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| ceci n'est pas une pipe |
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| fumees |
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| le duex msteres |
Foucault’s theories are often referred to as being both
a structuralist and as a post sturcturalist. While the two theories are
obviously related (see the names of the two theories), post structuralism makes
a distinct turn away from structuralism, through theorists like Jacques Derida
and Michel Foucault. Before analyzing
the aspects of structuralism and post structuralism in the work of Michel Foucault,
an explanation of the two theories is necessary. Structuralism comes from the theories of the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who studied what he called the arbitrary “connection
between the signifier and the signified” (Kronenfeld
and Decker 1979:5). Famously Saussure gave the example of a tree.
The word tree has nothing to do with the
object tree, the connection made between the word (signifier) and tree
(signified) is made through socialization with the community, language as
cultural; “a human construction no single human can change” (Kronenfeld
and Decker 1979:9). A key feature of this theory is that signs
only make sense in relation to other signs. Other theorists, especially Claude Levi-Strauss,
expanded off of Saussure’s base, by applying structuralism to fields other than
linguistics like anthropology. Strauss,
in his work on myths, “abstracted out
frozen and complete synchronic states from the inconsistencies and flux that
occur in any actual system as a result of normal and constant diachronic change…
[providing] a formal analysis”(Kronenfeld and Decker 1979:20). Strauss’s
application of structuralism was immensely influential on
social theory. Post structuralism on the
other hand posits that we “are beings that are culturally constituted by
interpretive frameworks or interpretive strategies that our culture makes
available to us, and these strategies are the only way that we have of conceiving
who we are, of thinking or of having a ‘self.’ The objects of our gaze are
likewise constituted by these interpretive strategies”(Tompkins
1988:734). The post sturcturalist thinker Derrida makes
this argument in his essay Différance, where Derrida develops his
concept of difference which he refers to as “what makes possible the
presentation of being-present”, “the possibility of opposition”. Différance is fundamentally undefinable, as
it is the process that makes binary opposition, and language, possible. (Tompkins
1988:741) In this incredibly complex (and quite honestly
often incoherent) work, Derrida essentially argues that the binary pairs, the oppositions
from which language is based on, leaves out meaning. He is building off of structuralism and the understanding
of language as existing in a relation of meaning between words, but attacks (deconstructs)
this relation, as words are always understood by relations to other words, and
those words are then understood by relations to other words and so on ad infinitum. There is never a final meaning, a word understood
in and of itself. Instead post
structuralisism looks at these oppositions to find meaning instead in their
difference. This isn’t an easy concept
to comprehend, as it attacks the very way we think and make sense of the world.
So where does Foucault fit into all of this?
Poststructuralists look at discourse, to see how meaning is defined, something that
Foucault certainly does in his works. (see history of sexuality, history of madness) Like Saussure and Derrida, Foucault does look
at meaning as existing in a system of other meaning, as being relational in
nature. In his work on madness, Focualt
sees how the discourse of madness defines what it is to be mad, and how that
meaning changes. This is one of the most
crucial implications of post structuralism, that meaning is not static, but
dynamic. For post structuralists there cannot
be any single truth, as all meaning is relational and dynamic and since
language is inherently incapable of conveying truth, due to post structuralism’s
rejection of the binary opposition. Furthermore,
inherent to post structuralism is a concept of power and hierarchy. The structures of meaning, according to post
structuralists, create hierarchy, a more and a less; the binary opposition, of
dominator and dominated, comes from the structure of meaning. This makes the analysis and deconstruction of
power structures central to post structuralism, and it certainly is central to Foucault’s
work. In his short work, This is not
a pipe, Foucault discusses Rene Magritte’s famous work, itself translated
as this is not a pipe, which depicts a pipe with the sentence this is
not a pipe (see picture above). For
Foucalt, the seemingly contradictory nature of the painting comes from the
conventions of language, the structural nature of language which relates the
object (pipe) to the statement (this is not a pipe). The actual logical contradiction comes, not
from the object or statement, but from the method of relating the two. This is post structuralism.
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