An Answer to the Question: 'What is Poststructuralism?'
Author(s)
Harcourt, Bernard E.
Abstract
What is poststructuralism? In this paper, the author unpacks the term and provides a synoptic answer. Poststructuralism is a style of critical reasoning that focuses on the moment of ambiguity in our systems of meaning, as a way to identify the ethical choices that we make when we overcome the ambiguity and move from indeterminacy to certainty of belief in our efforts to understand, interpret, and shape our environment. Post-structuralism concentrates on the moment when we impose meaning in a space that is no longer characterized by shared social agreement over the structure of meaning. It attempts to explain how it comes about that we fill those gaps in our knowledge and come to hold as true what we do believe – and at what distributive cost to society and the contemporary subject. By so clearly identifying points of slippage, poststructuralism clears the table and makes plain the significant role of ethical choice – by which the author means decision making that is guided by beliefs about virtue and the self, not by moral or political principle. Poststructuralism is, in this sense, a penultimate stage in the emancipation from that self-incurred immaturity that Kant famously identified as the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. The author uses the term penultimate carefully, though, because, in contrast to Judith Butler who locates poststructuralism in the work of Jacques Derrida, poststructuralism traces to the work of Michel Foucault and precedes deconstruction.
