Watch out for literary critics. They can get feisty.
As maybe you've guessed from the complicated origins, tangled mess of theoretical influences, and use of words like "rhizome," poststructuralism ain't a view people can discuss calmly over a sundae. This is one contentious branch of theory, and the debates can get personal. Got your boxing gloves? Let's dive into the ring.
The Jocks Jacques Face Off
Remember how we said it was hard to say who came up with poststructuralist theories of language first? Well, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida found this more than a little frustrating too. Back in the early 1960s, Derrida was nothing but a rookie compared to Lacan; he'd barely published any work of his own, and Lacan was teaching weekly seminars that were legen—wait for it—dary.
Now, Derrida had read a couple of Lacan's published essays, but he hadn't attended his seminars. Let's just say he had some issues with what Lacan was saying about the relationships between language and psychoanalytic treatment, but he didn't say anything about it—not in print, anyway. In 1966, Lacan published his magnum opus, Ecrits, a ginormous collection of his essays and lectures.
So Derrida curled up in his favorite armchair to read the "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" a lecture Lacan had given about a detective story of that name by spooky American author Edgar Allan Poe.
That essay, called "The Purveyor of Truth" (sense the sarcasm?) claimed that Lacan had seen only what he wanted to see in Poe's story, and that that was the problem with psychoanalysis on the whole. It always found exactly what it expected to: psychological traumas caused by repression and unfulfilled desire. And was that ever a psychological trauma for Lacan!
On top of everything, Derrida pointed out that Lacan had failed to acknowledge one of the major sources of his arguments in the seminar: an earlier psychoanalytic interpretation of Poe's story by the well known psychoanalyst (and Napoleon descendant and princess) Marie Bonaparte. Derrida wasn't accusing Lacan of plagiarism, exactly; instead, he argued that Lacan's seminar was full of gaps and ruptures and misidentifications. In other words, that it took a deconstructive reading, rather than a psychoanalytic reading, to come to terms with all of it.
Lacan never published a response to Derrida's essay, but, in true poststructuralist style, their conflict (such as it was) was supplemented and expanded over the years by other writers who jumped in to say their piece. In 1977, a poststructuralist scholar named Barbara Johnson published an essay called "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, and Derrida," where she showed that Derrida, in reading Lacan misreading Poe, repeats the exact same pattern by misreading Lacan!
Talk about a never-ending chain of signification. What the double-Jacques face-off highlights is how easy it is, in deconstructive and poststructuralist thinking, to go round and round in circles without ever escaping from the loop, drawing new texts and thinkers into the whirlpool as you go.
Where Do Texts Begin and End, and Who Writes 'Em, Anyway?
However you want to draw the lines between deconstruction and poststructuralism, there's no getting around their shared love of text. Roland Barthes's writings were what really set the stage for conversations about authors and texts. In his 1968 essay "The Death of the Author," he argued that it's more important to examine how language works through writers, rather than how writers work with language. Likewise, in in his 1971 essay "From Work to Text," he argued that "works" are simply products, but texts are animated, active processes of production.
For Barthes, not only are readers and critics involved in the processes of textual production, they're more important, heck, better than anyone else, even the "author," at figuring out what's going on inside them. That's because texts don't begin and end between the book covers: texts come into being because of discourse, the way they're talked about (or written about). And discourse has no beginning or end, and isn't ever contained inside individual books.
As we'll see in a moment, it's a pretty big deal to suggest that readers and critics are more important than writers, and better at grasping how language works. Some of the strongest and most important criticisms leveled against deconstruction and poststructuralism were made in response to ideas like these. Get ready for the fisticuffs.
Who Is Theory Really For?
One of the many characteristics that deconstruction and poststructuralism share is their insistence that writing—whether it be lit, philosophy, lit theory, the news, or an SNL skit—is always political. This makes for a BIG difference between deconstruction/poststructuralism and New Criticism, which argued that we should interpret lit without asking what it might have to say about its author's politics or morals or opinions whatsoever.
Deconstruction and poststructuralism, on the other hand, invented a whole new language for talking about how language itself creates and enforces power. Pretty meta, huh? And with that kind of credential, you might think that "theory" would be celebrated across the board.
But it wasn't. And it's a good idea to ask why.
First off, French feminist philosophers like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva all pointed out that Lacan's psychoanalytic notions about language were sexist. For Lacan, everything always comes down to the phallus. He loves talking about who has it (no one, really), who people think have it (usually men), who wants it (pretty much everyone), and what wanting it does to us.
Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva were all influenced by psychoanalysis, but they were sick of dealing with metaphors that connected men's bodies to power and women's bodies to weakness and "lack." All three of them argued, in their own ways, that women needed to reclaim language and discourse for themselves. This was usually done through attempts to associate certain kinds of speech with women's bodies—especially the maternal body.
Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva all had problems with parts of poststructuralist theory, and their response was to adopt and adapt the ideas they found useful, and to trash the rest. The same approach was used by others too, like Kentucky-born scholar bell hooks (that's right, she doesn't capitalize on purpose. Can't get much more poststructuralist than that). In her 1990 essay "Postmodern Blackness," hooks argued that even though the world of theory was dominated by white male intellectuals and other élites, there were still some valuable ideas coming out of the movement that could be put to good use by black activists, writers, and scholars who were trying to combat racism.
Despite her commitment to sifting through theory for its genuinely useful lessons, hooks' essay makes a comment that should make every reader—especially fans of Barthes's "Death of the Author"—take a serious step back. hooks asks: "Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the 'subject' when the surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time?"
That is a powerful question without an easy answer, and hooks wasn't the only one asking it. In her 1988 essay "The Race for Theory," Barbara Christian had argued that the language of poststructuralist theorists had become just as oppressive as the discourses it was supposedly attacking, and that its critiques of ideas about "centers" and "peripheries" had become popular "just when the literature of peoples of color, of black women, of Latin Americans, of Africans began to move to 'the center.'"
So, what hooks, Christian, and many others pointed out was that despite the fact that men like Derrida, Lacan, de Man, Barthes, and Foucault said they were interested in dismantling hierarchies, they never looked outside the Western tradition—the predominantly white and male Western tradition—to do so. They were getting famous while women and people of color were struggling to get their voices heard at all. Ain't much deconstructionist about that. Let the debates continue.