structuralism

structuralism and post-structuralism, are broad schools of thought that arose in Paris from the 1950s to the 1970s, asserting a powerful influence across a range of different kinds of cultural analysis. Structuralism had the ambition of bringing these various realms under a single general ‘science of signs’ called semiotics or semiology, and thus of uncovering the basic codes or systems of meaning that underly all human cultural activity. Post-structuralism tends to abandon such grand scientific ambitions, although it still roves freely among widely different cultural forms. Both currents share the same founding principle, which is the primacy of ‘Language’, conceived as an abstract system of differences, in all human activities. An important consequence is that the autonomous human mind, hitherto assumed to be the maker of all meanings and cultural artefacts, is demoted to a subordinate position, as ‘the subject’ generated by Language. This agreed, structuralism and post-structuralism disagree only on the question of whether Language is knowably fixed as an object of science, or unstably indeterminate and slippery. For structuralism, fictional texts are to be seen as instances of scientific laws, while post-structuralism often regards scientific laws as instances of textual fictions.

The origins of these movements lie in the foundation of modern linguistics by the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure, who redirected the study of languages away from ‘diachronic’ questions of their historical development and towards ‘synchronic’ study of their workings at a given time. Structuralism and post-structuralism are inimical to historical inquiry into the origins of any phenomenon, and usually dismiss notions of evolution and progress as 19th- cent. superstitions. Saussure's second condition for the reconstruction of linguistics as a science was that its object of study should be, not individual utterances and their meanings (parole), but the system of rules and distinctions (the langue) that underlies them in a given language. Structuralism follows suit by showing less interest in what a cultural product (a poem, an advertisement, a culinary ritual) may mean than in the implicit rules that allow it to mean something. The key principle of Saussure's linguistic theory is that a word is an ‘arbitrary sign’: that is, its form and meaning derive not from any natural quality of its referent in the world outside language, but solely from its differences from other words. Saussure's general conclusion here is that ‘in a language, there are only differences, without positive terms’. Structuralism and post-structuralism alike are founded upon this principle of the ‘relational’ nature of signification and thus of all meanings. Abstracting from Saussure's work, which applies to the analysis of a particular given language, they often invoke ‘Language’ as such, as a self-contained realm or general principle of differentiation. This permits the discovery of ‘Language’ at work in all kinds of activity not usually regarded as properly linguistic: cuisine, costume, dance, photography, and structures of kinship, for example, may all now be read as ‘sign-systems’.

After Saussure, the second founding father was the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), whose career links his early work in the Russian formalist school with full-blown structuralism in his later writings. Jakobson helped to shape the ideas of the leading French structuralists of the 1960s—Lévi-Strauss (1908– ), Barthes, Lacan, and the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–90)—with his claim that the basic principles by which all sign systems combine their elements into meaningful compounds are those of metaphor and Metonymy.

As applied to the analysis of particular literary works, the structuralist method is not concerned with critical evaluation, but with uncovering the basic ‘binary oppositions’ (nature/culture, male/female, active/passive, etc.) that govern the text. It rejects traditional conceptions in which literature is held to express an author's meaning or to reflect the real world; instead, it regards the ‘text’ as a self-contained structure in which conventional codes of meaning are activated. The most significant contribution it has made to literary study has been in the realm of narratology, in the writings of A. J. Greimas, Gérard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov. In the English-speaking world, some critics such as Kermode, D. Lodge in his Modes of Modern Writing (1977), and Jonathan Culler in his Structuralist Poetics (1975) have adopted elements of structuralist analysis, albeit cautiously. The anglophone tradition of literary criticism was already partly inoculated against these influences, having developed its own conceptions of literary language in the work of the New Critics, and of generic structures in the work of Frye.

Post-structuralism cannot be disentangled fully from structuralism: some of its leading figures, notably Barthes, show a transition from one to the other. In general, post-structuralism pursues structuralist arguments about the autonomy of Language from the world, to the point at which structuralism's own authority is undermined. The philosophical pioneer in this new phase is Derrida, who began to unpick the logic of structuralism in 1966, pointing out certain basic instabilities in the founding concepts of ‘structure’ and ‘binary opposition’. Post-structuralism challenges the ‘scientific’ pretensions not only of structuralism but of other explanatory systems (notably Marxism) by appealing to the inherent uncertainty of Language. In particular, it discredits all ‘metalanguages’ (that is, uses of language that purport to explain other uses: linguistics, philosophy, criticism, etc.) by pointing out that they are just as unreliable as the kinds of language they claim to comprehend. Post-structuralism usually allows no appeal to a reality outside Language that could act as a foundation for linguistic meanings; instead, it sees every discourse as circularly self-confirming. This is not quite the same as denying the existence of a real world outside of Language, although Derrida's notorious declaration that ‘il n'y a pas d'hors-texte’ (rather misleadingly Englished as ‘there is nothing outside the text’) has given this impression. The radical scepticism of this movement reflected in part the libertarian politics of the 1960s and in part the influence of Nietzsche, in its rejection of ‘hierarchical’ and ‘totalitarian’ systems of thought, and its denial of objectivity.

In terms of linguistic theory, the distinctive view of post-structuralism is that the signifier (a written word, for example) is not fixed to a particular ‘signified’ (a concept), and so all meanings are provisional. In the social sciences and beyond, this body of post-structuralist theory encouraged cultural relativism and the associated view that our models of reality are ‘constructed’ in Language or discourse. It also shaped the concept of postmodernism.

In academic literary criticism, post-structuralism has won a greater influence than the more narrowly scientific propositions of structuralism, partly because it respects such literary values as verbal complexity and paradox. In some versions, indeed, it threatens to treat history, philosophy, anthropology, and even natural science merely as branches of literature or ‘text’. Many philosophers and social scientists regard Derrida and Lacan primarily as literary jesters, as both are noted for their elaborate punning and impenetrably dense style. Post-structuralist literary theory and criticism have assumed varied forms, from the kind of linguistic and rhetorical analysis inspired by Derrida and known as deconstruction to the new historicism inspired by Foucault. They include a version of feminist criticism derived in part from Lacan and associated with the work of Kristeva. Another important figure is Barthes, whose writings of the 1970s present the process of reading less as a decoding of structures than as a kind of erotic sport. Post-structuralist criticism is in general more sympathetic to ‘open’, unstable, or self-referential writing than to what it regards as ‘closed’ literary forms; and it disparages Realism in particular because it disguises the active power of Language in ‘constructing’ reality.