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  • Structuralism

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    Definitions

    Language─set or system of symbols used in a more or less uniform way that enables intelligible communication by a number of people.

    Essentialism─the view that objects have essences, and that there is a distinction between what is essential and what is non-essential or accidental. 

    Phoneme─the smallest distinctive group or class of individual speech sounds within a language.

    Sign─for Saussure, a combination of a sound-image and a concept, or a signifier and signified.

    Signifier─written marks and sounds in the mouth.

    Signified─abstract concept.

    Signification─act or process of signifying by signs or other symbolic means.

    Field of signification─sphere or scene of signification.

    Syntax─the pattern or formation of sentences and phrases from words in a particular language.

    Grammar─the features of a language (sounds, words, formation and arrangement of words) considered systematically as a whole, especially with reference to their mutual contrasts and relations.

    Linguistics─the science of language.

    Psychoanalysis─a body of theory pertaining to the relation of conscious and unconscious psychological processes.

    Symbolic order─the ordered and hierarchical system of meanings and identities within the field of signification.

    Imaginary─existing only in the imagination, not real.

    Subject─the self or ego to which all experiences or mental operations are attributed.

    Humanism─the understanding that human beings have a special place in the world and a unique set of capacities and abilities which cannot be understood by reference to nature or divinity.

    Semiotics─the study of the communication of signs and the rules upon which communication is based.

    Synchronic─studying phenomena at a given time or stage without reference to historical data (The Macquarie Dictionary, 1991).

    Diachronic─of or pertaining to changes or developments over a period of time (The Macquarie Dictionary, 1991).

    Metaphor─a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable, in order to suggest a resemblance (The Macquarie Dictionary, 1991).

    Metonymy─the use of the name of one thing for that of another to which it has some logical relation, as 'sceptre' for 'sovereignty' or 'the bottle' for 'strong drink' (The Macquarie Dictionary, 1991).

    Introduction

    Structuralism, a period of French social thought from the 1950s to the 1970s, broadly refers to approaches which attempt to understand human culture with reference to a larger, overarching system or structure. Some of the most influential structuralist thinkers are Claude Levi-Struass, Jacques Lacan, and Lois Althusser. The key ideas of each thinker are introduced in turn in this topic. Structuralism emerges from diverse disciplines including anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, and political theory. It is strongly influenced by the structural linguistics of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. A wide variety of contemporary social philosophers have productively engaged with structuralist frameworks of thought including Ricoeur, Levinas, Kristeva, Blanchot, Derrida, Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Lacoue-Lebarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Irigaray.

    One of the key assumptions of modernist thought that structuralism challenges is the view that language corresponds to essential properties or phenomena. Many of the thinkers we have looked at thus far adhere to essentialist philosophies, in which objects of our perception are implicitly presumed to possess essences distinguishable from non-essential or accidental properties. Logical positivism and realism hold that there is a world ‘out there’ that is reflected in our language which can be grasped through perception. Interpretivists understand that social reality is made meaningful and can only be understood within the terms of those who live and act within it, but this world, social constructionists hold, while diversely interpreted, participates in meaning, so that our interpretations are seen to tell us something about the actual or essential world. In both, there is an essential world that we ‘recognise’ either through observation, interpretation or reflection, which we must understand and conform to. As we have seen there is much debate among the modernist social thinkers we have looked at so far about the extent to which we can trust that existing knowledge of the world, and especially of the social world, provides a real or meaningful description of that world. Each perspective attempts to provide a methodological rationale that can underpin the production of knowledge of the social world, whether of causation via a neutral language observation (logical positivism), the meaningful interpretations of social subjects (social constructionism), or analyses of social structure grounded in emancipatory values and democratic processes (Critical theory). All accept that language stands in a correspondence relation to the objects of our perception. In all, human language and the knowledge expressed within it can or does tell us about essential, or non-arbitrary properties of the world as they appear to consciousness.

    Structuralism observes an arbitrary and disconnected relationship between language and the objects it refers to. This leads to a distinctive approach to social research and scholarship whose focus becomes language.

    Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

    From Hawkes, T 2003, Structuralism and semiotics, second edition, Routledge, London pages 8-16 and Homer, S. 2005, Jaques Lacan, Routledge, London, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, 1999. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Saussure, a Swiss linguist, founded the school of structural linguistics, semiology, as well as profoundly influencing French structuralist philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology.

