Lost in the Post: (Post-)Structuralism Between France and the United States

(Post-)structuralism between France and the United States 6 Lost in the post: (Post-)structuralism between France and the United States Edward Baring Introduction Today, the term ‘post-structuralism’ designates a stage in the intellectual history of modern France. According to a familiar narrative, post-war French thought is divided up into a number of moments that can conveni- ently structure an American college course. The great success of existen- tialist ideas in the 1940s, propounded by figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who emphasized the free and acting subject, was followed by a ‘structuralist’ reaction, when Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes foregrounded anonymous structures that transcended and determined the self. Moving on at pace, so the narrative goes, these ideas were challenged by a range of post-structuralists, most prominently Jacques Derrida but also Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. The ‘post-structuralists’ added a dash of Nietzsche to the staid structuralist mix, which tended to dissolve certainties and unsettle the structures that earlier scholars had described. Despite the attractive simplicity of this narrative, it quickly runs into difficulties. Several figures are hard to place. Are Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser structuralists or post-structuralists? It is generally assumed that we can distinguish between an early and late Michel Foucault. But in a 1983 interview that is well beyond his putative break with structuralism, Foucault rejected ‘post-structuralist’ as a description of his work.1 Even the archetypal post-structuralist, Jacques Derrida, refused the label.2 To a certain extent, such refusals should be understood as a salutary sus- picion of -isms. Intellectuals are often reluctant to let their ideas be reduced to slogans, or to be seen as just one of a group. And certainly, if we take post-structuralism to be a school with a rigid set of doctrines that have to be accepted without question, it is clear that there is no such thing. But the French aversion to ‘post-structuralism’ cannot be attributed solely to intellectual self-assertion. Foucault’s rejection is telling on this point. The 1983 interview opened with a query about the origin of ‘post-structuralism’.3 Edward Baring - 9781526148179 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 05:59:37PM via free access (Post-)structuralism between France and the United States 117 Foucault, however, simply ignored the question, only returning to the term in passing later on. Instead, he focused his analysis on ‘structuralism’. For him, this latter term, though equally objectionable as a label for his work, at least had a meaning one could discuss. That Foucault was more familiar with ‘structuralism’ than ‘post- structuralism’ is instructive. At the time, the term post-structuralisme was hardly ever used in France.4 Rather it found traction predominantly in America, when a range of academics began to grapple with a new genera- tion of French thinkers. As the historian of ideas Vincent Descombes noted in 1991, ‘it so happens that what goes in France under the label “structuralist philosophy” is known in the U.S.A. as “post-structuralist philosophy”. Just by crossing the Atlantic, the very same book that was still considered of structuralist vintage when it left Saint-Germain-des-Près would be recat- egorized as poststructuralist.’5 The form of the word ‘post-structuralism’ thus sits uneasily with its referent. The relationship of post-structuralism and structuralism is not one of supersession but of translation. To understand the emergence and meaning of ‘post-structuralism’, therefore, we first need to analyse the French word it was meant to render in English. Structuralism in France: a polemical unity Unlike post-structuralisme, the term structuralisme had considerable currency in 1960s France. In July 1967, the influential magazine, the Quinzaine Littéraire, published an essay by François Châtelet, ‘Où en est le structuralisme?’ which featured a now famous cartoon by Maurice Henry: ‘The Structuralists’ Lunch Party’. The cartoon depicted Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss and Barthes sitting in a circle amidst palm trees and dressed in grass skirts, a reference to the type of society many associated with Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology.6 The resonance of the word structuralisme cannot simply be seen as an effect of vulgarization in the popular press. Some of the most important French-language philosophy journals – such as Esprit (1963), the Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1965) and Les Temps Modernes (1966) – published special editions on structuralism in the 1960s, and that decade saw the appearance of a range of books that sought to