Post-Structuralism and the Academic Project

If we take a strong post-structuralist position, it seems to me the academic project is left adrift, at the mercy either capital(Derrida 1994) or  a  profitable segmented  group based 'post-modern'pre-emptive warfare (Massumi 2007 Hicks 2006), for example any claims to be able to judge  an argument fail as the reader is  selection from an infinite number of interpretations the text offers (Barthes). And if we completely abandon meta narrative for exclusive  closed autopoetic system of local discourse what of the inclusive commons whether  physical, social, conceptual, spiritual ( does "communion" become reified onto various forms of consumption and their consumer groups eg alcohol))? what is left but the notoriously exclusive  ghost of capital...? (Derrida 1994) with it's profitable  sectarian disputes, and profitable control based replacements for an excluded common source of  inherent, emergent harmony that exists before distinction destroys it.


I agree with those authors who see post-modernism as a dialectical step and that its critiques and insights must be synthesised with  modernist thought  in some way  if the modernist project is to survive itself. (eg Jameson & Best)

Barthes Death of the Author

Derrida (1994) "What is Ideology" in Spectres of Marx
Hicks (2006) Postmodernism

Massumi (2007) Potential Politics