Some Elements of Structuralismand its Application to Literary Theory

This is a collection of ideas from various authors gathered together by Professor John Lye for the use of his students. This document is copyright John Lye 1996, but may be freely used for non-proft purposes. If you have any suggestions for improvement, please mail me.

I. General Principles

1. Meaning occurs through difference. Meaning is not identification of the sign with object in the real world or with some pre-existent concept or essential reality; rather it is generated by difference among signs in a signifying system. For instance, the meaning of the words "woman" and "lady" are established by their relations to one another in a meaning-field. They both refer to a human female, but what constitutes "human" and what constitutes "female" are themselves established through difference, not identity with any essence, or ideal truth, or the like.

2. Relations among signs are of two sorts, contiguity and substitutability, the axes of combination and selection: hence the existence of all 'grammars', hence all substitutions, hence the ability to know something by something else, or by a part of it in some way -- hence metonymy and metaphor. The conception of combination and selection provides the basis for an analysis of 'literariness' or 'poeticality' in the use, repetition and variation of sound patterns and combinations. It also provides keys to the most fundamental elements of culture. 3. Structuralism notes that much of our imaginative world is structured of, and structured by, binary oppositions (being/nothingness, hot/cold, culture/nature); these oppositions structure meaning, and one can describe fields of cultural thought, or topoi, by describing the binary sets which compose them. As an illustration, here is a binary set for the monstrous 4. Structuralism forms the basis for semiotics, the study of signs: a sign is a union of signifier and signified, and is anything that stands for anything else (or, as Umberto Eco put it, a sign is anything that can be used to lie).

5. Central too to semiotics is the idea of codes, which give signs context -- cultural codes, literary codes, etc. The study of semiotics and of codes opens up literary study to cultural study, and expands the resources of the critic in discussing the meaning of texts. Structuralism, says, Genette, "is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture." 6. Some signs carry with them larger cultural meanings, usually very general; these are called, by Roland Barthes, "myths", or second-order signifiers. Anything can be a myth. For example, two-story pillars supporting the portico of a house are a mythic signifier of wealth and elegance. 7. Structuralism introduces the idea of the 'subject', as opposed to the idea of the individual as a stable indivisible ego. Toquote from Kaja Silverman in The Subject of Semiotics,

The term 'subject' foregrounds the relationship between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics. It helps us to conceive of human reality as a construction, as the product of signifying activities which are both culturally specific and generally unconscious. The category of the subject thus calls into question the notions both of the private, and of a self synonymous with consciousness. It suggests that even desire is culturally instigated, and hence collective; and it de-centers consciousness, relegating it....to a purely receptive capacity. Finally, by drawing attention to the divisions which separate one area of psychic activity from another, the term 'subject' challenges the value of stability attributed to the individual.

The value of the conception is that it allows us to 'open up', conceptually, the inner world of humans, to see the relation of human experience to cultural experience, to talk cogently of meaning as something that is structured into our 'selves'.

There is no attempt here to challenge the meaningfulness of persons; there is an attempt to dethrone the ideology of the ego, the idea that the self is an eternal, indivisible essence, and an attempt to redefine what it is to be a

person. The self is, like other things, signified and culturally constructed. Post-structuralism, in particular, will insist that the subject is de-centered. 8. The conception of the constructed subject opens up the borders between the conscious and the unconscious. The unconscious itself is not some strange, impenetrable realm of private meaning but is constructed through the sign-systems and through the repressions of the culture. Both the self and the unconscious are cultural constructs. 9. In the view of structuralism our knowledge of 'reality' is not only coded but also conventional, that is, structured by and through conventions, made up of signs and signifying practices. This is known as "the social construction of reality." 10. There is, then, in structuralism, a coherent connection among the conceptions of reality, the social, the individual, the unconscious: they are all composed of the same signs, codes and conventions, all working according to similar laws.

II. Structuralism, culture and texts

1. Structuralism enables both the reading of texts and the reading of cultures: through semiotics, structuralism leads us to see everything as 'textual', that is, composed of signs, governed by conventions of meaning, ordered according to a pattern of relationships.

2. Structuralism enables us to approach texts historically or trans-culturally in a disciplined way. Whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, become dominant. 3. This sort of study opens up for serious cultural analysis texts which had hitherto been closed to such study because they did not conform to the rules of literature, hence were not literature but 'popular writing' or 'private writing' or 'history' and so forth. When the rules of literary meaning are seen as just another set of rules for a signifying arena of a culture, then literature loses some aspects of its privileged status, but gains in the strength and cogency of its relationship to other areas of signification. Hence literary study has expanded to the study of textuality, popular writing has been opened up to

serious study, and the grounds for the relationship between the meaning-conventions of literature and the way in which a culture imagines reality have been set, and we can speak more clearly of the relation of literary to cultural (or, 'human', or 'every-day') meanings. 4. As everything that can be known, can be known by virtue of its belonging to a signifying system, then everything can be spoken of as being textual.

a. All documents can be studied as texts -- for instance, history or sociology can be analyzed the way literature can be.

b. All of culture can be studied as text. Anthropology, among other fields, is revolutionized through ethnography; qualitative rather than quantitative study becomes more and more the norm in many areas of social science.

c. Belief-systems can be studied textually and their role in constructing the nature of the self understood.

5. Consequently much greater attention is paid to the nature of language-use in culture. Language-use relating to various social topics or areas of engagement has become known as "discourse." Although "discourse" is a term more prevalent in post-structuralist thinking, it is of its nature a structuralist development.

III. Structuralism and literature

See my summary of Gerard Genette's "Structuralism and Literary Criticism" for more ideas.

