5.4. The Models of Structuralism
The Models of Structuralism
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The advent of structural linguistics completely changed this situation. Not only did it renew linguistic perspectives; a transformation of this magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example, has played for the physical sciences. In what does this revolution consist, as we try to assess its broadest implications? N. Troubetzkoy, the illustrious founder of structural linguistics, himself furnished the answer to this question. In one programmatic statement, he reduced the structural method to four basic operations. First, structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure; second, it does not treat terms as independent entities, taking instead as its - basis of analysis the relations between terms; third, it introduces the concept of system - "Modern phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are always part of a system; it shows concrete phonemic systems and elucidates their structure" finally, structural linguistics aims at discovering general laws, either by induction "or . . . by logical deduction, which would give them an absolute character."
Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems. "Kinship systems," Finally, the recurrence of kinship patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics, the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which are general but implicit. Although they belong to another order of reality, kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena.
The study of kinship problems is today broached in the same terms and seems to be in the throes of the same difficulties as was linguistics on the eve of the structuralist revolution. In both cases, it is solely (or almost solely) diachronic analysis which must account for synchronic phenomena. Troubetzkoy, comparing structural linguistics and the old linguistics, defines structural linguistics as a "systematic structuralism and universalism," which he contrasts with the individualism and "atomism" of former schools. And when he considers diachronic analysis, his perspective is a profoundly modified one: "The evolution of a phonemic system at any given moment is directed by the tendency toward a goal. ... This evolution thus has a direction, an internal logic, which historical phonemics is called upon to elucidate." The "individualistic" and "atomistic" interpretation, founded exclusively on historical contingency, which is criticised by Troubetzkoy and Jakobson, is actually the same as that which is generally applied to kinship problems. Each detail of terminology and each special marriage rule is associated with a specific custom as either its consequence or its survival. We thus meet with a chaos of discontinuity. No one asks how kinship systems, regarded as synchronic wholes, could be the arbitrary product of a convergence of several heterogeneous institutions (most of which are hypothetical), yet nevertheless function with some sort of regularity and effectiveness.
Source: Structural Anthropology, 1958 publ.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/levistra.htm
Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who had already begun to absorb non-positivistic ideas in the second decade of the twentieth century, long before copies of Saussure's Cours reached
In the case of Roman Jakobson, we must reckon with an additional complicating factor, namely that he was exposed to Saussure's ideas in two stages. First, he had a colleague and friend, Serge Karcevski, who had studied in
In the same year (viz. 1929), Roman Jakobson gave the following much-quoted thumbnail definition of structuralism: "Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations, we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than structuralism. Language is a system all parts of which can and should be considered in their synchronic inter-dependence. Note that Karcevski uses Saussure's idiosyncratic term "synchronique" here, instead of the more traditional "statique." The term "structuralism" was, however, not created de novo by linguists in the late 1920s but had already been in use among psychologists a generation earlier.
While that starting point is still tantalizingly shrouded in mystery, however, there is no doubt that Jakobson was a key figure in the wider dissemination of the notion of structuralism to his fellow linguists in western Europe in the 1930s. Later, his association with Claude Lévi-Strauss in New York in the early 1940s was of crucial importance in the spread of some of the key ideas of structuralism to anthropology and from there subsequently to other social sciences (one thinks in this connection of Jean Piaget in psychology). The use of terms like "structure," "structural," etc. was, for instance, of terms like "organism" and "morphology," which were borrowed by comparative philologists in the nineteenth century from biology and geology, two fields with unimpeachably scientific legitimacy.
There perhaps three (not two) fundamental developments in twentieth-century linguistics, namely the rise of structuralism, the turning away from historical studies, and the vogue of Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale. Facts of this kind lead me to raise the awkward question of the relation between linguistics and literary criticism in the period up to the emergence of structuralism in
http://people.ku.edu/~percival/Jakobson&Structuralism.html
Gerard Genette's
In extending the range of the textual we have not decreased the complexity or meaning-power of literature but have in fact increased it, both in its textual and in its cultural meaningfulness. If the reader and the text are both cultural constructions, then the meaningfulness of texts becomes more apparent, as they share meaning-constructs; if the cultural is textual, then the culture's relation to the textuality of literature becomes more immediate, more pertinent, more compelling. Literature is a discourse in a world of discourses, each discourse having its protocols for meaning and typical uses of language, rhetoric, subject area and so forth.
