[lbo-talk] do people still read post-structuralism?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Oct 31 08:30:27 PDT 2009


Tilottima Rajan makes an effort to trace the usage of these terms (post-structuralism, deconstruction, post-modernism) and identify the features that each might be seen to name. Her books were rough going for me, but if my eyes hadn't crashed I think two more rereadings would have done it.

Incidentally, every time anyone uses a punctuation mark or an uppercase letter, or every time they space their text on the page in a way that makes a difference, they are illustrating one of Derrida's points of departure (to which both Joyce & Pound contributed). But consider Herbert's "Easter Wings," or this wonderful couplet of Pope's:

To sound or sink in cano, o or a, Or give up Cicero to C or K.

That couplet exists only in print; it is inconceivable in a totally oral culture.

I never got far enough to grasp the further implications of this, but many have pursued it, and it also has as background Voloshinov's Marxism and Linguistics. (I'm quoting names & titles from memory and may have them goofed up.)

Poststructuralism or whatever you want to call it has indeed disappeared, in the same wy DesCartes geometry has, by being absorbed and informing a great deal of work that no one would thik of labelling "post-anything."

Carrol



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