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RECENT PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Cultural Theory, Structuralism, Postmodernism, Deconstructionism |
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Postmodernism, & Deconstructionism
Diagrams The Development of Modern and Recent Philosophical Thought Major Influences on American Social Thought Cultural theory has two distinct, but often necessarily related, components. The first grapples with problems that arise from the nature of culture as an object of inquiry or from the different ways it has been defined and analyzed in the humanities and social sciences. The second proposes broad ways of understanding how culture (often more narrowly defined) develops within and influences society. The first component can be illustrated by some characteristic questions:
These questions have been probed by philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, linguists, and semioticians -- among others -- and continue to be debated among scholars interested in philosophical aspects of the humanities and social sciences. The second component of cultural theory is comprised of divergent general perspectives on the relationship between culture and society. These are too various to summarize, but normally address recurrent questions:
Most of these questions arose in the social sciences, but have increasingly been addressed by scholars in the humanities influenced by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, by the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, or by cultural theorist Michel Foucault. Though cultural theory began with the 18th-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico and has been contributed to by numerous major figures, it has only lately risen to prominence, now serving as the primary focus of interdisciplinary conversation in the humanities and social sciences. This conversation was stimulated when structuralism, which originated in anthropology and linguistics, began to influence literary theory; in turn, literary theoretical developments such as deconstruction began to influence social scientists. This cross-fertilization accompanied, and in part caused, the articulation of postmodern modes of cultural analysis hostile to the assumptions of traditional scholarship. Postmodern and Marxist scholarship sometimes now fuse as "cultural studies," a field with emancipatory ambitions that blends elements of sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism. Cultural theory is still characterized more by disagreement than consensus, but its influence has been broad. Social scientists today are more aware of the difficulties of interpreting culture, and of the narrative and rhetorical practices they use in doing so. Scholars in the humanities, for their part, are more apt to recognize that meaning is something "socially achieved" within a community, and that it reflects relations of power and influence within that community. As yet, no text has tried to map cultural theory or address all the questions cited above: a bibliography can include only a few works that individually misrepresent, but collectively delimit, what is less a field than an ongoing discussion. Structuralism is a mode of thinking and a method of analysis practiced in 20th-century social sciences and humanities. Methodologically, it analyzes large-scale systems by examining the relations and functions of the smallest constituent elements of such systems, which range from human languages and cultural practices to folktales and literary texts. In the field of linguistics the structuralist work of Ferdinand de Saussure, undertaken just prior to World War I, long served as model and inspiration. Characteristic of structuralist thinking, Saussure's linguistic inquiry was centered not on speech itself but on the underlying rules and conventions enabling language to operate. In analyzing the social or collective dimension of language rather than individual speech, he pioneered and promoted study of grammar rather than usage, rules rather than expressions, models rather than data, langue (language) rather than parole (speech). Saussure was interested in the infrastructure of language that is common to all speakers and that functions on an unconscious level. His inquiry was concerned with deep structures rather than surface phenomena and made no reference to historical evolution. (In structuralist terminology, it was synchronic, existing now, rather than diachronic, existing and changing over time.) In the domain of anthropology and myth studies, the work done in the immediate post-World War II period by Claude Levi-Strauss introduced structuralist principles to a wide audience. Following the ideas of Saussure and of the Slavic linguists N. S. Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, Levi-Strauss specified four procedures basic to structuralism. First, structural analysis examines unconscious infrastructures of cultural phenomena; second, it regards the elements of infrastructures as "relational," not as independent entities; third, it attends singlemindedly to system; and fourth, it propounds general laws accounting for the underlying organizing patterns of phenomena. In humanistic and literary studies, structuralism is applied most effectively in the field of "narratology." This nascent discipline studies all narratives, whether or not they use language: myths and legends, novels and news accounts, histories, relief sculptures and stained-glass windows, pantomimes and psychological case studies. Using structuralist methods and principles, narratologists analyze the systematic features and functions of narratives, attempting to isolate a finite set of rules to account for the infinite set of real and possible narratives. Starting in the 1960s, the French critic Roland Barthes and several other French narratologists popularized the field, which has since become an important method of analysis in the United States as well. Because structuralism values deep structures over surface phenomena, it parallels, in part, the views of Marx and Freud, both of whom were concerned with underlying causes, unconscious motivations, and transpersonal forces, shifting attention away from individual human consciousness and choice. Like Marxism and Freudianism, therefore, structuralism furthers the ongoing modern diminishment of the individual, portraying the self largely as a construct and consequence of impersonal systems. Individuals neither originate nor control the codes and conventions of their social existence, mental life, or linguistic experience. As a result of its demotion of the person, or subject, structuralism is widely regarded as "antihumanistic." Saussure envisaged a new discipline, a science of signs and sign systems that he named semiology, and for which he believed structural linguistics could provide a principal methodology. