Foundations of the Ontology of Emergent Complexity/5.3 Ambiguities of Post-Structuralism

5.3 – Ambiguities of Post-Structuralism Post-structuralist thought is one of the closest interlocutors of this book. It contests stable essences, decentres the sovereign subject, analyses the productive force of discourse and institutions, and treats difference as more basic than fixed identity. Those moves prepare much of the conceptual terrain on which the Ontology of Emergent Complexity (OEC) works. Closeness, however, is not identity. This chapter examines recurrent tensions within a diverse field that includes authors as different as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Butler, and later materialist interlocutors. The word “ambiguity” is used deliberately: the same conceptual move can open a decisive possibility and leave a question unresolved. The aim is neither to dismiss these thinkers nor to assign one thesis to all of them. It is to identify where the framework inherits their critical work and where it makes a further displacement. What post-structuralism makes possible The term post-structuralism is retrospective and imperfect. It groups projects that do not share a programme. Nevertheless, several critical achievements recur across this field. Identities are understood as produced through differences and practices rather than simply discovered; subjects as historically and institutionally formed rather than self-originating; and language and representation as operations that do not transparently copy a prior reality. Power operates through norms, classifications, bodies, and everyday arrangements, while tensions and exclusions prevent systems from achieving final closure. The framework accepts these achievements as starting points. Its questions arise inside the space they opened. The issue is whether critique of foundations can be joined to a positive account of the material field, of emergent capacities, and of the conditions under which symbolic response becomes possible. Decentring the subject and the persistence of correlation To decentre the subject is to deny that a self-transparent human consciousness is the origin of meaning and order. Foucault’s analyses of subject formation (Foucault 1972), Derrida’s critique of presence (Derrida [1967] 1997), and Butler’s account of performativity (Butler 1990) each displace the autonomous individual in a different way. Yet a philosophy can reject the sovereign subject while continuing to organise its questions around the relation between thought, language, and world. If the real is approached mainly through the conditions under which it is given, interpreted, or discursively articulated, the subject may remain as an absent centre: no longer master, but still the horizon around which the analysis turns. This framework makes a stronger materialist claim. Material processes do not begin when they enter human experience or discourse. Stars form, rivers alter their courses, cells differentiate, and species become extinct without awaiting symbolic recognition. Human knowledge of those processes is mediated, but the processes are not constituted by that mediation. This distinction avoids two symmetrical mistakes. Naive access assumes that thought simply receives the real as it is. Correlationist enclosure treats the relation between thought and real as the only philosophically accessible problem. Situated knowledge can be mediated and answerable to a real that exceeds it. Language, text, and the risk of discursivism Post-structuralist analyses demonstrate that descriptions do not merely label a neutral world. A diagnostic category can reorganise medical treatment; a legal definition can alter citizenship; an archive can determine which events become administratively visible. Discourse has material effects because it is embedded in institutions, bodies, technologies, and practices. The risk of discursivism appears when this insight is generalised into the assumption that whatever matters is constituted through discourse. That conclusion need not be attributed to every post-structuralist author, and it should not be inferred from Derrida’s often simplified discussions of textuality. It is better understood as a recurrent tendency in reception and application: attention to discursive mediation can eclipse processes that are neither linguistic nor dependent on human recognition. The analysis responds by distinguishing the real, the concrete, and theory. A process is real independently of its observation. The concrete is the situated portion of the real observed or captured by a material system; observation establishes this relation without creating the occurrence and without yet making it symbolic. When a new or previously unknown difference is discriminated, that event constitutes a trace; singular inscription then recognises the manifested difference under a protocol and constitutes the corresponding mark–symbol relation. Theory is a subsequent systematic articulation of symbols. It can reorganise how the real is engaged, but it does not produce the process it articulates. Symbols are therefore both material and limited. They require physical supports and organised capacities; they can change institutions and environments; and they still encounter differences they have not integrated. Discursive power is real precisely because discourse operates materially, not because materiality is only discourse. Power, normativity, and material exposure Foucault shows that power is productive: it shapes