a) Origins
" Structuralism derives ultimately from linguistics. Linguistics is a discipline which has always been inherently confident about the possibility of establishing objective knowledge. It believes that if we observe accurately, collect data systematically, and make logical deductions then we can reach reliable conclusions about language and the world. Structuralism inherits this confidently scientific outlook: it too believes in method, system and reason as being able to establish reliable truths.
" By contrast, post-structuralism derives ultimately from philosophy. Philosophy is a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things. This point of view is encapsulated in Nietzsche's famous remark 'there are no facts, only interpretations: Philosophy is, so to speak, sceptical by nature and usually undercuts and questions commonsensical notions and assumptions. Its procedures often begin by calling into question what is usually taken for granted. Post structuralism inherits this habit of scepticism, and intensifies it. It regards any confidence in scientific method as naive, and even derives a certain masochistic intellectual pleasure from knowing for certain that we can't know anything for certain (fully conscious of the irony and paradox which doing this entils.
2) Ione and style
" Structuralist writing tends towards abstraction and generalisation: it aims for a detached, 'scientific coolness' of tone. Given its derivation from linguistic science, this is what we would expect. An essay like Roland Barthes's 1966 pice 'Introduction to the structural Analysis of Narrative' is typical of this tone and treatment, with its discrete steps in an orderly exposition, complete with diagrams. The style is neutral and anonymous, as is typical of scientific writing.
" Post-structrualist writing, by contrast, tends to be much more emotive. Often the tone is urgent and euphoric, and the style flamboyant and self-consciously showy. Titles may well contain puns and allysions, and often the central line of the argument is based on a pun or a word - play of some kind.
3) Attitude to Language
" Structuralists accept that the world is constructed through language, in the sense that we so not have access to reality other than through the linguistic medium. All the same, all the same, it decides to live with that fact and continue to use language to think and perceive with. After all language is an orderly system, not a chaotic one, so realising our dependence upon it need not induce intellectual despair.
" By contrast, post-structuralism is much more fundamentalist and believe reality itself is textual. Post-structuralism develops the idea that any knowledge is attainable through language.
4) Project (the fundamental aims)
" Structuralism, firstly, questions our way of structuring and categorising reality, and prompts us to break free of habitual modes of perception or categorisation, but it believes that we can thereby attain a more reliable view of things.
" Post-structuralism is much more fundamental: It distrusts the very notion of reason, and the idea of human being as an independent entity, preferring the notion of the 'dissolved' or 'constructed' subject, whereby what we may think of as the individual is really a product of social and linguistic forces - that is, not an essence at all, merely a 'tissue of textualities'.
