Continental · 1916 – 1970s
Structuralism
Meaning comes not from things in themselves but from their differences within a system, so culture, like language, can be read as structure.
What hidden systems give words, myths and customs their meaning?
Saussure’s lectures, published by his students in 1916, studied language as a system at one moment rather than as a history of words. Lévi-Strauss, who learned structural linguistics from Roman Jakobson in wartime New York, applied the method to kinship and myth, and in 1950s–60s Paris it became the main alternative to existentialism’s focus on the free subject.
The sign “cat” means what it does not because of any natural link to cats but because it differs from “cap”, “bat” and “dog”. If meaning is relational, then to understand a myth, a menu or a fashion we should map the system of oppositions behind it (raw/cooked, nature/culture), which operates mostly without the awareness of those who use it.
- The link between signifier and signified is arbitrary.
- In language there are only differences.
- Deep structures, not individual intentions, organise culture.
It founded semiotics and transformed anthropology, literary criticism and psychoanalysis, and its critics became the post-structuralists.
Thinkers
1857–1913Ferdinand de SaussureGeneva linguist whose lectures founded structural linguistics1908–2009Claude Lévi-StraussFrench anthropologist who founded structural anthropology1915–1980Roland BarthesFrench critic who read everyday culture as signsKey texts
Where it came from
Reacted againstExistentialismLévi-Strauss attacked Sartre’s subject-centred philosophy of history; structures, not free choices, moved to the fore.
What it led to
Carried on byPost-structuralismPost-structuralists took Saussure’s point that meaning comes from difference and turned it against the idea of closed, stable structures.
Its answers to the big questions
Logic & languageCan words grasp the truth?Signs mean by their differences from other signs, not by naming things.On the record
Structuralism is drawn from 1916 to 1980.
A convention: 1916 is the publication of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; structuralism rose in France after the war with Lévi-Strauss (1949) and peaked in the 1960s; by the late 1960s its tenets were attacked by the post-structuralists, and 1980 marks Barthes’s death.
Sources: Wikipedia, “Structuralism”