Yesterday evening we kicked off our latest offering in our Philosophy Club series with a right whaaa-hoolie of a topic: Bodies without Organs…Everything
you always wanted to know about post-structuralism (but were afraid to ask). Alright, so for some of you this kind of learning
experience is becoming old hat. For others, you were dipping your toe in for the
first time last night. For my own part, I was both excited and filled with trepidation as
we set off on this latest philosophical journey together. Excited, because the
material is tough and challenging and unsettling. Filled with trepidation,
because the material is tough and challenging and unsettling. All par for the course, I might add...For this
sense of being all things and none, caught between incertitude and a hard place,
buffeted by a warm summer breeze whilst caressed by the winds of change, is part and parcel of the philosophical realm known as post-structuralism. For this
is a terrain of thinking where contradictions are embraced and paradox is the
norm; where life becomes topsy-turvy and all that keeps you grounded might well
disappear with a flick of a deconstructionist finger.
And it gets worse! For whereas in our first two series much time and attention was spent in cultivating a voice with which
to speak our lives (The Invisible Matron)
and a position from which to fight for those lives (Rebel with a Cause), this time round we were being asked to drop
that carefully cultivated ‘self’ altogether. Roughly translated – which is, incidentally,
the case with all translation for
your average post-structuralist – this meant stepping out into the abyss
with all the protective covering of a newborn babe. Swept along by a strategic
move that post-structuralism calls ‘decentering the subject,’ we had to be prepared to throw our illusions of personal
agency to the winds and watch from the sidelines as those strands of belief and connection and
origin that we once grasped on to like lifelines - at once identifying us as
unique, at once defining us as Same not Other – began to shred and splay,
leaving us dangling precariously. Which was, perhaps, the perfect place to find our bodies – with or without organs – as we struck out on this latest experimental
adventure in philosophy. Not a bad place to find ourselves, either, as back in the 'real' world we, along with the rest of Quebec (and a good many folks from outside of our borders too) grapple with our government’s recent proposal for a Charter of Values that, through erasing visible signs of 'difference,' seeks to render us all 'self-same'.
Okay, so we're throwing around a lot of post-structuralist jargon, here, and that in part was the point of our first session together: glancing backwards to the place from whence post-structuralism had sprung, in other words 'structuralism'; considering what it means to be post-anything in our post-modern, supposedly post-feminist (and here we hear a well-warranted growl from Gloria Steinem) world. This line of questioning inducted us into the hallowed hall of semiological signifiers and signifieds, syntagms and paradigms, as understood by the founder of structuralism, Swiss Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Grappling with de Saussure's new and revolutionary (at the time) way of positing language as 'a structure containing no positive terms, only differential relations,' we pulled out the old chess board (as de Saussure once did) and drew on the rules governing game-play to better grasp how language, too, operates as a system of arbitrary rules that, because we are so caught up inside language, we end up seeing as a priori, as somehow 'natural'.
If a plunge with Alice through the Looking Glass helped to illuminate how this inculcation into language and its taken-for-granteds work on us and through us, a brief survey of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss's (1908-2009) application of structuralism to tribal rituals (revealing a basic universality across all cultures, though not without its inherent hierarchies) helped us to see the inner workings of structuralism in our own everyday lives and practices. By this stage, some of our participants were clearly chomping at the bit: ready to challenge the extent to which structures like language imprison us within their ideological tentacles; questioning the idea, pace Louis Althusser (1918-1990) that we ourselves become the primary custodians of our own entrapment.
All to say, roll on post-structuralism with its 'response' to these very issues. We've hitched up the desiring-machine, we've bought our one-way ticket, and we’re set for
a life-altering ride. As for a sneak preview of our itinerary...
Week 1: Thursday, September 19, 2013
Post-what? : A look at Structuralism and what, why,
where, when, how came next…
Week 2: Thursday, September 26, 2013
Michel Foucault: Preface from The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge:
London, 1990
Week 3: Thursday, October 3. 2013
Roland Barthes: Excerpt from The Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang: New York, 1975
Week 4: Thursday, November 7, 2013
Jacques Derrida: Letter to
a Japanese Friend (Prof Isutsu) from Derrida and Difference, ed. Wood
& Bernasconi, Parousia Press: Warwick, 1985
Week 5: Thursday, November 14, 2013
Julia Kristeva: Toccata
and Fugue for the Foreigner from Strangers to Ourselves, Columbia University Press: New York, 1991
Week 6: Thursday, November 21, 2013
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: November 28, 1947: How do you make yourself a body without organs? from A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum: London, 1987
