Structuralism Explained: Key Concepts, History, and Criticisms

The speaker began by recounting an early morning Zoom conference with participants in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, a city heavily impacted by conflict. Despite the early hour in New Haven (4 AM), the speaker joined as a gesture of solidarity. They noted the calm demeanor of the Ukrainian participants, who chose to continue the conference even when air raid sirens sounded, opting not to go to a bomb shelter. This experience highlighted the resilience of the people and the stark contrast in circumstances.

The speaker then transitioned to the core topic of the lecture: structuralism and structural anthropology. They introduced the concept of "encounter," borrowing from Polish philosopher Jozef Tischner, who was inspired by Levinas. This idea posits that the fundamental moment of human existence and ontology is the face-to-face encounter between individuals.

The Genesis of Structuralism

The lecture then delved into the historical development of structuralism, tracing its origins to a pivotal meeting in New York during World War II. Alexandre Koyre introduced Roman Jakobson to Claude Lévi-Strauss, both émigrés fleeing the war. This encounter, the speaker emphasized, was crucial for the subsequent intellectual history of structuralism.

Revisiting Revisionist Marxism and Heideggerian Existentialism

Before diving deeper into structuralism, the speaker briefly revisited revisionist Marxism and its Heideggerian existentialist reading of Hegel. They drew parallels between this and contemporary critical race theory, highlighting the idea that individuals are always "thrown into" pre-existing historical circumstances and structures. This means we don't operate from a tabula rasa (blank slate); our world is shaped by structures that predate us. However, this embeddedness does not imply helplessness. Individuals interact with and shape these structures even as they are shaped by them, emphasizing a model of embeddedness and responsible agency. The speaker clarified that this concept is about responsibility, not guilt.

Transition to Structuralism: The Primacy of Structure

The speaker then explicitly linked Marxism to structuralism, noting that Marxism, in its focus on how societal parts fit together to form a whole, is a version of structuralism. This led to the central theme: "structure." Structural anthropology was presented as a key example of this broad school of thought, which significantly influenced 20th-century intellectual history.

The speaker recommended two texts by Leszek Kolakowski, "The Legend of Emperor Kennedy" and "A Theory of Non-Gardening," as helpful overviews for understanding structuralism.

Structuralism as a Response to the "Death of God"

Structuralism, like many other philosophical movements discussed in the course, was presented as another response to the "death of God" – an attempt to fill the void left by the decline of religion and address feelings of alienation and groundlessness. While previous responses, like Husserl's intentionality, sought to bridge the gap between subject and object, structuralism takes a different approach. It diminishes the importance of both teleology (purpose) and subjectivity, effectively "bracketing" the subject and history.

The speaker used the metaphor of "trying on different glasses" to explain how various philosophical frameworks offer different lenses through which to understand the world. Structuralism provides a new lens, distinct from revisionist Marxism, which sought to inject humanism into a structural worldview. Structuralism, in contrast, is non-humanist, even anti-humanist, not in a normative sense (advocating cruelty) but in a descriptive one: the individual human subject is not at the center of understanding the world. Instead, the primary variable is the system, the structure, and how its parts fit together. The world is viewed as a complex system of signs.

The Linguistic Inspiration: Ferdinand de Saussure

The inspiration for all forms of structuralism is structural linguistics, particularly the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure's foundational ideas, primarily compiled from his students' lecture notes after his death, include:

• Language as an object of study: Language, considered in itself, is the sole true object of linguistic study.
• Language as form, not substance: This seemingly simple statement is revolutionary. Saussure argued that language is a system of differences, not a collection of inherent substances. Meaning arises from these differences.
• Linguistic signs as dual: A linguistic sign comprises a "signifier" (the word or sound-image, e.g., "cat") and a "signified" (the concept or meaning, e.g., the furry creature). Structuralism often focuses on disentangling these two.
• Arbitrariness of the linguistic sign: The relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. There is no inherent reason why the sound "cat" refers to a feline; it's a matter of convention. This is evident in the multitude of words for the same concept across different languages.
• Meaning through difference: A signifier gains meaning only by being different from other signifiers (e.g., "cat" is "cat" because it's not "bat" or "dog").
• Stability through structure: Despite the arbitrary nature of individual signs, the relationship between signifier and signified remains stable because it is held in place by the holistic structure of the language system.
• Synchronic vs. Diachronic: Saussure made a strict distinction between diachronic linguistics (studying language evolution over time) and synchronic linguistics (studying language as a system at a given moment). Structuralism primarily focuses on the synchronic plane, emphasizing simultaneity and how the system functions as a whole.
• Meaning is relational and systemic: Meaning is differential and exists only within a given system. A word's meaning is dependent on its relations to all other elements within that system.
• The necessity of community: A community is essential to establish and maintain the values and relationships between signifiers and signifieds.
• Bracketing the signified: To properly study language, one must "bracket" the referent (the actual thing) and focus on how language itself works.

The speaker illustrated the synchronic plane with Saussure's chess analogy: the state of a chessboard at any given moment is independent of its previous states; understanding the current configuration doesn't require knowing the preceding moves.

