Poststructuralist Concepts Research Articles

Narrative as “legal tender”: the semiotic meanings of “exchange” in Malcolm Bradbury’s Rates of Exchange

Abstract Malcolm Bradbury’s novel Rates of Exchange, taking the economic term “rates of exchange” as a central metaphor, depicts various exchanges occurring in the socio-economic landscape of Britain during the 1970s and 1980s. In the context of governmental emphasis on economic development, the novel intricately explores exchanges among diverse entities, playing with multiple meanings of the term “exchange”. In this way, the novel itself becomes a form of “legal tender,” exchanged for reader comprehension, communication, and participation. It highlights the ubiquitous presence of exchange and the risks associated with the uncertain exchange rates between different entities. Furthermore, it invites readers to participate in the story-telling and the nostalgic journey back to British literary tradition. This paper, drawing on Roland Barthes’s semiotic theory along with structuralist and poststructuralist concepts, investigates the multifaceted meanings of “exchange” in the novel. Through this analysis, the paper aims to illuminate the semiotic significance of various narrative forms and the profound thematic concerns in Bradbury’s work.

The Influence of Social Context on EFL Learners’ Identity Construction: A Case Study of Three College Students in Jeju

Objectives This study aims to examine second language (L2) learners’ identity constructions considering the so-cial contexts of Jeju. In particular, this study explores how English learners are positioned in Jeju society, how their investments in learning English change depending on their positions, and how their investments influence the for-mation of L2 identity. Methods Data from the participants’ journal writings and interviews were analyzed to examine their identity con-structions in the process of English learning using the poststructuralist concept of positions, the unequal relations of power, and investments in learning English. Results Motivation is frequently socially constructed in various sociocultural contexts, and it needs to be under-stood in connection with the unequal relations of power. This study shows that the participants’ different positions had a significant impact on their investments in learning English. Also, the participants in this study established multiple identities in various contexts of Jeju depending on their positions influenced by the unequal relations of power, which may constrain their English learning opportunities. Conclusions Language learners’ marginalized positions can influence their investment and identity constructions, so it is important to develop pedagogical strategies that enhance language learners’ positions. This study is sig-nificant because it has implications for educators to understand how language learners resist or negotiate lan-guage practices in a given classroom, and re-examine their classroom strategies to find ways to improve language learners’ investments with more powerful positions.

보편을 다시 무대에 올리며, 보편의 상 아래에서 말하기 - ‘탈진실’ 시대 진리 개념의 포스트-구조주의적 재구성을 위한 정치철학적 시론 -

The present study takes the politico-philosophical approach of reconstructing the concepts of truth and the universal in a poststructuralist way in order to criticize our present situation of post-truth. This approach takes the following four steps. First, beyond simply diagnosing the present post-truth situation, it also critically analyzes the various discourses that criticize the post-truth situation. The conclusion of this critical diagnosis is that the discourses which criticize the present post-truth situation treat truth in a cognitivist way in accordance with the propositional conception of truth, which is based on a superficial misunderstanding of Anglophone analytic philosophy. Second, in order to criticize these attempts to reduce truth to the dimension of the true, it reconstructs the post-structuralist triangle of truth-history-subject based on French historical epistemology, i.e. the post-structuralist conception of truth. The post-structuralist conception of truth does not reduce truth to a dimension of the true but elevates it to the dimension of truth itself. Third, it defines this post-structuralist triangle of truthhistory-subject as the triangle of the universal, based on the post structuralist philosopher Étienne Balibar’s reflections on the universal. Through an analysis of the history of philosophy, Balibar deduces three qualities of universality - equivocal universality, conflictual universality, universality as translation - from the thoughts of Spinoza-Wittgenstein, Hegel-Marx, Quine-Benjamin. Fourth, in order to address the objection that can be raised against the post-structuralist conception of truth and the universal, which is the problem of the arbitrariness of the standards for truth and the universal, it criticizes the Deleuze-Nietzschean reflection on the courage of the false, based on Balibar’s philosophy of actualityas- structure. Lastly, it reflects on how truth and the universal ought to be thought of from the standpoint of the intellectuals in this post-truth situation. In the end, the aim of this article is to provide a theoretical key to overcoming our current post-truth situation, by thinking about truth and the universal in a different way from current discourses.

