POST-STRUCTURALISM

1. 1968

The name of the movement is a little odd, because several of the protagonists (Barthes, Foucault) are no longer alive, whereas Levi-Strauss, their structuralist predecessor, is still going strong at 92. But the post-structuralists, while sharing the structuralists' emphasis on language, were more radical. In part their radicalism was generational and political, a reaction to the failure of the student movements of 1968.

Terry Eagleton explains: "In 1968 the student movement had swept across Europe, striking against the authoritarianism of the educational institutions and in France briefly threatening the capitalist state itself. For a dramatic moment, that state teetered on the brink of ruin: its police and army fought in the streets with students who were struggling to forge solidarity with the working class. Unable to provide a coherent political leadership, plunged into a confused melee of socialism, anarchism, and infantile behind-baring, the student movement was rolled back and dissipated; betrayed by their supine Stalinist leaders, the working-class movement was unable to assume power. Charles de Gaulle returned from a hasty exile, and the French state regrouped its forces in the name of patriotism, law and order.

"Post-structuralism was a product of that blend of euphoria and disillusionment, liberation and dissipation, carnival and catastrophe, which was 1968. Unable to break the structures of state power, post-structuralism found it possible instead to break the structures of language.... The student movement was flushed off the streets and driven underground into discourse. Its enemies, as for the later Barthes, became coherent belief-systems of any kind... Power was everywhere, a fluid, quicksilver force which seeped through every pore of society, but it did not have a center any more than a literary text did."

2. ROLAND BARTHES AND THE PLEASURES OF THE TEXT

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a critic who made his reputation in the field of semiotics, the formal study of symbols and signs pioneered by Saussure. His early method: the decoding of the "mythologies" (hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena, from advertising and fashion to striptease and wrestling. He was especially eager to challenge signs that pass themselves off as "natural," offering themselves as the only conceivable way of viewing the world: realist literature, for example, which tends to conceal the socially relative or constructed nature of language, to pretend that language offers direct access to the world. Unlike many advanced French thinkers, he was not much influenced by German philosophy, but surely there is an echo of Nietzsche here.

Barthes wanted to purge from criticism the Romantic idea of a personal genius writing a personal book that only he was capable of producing. Literary originality is a myth, because all literary texts are woven out of other literary texts: here we are close to Barthes's provocative notion of the "death of the author." He stressed the inherent plurality of language, meaning, and points of view, and distrusted the idea of a single "monogamous" truth. "He compares the braidings of various 'codes' in a text to the interweavings of polyphonic music, where no single strand is definitively 'the' music" (Helen Vendler). He broke with the Sartrian concept of writing as commitment: writing is richer, more complex and subtle, than its political content. His own mature style was playful, light, skeptical, fragmentary. But he could also adopt a style of rigorous austerity and elegant abstraction: he believed that the task of the critic is to reconstitute not the "message" of a work but only its "system," its form or structure. The Eiffel Tower is a perfect subject for him: a structure without a function, except to call attention to its own shape and height–an empty symbol of modernity.

"Text" was one of his key words, and eventually he eroticized it:The Pleasures of the Text is one of his titles. Susan Sontag: "Considering something as a 'text' means for Barthes precisely to suspend conventional evaluations (the difference between major and minor literature) and to subvert established classifications (the separation of genres, the distinctions among the arts)." One of his most attractive qualities was his willingness to find charm and pleasure in a wide variety of things, including the self: he belongs in the great French tradition of self-examination that extends from Montaigne and Rousseau.

3. MICHEL FOUCAULT AND THE CRITIQUE OF POWER

Like Barthes, Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ended his career at the top of the French university hierarchy, a professor at the College de France. But both men thought of themselves as outsiders, and Foucault in particular was more comfortable in California than in Paris. Barthes was fatherless, poor in his youth, a Protestant, tubercular, homosexual. Foucault had a more conventional academic career; he attended the Ecole Normale and began as a historian of medicine. He too was homosexual, and much of his work may be regarded as a protest against the tyranny of rigid definitions of permissible sexual behavior or deisre.

Foucault's great subject: the concepts and codes by which societies operate, and especially their principles of classification and exclusion. "Discipline" is a key word for him, in its double sense of body of knowledge and imposition of authority. His major concern was to provide a critique of the way modern societies discipline their populations by stipulating norms for human behavior and encoding these in the "human sciences": medicine, psychiatry, criminology, sociology. His method was to ask what rules allow certain statements to count as "true," certain kinds of behavior to count as deviant. Power, he argued, is an integral component in the production of "truth." And at the heart of this critique lies the Nietzschean conviction that there is no coherent or constant human "nature" or human "condition."

"He had arrived on the philosophical scene," P.N. Furbank reminds us, "at the 'structuralist' moment, marked by a decisive shift to the doctrine of the primacy of language, according to which the 'self' or 'subject' is the invention, not the originator, of language." Another great critic, Goerge Steiner, explicates the point: "Personal individuality and egotism, together with their attendant ideals of privacy, of inviolate particularity, are no more than historical-psycho-sociological products that derive their legitimacy not from any natural truths but from the syntax of Western discourse, from the economics of upper and middle-class domination... Self-definition as we know it in the mercantile West is exactly as fragile, as subject to historical erosion, as were, say, archaic images of divinity or 'prescientific' schemes of human and animal biology. The very concept of what knowledge is–of what constitutes a scientific proof, an experimental or logical truth–is as much a part of a transient historical framework and code as is a given language or aesthetic style."

