CTDD: Lecture: 4 Structuralism and Semiotics

Lecture: 4 Structuralism and Semiotics

Objectives

At the end of this unit students should be able to:

Discuss the theoretical postulations of structuralism

Apply structuralist principles to the analysis of literary works.

1. Defining Structuralism: Structuralism is a method of interpreting and analyzing such things as language, literature, and society, which focuses on contrasting ideas or elements of structure and attempts to show how they relate to the whole structure.

2. The Emergence of Structuralism

-Structuralism has its roots in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (circa 1915) who argues, essentially, that with respect to signifying systems the whole(wholism) comes before its parts (5.3). ( Wholism, another spelling of holism, is defined as an idea that different parts are all interconnected and cannot be understood without understanding the entire whole..) Structuralism argues, moreover, that systems are constructed in terms of simple binary oppositions that establish patterns of identity and difference that encode signs and make them functional as meaningful elements within a system of differentiation and equivalences.

-The work by anthropologist Claude Lévi - Strauss is considered a major bulwark of structuralism, though structuralism has been practiced with considerable success by literary critics, among them, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Philippe Hamon, Michael Riffaterre, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kristeva. The advantage to structuralism is that it doesn't begin with the assumption that literature is a semiotic representation of some independent mental reality (or content) that exists transcendentally either out in the world or in the writer's imagination. In other words, structuralism abandons the mimetic fallacy of a pre-existing reality, whether mental or concrete, that the writer is translating into signs. Rather, structuralism argues that the real effect of a text is produced by the sign system, not reproduced by it. This seems like a small difference, but in fact, this shift has very significant consequences from an interpretive point of view. For one thing, it demystifies the idea that a novel is very much like a photograph of some independent reality.

-Structuralism in a strict sense of the term is the program of Levi-Strauss, borrowing from structural linguistics, tried to introduce into anthropology

-From linguistics Levi-Strauss took the idea of the morpheme (A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in a language. A morpheme is not necessarily the same as a word. The main difference between a morpheme and a word is that a morpheme sometimes does not stand alone, but a word, by definition, always stands alone), and the realization that each linguistic term derives its value from its opposition to all other words.

-Structuralism is a philosophy and method that developed from insight into the field of linguistics in the mid-20th century to study the underlying patterns of social life.

- Committed to the structuralist principle that a language is a self-contained relational structure, the elements of which derive their existence and their value from their distribution and oppositions in texts or discourse.

-Structuralists inquired to find out the structures behind or beneath the visible and conscious designs (beliefs, ideas, behaviors) of active human subjects (surface manifestations) to expose or unearth how those designs are in fact outputs, affects, consequences, products generated by underlying causes, hidden mechanism or the limited number of “deep” structures that are universal to the human mind-structures that are not directly visible of knowable.

-The difference between surface structure and deep structure

a. Surface Structure is actually produced structure. It refers to the sentence as it is pronounced or written i.e. how the sentence is actually represented.

b. Deep structure: is the abstract structure that allows the native speaker of a language to know what the sentence means. It may be said then that the deep structure expresses the semantic contents of a sentence, whereas, the surface structure of a sentence determines its phonetic form.

-In other words, any explanation of social life, of observed patterns, can only be found in the general mechanisms, structures, schemas, or systems that are assumed to underpin all observable events.

-structuralism’ is a term used in general to denote any kind of analysis that is concerned with exposing structures and relations. We cannot know what the meaning of is given language is if we do not know its contrast word in the language system or structure it is part of. We come to identify the red color only by its contrast to the other colors etc…

-Structuralism represented a challenging critique, a radical break from previous philosophical traditions and theoretical methods/models (including those focused around beliefs in human intention, understanding, and consciousness such as phenomenology, humanism, and existentialism), with its rejection of metaphysics, its indifference to the human subject (including individual and collective action), and its interest in discontinuity rather than continuity and flux, or socio-historical context. In general, structuralism was a method that was applied extensively in the study of language, society, art, and literature.

-Structuralism is a grab-bag of a term stuffed with a wide range of writers and writings: the structural anthropology of Lévi- Strauss; the formal linguistics of Saussure and Chomsky; the early writings of Roland Barthes and Derrida; the writings of the much earlier Russian Formalists as rediscovered and translated in the West during the late 1960s and 1970s. What all these writers and writings have in common is the understanding of phenomena (words, poems, narratives, myths, customs, social practice) not as discrete (separate; distinct) entities but as parts of larger structures or systems. The emphasis is on making sense of things like signs in large sign systems, and on perceiving how one sign system relates to another. Hence, the close association of structuralism with semiotics/semiology, the study of sign systems.