The Concept of Difference in Architecture: Transpositions Between Insides and Outsides

Postmodernity unhorsed the subject as powerful creator of life, showing not only that it is not in direct correspondence with the world, but furthermore that it is not even in control of itself. In this context, philosophy introduced an understanding of the world based on the concept of difference. Specifically, structuralism acknowledged difference as a poetics of ambiguity in the service of communication, while poststructulalism proclaimed difference as the impossibility of meaning. In this paper, we critically interpret these approaches in reference to the criterion of interiority/exteriority. Difference under structuralism introduces meaning as totally inside constructed, although towards outside operating. The figurative internalization of the postmodern architecture presents exactly the disconnection of meaning-making processes from the social context and their orientation towards consumption’s external experience. In addition, under the poststructuralist conception of difference the meaning lies exclusively outside and the corresponding trends of architectural creation, while in a way approximating freedom, seem also to contribute to a cultural disempowerment of critical ways of life and thinking. In distance both from the subject’s restriction inside and its abandonment in the tragedy of the outside, we suggest a Bakhtinian conception of difference which allows a creative continuous motion between interiority and exteriority, by both decomposing and producing meaning, always within the conflictual reality. In this direction, architecture may call for a spatial ethos of justice, a carnival polyphonic space of open boundaries between insides and outsides, which, although retaining their identities, they do not construct impenetrable territories as, in a sense, they are always at the critical limit.

Theorizing power and agency in state-initiated municipal climate change adaptation: integrating reflexive capacity into adaptive capacity

Abstract. Based on a review of existing research on adaptive capacity, we identify a research gap in theorizing institutions, power structures, and agency in municipal climate change adaptation processes. Drawing on sociological institutionalism, governmentality, and communicative planning theory, we use post-structuralist concepts of power to to elucidate the collective (de-)mobilization of existing stocks of capacities within municipal institutions of adaptation with a focus on structural power and agency in participation processes. The concept of reflexive capacity is introduced as the ability of organizations such as municipal administrations to incorporate diverse stakeholders and knowledge into decision-making processes in a local context, which is derived from the relationship of power with with power over. The emergence and transformation of reflexive capacity are illustrated and discussed with one case study municipality in Germany, revealing the potential of this concept for the analysis of participation in adaptation processes and the power structures that are inherent to them. In the paper, we incorporate the concept of reflexive capacity with established concepts of adaptive capacity, creating an integrated framework termed institutional adaptive capacity. The analysis concludes that examining power structures and agency in the context of climate change adaptation explains how capacity stocks and individual psychosocial capacity mobilization are institutionally embedded and influenced by reflexive capacity. We argue that the consideration of power structures and agency can provide a complementary approach to explaining adaptive capacity and call for further transdisciplinary empirical research on this topic in different settings of state-initiated adaptation processes.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN «POLITICAL POWER» AND «PSYCHIATRIC POWER» IN THE WORKS OF MICHEL FOUCAULT

The article demonstrates a retrospective analysis of the problem of the formation of the concept of power in the scientific activity of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The transformational socio-political processes of the postmodern era require a radical rethinking of classical theories and concepts. Foucault proposes to look at historical structures and social phenomena in a new way, to modernize them away from superficial explanations and primitive interpretations revealing hidden and less obvious political mechanisms and their functioning. The problems of the 20th century draw the thinker's attention to a deep rethinking of power and strongly recommends abandoning classical canons in order to avoid social problems in the future. M. Foucault's post-structuralist concept of power proves that the variety of types of power generates not only reality and objects of knowledge, but also the «rituals» of their understanding. Contemporaries point out that the philosopher's writings lack a logical process of understanding a problem, but this is why he attracts not only scientists. Foucault's cognitive process is dynamic and discursive. Having associative thinking, the thinker engaged in a pure search, free from any biased attitude. M. Foucault suggests considering power relations in the broadest context, which includes the following power positions: men to women, parents to children, psychiatrists to mentally ill patients, doctors to patients, and authorities to people's lifestyles. However, the philosopher's most interesting explanation of power is medical power, particularly power in psychiatry. M. Foucault interprets power and knowledge in classical psychiatry, the problems of psychiatry of the 20th century and explains the meaning of mental illnesses from the patient's point of view. While studying at the «Ecole Normale» school, where a unique atmosphere reigned, despite his erudition and organizational skills as a leader, M. Foucault began to experience psychological disorders. This is what provoked the future thinker to investigate the power relations between the psychiatrist and the patient. This paper also examines the philosophical paradigm of the formation of psychiatry and the phenomenon of mental illness. Foucault understands mental disorders as alienation from reality, as a desire to exist in a hostile world. Madness, or alienation in the deep sense of the word, becomes the main problem of anthropology.

