Structuralism

BY NASRULLAH MAMBROL ON MARCH 20, 2016 • ( 3 )

The advent of critical theory in the post-war period, which comprised various complex
disciplines like linguistics, literary criticism, Psychoanalytic
criticism, structuralism, postcolonialism etc., proved hostile to the liberal consensus which
reigned the realm of criticism between the 1930s and `50s. Among these overarching discourses,
the most controversial were the two intellectual movements, structuralism
and poststructuralism originated in France in the 1950s and the impact of which created a crisis
in English studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Language and philosophy are the major
concerns of these two approaches, rather than history or author.
Structuralism which emerged as a trend in the 1950s challenged New Criticism and
rejected Sartre‘s existentialism and its notion of radical human freedom; it focused instead how
human behaviour is determined by cultural, social and psychological structures. It tended to offer
a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines. Roland
Barthes and Jacques Derrida explored the possibilities of applying structuralist principles to
literature. Jacques Lacan studied psychology in the light of structuralism,
blending Freudand Saussure. Michel Foucault‘s The Order of Things examined the history of
science to study the structures of epistemology (though he later denied affiliation with the
structuralist movement). Louis Althusser combined Marxism and Structuralism to create his own
brand of social analysis.

Structuralism, in a broader sense, is a way of perceiving the world in terms of structures. First
seen in the work of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss and the literary critic Roland Barthes,
the essence of Structuralism is the belief that “things cannot be understood in isolation, they have
to be seen in the context of larger structures they are part of”, The contexts of larger structures do
not exist by themselves, but are formed by our way of perceiving the world. In structuralist
criticism, consequently, there is a constant movement away from the interpretation of the
individual literary work towards understanding the larger structures which contain them. For
example, the structuralist analysis of Donne‘s poem Good Morrow demands more focus on the
relevant genre (alba or dawn song), the concept of courtly love, etc., rather than on the close
reading of the formal elements of the text.
The fundamental belief of Structuralism, that all human activities are constructed and not natural
or essential, pervades all seminal works of Structuralism. Beginning with the trailblazers, Levi
Strauss and Barthes, the other major practitioners include A. J. Greimas, Vladimir
Propp, Terence Hawkes (Structuralism and Semiotics), Robert Scholes (Structuralism in
Literature), Colin MacCabe, Frank Kermode and David Lodge (combined traditional and
structuralist approaches in his book Working with Structuralism). The American structuralists of
the 1960s were Jonathan Culler and the semioticians C. S. Peirce, Charles Morris and Noam
Chomsky.

