In this series of pages, we are developing Anderson and Krathwohl’s proposal that cognitive domains require knowledge of facts, concepts, procedures and metacognition; specifically the procedures for investigating literary texts. Once a series of lessons has been developed on the procedures, it should give to students some explicit proposals about what to do with a text other than simply reading it and recalling the events. This series of lessons is starts life as the chapters of Rick Rylance’s Debating Texts, with this particular article exploring how Poststructuralist thought might give to students some path to follow and routine of investigation.
Post-structuralism begets the Structuralism that came before it, and readers of this article would do well to begin with some familiarity of that earlier school of thought. Neither critical perspective fits particularly well into simple statements or themes, but doing so would help to draw a distinction between Structuralism and Poststructuralism.
Structuralism, as its name suggests, is focused on structures from which meaning can be transferred between interlocutors. The transference of meaning requires that both speaker and recipient are operating with the same definitions of words. An older generation hearing a younger speaker refer to an artist as ‘sick’ causes issues for Structuralists because of the drift in meaning (or as Roland Barthes would refer to the cultural code – the older generation is outside of the cultural usage of sick being an positive and not a pejorative). Meaning is more than just definitions though, and an entire grammar of signs is also required. “The cat in the hat” cannot be reconstructed in any other order and still convey meaning, so rules are as important as meanings. Those rules are always learned from outside the text or the speaker; we come to understand the meanings not from within usage but from outside the usage. Structuralism is the study of these rules, where they are formed and how speakers come to understand them.
[Structuralism’s] emphasis on the static (synchronous) language system was felt to neglect process and change. The explanation of linguistic change through time is a major theoretical problem for the Saussurean theory of language (p112)… meaning is not anchored in the ‘real world’ but is a product of the particular language or discursive structure of which its units are a part. One consequence of ths is that meaning becomes insecure: there are no stable ‘truths’ i knowledge of belief; all is relational. thus some structuralist-influence theories encourage a sceptical view of the world, and Poststructuralist thought became adept at demonstrating how received, apparently ‘natural’ and taken-for-granted beliefs were in fact culturally produced effects of the governing structure.
Poststructuralism however deconstructs this theory that grammar and meanings can in fact be known with any degree of certainty at all. And the vernacular “sick” works well here; meaning is transcendental. Language and grammar is not fixed, nor can we know that readers are operating with the same signifier-signified relationships as the speaker.
Structuralism famously trends away from the text upwards and outwards to where the grammar was formed. Structuralism is exophoric in discovering where meaning comes from, and it is certain that it is able to find some root sign that forms the genesis of meaning. To some extent them, Structuralism generates some degree of certainty about where meaning comes from – that there is some actualization of meaning, some first domino, some origin of source, from which all meaning is derived. Poststructuralism however says that meaning is not so orderly and cannot be traced backwards genealogically. Poststructuralism is defined well by Jean Francois-Lyotard’s assertion that Modernity is incredulous towards grand-narratives; any all encompassing, totalitarian form of authority is not to be trusted and is ultimately superseded by the concept that meaning is formed through plurality. Poststructuralism’s argument that meaning is ultimately unknowable is highly abstract and conceptual, but there is actually a very neat modern analogy.
The argument against a taxonomy of sign systems is that we cannot take a word such as ‘blue’ and assume some agreed upon universal definition; what is being referred to by the author is not necessarily the same as what the reader decodes as being signified. ‘Blue’ requires knowledge of other colours, colour spectrum, and boundaries that define the limits of blue-ness. It also needs some concrete body upon which to ‘paint’ blue, as the actual referent is merely an electromagnetic wave that we conceive upon physical bodies. And there are cultural values to the colour as well: coldness? isolation? grief? When we decode the sign, we are not merely obtained some singular definition but sampling together a wide range of associations. Words do not simply have meanings. They are part of a vast web interconnecting words, opposites, feelings, experiences and literary usage that operate together in defining what the sign signifies.
This is how AI systems build their Large Language Models. Meaning in AI models is not built like dictionaries, but vast webs of interconnectedness. You cannot trace a word, a sign or a grammar backwards to earlier rules. We cannot know for certain exactly what meaning is being intended. The web of networked meanings implies an infinite possibility of meaning.
