What is poststructuralism as a philosophical concept? The ‘post’ in poststructuralism indicates that it is ‘after’ structures, which means it can be understood as a set of critical attitudes developing as a response to structuralism.
Very briefly: Structuralism argues that the meaning of something is not inherent to it, waiting to be discovered, but is socially constructed and comprehensible only as part of a system of relations – a structure – which underpins various phenomena that share the same pattern. Thus, to understand the meaning of something, one needs to understand the structure that makes it meaningful.
For example, Joseph Campbell’s comparative analysis of myths and religions used the template of a hero’s journey. For structuralism, the template itself is what matters in this example – it is the structure of a hero’s journey with its pattern of steps and phases that gives meaning (even if metaphorical) to any actual person’s life experiences that fit the pattern.
Poststructuralism developed a critical response to structuralism in that it challenged the apparently universal and foundational nature of the structures themselves. In other words, the problem of structuralism is not that we do not derive meaning from systems of relations but that it misses that these systems themselves are arbitrary constructs shaped by contingent historical processes (in this context, see what Derrida thought about identity and its relation to the changing systems of differences).
According to poststructuralism, our current structures of meaning are neither necessarily nor absolutely valid. Things could (and can) be otherwise, our present orders of sense-making may be different, and they are never entirely objective or value-free. Here is what the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy says about poststructuralism:
“The variety of postmodernism defined by its reaction against structuralism in France, and associated with writers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. Whilst deriving from Saussure the view that words mean what they do through their relations with each other rather than through their relationship to an extra-linguistic reality, poststructuralism adds an interest in their origins in relationships of power, or in the unconscious. However, it does not share the structuralist view that the unconscious, or the forms of society, will themselves obey structural laws, waiting to be discovered. Rather, it echoes Nietzsche’s hostility to the reduction of human phenomena to lawlike generalizations … and instead celebrating the formless, or the subjective and spontaneous.”
Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (p. 372)
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