1. In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the complexity or meaning-power of literature but have in fact increased it, both in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and the text are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more apparent, as they share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then the culture's relation to the textuality of literature becomes more immediate, more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a discourse in a world of discourses, each discourse having its protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject area and so forth. 2. The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how 'reality' is

represented in art -- what we get is a 'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are 'naturalized', that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them -- or in another way of saying, made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is achieved through 'vraisemblance', truth-seeming, or 'naturalization'. Some elements of vraisemblance (from Culler, Structuralist Poetics) are as follows.

a. There is the socially given text, that which is taken as the 'real' world -- what is taken for granted. That we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon. (Every term of "we have minds and bodies", the relations between most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally specific assumptions.)

b. There is the general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of 'nature'. This is the level at which we interpret motive, character and significance from descriptions of action, dress, attitude and so forth. "Jake put on his tuxedo and tennis shoes" will provide an interpretation of Jake or will look forward to an explanation of why he broke the cultural code, in this case a dress code. "Harry gazed for hours on the picture of Esmeralda" is a culturally coded statement: we read Harry's attitude, and so forth. We 'imitate' 'reality' by recording cultural codes.

c. There are the conventions of genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance -- "the series of constituent conventions which enable various sorts of works to be written." The lines

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; The center cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

require certain conventions of reading. If we were to read it as part of a paragraph in Dickens they would make less sense. One convention of literature is that there is a persona who is articulating the text -- that it comes from some organizing consciousness which can be commented on and described. Genre is

another convention: each genre designates certain kinds of action as acceptable and excludes others.

d. There is what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its own authority. The narrator may claim that he is intentionally violating the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not the way it should be done according to the conventions, but that the way he is doing it serves some higher or more substantial purpose -- the appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility.

e. There is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities. "When a text cites or parodies the conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of interpretation where both terms of the opposition can be held together by the theme of literature itself." -- e.g. parody, when one exploits the particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces us to posit an alternate possibility or reality in the face of the reality-construction of the text. All surface incongruities register meaning at a level of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment as it were on the relation between 'textual' and 'interpretive' reality.

In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which 'describe' (or, construct) reality according to the conventions of representation of the time.

3. The conventions of reading. We read according to certain conventions; consequently our reading creates the meaning of that which we read. These conventions come in two 'layers':

a. how we (culturally) think that reality is or should be represented in texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of the art of the period, which will describe the way in which reality is apprehended or imagined, and

b. the conventions of 'literature' (and of 'art' generally), for instance,

a. the rule of significance whereby we raise the meaning of the text to its highest level of

generalizability (a tree blasted by lightning might become a figure of the power of nature, or of God);

b. the convention of figural coherence, through which we assume that figures (metonyms, metaphors, 'symbols') will have a signifying relationship to one another on a level of meaning more complex than or 'higher' than the physical;

c. the convention of thematic unity, whereby we assume that all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text. These are all conventions of reading.

4. The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to interpret for its contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that we learn how its contemporaries would have read them in order fully to understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence, the possession by the reader of protocols for reading. When one reads modernist texts, such as The Waste Land, one has to learn how to read them. One has in fact to learn how to read Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and so forth. Culler remarks that

reading poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it.

5. Structuralism is oriented toward the reader insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature, that is, reads the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural theorists, Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text entirely, through the conventions of reading of her interpretive community.

6. In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the focus on the message itself as opposed to a focus on the addressee, the addresser, or the referential function of the message, structuralism places

ambiguity, as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic function, as its self-referential nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality is complexly meaningful. 7. Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are approached, about conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of language use, and so forth. "Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values." (Genette) 8. The idea that literature is an institution is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its protocols for creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature. 9. Through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture. 10. The following are some points based on Culler's ideas about the advantages of structuralism, having to do with the idea that literature is a protocol of reading:

a. Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as literature than are other approaches, because literariness and/or fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in the way it is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears, it explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing reading protocols -- one can read a text for its 'literary' qualities or for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as complex a text in doing so.

b. One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent and related set of codes and practices, and so one sees also that reading is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaning-domain or set of codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written under these codes (it can

break or alter the codes to create effects, but this is still a function of the codes).

c. Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of literary conventions.

d. Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on conventions one can read 'against the grain' in a disciplined way, and one can read readings of literature -- reading can become a more self-reflexive process.

IV. Structural Analysis

As structuralism is so broad a theory with such extensive ramifications, there will be different ways of doing structural analysis. Here are some possible approaches.

1. The study of the basic codes which make narrative possible, and which make it work. This is known generally as narratology, and often produces what might be called a grammar of narrative. Greimas, Barthes, Todorov and others investigated what the components and relations of narrative are. This gives rise to such things as Barthes division of incidents into nuclei and catalyzers, and his promulgation of five codes of narrative, given briefly here, as adapted from Cohen and Shires:

1. proairetic -- things (events) in their sequence; recognizable actions and their effects.

2. semic -- the field where signifiers point to other signifiers to produce a chain of recognizable connotations. In a general sense, that which enables meaning to happen.

3. hermeneutic -- the code of narrative suspense, including the ways in which the story suspends closure, structures parallels, repetitions and so forth toward closure.

4. symbolic -- marks out meaning as difference; the binaries which the culture uses/enacts to create its meanings; binaries which, of course,but disunite and join.

5. reference -- refers to various bodies of knowledge which constitute the society; creates the familiarity of reality by quoting from a large assortment of social texts which mediate and organize cultural knowledge of reality -- medicine, law, morality,

psychology, philosophy, religion, plus all the clichs and proverbs of popular culture.