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Saussure's contemporary, sketched a similar science labeled semiotic. In 1961, Levi-Strauss situated structural anthropology within the domain of "semiology." Increasingly, the terms semiology and semiotics came to designate a field of study that analyzes sign systems, codes, and conventions of all kinds, from human to animal and sign languages, from the jargon of fashion to the lexicon of food, from the rules of folk narrative to those of phonological systems, from codes of architecture and medicine to the conventions of myth and literature. The term semiotics has gradually replaced structuralism, and the formation of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in the 1960s has solidified the trend. At the moment when structuralist methodology was expanding into the discipline of semiotics, critical reaction occurred, particularly in France, where it led to such antithetical and schismatic projects as Gilles Deleuze's "schizoanalysis," Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, Michel Foucault's "genealogy," and Julia Kristeva's "semanalysis." These critical schools were lumped together and labeled poststructuralism in the United States. In a culture and during a time when rapid change is the norm and old values, standards, and categories seem to have little relevance, the notion that there are modes of thought and expression that transcend the modern and mark a new age of postmodernism has proved to be useful to critics and creators of the arts, as well as to contemporary scholars in the social sciences and philosophy. Modernism, in current usage, is a movement that began in the early 20th century and attempted to reject or profoundly modify the received wisdom about the proper shapes, subjects, and perceptions of the arts. The products of modernism were eventually subjected to the same kinds of formalist criticism that had been applied to earlier "isms" in the arts. In response, some thinkers -- particularly the French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean Francois Lyotard -- began to question the justifications for authoritative statements on meaning or significance in the arts. Lyotard claimed that the work of the postmodern creator is not governed by preestablished rules and cannot be judged according to given categories. In effect, both writers questioned the basis for authority and offered, instead, a world of many competing and equal ideas and "isms." The term postmodernism began to be widely used in the late 1960s, at first to describe new styles of architecture, where its influence could easily be seen. Postmodern architects rejected the tenets of the International Style and found their inspiration in an eclectic mix of previous architectural movements. Similar changes were taking place in other arts and in other academic fields. A wide-ranging eclecticism, a tendency toward parody and self-reference, and a relativism that refuses to distinguish good from mediocre or new from outmoded marks the work of postmodernist writers (Thomas Pynchon, for example), artists (Nancy Graves), musicians (John Cage), filmmakers (Quentin Tarantino), theater directors (Robert Wilson), and the many others who today are labeled postmodernist. Deconstruction is a theory about language and literature that developed in the 1970s, in large part as a reaction to the primacy of structuralism and semiotics in literary criticism. Its original premises were first formulated by the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida, whose works converted a number of U.S. academics. Americans have established different schools of deconstruction--feminist deconstruction, for example -- but the basic principles of the theory are the same for all. What most characterizes deconstruction is its notion of textuality, a view of language as it exists not only in books, but in speech, in history, and in culture. For the deconstructionist, language is everything. The world itself is "text." Language directs humanity and creates human reality. (A reality that cannot be named or described is illusory, at best.) Yet, upon close examination, words seem to have no connection with reality or with concepts or ideas. Related to textuality, the notion of intertext refers to the broader cultural background, the context that saturates the text with innumerable and nonverbal conventions, concepts, figurations, and codes. Given the silent and hidden links of a text to its cultural and social intertext, the text's content and meaning are, essentially, indeterminate. Texts, therefore, are unreadable, and the practice of interpretation may be defined as misreading. Derrida's deconstructions of Western thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger attack what he calls "logocentrism," the human habit of assigning truth to logos--to spoken language, the voice of reason, the word of God. Derrida finds that logocentrism generates and depends upon a framework of two-term oppositions that are basic to Western thinking, such as being/nonbeing, thing/word, essence/appearance, presence/absence, reality/image, truth/lie, male/female. In the logocentric epistemological system the first term of each pair is the stronger (TRUTH/lie, MALE/female). Derrida is critical of these hierarchical polarities, and seeks to take language apart by reversing their order and displacing, and thus transforming, each of the terms--perhaps by putting them in slightly different positions within a word group, or by pursuing their etymology to extreme lengths, or by substituting words in other languages that look and sound alike. Extending the work of Derrida, feminist critics have deconstructed the "phallocentric" pair male/female. Feminists in general see phallocentrism as fundamental to the larger "social text" of Western logocentric society, which, aided by language, has given women secondary sexual, economic, and social roles. Deconstruction has been regularly attacked as childish philosophical skepticism and linguistic nihilism. Nevertheless, it became the leading literary critical school in the United States during the period following the Vietnam War. In The Radical Academy
Positive contributions of Cultural Theory, Structuralism, Postmodernism, and Deconstructionism to the Perennial Philosophy. Absolutely none. Strictly speaking, it could be argued that Cultural Theory and Structuralism are not really philosophies at all in the sense in which Classical Realists use the term. At the root, Deconstructionism and Postmodernism are really philosophies of Nonsense. As pointed out above, deconstructionism has been regularly attacked as childish philosophical skepticism and linguistic nihilism.
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