A structuralist approach would tend to treat a sign system as a complete, finished, potentially knowable whole with a notional center. Structuralism concentrates on "whole systems". It concentrates on sense-making activities.

-The structures in question here are those imposed by our way of perceiving the world and organizing experience, rather than objective entities already existing in the external world. It follows from this that meaning or significance isn't a kind of core or essence inside things: rather, the meaning is always outside. Meaning is always an attribute of things, in the literal sense that meanings are attributed to the things by the human mind, not contained within them.

Structuralism gives importance to the underlying structure of a literary text. It gives great importance to the structural similarities within various texts, whereas the individual work contents are neglected. Furthermore, in Structuralist theory, a text is free from context, history, and readers' interpretation and isolated from the author itself. The meaning of any text then solely comes from rules and the underlying system which governs it. “ What we see on the surface are the traces of a deeper history; only by excavating beneath the surface will we discover the geological strata or the ground planes which provide true explanations of what we see above” ( Selden 69). Structuralists also see language as scientific where a sign is made of both signifier and a signified. “Words are not symbols which correspond to referents, but rather are signs which are made up of two parts: a mark either written or spoken, called the signifier and a concept called signified” (Selden 53).

The structuralist school emerges from theories of language and linguistics, and it looks for underlying elements in culture and literature that can be connected so that critics can develop general conclusions about the individual works and the systems from which they emerge. Structuralism maintains that "...practically everything we do that is specifically human is expressed in language" (Richter 809). Structuralists believe that these language symbols extend far beyond written or oral communication. For example, codes that represent all sorts of things permeate everything we do: "the performance of music requires complex notation...our economic life rests upon the exchange of labor and goods for symbols, such as cash, checks, stock, and certificates...social life depends on the meaningful gestures and signals of 'body language' and revolves around the exchange of small, symbolic favors: drinks, parties, dinners" (Richter 809). Hawkes says that "structuralism is fundamentally a way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of structures. (2003: 6) Put simply, an element in any given situation has no significance by itself, and in fact, it is determined by its relationship to all other elements involved in that situation. The full significance of any entity or experience cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into the structure of which it forms a part. (Hawkes, 2003: 7) The world comprises systems and logic and structures that are accessible through processes of reason. In structuralism, individual objects are seen as part of a greater whole. Nothing is observed as an independent entity. Rather a presentation of wholistic culture with its identifiable values. The underlying forms/structures are seen as the medium of transmitting meanings. "A radical claim by structuralism", Rapaport suggests, "is that the human subjects do not invent language but are preceded by language and are born in it. (Rapaport, 2011, p.39) Structuralists believe that language is a system of relation and difference. They adhere to meanings from the basic patterns of language and binary oppositions. They believe that language is the key process in the creation and communication of meanings. All perceptions and understandings are formed by language.

What is Structuralist Criticism?

Some scholars define it as the observation of the utilization of linguistics (the study of language) and semiotics (the study of signs) to portray the major ideas in a piece of work. De Saussure opened up the way for an understanding of communication in terms of sign systems in general. In his view, words do not simply mean things in themselves. Words are the product of systematic yet shifting relations between sounds in the air or marks on paper (signifiers) and those aspects or experiences to which sounds or marks are taken to refer (signifieds). Words 'mean' by assumed and broadly agreed on relations amongst people who speak the same language and therefore draw the same sign system. (Pope 176)

Saussure emphasized that the meanings of words are (what we might call) relational. That is to say, no word can be defined in isolation from other words. The definition of any given word depends upon its relationship with other 'adjoining' words. For example, the word 'hut' depends for its precise meaning on its position in a 'paradigmatic chain', that is, a chain of words related in function and meaning each of which could be substituted for any of the others in a given sentence. The paradigmatic chain, in this case, might include the following: hovel shed hut house mansion palace

Levi-Strauss, on the other hand, developed a model which sought to systematize the understanding of symbolic interaction within cultures. He used sets of fundamental oppositions such as 'nature v. Civilization', 'wild v.domestic'and 'raw v. Cooked' to produce an overview of how whole societies interact coherently. Strauss believes that all cultural artifacts and practices do not only have a functional but a symbolic dimension. (Pope 177) He also points out that myths, dramas, and narratives, in general, rehearse and resolve the contradictions experienced within societies, thereby, allowing cultures to maintain a sense of coherence.

4. Structuralism in Literary Theory

Structuralism is used in literary theory, for example,

...if you examine the structure of a large number of short stories to discover the underlying principles that govern their composition...principles of narrative progression...or of characterization...you are also engaged in structuralist activity if you describe the structure of a single literary work to discover how its composition demonstrates the underlying principles of a given structural system. (Tyson 197-198).

