Structuralism
1916 – 1970
Meaning comes from difference within a system rather than from any link between a sign and a thing, and the same holds for myths, kinship and fashion.
- Active
- 1916 – 1970
- Where
- Geneva, then Paris
- Status
- extinct as a movement
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
A sign has no positive content. Cat means what it does because it is not bat, cap or cot — value arises from position in a system of differences, not from resemblance to anything.
What it held
Saussure's lectures, published posthumously by students from their notes, make three distinctions that reorganised the human sciences. Langue is the system, parole the individual utterance. The link between sound and concept is arbitrary — nothing about a tree requires that word. And a system can be studied as it stands, synchronically, rather than only through its history.
Lévi-Strauss took the method to anthropology and argued that myths are not primitive explanations but structured transformations, working on oppositions — raw and cooked, nature and culture — the way a language works on phonemes. What matters is not what any myth says but the relations between its versions.
Barthes applied it to advertising, wrestling, food and clothes, showing that anything can be read as a system of signs. Lacan reread Freud through it: the unconscious is structured like a language.
The strong claim, and the one that eventually broke, is that the system rather than the speaker is where the action is. Sartre objected that this dissolves the subject; the structuralists more or less agreed, and thought it an advance.
How it argued
Isolate a system, identify its minimal contrasting units, and describe the rules by which they combine — regardless of the domain.
What it was arguing against
Historical and biographical explanation, the intentions of authors, and existentialism's free-standing subject.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether structures are in the object or imposed by the analyst. Whether the method eliminates agency, which was the central complaint against it.
Common misconceptions
That Saussure wrote the Course in General Linguistics. He did not — it was assembled from students' notes after his death, and scholars still argue about how much of it is his.
How it began
Saussure's Geneva lectures between 1907 and 1911, and their posthumous publication in 1916, which is the founding event of modern linguistics.
What became of it
Superseded within a generation by post-structuralism, which accepted the account of the sign and denied that any system is ever stable.
Lasting influence
Linguistics, anthropology, literary theory, psychoanalysis and media studies. The idea that culture can be read as a system of signs is now so common it is invisible.
Why it still matters
The claim that meaning is relational rather than referential remains the default in semantics, and structural analysis is standard equipment in several disciplines.
Put another way
A chess piece, which is defined entirely by how it moves and not at all by what it is carved from.
Where to start
Mythologies. Each essay is three pages and the method is visible in every one.
The surprising bit
The founding text of the movement is a book its author never wrote and would not necessarily have recognised.
In their own words
In language there are only differences, without positive terms.
Myths think themselves in men, and without men's knowledge.
Connections
- Opposed by
- Existentialism, Phenomenology
- Influenced
- Post-Structuralism, Lacanian Psychoanalysis
The verdict
A method borrowed from linguistics that reorganised half the humanities and then dismantled itself.