system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: What Is Poststructuralism?
gpt
Post-structuralism is a branch of theory and you need to understand "theory" and "structuralism" to begin to understand "post-structuralism."

**Theory**

(via Jonathan Culler in *Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction*) "The genre of 'theory' includes works of anthropology, art history, film studies, gender studies, linguistics, philosophy, political theory, psychoanalysis, science studies, social and intellectual history, and sociology. The works in question are tied to arguments in these fields, but they become 'theory' because their visions or arguments have been suggestive or productive for people who are not studying those disciplines. Works that become 'theory' offer accounts others can use about meaning, nature and culture, the functioning of the psyche, the relations of public to private experience and of larger historical forces to individual experience...**Theory is often a pugnacious critique of common-sense notions**, and further, an attempt to show that what we take for granted as 'common sense' is in fact a historical construction, a particular theory that has come to seem so natural to us that we don't even see it as a theory."

**Structuralism and Semiotics**

Structuralism is a branch of theory that seeks to understand cultural phenomena by looking at the underlying structure, which is examined by applying theories of structural linguistics. This is related to "semiotics," or the studies of signs.

The idea of a "sign" comes from the structuralist linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and describes what we understand as a word to be a bringing together of a sound and a concept. It breaks down like this:

Sign = signified (concept of a cat) / signfier (the sound you make when you say "cat") \[signified is positioned over the signifier\]

The important thing here is that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is *arbitrary*: the sound you make by saying the letters c-a-t together in english have a similar relationship to the signified as the letters c-h-a-t have to someone who speaks french. The relationship between *sound* and *concept—*which produces the *sign*—is culturally determined.

Structuralist thinkers take this relationship, extend it, and apply it to cultural artifacts and behaviors which seem "natural." An example of this is Roland Barthe's book *Mythologies*, which takes everyday objects like "soap," "professional wrestling," and "wine" and looks at the way they function in culture. 

He extends a sign in this way:

\[First-order signification\] =>  Soap powder = concept of soap powder / sound of "soap powder"

\[Second-order signification, or "Myth"\] => Soap powder's cultural meaning = Soap powder / Associations of cleanliness/whiteness/hygine

The cultural meaning of the sign can then be used to reinforce certain values: "The relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product, are very different in each case...Powders, on the contrary, are selective, they push, they drive dirt through the texture of the object, their function is keeping public order not making war. This distinction has ethnographic correlatives: the chemical fluid is an extension of the washerwoman's movements when she beats the clothes while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board." (from *Mythologies*)

**Post-structuralism**

Post-structuralism takes those tools and ideas of structuralism ("natural" things as cultural constructs) and turns it back toward itself. Here, things like the whole idea of systems of knowledge or the idea of a stable, singular self are under scrutiny as being historical constructs. "Post-structuralism" is sort of the umbrella under which several different discourses (Jacques Derrida's "deconstruction," contemporary feminism, etc.) fall. Examples:

**Michel Foucault** showing how the modern self is the product of a combination of different discourses, which limit our ideas of ourselves in different ways and to different ends. Knowledge is not neutral but is instead always tied to power. 

**Judith Butler** showing how the body is a historical idea and gender is imposed on a person while also being something that you *do* and participate in—a performance in relation to a historical moment.

**Roland Barthes** destabilizing the idea of a singular meaning of a text in "The Death of the Author" in favor of a multi-dimensional space in which meanings are teased out. The author's intent is only one voice among many.