/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6099770]

What are the arguments against Post-Structuralism? I can't see how they are exactly wrong in their views.

[Anonymous No.6099784]

>>6099770
Basically ot is convoluted bullshit that a certain academic circle has embraced in order to make themselves feel more intelligent than they actually are. It makes absolutely no sense and post structural analysis doesn't really advance our knowledge of anything, it almot hinders it because you're focusing on the minutiae of a text and deconstructing it to the point where it no longer has any context.

[Anonymous No.6099789]

>>6099784
literal ad hominem. don't comment if you don't know, is it really that hard?

[Anonymous No.6099791]

>>6099770
Have you seen Foucault versus Chomsky? Foucault's position in that debate is an effective counter to post-structuralism, the fulfilment of humanism, and an upholding of proletarian vulgar marxism.

[Anonymous No.6099792]

>>6099789
do you know what an ad hominem is?

>>6099770
it's sophistry

[Anonymous No.6099796]

>>6099791
Is there anything in particular I should know about Foucaults views before watching it? like should I skim over any specific theories of his before watching it?

[Anonymous No.6099800]

>>6099789
Explain what it is then, I dare you. State examples, quote works and the works thise works are referring to and give us your gods honest interpretation of what the fuck it actually is, how it works, its approach, and what it accomplishes.

[Anonymous No.6099812]

>mfw the bait worked

[Anonymous No.6099824]

>>6099812
Im genuinely interested, I don't know why people get so worked up about it. It doesn't seem controversial.

[Anonymous No.6099839]

>>6099824
If you support post modernist thought you are a wanker

If you dont support post modernist thoguht you are a wanker

Its a trap

[Anonymous No.6099991]

>>6099770
I guess, the baseline is a critique of intellectual dishonesty and overstating the meaning of contingency and exclusion in building theories.

The starting point is that modernity has become reflexive and thus questioned it's own base. E.g. what is the reason of reason? The truth of truth, what is the specific subject of modernity, and so on. A few times I saw that being refereed to as a "radicalization of modernity" which makes more sense to me than calling it post-modern.

However, every theory has to reduce contingency to articulate itself and no theory can account for everything, thus it has to exclude some interpretations and include others. What than often happens is that those who follow up take other the theory without seeing what selections where made.

That is the point where post-modernists often come in and make the selection visible by claiming this and that has been overlooked, and that is somewhat of a legitimate claim, but it also is a bit of a cheap trick, because every form of operationalization has to overlook something and insisting on contingency is partially just pointing out a necessity. You can always interpret things differently, but that itself is a very limited insight and you can write contingency, but you can't life it, because praxis often demands concrete decisions.

[Anonymous No.6099996]

>>6099796
Pretty much any empirical fact since the dawn of organized civilization is false ie. It is a power structure, used to opress minority groups and stop them from reaching enlightenment through the evil influence of biased western thought and knowledge. Funny how he had the privilege of learning at an institution that was around only due to western enlightenment, as opposed from picking his ass in a cave, communicating through grunts and clicks to find meaning.

[Anonymous No.6100700]

>>6099770
It is just pessimism, while it is hard to directly disprove, it is neither helpful nor unquestionable.

[Anonymous No.6100722]

>>6099784
>post structural analysis doesn't really advance our knowledge of anything, it almot hinders it
Sounds like a butthurt STEMfag who can't deal with criticism and scepticism.

If the advance of knowledge can be hindered by such a thing, it wasn't really knowledge.

[Anonymous No.6100734]

>>6100722
>actually thinking like this in 2015

[Anonymous No.6100752]

>>6099770
Guys not cut out for STEM, nevertheless, try to achieve academic career make up stuff beyond a normies imagination only for the reason to get funds and bang bitches. Bitches who actually believed all that shit that was shoved down their throat next to tiny cis male cocks who then started feminism. Thus, post-struct was nothing else as a pussy magnet that horribly derailed.

People who aren't cut out for STEM should learn a trade or become bookkeeper if they aren't good crafters.

[Anonymous No.6100755]

>>6100734
>thinks reverting to early modernist conceptions of knowledge in 2015 is better

kek

[Anonymous No.6100799]

>>6099770
>Post-Structuralism
thats deconstructuralism

[Anonymous No.6100928]

>>6099996
>used to opress minority groups and stop them from reaching enlightenment through the evil influence of biased western thought and knowledge.
That's not what Foucault says at all. Power is positive and productive and not repressive or negative, not on a primary level.

