Alternatively, as summarized by philosopherSimon Blackburn, structuralism is:[2]
"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."
The termstructuralism is ambiguous, referring to different schools of thought in different contexts. As such, the movement inhumanities andsocial sciences called structuralism relates tosociology.Emile Durkheim based his sociological concept on 'structure' and 'function', and from his work emerged the sociological approach ofstructural functionalism.
Apart from Durkheim's use of the termstructure, thesemiological concept ofFerdinand de Saussure became fundamental for structuralism. Saussure conceived language and society as a system of relations. His linguistic approach was also a refutation ofevolutionary linguistics.
Structuralism in Europe developed in the early 20th century, mainly inFrance and theRussian Empire, in thestructural linguistics ofFerdinand de Saussure and the subsequentPrague,Moscow, andCopenhagen schools of linguistics. As an intellectual movement, structuralism became the heir toexistentialism. After World War II, an array of scholars in thehumanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields. French anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such scholar, sparking a widespread interest in structuralism.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s,existentialism, such as that propounded byJean-Paul Sartre, was the dominant Europeanintellectual 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 historianMichel Foucault,Jacques Derrida,Marxist philosopherLouis Althusser, andliterary criticRoland Barthes. Though elements of their work necessarily relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists eventually came to be referred to aspost-structuralists. Many proponents of structuralism, such asLacan, continue to influencecontinental philosophy and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralism's post-structuralist critics are a continuation of structuralist thinking.
Russian functional linguistRoman Jakobson was a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology, and literary theory. Jakobson was a decisive influence on anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss, by whose work the termstructuralism first appeared in reference tosocial sciences. Lévi-Strauss' work in turn gave rise to the structuralist movement inFrance, 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 asLouis Althusser andpsychoanalystJacques Lacan, as well as thestructural Marxism ofNicos Poulantzas.Roland Barthes andJacques Derrida focused on how structuralism could be applied toliterature.
Saussure argued for a distinction betweenlangue (an idealized abstraction of language) andparole (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.'"[4]
Structuralism rejected the concept ofhuman freedom and choice, focusing instead on the way that human experience and behaviour is determined by various structures. The most important initial work on this score was Lévi-Strauss's 1949 volumeThe Elementary Structures of Kinship. Lévi-Strauss had knownRoman Jakobson during their time together at theNew School inNew York duringWWII and was influenced by both Jakobson's structuralism, as well as the Americananthropological tradition.
InElementary Structures, he examinedkinship systems from a structural point of view and demonstrated how apparently different social organizations were different permutations of a few basic kinship structures. In the late 1958, he publishedStructural Anthropology, a collection of essays outlining his program for structuralism.
Blending Freud and Saussure, French(post)structuralistJacques Lacan applied structuralism topsychoanalysis. Similarly,Jean Piaget applied structuralism to the study ofpsychology, though in a different way. Piaget, who would better define himself asconstructivist, considered structuralism as "a method and not a doctrine," because, for him, "there exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic."[5]
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."[6] In Lacan'spsychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of "the Symbolic" is distinguished both from "the Real" and "the Imaginary;" similarly, in Althusser'sMarxist theory, the structural order of thecapitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from theideological forms in which those relations are understood.
Although French theoristLouis Althusser is often associated with structuralsocial analysis, which helped give rise to "structural Marxism," such association was contested by Althusser himself in the Italian foreword to the second edition ofReading 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.[7]
asignifiant ('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, any kind of text, physical realization as part of aspeech act.
asignifié ('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.[9]
Although not fully developed by Saussure, other key notions in structural linguistics can be found in structural "idealism." Astructural idealism is a class of linguistic units (lexemes,morphemes, or evenconstructions) that are possible in a certain position in a givensyntagm, or linguistic environment (such as a given sentence). The different functional role of each of these members of theparadigm is called 'value' (French:valeur).
In France,Antoine Meillet andÉmile Benveniste continued Saussure's project, and members of thePrague school of linguistics such asRoman Jakobson andNikolai Trubetzkoy conducted influential research. The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies inphonemics. 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 distinctphonemes 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 ofcontrastive features also opens up comparative scope—for instance, it makes clear the difficultyJapanese speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ inEnglish 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.
According to structural theory inanthropology andsocial anthropology,meaning is produced and reproduced within a culture through various practices, phenomena, and activities that serve as systems of signification.
