What Happened to Post-structuralism?

Whatever happened to post-structuralism? asks Terry Eagleton in the TLS. Born in the latter part of the 1960s in reaction to the structural linguistics of Saussure and the structural anthropology of Levi-Strauss, post-structuralism presented itself as a liberation movement: “Structures were to be unmasked as less stable than they seemed, lacking in solid grounds and arbitrary in their exclusions. There was always that which eluded their authority, from the floating signifier to the feminine body. Works of literature were to be scanned for those slippages and moments of hesitancy which defeated any ‘totalized’ reading of them. Multiplicity was to be released from the tyranny of unity, and difference set free from the despotism of identity.”

It was a sober libertarianism, “one which dreams of a world free from the constraints of norms and institutions, but which is not so incorrigibly naive as to imagine that it could ever come about.” And it was a parasitic liberation, dependent “on codes and systems as the most hidebound bureaucrat. Without them, after all, there is nothing to subvert or transgress. . . . The brand of post-structuralist theory patented by Derrida seeks to deconstruct both texts and institutions; but it can perform this operation only from within, clinging tenaciously to the inner logic of the systems it examines in order to expose their ultimate incoherence.” Eagleton criticizes post-structuralists for failing or refusing to recognize the good of institutions, norms, and authority. The best they could do was acknowledge that norms are inevitable, while celebrating “the marginal and aberrant.”

That Derrida and others were quite aware of this dependence doesn’t impress Eagleton, but did lend an air of wry pessimism to their work. Eagleton insightfully notes that the post-structuralsts were “liminal figures themselves—either literal émigrés to France, or what one might call internal exiles. The doyen of structuralism proper, Claude Lévi-Strauss, was a marxisant Belgian Jew who taught in São Paulo and New York. A list of some his major (post-)structuralist successors—Barthes, Greimas, Todorov, Kristeva, Foucault, Cixous, Derrida, Irigaray—contains not a single male, French-born, heterosexual gentile. It is not surprising, then, that the theory should focus with such perverse persistence on what doesn’t quite fit in.”

In Eagleton’s view, many of the habits of post-structuralism persist in what he calls ‘postmodernism: “play, style, form, pleasure, difference, jouissance, the body, madness, sexuality and the unconscious.” So post-structuralism lives on, but not as theory. And that’s the heart of the answer to his question: “what died was not so much the movement itself as ‘theory’ in general, which in any case posed a problem for those more used to texting than textuality.” Postmodernism doesn’t have time for theory: “Whereas post-structuralism is a set of ideas, postmodernism is an actual culture. Instead of engaging in an arcane philosophical discourse of difference and identity, it takes to the town centres with gay rights placards. It is more concerned with disability than with the decentring of the humanist subject. Post-structuralists speak of the cultural inscription of the body, while postmodernists tattoo their forearms and dye their hair purple.”

And for all his sharp opposition to post-structuralism, Eagleton the Marxist can’t help but be a bit wistful about its demise as theory. Post-structuralism “was one of the last intellectual gasps of pre-technocratic academia—of an intelligentsia whose job was to be critical of rather than complicit with the idols of the marketplace. It had survived the so-called de Man affair, in which the distinguished Yale deconstructionist was revealed in 1987, not long after his death, to have published anti-Semitic, collaborationist journalism during the German occupation of Belgium. Around this time, a whole school of post-structuralism at Cornell seemed to fall mostly silent, but the exposure of the young de Man’s pro-fascist sentiments failed to strike the coup de grâce to the movement of which he was the American cynosure.” Theory is “is too recondite an affair for many of the cheerleaders for postmodernism, for whom what matters is less ideas than images. For all its blind spots, post-structuralism is also too critical an outlook, too much a hermeneutic of suspicion, for those for whom the whole concept of critique can now be classified with male sideburns and denim suits as irretrievably passé.”