Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system.Calhoun, Craig, ed. 2002. "Structuralism." In Dictionary of the Social Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Alternatively, as summarized by philosopher Simon Blackburn, structuralism is:Blackburn, Simon, ed. 2008. "Structuralism." In Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd rev. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. . p. 353."The belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure."
History and background The term structuralism is ambiguous, referring to different schools of thought in different contexts. As such, the movement in humanities and social sciences called structuralism relates to sociology. Emile Durkheim based his sociological concept on 'structure' and 'function', and from his work emerged the sociological approach of structural functionalism.
Apart from Durkheim's use of the term structure, the semiological concept of Ferdinand de Saussure became fundamental for structuralism. Saussure conceived language and society as a system of relations. His linguistic approach was also a refutation of evolutionary linguistics.
Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 20th century, mainly in France and the Russian Empire, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague, Moscow, and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. After World War II, an array of scholars in the humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.
Russian functional linguist Roman Jakobson was an important figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory. Jakobson influenced anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, by whose work the term structuralism first appeared in reference to social sciences. Lévi-Strauss' work in turn gave rise to the structuralist movement in France, also called French structuralism, influencing the thinking of other writers, most of whom disavowed themselves as being a part of this movement. This included such writers as Louis Althusser and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, as well as the structural Marxism of Nicos Poulantzas. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied to literature.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism, such as that propounded by Jean-Paul Sartre, had been the dominant European intellectual movement. Structuralism rose to prominence in France in the wake of existentialism, particularly in the 1960s. The initial popularity of structuralism in France led to its spread across the globe. By the early 1960s, structuralism as a movement was coming into its own and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that would embrace all disciplines.
By the late 1960s, many of structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly French intellectuals/philosophers such as historian Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and literary critic Roland Barthes. Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists eventually came to be referred to as post-structuralists. Many proponents of structuralism, such as Lacan, continue to influence continental philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's post-structuralist critics are a continuation of structuralist thinking.
Ferdinand de Saussure The origins of structuralism are connected with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure on linguistics along with the linguistics of the Prague and Moscow schools. In brief, Saussure's structural linguistics propounded three related concepts.Blackburn, Simon, ed. 2008. "Structuralism." In Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd rev. ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. . p. 353.de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1916. Cours de linguistique generale, published by C. Bally and A. Sechehaye. Paris: Payot.
Saussure argued for a distinction between langue (an idealized abstraction of language) and parole (language as actually used in daily life). He argued that a "sign" is composed of a "signified" (signifié, i.e. an abstract concept or idea) and a "signifier" (signifiant, i.e. the perceived sound/visual image). Because different languages have different words to refer to the same objects or concepts, there is no intrinsic reason why a specific signifier is used to express a given concept or idea. It is thus "arbitrary." Signs gain their meaning from their relationships and contrasts with other signs. As he wrote, "in language, there are only differences 'without positive terms.de Saussure, Ferdinand. 1959. Course in General Linguistics, translated by W. Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library. p. 120.
Lévi-Strauss Structuralism emphasized underlying relations and systems rather than individual choice. One of the earliest and most influential works associated with this approach was Lévi-Strauss's 1949 study The Elementary Structures of Kinship. During World War II, Lévi-Strauss was at the New School in New York City, where he came into contact with Roman Jakobson; Jakobson's work, together with currents in American Anthropology, helped shape the development of his structural approach.
In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Lévi-Strauss examined kinship systems from a structural perspective, arguing that apparently dissimilar forms of social organization could be understood as permutations of a limited number of basic relations. He returned to these questions in Structural Anthropology (1958), a collection of essays that helped define the scope and method of structuralism.
Lacan and Piaget Blending Freud and Saussure, French (post)structuralist Jacques Lacan applied structuralism to psychoanalysis. Similarly, Jean Piaget applied structuralism to the study of psychology, though in a different way. Piaget, who would better define himself as constructivist, considered structuralism as "a method and not a doctrine," because, for him, "there exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic."Jean Piaget, Le structuralisme, ed. PUF, 1968.
'Third order' Proponents of structuralism argue that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a structure that is modelled on language and is distinct both from the organizations of reality and those of ideas, or the imagination—the "third order."Deleuze, Gilles. 2004. "How Do We Recognise Structuralism?" Pp. 170–92 in Desert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series), translated by D. Lapoujade, edited by M. Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). . pp. 171–73. In Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary;" similarly, in Althusser's Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood.
Althusser Although French theorist Louis Althusser is often associated with structural social analysis, which helped give rise to "structural Marxism," such association was contested by Althusser himself in the Italian foreword to the second edition of Reading Capital. In this foreword Althusser states the following: Despite the precautions we took to distinguish ourselves from the 'structuralist' ideology…, despite the decisive intervention of categories foreign to 'structuralism'…, the terminology we employed was too close in many respects to the 'structuralist' terminology not to give rise to an ambiguity. With a very few exceptions…our interpretation of Marx has generally been recognized and judged, in homage to the current fashion, as 'structuralist'.… We believe that despite the terminological ambiguity, the profound tendency of our texts was not attached to the 'structuralist' ideology.Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar. Reading Capital trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1970. p. 7.
Assiter In a later development, feminist theorist Alison Assiter enumerated four ideas common to the various forms of structuralism:
a structure determines the position of each element of a whole; every system has a structure; structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change; and structures are the "real things" that lie beneath the surface or the appearance of meaning.
In linguistics
In Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, the analysis focuses not on the use of language (parole, 'speech'), but rather on the underlying system of language (langue). This approach examines how the elements of language relate to each other in the present, synchronically rather than diachronically. Saussure argued that linguistic signs were composed of two parts:
a signifiant ('signifier'): the "sound pattern" of a word, either in mental projection—e.g., as when one silently recites lines from signage, a poem to one's self—or in actual speech, any kind of text, physical realization as part of a speech act. a signifié ('signified'): the concept or meaning of the word.
This differed from previous approaches that focused on the relationship between words and the things in the world that they designate.Suryo, Roy, and Talbot Roosevelt. . Landmarks in Linguistic Thought (1st ed.). pp. 178–79.
Although not fully developed by Saussure, other key notions in structural linguistics can be found in structural "idealism." A structural idealism is a class of linguistic units (lexemes, morphemes, or even constructions) that are possible in a certain position in a given syntagm, or linguistic environment (such as a given sentence). The different functional role of each of these members of the paradigm is called 'value' (French: ).
Prague School In France, Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste continued Saussure's project, and members of the Prague school of linguistics such as Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy conducted influential research. The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies in phonemics. Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague school examined how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analysed as a series of contrasts.
Thus, in English, the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct phonemes because there are cases (minimal pairs) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of contrastive features also opens up comparative scope—for instance, it makes clear the difficulty Japanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in English and other languages is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. Phonology would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different fields.
Based on the Prague school concept, André Martinet in France, J. R. Firth in the UK and Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark developed their own versions of structural and functional linguistics.
In anthropology
According to structural theory in anthropology and social anthropology, meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena, and activities that serve as systems of signification.