poststructuralism

A clearer collective term for many of the texts and trends often subsumed under the misleading label postmodernism. Poststructuralism means theories which arise after the structuralist period in continental philosophy, which draw on structuralism but do not accept all of its ideas. Poststructuralists believe in the importance of discourse for understanding social life and question the idea of the self-determining individual, but they do not believe that people's actions can be entirely reduced to an external structure. Often, they study the ways in which structures can be subverted and broken down through their own limits or through ironic reinterpretation or reconfiguration of the structure itself. See power/knowledge, writerly, differance, line of flight.