    For Saussure:

    1. Human beings are characterised by their linguistic faculty, their ability to construct language or relationships between words and ideas.
    2. This faculty generates the structure of language (or langue) of which actual human utterances (or parole) are expressions.
    3. Language is a system of conventions or rules, or set of internal relations of difference–the structure of language.
    4. The structure of the language, or the system of conventions or rules that govern language, have no concrete existence except in the form of individual instances of speech. Langue is like the body of an ice burg hidden beneath the water but giving shape to parole, the speech acts which, like the tip of an ice burg, appear above the surface.
    5. This system operates at two levels.
    6. At the fundamental phonetic level what distinguishes sounds or makes them 'meaningful' is not their particular individual qualities, but their difference, their contrast or opposition from other sounds. A language does not recognise all differences as significant. For example, English speakers see no difference in the 'c' sound in call and coal, yet a non-English speaker may see these sounds as very different. Regardless of actual similarities and differences, the structure of language, by attributing significance to particular contrasts and not others, shapes our perception of what is a significant audible difference.
    7. At the more abstract level, words (signifiers) and concepts (signified), which together make up a 'sign', are defined in relation to other words and concepts (or signs) within the greater set, and not in relation to an essential reality or experience. For example─we know cat as not-bat, not-dog and so on; we do not know essence of cat.
    8. The process by which sounds and concepts, or signs, come to have significance is referred to as both 'arbitrary' and 'systematic'. Arbitrary because differences are not established by appeal to a natural or real audible sound or essential property of phenomena, but by some adhoc differential opposition or relation. Systematic because these adhoc relations are systematically imposed.
    9. For Saussure, the signifier and the signified are attached, with the implication that the relation between words and concepts or signs can be captured systematically.
    10. Saussure aimed for a description of the full pattern of relationships that make up the structure of language and generate individual speech performances.
    11. He took as his object the 'social fact' of language, and aimed to distinguish from among the mass of individual speech events the rules or structure that underpins the language of a given community of language users.
    12. Saussure adopted a synchronic, or static, (as opposed to a diachronic or historical) study of language. This is based on the assumption that, in order to understand culture as it is, it is not necessary to understand the history of the language, but only its present configuration.
    13. Language is understood to be a closed formal system of differences governed by autonomous structural determinations. Language is a totality, or does not exist at all.
    14. Since structure can only be known as a totality via individual speech acts, and since it is impossible to know the totality of individual speech acts, structure is always hypothetical.
    15. Although language is always changing, it does not change as a result of individual speech events; language is a social institution and changes independently of individual wishes.
    16. Semiology is the name of this science, of which structural linguistics is a part. Semiology is the study of the science of social sign systems. Saussure's insights were taken up by the Geneva, Copenhagen and Prague schools of linguistics, as well as by Russian formalism.

    For Saussure, our knowledge of ourselves and of the world is not tied to essential properties within things, ourselves or the world, but emerges within a shared set of linguistic differentiations. For Saussure, if we can understand the grammatical, phonemic and syntactic rules that regulate language we can understand the terms within which social systems are made intelligible.

    Claude Levi Strauss (1908–2009)

    From Hawkes, T 2003, Structuralism and semiotics, second edition, Routledge, London pages 19-43.

    1. Claude Levi-Strauss (b1908) was influenced by the structural linguistics arising from the work of North American linguists Franz Boas (1858–1942) and Edward Sapir (1884–1939).
    2. Boas and Sapir studied native Indian languages which led them to reflect upon the way culture is divided up or 'encoded' according to the structure of the language.
    3. Boas and Sapir noticed an 'anaesthetic' effect in the native speakers of a language such that differences that are not recognised by the phonemic structure of the native language are not heard.
    4. The power of language to shape perception and response led to the observation that the way of life or shape of a culture is itself determined by or structured in the same way as the language of that culture. This challenges the view that we experience or perceive reality in a direct manner, a view that, for structuralists like Levi Strauss, fails to acknowledge the way that language shapes what it is possible to perceive or experience.
    5. Levi-Strauss inherited from the Americans the view that language is the distinctive feature of human beings and the basis for the production and reproduction of social forms.
    6. Hence, as linguists do in their study of language, Levi-Strauss sought to identify the common elements within a culture, each of which become meaningful only in relation to other elements within the entire structure of that culture, just as words or concepts only make sense in relation to other words and concepts within the system of the language.
    7. Each social system, (kinship, food, political ideology, marriage ritual, cooking, and so on), forms a part of the whole culture, now understood as a kind of language. So, in the same way that linguists understand elements of spoken language as manifestations of the hidden structure of the language, Levi-Strauss understood that the manifestations of a culture, when understood within the overall system of which they are a part, reflect the unconscious attitudes that underpin that society.

    Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)

    From Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, chapter 3 and Homer, S. 2005, Jaques Lacan, Routledge, London, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, 1999. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    1. Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) explored the significance of Saussure’s thought about the structure of language for the internal dynamics of the unconscious and the formation of subjectivity. In doing so, he offered a reworking of Freud's theory of the unconscious, displacing the centrality of the ego in human psychic life.
    2. Lacan observes that language produces, structures and governs the unconscious of the subject.
    3. He observed that, although words are tied to other words in a systematic manner, the signified is only loosely attached to words (in disagreement with Saussure's view of the indivisibility of the sign). Misunderstandings, confusions, poetic resonances, slips of the tongue, absent-mindedness, forgetting names, misreadings and so on highlight this.
    4. Lacan sees the 'presence' of the unconscious within language in the expression of metaphor and metonymy. For Lacan, unconscious disruptions of conventional communication are then prone to structural regularities.
    5. The unconscious is a discourse of others (not the expression of something deep within and truly our own).
    6. The structure of consciousness has three orders: imaginary, symbolic and real.
    7. Human beings begin life as infants with a sense of continuous, uninterrupted limitless being.
    8. In the mirror stage, the child forms its sense of bodily separation, unity and wholeness via its visual sense of its own image.
    9. This bodily sense of wholeness and separation is quickly linked to the sense of wholeness and completeness of the self offered to us within language (the imaginary).
    10. Selfhood, and the meanings and identities upon which selfhood is based originate in the symbolic order; the ordered and hierarchical system of signs within the field of signification.
    11. The symbolic order pre-exists the subject, is shared by other subjects, and cannot be controlled by the subject, giving rise to a problematical sense of self. (Language constitutes the subject as whole and complete, non-derivative and as self-generating, but, according to Lacan, our sense of ourselves is derived from the symbolic order. It does not emanate from a 'deep' self that precedes the symbolic order).
    12. The self is brought into existence via an exchange between imaginary and symbolic orders, in which a reflected image is tied to the 'I' within language.
    13. Within the imaginary order (the sense of being a separate self within the discourse of everyday life), the subject fails to recognise the arbitrary nature of the symbolic.
    14. The sense of the wholeness of the self is insecure and ambivalent because it does not arise from inside the subject, but is projected from the outside world over which we have little control.
    15. The subject is in a condition of contradiction because its sense of wholeness, completeness and autonomy is attained via the other, upon whom it depends for its sense of self. 
    16. The sense of self-completeness that is both promised and refused by the imaginary and symbolic orders gives rise to a feeling of lack.
    17. This lack is stored or repressed in the unconscious, and gives rise to desire. Desire seeks to fill the sense of missing something (rather than to attain a specific object).
    18. Life becomes a constant search to replace this lost sense of unity by finding the self within the symbolic order; replacing one sense of selfhood with another in relation to nation, sexual relationships, fashion, political party, career, material possessions, and so on. We never succeed because, although we may fulfill a specific desire for a given object, we cannot fulfill the desire to return to the always already lost sense of self-unity or completeness.
    19. For Lacan, this is the pathos and the contradiction upon which human life exists. The sense of self is never spontaneous or self-generated, it is always derivative, unstable and incomplete.
    20. For Lacan, lack, or the feeling of having had something taken away from us, gives rise to an inescapable alienation, suspicion, and hatred of the other who is experienced as the one who has taken something from us, and who has all the pleasure we have lost. (Zizek, influenced by structuralism, uses this concept to explain racism, sexism and so on).
    21. The third order of the subject is the real. The real refers to that which lies outside of, or which cannot be touched by the imaginary and the symbolic orders.
    22. The real does not refer to an objective or outside world in the normal usage of that term, since, for Lacan, the world we take to be real is always already given to us by language.
    23. The body is the real limit that lies outside the imaginary and symbolic orders. That is to say, the body can be mistaken for the self and it can be inhabited by language, but it is not the actual or real site of the self.
    24. The real is the unattainable and inexpressible limit of language. For Lacan then, experience is not purely generated by language (as for Saussure), but is something more than the structure of language. This something more is ‘drive’, or physical, bodily needs that cannot be symbolised. Drive is the constant pressure originating in the body that seeks expression in representation, but which can never fully achieve it.

