Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Seldom in the history of thought has there been a single book so influential as Course in General Linguistics (published posthumously by his students from their course notes). With this work, the synchronic study of language and meaning generation truly began, and Saussure is thus credited as the “father of modern linguistics.” Previously, language was mainly studied diachronically; that is, the evolution of words and grammatical construction, and so on, was traced over time.

It is difficult to overstate the revolutionary nature of Saussure's work. His synchronic study of language focused upon the manner in which meaning is generated structurally through an arbitrary “sign” system of differences (as described below). The realization that meaning is structurally generated through sign systems took his linguistic analysis beyond the study of the spoken and written word to embrace potentially all sign systems (of which our spoken and written language is merely a subset) involved in human communication. Thus, an entire new discipline was born—semiology—and once again Saussure is credited as the “father” of it.

Through semiology, the entirety of human culture—and each and every aspect of it, from architecture to literary criticism to the unconscious mind—can be analyzed in terms of its being a structured sign system. A plethora of famous thinkers (though many did not accept the structuralist label) applied this methodology to a diverse range of human phenomena, for example, Roman Jakobson [Page 967](linguistics), Claude Lévi-Strauss (social anthropology), and Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis). Louis Althusser (Marxism) and Roland Barthes (literary criticism and cultural analysis) are perhaps the most famous.

The technical fundamentals of semiology are fairly simple. Language (or any meaning-generating sign system) can be broken down into two categories: langue and parole (or in English, “language” and “speech”). Parole is what is happening for me now as I type this and for you as you read it. When in speaking you utter a command or ask someone a question, that is parole, too. When they hear and understand you, that is also parole. One way of putting it is to say that parole (or speech) is any particular usage of language. Saussure's great insight was to realize that for any particular instance of language usage to potentially work in terms of intended and received meanings it must depend on the underlying system of linguistic rules or structure of language, that is, on langue.

A sign is composed of two elements, a signifier and a signified, which fit together as the two sides of the same coin, of the sign itself. In written or spoken language, the signifier is the written mark or sound, respectively, and the signified is the mental image associated with the mark or sound.

...