6. diegetic (C&S's addition) -- the narration, the text's encoding of narrative conventions that signify how it means as a telling.

2. The study of the construction of meaning in texts, as for instance through tropes, through repetitions with difference. Hayden White analyzes the structure of Western historical narrative through a theory of tropes; Lodge shows how metaphor and metonymy can be seen to form the bases respectively of symbolic and realist texts. 3. The study of mimesis, that is, of the representation of reality, becomes i) the study of naturalization, of the way in which reality effects are created and the way in which we create a sense of reality and meaning from texts; ii) the study of conventions of meaning in texts. 4. Texts are also analyzed for their structures of opposition, particularly binary oppositions, as informing structures and as representing the central concerns and imaginative structures of the society. 5. Texts can be analyzed as they represent the codes and conventions of the culture -- we can read the texts as ways of understanding the meaning-structures of the cultures and sub-cultures out of which they are written and which they represent.

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Structuralism/Poststructuralism

Structuralism is appealing to some critics because it adds a certain objectivity, a SCIENTIFIC objectivity, to the realm of literary studies (which have often been criticized as purely subjective/impressionistic). This scientific objectivity is achieved by subordinating "parole" to "langue;" actual usage is abandoned in favor of studying the structure of a system in the abstract. Thus structuralist readings ignore the specificity of actual texts and treat them as if they were like the patterns produced by iron filings moved by magnetic force--the result of some impersonal force or power, not the result of human effort.

In structuralism, the individuality of the text disappears in favor of looking at patterns, systems, and structures. Some structuralists (and a related school of critics, called the Russian Formalists) propose that ALL narratives can be charted as variations on certain basic universal narrative patterns. In this way of looking at narratives, the author is canceled out, since the text is a function of a system, not of an individual. The Romantic humanist model holds that the author is the origin of the text, its creator, and hence is the starting point or progenitor of the text. Structuralism argues that any piece of writing, or any signifying system, has no origin, and that authors merely inhabit pre-existing structures (langue) that enable them to make any particular sentence (or story)--any parole. Hence the idea that "language speaks us," rather than that we speak language. We don't originate language; we inhabit a structure that enables us to speak; what we (mis)perceive as our originality is simply our recombination of some of the elements in the pre-existing system. Hence every text, and every sentence we speak or write, is made up of the "already written." By focusing on the system itself, in a synchronic analysis, structuralists cancel out history. Most insist, as Levi-Strauss does, that structures are universal, therefore timeless. Structuralists can't account for change or development; they are uninterested, for example, in how literary forms may have changed over time. They are not interested in a text's production or reception/consumption, but only in the structures that shape it. In erasing the author, the individual text, the reader, and history, structuralism represented a major challenge to what we now call the "liberal humanist" tradition in literary criticism. The HUMANIST model presupposed:

1.) That there is a real world out there that we can understand with our rational minds. 2.) That language is capable of (more or less) accurately depicting that real world.. 3.) That language is a product of the individual writer's mind or free will, meaning that we determine what we say, and what we mean when we say it; that language thus expresses the essence of our individual beings (and that there is such a thing as an essential unique individual "self"). 4.) the SELF--also known as the "subject," since that's how we represent the idea of a self in language, by saying I, which is the subject of a sentence--or the individual (or the mind or the free will) is the center of all meaning and truth; words mean what I say they mean, and truth is what I perceive as truth. I create my own sentences out of my own individual experiences and need for individual expression.

The STRUCTURALIST model argues

1.) that the structure of language itself produces "reality"--that we can think only through language, and therefore our perceptions of reality are all framed by and determined by the structure of language. 2.) That language speaks us; that the source of meaning is not an individual's experience or being, but the sets of oppositions and operations, the signs and grammars that govern language. Meaning doesn't come from individuals, but from the system that governs what any individual can do within it. 3.) Rather than seeing the individual as the center of meaning, structuralism places THE STRUCTURE at the center--it's the structure that originates or produces meaning, not the individual self. Language in particular is the center of self and meaning; I can only say "I" because I inhabit a system of language in which the position of subject is marked by the first personal pronoun, hence my identity is the product of the linguistic system I occupy.

This is also where deconstruction starts to come in. The leading figure in deconstruction, Jacques Derrida, looks at philosophy (Western metaphysics) to see that any system necessarily posits a CENTER, a point from which everything comes, and to which everything refers or returns. Sometimes it's God, sometimes it's the human self, the mind, sometimes it's the unconscious, depending on what philosophical system (or set of beliefs) one is talking about. There are two key points to the idea of deconstruction. First is that we're still going to look at systems or structures, rather than at individual concrete practices, and that all systems or structures have a CENTER, the point of origin, the thing that created the system in the first place. Second is that all systems or structures are created of binary pairs or oppositions, of two terms placed in some sort of relation to each. Derrida says that such systems are always built of the basic units structuralism analyzes--the binary opposition or pair--and that within these systems one part of that binary pair is always more important than the other, that one term is "marked" as positive and the other as negative. Hence in the binary pair good/evil, good is what Western philosophy values, and evil is subordinated to good. Derrida argues that all binary pairs work this way--light/dark, masculine/feminine, right/left; in Western culture, the first term is always valued over the second. In his most famous work, Of Grammatology, Derrida looks particularly at the opposition speech/writing, saying that speech is always seen as more important than writing. This may not be as self-evident as the example of good/evil, but it's true in terms of linguistic theories, where speech is posited as the first or primary form of language, and writing is just the transcription of speech. Derrida says speech gets privileged

