The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 16
On the one hand, an analysis of the former will illustrate how a historical transformation occurs from structuralism to poststructuralism – a historical transformation, furthermore, that occurs on both a theoretical level (such as the structuralist elevation of the unapparent/unconscious that is then taken up, modified and/or discarded by poststructuralists), and an extratextual
level (such as the contribution of May ’68 to the contours of poststructuralist theories and their popular success). On the other hand, an analysis of the latter will remind us that it matters a great deal what we presuppose and obscure in the pursuit of this history; that it matters where we begin and hope to arrive.
For what would poststructuralism be if we began with Deleuze and then added Derrida (or not)? And what does structuralism become when it is played off
the presumption of a later poststructuralism? Could it not be that it is only in this retrospective moment of ‘radical’, ‘ultra’ or ‘post’ structuralism that the
‘classical’ image first appears? This double reminder might reconstitute the original structuralist battle between genesis and structure, historical origins and synchronic laws, or as poststructuralists might reconfigure, Being and
Untitled-2 103
16/10/2013 16:39:32
90
emergence
Becoming; a conflict, moreover, that can no doubt be located throughout
the history of philosophy, and thus responded to in a number of ways. But
provided that we make this problem our own, there is every chance that it will make a valuable contribution to the world today.
Notes
1. See Lundy (2009: 189–91).
2. Derrida was not the only one aware of the benefits to be had at the time by associating oneself with the structuralist brand. When Julian Greimas went to publish a book in 1966, tentatively titled Semantics, he was told by Jean Dubois:
‘You will sell a thousand more copies if you add the word structural’ (Algirdas J. Greimas, quoted by Jean-Claude Chevalier and Pierre Encreve, Langue
française, p. 97, as found in Dosse 1997a: 317).
3. ‘History’, Deleuze and Guattari contend, ‘is one with the triumph of States’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 394).
4. At this point in the text Deleuze in fact refers to Marx, noting that ‘We might compare the last sentence of this extract from Bergson with Marx’s formulation, which is valid for practice itself: “Humanity only sets itself problems that it is capable of solving” ’ (Deleuze 1991: 16).
5. See, for example, Sarup (1993: 4).
6. Although well known amongst intellectual circles in France from the 1950s, Deleuze did not become a widely recognisable figure until the publication of Anti-Oedipus (1972) with Félix Guattari. Furthermore, the English-speaking world would have to wait until 1994 before a translation of his magnum opus Difference and Repetition appeared, thus contributing to his ‘late’ arrival.
7. This essay was published in 1972 in a collection on the history of philosophy compiled by François Châtelet ( Histoire de la philosophie, vol. VIII: Le XXe Siècle, ed. F. Châtelet, Paris: Hachette, pp. 299–335). In the opening to the piece, however, Deleuze indicates that it was written around 1967.
8. Although present in the work of several poststructuralists, Deleuze is perhaps most responsible for promoting this notion of the ‘return of difference’.
According to Deleuze’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return in his
Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), it is not the same that eternally returns (as argued by Heidegger) but difference: ‘Every time we understand the eternal
return as the return of a particular arrangement of things after all the other arrangements have been realised, every time we interpret the eternal return as the return of the identical or the same, we replace Nietzsche’s thought with childish hypotheses. No one extended the critique of all forms of identity further than Nietzsche’ (Deleuze 1986: xi–xii).
9. In an interview with Raymon Bellour printed in Les Lettres françaises (May 20, 1970), Barthes cites the conceptual creditors of S/Z as ‘Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Sollers, Derrida, Deleuze, Serres, among others’ (Barthes 1985: 78).
Untitled-2 104
16/10/2013 16:39:32
from structuralism to poststructuralism
91
10. Julia Kristeva, ‘Le mot, le dialogue et le roman’ (1966); reprinted in Semiotke, recherches pour une semanalyse, as found in Dosse (1997b: 55).
11. When pressed on his distancing from a semiology that ‘reveals a structure’ in favour of one that ‘produces a structuration’, Barthes asserted that ‘one must go beyond the statics of the first semiology, which tried precisely to discover structures, structure-products, object-spaces in a text, in order to discover what Julia Kristeva calls a productivity – i.e., a working of the text, a junction, a coupling into the shifting infinity of language’ (Barthes 1985: 73).
12. In fact, Lévi-Strauss welcomed the demise of the structuralist vogue, since he considered many of the developments made in its name to be unhelpful
perversions of his original structuralist programme. As he remarked in 1973,
‘structuralism, happily, has not been in style since 1968’ (Dosse 1997b: 115).
References
Althusser, L. and É. Balibar ([1965] 1970), Reading Capital, trans. B. Brewster, London: NLB.
