Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism

A SPACE ODYSSEY 7
with the conceptual weapons of their discontent. Cultural, epistemological and
metaphysical debates were all expressed in a vocabulary bristling with
linguistic jargon (Pavel: 1990, p. vii).
Eve Tavor Bannet (1989) champions as poststructuralist the work of Barthes,
Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, who all dissent from structuralism’s notion of
universal laws in the human mind and society. She argues that poststructuralism is a
reaction to the centralizing features of the technocratic reorganization of France.
Robert Young (1981, p. 8) finds that poststructuralism 7 displaces rather than
develops structuralism through an immanent critique and interrogation of the latter’s
fundamental concepts:
Post-structuralism, then, involves a shift from meaning to staging, or from the
signified to the signifier…. Broadly, however, it involves a critique of
metaphysics (of the concepts of causality, of identity, of the subject, and of
truth), of the theory of the sign, and the acknowledgement and incorporation
of psychoanalytic modes of thought. In brief, it may be said that poststructuralism
fractures the serene unity of the stable sign and the unified
subject. In this respect, the ‘theoretical’ reference points of post-structuralism
can be best mapped via the work of Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, who in
different ways have pushed structuralism to its limits and shown how its most
radical premises open it up to its own deconstruction.
Discussing the theorists who have produced “poststructuralism,” Weedon (1987,
p. 13) counts Saussure, Althusser, Freud, Marx, Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. In her
terms:
All forms of poststructuralism assume that meaning is constituted within
language and is not guaranteed by the subject which speaks it….
Psychoanalytic forms of poststructuralism look to a fixed psycho-sexual order;
deconstruction looks to the relationship between different texts; and
Foucauldian theory…looks to historically specific discursive relations and
social practices (1987, p. 22).
Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (1989, p. 42) argues that poststructuralism is an American,
not a French phenomenon, and describes how Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan’s son-inlaw
and literary executor) shocked an Ottawa conference on “The Reception of
Post-Structuralism in Francophone and Anglophone Canada” “by saying that ‘poststructuralism’
was not a word used in France.”
7. Anthony Giddens identifies the following as definitive characteristics of structuralism and
poststructuralism: “the thesis that linguistics, or more accurately, certain aspects of particular
versions of linguistics are of key importance to philosophy and social theory as a whole; an emphasis
upon the relational nature of totalities, connected with the thesis of the arbitrary character of the sign,
together with a stress upon the primacy of signifiers over what is signified; the decentering of the
subject; a peculiar concern with the nature of writing, and therefore with textual materials; and an
interest in the character of temporality…(as separate from history)” (1987, p. 196).