Uprooted from the dense European social context from which it originates, post-structuralist philosophy becomes, in its transmission to North America, a stunted, impoverished ideology, made worse through its alloy to liberal culture.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Before proceeding, it is necessary to give the briefest (and perhaps most useless) philosophical primer ever written. But in its brevity might also lie its utility.

Three Philosophies: modernism, structuralism, and post-structuralism

Modernism is a philosophy that, in its most profound expression in the existentialism of Heidegger, founds the meaning of existence on the temporality of being. It is the durations within life, the understanding of being in between one moment that has happened and another that is yet to arrive, that defines the fundamental structure of existence. What in Neitzsche is the Eternal Return and in Deleuze the Third Time of Repetition: which is to say that it is more than the isolated moments of life that themselves are caught-up in a process of becoming, but also the whole of life itself that is always already in a process of returning towards death. More than a concept to objectively understand that life is a process of birth, growth, decline and then death, this is about the palpable sense of anxiety within which life is infused through which an awareness of our inextricable stuckness within its process of becoming arises.

Structuralism, on the other hand, is about seeing the way in which the structures of existence define the ways in which it unfolds. One is able to speak, not because they have complete freedom of choice of what to say, but because the rules of language delimit the sorts of things that are actually possible to be spoken. One behaves in situations in accordance with the ways in which a situation is constructed: all situations are man-made and, thus, flow from the reasons with which each element of the situation was created and brought together as an entire assemblage of man-made elements.. One wears a suit to a dinner party, a tuxedo to a wedding, a cowboy hat while on horseback in Montana. Looking at the ways in which life already pre-structures the ways in which it is possible to engage with it is where meaning originates.

Whereas structuralism can be seen as a displacement of philosophical inquiry from within the individual and its subjective experience of truth back out and into the objective fact of the external structures within which one's experience of life arises, post-structuralism is a recombination of both. Here, the subjectivity of one and their experience of meaning is reintegrated into the structural particularities within which that specific subjectivity arises. It is not that all of life is structured according to the same principles and that it is possible to find the meaning of all of existence according to the same terms for all people by uncovering the structures that condition them; rather, it is the fact that subjective experience itself coincides with specific histories and structure through which specific experiences derive their meaning.

Post-structuralism is, thus, the multiplication of structure: every narrative conditions the creation of a specific experience of it, for the specific subjectivity caught-up in it. Discourse is the ebb and flow of one from conditioned experience to another conditioned experience, encountering others whose experience differentiates based on their specific histories. Foucault developed this insight to the level of knowledge in his 'archaeologies': he showed how, for instance, the experience of madness changed throughout history depending on the specific constellation of knowledge, the structures of society and its institutions of a time. Not a casual difference of experience, but the profound poetic world of subjectivity that arises from out of social construction. From out of this flows the ideas of gender specific experience, brought about by the particular structures within which woman specifically emerges as a conscious individual capable of self-expression; the same for a black experience, a white experience, a native American experience; a rich or a poor experience. And on and on to infinity. Existence is a devolution from a shared experience that all inhabit to that of circumscribed consciousnesses: fractal subjectivities implicated in the negotiation of meaning from out of the specificity of their historical, cultural context.

Flowing from this is the whole elaborate post-modern/post-structuralist politics that recognizes the irreducibility of experiences that form a hierarchy of power positions that defines who and what is heard and seen on account of the 'legibility' of their experience: of the marginal experience whose obscurity needs to be accommodated in order to be incorporated; of the hegemony of certain discourses that exclude and the efforts to uncover the exclusions that the implied assumptions their histories express conceal. Politics in a post-structuralist world thus becomes about finding the terms through which unique experiences can be formalized in their relationships to one another so that through that formalization understanding can arise.

So:

The modernist says: temporality—the duration within which all of existence finds itself caught in a process of eternal becoming and return—is the meaning of being.

The post-structuralist says: 20th Century Continental European White Male Privileged Nazi Philosophy asserts that temporality—the duration within which all of existence finds itself caught in a process of eternal becoming and return—is the meaning of being.

So, while the former makes an all-encompassing poetic expression of the meaning of being, the latter, while retaining that poetic content, carries with it the self-reflexive awareness of its contextual origins.

Sociological Conditioning: European vs North American Post-Structuralism

The political discussion important for understanding the current condition of North American liberalism flows from the fact that, in the migration from Europe to the United States, post-structuralist philosophical thinking becomes displaced into an entirely other mode of existence. While in Europe the compression of space and the crowding of people all in on top of each-other all the time provides ample opportunity for provoking discussion about the particularity of experience, in North America, with is vast open spaces and much more alienated form of suburban life, such opportunities are much less common. The result of this is that the productive energy that post-structuralism has in Europe, where multitudes can philosophically seek common recognition of one another's specificity, in North America ends at the moment of expressing particularity. As a result, the philosophy takes on the experience of only defining distinctions and based on them courses of political action that derive their justification from their exhaustive, but untested, elaboration. What this produces is discourse that is authoritative because it has been expressed in the couched, deliberate and calculated complexity of particularity. This is in contrast to what arises in European contexts, which is the meta that flows from the contestation of these specific elaborations that define agreement and disagreement, coming-together and separation—the whole of which is produced by the exhaustive philosophical inquiry that creates it. In the European context, post-structuralism channels subjectivities into the exhaustive and repetitive process of always, all the time re-establishing the simple fact of co-presence (anyone who has ever been to a sociological conference in Europe will recognize this simple fact, that the greatest achievement of the presentation of the schizophrenia of self-conscious, self-reflexive projects is the achievement of a moment of understanding of the shared terms and purpose of the participants present there).

