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STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM FOR BEGINNERS
By DONALD D. PALMER For Beginners LLC
Copyright © 1997 Donald D. Palmer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-939994-23-3
CHAPTER 1
What is Structuralism?
In its less dramatic versions, structuralism is just a method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, a Weltanschauung, an overall worldview that provides an ORGANIC as opposed to an ATOMISTIC account of reality and knowledge.
An atomistic view of the world sees reality as composed of discrete, irreducible units. The parts ("atoms") are more real than the whole.
An organic view of the world sees reality as a TOTALITY, as an organism. The parts are real only insofar as they are related to each other and to the whole.
According to the most radical version of structuralist organicism, reality is composed not of "THINGS," but of RELATIONSHIPS.
When structuralists and "post-structuralists" make the apparently outrageous claim that every "object" is both a presence and an absence, they mean that an object is never fully "There"— it is there to the extent that it appears before us, but it is Not there insofar as its being is determined by its relation to the whole system of which it is a part, a system that does not appear to us. In this sense, each "object," even in its quasi-absence, reflects the total system, and the total system is present in each of its parts.
Because structuralism claims to discover permanent structures behind or beneath things, its analyses tend to be SYNCHRONIC (ahistorical) rather than DIACHRONIC (historical). Its most extreme practitioners deny the significance of history, or are nostalgic for primitive cultures that are oblivious to the existence of change, cultures that are themselves ahistorical.
Because structuralism is concerned with a universal, unchanging order of things (what one of its members, Jacques Lacan, called the "Symbolic Order"), it is in many respects opposed to the "existentialism" of Jean-Paul Sartre that preceded it on the intellectual scene in Europe, or to any other form of humanism that emphasizes the individual.
In structuralism, there is a "disappearance of the subject," as she is spawned by, and absorbed back into, the general structure.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SUBJECT
Because of these features, structuralism can claim as its ancestors the classical Continental rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century rather than the British empiricists who are the creators of the Anglo-American intellectual environment.
The empiricists (John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume) believed that knowledge of the world was IMMEDIATE. The mind is a blank slate at birth, and reality impresses itself upon that slate in the form of the data of the five senses. These sense-data are "the given." They are the building blocks of our knowledge of the world. (Sense-data are the "atoms" of the empiricists' atomism.)
On the contrary, the rationalists (René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanual Kant), taking a cue from Plato, claimed that knowledge of the world is MEDIATE. It is mediated by innate ideas or innate structures (ideas or categories that are present at birth.) By attending to these innate components, we can deduce the universal structure of reality, a structure that will contradict the mere appearances provided by the senses and show itself to be a UNIVERSAL, unchanging truth, one best articulated in terms of mathematical formulas.
Ever since the seventeenth century, British and American thinkers have almost always been more influenced by the EMPIRICIST philosophers, and Continental European thinkers have been more influenced by the RATIONALIST philosophers.
Two modern examples of such Continental thinkers (and ones who have had a direct impact on structuralism) are KARL MARX (1818-1886) and SIGMUND FREUD (1856- 1939). Both of these men thought of themselves as scientists, hence as "empiricists" in some sense, but they were clearly much more influenced by the rationalist philosophers than by the empiricist philosophers.
There is, according to Marx, AN UNDERLYING STRUCTURE THAT DETERMINES SOCIAL REALITY, AND THAT MUST BE GRASPED IF SOCIAL REALITY IS TO BE UNDERSTOOD. For him, this underlying structure was an economic one. Its foundation is:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
This underlying structure is tantamount to the "sum total" of all the RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. Furthermore, everything else in society must be understood as being built upon that foundation. This "superstructure" is a "reflex" or a "sublimate" of that underlying structure.
It is essentially an ideological reflection of the forces at work in the socio-economic foundation. For example, a POLITICAL CONSTITUTION is just a legalizing of the privileges of the social class that owns the economic foundation of the society.
The police are just heavily armed hired thugs who enforce the "rights" of the owning class. So-called morality is also the ideological defense of these advantages. The same with most art, literature, poetry, religious preaching, and what passes for science.
They are all CAPTIVES OF A PRIMARY STRUCTURE but are unable to understand themselves as anything but free.
Like structuralism, Marxism is a form of organicism and is anti-individualistic. Nevertheless, despite being almost a form of structuralism, ultimately Marxism is not, because of its obsession with HISTORY. Structualism is a SYNCHRONIC science, hence it is ahistorical. Nevertheless, Marxism deeply influenced structuralism, and a famous French Marxist, Louis Althusser, tried to synthesize his Marxism with structuralist arguments.
