Chapter 6 – Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism and Post-developmentalism
This critical thinking took systematic and structural forms. These highly generalized theories tried to
position every historical event and place each social characteristic as a component in some more general
overarching system, be it mode of production, world capitalist system, or global market. The aim was
nothing less than a systematic scientific theory of social totalities, their parts, and their developmental
dynamics, with nothing left unexplained or attributed to chance, although some aspects might have to
be examined empirically. Structural theories were the basis for political and social movements calling for
the wholesale transformation of society through development—that is, development is a way of
restructuring society. Structural theories of a critical nature have always been greeted with suspicion,
even antagonism, from the political right. However, structural explanation and even social
transformation came to be regarded with suspicion among many leftist critical thinkers as well during
the 1980s and subsequently—structuralism in the sense both of societies considered as whole entities
and theories as holistic explanations. Some apparently poststructural thinkers actually continued to
think structurally, but in new ways. For example, the French poststructural sociologist Jean Baudrillard
(1929–2007) argued that societies in the late 20th century were taking new forms—a structural shift had
occurred from mode of production, as understood in the traditional Marxist sense (discussed in Chapter
5), to what he termed “code of production”—that is, signs and cultural codes rather than material
production as the primary constituents of social life (Baudrillard 1983). Many other poststructural
thinkers attacked structural understanding altogether rather than merely shifting its emphasis, seeing
events as occurring in a far more anarchic world than structuralism posits. Theirs is a world of
spontaneous events that “just happen”—discontinuities rather than continuities of history, complexity
rather than structural simplicity. Whereas structuralism saw transcendent systems lending significance
to the individual (event or person), many poststructuralists wanted to return significance to the singular
(event or person)—that is, something is not important because of its role in the larger scheme of things .
. . it is just important in and of itself. Whereas structuralism, in its critical forms, usually employs
economic languages to criticize capitalism (understood as a class system), poststructuralism uses
cultural language to criticize modernity (understood as a semiotic or sign system). Whereas
structuralism saw potential for human emancipation in modern development, poststructuralism saw
development as a strategy of modern power and social control.
The Enlightenment and Its Critics
Ideas that are clearly empirically based but also provably logical mediate productively between human
beings and the rest of the natural world. Reasoned thinking produces science and technology as new
sources of material progress and human well-being; science replaces religion as the main mode of
understanding (although this has never happened with any degree of completeness); happiness on earth
replaces heavenly salvation as the main reason for living. Some modernists even believe that ethics can
be rationalized—that is, by examining the lessons of human history and experience, our social norms,
values, and morals can be systematically laid out as “rational” by everyone, rather than having as their
source what people have usually believed to be their source: religious doctrine. Hence, morality can be
accepted as just and right by all thoughtful, responsible, and reasonable people. The philosophers of the
,Enlightenment considered all people to be “indefinitely perfectible.” Thus, an Enlightenment map of the
world saw global space divided between a center of reason, knowledge, and wisdom in western Europe
and a periphery of ignorance, barbarity, and only potential reason elsewhere. The “idea of progress,”
which the social theorist Theodore Shanin (1997: 65) found to be the main legacy of modernity,
envisaged all societies advancing “up” a route leading from diverse barbarisms to a singular European-
style rationalized democracy. Europe was destined to lead the world and its enlightened generosity
should be demonstrated by helping others (“our pupils”). Poststructural and postmodern philosophies
try to reveal the inherent flaws in this entire modern, confident, structural stream of thought.
