Throughout the development of sociology as a discipline, the main backdrop to both sociological fieldwork and theory has been the distinction between Self and Other – or subject and object - expressed more generally through the study of the interaction between individuals and institutions. With the advent of poststructuralist thought, also known as postmodernism, the preference towards this distinction has been suspected by some contemporary sociologists and philosophers. Critics typically accuse postmodernism of holding subjectivity on a higher plane than objectivity, and that postmodernism is exclusively relativistic in that it questions the unity of an objective reality. This is only partly true; Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential writers on contemporary postmodernist thinkers, suggests that even the unity of a Subject is suspect. Historically, many sociologists have viewed society as derived from the Subject with the implication of inalienable axiomatic rights. This also implies a sort of contract between individuals in which the Subject defines the form and structure of societies. This notion is overturned by the postmodernist suggestion that the Subject is a creation of society. This reflects Foucault's idea of ​​the “discursive production of the subject,” or that discourses about power relations create an imposed personal identity. This is not a new idea for sociology – and Foucault was more of a structuralist than a postmodernist – but Derrida's main work centers on “deconstruction” which revolves around the idea of ​​“différance”, essentially declaring that “there is no 'is nowhere to begin' when it comes to tracing the universality or truth status of individual 'narratives', be they scientific or political. This is equally applicable...... middle of the paper......m text should be considered. That is to say, concepts like “human nature” are not really apparent and stable facts of how the world “really is,” but depend on the above factors. Essentially, deconstruction examines how knowledge is produced. In contrast, popular structuralism in 1950s and 1960s France focused on studying the structure of cultural products interpreted through linguistic structures. It was essentially a synchronic practice that attempted to analyze cultural products in the most objective and scientific way possible. The value that poststructuralism or deconstruction seemed to have was that it adopted an essentially diachronic view, looking historically at the descriptive methods used by structuralists. It has forced a redefinition of taken-for-granted concepts and highlighted the potential biases inherent in our knowledge.