In this sense, philosophers like Peter Sloterdijk (Dutch) who describe European existence as 'bubbles' and 'foam' are rendering explicit the experience of living a post-modern/post-structuralist European existence. Caught each one within their own hyper self-conscious bubble of poetic philosophical truth, with their sweeping contextual understanding that always at all times proceeds to the absolute limits of analytical possibility, the post-structuralist discourse between Europeans in their tightly crowded continent appears like a foam. In the serendipitous breakdown of bubbles that occurs through their being pressed together into discursive engagement, a frothing foam of understanding coincidentally arises that provides the redemption from one's irreconcilable separation from others and that impels the process forward, once again in search of these brief moments.

This is also why there is, in European liberalism, in cultural production and cinema such a focus on 'transgression' as the primary concept that defines the possibilities for escaping the prison of this philosophically self-conscious discourse. For instance Swedish film Let the Right One In expresses this process of transgression as vampiric: the only escape from the liberal post-structuralist dictum of tolerance and respect that enforces this bubbling, foaming process of only coincidental coming-together is the necessity to 'drink the blood' of others. Thus, a valorization of the colonization of others spaces, the cannibalization of one-anothers personal worlds through which new forms of liberty become available arises. Or in Lars von Trier's Melancholia, the need to at least make the effort to erect provisional structures that themselves give life meaning because no other meaning is otherwise within the control of one since it is coincidental whether or not a breakdown between two will release them from their individualizing philosophical processes.

None of the depth of this continued philosophical elaboration is anywhere present in the desert of North American alienated existence. Popular culture doesn't present the opportunity for such an exploration and it doesn't function as an articulation of philosophy (as we demonstrated in our previous article about the Swedish series Thin Blue Line). Sure, there are some isolated examples here and there (e.g. Kelly Reichardt's Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Coen brothers' films), but nearly exclusively what is presented in North American popular culture is over-determined by it economic logic. And when it does address philosophy, does so in its own more casual, humorous and objective way (the American remake Downhill of Swedish film Force Majeure is a great example of this). Discourse in North America is almost exclusively, no matter where one looks, devoid of any kind of poetic philosophical content; it makes no pretense to it and is primarily concerned with the objective states of things. North American existence is, because of this, ideologically determined.

Towards a Globalized Totalizing Ideology

As Hannah Arendt writes in her Origins of Totalitarianism, “Ideologies are known for their scientific character: they combine the scientific approach with results of philosophical relevance and pretend to be scientific philosophy”. When philosophy is shorn of is open-ended horizon of immanence and becoming through which a multitude is bound-together in their questioning, it becomes sterilized and purely an instrument of logic. Having made the migration across the ocean from its soil in continental Europe, post-structuralist philosophy, uprooted out of the dense social fabric within which it functions (and, arguably, is precisely an expression of), its mode of existence is no longer confronted with any probability that existences that articulate a post-structuralist philosophy will at any time be pressurized into rupture, from out of which shared understanding can emerge. Rather, what one has in North America is an impoverished post-structuralism whose main concern becomes its focus on establishing the specificity of experience. Shared, poetic communication does not become possible—its not even considered anyway, even if there were any societal, pop-cultural mediations for its occurrence—and so the main insight of post-structuralist philosophy (that poetry and context are linked as one) becomes its only compulsion. Which is why we see in North America the proliferation of rights-based interventions in every domain of life. Everywhere, the philosophy-become-ideology is excavating the particularity of marginal lives, defining their racial, linguistic, cultural, national, economic specificity, displacing the meaning and intention behind every discussion into its own expanding ideological elaboration. No longer does anything have the meaning it thinks it has, but the post-structuralist suspicion of meaning that doesn't include recognition of its context becomes its only meaning.

Post-structuralism becomes something else entirely in North America: a perverted form of alienating ideology that, while it may have at one time maintained some connection to a human process of communication(as it still does in its European context), defines its own dishonest, suspicious, totalizing logic of social and political life, particularly through its alloy with North American liberalism. Dishonest, because, as liberal, it valorizes privacy above honesty so that lying becomes a strategy for legitimately preserving the sanctity of personal space and one's liberty for action; and suspicious, because by carrying-out the fundamental concern of its post-structuralist philosophy, it questions all meaning and, rather, looks for the obscure structures of context that constitutes the full truth of any utterance. And totalizing, because, as it emanates from out of elite institutions with no possibility for being modulated by its necessary societal context, the partial truth of its critique seeks to rectify the outdated, implicit immorality of represented political power by reformulating every dimension of civic life. And now that American corporations have (perhaps, cynically) appropriated its language and stunted truth, into and through all of life mediated by the systems of global capitalism.