Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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and its emergence from structuralism and then identify the key strategies employed in the field of religion by some of the above scholars and examine the implications of this method for future studies in religion. Needless to say, in the limits of this presentation, I can only skim the surface of the post-structuralist literature to provide a ‘trace’ of its critique, focusing on a few key ideas from the foundational texts. I will, however, contend that the engagement with post-structuralism is one of the most significant developments in the study of religion, because this critical perspective raises important questions about the legitimacy and authority of knowledge claims in the field.

The complexity of the term: emerging themes in 1960s French thought

Post-structuralism is a difficult term and like all ‘isms’ needs to be used as a marker for a set of ideas and then critically suspended as a term, because it reflects a holding of ideas that are constantly in process and exchange: it is like trying to catch a single point in a moving stream of historical thought. Ideas are constantly in exchange and motion, and only for strategic reasons are terms frozen and thinkers positioned to achieve certain temporary shorthand clarifications or political objectives in the intellectual and social world. Few writers claim to be post-structuralist and are often labelled as such by other writers attempting to identify trends and patterns of thinking, or even simply to dismiss them. It is also true that the specificity of a writer always reveals greater complexity and multiple strands of thought than any one term can convey. Nonetheless, the term post-structuralism can be used to identify a broad set of intellectual patterns of thought emerging from 1960s France, which had major importance on the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century in almost every intellectual discipline.

The term post-structuralism is used in a variety of different ways by its exponents and opponents and it is thus useful to identify a strict and general use. In its strict sense, it is used to identify a number of French intellectuals in the 1960s and their emergence within and development of structuralism. The work of Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Jacques Lacan (1925–1980), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Julia Kristeva (1941–), who came to France from Bulgaria, are most commonly associated with this theoretical challenge. In its general usage post-structuralism has been used to embrace a wider movement of critical theory and continental philosophy and is often fused – and confused – with postmodernism. Postmodernism is a misleading term that tends to obfuscate the specificity of intellectual thought rather than provide any useful insight. Postmodernism suffers from even greater imprecision than post-structuralism and has more to do with the marketing of a broad set of ideas and thoughts in the late modern Anglo-Saxon world; it is a term of excitement or revulsion that hides the historical specificity of the texts and people it captures. However, it has been employed more effectively in Christian theology to identify partisan affiliations between different stylised positions of pre-modern, modern and latemodern theological thought (Ward 1997).

It is also important to recognise that the term postmodernism is often used by those who wish to assert clear statements of truth and fact from sense experience (positivism) to dismiss certain types of thinking as anti-Enlightenment relativism, which seriously distorts and does great injustice to the specific writers associated with post-structuralism. The reason for this confusion is related to the way French thinkers often associated with postmodernism, such as Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998) and Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), are wrongly

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linked with a different set of French thinkers connected to the more strict idea of poststructuralism. On the whole, it is best to separate the specific historical emergence of poststructuralism from the more enigmatic term postmodernism, while being aware that some confusingly use these terms interchangeably to identify wider trends of French intellectual thought. The specificity of post-structuralism will thus allow us to appreciate the historical context of French thought in the 1960s and move the discussion away from simple charges of relativism and anti-modernism. I will maintain that post-structuralism to some extent develops the critique of the Enlightenment – even in its suspicion of such thinking – by extending the critical platform of knowledge to the problem of representation. It arguably rests in the longer philosophical tradition of epistemology.

Structuralism and post-structuralism

It is not possible to understand post-structuralism without some understanding of structuralism and to understand why Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva are positioned by both terms at the same time. John Sturrock (1993: 137) rightly argues that post-structuralism is an extension rather than a complete break with structuralism. As he puts it: ‘Post-structuralism is a critique of Structuralism conducted from within: that is, it turns certain of Structuralism’s arguments against itself and points to certain fundamental inconsistencies in their method which Structuralists have ignored.’ The problem here is that structuralism is best understood as an intellectual ‘moment’ in French academic history rather than a clear set of principles and an identified school. In François Dosse’s (1997) comprehensive two volume History of Structuralism it is clear that ‘[w]hat Americans call poststructuralism existed even before the structural paradigm waned. In fact, it was contemporary with its triumph’ (Dosse 1997: 17). At the very moment that structuralism reached its historical pinnacle in France – 1966 – it fragmented. Post-structuralism was thus part of the ‘disparate fabric’ of structuralism (Dosse 1997: xiii). It was embedded in the atmosphere and discourse of the historical context of structuralism and carried over much of its language.

