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Structuralism and Post-structuralism
John Schostak
2005
Where Hegelianism, structuralism and hermeneutics focused upon the whole and the relation of the part as subsumed under the whole, to the post-structuralists this unity itself became both undesirable as an aim and untenable philosophically, epistemologically. Reason, whether as the I-Think, of the Cartesian, Kantian or Husserlian cogito, or as the Hegelian Absolute Reason, came under attack.
(Schostak 2006: extract from chapter 4)
Think of a house. It should have solid foundations, be whole, stable. Each room is fixed in place. they have particular functions: bedroom, kitchen, toilet and so on. You know where the entrances are. there's an inside and an outside. In short, it has a structure. this structure can be mapped logically. One can map kinship relations in a similar manner: there is father, mother, children, grandparents, uncles, aunts and so on. The roles and the relations between the roles are independent of the particular individuals that occupy them.This provides an image of structuralism, an approach that maps the logical relations between abstract roles of elements of a system. The model is that of language, particularly the view of language elaborated by Ferdinand de Saussure.
For Saussure language is a system of differences where one thing is defined simply as being different from another. In this system of differences a meaningful sign is composed of two entities: signifiers and signifieds. Signifiers have no positive content. They are the material side of the sign - the sound that you make when you say 'dog', or 'chien', or the ink on the page and the physical impact this has on the retina of the eye and so on. The content that fills out the meaning of the sound 'dog' in English or 'chien' in French associates with the sound that is accepted by different language communities. What is signified by the sound (i.e., the content) is different from all other signifieds that are associated with sounds such as 'cat' or 'chat'; or whatever other signified is available to a given language community. In this way the structures, not only of language but also of the social forms that are mediated by language and particular discourses can be analysed (e.g., Levi Strauss 1969, 1970). To any structure there is a centre from which order radiates, subsuming all parts into a coherent, logical whole.
What happens if the centre is lost? Or, rather, if there is no possible centre? Laclau (1996: 37) more formally defines the difference from Saussure this way:
We know, from Saussure, that language (and by extension, all signifying systems) is a system of differences, that linguistic identities, -values - are purely relational and that, as a result, the totality of language is involved in each single act of signification. Now, in that sense, it is clear that the totality is essentially required – if the differences did not constitute a system, no signification at all would be possible. The problem, however, is that the very possibility of signification is the system, and the very possibility of the system is the possibility of its limits. But if what we are talking about are the limits of a signifying system, it is clear that those limits cannot be themselves signified, but have to show themselves as the interruption or breakdown of the process of signification. Thus we are left with the paradoxical situation that what constitutes the condition of possibility of a signifying system – its limits – is also what constitutes its condition of impossibility – a blockage of the continuous expansion of the process of signification.
What does this mean? It means that language is not closed and that its centre cannot be found. Think of a box made of cardboard. it is structurallly sound. You can put things inside it. Now put the box inside itself. This is an impossibility. Similarly, suppose one tried to collect all the signifiers and signified of language and place them in a box labelled 'language'. Now, is that label which refers to the box, inside the box or outside? If it is inside, doesn't that increase the number of different signifiers and signifieds by one, that then needs to have a new label to signify this fact? But then, doesn't that increase the number of signifiers and signifieds.....? There is no end to to the process of labelling the fact that each label needs to be signified by making a new label to sginfiy it and so distinguish it from all others. Language keeps incorporating new differences. With each difference the centre shifts as the boundaries between inside and outside shifts and as the relations between differences alters to encompass the changed circumstances. We are now in the realm of post-structuralism.
References
Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipation(s), London and New York: Verso
Levi Strauss, C. (1969) The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer and Rodney Needham, Boston, Beacon Press
Levi Strauss, C. (1970) Introduction to a science of mythology Part1 : The raw and the cooked, translated from the French by John and Doreen Weightman, London, Cape
Saussure, F. de, (1966) Course in General Linguistics, ed., C. Bally and A. Sechehaye. Translated by W. Baskin, New York, McGraw-Hill