conduct, knowledge, bodies, and possible identities (Foucault 1977a). Butler demonstrates how norms become embodied and how recognition distributes livability (Butler 1990). These analyses prevent politics from being reduced to commands issued by a central sovereign. The chapter asks an additional question: How are the effects of these operations materially distributed? A norm does not affect every configuration in the same way. Housing rules, borders, medical protocols, and technical standards distribute access, risk, delay, mobility, and injury. Their operation becomes ethically legible through exposure and vulnerability. Exposure is not only the experience of feeling exposed. It is the condition of being open to effects produced by other configurations. Vulnerability names the unequal capacities to absorb, avoid, contest, or repair those effects. These operators join an analysis of power to bodies, infrastructures, ecologies, and resources without reducing politics to subjective intention. This extension also prevents normativity from floating above the field. A decision is evaluated through the reorganisations it produces: whose capacities of response are maintained, which destructive asymmetries are reduced or intensified, and whether contestation and repair remain possible. Difference, undecidability, and decision Derridean undecidability shows why a responsible decision cannot be the mechanical application of a complete rule (Derrida 1990). If a rule uniquely determined the outcome, there would be calculation but no decision in the strong sense. This framework preserves this insight. In a symbolically organised field, operative excess is established when, according to an explicit criterion, the symbolic relations whose realisation is permitted by current material conditions exceed the symbolic relations realised in the current form. This makes reconfiguration possible without making it necessary and does not by itself justify any decision. The ambiguity begins when openness is confused with endless postponement. Material processes do not pause until interpretation is complete. Institutions allocate resources, bodies undergo harm, and ecological thresholds are crossed. Refusal to decide can itself maintain an existing distribution of exposure. Hesitation therefore has a precise function. It interrupts automatic response long enough to register excluded relations and possible consequences. It is not an alibi for indefinite deferral. Decision is a situated intervention that selects and reorganises relations under conditions that do not supply a final guarantee. It may be expressed, recorded, or implemented through inscriptions, but it is not, merely by being a decision, an inscription in the technical sense used by the OEC. Accountability follows from this structure. A decision may be necessary without being certain, and revisable without being arbitrary. It should state the differences it selects, the exposure it redistributes, and the conditions under which it must be reconsidered. Bodies, non-human processes, and agency Deleuze, feminist materialisms, science and technology studies, and more-than-human approaches have widened philosophy’s attention to bodies, affects, technical systems, animals, and ecologies. The framework shares this movement away from human exceptionalism, but uses a restricted vocabulary of agency. Every material configuration can have operative effects: a storm alters a coast, a virus changes behaviour, and a database constrains access. Symbolic agency is more specific. It requires a system to articulate symbols, establish or revise relations among them, and modulate operations through those relations. Where public signs are involved, they provide evidence only when the system integrates them into these symbolic operations. The restriction follows the operations demonstrated; it is not a declaration of human privilege. A non-human or post-biological configuration counts as symbolically agentive whenever it demonstrates the same operations. This distinction avoids two reductions. It does not treat non-human processes as passive matter awaiting human action. Nor does it call every causal effect “agency”, which would erase the difference between producing an effect and symbolically reorganising a field in response to represented relations. A diagnostic synthesis The first gain is the production rather than sovereignty of the subject; its recurrent ambiguity is that analysis can remain centred on the conditions of human access. The displacement affirms that material processes exceed their relation to thought. The second gain is the recognition that discourse produces real effects; its risk is that mediation eclipses non-discursive processes. The displacement treats symbols as material operations within a wider field. The analysis of distributed and productive power is retained, while exposure and vulnerability make its asymmetric material burdens more explicit. The refusal of final closure is also retained, but hesitation is directed towards situated and revisable decision rather than indefinite deferral. Finally, criticism of human exceptionalism is preserved without naming every causal effect agency: operative effects are general, whereas symbolic agency requires the functional capacities stated above. These are diagnostic tensions, not allegations that every named author occupies the ambiguous side of each distinction. Their use depends on the particular argument, its scope, and the material operations it succeeds or fails to specify. Reading Colloquium This guide accompanies the argument; it does not replace it. 1. Placement of the Text within the Architecture of the Work This is the final section of Part V and addresses the OEC's most important interlocutor: post-structuralism. The section is titled "ambiguities" rather than "critiques" because the OEC's relation to post-structuralism is one of continuation and displacement, not opposition. Without the post-structuralist critiques of the subject, of presence, and of totalising systems, the OEC's own apparatus would not be possible. 