[Anonymous No.6100931]

>>6100700
That's like reading Nietzsche as a total pessimist.

[Anonymous No.6100962]

>>6099991
>That is the point where post-modernists often come in and make the selection visible by claiming this and that has been overlooked
You're thinking of Foucault here, more than anyone else. He doesn't want merely to point what has been overlooked, that wouldn't do much. The point is more about showing how those "selections" happen, what are their causes and effects, and the ultimate point is perhaps to offer a history of our times, to make us aware of what exactly in our times, that seems necessary and universal, is actually contingent, in this way expanding the possibilities of practice. He also says he's offering us maps of power for us to orient in our practice, to make our practice more strategic. He thinks he belongs to the tradition of critical philosophy of Kant, actually.

[Anonymous No.6100963]

>>6100755
Where have out post modern conceptions of knowledge gotten us? stuck in a self-reflexive, solipsistic hole where everything falls victim to subjectivity, nothing really means anything, no one has to account to anything they do because it's all relative anyway. What an amazing advancement of thought.

[Anonymous No.6100979]

>>6100963
You're confusing post-modernism i.e. late capitalism with post-structuralists. Many things that are happening today have been criticized by them already e.g. Deleuze and Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

[Anonymous No.6100986]

>>6100963
>falls victim to subjectivity
>nothing really means anything
>no one has to account to anything

These are only bad things for weak minded people who need to be coaxed along a singular narrative and rather have fixed fictions than sincere doubts.

Others would find them freeing.

[Anonymous No.6101008]

>not embracing neo-futurism with reckless enthusiasm

[Anonymous No.6101011]

>>6100986
Society needs structure, without it, it falls apart, just like everything else without structure. If current thought keeps going the way it is, the world will be run by trans-wolfkin-non hetronormative-males that identify as lesbian women and all of your tax dollars will go to funding minorities and underepresented trans lesbians who indetify as a potplant because DUDE, SUBJECTIVITY LMAO

[Anonymous No.6101045]

>>6101011
That's not the fault of post-structuralism though, and you know it. They criticized this identity-construction shit, if anything.
Some post-structuralists are even conservative, like that French guy that worked directly with Foucault as his assistant.

[Anonymous No.6101061]

>>6101011
Oh, you're from /pol/.

Nice buzzwords.

[Anonymous No.6102476]

bumpino

[Anonymous No.6102503]

>studying shakespeare is an act of 'ethnocentric violence' and the west is inherently evil because it was created by white males.

Okay faggots you can take a one way trip to avana and tell me how you like it

[Anonymous No.6102514]

>>6102503
Who are you quoting and why is that person representative of every so called post-structuralist?

[Anonymous No.6102529]

>>6100979
how's late capitalism responsible for our nosediving into relativism and solipsism?

[Anonymous No.6102568]

>>6102529
Late capitalism and post-modernism go hand in hand, flows of identities and commodities. Post-structuralism sees how stupifying this is, how it is a power that drives culture to trivial differences and fundamental homogeneity, which is also what liberalism is, if you look at it at another angle.

It's kinda similar to what Nietzsche called "last men".

More philosophically speaking, post-structuralism doesn't believe in subjectivity (or in solipsism as an extension), in a similar sense that Heidegger doesn't: we're not souls looking at the world from the outside, as if reality is out there, we are inside the world.

[Anonymous No.6102588]

post-structural critique is a double edged sword that could easily be used by right wing groups but the left has so thou roughly bastardized the process that it's political effects are stagnation and the creation of a mindless critique culture. It terms of philosophical issues, there is a lot of begging the question but post-structuralism sees this as almost a nonissue. We have no established way of argumentation outside of structure so even poststructualists return to it all the time.

[Anonymous No.6102593]

>>6099770
STOP SHITPOSTING

[Anonymous No.6102597]

>>6102593
state your arguments against post-structuralism first

[Anonymous No.6102609]

>>6101011
where do these structures you are talking about come from? Where does it say they are objective?

