Structuralism

• 1. Introduction

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  Structuralism poses a disarmingly simple claim: that nothing in human life has meaning on its own. Every word, every myth, every family arrangement, every meal served at a certain time of day draws its significance from a web of relations that runs beneath the surface of everyday experience. Philosopher Simon Blackburn summarized it this way: the phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations, and behind local variations in surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract structure.

  That idea, which sounds almost like a mathematical theorem, became one of the defining intellectual movements of the 20th century. It began in linguistics, spread through anthropology and literary criticism, passed through psychoanalysis and political theory, and eventually provoked its own rebellion. The scholars who built structuralism, and the scholars who dismantled it, share a starting point that is still impossible to ignore: the belief that beneath what we see and say and feel, there is a structure waiting to be uncovered.

• 2. Saussure's Linguistic Foundation

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  Ferdinand de Saussure did not set out to start a movement. He set out to rethink the nature of language, and in doing so he handed future thinkers a conceptual toolkit they would use for decades.

  Saussure drew a sharp line between langue and parole. Langue is the abstract, idealized system of language; parole is actual speech as it happens in daily life. His analysis focused on the system, not the instances. Within that system, he argued that every linguistic sign is made of two parts: a signifier, which is the sound pattern or visual image of a word, and a signified, which is the concept or meaning the word carries. The relationship between them is arbitrary. Different languages use entirely different sounds to refer to the same object, which means no signifier is naturally connected to its signified. Meaning is not found in things themselves. It emerges from differences between signs: as Saussure wrote, in language there are only differences without positive terms.

  This last point was the most radical. It meant that the identity of any word depends entirely on how it differs from every other word in the system. Pull one element out of its context and you lose its meaning entirely. Saussure had also been developing a broader semiological project, conceiving language and society as systems of relations, and it was this relational logic that French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss and others would carry into entirely new fields.

• 3. Lévi-Strauss and Anthropology

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  During World War II, Lévi-Strauss was in New York City at the New School, where he encountered Roman Jakobson. That meeting shaped the rest of his career. Jakobson's structural linguistics, combined with currents in American anthropology, gave Lévi-Strauss the framework he needed to approach culture the way Saussure had approached language: as a system of relations.

  Lévi-Strauss's 1949 study The Elementary Structures of Kinship was one of the earliest and most influential works to emerge from this approach. He examined kinship systems from societies that seemed wildly different on the surface, and argued that their various forms of social organization could be understood as permutations of a limited number of basic relations. In the 1950s he also analyzed mythology, food preparation, and the incest taboo through the same structural lens. He borrowed from the Prague school's method of analyzing sounds by the presence or absence of features, and applied it to culture: meaning, he argued, is generated through pairs of binary oppositions such as hot-cold, raw-cooked, and culture-nature.

  A third influence on his thinking came from Marcel Mauss, who had written on gift-exchange systems. Lévi-Strauss used Mauss as a starting point for his alliance theory of kinship, arguing that kinship systems are grounded in the exchange of women between groups. He also argued that the structures underlying the deep grammar of society originate in the mind itself and operate unconsciously. While replacing Mauss at his Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes chair, Lévi-Strauss's writings became widely popular in the 1960s and 1970s. His 1958 collection Structural Anthropology helped define the method's scope, and it was through his work that the term structuralism first came into use in reference to the social sciences.

• 4. Structuralism Beyond Linguistics

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  Roman Jakobson, working out of the Prague school tradition, was a pivotal figure in carrying structural analysis across disciplinary boundaries. His influence reached Lévi-Strauss directly, but the Prague school's reach extended further still. In France, Antoine Meillet and Émile Benveniste continued Saussure's project. André Martinet in France, J. R. Firth in Britain, and Louis Hjelmslev in Denmark each developed their own versions of structural and functional linguistics.

  The Prague school's most concrete contribution to the wider movement came through phonemics. Rather than simply cataloguing the sounds in a language, the school analyzed how sounds stood in contrast to one another. In English, /p/ and /b/ are distinct phonemes because swapping them changes the meaning of a word: 'pat' becomes 'bat.' This contrastive approach also had explanatory power across languages. The difficulty Japanese speakers have distinguishing /r/ and /l/ in English reflects the fact that these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. Phonology, as a result, became the model that structuralists in other fields repeatedly cited as proof that their method worked.

  In literary theory, structuralist criticism located meaning not in character or voice but in underlying narrative structures. Scholars following Vladimir Propp, Algirdas Julien Greimas, and Lévi-Strauss searched myths and stories for basic deep elements that recombine to produce many surface variations. The scholar Catherine Belsey named the hazard: a structuralist reading risks collapsing all difference. Her example was a student who concludes that West Side Story adds nothing new because it shares the same deep structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, a structure that can be inverted to describe two families who arrange a marriage their children resist and escape only through suicide.