The problematic nature of the situation can be illustrated by considering a famous cartoon by Maurice Henry in the French journal La Quinzaine littéraire in July 1967. The cartoon known as ‘the structuralist picnic on the grass’, depicts four structuralists (Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and Lévi-Strauss) sitting on the ground beneath tropical trees, wearing grass skirts, and having a conversation. The cartoon captured the intellectual moment of 1966 in French thought, with Foucault’s successful Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), Lacan’s Écrits (Writings) and Barthes’s Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth), in the context of Lévi-Strauss’s 1958 text Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology); the tropical setting echoes the work on primitive civilisations. However, as the cartoon appeared it also witnessed the artificial positioning of the thinkers. Only Lévi-Strauss would hold on to the term structuralism while the others would seek to distance themselves from it, especially Foucault. Soon after the cartoon the work of Derrida would come to the intellectual foreground and Kristeva would in time also emerge with her own contributions to semiotic theory after her arrival in France in 1965 (see Dosse 1997: 17ff; 54).

It important to note that French linguistic structuralism from the Parisian Left Bank is not the only type of structuralism. As Barthes (1966: 5) correctly asks: ‘What structuralism are we talking about?’ Barthes recognised that the idea had been discussed for a hundred years and it is, therefore, possible to find longer histories of structure. Derrida (1966: 278) makes the same point in his 1966 critical essay decentring the idea of structure in Lévi-

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Strauss’s work by showing it is ‘as old as Western science and Western philosophy’. The idea that there are given structures can be found at all levels of analysis and in different types of knowledge. The post-structuralist linguistic type of structuralism should not obscure the fact that structures have also played a key part in wider scientific thinking, as Jean Piaget’s (1968 [1971]) seminal text, Structuralism, argued. Types of structure can be seen in philosophy from Platonic forms to Kantian a priori synthetic forms and in science from general algebra to Newtonian physics. Piaget pointed out that despite the various types of structuralism there was an underlying synthesis. Although his concern was to explore structuralism within mathematics and social science, he mapped three key features. First, there is the determining feature of wholeness. The various elements always exist within a law or order. Second, these systems of wholeness are ‘transformations’, they are ‘simultaneously structuring and structured’, because in static form they would collapse. Piaget’s third and final form is that structures are ‘self-regulating’. They have a ‘rhythm, regulation’ and ‘operation’ that maintains the system and creates a closure by setting a boundary (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 3–16). Piaget’s general insights allow the linguist Terence Hawkes (1977: 17) eloquently to capture something of the general nature of structuralism by considering the relationship between things. It is, for Hawkes, a ‘way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of structures’. It is a ‘way of thinking’ that does not examine the object itself, because ‘the world is made up of relationships not things …’ [my emphasis]. This structural relationship emerged across all fields of study: anthropology (Lévi-Strauss), psychology (Piaget) and linguistics (Saussure), but it is the Saussurean tradition of structural thinking that leads to the insights of post-structuralism in France.

Saussure and semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure’s great insight in his 1916 Cours de linguistique générale was to study language from the synchronic rather than diachronic perspective; that is, to study language as a complete system at a given moment rather than its historical changes and variations. Saussure’s first principle, according to Jameson’s (1972: 7, 21) critical reading of the relation of the synchronic and diachronic, is ‘an anti-historical one’ that reacts against the dominant view of the time. This marking out of the underlying feature of language enables Saussure to see language as a ‘system’ with its own intrinsic relations. As Sturrock (1993: 6, 26) indicates, the word ‘system’ carries the meaning of ‘structure’, which oddly does not appear in Saussure and does not emerge until 1928 in the context of phonetics. From this basis of the synchronic, the central parts of language are then analysed. First, according to langue (the system of language) and parole (individual speech acts), something which has its source in Durkheim’s sociological distinction between the collective and the individual (Doroszewski 1933, noted in Jameson 1972: 27, note 23). Language thus exists as a collective reservoir and is appropriated by the individual users who do not have complete assimilation of all its elements. As Saussure ([1916]: 1974 14) writes: ‘For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity.’ He continues: ‘In separating language from speaking we are at the same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental’ ([1916]: 1974 14).

The next major insight that sets the ground for post-structuralism is the marking out of the parts in language. The radical insight of Saussure was to mark out these parts not in terms of words as such, but in terms of signs. The basic element of the sign challenged the natural

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correspondence between words and things and set up the key notion of the arbitrariness of the sign.

The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary … The word arbitrary also calls for comment. The term should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker … I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.

(Saussure [1916] 1974: 67, 69)

This famous assertion means that language is not a clear and transparent set of meanings but a system of signs and their structural relation. The sign has two aspects, the concept or signified (signifié) and the sound-image or signifier (signifiant). The relation is arbitrary because there is no natural link between – for example – the signifier ‘cat’ and the concept of the physical animal sitting on the mat (the signified), other than inside the structure of the language. There are two general types of relation between signs, echoing, as Jameson (1972: 37) notes, the diachronic and synchronic. First, the syntagmatic, those held in a time sequence as they are positioned alongside other signs (a ‘horizontal’ link) and, second, the associative or ‘vertical’ link, where there is a link through a shared meaning or sound, such as synonyms. What this technical outline of language indicates is that it is the relation between signs that is important. As Saussure indicates: ‘language is a form and not a substance’ (Saussure [1916] 1974: 122). Language thus depends on the differences and oppositions between signs. Structuralism extends Saussure’s insights to other sign systems, such as myth and ritual.

