Compare and contrast post-structuralism and post-modernism.

 Postmodernism and poststructuralism both describe theoretical movements in the late 20th century that focused on ideological structures of society and personal identity. Postmodernism is more associated with art and literature, such as Terry Gilliams’ postmodern film “Brazil” or Don DeLillo’s postmodern novel “White Noise.” Poststructuralism, on the other hand, is more associated with theory and philosophy, specifically the works of French theorists Michael Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Post structuralism is based on the critical evaluation of texts, otherwise known as deconstructive theory, to expose cultural biases in the structure of language. There is no one view on these approaches and both post structuralism and post modernism are blanket terms containing many strands of thought. Let us turn now to post structuralism first.  What does the term indicate? As is clear from the word “post structuralism”, these approaches are those that came after ‘structuralism’.

These theories and approaches sought to seek insights into society by critiquing and deconstructing social and cultural processes. The post modernism break with structuralism was the fact that structuralism reduced everything into binary oppositions and the interrelations between them. The structuralists held they could analyse any phenomena with the help of their methodology. We must emphasise that post structuralism is a number of approaches and not one monolithic theory. However, these approaches have in common their point of departure a critique of “structuralism”.

Post structuralists often point out in their various writings that meaning in language is diverse and open to many different interpretations. Yet to get to the meaning of a text it can be deconstructed and is different from its apparent or surface meaning.  That is different meanings can be assigned to a single text depending upon the perspective taken. As would be clear by now that post structuralism proceeds as a critique of structuralism which is itself bounded by its own linguistic boundaries. Structuralism, however, was found to be inadequate as an explanation of social process and phenomena.

Thus we find that structuralism did not pay heed to historical processes and is a-historical applied the rules of linguistics to societal processes which is a questionable procedure it is assumed that a work has meaning in itself and this persists even before it is discovered and the text is only a conduit between the subject and the structure of rationality. Thus post structuralism began with Derrida’s critique of structuralism or rather this ‘deconstruction’ of language society and culture. The structuralists felt that man was chained to structures which controlled him.

In contrast, however, Derrida feels that language can be reduced to writing which does not control the subjects.  According to him all institutions and structures are nothing but writing and incapable of controlling the individual. The structuralists saw order and stability in language, hence in all structures; the post structuralists on the other hand saw language as essentially changing and quite unstable. This means that the language structure being itself in flux cannot create structures that constrain, restrain, or punish people, because language itself is disorderly, and the underlying laws of language cannot be discovered

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