structuralism a distinctive yet extremely wide range of productive research conducted in the social and human sciences from the 1950s through the 1970s, principally in France. It is difficult to describe structuralism as a movement, because of the methodological constraints exercised by the various disciplines that came to be influenced by structuralism – e.g., anthropology, philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalysis, political theory, even mathematics. Nonetheless, structuralism is generally held to derive its organizing principles from the early twentieth-century work of Saussure, the founder of structural linguistics. Arguing against the prevailing historicist and philological approaches to linguistics, he proposed a ‘scientific’ model of language, one understood as a closed system of elements and rules that account for the production and the social communication of meaning. Inspired by Durkheim’s notion of a ‘social fact’ – that domain of objectivity wherein the psychological and the social orders converge – Saussure viewed language as the repository of discursive signs shared by a given linguistic community. The particular sign is composed of two elements, a phonemic signifier, or distinctive sound element, and a corresponding meaning, or signified element. The defining relation between the sign’s sound and meaning components is held to be arbitrary, i.e., based on conventional association, and not due to any function of the speaking subject’s personal inclination, or to any external consideration of reference. What lends specificity or identity to each particular signifier is its differential relation to the other signifiers in the greater set; hence, each basic unit of language is itself the product of differences between other elements within the system. This principle of differential – and structural – relation was extended by Troubetzkoy to the order of phonemes, whereby a defining set of vocalic differences underlies the constitution of all linguistic phonemes. Finally, for Saussure, the closed set of signs is governed by a system of grammatical, phonemic, and syntactic rules. Language thus derives its significance from its own autonomous organization, and this serves to guarantee its communicative function.
Since language is the foremost instance of social sign systems in general, the structural account might serve as an exemplary model for understanding the very intelligibility of social systems as such – hence, its obvious relevance to the broader concerns of the social and human sciences. This implication was raised by Saussure himself, in his Course on General Linguistics (1916), but it was advanced dramatically by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss – who is generally acknowledged to be the founder of modern structuralism – in his extensive analyses in the area of social anthropology, beginning with his Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). Lévi-Strauss argued that society is itself organized according to one form or another of significant communication and exchange – whether this be of information, knowledge, or myths, or even of its members themselves. The organization of social phenomena could thus be clarified through a detailed elaboration of their subtending structures, which, collectively, testify to a deeper and all-inclusive, social rationality. As with the analysis of language, these social structures would be disclosed, not by direct observation, but by inference and deduction from the observed empirical data. Furthermore, since these structures are models of specific relations, which in turn express the differential properties of the component elements under investigation, the structural analysis is both readily formalizable and susceptible to a broad variety of applications. In Britain, e.g., Edmund Leach pursued these analyses in the domain of social anthropology; in the United States, Chomsky applied insights of structuralism to linguistic theory and philosophy of mind; in Italy, Eco conducted extensive structuralist analyses in the fields of social and literary semiotics.
With its acknowledgment that language is a rule-governed social system of signs, and that effective communication depends on the resources available to the speaker from within the codes of language itself, the structuralist approach tends to be less preoccupied with the more traditional considerations of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘history’ in its treatment of meaningful discourse. In the post-structuralism that grew out of this approach, the French philosopher Foucault, e.g., focused on the generation of the ‘subject’ by the various epistemic discourses of imitation and representation, as well as on the institutional roles of knowledge and power in producing and conserving particular ‘disciplines’ in the natural and social sciences. These disciplines, Foucault suggested, in turn govern our theoretical and practical notions of madness, criminality, punishment, sexuality, etc., notions that collectively serve to ‘normalize’ the individual subject to their determinations. Likewise, in the domain of psychoanalysis, Lacan drew on the work of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss to emphasize Freud’s concern with language and to argue that, as a set of determining codes, language serves to structure the subject’s very unconscious. Problematically, however, it is the very dynamism of language, including metaphor, metonymy, condensation, displacement, etc., that introduces the social symbolic into the constitution of the subject. Althusser applied the principles of structuralist methodology to his analysis of Marxism, especially the role played by contradiction in understanding infrastructural and superstructural formation, i.e., for the constitution of the historical dialectic. His account followed Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach, at once denying the role of traditional subjectivity and humanism, and presenting a ‘scientific’ analysis of ‘historical materialism,’ one that would be anti-historicist in principle but attentive to the actual political state of affairs. For Althusser, such a philosophical analysis helped provide an ‘objective’ discernment to the historical transformation of social reality. The restraint the structuralists extended toward the traditional views of subjectivity and history dramatically colored their treatment both of the individuals who are agents of meaningful discourse and of the linguistically articulable object field in general. This redirection of research interests (particularly in France, due to the influential work of Barthes and Michel Serres in the fields of poetics, cultural semiotics, and communication theory) has resulted in a series of original analyses and also provoked lively debates between the adherents of structuralist methodology and the more conventionally oriented schools of thought (e.g., phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism, and empiricist and positivist philosophies of science). These debates served as an agency to open up subsequent discussions on deconstruction and postmodernist theory for the philosophical generation of the 1980s and later.
These post-structuralist thinkers were perhaps less concerned with the organization of social phenomena than with their initial constitution and subsequent dynamics. Hence, the problematics of the subject and history – or, in broader terms, temporality itself – were again engaged. The new discussions were abetted by a more critical appraisal of language and tended to be anti- Hegelian in their rejection of the totalizing tendency of systematic metaphysics. Heidegger’s critique of traditional metaphysics was one of the major influences in the discussions following structuralism, as was the reexamination of Nietzsche’s earlier accounts of ‘genealogy,’ his antiessentialism, and his teaching of a dynamic ‘will to power.’ Additionally, many poststructuralist philosophers stressed the Freudian notions of the libido and the unconscious as determining factors in understanding not only the subject, but the deep rhetorical and affective components of language use. An astonishing variety of philosophers and critics engaged in the debates initially framed by the structuralist thinkers of the period, and their extended responses and critical reappraisals formed the vibrant, poststructuralist period of French intellectual life. Such figures as Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Kristeva, Maurice Blanchot, Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Irigaray inaugurated a series of contemporary reflections that have become international in scope.
See also CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY , DECONSTRUCTION , FOUCAULT , HEIDEGGER , LACAN , LYOTARD , POSTMODERN , SAUSSUR. D.Al.