because speech is associated with presence--for there to be spoken language, somebody has to be there to be speaking. No, he doesn't take into account tape recordings and things like that. Remember, a lot of what these guys are talking about has roots in philosophic and linguistic traditions that predate modern technology--so that Derrida is responding to an opposition (speech/writing) that Plato set up, long before there were tape recorders. Just like poor old Levi-Strauss talks about how, in order to map all the dimensions of a myth, he'd have to have "punch cards and an IBM machine," when all he'd need now is a home computer. Anyway, the idea is that the spoken word guarantees the existence of somebody doing the speaking--thus it reinforces all those great humanist ideas, like that there's a real self that is the origin of what's being said. Derrida calls this idea of the self that has to be there to speak part of the metaphysics of PRESENCE; the idea of being, or presence, is central to all systems of Western philosophy, from Plato through Descartes (up to Derrida himself). Presence is part of a binary opposition presence/absence, in which presence is always favored over absence. Speech gets associated with presence, and both are favored over writing and absence; this privileging of speech and presence is what Derrida calls LOGOCENTRISM. You might think here about the Biblical phrase "Let there be light" as an example. The statement insures that there is a God (the thing doing the speaking), and that God is present (because speech=presence); the present God is the origin of all things (because God creates the world by speaking), and what God creates is binary oppositions (starting with light/dark). You might also think about other binary oppositions or pairs, including being/nothingness, reason/madness, word/silence, culture/nature, mind/body. Each term has meaning only in reference to the other (light is what is not dark, and vice-versa), just as, in Saussure's view, signifiers only have meaning--or negative value--in relation to other signifiers. These binary pairs are the "structures," or fundamental opposing ideas, that Derrida is concerned with in Western philosophy. Because of the favoring of presence over absence, speech is favored over writing (and, as we'll see with Freud, masculine is favored over feminine because the penis is defined as a presence, whereas the female genitals are defined as absence). It's because of this favoring of presence over absence that every system (I'm referring here mostly to philosophical systems, but the idea works for signifying systems as well) posits a CENTER, a place from which the whole system comes, and which guarantees its meaning--this center guarantees being as presence. Think of your entire self as a kind of system--everything you do, think, feel, etc. is part of that system. At the core or center of your mental and physical life is a notion of SELF, of an "I", of an identity that is stable and unified

and coherent, the part of you that knows who you mean when you say "I". This core self or "I" is thus the CENTER of the "system", the "langue" of your being, and every other part of you (each individual act) is part of the "parole". The "I" is the origin of all you say and do, and it guarantees the idea of your presence, your being. Western thought has a whole bunch of terms that serve as centers to systems --being, essence, substance, truth, form, consciousness, man, god, etc. What Derrida tells us is that each of these terms designating the center of a system serves two purposes: it's the thing that created the system, that originated it and guarantees that all the parts of the system interrelate, and it's also something beyond the system, not governed by the rules of the system. This is what he talks about as a "scandal" discovered by Levi-Strauss in Levi-Strauss's thoughts about kinship systems. (This will be covered in detail in the next lecture). What Derrida does is to look at how a binary opposition--the fundamental unit of the structures or systems we've been looking at, and of the philosophical systems he refers to--functions within a system. He points out that a binary opposition is algebraic (a=~b, a equals not-b), and that two terms can't exist without reference to the other--light (as presence) is defined as the absence of darkness, goodness the absence of evil, etc. He doesn't seek to reverse the hierarchies implied in binary pairs--to make evil favored over good, unconscious over consciousness, feminine over masculine. Rather, deconstruction wants to erase the boundaries (the slash) between oppositions, hence to show that the values and order implied by the opposition are also not rigid. Here's the basic method of deconstruction: find a binary opposition. Show how each term, rather than being polar opposite of its paired term, is actually part of it. Then the structure or opposition which kept them apart collapses, as we see with the terms nature and culture in Derrida's essay. Ultimately, you can't tell which is which, and the idea of binary opposites loses meaning, or is put into "play" (more on this in the next lecture). This method is called "Deconstruction" because it is a combination of construction/destruction--the idea is that you don't simply construct new system of binaries, with the previously subordinated term on top, nor do you destroy the old system--rather, you deconstruct the old system by showing how its basic units of structuration (binary pairs and the rules for their combination) contradict their own logic.

Suggestions for Further Information: Derrida for Beginners, Jim Powell Poststructuralism Poststructuralism as Theory and Practice in the English

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Structuralism and Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

Let's start by talking about structuralism in general as a philosophical stance or worldview. Structuralists are interested in the interrelationship between UNITS, also called "surface phenomena," and RULES, which are the ways that units can be put together. An example is Tinkertoys. The "units" in a tinkertoy set are all the parts in the box: the various colored rods of different lengths, the various kinds of connectors and wheels and attachments; the "rules" of tinkertoy construction is that rods go into holes. That's the structure of tinkertoys: everything you can make out of tinkertoys, whatever that may be, is made by using the units according to the rules. A structuralist analysis of tinkertoys wouldn't look at what you made (a building, a race car, a windmill, etc.) but would look only at the structure governing every possible combination of tinkertoy elements. And that structure is that rods go into holes.

That's what structuralist analysis does, whatever it's analyzing: looks at the units of a system, and the rules that make that system work,

without regard for any specific content. In language, for instance, structuralists (like Saussure) the units are words (or, actually, the 31 phonemes which make all the sounds of words in English) and the rules are the forms of grammar which order words. In different languages the grammar rules are different, as are the words, but the structure is still the same in all languages: words are put together within a grammatical system to make meaning.

