Post-structuralism

“Systems art shares its roots with 'post-structuralism'; the critical discourse from the arts that can account for both 'open' system of structural relations and 'death of the author'; where the 'reader' is credited with an active part in emergent, multiple and evolving interpretations of a cultural artefact.”

“Post-structuralism takes as its theoretical object “structuralism,” whereas postmodernism takes as its theoretical object “modernism.” Post-structuralism can be characterized as a mode of thinking, a style of philosophizing, and a kind of writing. Yet the term should not be used to convey a sense of homogeneity, singularity and unity. More generally, it is a label used in the English-speaking academic community to describe a distinctively philosophical response to the structuralism.”

“Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.”

“We do not need French post-structuralism, whose pedantic jargon, clumsy convolutions, and prissy abstractions have spread throughout academe and the arts and are now blighting the most promising minds of the next generation. This is a major crisis if there ever was one, and every sensible person must help bring it to an end.”

“Post-Structuralism is a reaction to structuralism and works against seeing language as a stable, closed system. It is a shift from seeing the poem or novel as a closed entity, equipped with definite meanings which it is the critic's task to decipher, to seeing literature as irreducibly plural, an endless play of signifiers which can never be finally nailed down to a single center, essence, or meaning.”

“The negations of post-structuralism and of certain varieties of deconstruction are precisely as dogmatic, as political as were the positivist equations of archival historicism. The "emptiness of meaning" postulate is no less a priori, no less a case of despotic reductionism than were, say, the axioms of economic and psycho-sociological causality in regard to the generation of meaning in literature and the arts in turn-of-the-century pragmatism and scientism.”