Structuralism & Poetry

 

Structuralists view society and its rules as expressions of deep structures, often binary codes, that express our primary natures. A systematic study of such codes is semiotics, which was later hijacked by Poststructuralists as evidence that language alone provides a true reality.

The matter began with Ferdinand de Saussure's work in linguistics. The signified (concept) and signifier (sound or letter group) were connected only arbitrarily, as had been noted since Aristotle, but Saussure made it a cardinal feature of his system: the principle of arbitrariness, he said, dominates all linguistics.

Binary opposition is a common feature of the western intellectual tradition (e.g. individual versus society, true versus false) and Saussure writes this opposition into his system. No particular unit (word, sound, concept) has any intrinsic value beyond what it derives from the presence of other units in the system, similar or dissimilar. Any unit (and that includes larger elements of syntax and meaning) can substitute for any other, or be compared to another. Words acquire their values in two ways. One is by virtue of being strung together in sentences: their syntagmatic relationships. The other is paradigmatic, associative, from experience of the world outside, whether directly through sense impressions or via mental operations. This paradigmatic way is not logical: we build up chains of associations — school, playtime, games, competition, etc. — where the end members have no obvious connection with each other.

 

Now of course language can be studied from many aspects (as individual expression, social need, aesthetic shape, etc.) but Saussure's approach cuts these off, treating language as a self-contained system of signs. The arbitrary nature of signs is a product of that approach: it is not proved by his system but presupposed by it.

 

Structuralism proper originated in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on pre-literate peoples. Lévi-Strauss was a contemporary of Sartre and French existentialism, but his thinking went back to the collectivist notions of the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who saw society as the determining force. Societies controlled the reasoning and morals of their citizens, and it is therefore societies as a whole that should be studied, in a rational, secular and scientific manner. In this spirit, Lévi-Strauss analyzed the kinship and myths of Brazilian peoples, deriving sets of rules or structures that represented them in a quasi-mathematical terminology. His doctoral thesis, published in 1949 as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, described marriage in preliterate societies as an exchange between social groups, an expression of a universal "reciprocity". Feminists were attracted to this explanation of the subordinate role of women. Grander still was the claim that Structuralism disclosed the foundations of society, and therefore the true meaning of human existence.

Lévi-Strauss was a theoretician par excellence. He drew widely on the work of others, but had only six months of practical field experience to his credit. His writing was very technical, and couched in a style unusual in science, with gnomic, metaphorical, abstractions to illustrate the practical.

 

Though his writing brought Structuralism to public notice, and was hailed as important for that reason, many anthropologists now think the approach unnecessary. All the same, Lévi-Strauss's novel insights range over an astonishingly wide field, and his analysis of unsuspected relationships in myths, totemism, and kinship, together with his demonstrations of ways that natural and social behaviour lend themselves to cultural elaboration, were important contributions in their own right.

Language theorists were more critical. Lévi-Strauss's theories were vaguely expressed or tautological: i.e. not scientific, couldn't be falsified. Individuals become symbolic concepts, lacking existence outside these conceptual schemes. What (to press the questions that plague Chomsky's deep grammar) was the status of these structures? It is one thing to identify underlying structures in the mythology and social behaviour of illiterate peoples, but something else to suppose that such structures really exist, that they find expression in language and unconsciously control action.

Whatever the shortcomings, the movement soon branched into new areas: ideology and Poststructuralism. Books continue to appear, which literature students must include in their reading, but Paris grew bored with Structuralism after the middle seventies. The theorists undermined their own precarious assumptions. Foucault adopted the looser, anti-rationalist approaches of Lacan. Derrida attacked the very notion of structure, or of language saying anything definite at all.

 

A greatly expanded article, with references, can be found on TextEtc.

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