[Anonymous No.6102613]

>>6102597
>What are the arguments against a whole post-modern school of philosophy with tens of different, contradicting theorists? I can't see how they are exactly wrong in their views [doesn't provide a single point of view]

[Anonymous No.6102617]

Anyone find it a bit odd that most of the philosophers behind it are Jewish? It just so happens that the "proggresive" "lets destroy western culture" happen to be Jews

[Anonymous No.6102620]

>>6099784
you're an idiot

[Anonymous No.6102623]

>>6102617
>muh cultural marxism

[Anonymous No.6102626]

>>6102620
>says the apologist for a literal circle jerk

[Anonymous No.6102646]

>>6102623
what do they gain out of it? is it just a money grab?

[Anonymous No.6102653]

>>6100963
my god, thish ish pure ideology

[Anonymous No.6102660]

>>6101011
identity politics is a structure that needs to be deconstructed. you are attacking the result rather than the method

[Anonymous No.6102664]

>>6100963
> Where have out post modern conceptions of knowledge gotten us?
What should it get for us?

[Anonymous No.6102665]

>>6102626
>he's an idiot

[Anonymous No.6102667]

>>6101011
> Society needs structure, without it, it falls apart, just like everything else without structure
Yes, and? Do you have an issue with societies falling apart? Is destruction a negative element?

[Anonymous No.6102675]

>>6102667
Hold your horses, post-structuralism isn't about destruction or classical anarchism, if anything it is about transforming the structures. They don't think a state outside of structures is possible, which is one of the elements of their critique of structuralism which kinda believed that it was looking at the structures from a neutral external position.

[Anonymous No.6102693]

>>6102617
> Anyone find it a bit odd that most of the philosophers behind it are Jewish?
> Derrida
Yes, albeit not Ashkenazi.
> Foucalt
No.
> Deleuze
No.
> Guattari
No.
> Lacan
No.
> Barthes
No.
> Kristeva
No.
> Baudrillard
No.
> Baudiou
No.
> Zizek
No.
> Althusserl
No.
> Eco
No.
> Butler
Yes.

> It just so happens that the "proggresive"
Post-structuralists unanimously abandon the idea of societal progression in all ways except perhaps in a very specific Marxist/Hegelian manner.
> "lets destroy western culture"
Western culture, to its critics, is already largely dead. Owl of Minerva descends during the Nightfall for a reason. Most, if not all post-structuralists have abandoned the idea of continuity or vitaly in bourgeois capitalist system: their thoughts aim to see what lies behind.

[Anonymous No.6102699]

>>6102675
Yes, but the transformation to happen the old has to fall down in a way or another which is what I mean. Post-structuralists don't fear the change, the destruction of current structure in favor of the next one the same way as non-post-structuralists do.

[Anonymous No.6102701]

Deconstruction IS post-structuralism

[Anonymous No.6102727]

>>6102701
Yes, yes, but so is semiology, schizoanalysis and queer theory.

[Anonymous No.6102728]

>>6102693
Heidegger was the one who inspired them all and he was a jew

[Anonymous No.6102731]

>>6102701
In what sense? You may be right, if you mean that deconstruction* and post-structuralism** both signify American reception of what was happening in France at the time.

* Derrida is only of the post-structuralists, very different from the others, and he himself says that "deconstruction" isn't a central term in his philosophy
** "post-structuralism" is a label that comes from American academia, but none of the authors used that label themselves, some of them explicitly dismissed it

[Anonymous No.6102755]

>>6102728
> Heidegger
> Jew
what magic

[Anonymous No.6102767]

>>6102755

[Anonymous No.6102994]

Here's a clue: structuralism was shit because humanist marxism in its proletarian form (vulgar or not) is self-sufficient. Althusser's attacks on Sartre and Marx are reliant on a theory of social change that posits priest-kings and nomenklatura; a theory obviously invalidated in relation to radical social transformation. Moreover, Althusser's reliance on final instances being determinate has been demonstrated to be false.

Therefore MIKLOS GIMES PARTY IN THIS HOUSE.

[Anonymous No.6103102]

>>6102994
>structuralism
This thread is about those fags that came after structuralism, and were very suspicious of it. Anything to say about that?

[Anonymous No.6103158]

>>6103102
They are functionally indistinguishable from Althusser from a proletarian perspective.

[Anonymous No.6103195]

>>6103158
How so? I'd say some post-structuralists are actually more on the side of lumpenproletariat, if you want to make accusations.

[Anonymous No.6103236]

>>6100986
So, what does one do when one finds itself stuck between pure disgust for a linear, objective and hierarchical narrative and the inability to live in a completely relativist world?