define the movement, from Jean Piaget’s idiosyncratic ‘Que sais- je’ volume to the more substantial Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? edited by the philosopher François Wahl. Despite the widespread use of the term, few thought that the structuralist movement cohered. The Quinzaine Littéraire article began by acknowl- edging its variety and complexity and reached the conclusion that ‘only a very hasty reading, one can see, can constitute a doctrinal body called Edward Baring - 9781526148179 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 05:59:37PM via free access 118 ‘Post’ rising to prominence (1970s–1990s) “structuralism”’.7 The divergences were foregrounded in Henry’s cartoon, which was hardly the picture of a genial get-together. Foucault is trying to speak, but he is confronted by Barthes’s stony expression and Lacan’s defensive scepticism; Lévi-Strauss does not appear to be listening at all. The worry that ‘structuralism’ might involve a number of scholars talking past each other pervades the literature. In the introduction to his edited volume, Wahl felt compelled to ask the question, ‘Does structuralism exist?’ and was sceptical that one could identify a common approach.8 Others were equally unconvinced. Foucault complained in the pages of the Quinzaine Littéraire on 1 March 1968 that ‘structuralism is a category which exists for other people, people who aren’t in it … We ourselves don’t see any unity.’9 If there was a unity to structuralism then, it was a weak or thinly coher- ent one. Rather than a school, it is better to consider structuralism as a diverse appeal to a shared set of sources, the most important of which was Ferdinand de Saussure’s 1916 Course on General Linguistics. In that text, Saussure had made a number of claims whose implications would be enthusiastically debated almost half a century later. First, he had shifted analytic focus from linguistic reference to linguistic structures. A word’s meaning arose not from the relationship between a ‘signifier’ (the sound pattern ‘tree’) and a ‘signified’ (the concept of a tree), but rather thanks to a homology between the differences between signifiers (the word ‘tree’ sounds different from ‘plant’ and ‘leaf’) and the differences between the signified objects (tree, plant and leaf). The upshot of this argument was that the sign was ‘arbitrary’, and a different signifier could take its place as long as the structure of differences was maintained.10 Second, these structures had to be understood ‘synchronically’. Since meaning was produced according to the set of relations between signifiers, the history of a language (diachronic change) was irrelevant to its meaning. Saussure argued his point by compar- ing language to a game of chess. Certainly it was interesting to understand how a game had developed up until a particular point, but that history was irrelevant to the next move.11 Third, Saussure’s structures exceeded and determined the individual. It was not possible for any single person to shape his or her language. Rather the structure of a language constrained what an individual could say and how.12 The Saussurian revival can be traced back to the anthropologist Lévi- Strauss. Fleeing France in 1941, he had learnt about Saussure in New York from the Czech linguist Roman Jakobson.13 Saussure’s structuralism then informed Lévi-Strauss’s 1949 thesis, the Elementary Structures of Kinship, where he argued that marriage choices were not entirely free or determined by individual preferences. Rather they were the effects of a shared set of structures that distinguished appropriate from inappropriate partners. Lévi-Strauss based his work on the study of non-Western societies, Edward Baring - 9781526148179 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/26/2021 05:59:37PM via free access (Post-)structuralism between France and the United States 119 which he quickly came to present not as inferior or undeveloped, but as privileged means for grasping the universal structures of human thought.14 Though Lévi-Strauss rejected the idea that there was any natural logic to these structures – for instance, he argued that the incest taboo could not be explained by biology, just as Saussure argued that words could not be explained by their referent – he did think that these social structures could be explained by the architecture of the human brain.15 Lévi-Strauss introduced Saussure to his friend, the psychoanalyst Lacan, who incorporated Saussure’s ideas in his famous ‘Rome Report’ from 1953. There he posited what he called the ‘symbolic’ realm as the foundation of psychoanalysis. When Lacan argued that the unconscious was ‘structured like a language’ he meant language understood in Saussure’s sense, one that preceded and shaped the ego.16 The literary critic Barthes picked up structuralist ideas in his 1957 book

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