#and i squinted and said isn't that like... all conservative media? and the result is usually stochastic terrorism

[houndstoothjacket]

(makes the external organizers laugh at the training meeting) oh boy i am going to get a good grade at being a wobbly. something i've wanted all my life and is necessary for the health of society to achieve.

[grandhotelabyss]

How can poststructuralists claim to discredit grand narratives when they themselves ground the entirety of human history in a single principle, whether it be power, language, or any of the other famous academic buzzwords pretending to universality?

It's a bit of a contradiction. In their defense—though I think only one of them put it in the specific terms of "grand narratives" (Lyotard)—I might offer this argument: the operation of certain principles, like Derrida's universality of writing qua absence or Foucault's productivity of knowledge/power, isn't exactly the same as a grand narrative. These principles may constrain or frame human activity everywhere, but they can be enacted in all manner of ways and with all kinds of results, within single civilizations or cultures (even within single lives!) as much as between them—hence Foucault's word micropolitics—as opposed to the logic of universal history moving toward a single global goal as one finds it in Christianity, Marxism, liberalism.

We should remember what they were afraid of—the Cold War, post-imperial, and post-Auschwitz context as well as the rise of mass media—and their European location between the superpowers. It seemed like the whole planet for the first time might fall under control of a single ideology or way of life, with all the elimination of otherness this implies. That, or be destroyed. And the biographical details lend impetus to their anxiety: Derrida as an Algerian Jew, thus double or triply alienated both in Algeria and France; Foucault and Barthes as gay men in a time when even left-wing parties regarded this as pathology. Not such unreasonable concerns, I think, even if we don't necessarily agree with or even comprehend how they responded.

I seem to have become the poststructuralists' defense attorney lately, though I'm not an expert in their work or even their biggest admirer. I will even allow that they influenced the academic humanities in some destructive ways. I just think they're getting blamed for developments that aren't primarily their fault—the simplistic excesses of always-puritanical American activism; the statist designs of a leftism or of a technocracy having more to do with Hegelian than Nietzschean metapolitics (if we must blame philosophers)—and that so much of what they said was, as they themselves liked to point out, anticipated in the philosophical and literary tradition. I think of that conservative complaining in Quillette about professors assigning Kant. It doesn't get more canonical than Kant, but, if you squint, he can look as relativistic as Derrida, separating us as he does from the ding an sich. Look at Hume—he's not even sure the sun will come up tomorrow! Then again, how sure should we be?