4 Quotes About Post Structuralism

Post-structuralism is a school of thought within the social sciences that emphasizes the importance of language and text. This international philosophical movement is best known for its critique of structuralist theory, which emphasized the notion that language had a fixed meaning and was independent from culture. With this in mind, post-structuralism has a number of different themes and ideas, including the critique of essentialism (the idea that something is definable in terms of one thing), the role of power in society (including third world feminism), and the deconstructionism (or the idea that meaning is created rather than found) of language. The social sciences can be difficult to grasp, but these post-structuralism quotes will help you form your own opinion about the ideas behind this influential school of thought.

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Post-structuralism is a reaction to structuralism and works against seeing language as a stable, closed system. It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center, essence, or meaning. Jan Rybicki, 2003 . E. Smith Sleigh
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The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future. Chris Weedon
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Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs – stable meanings – than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation. Terry Eagleton