Abstract

My dissertation is critical of the usefulness of poststructuralism and postmodernism for oppositional politics. Poststructuralism, and postmodernism which presupposes the poststructural view of language and the self as a differential system of signs, cannot provide a viable political theory because it jettisons structure, community, and similarity. Even if we agree with poststructuralism and postmodernism that totality cannot be universalized--that difference is the ineliminable fact of language and so pluralism the ineliminable fact about the self and community--the poststructuralist and postmodernist response remains invalid: difference must not be universalized. Such universalization makes politics incoherent and ineffective. ;I argue that we can accept the poststructuralist understanding of the self as radically plural and still argue for community and the recognition of similarity. We can rethink structure, selves, and community along lines provided by poststructuralism: all structures are always open to redescription and deconstruction. This is a fact beyond which we cannot get. However, the linguistic self described by poststructuralism and adopted by postmodernism is always and necessarily a product of many communities. This is the key to empowerment. We have vocabularies only as members of some community or another, and so it is only as a member of one or another community that we are empowered. The task for oppositional politics is to bring to light those places where each one of us identifies with communities which are suppressed by the dominant power regime. Among other things, the success of such a task entails the repudiation of the public/private distinction for such a distinction aids the suppression of marginalized, oppositional, and potentially subversive, voices. ;In the first three chapters, I use the works of Lyotard, Rorty, and Foucault, to show how poststructuralism, which is concerned with the voicing of otherness, and postmodernism, which repudiates all grand legtitimizing discourses, is formative for oppositional politics. I also use these works to show how poststructuralism and postmodernism keep oppositional politics from being effective. Finally, I insist upon the importance and necessity of recognizing the subject as "subjects-in-community."