SIGMUND FREUD's psychoanalysis also has some important similarities with structuralism, and strongly influenced it. In psychoanalysis, too, what appears in consciousness is often very different from the truth which those "appearances" mask- a truth that can only be derived from the study of the STRUCTURAL ORGANIZATION OF THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND.
This underlying structure of which the conscious mind is unaware produces a tension between natural animal forces with the forces of civilization (i.e., basic sexual and aggressive instincts aligned against the interests of society that try to repress those instincts).
According to psychoanalytic theory there are three agencies at work in this dynamic: THE ID (an irrational, violent rapacious force demanding immediate gratification of its need for total pleasure), THE SUPEREGO (an irrational counterforce organized to control the demands of the id through the use of guilt), and THE EGO (composed of a rational, socially oriented conscious mind, and an unconscious CENSORING DEVICE that keeps much of the information about the battle between the id and the superego out of consciousness).
The main function of the ego is that of compromise between id and superego, through delaying tactics ("There's a time and a place for everything"), or through displacement and sublimation.
Despite this "structural" analysis of the mind, ultimately traditional psychoanalysis is incompatible with structuralism because, like Marxism, it is DIACHRONIC. It is oriented toward history. For Freud, these structures can only be understood by tracing them back historically, to the infancy or childhood of the individual ("ONTOGENY"), or to the infancy or childhood of the human race ("PHYLOGENY"), where, according to Freud, the whole mess (that is, human culture and the human mind) began with the PRIMORDIAL PATRICIDE— an act of father murder and father cannibalism.
Freud believes that structurally ONTOGENY RECAPITULATES PHYLOGENY.
Still, psychoanalysis has deeply influenced both structuralism and post-structuralism, and we will see that Jacques Lacan, who has been called both names, tries to synthesize psychoanalysis with structuralist principles.
CHAPTER 2
Ferdinand de Saussure: Structural Linguistics
Saussure was born in Geneva into a family that had produced several noteworthy natural scientists. He too studied science but had a passion for languages. By the time he was fifteen he knew French. German. English, Latin, and Greek. He began his studies at the University of Geneva and continued them at the Universities of Berlin and Leipzig, where he earned his doctorate at the age of twenty-three. After teaching some time in Paris, he returned to his hometown of Geneva as a full professor having received a knighthood in the French Legion of Honor. He had published his first book when he was only twenty- one, but he found it more and more difficult to write after that. Between 1907 and 1911 he presented a series of lectures that, after his death at fifty-six, were reconstructed through his notes and those of his students and were published as A Course in General Linguistics, a book that was to thrust the young science of linguistics into prominence and one that would prove to be highly influential when its ideas were incorporated into structuralism some fifty years later.
We can examine Saussure's revolutionary importance by comparing and constrasting his view of the linguistic tradition inaugurated in ancient Green by PLATO (427-347 BC), who argued that words do not name things in the world. (They couldn't do that, because there are too many things in the world, and they are all different from each other. If words named things, there would have to be as many names as there are things.)
Rather, according to Plato, words name CONCEPTS, IDEAS, which themselves are abstractions, designating ESSENCES, namely, that which a number of individuals have in common by virtue of which they are identifiable. (There can be many different kinds of triangles — acute, right, isosceles,— but the word "TRIANGLE" denotes what all triangles have in common, namely, three sides and three angles; that is, it designates the triangle's TRIANGULARITY. Similarly, the word "DOG" must denote what all dogs have in common, namely, DOGNESS.)
These essences, by the way, are not merely abstractions for Plato. They are real— in fact, more real than are the many physical manifestations of them that exist on earth, which are nothing but mere copies of the real thing, which exists in a Platonic heaven of Ideas as an eternal, unchanging truth.
Furthermore, for Plato, there is some natural connection between words and concepts. Just as the word "writing" is like the idea of writing, so is the word "dog" somehow like the idea of a dog.
Well, what about Saussure? How much of this does he agree with?
NOT A HECK OF A LOT!
He does agree with one important point, however. Words name ideas, not things. There the similarities between Saussure and Plato end. What defines a word for Saussure is not its relation to some eternal essence; rather, what defines it is the relation in which it stands to other words in the system. Furthermore, these relations are NEGATIVE, not positive.
Take the consonants "B" and "T." Place between them all the possible vowels in English.
In each case the sound produced creates a distinct word. Consider the first of these words, "BAT." It is what it is by not being the words "bet," "bit," "bot" ["bought"], "but."
Sometimes people with foreign accents are misunderstood because they do not make these distinctions clear enough.
And what's true of SOUNDS is true of IDEAS.
