The Good Sides of Poststructuralism

 I have not been writing a lot in my blog recently because I did get caught up in my recent course work, which relates to Poststructural Research Methods in education. To be honest, I am still getting the hang of Poststructuralism. I have often (falsely, I think), equated poststructural thinking with nihilism or even a kind of suspicious doubt that attacks every foundation of what a person believes about the self. Hey, doesn't Chan Buddhist practice try to do the same? However, I notice that while practicing Chan makes me feel relaxed and uplifted, Poststructural thinking often makes me feel a little heavy, as though I were trying to master an entirely new vocabulary with so much subtlety and nuance. It is often like filling "big shoes".
   I think the value of thinking and learning poststructurally is that it allows a person to question "foundations" and "essence" which are always tricky and suspect. But at the same time, I can't help but warn myself, not to go too far with this kind of thing, because it can end up pretty much eating  and eroding everything. It's almost like one of those cleaners that is so powerful that it dissolves the hand that is using it to scrub the tiles. At the end of the day, people do need to occupy narratives, and these narratives (however tentative) are the projects that are needed to connect people together, to nourish people and to help people.
    Why would poststructuralism lead me to feel heavy (depressed) whereas the exact same philosophy coming from, say, Nagarjuna (a famous Buddhist monk) does not make me feel this way? That's a good question, and I would love to do a study on that. I suspect it's because Buddhist practices are not designed for people to construct complex, nuanced field texts, the way Poststructuralists do, so there is much less pressure among Buddhists to try to impress each other or prove each other "wrong". Buddhism never attempts to be obscure or deliberately sophisticated, whereas I do find at times that Poststructuralism proliferates a kind of elitism using complex ways of expressing things. What it does is that it makes a person continually anxious to find enlightenment (o sorts) through choosing the right expression. Poetic, yes, but not always entirely "clear", and there is even a phobia amongst Poststructural thinking toward "clarity" especially if it is clear because it's a dominant familiar narrative.
   I could go on, but I do think that too much thinking in Poststructural jargon can be a rather depressing act of striving to impress fellow intellectuals, striving to step out of the familiar discourses of self and society, yet having no place to roost at the end of it.