Thinking through critical posthumanism: Nursing as political and affirmative becoming.

As a rejection and continuous reframing of theoretical humanism, critical posthumanism questions and imagines the human condition in the current context, aligning it with nonhuman and more than human entities, past and future. While this philosophical approach has been referenced in many academic disciplines since the 1990s, it has been gradually garnering interest among nursing scholars, leading to questions such as what it means to be human and what it means to be a nurse in the here and now. As a deeply ethical and political project, posthumanism, which we associate with poststructuralist concepts of power and resistance, questions the formation of posthuman subjects who more accurately reflect complex times, characterized by capitalistic commodification of life-human and nonhuman. In this article, we aim to explore how the ontological and epistemological underpinnings of critical posthumanism, specifically through Rosi Braidotti's works, can be useful to understand a posthuman subjectivity that favors affirmative actions aimed at actualizing our world in becoming. Through examples in nursing practice, education, and research, we will explore not only how critical posthumanism allows us to frame transformations in the current situation that we are embedded in as nurses and more generally as beings but also how these examples allow us to move beyond critique to the actualization of affirmative actions that correspond to the creation of new worlds.

Different logics of social and political analysis

The article is a detailed consideration of the poststructuralist concept, which is developed in the work "Logic of Critical Explanation in Social and Political Theory" by D. Glinos and D. Howarth, and will arouse the interest of all those engaged in discursive research. In the work of professors of the University of Essex, the forces of social and political philosophy carried out a deep study of the discursive paradigm, first conceptually outlined in the work of S. Mouff and E. Laclo "Hegemony and socialist strategy", which has not yet been translated into Russian. The "new ontology" proposed by Mouff and Laclos became the basis for the original scientific school. The reviewed monograph is presented as a new round of development of this research direction. Based on the ontological attitudes of the discursive paradigm, Glinos and Howarth propose a postpositivist model of social sciences based on abduction, a problem-oriented approach (problematization), the need to take into account both the "hermeneutic" and "materialistic" components, both the objective and subjective sides of the social. The schemes they form for socio-political analysis seem analytically valuable. Of course, there are alternatives to them, but one of the key consequences of the discursive paradigm is the installation not on the competition of ontic approaches, but on their unification, since it is important to rely on what one or another approach brings to social knowledge, and not what it contradicts to another approach.

Spolia and the Open Work

This article discusses the possibilities of signification in architectural interventions involving historical remnants, focusing on the notions of spolia and of opera aperta. The notion of spolia has been the province of art history since the Renaissance. In bringing it to the field of architectural design, the focus will shift from the historical realm to the conceptual possibilities opened up by spolia in architectural practice. The aim is to analyse the association between the creative reuse of and intervention in historical remnants and the multiplication of possible significations through various examples. Methodologically, the article expands the linguistic drive of the contemporary debate on spolia to the structural linguistics upon which Umberto Eco built the poststructuralist concept of open work. More precisely, the essay resorts to the notions of ‘sign’ and ‘sign structure’ as a vehicle to explore the possibilities for the semantic and syntactical openness of spolia. Toning in with Eco’s arguments on the open work, the openness associated with spolia will be seen as dependent on the loosening of the formal and typological structures of established architectural codes.

Metadrama and Language (Language and Metadrama in Major Barbara and Pygmalion: Shavian Sisters)

Metadrama and Language (Language and Metadrama in <i>Major Barbara</i> and <i>Pygmalion:</i> Shavian Sisters)

Gender and Participation in Sexuality Extra-Curricular Education in Primary Schools in Bugiri Municipality, Uganda

