The concept of structuralism: A critical analysis | Date: 12 November 2010, 06:25
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The concept of structuralism: A critical analysisUniversity of California Press |1975 | ISBN: 0520028821 | 117 pages | djvu | 1 MB
'Structuralism' claims to provide a framework for organising and orientating any 'semiological' study, any study concerned with the production and perception of 'meaning'. It derives the framework from linguistics, the primary semiological discipline, and extends it to the analysis of the literary arts, the analysis of the non-literary arts and the analysis, in social psychology and social anthropology, of 'customary arts'.
The framework deserves the attention of the practitioners and philosophers of linguistics and these other disciplines. I argue that, with the possible exception of linguistics, the framework will not make a 'science' of any of these disciplines. What it can do however is give them the means of being organised in their analysis, going beyond ad hoc observations.
My essay is in four chapters. The first examines the framework available to structuralists from linguistics: I call the framework, the 'linguistic model'. The second chapter considers the possible range of this model in other semiological disciplines. The third criticises the development of the model proposed by Levi-Strauss; and the fourth offers an evaluation of the part which such a model can play in the advance of knowledge. I have divided the chapters into sections and each of these is described in the analysis of contents (pp. viii-x).
This is a theoretical essay, not a historical one, as my interest is in the concept of structuralism rather than the structuralist movement. I have not found it possible, however, to avoid history entirely. In the first chapter I discuss Saussure, Jakobson and Chomsky since their theories are, inevitably, the source of the linguistic model. In the second chapter I discuss various thinkers whose work, wittingly or not, illustrates the extension of the linguistic model to non-linguistic fields. Among these thinkers are self-styled structuralists like Barthes and Todorov but also thinkers who would not normally rank as structuralists: this is a varied group and includes people as diverse as Rudolf Arnheim, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman. In the third chapter I discuss Levi-Strauss since his work is often taken as a paradigm of a structuralist approach and I also comment on the work of Althusser, Foucault and Lacan.
Being essentially theoretical, the essay does not claim to be a piece of sharp scholarship. I have quoted from translations where these were available—the sources are usually French— and made amendments only in a few places; where no translation was available I have made my own. Saussurian scholarship is particularly tortuous and I have been careful to avoid the controversial issues. I provide a bibliography for each chapter in the list of references at the end. Where a book referred to in one chapter is listed at the end of another I indicate this in the referring note by adding 'cited above (or below) in X', 'X' being the chapter at the end of which the book is listed.
The essay took the form of a lecture course at Cambridge in the Lent term 1974 and I am grateful to the audience for forcing me to some degree of clarity. I am grateful also to the many friends who were good enough to comment on drafts of the text or discuss ideas contained in it. Thb must be a nearly complete list: Eileen Barker, Kevin Barry, Joe Cremona, Jonathan Culler, Stephen Heath, Mary Hesse, Peter Holland, Caroline Humphrey, Mary Kelly, Joel Kupperman, Colin McCabe, Graham MacDonald, Christine MacLeod, Ernan McMullin, John Maguire, Paddy Masterson, David Reason, Eva Schaper and Denys Turner. Jonathan Culler was particularly helpful as a guide to structuralist sources and Christine MacLeod as a guide to style. Finally, I must express my gratitude to Mr Pauley and Mrs Smith: while I wrote this, they sustained me in a College existence.
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