    Lois Althusser (1918–1990)

    From Audi, R (editor) 1999, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    1. Lois Althusser (1918–1990) offers a reinterpretation of Marx’s later work, announcing an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx in the mid-1840s preceded by a pre-scientific humanism derived from the classical economists (Hegel and Feuerbach) and a view of human needs as pre-cultural.
    2. That is, for Althusser, Marx recognized the impossibility of pre-cultural human needs, and offered a new science of history and social change in his exposition of the various social practices and the role they play in the structure and development of a whole society.
    3. Rather than building social theory on individual and social interests, Althusser builds it upon the ‘structure’ of society.
    4. The structure of capitalist society comprises economic, ideological and politico-legal practices which make up a complex interdependent whole such that a change in one part of the system will lead to change in another. It is observations along these lines that enable a history of society.
    5. A second important contribution of Althusser is his theory of ideology─a term that brings together ideas and social practices expressed in the form of human actions. He argues that Ideological State Apparatuses like the church, family, school and mass media within capitalism, not only produce individual values, desires and preferences, but also the perception of being a self-conscious agent (a process called interpellation).
    6. Self-consciousness and self-interest are not fundamental or rational properties of being, but are brought into effect by the system, and are operationalised to support capitalist imperatives.

    Conclusion

    The structuralism of thinkers like Saussure and Lacan is different from logical positivism and interpretivism because it rejects the view that knowledge of the world and of ourselves originates in the relation between an essential reality and a perceiving mind or originating separated consciousness. Critical theory understands that concepts or ideology constitute our sense of ourselves and our knowledge of the world, but for Critical theory knowledge or truth, stripped of political and cultural bias, emerges from a direct encounter between consciousness and truth. For structuralism, experience and knowledge arise from the structure of language itself. Language is always a mediator between consciousness and perception, such that 'perception' will always, already be structured by language. Language is more than merely a representational tool humans use to represent the realities that appear to consciousness, as for modernist thought.

    Although Saussure saw that human beings author speech, and nothing can come into the structure of language that does not, in the first instance, appear in speech, knowledge of self and of the world is nevertheless seen to be wholly shaped by language in the sense that we are always situated within an existing language system. Structuralism is interested in generating knowledge about the relationships that exist between signs within language, and the way that language structures experience, consciousness, society and culture, rather than unbiased facts, as for logical positivism, the meanings human beings make, as for interpretivism, or emancipated knowledge and theory, as for Critical theory.

    Structuralism offers a theory of language and a theory of the formation of subjectivity that aims to explain the human condition. This 'scientific' and theoretical orientation to the study of culture, society and the psyche has not been without criticism. Some of the most salient criticisms of the different structuralist thinkers argue that their thought:

    • is ahistorical, the study of social change becomes an abstract theoretical and linguistic exercise divorced from social actions and developments;  
    • over emphasises the logical, fixed structure of language over irrationality, openness and ambiguity within language;
    • imposes a theory of the unconcsious. 

    As we will see in the topics that follow, cognisance of these criticisms led poststructuralists to abandon the structuralist understanding that language is structured and rule-governed. Foucault adopts an epistemology that traces the organic evolution of language in relationship with the extra discursive realm of human actions and events. In the next topic we will consider the uses and advances made on structuralist thought by the poststructuralist Jacques Derrida.

    References used in the development of this resource

    Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, 1999. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Dreyfus, H and Rabinow, P 1982, Michel Foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York.

    Hawkes, T 2003, Structuralism and semiotics, second edition, Routledge, London.

    Homer, S. 2005, Jacques Lacan, Routledge, London.

    Lechte, J 1994, Fifty key contemporary thinkers, From structuralism to postmodernity, Routlege, London.

    Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Crows Nest.

    Macquarie Dictionary, Second edition, 1991, the Macquarie Library, Macquarie University.

    Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2007, http://en.wikipedio.org/wiki/Louis_Althusser.

    This resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich.


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