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# Structuralism

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In film and [literary theory]? and criticism, the term usually refers to a line of thought stemming from the structural linguistics usually identified with [Ferdinand Saussure]?. The generalization of linguistic models by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss inspired others to apply their versions of structuralist ideas to a wide range of subjects.

Levi-Strauss' views, naturally, also affected the social sciences from the 1960s on.

As with any cultural movement, the influences and developments are complex. Other linguists besides Saussure were important. Roman Jakobson, in particular, worked on specifically literary problems long before structuralism became a general trend. But for a brief overview, Levi-Strauss is a good enough representative of the approach; he is quite clear and meticulous in stating his principles.

But he is anthropologist. One of his terms is used in a way peculiar to his field, noted here as a warning about searches for further information. Levi-Strauss repeatedly contrasts his anthropology with the work of "functionalists", but he usually cites two linguistic authorities, Roman Jakobson and Nicolas Troubetzkoy, who are functionalists as far as many linguists are concerned. Indeed, the purpose of calling them functionalists, along with other members of the Prague School, is to distinguish their work from structural linguistics.

Worse, the Prague School is sometimes referred to as "functional-structuralist", while there is a well-known position in the social sciences, deriving from Talcott Parsons, which is sometimes called "structural-functionalism."

This contradictory labelling stems from a genuine issue in the social sciences, which is outlined in the entry on Levi-Strauss. It is peripheral to structuralism in general culture.

Structural linguists make the influential argument that the elements of a language have no intrinsic character. They take on a character only in relation to each other.

Human beings can make a certain range of noises, for example, but the sound of "m" is not really the sound of "m" outside of a language that uses an "m." Within that language, a certain range of noises gets classified together as equivalent versions of the "m" sound, and there is no useful way to describe this classification except by referring to the language. The boundaries are imprecise--people who hear an "m" are not measuring waveforms and rejecting the ones beyond a certain cutoff point. Furthermore, there is change through time, local variation, and a good deal of overlap between the range of noises that can be classified as "m" and those that can be classified as something else. If there is an "m" sound that exists in the language, it must be thought of as something persisting through the welter of possible variations.

The phoneme has some essential character, apart from all its manifestations. Furthermore, the language defines this essential character partly by differentiating it from other phonemes. What makes an "m" is partly its distinction from "n." But what makes an "n" is partly its distinction from "m."

Continuing this line of analysis, it must be the case that the “m” sound in one language is not the same as the “m” sound in another, even if the same range of vocal noise is classified as “m” in each. The classification is being made by contrasts within two different systems.

Saussure believed that the meanings expressed in a language were determined by an analogous system of differences.

This way of thinking has several obvious characteristics.

It defines the boundaries of a language by reference to its internal structure.

It portrays the workings of a language solely in terms of the internal structure, rather than seeking a set of causes, functions, or patterns that could underlie several different structures. The approach obviously raises the possibility that what's expressed in one language cannot be expressed in any other.

Most pervasively, it depends on a notion of purely abstract structure underlying all the particular manifestations of a language. Language is not the sound, it is the classification of sounds; it is not the question, it is the comparison with other sentence types that define what a question is; it is not the idea, it is the set of underlying distinctions that make the idea possible.

This idealism, if that’s the term, has a somewhat surprising result. Sign and meaning tend to merge. A word means just what it means in the language that uses it, and there is no expression of the meaning except that very word.

So, implicitly, languages are not translatable into each other. This is the possibility taken up by deconstructionism.

Levi-Strauss extends this form of linguistic analysis to all human culture. All the operations of human consciousness and action are built on simple contrasts—the raw and the cooked, the wet and the dry, and so forth. In his view, these contrasts are changeless and universal.

In this respect, he is extending another aspect of linguistic research, the search for a universal grammar.

Commenting on Saussure, the philosopher Hilary Putnam remarked that it was "scarcely coherent" to search for a universal pattern in language while attempting to describe each language exclusively in terms of its own structure. However, this bundling of universals and mutually-exclusive particulars does seem to be the common structuralist view.

Levi-Strauss takes the position that cultures cannot be explained without some reference to universals. He locates them in a fundamental structure of the human mind, which must necessarily be expressed in every human act.

One implication of this view is that the same structures will operate in both the actions being studied and the scholar's interpretation of them. Freud may completely misread a folktale's meaning, in the sense of giving a bad description of the psychological tensions that its tellers had in them to express. But his response to the tale nevertheless arises from the same basis as theirs. It is at least relevant to a good description of what the tale means. Levi-Strauss explored this sort of ambiguity in his later MYTHOLOGIES.

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