Weekly Reflection 8: Post-structuralism... or simply neo-structuralism?

Post-structuralism is the belief of reality having no structure, literally. It sounds crazy, and it is - crazily wise.
Jacques Derrida pioneered the idea that "when you see the world, what you see is not identities but a network of relations between things whose difference from one another allows them to appear to be separate and identifiable" (Rivkin 258). Simply, Derrida means that when you think of, for example, a lemon, you must also think of an orange to establish what a lemon is not. A lemon cannot be understood at all without having something to contrast it to.

"What this suggests is that no presence or substance of an object or of an idea is complete in itself" (Rivkin 259). Essentially, identity itself is impossible. This is a problem for ideas and reality, but even more of a problem for literature. Because literature depends on words referring to objects/ideas, if there are no identities of objects/ideas, then there can be nothing for words to refer to; literature, like identity, becomes impossible.

This post-strucrutalist idea that life is entirely relative has some merit, however there seem to be issues with saying that this means there can be no identities.
Marx, a renowned structuralist, discussed in reflection 7, believed man did not make history, but history made the man. This seems to parallel post-structuralist thought - no person creates themselves out of nothing, but our identities are created by causal relations. Marx essentially put human identity in the post-structuralist form, but he never says once that humans have no identity. This shows that post-structuralist belief and identity are compatible. Humans, objects, and ideas are understood by their relation to other things, and that is how we come to know their identities. The identity is not nonexistant, it is simply different from the past conception of identity.
Identity is not post-structure, or "without structure," it is simply in a new structure, "neo-structure."


Works Cited_

Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Introduction: Introductory Deconstruction. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology Second Edition.