Barthes, R. (1964), Essais Critiques, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Barthes, R. ([1970] 1974), S/Z, trans. Richard Miller, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Barthes, R. ([1981] 1985), The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980, trans. L
Coverdale, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bergson, H. (2007), The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. M.
L. Andison, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.
Deleuze, G. ([1962] 1986), Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. ([1966] 1991), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York, NY: Zone Books.
Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, London: Athlone.
Deleuze, G. (2004), Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, ed. D. Lapoujade, trans. M. Taormina, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari ([1972] 1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, London: Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987), A Thousand Plateaus, trans. B Massumi, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Derrida, J. ([1967] 1976), Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. ([1967] 1978), Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, London: Routledge.
Dosse, F. ([1991] 1997a), History of Structuralism: Volume I: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Dosse, F. ([1992] 1997b), History of Structuralism: Volume II: The Sign Sets, 1967–
Present, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Fitzgerald, F. S. ([1931] 1945), The Crack-Up, New York, NY: New Directions.
Untitled-2 105
16/10/2013 16:39:32
92
emergence
Foucault, M. ([1978] 1991), ‘Introduction’, in G. Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, New York, NY: Zone Books.
Foucault, M. ([1969] 2002), The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith, London: Routledge.
Foucault, M. ([1961] 2006), History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa, ed.
J Khalfa, London: Routledge.
Kurzweil, K. ([1980] 1996), The Age of Structuralism: From Lévi-Strauss to Foucault, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Lacan, J. ([1966] 2006), Écrits, trans. B. Fink with H. Find and R. Grigg, London: W. W. Norton & Company.
Lévi-Strauss, C. ([1958] 1963), Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson and B.
Grundfest Schoepf, London: Penguin Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. and D. Eribon ([1988] 1991), Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. P. Wissing, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lundy, C. (2009), ‘Deleuze untimely: uses and abuses in the appropriation
of Nietzsche’, in Deleuze and History, eds Jeffrey Bell and Claire Colebrook, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Nietzsche, F. ([1874] 1983), ‘On the uses and disadvantages of history for life’, in Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sarup, M. (1993), An Introductory Guide to Post-structuralism and Postmodernism, Harlow: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Wahl, F. (1968), Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Williams, J. (2005), Understanding Poststructuralism, Chesham: Acumen.
Untitled-2 106
16/10/2013 16:39:32
metHods
93
Part II
Methods
metHods
metHods
In Chapter 4, ‘A History of the Method: Examining Foucault’s Research
Methodology’, Hardy provides a survey of the key research methodologies
developed by Foucault across his life and work. For Hardy, it is important
to distinguish between the particular methods that Foucault actually used
for undertaking research (say, for example, collecting data through archival research) and what could be more broadly termed ‘Foucault’s methodology’
as such: namely, the particular theoretical frameworks he created to order
and interrogate his collected data. To this end, Hardy focuses his attention mainly on the two innovative theoretical frameworks that Foucault is most
famous for: ‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’.
In Chapter 5, ‘Derrida, Deconstruction and Method’, Phillips concen-
trates on the formative work of Derrida, the name most associated with
deconstruction, with the aim of outlining some of the basic principles of
this method (also see Anderson in Chapter 11). At the heart of deconstruc-
tion, Phillips argues, lies the question of reading, which henceforth will be difficult to distinguish absolutely from writing. When a person reads, a kind of writing takes place: repeating, revising, decontextualising, recontextualising and so on. In certain cases this ‘taking place’ attains the status of an
‘event’. In an important respect, then, for Phillips, the methodological aim of deconstruction is to produce such an event: a meta-methodological event
of ‘reading-as-writing’ that can be put to work in the critique of method in any activity whatsoever (scientific, critical, philosophical, ethical and so on).
In Chapter 6, ‘ Écriture Féminine’, Brigley Thompson explores some of the problems raised in and through Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine (see also Puri in Chapter 12), while also seeking to unravel some of misunderstandings and misconceptions associated with this method. The chapter begins
Untitled-2 107
16/10/2013 16:39:32
94
metHods
by outlining the first formulations of écriture féminine in Cixous’s essays
‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and ‘Sorties’. From such beginnings, Brigley
Thompson then goes on to consider in more detail the related concepts of
écriture féminine and féminité, offering an account of the key characteristics of the method. Though complex and necessarily in a state of constant reinvention, the concepts and methodological practices associated with écriture féminine and féminité are always, Brigley Thompson insists, conditioned or brought to life in the opening up to otherness and in the creation of a space where otherness can dwell.
