Editing Post-structuralism (section)

== History ==
Post-structuralism emerged in [[France]] during the 1960s as a movement critiquing [[structuralism]]. According to [[José Guilherme Merquior|J.&nbsp;G. Merquior]], a [[love–hate relationship]] with structuralism developed among many leading French thinkers in the 1960s.<ref name="Merquior1987" /> The period was marked by the rebellion of students and workers against the state in [[May 1968 events in France|May 1968]].

In a 1966 lecture titled "[[Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences]]", [[Jacques Derrida]] presented a thesis on an apparent rupture in intellectual life. Derrida interpreted this event as a "decentering" of the former intellectual cosmos. Instead of progress or divergence from an identified centre, Derrida described this "event" as a kind of "play."

A year later, in 1967, [[Roland Barthes]] published "[[The Death of the Author]]", in which he announced a metaphorical event: the "death" of the author as an authentic source of meaning for a given text. Barthes argued that any literary text has multiple meanings and that the author was not the prime source of the work's semantic content. The "Death of the Author," Barthes maintained, was the "Birth of the Reader," as the source of the proliferation of meanings of the text.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Barthes |first=Roland |title=Image, Music, Text |publisher=Hill & Wang |year=1977 |isbn=0809057409 |location=New York |translator-last=Heath |translator-first=Stephen}}</ref>

=== Barthes and the need for metalanguage ===
In ''[[Elements of Semiology]]'' (1967), Barthes advances the concept of the ''[[metalanguage]]'', a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of the first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore [[deconstruction]] itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny. Barthes' other works contributed deconstructive theories about texts.

=== Derrida's lecture at Johns Hopkins ===
The occasional designation of post-structuralism as a movement can be tied to the fact that mounting criticism of Structuralism became evident at approximately the same time that Structuralism became a topic of interest in universities in the United States. This interest led to a colloquium at [[Johns Hopkins University]] in 1966 titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man", to which such French philosophers as [[Jacques Derrida]], [[Roland Barthes]], and [[Jacques Lacan]] were invited to speak.

Derrida's lecture at that conference, "[[Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences|Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences]]", was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist.

The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while [[social constructionism]] as developed in the later work of [[Michel Foucault]] is said to create play in the sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change<!--what are the "levers of historical change" specifically?-->.