Northrop Frye, however, takes a different approach to structuralism by exploring ways in which genres of Western literature fall into his four mythoi (also see Jungian criticism in the Freudian Literary Criticism resource): theory of modes, or historical criticism (tragic, comic, and thematic); theory of symbols, or ethical criticism (literal/descriptive, formal, mythical, and anagogic); theory of myths, or archetypal criticism (comedy, romance, tragedy, irony/satire); theory of genres, or rhetorical criticism (epos, prose, drama, lyric) (Tyson 240).

Structuralism argues, moreover, that systems are constructed in terms of simple binary oppositions that establish patterns of identity and difference that encode signs and make them functional as meaningful elements within a system of differentiation and equivalences. A radical claim made by structuralism is that the human subject does not invent language but is preceded by language and is born into it. That sounds odd until one realizes that DNA is a semiotic system with properties rather like language and that our ability to converse was prepared for long before humans evolved, given that animals had most of the features of speech and the basic sociality to go with it long before we evolved. Because the " wholism " of structuralism is so at odds with how people have been habituated to think about language, the movement never became widely popular, though conceptually it is more robust than, say, New Criticism or traditional historicism. The work by anthropologist Claude Lévi - Strauss is considered a major bulwark of structuralism, though structuralism has been practiced with considerable success by literary critics, among them, Roland Barthes, Gerard Genette, Philippe Hamon, Michael Riffaterre, Tzvetan Todorov, and Julia Kristeva. The advantage to structuralism is that it doesn't begin with the assumption that literature is a semiotic representation of some independent mental reality (or content) that exists transcendentally either out in the world or in the writer's imagination. In other words, structuralism abandons the mimetic fallacy of a pre-existing reality, whether mental or concrete, that the writer is translating into signs. Rather, structuralism argues that the real effect of a text is produced by the sign system, not reproduced by it. This seems like a small difference, but this shift has very significant consequences from an interpretive point of view. For one thing, it demystifies the idea that a novel is very much like a photograph of some independent reality.

Roland Barthes's Semiotics

Barthes's major critical concern was to explore how a culture's system of values and various ideologies are encoded in the culture's languages and other social interactions. Barthes stressed that these values and ideologies were spread throughout cultures through stereotypes or "mythologies." Barthes believed that language was a powerful force that served to influence the way people understood the world around them. Language, according to Barthes, is always controlled by various cultural, social, and political ideologies and serves to structure the way we conceptualize the world in which we reside. Barthes's theoretical work, then, served to challenge institutions and languages that allowed one group of people to govern and control another. What Barthes was ultimately contending, then, was that most of what we consider to be natural within a culture is based upon relative and subjective historical social, political, and cultural constructs. Barthes's later work in semiotics (which is the study of signs and symbols), developed out of the conception of the relativity of language. Through his study of signs and symbols, Barthes concluded that unlikely objects are signs and always function as part of a larger system of signs in which the true meaning and intention of the signs themselves.

b. Conclusion

According to Eagleton (1996), structuralism, as the term suggests, is concerned with structures, and more particularly with examining the general laws by which they work. Literary structuralism flourished in the 1960s as an attempt to apply to literature the methods and insights of the founder of modern structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure viewed language as a system of signs, which was to be studied 'synchronically' that is to say, studied as a complete system at a given point in time- rather than 'diachronically', in its historical development. Each sign was to be seen as being made up of a 'signifier (a sound image, or its graphic equivalent), and a 'signified' (the concept or meaning). For instance, the three black marks c - a-t is a signifier that evokes the signified 'cat' in an English mind. The relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one: there is no inherent reason why these three marks should mean 'cat', other than cultural and historical convention. Each sign in the system has meaning only by its difference from the others. 'Cat' has meant not 'in itself, but because it is not 'cap' or 'cad' or 'bat'. It does not matter how the signifier alters, as long as it preserves its difference from all the other signifiers; you can pronounce it in many different accents as long as this difference is maintained. 'In the linguistic system,' says Saussure, 'there are only differences': meaning is not mysteriously immanent in a sign but is functional, the result of its difference from other signs. Finally, Saussure believed that linguistics would get into a hopeless mess if it concerned itself with actual speech or parole as he called it. He was not interested in investigating what people said; he was concerned with the objective structure of signs which made their speech possible in the first place, and this he called langue. Neither was Saussure concerned with the real objects which people spoke about: to study language effectively, the referents of the signs, the things they denoted, had to be placed in brackets.

c. Summary

In this unit, you have learned that structuralism in general is an attempt to apply linguistic theory to the study of literature. As Eagleton notes, you can view a myth, wrestling match, system of tribal kinship, restaurant menu, or oil painting as a system of signs, and a structuralist analysis will try to isolate the underlying set of laws by which these signs are combined into meanings. It will largely ignore what the signs actually 'say', and concentrate instead on their internal relations with one another. Structuralism, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is an attempt ―to rethink everything once again in terms of linguistics.