In Chapter 7, ‘Schizoanalysis: An Incomplete Project’, Buchanan argues
that Deleuze and Guattari’s method of schizoanalysis is best understood as a project which is in a state of permanent revolution. Pointing out that Deleuze and Guattari were unwilling to provide any kind of ‘formula’ or ‘model’ that would enable us to simply ‘do’ schizoanalysis as a simple tick-box exercise, and emphasising how Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the questions their methods and work
raises, Buchanan nonetheless insists and shows that schizoanalysis is not
incoherent, impractical or without specific focus, as many of its detractors are quick to claim. Indeed, what Buchanan infers specifically from Deleuze
and Guattari’s methodological practices or body of work is a clear attempt
to give us a new topography of the psyche.
Untitled-2 108
16/10/2013 16:39:32
foucault’s researcH metHodologY
95
Chapter 4
A History of the Method: Examining
Foucault’ s Research Methodology
Nick Hardy
metHods
foucault’s researcH metHodologY
Introduction
Since Foucault started publishing in the early 1960s much ink has been
spilled by both his detractors and supporters alike.1 An interesting point
to note, however, is that each tends to assign to Foucault’s work a level of coherence and/or integration that is overall quite difficult to substantiate.
One of the most famous of the supportive texts is by Dreyfus and Rabinow
(1982), gained from their discussions and interviews with Foucault during
his annual research trips to the University of California, Berkeley. Dreyfus and Rabinow appoint to Foucault’s work a definite methodological evolution
that clearly separates his ‘archaeological’ and ‘genealogical’ periods. Other writers attempt to move away from this dichotomy, arguing that Foucault’s
later work (much of which was posthumously published) shows that he
understood it as maintaining a continuum and not involving a break at all.
However, in different ways both of these positions disregard one of Foucault’s own theoretical and methodological warnings: never treat an author or their works as a complete and integrated whole (Foucault [1969] 2003b). This
may at first seem paradoxical, for is not the author of a work also in overall command of that work? Foucault convincingly argued that the ‘author function’ is in fact just a discursive device, used as a means of separating the desirable from the undesirable (e.g. a scholar’s books from her laundry lists) but also as operating to give wider coherence to a range of texts (Foucault
[1969] 2003b: 379, 384). Foucault’s point is that ‘the author’ exists as both a changeable set of pre-existing rules but also as implying a false coherence. It is also not without some irony, then, that there are instances where Foucault himself re-examines his previous works and, in effect, assigns to them an
author function (see also Shumway 1989: 1–13). The inconsistencies, the
Untitled-2 109
16/10/2013 16:39:32
96
metHods
breaks, the problems that Foucault had during his research career are a large part of the fruitfulness that he offers to those scholars who read him. To
paper over the cracks, so to speak, is to turn his work into a sheer edifice and to deny the intellectual accomplishments he achieved when changing his
research in light of perceived methodological problems.
In terms of method and methodology, it is especially important to main-
tain a balanced perspective on what Foucault actually produced, compared
to what is claimed he produced. If reinterpretations are taken at face value then the richness of his earlier works become obscured – or, more importantly, alternate theoretical and methodological paths lost. It is important to establish at this point that Foucault did not single-handedly generate new
methods for undertaking research; his actual method was nothing more than extensive archival research. These are the kind of research skills most often used by the historian: finding, accessing and extracting information buried deep within an archive of documents. It was Foucault’s methodology – the particular theoretical frameworks he used to order and interrogate his collected data – that was so innovative and particular to him. In this way he
aided the development of what would now be termed discourse analysis: the interrogation of a series of related statements in order to discern the overt or covert assumptions, generalisations or prescriptions that they contain.
The two main theoretical frameworks Foucault developed he termed
‘archaeology’ and ‘genealogy’. These were responses to the ontological and
epistemological concerns he developed during the course of his intellectual career. The ‘archaeology’ includes the texts History of Madness ([1961] 2006a), The Birth of the Clinic ([1963] 1994a), The Order of Things ([1966] 1994b) and The Archaeology of Knowledge ([1969] 1972). The ‘genealogy’ includes the article ‘Nietzsche, genealogy, history’ ([1971] 2003c), and the books Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1995) and History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 ([1976] 1990a).2
Before moving on to discuss each, it is important to briefly note that
Foucault took for granted his readers knowledge of Ferdinand de Saussure’s
‘structural linguistics’, a theory which broke the link between language and the objects language describes. Saussure argued that language consists of
signs, the linking together of words (the signifier) and concepts (the signified) ([1915] 1986: 65–7). Language is understood as a system of interconnected
associations rather than a form of direct representation of ‘real’ things. Later developments to Saussure’s work demonstrated the malleability of the connection between a signifier and the signified. The effect was not only that language was shown to be a system in its own right but, in specific social
circumstances, the connections between signifiers and signifieds was open
to change.
Untitled-2 110
16/10/2013 16:39:32