The paper intended to investigate the incorporation of gender and sexuality in extra-curricular education among primary schools in Bugiri Municipality with focus on highlighting the significance of sexuality education outside of the classroom, to determine how much gender is considered in extracurricular sexual activities as well as identifying obstacles to gender inclusion in extra-curricular sexuality education. The study was qualitative in nature. Findings indicate that sex education helps reduce teen pregnancy, which can hinder possibilities for school and other aspects of life. It has been shown to be more successful in preventing STDs than education that only stresses abstinence until marriage. Sexually active teens are more likely to postpone their first encounter and take contraception overall. Too many young people get muddled and inconsistent information about relationships and sex. In addition, Sexuality education aims to raise awareness of gender-based violence and advance respect-based human rights for all. Such a position is hypothesized using inclusive and post-structuralist conceptions of gender and sexuality. The fact that these subjects have been handled successfully does not exclude linking them to utterances that can portray them as a potential threat. Further, many schools have created CSE curriculum, but difficulties with program design and roll-out prevent their complete implementation. Issues include ineffective methods for monitoring and evaluating teachers and pupils on CSE. Changes in educational administration (such as a change in the minister) affect implementation strategies. Conclusively, the process of teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, physical, and social elements of sexuality is known as comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) it strives to provide knowledge that will enable kids and teenagers to achieve their health, happiness, and dignity. CSE aims to spread awareness of gender violence and to advance respect-based human rights for all.

A Way Out of No Way: Racial and Ethnic Minority Nursing Students' COVID-19 Experiences

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic presented undergraduate racial and ethnic minority nursing students with unprecedented educational restrictions as their communities were also affected disproportionately by COVID-19. This study explored the lived experiences of racial and ethnic minority nursing students in the southeastern United States during the pandemic. Semistructured interviews using a qualitative framework and methodology of post-intentional phenomenology were conducted with one Muslim, one multiracial, and three Black nursing student participants. Data were analyzed in an iterative process using poststructural concepts of lines, rhizomes, and space. Students experienced abrupt challenging changes and isolation with the onset of pandemic restrictions. Barriers created by the pandemic and by routine educational experiences were met by creating alternate pathways to maintain forward progress. Undergraduate racial and ethnic minority nursing students experienced pandemic restrictions within a larger context of their lived experiences. Nurse educators can use these experiences to create better relationships between these students and nursing education. [J Nurs Educ. 2022;61(8):483-487.].

Anarchiving

This essay is the outcome of my affective immersion in a century-old family archive. Through writing as a method of inquiry, I focus on a particular episode that happened within my family and use it as a starting point to question the archive as a performative, patriarchal system. Accompanied by post-structural concepts, I wander through its rooms unsettling their order; through anarchiving I attend the archive’s marginal spaces and silences by wonder. In this immersive process, I question my own research and position within the family history while also abandoning myself to a feeling of nostalgia for what the archive used to be.

To give the literary event: Blanchot and Lawrence’s narratives of life/death

ABSTRACT This essay explores the poststructuralist concept of the ‘event’ as an unforeseen and incalculable surprise, reading its theoretical significance in two ways: as an occurrence that has already taken place (divided at its source) and an occurrence that opens up the impossible consideration of futurity. By linking the thought of the event with the phenomenological notion of the gift, I aim to explore how literary narratives perform the happening of the event through the conditions of absolute givenness, undercutting notions of power, possession and mastery in the work of language. Through a reading of Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure and D.H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died, I demonstrate how narratives articulating themselves at the boundaries of life and death inform theoretical thinking of the event by collapsing the boundaries separating biography and mortality, inducting us into an asynchronous temporality and economy of givenness.

Koncepcja polityczności Chantal Mouffe a poststrukturalizm w filozofii interpretacji prawniczej

The present article deals with the political nature of the interpretation theory, using poststructuralism as a source of reflection. The analysis is conducted by using poststructuralist epistemology and poststructuralist political theory. The thesis of this article, which is metatheoretical in nature, is that the poststructuralist concepts of legal interpretation can be used only after simultaneously adopting the assumptions of the political philosophy which originated in poststructuralism. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of the political is very much tied to considerations about agonistic democracy and agonistic pluralism, which gives us original answers to the questions of how society, the political system, and the legal system can help us prevent the emergence and flourishing of authoritarianism. The first part of the text presents the poststructuralist definition of the political and politics as well as shows its importance for the analysis of the contemporary legal interpretation concepts. In the next part, the author discusses the topic of poststructuralism in jurisprudence and its most important features for a change in the discourse of philosophy of interpretation. The third part of the article examines poststructuralist anti-essentialism using the example of one from among the most famous neopragmatist and poststructuralist philosophers — Stanley Fish. In the fourth and last part of the considerations, the thesis about the necessity of joint use of poststructuralist epistemology and political theory for research on legal interpretation is verified and metatheoretical conclusions are drawn from it.

