French Structuralism

Saussure's Premises

Before Saussure, the field of linguistics had primarily consisted of cataloguing the world's languages and tracing etymologies. Saussure rejected the study of empirically available elements of language for the study of the independent formal relations between them. In his Cours de Linguistique Générale, delivered as a series of lectures in Paris in the first decade of the 20th century, but only edited after his death, Saussure put forward several propositions about language that are definitive for the later development of structuralism. He postulated that language was a coherent social system regulated by the principles of syntax and semantics and that the structure of language consisted in the relations (principally oppositions) between its elements.

He further maintained that any given “signifier” (word)stood in a purely conventional relationship to its “signified” (meaning), with nothing essential, intrinsic, or even stable about the association. To understand language, therefore, linguists needed to chart the logical relations governing the production of utterances rather than these surface forms themselves: grammar rather than speech or, in Saussure's terms, langue rather thanparole.

A Russian disciple, Troubetzkoy, achieved great success in applying Saussure's postulates to phonology. Troubetzkoy's student Jakobson, founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle, who would be Lévi-Strauss's colleague at the New School before and during the Second World War, developed Saussure's science of signs to analyze poetics.

Structuralist thought holds other social systems to be analogous to language, as defined by Saussure. Just as language grammars, of which most speakers are not consciously aware, govern the production of utterances, cultural, political, and other social phenomena conform to grammars or codes. Furthermore, Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson shared with psychologist Jean Piaget and Biologist François Jacob a conviction that a genetic mechanism acts as a “structuring force” in man.

Structuralist Anthropology

Lévi-Strauss saw cultural variation as a difference of number and arrangement, like, to use a favorite analogy, various melodies composed from a determinate number of keys. He studied the variations to generate the laws of transformation that formed the essential cultural grammar and indicated universal innate structures of mind. The ultimate goal was l'attitude totalisante, the awareness of complex social structure as determined by “unconscious reason.”

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