How It All Got Started
It's ironic to point to a single moment, or even a series of moments, as the starting point of poststructuralism, because poststructuralists by the fiber of their beings think that origins are about as real as unicorns, the Loch Ness monster, or pay equity based on gender. That said, let's see what we can learn from giving this story a conventional narrative form.
Picture this. It's October, 1966. Baltimore. A dark and stormy night and all that. A gaggle of scholars have gathered at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center to take part in an interdisciplinary, bilingual symposium named "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man."
In it, prominent scholars (mostly men) have come to exchange insights from fields as diverse as anthropology, classics, comp lit, history, linguistics, semiology, sociology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. The hot topic on everyone's lips is structuralism. What's it mean? Where's it going? How best to apply its methods across the gamut of the humanities and social sciences? So, 1966 was the place to be, huh?
Wait. Maybe not.
Okay, scratch that whole Johns Hopkins thing. Let's start again. It's Geneva. 1906. An eminent linguistics prof named Ferdinand de Saussure is asked to take over a course in "general linguistics." His doting students take notes attentively. One afternoon, Saussure is assaulted by a band of Klingons who're enraged by his dishonorable conjugations of the verb hegh. Typical way to go in the early 1900s.
In the wake of their prof's untimely death, Saussure's students cobble together their notes from his classes to publish Course in General Linguistics under his name. His theories incite a critical revolution. Fast forward fifty years, and we're back at the "Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" symposium, where dozens of dudes have gathered to launch two years' worth of seminars and discussions about structuralist thought practice.
See what we're getting at? It's a question of where stories really begin and end, and whether you can really pin down those sorts of things anyway.
Meanwhile, back to the "Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" symposium. At that point, Derrida's reputation as a dapper young philosopher had been starting to grow. He stood up to present a paper called "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." And the world of academia was never the same again. Pretty much, most of the other academics there were just starting to wrap their heads around structuralism, and along comes Derrida to demolish the movement before it even really took root.
So how'd he do it? To paraphrase, it went something like this:
"Hey guys, so you know this structure thing we're so into? Well, throughout the history of Western thought, the idea of 'structure' has always been wrapped up with the idea of the 'center'—you know, the assumption that there's some sort of origin or ultimate purpose, something that makes it all make sense."
Got it so far? Let's keep going.
"And that would be sweet and all" (he went on), "except that if we were really serious about structure, we'd just admit that there isn't actually a single point which everything else refers to. So saying there's some floaty, mysterious, ultimate truth out there that structures the world? Total garbage. We'd do better to take apart all those oversimplified binaries these loony structuralists are taking for granted. Right, audience?"
Chirp, chirp.
Sure, we're paraphrasing a little. But nowadays, when theorists point to the "beginning" of poststructuralism, they point to Derrida's delivery of this paper, his infamous "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences." Though they're also a little bit terrified to call it a "beginning" for fear Derrida will call them out again. So even though Derrida's brazen, convoluted cannonball marked a beginning of a kind, you'd best keep in mind that that beginning was only one among many.
And, ever since, deconstructionists and poststructuralists have been taking their story apart. Heck, what other choice have they got?