• 5. Lacan, Althusser, and the Third Order

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  Jacques Lacan blended Freud with Saussure, applying structuralism to psychoanalysis. In his framework, the structural order of what he called the Symbolic is distinct both from the Real and from the Imaginary. This three-part division embodied the broader structuralist principle that a specific domain of culture can be understood as a structure modelled on language, separate both from material reality and from individual imagination.

  Louis Althusser pursued a parallel move in Marxist theory. His structural order, the capitalist mode of production, was understood as distinct both from the actual agents involved in economic relations and from the ideological forms through which those relations are understood. Yet Althusser himself resisted the structuralist label. In the Italian foreword to the second edition of Reading Capital, he wrote that his interpretation of Marx had been recognized as structuralist in homage to the current fashion, but argued that the profound tendency of his texts was not attached to the structuralist ideology. He acknowledged that the terminology he employed was too close to structuralist terminology to avoid the confusion.

  Also working within this tradition, psychoanalyst Jean Piaget applied structuralism to developmental psychology in a deliberately different way. Piaget preferred to call himself a constructivist, and he described structuralism as a method rather than a doctrine, arguing that there exists no structure without a construction, abstract or genetic. Feminist theorist Alison Assiter later enumerated four assumptions common to all structuralist variants: that a structure determines the position of each element of a whole; that every system has a structure; that structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change; and that structures are the real things beneath the surface of meaning.

• 6. Post-Structuralist Revolt

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  By the late 1960s, a wave of predominantly French intellectuals began attacking structuralism's basic tenets. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes each engaged with structuralist premises while ultimately pushing past them. They came to be called post-structuralists, though their work was shaped by structuralism precisely because it was arguing with it.

  The political turbulence of the period sharpened the criticism. The student uprisings of May 1968 brought issues of power and political struggle to the center of academic life. Structuralism's critics charged that it was ahistorical and that it gave structural forces too much weight while leaving little room for human agency. French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricœur described Lévi-Strauss as overstepping the limits of his own method, producing what Ricœur called a Kantianism without a transcendental subject. Cornelius Castoriadis argued that language and symbolic systems cannot be reduced to a binary logic of oppositions. Philip Noel Pettit called for abandoning the positivist dream that Lévi-Strauss had projected onto semiology. Jürgen Habermas accused structuralists such as Foucault of being positivists who used the tools of science to criticize science, a charge that pointed toward what Habermas called a performative contradiction.

  Anthropologist Adam Kuper offered a sociological diagnosis of why structuralism had attracted such fierce allegiance in the first place, writing in 1973 that it had come to have something of the momentum of a millennial movement, and that conversion was not just a matter of accepting a new paradigm but was, almost, a question of salvation. Structural anthropology fell out of favour in the early 1980s. D'Andrade pointed to its unverifiable assumptions about universal mental structures. Pierre Bourdieu's criticisms led toward what Sherry Ortner would call practice theory, which centered on how human agency and practice actually change social structures.

• 7. Later Developments and Legacy

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  Structuralism did not disappear; it transformed into the frameworks that replaced it. Sociologist Anthony Giddens, though drawing on structuralist themes in his own theorizing, rejected the view that social reproduction is merely a mechanical outcome of structure. The Biogenetic Structuralism group took a different path, arguing that structural foundations for culture must exist because all humans share the same brain architecture. They proposed what they called neuroanthropology, an integration of cultural anthropology and neuroscience that theorists such as Victor Turner also embraced.

  In literary studies, scholars tried applying structural theory to individual works, though this ran against the grain of the original program, which was better suited to finding patterns across many texts than to illuminating a single one. The kinship with Northrop Frye's archetypal criticism, which also drew on the anthropological study of myths, suggested that structuralism's search for deep narrative elements had antecedents it had not always acknowledged.

  In applied ethnography, Douglas E. Foley's 2010 study Learning Capitalist Culture combined structural and Marxist theories in fieldwork among high school students in Texas. Foley analyzed how students reached shared goals through social solidarity, observing the way Mexicanos and Anglo-Americans joined the same football team to defeat a rival school, while also applying what he described as a cultural Marxist theory of schooling. By the end of the 20th century, structuralism was widely regarded as a historically significant school of thought, one that generated the very movements that overshadowed it. The influence of Lacan in particular continued to run through continental philosophy long after the movement itself had passed its peak.