Structuralism

1)  History and Main Principles of Structuralism?

Structuralism is an intellectual tendency that aims to explain and interpret social reality through social structures. Positions, units, levels, regions and locations, and social formations are all examples of structures, which are defined as patterns and forms of social connections and combinations among a collection of constituent social elements or component parts.

Structuralism operates on two levels of analysis: as a method of analysis or procedure of knowing (epistemology), and as an ontology or metaphysical design of social reality. It also favours two alternative meta-theoretical viewpoints on social reality: social structure as an empirical and historical fact, and social structure as a model or representation of reality.

These analytic dimensions provide a conceptual property space that accommodates the major theories of structuralism that exist today, such as sociological structuralism, symbolic structuralism, historical structuralism, and orthodox structuralism. Marx, Durkheim, Saussure, Piaget, Lévi-Strauss, and Althusser are key figures in interpreting structuralism.

Structuralism emerged in Europe in the early twentieth century, primarily in France and the Russian Empire, from Ferdinand de Saussure’s structural linguistics and the succeeding Prague, Moscow, and Copenhagen schools of linguistics. As a philosophical movement, structuralism succeeded existentialism. Following World War II, a slew of humanities experts appropriated Saussure’s ideas for application in their own fields. Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist, was perhaps the first of these scholars, and his work sparked worldwide interest in structuralism.

The structuralist way of reasoning has since been used in anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics, and architecture, among other subjects. Along with Lévi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jakobson and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan are two of the most well-known intellectuals linked with structuralism. By the late 1960s, a new group of primarily French intellectuals/philosophers, including historian Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and literary critic Roland Barthes, had attacked many of structuralism’s key assumptions.

These thinkers later became known as post-structuralists, despite the fact that components of their work are inextricably linked to and shaped by structuralism. Many structuralist proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to influence continental philosophy, and many of the core assumptions of structuralism’s post-structuralist detractors are structuralist thinking.

Proponents of structuralism say that a certain domain of culture may be comprehended via the use of a structure based on language that is different from both reality and the “third order” of ideas and imagination. The structural order of “the Symbolic” is distinguished both from “the Real” and “the Imaginary” in Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory; similarly, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinguished both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood in Althusser’s Marxist theory.

2) Main Thinkers of Structuralism:

Saussure:

The beginnings of structuralism can be traced back to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics work, as well as the Prague and Moscow schools’ linguistics. Saussure’s structural linguistics proposed three related notions in summary. Saussure proposed a separation between langue and parole (an idealised abstraction of language) (language as actually used in daily life). A “sign” is made up of a “signified” (signifié, i.e. an abstract concept or idea) and a “signifier” (signifiant, i.e. the experienced sound/visual picture), according to him.

There is no inherent reason why a specific signifier is employed to convey a given concept or idea because different languages have different terms for the same things or concepts. As aresult, it’s “arbitrary.” The interactions and contrasts between signs give signs their meaning. “There are only differences ‘without positive terms’ in language,” he wrote.

Lévi-Strauss:

Structuralism denied the concept of human freedom and choice, focusing instead on how various structures shape human experience and behaviour. The most notable early study on this topic was the Lévi-Strauss’s Elementary Structures of Kinship, published in 1949. During their time together at the New School in New York during WWII, Lévi-Strauss met Roman Jakobson and was affected by both Jakobson’s structuralism and the American anthropological tradition.

He looked at kinship systems from a structural standpoint in Elementary Structures, demonstrating how seemingly various social institutions were only mere permutations of a few basic kinship structures. He released Structural Anthropology, a collection of essays describing his structuralism programme, in the late 1950s.

Lacan and Piaget:

Jacques Lacan, a French (post)structuralist, combined Freud and Saussure to apply structuralism to psychoanalysis. Similarly, although in a different way, Jean Piaget brought structuralism to the study of psychology. Piaget, who preferred the term constructivist, saw structuralism as “a method, not a doctrine,” because “there is no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic,” according to him.

