Poststructuralism for Open Minds

From the opening pages

Structuralism begins with a simple insult to common sense: things do not mean very much by themselves. A word, a gesture, a myth, a fashion, a meal, a marriage rule, a traffic light, a heroic story about national destiny — none of these arrives in the world carrying a little label that says, “Hello, here is my meaning, please admire my self-sufficiency.” Meaning appears because things belong to systems. Remove the system, and the thing begins to look less like a message and more like an object having a private crisis.

The basic structuralist idea is that human culture can be studied not as a pile of isolated facts, but as a network of relations. This was the great promise: beneath the chaos of everyday life there might be forms, patterns, rules, and structures. People tell stories, arrange families, classify animals, organize meals, perform rituals, decorate bodies, and produce art. The structuralist does not begin by asking what one isolated custom “means” in itself. The structuralist asks what larger arrangement gives it meaning. A wedding ring is not meaningful because metal has deep romantic opinions. It works because it belongs to a system of marriage, property, religion, law, gender, etiquette, romance, inheritance, photography, and relatives who ask inappropriate questions near cake.

Structuralism became a major intellectual movement in the twentieth century, especially in linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism, and semiotics, the study of signs and sign-systems. Its roots are often traced to Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss linguist whose Course in General Linguistics was published in 1916 after his death, based on lectures delivered at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911 and edited by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. That book helped turn language away from being treated mainly as a historical collection of word-origins and toward being studied as an organized system. Naturally, once scholars noticed that language could be approached this way, several of them began looking at almost everything else and thinking, “That too. Obviously that too.”