The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The republication of a symposium connected with structuralism perhaps deserves a word of explanation. Today we may question the very existence of structuralism as a meaningful concept [...] With the exception of Lévi-Strauss, all those whose names have come to be associated with structural theory-Foucault, Lacan, Derrida-have felt obliged programmatically to take their distance with relation to the term."--The Structuralist Controversy (1970), incipit |
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"The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" (1966) was a colloquium held at Johns Hopkins University from October 18 to 21.
French philosophers such as Derrida, Barthes, and Lacan were invited to speak.
Derrida's lecture at that conference, delivered on the final day October 21 1966, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences", was one of the earliest to propose some theoretical limitations to Structuralism, and to attempt to theorize on terms that were clearly no longer structuralist.
The element of "play" in the title of Derrida's essay is often erroneously interpreted in a linguistic sense, based on a general tendency towards puns and humour, while social constructionism as developed in the later work of Michel Foucault is said to create play in the sense of strategic agency by laying bare the levers of historical change. Many see the importance of Foucault's work to be in its synthesis of this social/historical account of the operation of power (see governmentality).
