The Edinburgh Companion to Poststructuralism, page 81
in this volume challenge the assumptions about poststructuralism that have
led to this state of affairs. All of which is guided by the question of how to revitalise the poststructuralist event today.
Poststructuralism Tamed
What image of poststructuralism has led to its domestication? How has this
image fed the view that poststructuralism is an a-political philosophy or,
worse, a philosophy in league with the forces of neo-liberalism that have
fuelled the economic crises definitive of the first two decades of the twenty-first century? We propose that two images of poststructuralism have been
central to its domestication: the idea that all forms of knowledge are trapped within the walls of discourse and the idea that poststructuralism heralded
the death of the emancipatory political subject without any sense of what
could or should be put in its place.
These are images of poststructuralism that have currency today but that
were first expressed in the reception of poststructuralism in the 1970s and 1980s. Amongst these critical responses the most forceful were those animated by either a feminist, hermeneutic or Frankfurt School perspective. In a variety of different ways the charges laid at the door of poststructuralism by these critics characterised it first as a flat form of social constructivism that left no critical distance to call oppressive practices to account. The putative aspiration to social criticism within poststructuralist theories was challenged as being riven by ‘performative contradiction’, ‘crypto-normativism’
and ‘self-defeating’ political strategies. Interestingly, these criticisms were angled from within the linguistic and communicative turn that defined the
critical tradition in twentieth-century philosophy (with perhaps the case of feminism being rather more variegated). What was at stake, in other words,
was how to articulate a critical distance on the contemporary forms of dis-
torted social practice from within the house of language. Taylor and Ricoeur, on the side of hermeneutics, and Habermas, on the side of Frankfurt School
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Critical Theory, were the main thinkers who took poststructuralism to
task on these terms. In each case, the poststructuralist emphasis upon the
constitutive and inescapable realms of discourse was challenged as offering no way of articulating the distinction between distorted and undistorted
forms of communication, but this was done within the terms of the com-
municative turn. In consequence, many of the poststructuralist responses
to these charges sought to deflate the distinction between emancipatory and oppressive language use and/or express forms of social criticism that took
antagonism to be an irreducible feature of our communicative interactions.
At which point, the die was cast and unbreachable lines were established
between these critical heirs to the linguistic turn.
The situation has now changed. The notion that poststructuralism can be
situated within the broader communicative turn has led to its submersion
within the academy, where it now rests as a critical undercurrent but one that does not cause too many waves. For those seeking to find a critical posture beyond the current series of compromises there is the need to escape the
linguistic and communicative turns altogether and with that think ‘after’
poststructuralism and the dominance of the idea of discourse associated
with it. At one level, this has led to the idea that poststructuralist thinkers are implicated in the parliamentary form of political philosophy so devastatingly castigated by Badiou. At another level, this has led to a resurgence of interest in the extra-discursive; be it natural, economic, political or, indeed, the very formal bases of thought itself.
Before delving into this issue some more, it is worth establishing that
poststructuralism, for all its emphasis on discourse and the text, was never an intellectual event forged simply within the linguistic or communicative
turn of twentieth-century philosophy (witness Stiegler’s very interesting
remarks about Derrida’s early engagement with scientific questions and the
scientific community in France). While there is a sense in which each of the key thinkers has dallied with our entrapment in the house of language this
has never been definitive of the project as such. As we made clear in the
introduction, and as the essays collected in this volume all attest in various ways, the poststructuralist project was to expose the limits of language, the literary, the discursive, the textual, by crossing over into the extra-discursive conditions that shape and form these limits. Knowing that these limits
re-establish themselves was also part of this project; the limits are to be crossed, transgressed, but can never simply be removed. In a metaphor
beloved of Foucault and others, the aim is to travel to the outside always
aware of the lure of the inside. In many respects, it is this sense of tension that provides the impetus for the deep engagement within poststructuralism
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with philosophers and writers who worked at the limits of language and
thought. Poststructuralism never meant transgression for transgression’s
sake (or an ‘anything-goes’ transgression), but a meticulous and patient
diagnosis of the formation of knowledges. The concept of transgression has
meant to understand the networks of power/knowledge in a given culture in
which subjects are constituted. It also meant that it is from these networks that subjects can find their immanent conditions of possibility (through a
creation of immanent norms for instance). Misunderstanding this dynamic
within the poststructuralist project has led to its domestication as a form of the linguistic turn overly concerned with the strategic uses of language and unable to escape the conditions of its own analysis. Coming to terms with
the transgressive nature of poststructuralism is a way to revivify this project in an intellectual and cultural landscape that tends toward homogenising
experience in the name of capitalist axiomatics.
