Post-structuralism features a critique of the assumption of meaning in language when meaning is no longer distinguished by a shared social agreement. Post-structuralism thus clarifies the function of choice in human action.
Post-structuralism asserts that the author of a classic literary novel loses authority and centrality to the equally valid perspectives of the reader. As such, the novel is no longer a self-contained, predestined narrative constructed by a god-like author, but rather is a multidimensional production in which the reader plays the critically active role in determining meaning.
The structuralist view of an individual's coherent identity and singular free will are rejected by post-structuralists, who view the individual as incoherent, a mixture of various cultural constructs produced by organized power in a given society.
"He threw the ball like a girl." The sentence asserts a binary hierarchy in which female is secondary to male with regards to athletics. However, going beyond this culturally derived structural concept we find the opposite is true: Maleness is defined in terms of femaleness, and so in effect the category of female is prior to that of male.
Post-structuralism serves as a way to identify the ethical and cultural choices that we make when we move from uncertainty to certainty in our efforts to understand and shape our world.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was the earliest critic of structuralist thought, though the post-structuralist movement itself was made famous by the French academics Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Michel Foucault (1926-84).