We tend to think of power as a function of sovereignty, and it was no less a figure than Max Weber who defined sovereignty as the monopoly of legitimate violence in a given territory. Foucault claims to go deeper. To understand power it's not enough to understand the relationship between the sovereign and the subject, or between the state and the citizen. One must look at hospitals, asylums, schools, prisons, armies, factories–at patients, the insane, students, prisoners, soldiers, factory workers–and the norms and disciplines that sustain these institutions and tranform their inhabitants into "docile bodies." Foucault focuses on what he calls the "micro-fascism" of everyday life. He claims to unmask the coercive character of institutions that are ordinarily considered to have generally benevolent purposes. "The more advanced the society, the less power is exercised as naked force and overt coercion. Instead, people internalize the will to power, and power becomes not an emanation of the state but an aspect of more intimate relations.... The locus of power is thus no longer the 'objective' rules of public authorities but the practices that define health, illness, and well-being... He took from Nietzsche the notion of the rise, throughout modernity, of a form of domination based on claims to superior knowledge and on the ability to set standards of knowledge and truth, as opposed to domination based on specific legal and political claims" (David Gress).

One of the most important influences on Foucault was the French philosopher/pornographer/librarian Georges Bataille, who died in 1962. (As a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Bataille saved the Paris manuscript of his friend Walter Benjamin from the Nazis. It has been published in English this year.) Bataille was one of the wild men of French letters, who broke with the Surrealists because they were insufficiently radical. As a novelist he produced a highly intellectualized form of pronography; as a theorist he performed the very difficult trick of crossing Nietzsche's thought with the school of French anthropology. He was very much indebted to Marcel Mauss's analysis of the potlatch, and generalized from that institution a theory of creative destruction as the root of economics. He was impressed, that is, by the enormous waste and extravagance of the great feasts in primitive societies, and by their association with rituals of sacrifice and orgiastic sexuality. He developed a systematic theory of the role of excess and transgression in ritual, and this was the aspect of Bataille's thought that especially interested Foucault. Liberalism was an inadequate theory of politics not only because it missed the insidious coerciveness of seemingly benevolent institutions and therapies, but also because it failed to allow for the orgiastic pleasures of excess and transgression. Liberalism privileged reason as the crucial human faculty, but Foucault distrusted "reason" as an agency of repression. Foucault was a disciple of Nietzsche, but he was also one of those French thinkers who belonged to the cult of the Marquis de Sade.

One can see the consequences of Foucault's way of thinking most clearly in his work on prisons. He contrasts the awful punishments of the Old Regime–a famous passage on the gruesome torture of a regicide opens Discipline and Punish–with the rationalized prisons of the Enlightenment. Jeremy Bentham's plan for a "Panopticon," in which prisoners would live under continuous surveillance by the prison authorities as they underwent "correction," was one of Foucault's principal targets, and a metaphor for his vision of modern society. Under the Old Regime, torture was a dreadful spectacle but a rare one, whereas in modern societies discipline and surveillance are less visible but more pervasive. The abolition of physical torture, of "cruel and unusual punishment," was one of the proudest achievements of the Enlightenment, but Foucault finds the correctional therapies that replaced torture even more sinister: the repression of the psyche is for him worse than the punishment of the body.

4. CRITIQUE OF THE CRITIQUE

It sounds very impressive, very radical. And there is no doubt that Foucault revealed some of the darker possibilities of modern institutions, their ways of classifiying, excluding, and disciplining people. But Foucault, disciple of Nietzsche and Bataille, cut himself off from both the Marxist and the liberal traditions: the critique of economic power so important to Marx, the critique of state power so dear to liberals. At the end of his life, Foucault began to pay closer attention to violations of human rights by "revolutionary" regimes. Perhaps he was coming closer to the liberal tradition, then making a strong if belated comeback in France. But the fact remains that much of his work was a critique of the Enlightenment and its program of social reform backed by scientific knowledge. And if we have learned anything from the tragic history of the twentieth century, perhaps it's that those who would abandon the liberalism of the Enlightenment in the name of more radical programs are flirting with disaster. It now looks as if Albert Camus and Raymond Aron, scorned by Sartre for their liberalism, were more prescient than Sartre and Foucault. And if one really wants to learn about abuses of power in the modern world, perhaps Mrs. Mandelstam is a better guide than any of the French post-structuralists.

RECOMMENDED:

Susan Sontag, " Writing Itself: On Roland Barthes," The New Yorker, April 26, 1982.

Helen Vendler, ""The Medley is the Message: On Roland Barthes," in The Music of What Happens (Harvard, 1988).

Sheldon Wolin, "On the Theory and Practice of Power," in After Foucault (Rutgers, 1988).

Gordon Wright, "Foucault in Prison," Stanford French Review (Spring 1977).

P.N. Furbank, "Unhappy Man," London Review of Books, July 22, 1993.

David Gress, "Michel Foucault," in The New Criterion Reader (New York: Free Press, 1988).

Michael Walzer, "The Politics of Michel Foucault," Dissent (Fall 1983).

George Steiner, "Power Play," The New Yorker, March 17, 1986.