The Big Names in Poststructuralism
By now you're probably realizing that unlike some other lit theories with clear-cut foundations and manageable memberships, poststructuralism is kind of all over the place. That's why it's helpful to think of it just as Deleuze and Guattari say we should: as a rhizome (a big, tangly plant system), rather than a single tree (which has a seed and a trunk and orderly branches).
In North America, the term poststructuralism was used synonymously with deconstruction for a long time. And lots of the time, it still is. So, Derrida's influence in American letters gives us one of poststructuralism's connecting points. He met the Yale prof Paul de Man in the early 1960s, and the two became best buds. How could you not when you're smarter than everyone else?
Together, they defined the Yale School of deconstruction, with de Man adapting Derrida's insights into practical methods for tackling lit. de Man was also largely responsible for making Derrida's ideas popular in the USA, and it was one of his grad students, the brilliant Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who first translated Derrida's mind-bogglingly complicated masterpiece Of Grammatology from French into English. Lucky for us, she added a long explanatory introduction, too.
Meanwhile, back in France, Lacan was doing his psychoanalysis thing. You know, lecturing on Freud in the modern world to massive audiences as if it was the filming of The Colbert Report. People were that into it.
And hey, some other guys were publishing work that had nothing to do with either him or Derrida (shocking, we know). These were dudes like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, both of them making serious names for themselves in their respective fields of literary/cultural studies, and history/sociology.
Basically, Barthes was doing crazy textual interpretation that wandered all over the map, and Foucault—the only 20th-century thinker whose celebrity status rivals Derrida's—was doing intensive historical studies that showed how academic disciplines like literature, history, and philosophy had come about around the same time that state institutions (like prisons, churches, and schools) had started to impose new controls over French citizens' lives. Heady stuff!
What all of these thinkers had in common was their fascination with the connections between language and power. Deleuze and Guattari picked up on some of the same threads when they published their first book together, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in 1972.
Soon, Julia Kristeva joined the ranks of the psychoanalytically-trained poststructuralists by defending and publishing her massive tome of a doctoral thesis, Revolution in Poetic Language.
Also in France, Jean Baudrillard threw his lot in with the growing crowd too. He may have thought society was all about simulations of reality, but at least he knew whose simulations he liked best.
All of these thinkers published A LOT of work over the course of the mid-to-late 20th century, and there's no one text or player who was the biggest and baddest of all (even Derrida). Together, deconstruction and poststructuralism kept picking up steam until their influence was felt throughout the Western academic world. Whether you loved 'em or hated 'em, you knew who they were. Kind of like Justin Bieber.
By the early 1990s, though, the fervor was starting to die down. Major scholarly stuff was still being done, but by then lots of thinkers were starting to put deconstructive and poststructuralist lessons to use in other emerging fields, like postcolonial theory and gender studies.
Respectively, Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler were pioneers in these fields, proving that even though deconstruction and poststructuralism often seemed like the jargon-filled, murky scribblings of élite academics, they could still have practical value for people who needed to resist imperial violence and patriarchy.