A similar trajectory can be detailed regarding the interpretation of post-
structuralism as a project that simply glories in the death of the subject. The roots of this misconception are not hard to trace. Clearly, the relationship to structuralism is of paramount importance here. One of the ways in which
poststructuralism announced its arrival was in its critical evaluation of how structuralism had, for all its successes, failed to overcome the humanist
paradigm. By universalising and dehistoricising certain structures it was
felt that structuralism had de facto anthropomorphised the conditions of
human existence themselves. Where the enlightenment had placed humans
at the centre of the world and endowed them with agency in the construction of knowledge and in the aspiration for emancipatory activity, so it was that structuralists tended to treat the structures they unearthed as the condition of all knowledge while displacing any hope of subjective agency in so doing.
In this sense, the structuralists had simply taken Kant’s categories of understanding and relocated them without fundamentally challenging the ways
in which knowledge was generated in different times and places. As such,
the poststructuralist critique of structuralism was an attempt to remove the last vestiges of humanism from within Kantianism and it is understandable
therefore that the image of poststructuralism as a rampantly anti-humanist
theory emerged. But this is only part of the story.
As we have become increasingly aware, and several essays in this volume
attest to this, the characterisation of the death of the subject was overblown.
For all that poststructuralists remain structuralists searching for the conditions of human experience in the relations that underpin such experience,
and for all that these relations were historicised and contextualised by the poststructuralists to evince their contingency, this does not mean that
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poststructuralists displaced the problem of subjective experience altogether or that they undermined the emancipatory desire of political subjectivities to such an extent that only quietism and resignation remained, or that they even adopted an ahistorical perspective by putting forward a philosophy
of the event and becoming. The common theme with structuralism was
that of problematising the idea that individual or collective subjectivities could serve as the basis for knowledge about the world and as the bases
for changing that world. Poststructuralism, then, is a project oriented by
problematising the way that structuralists conceived of this problem – in this sense, poststructuralism is a project of intensification of structuralism. This is why the problem of subjectivity remains a real problem in poststructuralist thought and in this sense the question of the emancipatory potential of critical subjectivities has never disappeared from view.1 The classical belief in emancipation has held on to an image of the autonomous subject. It is
therefore more appropriate to think of poststructuralism as a project con-
cerned with the role of subjects in a world that it effuses, rather than to see them as merely standing in opposition to the world itself (echoing Stiegler, once more). By doing this (and while liberalism and Marxism inherited an
idealistic form of subjectivity and freedom as enlightenment), poststructuralism has raised the problem of the social, cultural, economic and epistemological formation of subjectivity in order to complicate the understanding
of emancipation. This did not mean that poststructuralists were intent on
demolishing the formidable legacy of enlightenment thought. For instance,
Foucault (2000), in one of his most famous essays, re-appropriates Kant’s
question ‘What is enlightenment?’ to develop his project of a critical ontology of the present. It is this critical enterprise that has now become reified and recuperated. Not that there is an ‘authentic’ poststructuralist discourse either, but there is, within poststructuralism, a general concern raised about any attempt to limit the potential of subjective experience – a limit that is shared by liberal and Marxist approaches that seek to identify THE subject
of political change – but this concern is raised in the name of multiplying forms of subjective engagement and thereby of recognising that individual
and collective emancipatory subjects are part of a world of complex social, economic, natural, gender and political relations.
These two fundamental characterisations of poststructuralism – that it
trapped thought and action within the house of discourse and that it evacu-
ated political subjectivity of all critical potential – are mischaracterisations that served to tame poststructuralism in related but different ways within
the academy. On the one hand, the priority of discourse was folded into the linguistic and communicative turn as a partial and incomplete theoretical
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insight. On the other hand, claims regarding the death of the subject were
characterised in a way that enabled poststructuralism to be excluded from
the mainstream of contemporary thought as the bearer of an irrational,
excessive or overly dramatic claim. Yet neither are accurate reflections of the poststructuralist project and the essays in this volume make it clear that poststructuralists have always been concerned with the extra-discursive
conditions of human experience and the conditions that shape subjectiv-
ity so as to better understand the complexities of that experience. It is not without irony, however, that the reception of poststructuralism that led to its current submergence within the academy has followed a process of inclusion/exclusion that the poststructuralists themselves did so much to expose as constitutive features of disciplinarity, across the sciences, humanities and social sciences. Animating poststructuralism today requires a renewed effort to work at the limits; to cross them, return and cross them again in order
to affirm both the ways in which common sense is formed and the ways in
which it may be surpassed in the name of creative alternatives to the status quo. It is a form of work that always works at the limits; poststructuralists contest the bureaucrats of Reason, preferring to be the labourers of the
limits.
