Our age is characterized by the proliferation of ‘simulacra’: a ‘replacement of reality by signs of reality’.
These texts derived from Situationist circles, issuing from the crossing of a libertarian Marxism and the tradition of the French avant-gardes, Dadaist, Surrealist and Lettrist in particular.
Derrida dismissed the Saussurean hypothesis that language is a stable ‘system of differences’, therewith marking one of the ways in which the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism was made.
The semiology developed by Barthes conceived the social world as a whole as a system of signs, as illustrated by the studies collected in Mythologies
The doctrine of power developed by Foucault is therefore relational, not substantive. Most structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers defend approaches of this type. The concept of ‘rhizome’ developed by Deleuze and Guattari, like the idea of ‘societies of control’, is an example of it.
