Poststrcturalism

Post-structuralism is a school of thought that emerged partly from within French structuralism in the 1960s, reacting against structuralist pretensions to scientific objectivity and comprehensiveness. The term covers the philosophical deconstruction practised by Jacques Derrida and his followers, along with the later works of the critic Roland Barthes, the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, the historical critiques of Michel Foucault, and the cultural-political writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Gilles Deleuze. These thinkers emphasized the instability of meanings and of intellectual categories (including that of the human ‘subject’), and sought to undermine any theoretical system that claimed to have universal validity – such claims being denounced as ‘totalitarian’. They set out to dissolve the fixed binary oppositions of structuralist thought, including that between language and metalanguage – and thus between literature and criticism. 

It should be noticed that metalanguage is regarded as any use of language about language, for example in glosses, definitions, or arguments about the usage or meaning of words. Linguistics sometimes describes itself as a metalanguage because it is a ‘language’ about language; and so on the same assumption criticism is a metalanguage about literature. Some theorists of structuralism have spoken of metalanguages as if they were clearly separate from or standing above the ‘object-languages’ they describe, but this claim is denied by post-structuralism, which points out that linguistics, criticism, etc. Are still within the same general language, albeit as specialized uses with their own terminologies. Thus there is in principle no absolute distinction between criticism and literature. It is also possible to have a meta-metalanguage, i.e. a ‘third-level’ discourse such as an analysis of linguistics, or a work of metacriticism.

Metacriticism is criticism of criticism; i.e. the examination of the principles, methods, and terms of criticism either in general (as in critical theory) or in the study of particular critics or critical debates. The term usually implies a consideration of the principles underlying critical interpretation and judgement.

Instead they favoured a non-hierarchical plurality of ‘free play’ of meanings, stressing the indeterminacy of texts. Although waning in French intellectual life by the end of the 1970s, post-structuralism’s delayed influence upon literary and cultural theory in the English-speaking world has persisted.