An example of this idea of structure can be found in the game of "Mad Libs." In class I read an example, which asked for various nouns, adjectives, verbs, proper names, and exclamations. When plugged into a story, these randomly chosen parts of speech made a very silly narrative-- but one which was recognizable as a narrative because the parts of speech were appropriately placed: nouns went where nouns go, and verbs where verbs go, etc. In a sentence, any noun can replace any other noun and not change the grammatical structure: the sentence "My pencil ate my PT Cruiser" might not make any rational sense, but it's recognizable as a sentence because the parts of speech are all in the right places. Here's an example of this using literature. I'll give you three characters: princess, stepmother, and prince. Now you tell me the story. Many of you said "Cinderella," and others came up with other story titles. From a structuralist point of view, Cinderella is the same story as Snow White and as lots of other Disney stories and fairy tales: a princess is persecuted by a stepmother and rescued (and married) by a prince. The "units" here are the characters, and the "rules" are: stepmothers are evil, princesses are victims, and princes and princesses have to marry. Whatever details or added elements you supply, the basic structure of this story is always the same. And that's exactly what structuralist analyses of literature (or myth or other forms of narrative) are analyzing.

Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organize units and rules into meaningful systems are generated by the human mind itself, and not by sense perception. As such, the mind is itself a structuring mechanism which looks through units and files them according to rules. This is important, because it means that, for structuralists, the order that we perceive in the world is not inherent in the world, but is a product of our minds. It's not that there is no "reality out there," beyond human perception, but rather that there is too much "reality" (too many units of too many kinds) to be perceived coherently without some kind of "grammar" or system to organize and limit them.

So structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, and works to uncover all the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel--in mathematics, biology, linguistics, religion,

psychology, and literature, to name just a few disciplines that use structuralist analyses.

Structuralist analysis posits these systems as universal: every human mind in every culture at every point in history has used some sort of structuring principle to organize and understand cultural phenomena. For instance, every human culture has some sort of langauge, which has the basic structure of all language: words/phonemes are combined according to a grammar of rules to produce meaning. Every human culture similarly has some sort of social organization (like a kind of government), some sort of system for who can marry whom (usually referred to as a kinship system), and some sort of system for exchanging goods (usually referred to as an economic system). All of these organizations are governed, according to structuralist analyses, by structures which are universal.

For a more formal definition: a structure is any conceptual system that has the following three properties:

Wholeness. This means that the system functions as a whole, not just as a collection of independent parts. With the tinkertoy set, it's hard to play with just the individual items; you need the whole set, with all the rods and holes, and the rules they follow, in order to make stuff at all. Transformation. This means that the system is not static, but capable of change. New units can enter the system, but when they do they're governed by the rules of the system. With the tinkertoys, I can substitute a blue wheel for a yellow one, or an orange rod for a purple one, but rods still go into holes in order to create something. With tinkertoys, you could add any rods (of the right diameter) and any holes (ditto) and the system still works. Another example is the word "office"--normally it's a noun, but a Kinko's commercial has made it a verb, as in "a new way to office." The commercial creates a new word, "to office," and we know what it means because the structure it fits into hasn't changed. Self-Regulation. This is related to the idea of transformation. You can add elements to the system, but you can't change the basic structure of the system no matter what you add to it. The transformations of a system never lead to anything outside the system. We can add things to the tinkertoy set and never alter the fundamental rule that rods go into holes. (Stay tuned, though; poststructuralist theories will challenge this point).

Now then. On to Saussure, who is provides us with a structuralist analysis of language as a signifying system.

Why are we studying Saussure, a linguistic theorist, in a literature class? When we discard the assumptions of liberal humanism, we start our new conceptions of how literature operates by noting that, first and foremost, literature is made of language; to understand how literature works, we must therefore have some ideas about how language itself works. Saussure, as a structuralist, is interested in language as a system or structure. His ideas apply to any language--English, French, Farsi, computer languages--and to anything we can call a "signifying system" (more on what this is later). He describes the structures within any language which make meaning possible, but he's not interested in what particular meanings get created. Like all structuralists, he's not interested in the details of what fills up the structure, the specifics of speech or writing, but only in the design of the structure itself. SECTION I: THE NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN Language is based on a NAMING process, by which things get associated with a word or name. Saussure says this is a pretty naive or elementary view of language, but a useful one, because it gets across the idea that the basic linguistic unit has two parts. Those two parts Saussure names the "concept" and the "sound image". The sound image is not the physical sound (what your mouth makes and your ear hears) but rather the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes. An illustration of this is talking to yourself--you don't make a sound, but you have an impression of what you're saying. The linguistic SIGN (a key word) is made of the union of a concept and a sound image. The union is a close one, as one part will instantly conjure the other; Saussure's example is the concept "tree" and the various words for tree in different languages. When you are a speaker of a certain language, the sound image for tree in that language will automatically conjure up the concept "tree."  The MEANING of any SIGN is found in the association created between the sound image and the concept: hence the sounds "tree" in English mean the thing "tree." Meanings can (and do) vary widely, but only those meanings which are agreed upon and sanctioned within a particular language will appear to name reality. (More on this as we go on). A more common way to define a linguistic SIGN is that a SIGN is the combination of a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED. Saussure says the sound image is the SIGNIFIER and the concept the SIGNIFIED. You can also think of a word as a signifier and the thing it represents as a signified (though technically these are called sign and referent, respectively). The SIGN, as union of a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED, has two main characteristics.