Poststructural thinking, especially in its more postmodern forms, emphasizes the other sides of modern
rationality—its peasant, female, and colonized victims; its disciplinary institutions (schools, prisons,
psychiatric clinics); and its sacrifice of spontaneity, emotion, and pleasure suppressed under rational
control—the idea that modern people suffer by continually scrutinizing the emotional upsurge of
pleasurable free behavior through the lenses of logic, thought, and rationalized ethics (we consciously
have to try to relax). In the poststructural view, modern philosophy’s claim to universal truth is rejected
as practically impossible but also dangerously motivated. The poststructural philosopher Richard Rorty
(1979, 1991) criticizes modern theories of “representational truth” in which systems of symbols
(statements, theories, models) accurately reflect (“mirror”) real and separate structures of events. In
poststructural thinking such as his, representational theories of truth can never be “accurate”; even at
their best, theories provide the perspective of a particular prejudiced thinker. For poststructural
philosophy, especially the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the relations
between reality and the mind are not direct, and therefore ideas cannot be objectively accurate
(“truthful”) but instead are linguistically mediated—that is, the play of language creates what is only
taken to be “true.” Derrida’s notion of deconstruction was a poststructural/postmodern expression of
skepticism about the possibility of telling coherent truths (Derrida 1974, 1978). Derrida wanted to use
deconstruction to deprive theorization of its logical authority as an attack on the certainties of what he
found to be an overly arrogant, even dangerous, modernity. Hence, poststructuralism attacks the central
tenets of modern progress: reason, truth, and accuracy (Best and Kelner 1991). The new stress on this
relation, Young says, had stimulated a “relentless anatomization of the collusive forms of European
knowledge.” European Enlightenment thinking is universal reason—for example (as we saw earlier), that
classical economics (born of the prejudices of English gentlemen-scholars), is a universal economic
science capable of representing all productive thinking. Added to this is the normative prescription that
copying European rationality and European models (of economy, for example) is good for everyone,
what all people should do. Hence, Derrida (1971: 213) said: “The white man takes his own mythology,
Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that
he must still wish to call Reason.” Sometimes Marxism is seen as a utopian form of Enlightenment
rationalism, and sometimes as the Enlightenment’s most persistent critique. On the one side, there are
elements in Marxist thought that conform to Enlightenment principles—the possibility of rational
thinking that is preferred over religion or mysticism, the potential of science to help all people if
properly (socially, democratically) directed, development as the growth of the forces of production (and
productivity) guided by rationality, to give a few instances. On the other side, there are aspects of
Marxism confounding the Enlightenment, as with the notion of the dominant forms of rationalism as
ideologies serving the interests of the ruling class—the “science” of economics, for instance. Both of
,these positions clearly have significant content. As a result, critical thought in the early 21st century can
be divided into critical modernism, derived from Marxism and other coherent critical political
philosophies, on the one side, and critical poststructuralisms and postmodernisms.
Post-Enlightenment Criticisms
Modern rational thinking, with its secular beliefs and scientific attitudes, has from the beginning, and
continuously since, encountered resistance. It cannot be automatically assumed that modern
rationalism is so clearly the final superior form of thought that everyone who hears of it and samples its
theoretical delights immediately succumbs to its logical charms. Nor should the finest product of
rationality, the plentitude of modern life, with its ability to satisfy even the most trivial (consumptive)
whim, be seen as satisfying to all and in every way with its seductive, sedative, selfish appeal. Truth in
the way it had come to be conceived deprived life of meaning—what we might call “truth in cleansing.”
Similarly, the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) criticized modern rationalism’s intellectual
product— the realist, empiricist, and scientific positivism of the 19th century (Husserl, 1970: 5–6).
Empirical science’s inability to provide answers for normative evaluative (meaningful) questions, Husserl
maintained, created a cultural crisis in modern life. For Husserl, science as knowledge of the objectively
real relegated what he called the “life-world” (the world as experienced in everyday prescientific
activities) to the inferior status of a subjective appearance—less important than the “real” world
uncovered by science. Similarly, the existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
searched for a radical foundation not only for knowledge (as with Husserl) but also for the “qualities” of
being human. In this best-known work Being and Time (1962 ed.), Heidegger argued that philosophy
had to arise from and return to the whole existence and not come merely from a disengaged (distanced,
separated, alienated) attitude of scientific knowing (i.e., humans as disembodied rational
consciousnesses). He saw the history of Western philosophy as one long misinterpretation of the nature
of reality, which in his view as inevitable once the detached perspective of scientific theoretical
reflection was adopted (i.e., stepping back to get an impartial, objective view of things), for with that
distancing the world went dead—that is, things lost their meaningfulness. For Heidegger, the meaning
of being was an “absence of ground,” or an “abyss,” in that he thought there was no ultimate
foundation (like God’s intention, or the march toward progress) for the holistic web of meaning that
made up people’s “being-in-the-world.” In his “Letter on Humanism” Heidegger (1977) took these
arguments against modern certainty a step further. He criticized the entire Enlightenment project of
emancipation as amounting to the subjugation of nature through its mastery by human rational will; for
Heidegger, the (ultimately insecure) modern subject manipulated an objective world, dominating nature
according to the human’s own (subjective) priorities.