What a Poststructuralist does is to show that we cannot know for certain what has been meant within a text, and that meaning is constructed by the reader and their unique experiences. Reading creates more meaning than the author can control.
This has some rather unsettling consequences however, and Poststructuralist’s messiah suffered at the crucifix of his own religion. Jacques Derrida was one of the key philosophers of the Poststructuralist movements and a Jewish man living through World War II. In 1987, a Belgian scholar discovered that Derrida’s colleague, Paul de Man, had written over 180 articles for a pro-Nazi newspaper, at least one being explicitly antisemitic. Derrida was approached for comment, and was compelled to respond in the famous, poignant and heartbreaking article, Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell (1988), which Marci Shore calls the obituary for Poststructuralism. Many readers have noted the elegiac, defensive, and conflicted tone of Derrida’s essay. Derrida writes “for almost twenty years, I never had the least reason to suspect my friend to be the author of such articles”. Derrida goes on to attempt to salvage some of de Man’s dignity, despite the clear conflict between the one’s identity and the other’s ideology. Derrida uses the Poststructuralist approach to show that de Man subvert himself, and that no determinate moral centre can be possible. Language always says something other than what it wants, something contradictory, some double bind of ‘however / on the other hand’. Derrida does not deny the antisemitism present in de Man’s articles. But he does warn against “moralising” readings that ignore the complexity of the texts and the human writing them. Derrida asks that we, contextualise it, analyse its rhetorical structure, and discover that the article’s logic is internally unstable. Derrida claimed that de Man’s later work implicitly repudiates such positions… Maybe de Man’s work can be deconstructed to pull the rug from beneath the feet of meaning and destabilize the entire text… and so destabilize the accusation of antisemitism… maybe de Man is the victim of decontextualised readings and not simply an anti-semite…
Derrida is expert at turning texts against themselves in this way, and exploring the contradictions in pieces of writing so as to deconstruct their foundations (p114).
But to do so would be to exonerate any crime, and no insult could ever be taken at face value. What crime cannot be turned into a dialectical argument? What virtue cannot be twisted into cruelty? When signs cannot be taken at face value and have no central, mandatory, definable meaning, how can any judgement ever be made? This moment created a crisis in literary theory and Poststructuralist procedures continues to do great good in the world that we stand to lose if we don’t ensure some safe grounds upon which to be critical.
Let’s reflect upon Derrida’s paradox a moment and see it through the mirror of pop culture today, and almost every cinema-goer has had the very same debate destabilizing meaning in the post film debate. Let’s turn ourselves to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its de Man, and the MCUs Derrida. Structuralism is able to determine that Thanos is the great antagonist of the series through the roles and function he fulfils; he is in binary opposition to the Avengers who have already been defined as heroes in earlier films; his narrative places him in the disruption sequence, unsettling the equilibrium; he is killed so that a new equilibrium can be obtained. We can investigate outwards to literary tradition and see how such structures persist in defining the ‘bad guy’, where “elements from one text are offered to legitimate elements of another” (p112). And yet… Thanos is attempting to bring ‘balance to the universe’; he has no prejudice and kills half of all living creatures at random; it seems that his own family, friends and even himself are not safe from the randomness (Thanos survives only as a function of the plot and not some nepotism or merit). At the start of the final film, we see some new equilibrium in which Earth is healing, there seems to be no wars, and even Tony Stark is cynical of trying to reverse the ‘snap’ that successfully fulfilled Thanos’ goals. Genocide or no, the universe post-snap is serene in a way that complicates the moral binary. Poststructuralists’ readings of Thanos, like Derrida’s reading of de Man, do not reject the crimes of Thanos. Marvellers (a term I just invented as the collective noun for those who imbibe the MCU) accept Thanos’ act as genocide, they accept genocide is a bad thing – but the function behind it is aligned with many of today’s very real concerns about survival and resources. Poststructuralism is capable of taking the accepted meaning of the Structuralist and undermine binary readings of good and bad, so that the extenuating circumstances surrounding any truth-claims make us question the certainty that the Structuralist feels.
