Post-Structuralism as Ideology
From Arena issue 69, 1984. PDF, 1.5 MB.
At the recently held ‘Futur * Fall: Excursions into Post-Modernity’ conference, over 1000 people – mainly young – packed into lecture theatres to listed to the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, or at least, by an appropriate irony, make do with his image relayed to adjacent theatres by closed circuit television. Jean Baudrillard: post-structuralist, post-marxist, and interpreter, as he would have it, of the post-modern, post-social, post-political world…
Post structuralist thought has been a force in Australian intellectual life for at least a decade. It has become central to the new disciplines of media studies and film theory and developed into a vigorous challenger to orthodox literary and art criticism. It has shaken traditional approaches in almost all the disciplines of the arts and social sciences, as well as seeming to offer itself as a metadiscipline or metadiscourse linking them all…