What is poststructuralism

I came across this video a couple years back. It's gold. I seem to remember that it's possibly nsfw near the end. Maybe.

Love the sound quality. Even my own voice sounds really nice on it.

Preface: poststructuralism is really hard to explain. I'm kinda hoping someone can help me with it. I'll try my best though.

So in my political ecology class, we've been talking about how power relations influence ecological issues. Natural resources give power to those who extract it. For example, a large oil company will use the profits from natural resources extraction to lobby for policies in their best interest, which allows them to retain or expand their power.

The premise of political ecology is that almost all ecological problems are a power problems, because the gains and losses from these problems are distributed unequally. To keep with the oil company example, Ecuadorian indigenous people had their habitats relentlessly and irreparably damaged due to environmental damage from Texaco's oil extraction. These local people couldn't get the large company to pay damages, and they weren't getting any bit of the profits either, because they didn't have any power to exert over them. When they tried to fight back, Texaco sent hired militia on their ass and put the protesters in jail for obstructing a project of national importance (militia paid with oil profits, ironically).

Structuralism says that we need to look at such a case as a result of larger structures. It is not the individual who has full control here. Rather, the individual is heavily influenced by the structure already there. It's like a game of chess: the pieces can move, but only within the game's rules and constraints. Early Marxism (AFAIK) was about this too: capitalism creates an inherently unequal playing field. While a lot of people disagree about how he wanted to change inequality (he wanted revolutions and communism), he thought in a structuralist way about society.

The consequence of this is that responsibility is taken away from the individual and put on the system. Now, my first response was "structure's nice and all, but it can't account for everything, right?" Turns out that I'm not the only one who thought about it that way. Post-structuralism is a response to structuralism. While I haven't read any of these authors, it often linked to Foucalt, Nietzsche and Derrida. It's not a rejection, but a critique of some of its assumptions, taking the theory in a different direction. Think of it like calling indigo 'post-purple': it still looks similar, but it is just different enough to call it by a different name.

What I think they're trying to say with post-structuralism is that while it is a good idea to look at structures, we must take into account that everyone perceives these structures differently. Language is the most used example of this. When you write a piece of text, it can (and will) be interpreted differently by every reader: the meaning changes from person to person based on who they are. Language is not a thing that is objectively true, detached from humans. Rather, it is a social construct. In turn, language shapes our way of thinking, too. In turn, language shapes our way of thinking, too.

The concept of 'nature', too, is a social construct. What you think of as nature is heavily influenced by your anthropocentric view. For instance, do a quick Google Image search of the word nature. Out of all these images, how many of them feature humans? I counted only two. Even though we're obviously a part of nature due to our influence, we often think of nature as places where humans aren't. So we go and find ourselves some 'wilderness' in national parks, which are highly controlled areas if you think about it: only certain activities are allowed, those that fit our image of what a national park ought to be. You always see this image of Moraine Lake, for example:

But you never see the parking lot that is just to the right of this picture, because it doesn't fit our image of nature. And because we never include people in pictures of nature, our concept of nature becomes devoid of humans. It's a feedback loop.

More general, I think the theory argues that because so much meaning is dependant on the receiver, that you can't really speak about the structure like structuralists want to believe. There is no objectivity in anything that deals with meaning. And because we base our knowledge of concepts like nature on our image of it, these social constructs influence how you think about concepts.

The what-are-the-implications part is where I'm the least certain, though. I have another lecture tomorrow, about the implications this has for science, so I'll see how that will go.