Therefore
(AND THIS IS RADICAL),
different languages produce different concepts. The French speaker not only speaks differently from the American, but THINKS differently. (Jonathan Culler, a Saussure scholar, has come up with an excellent example. In English, we have two words: "river" and "stream." In French there are also two words, "fleuve" and "riviére." Now it looks as if "river" and riviére should be identical but "fleuve" turns out to mean "river," even though our word "river" obviously evolved from the French "riviére." But in fact it is even more complicated than this. In English, "rivers" are bigger bodies of flowing water; streams by comparison are smaller. But in French, "fleuves" flow into the sea, and "riviéres" flow into "fleuves." So, STRICTLY SPEAKING, there is no word in English that means the same as the French words "fleuve" and "riviére.")
According to Saussure, language is made up of SIGNS. A sign is the combination of a SIGNIFIER (a "sound" or a "sound-image," like the noise "kAT") and a SIGNIFIED (an idea, a concept, for example, "any of several members of the family Felidae, but particularly the domesticated carnivore Felis domestica").
The first principle of Saussure's linguistics is THE ARBITRARINESS of THE SIGN. This means several things. First, there is no natural connection between the signifier and the signified. (Plato was wrong about that.) There are only conventional relations between words and meanings. There is nothing in nature nor in logic that requires that English speakers use the word "dog" for dogs.
There are partial exceptions. Words like "writing desk" are not purely arbitrary, even though both "writing" and "desk" are arbitrary. There is a kind of logical connection between the two words that link them. (Saussure called these terms "motivated.") Still, we shouldn't be too far misled by the "logic" of these "motivated" terms.
"Fingerhut" may be motivated, but "thimble" is not.
Also, so-called ONOMATOPOEIA are partially "motivated." These are words that are supposed to imitate sounds in nature, such as the English word "chirp." But in French a chirp is a "pépier" (like "peep!") and a "Zirp" in German. "Clap" in French is "claque," and in German "Knall." These are all onomatopoetic, but do they really "imitate nature?" Dogs say "bow-wow" in America, "bau-bau" in Italy, and "ouâ-ouâ" in France.
Furthermore, for Saussure the conventions that tie t signifier to the signified an also arbitrary. That mean that they, too, are determined not by facts in "realty" but by other facts in t linguistic system, as we saw with the "river/riviére" example. (The English word "pigeon" comes from the Latin word "pipio," a "chirp." The English word "dove" comes from the Gothic we "dubo," meaning "diver."
But not all chirpers and divers are members of the family of birds known scientifically as "Columbidae," and anyway, I always thought that doves "cooed," not chirped.) What all this means is that there are no essences, "no fixed universal concepts." (Plato was wrong about that too.)
Another important distinction in Saussurian linguistics is that between LA LANGUE (language) and PARÔLE (speech). "La langue" is the whole linguistic system. It is a social structure into which the individual is born. "Parôle" is composed of the actual speech acts that the speaker enunciates. It is the individual aspect of language rather than the social. "Parôle" must be analyzed in terms of "langue." Saussure compares "parôle" with an individual move in a chess game. It can only be understood in terms of the underlying system of rules which is chess. Yet at the primary level the rules govern only differences. The pawn is not the queen, the queen is not the bishop, the bishop is not ..., etc. Furthermore, the queen is not defined by "her" material construction (ivory, wood, plastic) nor by her shape.
In this comparison between language and chess we see the beginnings of a STRUCTURAL analysis rather than a CAUSAL analysis of the type used in the natural sciences. Neither a linguistic component nor a piece in chess is explained by showing what caused them, but by locating them within the structure of a system.
The distinction between "la langue" and "parôle" is related to another Saussurean dichotomy that has already been mentioned— that between a SYNCHRONIC and a DIACHRONIC study of language. The latter is the study of the evolution of language, of history's impact on linguistic events. The former is the study of all the relations among the different parts of a linguistic system at any given moment in time, without reference to the past. For Saussure, the major task of linguistic analysis is synchronic. The diachronic (historical) features are not the most important considerations for him.
Again, the explanation of any linguistic phenomenon will be the activity of revealing an underlying system of conventions governing negative relationships of difference, as in the locating of the particular phenomenon within that system at any particular moment.
Another Saussurean distinction that will appear again in later structuralist writers is that between ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS (today called PARADIGMS) and SYNTAGMS. Paradigmatic analysis is "vertical." It studies the rules of substitution within a particular grammatical category. Syntagmatic analysis is "horizontal." It studies temporal relations of contiguity.
The horizontal substitutions are syntagmatic. The vertical substitutions are paradigmatic.
Saussure's STRUCTURALISM can be seen most clearly in his claim that the whole of language as he wishes to study it can be displayed as a system of syntagmatic and paradigmatic negative relations of difference.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM FOR BEGINNERS by DONALD D. PALMER. Copyright © 1997 Donald D. Palmer. Excerpted by permission of For Beginners LLC.
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