2. Philosophical Problem at Stake The problem is whether post-structuralism has fully achieved the displacement of the classical and modern configurations, or whether it remains, at certain crucial junctures, entangled in the structures it sought to overcome. The section identifies five specific ambiguities: the persistence of correlation (the human regime of signification as default horizon), the risk of discursivism (reducing material processes to discourse), the under-theorisation of material exposure, the slide from undecidability to inaction, and the unresolved status of the non-human. 3. Core Thesis and Conceptual Reorganisation The thesis is that post-structuralism radicalises the critique of foundations while leaving, in some arguments and receptions, questions about non-discursive material processes, differentiated exposure, decision, and agency insufficiently specified. The OEC proposes a further step: to think symbols, norms, and institutions as material operations within an unstable field, not as the ultimate horizon of reality. This is a selective continuation and displacement, not the claim that diverse post-structuralist projects reproduce one hidden doctrine. 4. Key Concepts and Their Articulation The key concepts are correlationist enclosure, in which the relation between thought and real becomes the only philosophically accessible problem; discursivism, in which attention to mediation eclipses processes not dependent on discourse; hesitation, which prepares rather than indefinitely postpones decision; and the distinction between operative effect and symbolic agency. A river has effects without thereby discriminating differences as traces, performing inscription, relating symbols, or modulating operations through those relations. The section engages directly with Foucault, Derrida, Butler, and Deleuze, while referring more generally to feminist materialisms, science and technology studies, and more-than-human approaches. 5. Implications for Readers and Pedagogical Pathways Readers trained in continental philosophy should distinguish the arguments of the interlocutors instead of distributing every ambiguity across all of them. The OEC does not dismiss post-structuralism; it tests where particular analyses leave material operations or practical criteria unspecified. The distinction between operative effect and symbolic agency is central: non-human processes are causally real without every effect becoming agency. Readers can test this restricted functional criterion against the materialist and more-than-human approaches mentioned in the chapter. Learning orientation By the end of this chapter, the reader should be able to: explain why decentring the subject does not automatically move beyond subject-centred philosophy; distinguish the materiality of discourse from the claim that everything is discursive; relate power to material distributions of exposure; separate undecidability from indefinite deferral; distinguish operative effect from symbolic agency. The guiding question is: After identity, origin, and sovereign subjectivity have been criticised, how can material processes and accountable decisions be described without restoring a hidden centre? Worked example: a polluted river Consider a river contaminated by industrial discharge. The chemical processes and biological damage are real before they are legally or publicly recognised. Sampling devices capture situated measurements of the river, making a portion of the real concrete for the inquiry. Scientific classifications, maps, and reports represent and organise those results through signs and symbols. Legal thresholds and administrative categories determine which harms become actionable. Communities, workers, species, and infrastructures are exposed differently to the contamination and to the measures adopted. A decision about closure, remediation, or compensation reorganises those relations under incomplete knowledge. A purely naive realist account may ignore how categories and institutions shape action. A purely discursive account may obscure the material process that resists every description. The analysis requires both dimensions: symbolic configurations materially intervene in a field they do not exhaust. Check your understanding Can a discourse be materially effective without constituting the whole reality it describes? What remains subject-centred after the sovereign subject has been criticised? When does hesitation improve a decision, and when does delay reproduce harm? Why is a storm operative without necessarily being a symbolic agent? In the river example, which differences remain outside the initial institutional description? Transition The three chapters of Part V have displaced substance, sovereign reason, and critique without decision. Part VI now gathers the operators needed to work positively. Section 6.1 defines the vocabulary; Section 6.2 shows how its application changes across material regimes.