Power-Truth-Knowledge
Foucault shared with Nietzsche a fascination with the power–truth–knowledge complex and with
Husserl and Heidegger a deeply critical attitude toward rationalism, truth, and the whole modern
project. Foucault was critical of “reason”—he saw reason as saturating modern life and intruding the
gaze of rationality into every nook and cranny of human existence, with science classifying and thereby
regulating (controlling) all forms of experience, interpretation, and understanding. Foucault launched
, two kinds of attack on the philosophy of modern rational humanism. First, he said, modern reason
metaphysically grounds its image of universal humanity on traits culturally specific to the Europeans—
that is, reason claims to speak for everyone when, in fact, it is really speaking for the European minority
in the world. Second, the values and emancipatory ideals of the European Enlightenment (autonomy,
freedom, human rights, etc.) are the ideological bases for a “normalizing” discipline that imposes an
“appropriate identity” on modern people—ideals are powerful ideologies. Foucault was a student of the
structural Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and was briefly a member of the French Communist
party, but he was critical of Soviet political practice and Stalinist Marxism. So, in analyzing coercion, he
employed methods different from, say, the Marxist critique of capitalist rationality as ideology, which
(following Nietzsche) he called “archaeology” and “genealogy.” Such “discourse” is different from a
conversation in that statements made under certain circumstances (in a lecture, a peer-reviewed
scientific article, a nonfiction book reviewed by other experts) are taken to be objectively true—and
therefore significant, worthy of respect, capable of supporting responsible action. Foucault had given up
on the possibility of telling the truth—he thought instead that discourses claimed the status of truth
primarily in order to gain power. Foucault was interested in the types of these serious speech acts, the
regularities statements exhibited in “discursive formations,” and the transformations occurring in these
formations. So by “episteme” he meant the set of conditions in a given period that validate formalized
systems of knowledge (Foucault 1973: 191). Discourses have systematic structures that can be analyzed
“archaeologically” (identifying their main elements and the relations that form these into wholes) and
“genealogically” (how discourses were formed by nondiscursive social practices, especially by
institutions of power). Genealogy involves diagnosing relations of power, knowledge, discourse, and the
body in modern society. Genealogy is opposed to most modern methods of inquiry in that it claims to
recognize no fixed essences or underlying laws, seeks discontinuities rather than great continuities in
history, avoids searching for depth, and recalls forgotten dimensions of the past. The genealogist finds
hidden meanings, heights of truth, and depths of consciousness to be shams of the modern imagination.
Modern discourses are founded on an appeal to truth—some statements are significant because they
follow the rules set up to distinguish what is taken to be true. Yet, for Foucault, modern Western
knowledge is also integrally involved in domination. For Foucault, knowledge does not detach itself from
its practical empirical roots to become pure thought, subject only to the demands of reason For
Foucault, modern power resides in the community of experts that sets up the rules for telling the truth
—he had in mind not so much natural science (physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy) but rather the
sciences of humanity and society (economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, geography,
etc.). For Foucault, thinking in terms of totalities reflected an urge toward theoretical unity and
coherence (e.g., one great theory of development), but also such thinking curtailed and caricatured local
research on particular groups of people (e.g., many particular ways of changing or improving societies).
Instead, Foucault favored autonomous noncentralized theorizing that did not depend, for its validity, on
gaining approval from the established dominant regimes of thought (e.g., the World Bank). That is, he
favored local knowledge, the “return of (forgotten) knowledge,” the insurrection of subjugated
knowledges, rediscovering blocs of historical knowledges usually disqualified as inadequate, naive,
mythical, and below the required threshold of scientificity—people’s knowledges that had not been
“certified” as true by academicians, for instance. In genealogy Foucault examined anew the multiple
aspects, relations, and kinds of domination. For him, the issue was not just global domination—one
