Philosophy of Society

Philosophy of Culture

Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Postmodernism

In the 20th century, interest in the philosophy of culture grew significantly, and the global philosophical treasury expanded with new insights. The essence of culture and the patterns of its transformations became a leading theme for several contemporary philosophical movements. A notable feature of these schools is the blurred boundaries between them: often, there are sufficient grounds to classify the same philosopher under multiple movements. One such movement is structuralism. Cultural structuralism traces its roots to linguistic structuralism, the foundations of which were laid by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Among modern cultural theories, structural anthropology occupies a prominent place, founded by the French scholar Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009). He was influenced by the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism in linguistics. De Saussure posited that language is a cohesive structure, and understanding its individual elements is possible only within the context of the entire linguistic structure, that is, based on the connections between individual elements of language and others. Lévi-Strauss sought to apply this model to culture. In his view, culture is a unified structure, where each element becomes comprehensible only in relation to others. Lévi-Strauss considered the human being as the central element of culture, and structuralism as the method for studying it; thus, he termed his cultural research structural anthropology. The researcher was particularly drawn to the myth, which he saw as an expression of collective consciousness and cultural structure.

French philosopher Michel Foucault (1929-1984) analyzed the history of humanity. He believed that throughout history, the collective unconscious is expressed. This unconscious evolves, and therefore, cultural structures differ in each epoch. These structures can only be perceived from a distance. No one can provide an objective assessment of their own time and culture, but they can evaluate the cultures of other eras. Foucault examined changes in various aspects of human life, demonstrating their profound nature. Among the topics Foucault focused on are prisons, hospitals, sexuality, power, and others. In particular, analyzing attitudes towards the mentally ill, he concluded that contemporary attitudes are a product of the cult of reason that flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries. Before people elevated reason to a pedestal in their culture, the insane lived among other people. Once reason was highlighted as a special mark of humanity, the insane were isolated, as if punishing them for their otherness. Another example of cultural transformations cited by Foucault is the modern clinic. In the past, doctors were healers, meaning they restored the person's wholeness. With the advancement of sciences, there arose a tendency to divide and specialize. In medicine, this manifested in the emergence of modern clinics, where doctors are no longer healers, i.e., they do not treat the whole person but are narrowly specialized specialists treating individual organs. Similarly, Foucault analyzed changes in attitudes towards sexuality, prisons, power, and more.

Everything Foucault analyzed, and indeed everything, acquires its meaning within the discourse. People changed their attitudes towards the mentally ill, prisoners, sexuality, etc., because changes occurred in the overarching human discourse. There is no other source of knowledge than discourse. The individual, or rather all that is known about them, is also a product of discourse. Foucault predicted the disappearance of the familiar concept of the human being in the near future. According to Foucault, there is nothing objective. There is only discourse, which creates structures, and everything else is merely structural elements of these structures, with their meaning also deriving from discourse. Changes in the vectors of discourse alter the meaning of everything.

The French philosopher Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) based his philosophical concept on the foundations of psychoanalysis. At the center of his philosophy stands the triad of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. By the Real, he referred to what exists in actuality. It is not directly given to human perception. Humans operate with a system of signs, that is, the Symbolic, which serves as their only possible representation of the world. The Symbolic includes collective achievements (language, culture, system of symbols). In contrast to the collective Symbolic, each person also possesses their own worldview, which Lacan termed the Imaginary. Thus, Lacan distinguished three levels of reality and how it is represented to the individual: the Real, i.e., what truly exists; the Symbolic, i.e., how reality is collectively imagined, in other words—culture; and the Imaginary, i.e., how reality is represented to each individual. A person does not have direct access to reality under normal circumstances. Everything a person knows about the Real is merely what is reflected in the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and the Symbolic and Imaginary are not identical to the Real. What is contained in culture (Symbolic) and individual knowledge (Imaginary) may be quite different from the Real. The Real manifests only in illness. Just as Freud believed that psychoses, neuroses, hallucinations, etc., are breakthroughs of the unconscious into the realm of consciousness, Lacan considered these anomalous states as breakthroughs of the Real. Lacan's terms are very vague; he did not provide definitions for any of the concepts he used, as if emphasizing that these concepts cannot be precisely defined.

