Page 100 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

POST-STRUCTURALISM

corresponding sense of the practical creative efficacy of the human
subject. For post-structuralism persists in structuralism’s rigorous anti-
humanism: Foucault’s genealogy, as much as Barthes’s early semiology,
requires a “form of history which can account for the constitution of
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knowledges…without having to make reference to a subject”. Indeed,
for all the éclat with which the transition from structuralism to post-
structuralism has invariably been announced, the latter clearly exhibits
a remarkable fidelity to all but one of the five major structuralist
motifs we identified above: positivism seems the sole casualty of this
bloodless revolution in thought.
The fundamental continuity between structuralism and post-
structuralism is, nonetheless, not so much logical as sociological. Where
Marxism aspired to mobilise the working class, and culturalism—at its
most successful at any rate—the intelligentsia, against the logics of
capitalist industrialization, both structuralism and post-structuralism
subscribe to a very different, and much more modest, sense of the
intellectual’s proper political function. In an observation actually directed
at Sartre (or at least to intellectuals of a Sartrean kind), but which could
just as easily be directed toward Leavis, Foucault writes thus:

For a long period, the…intellectual spoke and was acknowledged
the right of speaking in the capacity of master of truth and justice…
To be an intellectual meant something like being the consciousness/
conscience of us all… Some years have passed since the intellectual
was called upon to play this rôle. A new mode of the “connection
between theory and practice” has been established. Intellectuals
have got used to working, not in the modality of the “universal”,
the “exemplary”, the “just-and-true-for-all”, but within specific
sectors, at the precise points where their own conditions of life or
work situate them… This is what I would call the “specific”
intellectual as opposed to the “universal” intellectual. 52

Foucault himself affects a genuine enthusiasm for the likely political
rôle of this “specific” intelligentsia. But he is far too acute an observer
not to notice its probable limitations: that its struggles will be merely
conjunctural, that it may well be open to manipulation, that it will
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lack both global strategy and wider support. What Foucault does
fail to register, however, is the possibility that an increasingly
professionalized intelligentsia, such as that which he describes, might

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