However, perhaps it will have helpful simply to list some difference and distinction between structuralism and post-structuralism under the four heading below.
Origin :
Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics is a discipline which has always been inherently confident about the possibility of establishing objective knowledge. It believes that if we notice accurately, collect data systematically and make logical deductions. Then we reach reliable conclusions about language and the world. Structuralism inherits this is confidently scientific outlook :it too believes in method, system and reason as being able to establish reliable truths.
By contrast, post-structuralism gains ultimately from philosophy. Philosophy is authority, it has always tended to emphasize the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things. This point of view is summarized in Nietzsche's famous remark, 'There are no facts, only interpretations'. Philosophy is, so to speak, skeptical by nature and usually under cures and questions common sensual notion and assumptions. Its systems often begin by calling into question what is usually taken for granted as simply the way things are. Post-structuralism comes into this habit of skepticism, and intensifies it.
It regards any confidence in the scientific method naive, and even drives a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain. That we can't know anything for sure, fully conscious of the irony and paradox which doing this entails.
Tone and Style :
Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalization :it aims for a detached, 'scientific coolness', of tone. Give its derivation from linguistics science, this is what we expect. Structuralist is typical of this tone and treatment, with its discrete steps in an orderly exposition, complete with diagrams. The style is neutral and anonymous, as it is typical of scientific writing.
Post-structuralist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. Often the tone is urgent and joyful, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may well carry puns and allusions. Often the line of the argument is based on a pun or a word - play of some kind. Often reconstructive writing fixes on some material aspects of language such as a metaphor used by a writer, or the etymology of a word. Overall, it seems to aim for an engaged warmth rather than a detached coolness.
Attitude to Language :
Structuralist accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense. We don't have retrieved to reality other than through the linguistic medium. All the same, it determines to live with that fact. It continues to use language to think and perceive with. After all, language is an orderly system, not a chaotic on, so realizing our dependence upon it. It doesn't need to induce intellectual despair.
By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamental in insisting upon the consequences of the view that, in effect, reality itself is textual. Post-structuralism develops what threaten to become terminal anxieties about the possibility of achieving any knowledge through language. The verbal sign, in its view, is constantly floating free of the idea it is supposed to designate. Thus, the post-structuralist's way of speaking about language involves, a rather obsessive imagery based on liquids-signs float free of what they designate, meanings are fluid, and subject to constant 'slippage' or 'spillage'. This linguistic liquid, stopping about and swilling over unpredictably, defies our attempts to carry signification carefully from 'give' to 'receive' in the containers we call word.
We are not fully in control of the medium of language, so meaning can not be planted in set places, like someday planting a row of potato seeds : they can only be randomly scatted or 'disseminated', like the planter walking along and scattering seed with broad sweeps of the arm. So that much of it lands unpredictably or drifts in the wind.
Likewise, the meanings words have can never be guaranteed 100 per cent pure. Thus, words are always 'contaminated' by their opposites - you can't define the night without reference to today, or good without reference to evil, or else they are interfered.
Project:
By project, I mean the fundamental aims of each movement, what it is they want to be persuaded us of. Structuralism, firstly, questions our way of structuring and categorizing reality, and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorization. But it believes that we thereby attain a more reliable views of things.
Post-structuralism is much more fundamental : it distrusts the very notion of reason of 'dissolved' or 'construct' subject, whereby what we may as the individual is really a product of social and linguistics forces - that is, not an essence at all, merely a 'tissue of textual'. Thus, its torch of skepticism burns away the intellectual ground on which Western civilization is built.
This is the second part of my previous a previous article. The previous article's link is below :
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