Another strand of 20th-century cultural philosophy is poststructuralism, which, as its very name suggests, represents a counterpoint to structuralism. While structuralists perceived the world as a unified structure where each element could only be understood within the context of the whole, poststructuralists rejected the notion of an overarching structure. Culture, for them, is an illogical collection of symbols that are not necessarily interrelated. A prominent figure in poststructuralism was Jacques Derrida (1930-2004). His primary focus was on language. Derrida argued that language did not emerge to express philosophical theories, scientific knowledge, legal norms, sociological data, or the like. Instead, language arose as a means of communication and the signification of human perception. Consequently, language is illogical, unsystematized, and chaotic; it is inadequate for articulating complex philosophical concepts. When applied to formulate philosophical theories, it introduces chaos into philosophy. Derrida analyzed fundamental concepts introduced by language. If language contains words that describe something, it follows that what these words describe exists in reality. This led to the development in Western philosophy of concepts such as being, totality, identity, substance, and God. Derrida referred to this as "presence." As language claims logicality, Western philosophy developed what Derrida called "logocentrism," the tendency to see logic and rationality everywhere. Derrida termed his philosophical approach "deconstruction." This term was meant to demonstrate that the task of his philosophy was to dismantle the cultural and philosophical constructs formed by language. Since Derrida argued that all human knowledge and cultural achievements are nothing other than language, it follows that outside of language, there is nothing. The deconstructive program is an attempt to show that there is nothing outside of language. Derrida examined the contributions of notable philosophers, revealing that their theories were products of the language they employed. The discovery of the deconstructive method enabled Derrida to show that pre-existing philosophical theories are connected to language rather than to reality. Hence, their deconstruction would bring philosophy to an end. Derrida proposed that the deconstructive method be applied to other areas of culture as well.

The postmodern era in culture gave rise to a new direction in contemporary philosophy—postmodernism—where proponents seek to evaluate the cultural transformations of the postmodern age. Specifically, the French postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) introduced the concepts of hyperreality and simulacra into cultural philosophy. He asserted that postmodernism is characterized by the emergence of something new and unprecedented. This is hyperreality, something that grows out of reality but bears no real connection to it. For example, when a war occurs in a distant part of the world, people cannot personally verify what is happening, and all they know about the war comes from politicians and journalists. This information may not necessarily reflect reality; it could be politically manipulated or simply an exaggeration designed to incite public panic. For most people, what they learn from the media seems like truth but is not connected to reality. This is hyperreality. Within hyperreality, new values, goals, and methods emerge, which, like hyperreality itself, bear no real connection to actuality. Baudrillard referred to these as simulacra because they simulate reality. The postmodern world is one of simulacra, where genuine values are replaced by substitutes: accumulating diplomas and certificates instead of knowledge, flaunting photographs with smiling faces instead of true happiness, displaying wealth without real assets, and rankings instead of quality. The concept of simulacra has been known in philosophy since ancient times. Plato, for instance, proclaimed ideas as the true reality and considered the material world merely a simulacrum. However, Baudrillard was the first to use this concept to analyze culture, particularly postmodernism.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998) characterized postmodern culture as the collapse of grand narratives. For many centuries, humanity created and believed in grand narratives. For example, people believed that general enlightenment would make humanity better, yet, after receiving education, people unleashed two world wars and horrific terror; people believed that economic development would resolve issues of poverty and hunger, yet one part of the world revels in luxury while another suffers from starvation and lack of basic necessities; people believed that science would ease life, yet science produced the atomic bomb and tested it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazism and communism were grand narratives resulting in immense terror. All this led to great disillusionment. Lyotard emphasized that humanity no longer believes in grand narratives. It has paid too high a price for its belief. With the decline in faith in grand narratives came a loss of trust in all that is universal. Humanity ceased to believe in universal ethics, universal religion, universal law, and so forth. Grand narratives have been replaced by micro-narratives: humanity is now divided into small groups, each with its own narrative, ideology, morality, and religion.

Postmodernism represents a unique phenomenon in the history of philosophical thought. Philosophers of previous eras sought to formulate philosophical-worldview systems or contribute to the development of already established ones. Only postmodernists did not build new philosophical theories but dismantled the old ones. Their concepts are based on Friedrich Nietzsche's thesis that "God is dead." If God is dead, then all that is eternal, immutable, and universal has died with Him. If God is dead, there is neither universal morality, nor law, nor truth. Everything is relative. Postmodernists became those thinkers who, in their works, revealed the absurdity of any universal concepts. In their view, the world is pure chaos, and there is no sense in trying to organize it. Postmodernists wrote in an extremely convoluted language, ignoring scientific style standards, using terms without providing definitions, and presenting thoughts chaotically. All this was meant to showcase the chaotic, disordered, and relative nature of reality. The contributions of poststructuralists and postmodernists are often referred to as cultural critique, as they criticized any universal categories of culture.