Against philosophies of the Center, modernism in particular, poststructuralism introduced an intellectual politics based on the now famous concept of decentering. It is not always understood that decentering is less a philosophy, or a rival concept to those of modernism, than a practice. This is, in part, the point of post-structuralism's unsettling approach to writing.

From one point of view, decentering is a reasonably precise philosophical concept conveying Deridda's and Foucault's (1972) original attacks on centered philosophies, most especially phenomenology's extreme subjectivist philosophy of consciousness. This is the sense most accurately associated with the postmodernist rejection of Enlightenment theories of knowledge. From another point of view, decentering suggests a broad political opposition to all traditional and modern social forms, philosophy included, in which structures serve to inhibit social freedom. It is advisable, therefore, to think of post-structuralism and postmodernism as first and foremost a form of knowledge derived from a political practice. This attitude conveys not only post-structuralism's attempt to overcome philosophy for political purposes but also its claim that discourse and writing must be taken as the subject matter and means of intellectual work.

Such an interpretation of decentering makes a heavy demand on sociologists accustomed to viewing politics as something totally other than science, or, at most, that to which sociologists contribute expertise. Poststructuralism claims that intellectual work is political, and it does so with reference to concepts most sociologists would consider anything but political – text and discourse.