Typical Questions

Using a specific structuralist framework (like Frye's mythoi)...how should the text be classified in terms of its genre? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that makes it a part of other works like it?

Using a specific structuralist framework...analyze the text’s narrative operations...can you speculate about the relationship between the... [text]... and the culture from which the text emerged? In other words, what patterns exist within the text that makes it a product of a larger culture?

What patterns exist within the text that connects it to the larger "human" experience? In other words, can we connect patterns and elements within the text to other texts from other cultures to map similarities that tell us more about the common human experience? This is a liberal humanist move that assumes that since we are all human, we all share basic human commonalities.

What rules or codes of interpretation must be internalized to 'make sense of the text?

What is the semiotics of a given category of cultural phenomena, or 'text,' such as high-school football games, television and/or magazine ads for a particular brand of perfume...or even media coverage of a historical event? (Tyson 225)

References

Barthes, Roland. (1972). Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, Ill.

... . (1977). Critical Essays, 1964; Mythologies, 1957; S/Z, 1970; Image, Music, Tex

Chomsky, Noam. (1965). Syntactic Structures, 1957; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

Culler, Jonathan. (1997). Literary Theory: (1983). A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press de Saussure, Ferdinand. (1923). Course in General Linguistics.

Ehrmann, Jacques. (1970). ed., Structuralism. New York

Hawkes, Terence. (1977). Structuralism and Semiotics. London: Methuen

Jameson, Fredric. (1972). The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ.

Lane, Michael. (1970). ed., Structuralism: A Reader. London

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1955) The Elementary Structure of Kinship, 1949; "The Structural Study of Myth"

Said, E. W. (1983). The World, the Text and the Critic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press

Scholes, Robert. (1974). Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction. New Haven, Conn.

Sontag, Susan. (1972). ed., A Barthes Reader. London,

Strauss, Anselm & Corbin, Juliet. (1998). Basics of Qualitative Research, New York / New Delhi: Sage Publications

Sturrock, John. (1979). ed., Structuralism, and Since: From Livi-Strauss to Derrida. Oxford

Weick, Karl E. (1999). 'Theory Construction as Disciplined Reflexivity: Tradeoffs in the 90s', Academy of Management Review, Vol 24 no 4 (797 – 806).

Further Readings

Structuralism is a theory that argues that all literary texts are written to be parts of a greater pattern, or structure, which can consist of a narrative model, a set of recurring motifs or patterns of story, or perhaps a particular set of beliefs or convictions. Thus virtually every work of literature will adhere to one or more set patterns, and individual variations will be of little interest to the structuralist critic. An example showing both the idea and its (in my view) absurdity is the “frontier” story: literary works which tell of exploring or “taming” previously unknown places. A large number of Wild West stories fit into this story pattern. So do stories of explorations in Africa, Antarctica, and the Gobi desert. So do many science fiction stories telling the exploration of other worlds, or even of space itself. In the end, the “structure” boils down to Stories about humans going where no human previously has gone. Since this basically equates all experiences and negates the individuality of the characters and specific events of the many individual stories, we are left with only the idea that yes, a lot of people have written a lot of stories about somebody going to a previously unknown place. Similarly, there are probably millions of stories about a boy meeting and falling in love with a girl (or, for that matter, a girl meeting girl or a boy meeting boy). At a rough guess, there are probably as many of these as there are stories of someone trying to identify a murderer and succeeding. In the simple case, the “love story” structurally just tells us that people of different (or the same) sex do fall in love. If you add complexity, you get perhaps a story stating that people fall in love despite the disapproval of their parents, peers, previous partners, or other influences. You then have a conflict story that can be resolved in different ways, and the particular way in which an author resolves it then makes his/her version fall into one of several possible structures containing the same basic ingredients (attraction with complications). Again, what you have is a view of literature that fundamentally reduces it to endlessly repeated ingredients of the protagonist, story, and resolution, but where the individuality and viewpoint of the author are seen as entirely secondary. The underlying philosophical rationale of structuralism is a rejection of individual choice since individuals are viewed as having their actions and reactions determined by social and historical structures. Its original primary proponents in the field of literary theory were Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.

Last modified: Friday, 10 February 2023, 8:00 AM