The relationships between the sign and signified opens a key problem of what shapes, or determines, the relation. Jameson’s (1972: 102, 106) political consciousness jumps on this dimension within linguistic structuralism and not only makes the point that French structuralists were ‘the beneficiaries of a Marxist culture’ but also shows how ideology rests within the ‘idealistic tendencies’ of the relation. As Jameson argues: ‘[I]n practice, all the Structuralists … do tend to presuppose, beyond the sign-system itself, some kind of ultimate reality which, unknowable or not, serves as its most distant object of reference’ (109–110). Here we see what will be a central struggle within structuralism: the relation between history and structure and what determines structure. The post-structuralists expose these tensions and this represents one of the radical extensions of the theory.

Structuralism and constructivism: the shift to post-structuralism

The shift to post-structuralism from within structuralism is a complex one and something obfuscated in Anglo-Saxon commentaries. As Dosse (1997: xiii) shows, the public reception of structuralism occurred at a time when it was already in a ‘period of deconstruction, dispersion and ebb’. This internal shift reflects something of the very nature of structuralist logic. Although Fredric Jameson (1972: ix) tends to dismiss Piaget as appropriating structuralism, Piaget’s wider perspective in the history of ideas surprisingly offers an insight into a more unified extension thesis between structuralism and post-structuralism. He makes the point, from mathematical and scientific domains, that structuralism contains its own

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internal problem that requires an external theory. This point arises when he discusses the work of Foucault. In discussion of Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses (1966) he believes that Foucault’s ‘corrosive intelligence has performed a work of inestimable value’ (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 135), one that supports Piaget’s general insight: ‘There is no structure apart from constructivism’ (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 140).

The logical outcome of structuralism is a question about its own formation and the poststructuralists provide various ways of thinking about this problem. Foucault, like other post-structuralists, takes the structure – the given or what we assume is evident – and questions its assumptions through historical knowledge and the limitations of thinking. In a fascinating alignment of ideas, Piaget (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 13, 33, 135) links such ideas with the philosophy of Kurt Gödel and his 1931 critique of formal mathematics, which provided important insights into the limits of knowledge. According to Piaget, Gödel showed that any system of reasoning cannot demonstrate its own consistency or validity, because it requires a higher system of knowledge outside itself to provide its own justification. There was in the end a ‘formally undecidable’ nature to knowledge, and the foundation of mathematics. What this meant was that knowledge was ‘essentially incomplete’ (Piaget [1968] 1971: 33). The link between Gödel and Foucault is an important one in showing how the incompleteness of structure is the ‘construction’ of ‘structure’, which for Piaget ‘is no longer avoidable’ (Piaget 1968 [1971]: 13).

We have already noted in passing that Derrida (1966) was critical of the limitations of the idea of structure. For Derrida contemporary structuralism was an ‘event’ that asserted a metaphysical centre and presence with the idea of structure. He refers to its historical emergence as the ‘structuralist invasion’, but resists the historian making it an ‘object’, because its whole aim was to question how something is perceived and made into an object (Derrida 1963: 3). Derrida reveals the contradictions and tensions inherent not only in metaphysics but also in the metaphysics of structuralist theory. He shows how structuralism privileges the very concepts of sign and structure in a Saussurean displacement of the sign. Derrida’s reading of structure shows his resistance and reconfiguration of structuralism. As he argues in his essay on Rousset:

A structural realism has always been practiced, more or less explicitly. But never has structure been the exclusive term – in the double sense of the word – of critical description. It was always a means or relationship for reading or writing, for assembling significations, recognising themes, ordering constants and correspondences.

(Derrida 1963: 15)

One tactic Derrida employs to undermine the notion of structure is to show how it operates as a metaphor rather than a thing itself. It constructs a relation rather than discovers it. ‘Structuralism’, for Derrida (1963: 26), ‘lives within and on the difference between its promise and its practice.’ For Dosse (1977: 19), Derrida was a paradoxical figure who was both ‘inside and outside’ structuralism. As Dosse went on to argue: ‘But he might just as well have been considered to be the person who pushed the structuralist logic to its limit and toward an even more radical interrogation of all substantification or founding essence, in the sense of eliminating the signified.’

Derrida’s reading of structuralism shows how the language of Saussure persists in poststructuralism and is made more complex as it is interrogated in different ways. Mark Taylor (1999: 106) aptly captures this critical transition: ‘Structures, which seem to be complete, are