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RECENT PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Gyorgy Lukacs - Antonio Gramsci - Ferdinand de Saussure Claude Levi-Strauss - Michel Foucault - Jacques Derrida |
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Postmodernism, & Deconstructionism
Philosophers and Theorists Gyorgy Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary critic, and writer. One of the foremost Marxist theoreticians during the first half of the 20th century, Lukacs developed a Marxist aesthetic drawing a link between art and social struggle. His earliest works -- such as The Soul and the Forms (1910) and The Theory of the Novel (1920) -- were heavily influenced by the thoughts of Max Weber as well as Karl Marx. After moving to Vienna, Lukacs wrote his major reevaluation of Marxism, History of Class Consciousness (1923). He was, however, promptly labeled a revisionist because he departed from standard Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he lived in Moscow, where he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute and at the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Following World War II, Lukacs returned to Hungary to become a professor of philosophy and aesthetics in Budapest. Because of his idealist interpretation of Marxism, however, he often became the center of ideological controversy. His involvement in the revolution of 1956 pushed him into the background, but in 1965 he was rehabilitated.
Antonio Gramsci, a leading Marxist theoretician, played an important role in Italian revolutionary politics during the 1920s. He studied at the University of Turin from 1911 to 14, where he met Palmiro Togliatti and other young socialists. After writing for the socialist papers Avanti and L'Ordine Nuovo ("The New Order," which he cofounded in 1919), Gramsci helped found the Italian Communist party in 1921 and became its leader in 1924. He worked for the Comintern in Moscow, Vienna, and Italy from 1922 to 1926. Elected in 1924 to the Chamber of Deputies, Gramsci was arrested in 1926 with other Communists in Rome after the Fascists outlawed their party. He remained in prison until shortly before his death. Since World War II, Gramsci's Prison Notebooks (1948-57) and Letters from Prison (1947), which deal with wide-ranging cultural and political issues, have been enormously influential among Italian intellectuals, both Marxist and non-Marxist.
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is generally regarded as one of the formulators of structuralism. He viewed language as a system of signs that define one another through their relations rather than through their meanings. He distinguished sharply between the system of language (la langue) and its actual use (la parole), as well as between the historic study of language (diachronic) and its contemporary state (synchronic). After Saussure's death some of his students published their collated notes as his famous Course in General Linguistics (1916; Eng. trans., 1966). According to Saussure, no ready-made ideas exist before words.
Claude Levi-Strauss, a leading French philosopher, social theorist, and anthropologist, is associated with the development of structuralism as a method in both the social sciences and humanities. Aside from a period spent teaching in Brazil before World War II and a few years as an academic and diplomat in the United States during and after the war, Levi-Strauss has lived and taught in France. His researches have focused on the massive amount of ethnological materials collected by field-workers worldwide. In the tradition of 19th- and early-20th-century French sociology (which included anthropology), pioneered by such figures as Emile Durkheim, Levi-Strauss is a theorizer on a grand scale. By developing a sophisticated means of analyzing the cultural artifacts of preindustrial, nonliterate peoples, he has sought to discover underlying structures of thought that characterize not only so-called primitive societies -- the anthropologist's specialty -- but also the formal structures of human mentality generally. Levi-Strauss derived his structuralist method from structural linguistics. Considering the perspective of structural linguistics appropriate for culture and thought, as well as for language, he attempted to demonstrate that the cultural features of tribal societies were assemblages of codes, in turn reflecting certain universal principles of human thought. Levi-Strauss's first major work was Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949; Eng. trans., 1962), but his career project has been the structural study of mythology, realized in Mythologiques (4 vols., 1964-71; Eng. trans., 1970-81). Unlike previous analysts of myth, Levi-Strauss holds that meaning does not reside in the intrinsic significance or symbolism of a particular element in a mythical story. Rather, a myth's meaning is hidden in the underlying relationships of all its elements, which can be discovered only through structuralist analysis. As Levi-Strauss's works became available in English in the 1960s, his structuralist method gained popularity in the United States in such fields as sociology, architecture, literature, and art, as well as anthropology. His writings include
The French cultural historian Michel Foucault was a professor at the College de France from 1970; earlier, he had taught in Sweden and West Germany. Foucault examined the codes and theories of order by which societies operate and the "principles of exclusion" through which they define themselves: for example, the sane and the insane, the innocent and the criminal, the insider and the outsider. His thoughts on history and the self have interested contemporary philosophers and literary critics. His works include
Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and literary critic, formulated the theories that became the basis for deconstruction, a movement that has been influential in both Europe and the United States. In contrast to the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure and his followers, Derrida maintains that the meaning of language is elusive and hidden and that no definitive interpretation can be established for a written text. His critical method is to "deconstruct" a text by exposing the linguistic and philosophical presuppositions concealed in it. Derrida's theories were first made public in a 1966 lecture, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." This lecture is generally accepted as the "birthday" of deconstruction (aka poststructuralism or postmodernism). In it, Derrida, ironically, spends more time attacking and deconstruction modern theorists (i.e., structuralists) than he does the traditional ones. Derrida's attack on all theory (whether traditional or modern) has led to a growing suspicion of (and backlash against) theory itself. Indeed, neopragmatists, such as Richard Rorty, have argued that ultimately no link exists between a critic's theoretical stance and his actual practice, that is, the theory entails no practical consequences. Most of Derrida's many writings have been published in English. The most accessible are:
In The Radical Academy
Positive contributions of these thinkers to the Perennial Philosophy. Absolutely none. Strictly speaking, it could be argued that Cultural Theory and Structuralism are not really philosophies at all. 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.
Deconstructionism, and Postmodernism
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