interviews should dispel many erroneous generalisations and regurgitated inaccuracies
(some of which have been necessarily repeated in this chapter). But despite, or perhaps more accurately, aside from the value of careful reading, it must be acknowledged that the problem of the transformation from structuralism to
poststructuralism does not only concern what this or that thinker said, nor can it be exhausted or resolved by settling upon a ‘correct’ reading of their corpus. This is because the problems at hand are far greater than the thinkers themselves. The reality of their various poststructuralisms, therefore, cannot be reduced to textual interpretation, regardless of how faithful or
impressive the analysis may be.
In an excellent work on poststructuralism, James Williams warns against
reducing the work of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault to the problem of poststructuralism. Poststructuralism, in his view, is rather defined by these great works (Williams 2005: 25–6). An understanding of poststructuralism,
in other words, can be accumulated through an investigation of Derrida’s
method of deconstruction, Deleuze’s philosophy of difference, and so on,
but poststructuralism must not be presumptively deployed as a means for
constructing an understanding of those thinkers. Williams’ sentiment is a
good one: as Althusser showed in the case of Marxism, any ‘ism’ can argu-
ably benefit from a return to what the relevant thinkers actually said (or
what is not said in what they say). But it is also wilfully limited. As pointed out above, Althusser’s return to the texts was in part motivated by a desire to turn away from realities in the East and respond to new challenges in the West. This allowed for much creative ‘Theory’, but it also compromised the
work, for it denied to a large extent the active involvement of extra textual elements in the constitution of the problematic. It is questionable, therefore, how far Williams can turn away from extratextual realities in the West that contributed to the formation of poststructuralism, if the objective is to gain an understanding of poststructuralism, including its seminal texts.
Poststructuralism, as it is currently understood and deployed, may contain
many assertions that have been derived from lazy readings of Derrida or
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too little familiarity with Deleuze’s solo works, but this problematic still has very real effects in the world of academia and beyond. Like Deleuze and
Guattari say of capitalism, its contradictions do not necessarily harm it, but perhaps make it stronger, for better or worse (Deleuze and Guattari 1984:
151). This was indeed precisely the case with structuralism: if Lévi-Strauss had been consistently read in the way that he wanted, it is probable that
structuralism would not have spread as it did or led to poststructuralism.12
This is not to say that all misreadings are good, or that what a thinker writes is necessarily of secondary importance to the circumstance of the reader. It is also not to say that one necessarily needs to understand poststructuralism in order to understand Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. But it is to insist upon a recognition of the importance that extratextual elements play in the determination of poststructuralism, including the texts this problematic embraces, if one wishes to fully understand poststructuralism, as opposed
to analyse the texts of Deleuze, Derrida, and so on.
So, what exactly is this poststructuralist problematic? Or as Deleuze might have modified, how do we recognise this problem across a number of divergent works and locales? What are its singularities, critical points of change and indeterminacies? Who is it that employs the term, where, when and why? I will leave these questions for others in this volume to ascertain more fully. But as a way of concluding my contribution, I would suggest that the following be
borne in mind when pursuing these issues: to understand poststructuralism
requires that an attempt be made to articulate both its history and its problematic structure (accompanied, of course, by a reading of the relevant texts).