The Esperanto Interlude

The speaker briefly discussed Esperanto, an artificial international language created by Ludwik Zamenhof (a contemporary of Saussure) in the late 19th century. Zamenhof, a Polish Jew from a multilingual background, envisioned Esperanto as a neutral, easy-to-learn language to foster international understanding and peace. While it gained some momentum and still has speakers today, it did not achieve its utopian goal of saving the world.

Implications of Structural Linguistics: From Language to Culture

The principles of structural linguistics were extended to other domains, leading to semiology or semiotics – the study of signs and their governing laws. Key implications include:

• Decoupling signifier and signified: Allowing for separate analysis.
• Focus on the synchronic: Understanding systems at a given moment.
• Relational meaning: Terms derive meaning from their relationships within a system.
• Language produces meaning: Language doesn't just express pre-existing meaning; it actively produces it, structuring thought.

Roman Jakobson and the Prague Linguistic Circle

The speaker highlighted Roman Jakobson, a precocious linguist who, as a teenager, founded the Moscow Linguistic Circle and worked with Russian Futurists like Shklovsky and Mayakovsky. This group emphasized "ostranenie" (defamiliarization), drawing attention to language as language, and the idea of "the word as such" – decoupling words from their referents to view them as things in themselves.

Jakobson fled Russia during the Bolshevik Civil War and established the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1920. This circle became a hub for structuralist thought, attracting a diverse, cosmopolitan group of intellectuals. The speaker shared an anecdote about Shklovsky's sarcastic refusal to join Jakobson in Prague, and a participant's memoir noting the accented Czech spoken at the Circle's meetings.

The Meeting of Minds: Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss

The narrative returned to the pivotal meeting in New York. In 1938, Jakobson, a Jew, fled Prague due to the Nazi invasion and eventually reached the United States. There, he reconnected with Alexandre Koyre, another Russian émigré and Husserl scholar who had also fled Europe. Koyre then introduced Jakobson to Claude Lévi-Strauss, a French anthropologist and Jew also fleeing the Nazis. This meeting, the speaker emphasized, was legendary, giving birth to structural anthropology.

Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist who had conducted fieldwork in Latin America, was deeply influenced by Jakobson's linguistic insights. He aimed to uncover the deep, unconscious laws governing cultural systems, viewing culture broadly to include tools, institutions, customs, beliefs, art, knowledge, and language. He asked what anthropology could learn from linguistics, concluding that both deal strictly with symbolism and signifiers.

Lévi-Strauss and Kinship Systems

Lévi-Strauss applied structuralist principles to kinship systems, arguing that they function like a language. Kinship relations are structured like Saussure's systems of signs, where units derive value from their differences. A kinship system, he posited, exists not in objective blood ties but in human consciousness as an arbitrary system of representations. He used the example of the "avunculate" (a close relationship between a maternal uncle and nephew) to illustrate how understanding one relationship requires viewing it within the entire systemic whole. Lévi-Strauss also incorporated Freudian ideas, particularly the incest taboo, as a primordial element in the emergence of culture.

Binaries and Myth

Classical structuralism, particularly in Lévi-Strauss's anthropology, often relies on binaries (good/bad, hot/cold, raw/cooked) to map relationships. He also made observations like "In human society, it is men who exchange the women, and not vice versa."

Lévi-Strauss's work on myth is also crucial. He viewed myths across diverse cultures as variations on a limited set of universal themes, functioning like a language with units that can be broken down and combined according to a grammar inherent in the human mind. Myths, for Lévi-Strauss, classify and organize human reality, offering imaginary resolutions to real social contradictions. This perspective decenters the human subject; myths are seen as "thinking their way through people," rather than individuals creating myths. Many myths, he noted, begin with a crisis of differentiation, where too little difference leads to chaos.

Criticisms of Structuralism

The speaker concluded by outlining common criticisms of structuralism:

• Loss of inherent reality: Everything becomes about symbols interacting with other symbols, leading to a sense of relativism.
• Diminishment of the human subject: It effectively diminishes or abolishes the human subject, bracketing life, history, and individual experience.
• Ahistorical and amoralizing: It tends to be ahistorical, focusing on synchronic systems, and shies away from value judgments.
• Dispersed agency: Agency is dispersed, largely residing in language itself.
• Meaning as profoundly contingent: Due to the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign, meaning is seen as contingent, not natural, universal, or intrinsic, but relational.
• Presupposes a totality: Like Hegelian thought, it assumes a holistic system where everything means something within the larger structure.
• Impersonal nature: It brackets life to look at signs representing life.
• Reconfiguration of subject-object: It reconfigures the subject-object paradigm by effectively bracketing both.
• Linguistic turn: It rethinks all of human life on the model of language, leading to the "linguistic turn" in various disciplines.
• Squashing the subject: It raises questions about the fate of the individual subject when it is decentered.
• Form over substance: It emphasizes form as everything, questioning reference beyond the text.

The speaker ended with a critique of Lévi-Strauss by anthropologist Clifford Geertz: "Lévi-Strauss's search is, after all, not for men, whom he doesn't quite care for, but for man as such, with whom he is enthralled." This highlights the impersonal, abstract nature of structuralism's focus on universal human structures rather than individual human experience.