We can apply this same Poststructuralist logic to literary texts too. We can argue that Priestley’s Mr Birling is not well defined as the antagonist of An Inspector Calls as a Structuralist would do; that his wages meet the industry average; he gave Eva Smith opportunity to progress and lead; there is an actual economic argument that running a business with higher operating costs (through labour rates) harms employees when the business fails due to being economically uncompetitive. Mr Birling functions as the Structural antagonist, but he is not the moral antagonist Priestley sets him up to be. Inspector Goole, however is deconstructed into a possible antagonist through his narrative which breaks the very principles of judicial procedures, ignoring legal rights and representation. Goole engages in entrapment and fails to abide by the code of ‘innocent until proven guilty’. The Structuralist reading lives on in how we understand the characters, but the validity of its assertion is undermined by the Poststructuralist who double-takes at the text and points to contradictions.
So what have the Romans done for us then? Apart from questioning the grand-narratives of religious scripture and paving the way for both religious and scientific freedom; advancing the rights of citizens through legislation; questioning the hegemony of patriachy and creating the emancipation of women; questioning the founding of relationships as between man and woman, creating the freedom for same sex relationships; questioning the very identity of people to create space for gender and sexuality; questioning the role of the citizen to its government and corporations, promoting freedom from servitude and labour; questioning euro-centrism and recognising the value of culture and art in colonised communities… What has Poststructuralism actually done for us? It has freed us from assumptions that became dominant narratives – grand narratives, that ruled with an iron fist. Examining accepted dogma is the function of Poststructuralism critique to create space for alternative, subversive narratives.
What grand narratives are left to question and provoke through the Poststructural lens? What is the human? Do we have to be bound to life on Earth? Is intelligence something within the brain or can it be computed? Is death final (and by that I’m not insinuating a heaven or hell afterlife)? Are humans superior to animals? Poststructuralism doesn’t assume that the grandnarratives are wrong – it is simply questioning the longstanding beliefs so that truth can be validated.
How does this translate into the classroom? Here is a procedure that students could be taught to follow in the examination of a text:
1. Identify the text’s apparent meaning
- What does the text seem to claim on a first reading?
- What is the “stable” or “obvious” interpretation a Structuralist would give?
- Which binaries, roles, or conventions appear to organise meaning?
(This gives you the surface against which instability can be measured.)
2. Locate contradictions, tensions, or slippages
- Where does the text say one thing but imply another?
- Where do characters, narrators, or arguments undermine themselves?
- Where does tone conflict with content?
- Where does the text hesitate, reverse, or contradict its own claims?
(Poststructuralism begins wherever the text stops agreeing with itself.)
3. Examine unstable or overloaded signs
- Choose key words, images, or symbols.
- Ask: What else could this mean? What associations cluster around it?
- Identify ambiguities, double meanings, metaphors, or culturally shifting terms.
- Consider how different readers might decode the same sign differently.
(Meaning is not fixed; it is a network of associations.)
4. Analyse binary oppositions
- Identify the binaries the text relies on (e.g., hero/villain, male/female, civilised/uncivilised).
- Ask how the text depends on these binaries.
- Then ask how the text destabilises them.
- Look for moments where the “inferior” term becomes necessary, powerful, or central.
(Poststructuralism shows that binaries are never stable.)
5. Look for the “absent centre”
- What does the text rely on but never fully defines?
- What assumptions does it take for granted?
- What “truths” does it gesture toward but never secure?
(Every text depends on something it cannot fully explain.)
6. Read against the grain
- What interpretation emerges if you take the text’s contradictions seriously?
- How might a marginalised or alternative perspective read this differently?
- What meanings appear when you refuse to accept the text’s authority?
(Reading becomes an act of questioning, not confirming.)
7. Consider the role of the reader
- How do your experiences shape your interpretation?
- How might another reader construct a different meaning?
- What does this tell you about the instability of meaning itself?
(Meaning is co‑created, not delivered.)
8. Reflect on what the text cannot control
- What meanings escape the author’s intention?
- What cultural, historical, or linguistic forces shape the text beyond its control?
- What readings does the text accidentally invite?
(Texts always say more than they intend.)
9. Formulate your Poststructuralist interpretation
Your final reading should:
- acknowledge the surface meaning
- show how that meaning destabilises itself
- demonstrate how signs, binaries, and contradictions multiply meaning
- argue that no single, authoritative interpretation can be secured
Marci Shore’s excellent lecture on Derrida and Poststructuralism is well worth a listen, search for European Intellectual History Since Nietzsche – Class 22: French Poststructuralism: Derrida and Deconstruction
Leave a Reply