Althusser:

Although the French thinker Louis Althusser is sometimes associated with structural social analysis, which helped to give rise to “structural Marxism,” Althusser himself disputed this association in the Italian foreword to the second edition of Reading Capital. “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,” writes Althusser in the foreword. “With a few exceptions, our interpretation of Marx has been widely acknowledged and judged as ‘structuralist,’ in keeping with current fashion…. Despite the terminological ambiguity, we believe our writings’ fundamental propensity was not associated with ‘structuralist’ ideology.”

Assiter:

Alison Assiter, a feminist theorist, outlined four themes common to many types of structuralism in a later version. The position of each part of a whole is determined by a structure; second, every system has a structure; third, structural laws deal with coexistence rather than change; and fourth, structures are the “real things” that lay under the surface or the appearance of meaning.

3) Criticism of Structuralism:

In literary theory, structuralist critique connects literary pieces to a broader structure, which could be a genre, a set of intertextual relationships, a model of a universal narrative framework, or a set of recurring patterns or motifs.

The field of structuralist semiotics contends that every text must have a structure, which explains why experienced readers have an easier time interpreting a text than nonexperienced readers. Everything written appears to be guided by rules, or “literary grammar,” that are learned in educational institutions and must be uncovered.

A structuralist interpretation’s possible drawback is that it might be very restrictive; as scholar Catherine Belsey describes it, “the structuralist danger of compressing all difference.” If a student believes that the authors of West Side Story did not write anything “truly” unique its is because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In both works, a girl and a boy fall in love despite belonging to two opposing groups and the struggle is resolved by their deaths.

Structuralist readings concentrate on how the text’s structures resolve inherent narrative tensions. If a structuralist reading focuses on several texts, those texts must somehow come together to form a cohesive system. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story about two friendly families who arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other (Boy-Girl Dilemma), and then the children commit suicide to avoid the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story’s structure is an “inversion” of the first story’s structure: the link between love’s values and the two parties involved has been flipped around.

The “literary novelty of a work,” according to structuralist literary criticism, can only be found in new structure, not in the particular of character development and voice in which that structure is conveyed. Literary structuralism frequently follows in the footsteps of Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Claude Lévi-Strauss in looking for basic deep elements in stories, myths, and more recently, anecdotes, which are then combined in various ways to produce the many editions of the ur-story or ur-myth.

The structural literary theory and Northrop Frye’s archetypal criticism, which is similarly based on the anthropological study of myths, have a lot in common. Some critics have attempted to apply the theory to particular works, however this endeavour goes opposite to the structuralist aim and has affinities with New Criticism.

Other methods, like as post-structuralism and deconstruction, are more prevalent today than structuralism. Structuralism has been chastised for being ahistorical and for prioritising deterministic structural factors over people’s power to act. As the political turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s began to touch academia (especially the student protests of May 1968), themes of power and political conflict became more prominent.

Deconstruction became popular in the 1980s, with its emphasis on the intrinsic ambiguity of language rather than its logical structure. By the turn of the century, structuralism had established itself as a historically significant school of thought, but it was the movements that it spawned that drew the most attention, not structuralism itself.

Numerous social theorists and academicians have harshly attacked or discarded structuralism. Lévi-Strauss was chastised by French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1969) for going beyond the structuralist approach’s limitations of validity, resulting in “Kantianism without a transcendental subject.”

‘Structuralism’ gained the impetus of a millennial movement, according to anthropologist Adam Kuper (1973), and some of its members believed they formed a secret society of the seeing in a world of the blind. Accepting a new paradigm was not enough for conversion. It was nearly a case of life and death.

Philip Noel Pettit (1975) argued that semiology should not be classified among the scientific sciences because of “the positivist fantasy” that Lévi-Strauss had for it. Cornelius Castoriadis (1975) criticised structuralism for failing to explain symbolic mediation in the social world; he saw structuralism as a variation on the “logicist” theme, making the argument that, contrary to structuralists’ claims, language and symbolic systems in general cannot be reduced to logical organisations based on binary opposition logic.

Jürgen Habermas (1985), a critical theorist, accused structuralists like Foucault of being positivists; according to Habermas, while Foucault is not a typical positivist, he ironically utilises scientific means to attack science. Another important critic is sociologist Anthony Giddens (1993); although Giddens draws on a variety of structuralist topics in his theorising, he denies the structuralist assumption that social system replication is essentially “a mechanical conclusion.”