Poststructuralism Styled
Bearing in mind the ways in which poststructuralism has been tamed, there
are concerns that remain regarding the way poststructuralists approach
the problem of the conditions of human experience. At stake is the vexed
issue of style. Poststructuralism emerged as a way of doing philosophy, as a way of thinking and acting in the world, that challenged the dry analyses of minutiae that characterised Anglo-American philosophy and also displaced
the tortuous dialectics of the Hegelian and Marxist traditions. It appeared as a breath of fresh air in the staid atmosphere of post-WWII philosophy and in its global reception it came with a promise of liberating philosophical writing from the dogmatisms operating within a variety of different contexts – hence a certain productive, if complicated, relationship to postcolonial thought. Of course, part of this sense of relief can be attributed to a confusion that has also plagued poststructuralism, at least in the Anglo-American reception of it; namely, its confusion with postmodernism. If postmodern philosophy
opened the doors to playfulness in all aspects of theoretical construction, and if poststructuralism was thought to be a part of this general sense that playfulness is the only way of avoiding the foundational assumptions that
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that the poststructuralist project was a wholly new way of doing philosophy that cast all the old ways aside. The most obvious marker of this perceived allegiance between postmodern movements and the poststructuralist ones
was the label ‘continental philosophy’.
The intricacies of the continental tradition have been well documented
and surveyed with such subtlety that it would be foolish to claim that differences do not exist in, for example, the competing ways Kant’s critical turn was understood within philosophy. Yet, as the very idea of ‘the continental’
has been subjected to serious philosophical engagement, it has become
increasingly clear that this term itself hindered thought as much as it has allowed certain questions to be asked. In relation to poststructuralism this was certainly the case. The idea that poststructuralism could be situated solely within a putative continental tradition has hampered our understanding of
the sources and nature of poststructuralist work on the conditions of human experience. One signal of this in the current conjuncture is the appearance of the notion of the ‘post-continental’ (Mullarkey 2006). Relatedly, we are also witnessing the return to a more particular set of reflections on the nature of
‘French philosophy’ (Alliez 2010; Badiou 2012; Balibar and Rajchman 2011;
James 2012). Both are attempts to recover certain thinkers from the confines of the continental, even though it is still contested which thinkers mark
this break and what label best articulates it. Another signal is the increasing sense that the stylistic opposite of the continental, the analytic, is nowhere near as dry and arid as previously suspected. The result is a series of works in the ‘(post-)continental tradition’ that expressly align themselves with the approaches and debates of the analytical tradition of philosophy (Brassier
2007). At the juncture, one might say, of these two tendencies, we see the
continued vitality of Freudian and Lacanian analysis and the formalism that accompanies it (see, for example, Žižek’s oeuvre).
This period of transition, after the relative stability of the analytic-continental divide that shaped and was shaped by the reception of poststructuralism in a global context, enables the reconstitution of the poststructuralist project without the limitations of an umbrella term to define it. It is no
coincidence, therefore, that a lot of the recent work on poststructuralism, including the essays in this volume, have a much more subtle appreciation
of the role of formal analysis. Allied to this, there is a growing awareness that questions of method – for long the preserve of analytical philosophers concerned with the appropriate access to the real in the mode of the natural sciences – must come to the fore when understanding the poststructuralist
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in a variety of domains that enable work to be furthered, systematically.
While there is no doubt that poststructuralist methods must be situated at
the critical end of the methods spectrum – the end that, roughly speaking,
is still trying to make sense of Marx’s dictum ‘that the philosophers have
only interpreted the world, the point is to change it’ – this is nonetheless recognition that questions of method are questions that pertain to poststructuralism. Of course, a quick glance through the poststructuralist texts that signalled this event in philosophy shows that this was always the case.
That this has often been forgotten, however, is itself a sign that something went awry as poststructuralism sheltered under the umbrella of ‘continental theory’.