A structuralist approach may study activities as diverse as food-preparation and serving rituals, religious rites, games, literary and non-literary texts, and other forms of entertainment to discover the deep structures by which meaning is produced and reproduced within the culture. For example,Lévi-Strauss analysed in the 1950s cultural phenomena including mythology, kinship (thealliance theory and theincest taboo), and food preparation. In addition to these studies, he produced more linguistically-focused writings in which he applied Saussure's distinction betweenlangue andparole in his search for the fundamental structures of the human mind, arguing that the structures that form the "deep grammar" of society originate in the mind and operate in people unconsciously. Lévi-Strauss took inspiration frommathematics.[10]
Another concept used in structural anthropology came from thePrague school of linguistics, whereRoman Jakobson and others analysed sounds based on the presence or absence of certain features (e.g., voiceless vs. voiced). Lévi-Strauss included this in his conceptualization of the universal structures of the mind, which he held to operate based on pairs ofbinary oppositions such as hot-cold, male-female, culture-nature, cooked-raw, or marriageable vs. tabooed women.
A third influence came fromMarcel Mauss (1872–1950), who had written ongift-exchange systems. Based on Mauss, for instance, Lévi-Strauss argued analliance theory—that kinship systems are based on the exchange of women between groups—as opposed to the 'descent'-based theory described byEdward Evans-Pritchard andMeyer Fortes. While replacing Mauss at hisEcole Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair, the writings of Lévi-Strauss became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s and gave rise to the term "structuralism" itself.
In Britain, authors such asRodney Needham andEdmund Leach were highly influenced by structuralism. Authors such asMaurice Godelier and Emmanuel Terray combinedMarxism with structural anthropology in France. In the United States, authors such asMarshall Sahlins andJames Boon built on structuralism to provide their own analysis of human society. Structural anthropology fell out of favour in the early 1980s for a number of reasons. D'Andrade suggests that this was because it made unverifiable assumptions about the universal structures of the human mind. Authors such asEric Wolf argued thatpolitical economy andcolonialism should be at the forefront of anthropology. More generally, criticisms of structuralism byPierre Bourdieu led to a concern with how cultural and social structures were changed by human agency and practice, a trend whichSherry Ortner has referred to as 'practice theory'.
One example is Douglas E. Foley'sLearning Capitalist Culture (2010), in which he applied a mixture of structural and Marxist theories to his ethnographicfieldwork among high school students in Texas. Foley analyzed how they reach a shared goal through the lens of social solidarity when he observed "Mexicanos" and "Anglo-Americans" come together on the same football team to defeat the school's rivals.[11]: 36–7 However, he also continually applies a marxist lens and states that he, "wanted to wow peers with a new cultural marxist theory of schooling."[11]: 176
Some anthropological theorists, however, while finding considerable fault with Lévi-Strauss's version of structuralism, did not turn away from a fundamental structural basis for human culture. TheBiogenetic Structuralism group for instance argued that some kind of structural foundation for culture must exist because all humans inherit the same system of brain structures. They proposed a kind ofneuroanthropology which would lay the foundations for a more complete scientific account of cultural similarity and variation by requiring an integration ofcultural anthropology andneuroscience—a program that theorists such asVictor Turner also embraced.
Inliterary theory, structuralist criticism relates literary texts to a larger structure, which may be a particulargenre, a range ofintertextual connections (such as patterns ofmetaphor[12]),a model of a universalnarrative structure, or a system of recurrent patterns or motifs.[13][14]
The field ofstructuralist semiotics argues that there must be a structure in every text, which explains why it is easier for experienced readers than for non-experienced readers to interpret a text.[15] Everything that is written seems to be governed by rules, or "grammar of literature", that one learns in educational institutions and that are to be unmasked.[16]
A potential problem for a structuralist interpretation is that it can be highly reductive; as scholarCatherine Belsey puts it: "the structuralist danger of collapsing all difference."[17] An example of such a reading might be if a student concludes the authors ofWest Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy+ Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group- Girl's Group" or "Opposing forces") and conflict is resolved by their deaths. Structuralist readings focus on how the structures of the single text resolve inherent narrative tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on multiple texts, there must be some way in which those texts unify themselves into a coherent system. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of twofriendly families ("Boy's Family+ Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy- Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.
Structuralist literary criticism argues that the "literary banter of a text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed. Literary structuralism often follows the lead ofVladimir Propp,Algirdas Julien Greimas, andClaude Lévi-Strauss in seeking out basic deep elements in stories,myths, and more recently, anecdotes, which are combined in various ways to produce the many versions of the ur-story or ur-myth.
There is considerable similarity between structural literary theory andNorthrop Frye'sarchetypal criticism, which is also indebted to the anthropological study of myths. Some critics have also tried to apply the theory to individual works, but the effort to find unique structures in individual literary works runs counter to the structuralist program and has an affinity withNew Criticism.