1. The bond between the SIGNIFIER (SFR) and SIGNIFIED (SFD) is ARBITRARY. There is nothing in either the thing or the word that makes the two go together, no natural, intrinsic, or logical relation between a particular sound image and a concept. An

example of this is the fact that there are different words, in different languages, for the same thing. Dog is "dog" in English, "perro" in Spanish, "chien" in French, "Hund" in German. This principle dominates all ideas about the STRUCTURE of language. It makes it possible to separate the signifier and signified, or to change the relation between them. (This makes possible the idea of a single signifier which could be associated with more than one signified, or vice-versa, which makes AMBIGUITY and MULTIPLICITY OF MEANING possible.) Language is only one type of semiological system (the word "semiological," like the word "semiotic," comes from the Greek word for "sign"). Any system of signs, made up of signifiers and signifieds, is a semiotic or SIGNIFYING SYSTEM. Think, for example, of football referee signals, baseball signs, astrological signs. Any time you make up a secret code or set of signals you are making your own signifying system. There may be some kinds of signs that seem less arbitrary than others. Pantomime, sign language, gestures (what are often called "natural signs") seem to have a logical relation to what they represent. The tomahawk chop used by Atlanta Braves fans, for example, seems to imitate the action of chopping, and thus would be the most "natural" way to designate the idea of chopping. But Saussure insists that ALL SIGNS ARE ARBITRARY; the tomahawk chop only has meaning because a community has agreed upon what the gesture signifies, not because it has some intrinsic meaning. Saussure discusses whether symbols, such as the use of scales for the idea of justice, are innate or arbitrary, and decides that these too are arbitrary, or based on community agreement. He also dismisses onomatopoeia (words that sound like what they mean, like "pop" or "buzz") as still conventional, agreed-upon approximations of certain sounds. Think, for example, about the sounds attributed to animals. While all roosters crow pretty much the same way, that sound is transcribed in English as "cock-a-doodle-do" and in Spanish as "cocorico." Interjections also differ. In English one says "ouch!" when one bangs one's finger with a hammer; in French one says "Aie!" (Curse words work the same way. Come up with your own examples). Admittedly, Saussure is not very interested in how communities agree on fixing or changing the relationships between signifiers and signifieds. Like all structuralists, he focuses on a SYNCHRONIC analysis of language as a system or structure, meaning that he examines it only in the present moment, without regard to what its past history is, or what its future may be. (Analyses which do take time into account, and

look at the history of changes within a structure, are called DIACHRONIC). 2. The second characteristic of the SIGN is that the signifier (here, meaning the spoken word or auditory signifier) exists in TIME, and that time can be measured as LINEAR. You can't say two words at one time; you have to say one and then the next, in a linear fashion. (The same is true for written language: you have to write one word at a time (though you can write over an already written word) and you generally write the words in a straight line). This idea is important because it shows that language (spoken language, anyway) operates as a linear sequence, and that all the elements of a particular sequence form a chain. The easiest example of this is a sentence, where the words come one at a time and in a line, one after the other, and because of that they are all connected to each other.

SECTION II: LINGUISTIC VALUE According to Saussure's picture (p. 649a), thought is a shapeless mass, which is only ordered by language. One of the questions philosophers have puzzled over for centuries is whether ideas can exist at all without language. (Think, for example, about Helen Keller before she learned language--did she think?) Saussure says no ideas preexist language; language itself gives shape to ideas and makes them expressible. In other words, from Saussure's point of view, thought cannot exist without language. (This leads to an important structuralist and post-structuralist idea, which is that language shapes all our conceptions of ourselves and our reality. More on this later). Sound is no more fixed than thought, though sounds can be distinguished from each other, and hence associated with ideas. Sounds then serve as signifiers for the ideas which are their signifieds. Signs, in this view, are both material/physical (like sound) and intellectual (like ideas). This is important to Saussure because he wants to insist that language is not a thing, a substance, but a form, a structure, a system. His image is that thought and sound are like the front and back of a piece of paper (and the paper is the linguistic sign); you can distinguish between the two, but you can't separate them. Saussure (and other structuralist and post-structuralist theorists) talk about the system of language as a whole as LANGUE (from the French word for language), and any individual unit within that system (such as a word) as a PAROLE. Structuralist linguistics is more interested in the LANGUE than in any PAROLE. (Peter Barry, in Beginning Theory, talks about literary systems, like genre categories, as a form of LANGUE, and individual literary texts as examples of PAROLE). The arbitrary nature of the sign explains why language as a system (LANGUE) can only arise in social relations. It takes a community to set up the relations between any particular sound image and any particular concept (to

form specific PAROLES). An individual can't fix VALUE for any signifier/signified combination. You could make up your own private language, but no one else would understand it; to communicate, two or more people have to agree on what signifiers go with what signifieds. (And again, Saussure as a structuralist is not really interested in how this happens. Other theorists of language, such as 18th century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, focus on how these agreements come about). VALUE is thus defined as the collective meaning assigned to signs, to the connections between sfrs and sfds. The VALUE of a sign is determined, however, not by what signifiers get linked to what particular signifieds, but rather by the whole system of signs used within a community. VALUE is the product of a system or structure (LANGUE), not the result of individual sfr-sfd relations (PAROLE). Saussure distinguishes between VALUE and SIGNIFICATION. SIGNIFICATION is what we commonly think of as "meaning," the relationship established between a signifier and a signified. VALUE, by contrast, is the relation between various SIGNS within the signifying system. As Saussure says on p. 650b: "Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others." VALUE is always composed of two kinds of comparisons among elements in a system. The first is that dissimilar things can be compared and exchanged, and the second is that similar things can be compared and exchanged. A good example of this is money. A dime is a signifier connected to a signified of 10 cents of something. The VALUE of a dime is established because it can be exchanged for something dissimilar--a piece of gum--or something similar--ten pennies. (Coins are also good examples of the arbitrary nature of signs. A dime is worth 10 cents because we all agree that it is, not because the materials in the coin have some absolute value of 10 cents). Words work the same way. A word can be "exchanged" for something similar--another word, a synonym--or for something dissimilar--an idea, for example. In both cases (coin or word), it is the system itself which creates value, and sets up the ways that exchanges can be made. A signifier, such as a coin or a word, when considered alone, has only a limited relation to its own signified; when considered as part of a system, a signifier has multiple relations to other signifiers in the system. The most important relation between signifiers in a system, the relation that creates VALUE, is the idea of DIFFERENCE. One signifier has meaning within a system, not because it's connected to a particular signified, but because it is NOT any of the other signifiers in the system. The word "cat" has meaning, not because of the animal it's

