Is Post-Structuralism Fundamentalist?
Academic "Revolutionaries" Aren't Revolutionary
Let’s define post-structuralism as the view that there is no master-key that can open up the lock of Being. Ok, that didn’t work. Take two: there is no single Archimedean point from which we can access the truth. Take three: there is no truth, and Derrida is its prophet. Take four: since there are many ways to express an idea, it’s the expression, not the idea, that counts. Take five: be suspicious of essentialist arguments, that is, arguments that claim to reduce a phenomenon to something innate.
Richard Rorty married post-structuralism to pragmatism, translating the French intellectual movement into American parlance. Post-structuralism is vaguely leftist in in that it deploys a hermeneutics of suspicion against anything claiming to be definitive: Nation, Church, etc. It’s academic punk—or it used to be.
The left-wing critique of post-structuralism is that it’s just as easily leveraged to cast suspicion on the gods of the left. Foucault can no more be said to favor anti-nationalism than he can be said to favor anti-anti-nationalism. Theoretically, he’s an equal opportunity offender. Yet sociologically, post-structuralism emerged out of post-’68 disappointment with Soviet Communism.
I often see post-structuralism used as an antonym for fundamentalism. Thus, you can be a naive sucker who embraces some metaphysical view of the world, or else you’ve been French-pilled and now see language as one giant game, all facts as social constructions.
I’m not convinced that post-structuralism is as anti-fundamentalist as it thinks. Doesn’t it, too, rest, on faith, conviction, Jerusalem, not reason? Isn’t its suspicion of all authority, in fact, a Trojan horse for fideism—the belief that we can only accept things on faith?
I’ve never read a convincing argument for post-structuralism; I've only read texts that appeal to its truth on aesthetic or ethical grounds. Positing the death of grand narratives, as Lyotard did, is a subjective event, not an argument. And if the argument is that arguments don’t work because the terms are already stacked against the arguer, well, that’s exactly what cult leaders say.
So to my friends who have jumped the religious fundamentalist ship hoping “theory” would be an alternative, I’m not sure you’ve done anything other than convert from one religion to another. You’ve made professors and critical theorists your pastors, but your espoused radicalism isn’t as radical as you think. It’s just another ritual that, by your own lights, we should call into question.
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