Assembling bodies-without-organs: A poststructuralist analysis of group sex between men.

Group sex among men who have sex with men may be understood as a 'radical' practice insofar as it transgresses dominant social discourses around appropriate sexual relations-prioritizing heteronormative, monogamous and risk-averse sex. These practices are generally defined as steeped in risk, most commonly due to the potential for transmitting human immunodeficiency virus and sexually transmitted infections and accompanied by the possibility of legal and social repercussions. Our ethnographic research study explored the desires, practices and contexts of group sex participants (n = 10) within a popular group sex party destination located in the United States. We employ a poststructuralist perspective (utilizing the work of Deleuze and Guattari) to understand group sex events with the pretext that bodies have no inherent ethics, meaning or essence: they are 'bodies without organs'. We identify group sex as a form of boundary play, in which participants pursue new limits to what their bodies can do but within a carefully constructed environment that establishes norms of interaction meant to secure trust and safety between participants. A variety of risk reduction practices are shown to be promoted and honoured within these eventful sexual(ized) spaces. The application of poststructuralist concepts of 'boundary play' and 'bodies without organs' helped to depict the construction and navigation of pleasure, safety and risk among group sex participants.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

‘Both are equal, which is awesome’: exploring gendered discourses of Canadian summer camp experiences

ABSTRACT This study discusses gendered discourses of summer residential camp experiences and, in particular, the gendered roles performed by camp counsellors. By drawing on feminist poststructuralist concepts, this article considers how gender power-relations operate and how camp counsellors perform gender within camps. We start by considering the history of gender in early camp movements and recent research literature on camps. Interview participants revealed the iteration and reiteration of stereotypic gender norms within camp contexts. The findings suggest that participants found both empowerment and challenge in the assumed genderlessness, or gender neutrality, of camp experiences. Findings also suggest that women counsellors are assumed to do disproportionate amount of care work. The article concludes by considering opportunities for positive youth development when gendered norms are critically considered, resisted and/or transformed within camp contexts.

Lecturas del miedo y control social en la teoría sociocrítica y posmoderna

Históricamente el factor miedo a las amenazas ha desempeñado un rol fundamental en la legitimación de los sistemas políticos y sociales porque se presentan como la encarnación de un poder para la protección de personas y comunidades ante los distintos peligros que afectan a una sociedad determinada, de ahí que el miedo además se constituye en una fuerza que propicia en cada momento el despliego de los dispositivos del control social, formales e informales para disciplinar y castigar de ser preciso. El objetivo de este artículo científico radica en debatir distintas lecturas sobre el binomio: miedo y control social en los dominós del derecho, la teoría crítica de la sociedad, el pensamiento postestructuralista de Michel Foucault y la doctrina del shock. La investigación transcurrió en las coordenadas de la hermenéutica y la metódica de las entrevistas abiertas con guion semiestructurado como excusa para triangular los postulados de las teorías seleccionadas, la opinión de dos expertos en la materia y la perspectiva particular del equipo de investigación. Entre los hallazgos concluyentes de la investigación destacan que en cualquier escenario venidero las estrategias de resistencia civil y movilización ciudadana juegan un rol primordial para inclinar la balanza del lado de las democracias.

Latour, Foucault, and Post-Truth: The Role and Function of Critique in the Era of the Truth Crisis

This paper, first published in German in Le foucaldien 4, no. 1 (2018), explores Bruno Latour's critique of contemporary critical theory. According to Latour, poststructuralist conceptions of critical inquiry are becoming increasingly outdated. In our "post-factual" era, attempting to expose facts as results of power-laden processes of social construction plays into the hands of anti-scientific obscurantists. This is not to say, however, that one ought to opt for some reductionist notion of objectivity. Instead, Latour proposes a new form of critical realism. While we agree with Latour about the necessity of widening our epistemological paradigm, we deem his critique of poststructuralism unfair and exaggerated. Moreover, we argue that he fails to account for the relationship between epistemology, power, and subjectivity. Since Foucault, on the other hand, succeeds where Latour falls short and probes into this very relationship, his is a form of critique that remains crucial to tackling the current crisis of truth.