associated with, but because that word is not "hat" or "bat" or "car" or "cut." You might think about the letters of the alphabet in this context. The sound "t-t-t-t", made with the tip of the tongue against the teeth, is represented in English with the symbol "T." Because the connection between sound and concept, or signifier and signified, is ARBITRARY, that sound "t-t-t-t" could just as easily be represented by another symbol, such as "D" or "%". Further, within the alphabet, "T" has meaning because it is NOT "A" or "B" or "X." Saussure calls this a negative value, wherein something has meaning or value because it is NOT something else within a system. (Positive value, on the other hand, is established in the sfr/sfd connection; a sign has positive value in and of itself because of the connection of its two parts, but has negative value within a signifying system). Another good example of this is the digital languages recognized by computers, which consist of two switch positions, off and on, or O and 1. O has meaning because it is not 1, and 1 has meaning because it is not 0. The system of linguistic units depends thus on the idea of DIFFERENCE; one unit has VALUE within the system because it is not some other unit within the system. As the computer example shows, this idea of DIFFERENCE depends upon the idea of BINARY OPPOSITES. To find out what a word or sign is not, you compare it to some other word or sign. (And because language exists in time and space, you can only do this comparison one word at a time, hence always forming binary pairs, pairs of two.) A binary pair shows the idea of difference as what gives any word value: in the pair cat/cats, the difference is the "s"; what makes each word distinct is its difference from the other word. (Saussure uses the example of Nacht and N[[questiondown]] [[questiondown]]chte, p. 653). SYNTAGMATIC AND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS In this section, Saussure says more about how he thinks the structure of language, or of any signifying system, operates. Everything in the system is based on the RELATIONS that can occur between the units in the system. These relations, as we've already noted, consist mainly of relations of DIFFERENCE. In this section Saussure talks more about the rules that may connect units together. The most important kind of relation between units in a signifying system, according to Saussure, is a SYNTAGMATIC relation. This means, basically, a LINEAR relation. In spoken or written language, words come out one by one (see above, the second characteristic of the linguistic sign). Because language is linear, it forms a chain, by which one unit is linked to the next. An example of this is the fact that, in English, word order governs meaning. "The cat sat on the mat" means something different than "The mat sat on the cat" because word order--the position of a word in a chain of signification--contributes to meaning. (The sentences also

differ in meaning because "mat" and "cat" are not the same words within the system). English word order has a particular structure: subject-verb-object. Think of this sentence: "The adjectival noun verbed the direct object adverbially." Other languages have other structures; in German, that sentence might be "The adjective noun auxiliary verbed the direct object adverbially main verb." In French it might be "The noun adjective verbed adverbially the direct object ." In Latin, word order doesn't matter, since the meaning of the word is determined, not by its place in the sentence, but by its cases (nominative, ablative, etc.) Combinations or relations formed by position within a chain (like where a word is in a sentence) are called SYNTAGMS. Examples of SYNTAGMS can be any phrase or sentence that makes a linear relation between two or more units: under-achiever; by the way; lend me your ears; when in the course of human events. The terms within a syntagm acquire VALUE only because they stand in opposition to everything before or after them. Each term IS something because it is NOT something else in the sequence. Again, think of coins: a dime is a dime because it's not a quarter or a nickel or a penny or a $100 bill. SYNTAGMATIC relations are most crucial in written and spoken language, in DISCOURSE, where the ideas of time, linearity, and syntactical meaning are important. There are other kinds of relations that exist outside of discourse. Signs are stored in your memory, for example, not in syntagmatic links or sentences, but in ASSOCIATIVE groups. The word "education", for example, may get linked, not to verbs and adjectives, but to other words that end in "-tion":education, relation, association, deification. You may store the word education" with other words that have similar associations: education, teacher, textbook, college, expensive. Or you may store words in what looks like a completely random set of linkages: education, baseball, computer games, psychoanalysis (things I like). The idea of ASSOCIATIVE groups or linkages makes me think of pigeonholes, and what pigeonholes I put certain words or ideas in; when I pull out that word or idea, all the other things in that pigeonhole come tumbling out with it. ASSOCIATIVE relations are only in your head, not in the structure of language itself, whereas SYNTAGMATIC relations are a product of linguistic structure. Think of the columns of a building (or the rods in a Tinker-Toy "building"). The columns form syntagmatic, or structural, relation when you think about where in the building the columns are, what they support, what they're connected to. The columns form associative relations when you think of what else the columns make you think of: phallic symbols, rockets, popsicles, or whatever.

syntagmatic relations are important because they allow for new words--neologisms--to arise and be recognized and accepted into a linguistic community. "To office," for example (now used in a Kinko's commercial) has meaning because the noun "office" can be moved to the position of verb, and take on a new syntagmatic position and relation to other words. Associative relations are important because they break patterns established in strictly grammatical/linear (syntagmatic) relations and allow for metaphoric expressions.