With its penchant for scientific categorization, Structuralism suggests the interrelationship
between “units” (surface phenomena) and “rules” the ways in which units can be put together).
In language, units are words and rules are the forms of grammar which order words. In different
languages, the grammar rules are different as the words also are, but the structure. is make
meaning. still the same, i.e., words are put together within a grammatical system to
In literature, an illustration of this can be seen in fairy tales such as Cinderella, Snow White,
Sleeping Beauty, etc. In these stories, the units are Princess,— stepmother/ witch and , prince,
and rules are stepmothers/ witches are evil, princesses are victims, and princes and princessess
have to marry. The units and rules may differ, but the underlying structures are the same for all
fairy tales. Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organize rules and units
into meaningful systems are generated by the human mind itself and not by sense perception.
Structuralism tries to reduce the complexity of human experiences to certain underlying
structures which are universal, an idea which has its roots in the classicists like Aristotle who
identified simple structures as forming the basis of life. A structure can be defined as any
conceptual system that has three properties: “wholeness” (the system should function as a
whole), “transformation” (system should not be static), and “self-regulation (the basic structure
should not be changed.
Structuralism in its inchoate form can be found in the theories of the early twentieth century
Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (Course in General Linguistics, 1916), who moved away
from the then prevalent historical and philological study of language (diachronic) to the study of
the structures, patterns and functions of language at a particular time (synchronic). Saussure’s
idea of the linguistic sign is a seminal concept-in all structuralist and poststructuralist discourses.
According to him, language is not a naming process by which things get associated with a word
or name. The linguistic sign is made of the union of “signifier” (sound image, or “psychological
imprint of sound”) and “signified” (concept). in this triadic view, words are “unmotivated signs,”
as there is no inherent connection between a name (signifier) and what it designates (signified).
The painting This is Not a Pipe by the Belgian Surrealist artist Rene Magritte explicates the
treachery of signs and can be considered a founding stone of Structuralism. Foucault‘s book with
the same title comments on the painting and stresses the incompatibility of visual representation
and reality.
Saussure’s theory of language emphasizes that meanings are arbitrary and relational (illustrated
by the reference to 8.25 Geneva to Paris Express in Course in General Linguistics; the
paradigmatic chain hovel-shed-hut-house-mansion-palace, where the meaning of each is
dependent upon its position in the chain; and the dyads male-female, day-night etc. where each
unit can be defined only in terms of its opposite). Saussurean theory establishes that human being
or reality is not central; it is language that constitutes the world. Saussure employed a number of
binary oppositions in his lectures, an important one being speech/writing. Saussure gives
primacy to speech, as it guarantees subjectivity and presence, whereas writing, he asserted,
denotes absence, of the speaker as well as the signified. Derrida critiqued this as phonocentrism
that unduly privileges presence over absence, which led him to question the validity of all
centres.
Saussure’s use of the terms Langue (language as a system) and Parole an individual. utterance in
that language, which is inferior to Langue) gave structuralists a way of thinking about the larger
structures which were relevant to literature. Structuralist narratology, a form of Structuralism
espoused by Vladimir Propp, Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes and Gerard Genette illustrates
how a story’s meaning develops from its overall structure It, (langue) rather than from each
individual story’s isolated theme (parole). To ascertain a text’s meaning, narratologists
emphasize grammatical elements such as verb tenses and the relationships and configurations of
figures of speech within the story. This demonstrates the structuralist shift from authorial
intention to broader impersonal Iinguistic structures in which the author’s text (a term preferred
over “work”) participates.
Structuralist critics analyse literature on the explicit model of structuralist linguistics. In their
analysis they use the linguistic theory of Saussure as well as the semiotic theory developed by
Saussure and the American philosophe’r Charles Sanders Peirce. According to the semiotic
theory, language must be studied in itself, and Saussure suggests that the study of language must
be situated within the larger province of semiology, the science of signs.
Semiology understands that a word’s meaning derives entirely from its difference from other
words in the sign system of language (eg: rain not brain or sprain or rail or roam or reign). All
signs are cultural constructs that have taken on their meaning through repeated, learned,
collective use. The process of communication is an unending chain of sign productior
which Peirce dubbed “unlimited semiosis”. The distinctions of symbolic, iconic and indexical
signs, introduced by the literary theorist Charles Sande Peirce is also a significant idea
in semiology. The other major concepts asiociated with semiotics are “denotation” (first order
signification) and “connotation” (second order signification).
Structuralism was anticipated by the Myth Criticism of Northrop Frye, Richard Chase, Leslie
Fiedler, Daniel Hoffman, Philip Wheelwright and others which drew upon anthropological and
physiological bases of myths, rituals and folk tales to restore spiritual content to the alienated
fragmented world ruled by scientism, empiricism and technology. Myth criticismsees literature
as a system based or recurrent patterns. Though Frye‘s Anatomy of Ctiticism(1957) echoes the
formalist emphases of New criticism, at also to literary history as a repetitive and self-contained
cycle, where basic symbolic myths like deluge myth and trickster myth recur.

The French social anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss applied the structuralist outlook to cultural
phenomena like mythology, kinship relations and food preparation. He applied the principles of
langue and parole in his search for the fundamental mental structures of the human mind. Myths
seem fantastic and arbitrary yet myths from different cultures are similar. Hence he concluded
there must be universal laws that govern myths (and all human thought). Myths consist of 1)
elements that oppose or contradict each other and 2) other elements that “mediate” or resolve
those oppositions (such as trickster / Raven/ Coyote, uniting herbivores and carnivores). He
breaks myths into smallest meaningful units called mythemes. According to Levi-Strauss, every
culture can be understood, in terms of the binary oppositions like high/low, inside/outside,
life/death etc., an idea which he drew from the philosophy of Hegel who explains that in every
situation there are two opposing things and their resolution, which he called “thesis, antithesis
and synthesis”. Levi-Strauss showed how opposing ideas would fight and also be resolved in the
rules of marriage, in mythology, and in ritual.

In interpreting the Oedipus myth he placed the individual story of Oedipus within the context of
the whole cycle of tales connected with the city of Thebes. He then identifies repeated motifs and
contrasts, which he used as the basis of his interpretation. In this method, the story and the cycle
part are reconstituted in terms of binary oppositions like animal/ human, relation/stranger,
husband/son and so on.