Yifu Lin criticizes early structural economic systems and theories, discussing the failures of it. He writes:
"The structuralism believes that the failure to develop advanced capital-intensive industries spontaneously in a developing country is due to market failures caused by various structural rigidities..." "According to neoliberalism, the main reason for the failure of developing countries to catch up with developed countries was too much state intervention in the market, causing misallocation of resources, rent seeking and so forth."
Rather these failures are more so centered around the unlikelihood of such quick development of these advanced industries within developing countries.[18]
NSE studies two parts:the base and the superstructure. A base is a combination of forces and relations of production, consisting of, but not limited to, industry and technology, while the superstructure consists of hard infrastructure and institutions. This results in an explanation of how the base impacts the superstructure which then determinestransaction costs.[19]
Structuralism is less popular today than other approaches, such aspost-structuralism anddeconstruction. Structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical and for favouringdeterministic structural forces over theability of people to act. As the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (particularly thestudent uprisings of May 1968) began affecting academia, issues of power and political struggle moved to the center of public attention.[20]
In the 1980s,deconstruction—and its emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language rather than its logical structure—became popular. By the end of the century, structuralism was seen as a historically importantschool of thought, but the movements that it spawned, rather than structuralism itself, commanded attention.[21]
Several social theorists and academics have strongly criticized structuralism or even dismissed it. Frenchhermeneutic philosopherPaul Ricœur (1969) criticized Lévi-Strauss for overstepping the limits ofvalidity of the structuralist approach, ending up in what Ricœur described as "aKantianism without atranscendental subject."[22]
'Structuralism' came to have something of the momentum of a millennial movement and some of its adherents felt that they formed asecret society of the seeing in a world of the blind. Conversion was not just a matter of accepting a new paradigm. It was, almost, a question of salvation.
Philip Noel Pettit (1975) called for an abandoning of "thepositivist dream which Lévi-Strauss dreamed forsemiology," arguing that semiology is not to be placed among thenatural sciences.[24]Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) criticized structuralism as failing to explainsymbolic mediation in the social world;[25] he viewed structuralism as a variation on the "logicist" theme, arguing that, contrary to what structuralists advocate, language—and symbolic systems in general—cannot be reduced to logical organizations on the basis of thebinary logic ofoppositions.[26]
^Deleuze, Gilles. [2002] 2004. "How Do We Recognise Structuralism?" Pp. 170–92 inDesert Islands and Other Texts 1953-1974 (Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents series), translated by D. Lapoujade, edited by M. Taormina. Los Angeles:Semiotext(e).ISBN1-58435-018-0. pp. 171–73.
^Louis Althusser andÉtienne Balibar.Reading Capital trans. Ben Brewster. London: NLB, 1970. p. 7.
^abE. Foley, Douglas (2010).Learning Capitalist Culture: Deep in the Heart of Tejas. Baltimore, MD: University of Pennsylvania.ISBN978-0-8122-2098-8.OCLC461631692.
^Barry, P. 2002. "Structuralism." Pp. 39–60 inBeginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory. Manchester:Manchester University Press.
^Nöth, Winfried. 1995.Handbook of Semiotics. Indiana University Press. p. 312.
^Selden, Raman, Peter Widdowson, and Peter Brooker. 2005.A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (5th ed.). Harlow. p. 76.
^Belsey, Catherine. 1983. "Literature, History, Politics." Pp. 17–27 inLiterature and History 9.
^Yifu Lin, Justin (January 2019). "New Structural Economics: The Third Generation of Development Economics".Boston University: Global Development Policy Center:2–3.
^"About NSE".Institute of New Structural Economics. June 17, 2024.
^Ricœur, Paul. [1969] 2004.The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics [Le conflit des interprétations: Essais d’herméneutique].Continuum. pp. 49, 78ff.
^Kuper, Adam. 1973.Anthropologists and Anthropology: The British School 1922–72. Penguin. p. 206.
^Castoriadis, Cornelius. [1975] 1987.The Imaginary Institution of Society [L'institution imaginaire de la société]. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 116–17.
^C. Castoriadis (1997),The Imaginary: Creation in the Social-Historical Domain. In:World in Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 3–18.
^Habermas, J. (1990),The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (originally published in German in 1985 asDer Philosophische Diskurs der Moderne), MIT Press, 1990, p. 276.
^Giddens, Anthony. 1993.New rules of sociological method: A positive critique of interpretative sociologies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p. 121.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1973. "À quoi reconnaît-on le structuralisme?" Pp. 299–335 inHistoire de la philosophie, Idées, Doctrines. Vol. 8: Le XXe siècle, edited byF. Châtelet. Paris:Hachette
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