Some of the ideas about structuralism in this lecture were inspired by Lois Tyson, Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999) pp. 197-200.

All page references in this lecture refer to Ferdinand de Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics" in Adams and Searle, ed., Critical Theory Since 1965.

Suggestions for Further Reading: Richard and Fernande de George, eds., The Structuralists from Marx to Levi-Strauss, 1972. John Sturrock, Structuralism, 1986. Roy Harris, Reading Saussure, 1987 Terrence Gordon, Saussure for Beginners, 1996.

All materials on this site are written by, and remain the property of, Dr. Mary Klages, Associate Professor of English, University of Colorado at Boulder. You are welcome to quote from this essay, or to link this page to your own site, with proper citation and attribution. For more information on citing electronic sources, see Citing Electronic Sources

Last revision: September 6, 2001For comments, send mail to The Course Email ListReturn to English 2010 Home Page

Post Structuralism

By the mid 20th century there were a number of structural theories of human existence. In the study of language, the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) suggested that meaning was to be found within the structure of a whole language rather than in the analysis of individual words. For Marxists, the truth of human existence could be understood by an analysis of economic structures. Psychoanalysts attempted to describe the structure of the psyche in terms of an unconscious.

In the 1960's, the structuralist movement, based in France, attempted to synthesise the ideas of Marx, Freud and Saussure. They disagreed with the existentialists' claim that each man is what he makes himself. For the structuralist the individual is shaped by sociological, psychological and linguistic structures over which he/she has no control, but which could be uncovered by using their methods of investigation. Originally labelled a structuralist, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault came to be seen as the most important representative of the post-structuralist movement. He agreed that language and society were shaped by rule governed systems, but he disagreed with the structuralists on two counts. Firstly, he did not think that there were definite underlying structures that could explain the human condition and secondly he thought that it was impossible to step outside of discourse and survey the situation objectively. Jacques Derrida (1930- ) developed deconstruction as a technique for uncovering the multiple interpretation of texts. Influenced by Heidegger and Nietzsche, Derrida suggests that all text has ambiguity and because of this the possibility of a final and complete interpretation is impossible.

Post-modernism

Post-structuralism and deconstruction can be seen as the theoretical formulations of the post-modern condition. Modernity, which began intellectually with the Enlightenment, attempted to describe the world in rational, empirical and objective terms. It assumed that there was a truth to be uncovered, a way of obtaining answers to the question posed by the human condition. Post-modernism does not exhibit this confidence, gone are the underlying certainties that reason promised. Reason itself is now seen as a particular historical form, as parochial in its own way as the ancient explanations of the universe in terms of Gods. The postmodern subject has no rational way to evaluate a preference in relation to judgements of truth, morality, aesthetic experience or objectivity. As the old hierarchies of thought are torn down, a new clearing is formed on the frontiers of understanding: quite what hybrids of thought will metamorphose, interbreed and grow is this clearing is for the future to decide.

Michel Foucault: Genealogy of Knowledge.

Foucault attempted to analyse the 'discursive practices' or serious speech acts that lay claim to revealing knowledge. Rather than analyse these discursive practices in terms of their truth, he analyses them in

terms of their history or genesis. He claimed that he was attempting to do an 'archaeology' of knowledge, to show the history of truth claims. In his latter work, he borrowed from Nietzsche the 'genealogical' approach and from Marx his analyses of ideology. Foucault sought to show how the development of knowledge was intertwined with the mechanisms of (political) power. Unlike Marx, Foucault had no underlying belief in a deep underlying truth or structure: there was no objective viewpoint from which one could analyse discourse or society. Foucault focused on the way that knowledge and the increase of the power of the state over the individual has developed in the modern era. In his 'History of Sexuality' he argued that the rise of medical and psychiatric science has created a discourse of sexuality as deep, instinctual and mysterious. This discourse became accepted as the dominant explanation, and its assumptions began to seep into the discourse of the everyday. In this way the human subjects's experience of their own sexuality is shaped and controlled by the discourses that purport to explain it. The search for knowledge does not simply uncover pre-existing 'objects'; it actively shapes and creates them. Foucault does not offer any all-embracing theory of human nature. He was critical of 'meta-theory': beliefs that claimed to give an exclusive objective explanation of reality. For Foucault there is no ultimate answer waiting to be uncovered. The 'discursive practices' of knowledge are not independent of the objects that are studied, and must be understood in their social and political context.

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

For Derrida, language or 'texts' are not a natural reflection of the world. Text structures our interpretation of the world. Following Heidegger, Derrida thinks that language shapes us: texts create a clearing that we understand as reality. Derrida sees the history of western thought as based on opposition: good vs. evil mind vs. matter, man vs. woman, speech vs. writing. These oppositions are defined hierarchically: the second term is seen as a corruption of the first, the terms are not equal opposites. Derrida thought that all text contained a legacy of these assumptions, and as a result of this, these texts could be re-interpreted with an awareness of the hierarchies implicit in language. Derrida does not think that we can reach an end point of interpretation, a truth. For Derrida all text s exhibit 'differance': they allow multiple interpretations. Meaning is diffuse, not settled. Textuality always gives us a surplus of possibilities, yet we cannot stand outside of textuality in an attempt to find objectivity. One consequence of deconstruction is that certainty in textual analyses becomes impossible. There may be competing interpretations, but there is no uninterpreted way one could assess the

validity of these competing interpretations. Rather than basing our philosophical understanding on undeniable truths, the deconstructionist turns the settled bedrock of rationalism into the shifting sands of a multiplicity of interpretations.