Because I'm there right now and boy does it suck

[Anonymous No.6103272]

>>6103236
believing in the mythology of 'better' despite no real justification

ex. aesthetics, perhaps there are no singular, universal standards of taste and beauty, but who cares? yours is the good, the noble, the informed, the educated, others maybe a different good or outright bad and misinformed

[Anonymous No.6103274]

>>6103236
You read post-structuralism through Nietzschean lens, which is very easy to do. It is the right way to do it, anyway.

[Anonymous No.6103276]

>>6101011
>Structures fall apart
>yet ideas inherent to that structure remains
>while other coercive means of that same structure still remain

you haven't put much thought into this, have you?

>>6102503
Yeah, that's what America does with anything, turns it into a extreme ideology. I seriously doubt Fowl Cowl or De Leeze would argue against studying Shakespeare, they'd mostly claim that studying solely Shakespeare appeals to a certain narrative

>>6102588
Actually, from what I gather, critical theory in general could be very well used by the right, but the right is too afraid to get leftist cooties to do so.

>>6102617
post-struc =\= frankfurt. If you're gonna shitpost, at least read wikipedia first

>>6103195
Actually, post-structuralists were the first theorists to actually look to the lumpenproletariat as anything more than "shit" (at least in terms of Marxism / Post-Marxism)

[Anonymous No.6103284]

>>6103276
>Actually, post-structuralists were the first theorists to actually look to the lumpenproletariat as anything more than "shit" (at least in terms of Marxism / Post-Marxism)
That's what I'm saying there, yeah.

[Anonymous No.6103288]

>>6103284
I know, I was just throwing a Flash Fact there

[Anonymous No.6103294]

>>6103195
>How so? I'd say some post-structuralists are actually more on the side of lumpenproletariat, if you want to make accusations.

They're intellectuals aren't they? Their work is incomprehensible to someone diligently doing party school isn't it? Their objects of analysis are total and esoteric aren't they?

[Anonymous No.6103301]

>>6103276
>Actually, post-structuralists were the first theorists to actually look to the lumpenproletariat as anything more than "shit"

>first

Go look up the situationalists or autonomia.

>theorists

Oh, that's why you're blind.

[Anonymous No.6103305]

>>6103301
The SI isn't about theory.
It's about praxis.

GTFO leninist

[Anonymous No.6103390]

>>6103305
I'm sorry you're illiterate. >>294 said "first," and I noted preceding groups that looked, in praxis, at the lumpenproletariat as more than shit.

Then observed that >>294 was blind to them because >>294 is only interested in theorists.

[Anonymous No.6103391]

ITT: no one know what the word "post-structuralism" means.

In case it wasn't obvious to anyone who's read even just the wikipedia entry on post-structuralism, post-structuralism isn't a single "idea" like utilitarianism or evolutionary theory, but rather a vague, often inappropriate grouping of various ideas which respond in some way to structuralism. For example, Derrida, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and Lyotard have all been called post-structuralists, even though that take massively different approaches to massively different issues.

As such, you can't really talk about single, all-encompassing arguments against post-structuralism. That'd be like asking for an argument against late 20th century British philosophy. It's not a single thing but rather a haphazard grouping of a bunch of different things.

All this really should be obvious though, even if you have no formal education. I know this is /lit/ and every idiotic freshman here pretends to be an expert on everything, but I didn't expect you guys to be quite so daft.

[Anonymous No.6103648]

>>6103391
This has been pointed out a few times in this thread already.

[Anonymous No.6104432]

>>6103391
>believing the own field is vastly diverse
>believing all other fields are a homogeneous unity

>that is what post-modernists actually believe

[Anonymous No.6104459]

>>6104432
Yeah, post-structuralists tend to be conceited white undergraduate fucks in the private US college system, or at the better state Universities.

They tend to be incapable of seating the text in social contexts, because they're blinded to their own social position, largely due to the declining position of the managerial-professional class in the United States. They desperately believe that Holden Caulfield is a credible character to empathise with, that the Man in the Gray Flannel suit is a significant work of art, or that the standard of US housing is up and down multi-bedroom houses set in grass. They hear "little boxes" and feel sympathy for the people living in "little boxes" because the girls all get married and the boys go to university.

The nouveaux petits-bourgeois are ticky tacky all the same.