Poststructuralism

In 1968, a Sorbonne professor by the name of Gilles Deleuze came out with the work titled "Difference and Repetition". By that time, Deleuze had already garnered attention of critics and fellow professors with his extraordinary and imaginative interpretations of philosophy`s major canonical figures - Spinoza, Leibniz, Nietzsche, you name it. But with D&R, French philosopher had set out to construct his own metaphysics, a system of propositions and concepts regarding the nature of principles by which our world functions. What`s more, his grounding would be based on the critique of old metaphysical systems, the ones that were analytically deduced by such philosophical giants such as Kant and Plato hundreds of years ago. However Deleuze`s main target would be Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a german idealist philosopher whose concept of dialectics, its influence on all Deleuze`s contemporaries almost universal, had long ago undermined the very possibility of a functioning metaphysical system. It was not long after that the infamous May student protests of 68 took place, raging masses bursting out into the streets all at once and into the core of conservative Authority with the intention of breaking up all of its power and influence once and for all. Deleuze was among those in the protesting crowd.

Indeed, Deleuze and thinkers alike himself had an immense influence on the ideas of students brewing up the protest, which in turn had an even greater influence on how we see the world in general and power structures in specific today. So what exactly did poststructuralist thinkers propose conceptually? First and foremost, they targeted the structure, anything that resembled it and what formed it. Their favorite example of a structure is the power, specifically institutions in which power is omnipresent and continuously at action - schools, prisons, trials. Deleuze`s close friend, French philosopher Michel Foucault had an idea, that institutions, being modeled as a power structure, are all essentially the same - say school is like a prison, that is due to the fact that it exercises the same kind of hierarchy as prison does, a hospital is like a police station - this particular example shows the antipsychiatric idea, which was pioneered by the French post-war philosophers and some time later grew into a full-fledged political movement. This idea is essnetially this - nowadays, writes Foucault, structures came to learn of a different way of exercising their power, not by the way of, say, punishing an individual physically or humiliating him publicly, but by integrating the power into the everyday life of society, in a way that one simply won`t notice that he is being led by the measured agendas of the powers that be or, simply speaking, that he is experiencing a new kind of influence on himself, a psychic one.

In his essay titled "Societies of Control", Deleuze extends Foucault`s theory of power. The psychic warfare of twentieth century, that was presented by Foucault as the last type of society based on the intervention of power into the everyday experience, was modernized by Deleuze into the socities of control, that is a postmodern society with all of its media sphere intricacies and technical advancements - all of this is about the way we acquire knowledge has changed and according to Foucault, "power is knowledge", that is it is the ideas in the mainstream that dominate our knowledge. This way Deleuze predicts what would be later called "post-truth", the state of knowledge where its content becomes ambigious due to the manipulations of the media.

"Societies of Control" was published in 1990, five years after the death of Foucault, half a decade before the death of Deleuze and a decade before the start of twentieth century.