post structuralists and Lepidoptera

[John Grehan]

>Will everyone get off the post-structuralist stuff. It is stale.

While I would be the first to admit that my readings of Derridean
postructuralist
metaphysics are rather shallow, it seemed to me that the writings attribued to
post structuralism read  more like essentialism. Certainly a lot of the
words come out or are associated with post-structuralism, but they are
also appropriated by so-called post-modernist movements that seem to me
to have little in common with Derridean post-structuralism apart perhaps from
some common language elements.

Derridean post-structuralism has actually been of some practical use in
understanding biogeographic methodology, so there can be an empirical
element to all this.

Bringing matters back to Lepidotpera, post-structuralist considerations have
at least made me (hopefully) more critical in how I compare the context
in which characters and structures are defined, and thus interpreted. For
example,
the wing of a butterfly or moth is defined by its attachment to said insect, but
if a "wing" were attached to a plant it might be said to be a "leaf". Though
perhaps an absurdity from an essentialist viewpoint, there are structural
aspects shared in common that might be more than simple "coincidence"
of unrelated events (i.e. they may be related in terms of sharing common
developmental, physical, or other biological constraints or bias).

Comments for the sake of it.

John Grehan