Concrete details from the story are seen in the context of a larger structure and the larger
structure is then seen as an overall network of basic dyadic pairs which have obvious symbolic,
thematic and archetypal resonance. This is the typical structuralist process of moving from the
particular to the general placing the individual work within a wider structural content.
A very complex binary opposition introduced by Levi-Strauss is that of bricoleur (savage mind)
and an engineer (true craft man with a scientific mind). According to him, mythology functions
more like a bricoleur, whereas modern western science works more like an engineer (the status
of modem science is ambivalent in his writings). In Levi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, what is
important is that the signs already in existence are used for purposes that they were not originally
meant for. When a faucet breaks, the bricoleur stops the leak using a cloth, which is not actually
meant for it. On the other hand the engineer foresees the eventuality and he would have either a
spare faucet or all the spanners and bolts necessary to repair the tap.
Derrida, the poststructuralist, opposes Levi-Strauss‘s concept of bricolage in his Structure, Sign
and Play, saying that the opposition of bricolage to engineering is far more troublesome
that Levi-Strauss admits and also the control of theory and method, which Levi-Strauss attributes
to the engineer would seem a very strange attribution for a structuralist to make.
Roland Barthes, the other major figure in the early phase of structuralism (later he turned to Post
Structuralism), applied the structuralist analysis and semiology to broad cultural phenomena. His
work embodies transition from structuralist to poststructuralist perspectives. Certain works of
his-have a Marxist perspective and some others deal with the concept of intertextuality, a
coinage by his student and associate Julia Kristeva. His early works like Writing Degree
Zero (1953) and Mythologies (1957) derived inspiration from Saussure, Sartre and Brecht. His
structuralist works include Elements of Semiology (1964), Introduction to the Structural Analysis
of Narratives (1966), Death of the Author (1968), and S/Z (1970). From Work to Text, The
Pleasure of the Text are some of the seminal poststructuralist works.
In Mythologies he examines modern France from the standpoint of a cultural theorist. It is an
ideological critique of products of mass bourgeois culture, like soaps, advertisements, images of
Rome etc., which are explained using the concept of ‘myth’. According to Barthes, myth is a
language, a mode of signification. He reiterates Saussure’s view that semiologycomprises three
terms: signifier, signified and sign, in which sign is a relation between the signifier and signified.
The structure of myth repeats this tri-dimensional pattern. Myth is a second order signifying
system illustrated by the image of the young Negro in a French uniform saluting the french flag,
published as the cover page of the Parisian magazine, Paris Match, which reveals the myth of
French imperialism at the connotative level.
Roland Berthes underlies that the very principle of myth is “to transform history into nature”.
Ideology and culture as kinds of propaganda work best when they are not recognized as such
because they contribute to the construction of what people think of as “common sense.”
Barthes‘ Death of the Author (1968) reveals his deconstructionist and antihumanist approach as
it deposes the Romantic idea of an author, symbolically male and end of all meanings. The death
of the author is followed by the birth of the reader; not just the reader but the scriptor, an idea
which has echoes of Eliot’s theory of impersonality.
In his S/Z (a book which sits on the fence between structuralism and poststructuralism) Barthes’
method of analysis is to divide the story (Balzac’s (Sarrasine) into 561 lexias or units of
meaning, which he classifies using five ‘codes’: Proairetic, hermeneutic, cultural, semic and
symbolic, seeing these as the basic underlying structure of all narratives. in this book appears the
substantial reference to the readerly (lisible) and writerly (scriptable) texts. In The Pleasure of
the Text he distinguishes between plaisir (pleasure) and jouissance (bliss).
The complexity and heterogeneity of structuralism, which is reflected even in the architecture of
this period (eg., structuralist artefacts like Berlin Holocaust Memorial, Bank of China Tower,
etc) paved the way to poststructuralism which attacked the essentialist premises of
structuralism. Poststructuralism argues that in the very examination of underlying structures, a
series of biases are involved. Also, structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical
and for favoring deterministic structural being forces over.the ability of individual people to act.
As the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (especially the student uprising of May 1968)
began affecting the academy, issues of power and political struggle moved to the centre of
people’s attention. In the 1980s deconstruction and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of
language—rather than its crystalline logical structure—became popular, which proved fatal to
structuralism.