Poststructuralism: A New Approach to Knowledge

Poststructuralism functions as a method for the radical critique of knowledge systems. Emerging in the late 20th century as a direct response to structuralism‘s search for stable, universal patterns, this movement dismantles the very possibility of fixed meaning, objective truth, and authoritative interpretation. Its work is deconstructive: it reveals how language, far from neutrally describing the world, actively constructs our perception of reality through unstable signs and embedded power relations.

This article serves as a guide to this critical method. It outlines the core principles that define the poststructuralist critique, details its break from structuralist thought, and illustrates its transformative impact on literary analysis through key techniques. The goal is to provide a framework for understanding the nature of poststructuralism and the manner in which it recalibrates our engagement with texts, culture, and knowledge.

The Theoretical Intervention: From Structure to Instability

Poststructuralism constitutes a departure from the intellectual project that preceded it. To understand its intervention, one must first understand its target: structuralism.

Feature	Structuralism	Poststructuralism
Primary Goal	To uncover the underlying, universal structures (e.g., linguistic rules, narrative patterns, cultural binaries) that organize human thought and cultural products.	To expose the instability, contradictions, and power dynamics within those purported structures, denying their universality and neutrality.
View of Language	A stable, rule-bound system of signs where meaning is relatively fixed within the structure (the signifier reliably points to the signified).	A slippery, “playful” medium where the signifier only leads to other signifiers in an endless chain; meaning is deferred and contingent.
View of the Text/Subject	The literary text or cultural artifact has a discoverable, coherent meaning based on its place within a structure. The individual subject is produced by these structures.	The text is a site of “freeplay,” open to infinite reinterpretation; it often contains the seeds of its own deconstruction. The subject is fragmented, not unified, and constituted by discourse.
Key Metaphor	A blueprint or skeleton: an invisible framework that provides form and order.	A web or labyrinth: an interconnected network with no fixed center or single exit.
Theorists and Works	Ferdinand de Saussure (linguistics), Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropology), early Roland Barthes.	Jacques Derrida (deconstruction), Michel Foucault (power/discourse), later Roland Barthes (“The Death of the Author“).

This table illustrates the fundamental shift. Structuralism sought a science of meaning; poststructuralism performs a critique of that scientific ambition. The poststructuralist move is to look at a structure—a philosophical system, a social norm, a literary genre—and ask: What does it exclude? What contradictions does it contain? Whose power does it naturalize? This relentless questioning is the core of its deconstructive method.

Key Concepts: Deconstruction, Discourse, and the Death of the Author

The poststructuralist critique is operationalized through several interconnected concepts. These concepts function as analytical tools for the examination of texts and systems of thought.

Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida): Deconstruction is the practice of analyzing a text to reveal its internal contradictions and hidden assumptions. Derrida argued that Western thought is built on hierarchical binary oppositions (e.g., speech/writing, male/female, culture/nature), where one term is privileged as original or superior. Deconstruction works to destabilize these binaries by showing how the “inferior” term is logically necessary to define the “superior” one, and how the meaning of each is endlessly deferred through language. The goal is not to destroy meaning but to demonstrate its inherent instability and openness.
Power/Knowledge and Discourse (Michel Foucault): Foucault shifted the focus to the mechanisms through which societies produce “truth.” He argued that knowledge is not discovered but manufactured within specific historical discourses—systems of language, practice, and rules that define what can be said, thought, and known in a given era. Crucially, he linked knowledge inextricably to power. Power, for Foucault, is not merely repressive but productive; it circulates through discourse to create norms, categories (like “madness” or “criminality”), and even subjects themselves. To analyze a discourse is to map the relations of power that authorize certain statements and silence others.
The Death of the Author (Roland Barthes): In his seminal 1967 essay, Barthes declared the “death” of the author as the ultimate authority over a text’s meaning. He argued that a text is not a vessel for an author’s singular message but a “tissue of citations” drawn from the infinite web of culture and language. Consequently, meaning is produced in the act of reading, not unearthed from authorial intent. This transfers interpretive authority to the reader, liberating the text to generate a plurality of meanings. This concept is a direct application of poststructuralist thought to literary criticism, emphasizing the text’s openness and the reader’s creative role.

These concepts are not isolated; they form a coherent toolkit. Deconstruction exposes textual instability, Foucault’s discourse analysis traces the social production of that text’s “truth,” and Barthes’s principle liberates the reader to engage with that instability productively.

Analytical Applications in Literature

Poststructuralist concepts provide specific methodologies for literary analysis. The following techniques illustrate how the theory’s principles manifest in textual practice, moving from broad narrative strategies to minute linguistic details.

Deconstructive Reading: Unsettling Binary Oppositions

A deconstructive analysis targets the foundational binaries a text seems to uphold. For example, a critic might examine Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) to show how its opposition of “civilization” (Europe) and “savagery” (Africa) unravels. The narrative repeatedly demonstrates that European civility depends on and produces extreme brutality, while the African jungle exposes the fragility of European identity. This reading does not choose one side but shows how the text’s own logic destabilizes the hierarchy it appears to present. Consequently, meaning is revealed as a contested site rather than a settled message.

Discourse Analysis: Tracing Power in the Narrative

Applying Foucault, an analyst investigates how a novel constructs and normalizes certain forms of knowledge and power. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), the discourse of marriage functions as a regulatory mechanism. The plot revolves around characters internalizing and negotiating societal “truths” about eligible matches, financial settlements, and feminine propriety. A discourse analysis would map how the narrative itself circulates these norms. The narrative rewards characters who conform (Jane, Bingley) and subjects those who deviate (Lydia) to crisis. Through this process, the novel participates in the era’s production of gendered and classed subjects.

Intertextuality and the “Death of the Author”

Intertextuality (the relational network between texts) exemplifies Barthes’s principle. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) derives immense semantic layers from its constant dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey. A poststructuralist reading emphasizes that meaning resides not in Joyce’s intended parallels alone, but in the active work of a reader who recognizes, questions, or even subverts those connections. The author’s design becomes one thread in a larger cultural fabric, and the reader’s ability to trace or ignore these threads becomes a primary source of the text’s significance.

Metafiction and Fragmented Form

Metafiction (texts about their own fictionality) and narrative fragmentation perform poststructuralist ideas formally. Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979) constantly interrupts its stories to address “you, the reader,” explicitly exposing the mechanics of narrative construction and consumption. This self-reference dismantles the illusion of a coherent, author-controlled world, transferring agency to the reader in assembling the experience. Similarly, the fragmented, nonlinear prose of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) rejects a single, authoritative perspective. This prose compels the reader to actively construct coherence from discontinuity, an act that mirrors the theory’s view of meaning as a collaborative, unstable process.

The Unending Critical Process

Poststructuralism offers no final theories or universal answers. Instead, it provides a mode of perpetual questioning. Its legacy is a fundamental recalibration of how we approach texts, culture, and knowledge. By challenging fixed meanings, exposing embedded power, and placing the reader in an active role, it alters interpretation from a search for stable truth into an engagement with dynamic, contested processes. To read with poststructuralism is to embrace complexity, to look for what a system excludes, and to acknowledge that meaning is always provisional, collaborative, and entangled with power. It is less a definitive method than an invitation to rigorous critique.