The thesis that what seems real to us is coded and conventional leads to a consideration of how 'reality' is represented in art -- what we get is a 'reality effect'; the signs which represent reality are 'naturalized', that is, made to seem as if we could see reality through them -- or in another way of saying, made to seem to be conforming to the laws of reality. This is achieved through 'vraisemblance', truth-seeming, or 'naturalization'. Some elements of vraisemblance (from Culler, Structuralist Poetics) are as follows.
a. There is the socially given text, that which is taken as the 'real' world -- what is taken for granted. That we have minds and bodies, for instance. This is a textual phenomenon. (Every term of "we have minds and bodies", the relations between most of these terms, and what we mean by them, in fact codify culturally specific assumptions.)
b. There is the general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of 'nature'. This is the level at which we interpret motive, character and significance from descriptions of action, dress, attitude and so forth. "Jake put on his tuxedo and tennis shoes" will provide an interpretation of Jake or will look forward to an explanation of why he broke the cultural code, in this case a dress code. "Harry gazed for hours on the picture of Esmeralda" is a culturally coded statement: we read Harry's attitude, and so forth. We 'imitate' 'reality' by recording cultural codes.
c. There are the conventions of genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance -- "the series of constituent conventions which enable various sorts of works to be written." The lines
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; The center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
require certain conventions of reading. If we were to read it as part of a paragraph in Dickens they would make less sense. One convention of literature is that there is a persona who is articulating the text -- that it comes from some organizing consciousness which can be commented on and described. Genre is another convention: each genre designates certain kinds of action as acceptable and excludes others.
d. There is what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the kind directly above, so as to reinforce its own authority. The narrator may claim that he is intentionally violating the conventions of a story, for instance, that he knows that this is not the way it should be done according to the conventions, but that the way he is doing it serves some higher or more substantial purpose -- the appeal is to a greater naturalness or a higher intelligibility.
e. There is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities. "When a text cites or parodies the conventions of a genre one interprets it by moving to another level of interpretation where both terms of the opposition can be held together by the theme of literature itself." -- e.g. parody, when one exploits the particular conventions of a work or style or genre, etc. Irony forces us to posit an alternate possibility or reality in the face of the reality-construction of the text. All surface incongruities register meaning at a level of the project of interpretation itself, and so comment as it were on the relation between 'textual' and 'interpretive' reality.
In short, to imitate reality is to represent codes which 'describe' (or, construct) reality according to the conventions of representation of the time.
The conventions of reading. We read according to certain conventions; consequently our reading creates the meaning of that which we read. These conventions come in two 'layers':
a. how we (culturally) think that reality is or should be represented in texts, which will include the general mimetic conventions of the art of the period, which will describe the way in which reality is apprehended or imagined, and
b. the conventions of 'literature' (and of 'art' generally), for instance,
a. the rule of significance whereby we raise the meaning of the text to its highest level of generalizability (a tree blasted by lightning might become a figure of the power of nature, or of God);
b. the convention of figural coherence, through which we assume that figures (metonyms, metaphors, 'symbols') will have a signifying relationship to one another on a level of meaning more complex than or 'higher' than the physical;
c. the convention of thematic unity, whereby we assume that all of the elements of the text contribute to the meaning of the text. These are all conventions of reading.
The facts that some works are difficult to interpret, some are difficult to interpret for its contemporaries but not for later readers, some require that we learn how its contemporaries would have read them in order fully to understand them, these facts point to the existence of literary competence, the possession by the reader of protocols for reading. When one reads modernist texts, such as The Waste Land, one has to learn how to read them. One has in fact to learn how to read Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and so forth. Culler remarks that
reading poetry is a rule-governed process of producing meanings; the poem offers a structure which must be filled up and one therefore attempts to invent something, guided by a series of formal rules derived from one's experience of reading poetry, which both make possible invention and impose limits on it.
Structuralism is oriented toward the reader insofar as it says that the reader constructs literature, that is, reads the text with certain conventions and expectations in mind. Some post-structural theorists, Fish for instance, hold that the reader constructs the text entirely, through the conventions of reading of her interpretive community.
In joining with formalism in the identification of literariness as the focus on the message itself as opposed to a focus on the addressee, the addresser, or the referential function of the message, structuralism places ambiguity, as Genette points out, at the heart of the poetic function, as its self-referential nature puts the message, the addresser and the addressee all in doubt. Hence literary textuality is complexly meaningful.
Structuralism underlines the importance of genre, i.e., basic rules as to how subjects are approached, about conventions of reading for theme, level of seriousness, significance of language use, and so forth. "Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values." (Genette). The idea that literature is an institution is another structuralist contribution; that a number of its protocols for creation and for reading are in fact controlled by that institutional nature.
Through structuralism, literature is seen as a whole: it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.
The following are some points based on Culler's ideas about the advantages of structuralism, having to do with the idea that literature is a protocol of reading:
a. Structuralism is a firmer starting-point for reading literature as literature than are other approaches, because literariness and/or fictionality does not have to be shown to be inherent in the text, but in the way it is read. It explains, for instance, why the same sentence can have a different meaning depending on the genre in which it appears, it explains how the boundaries of the literary can change from age to age, it accommodates and explains differing readings of a text given differing reading protocols -- one can read a text for its 'literary' qualities or for its sociological or ideological qualities, for instance, and read as complex a text in doing so.
b. One gains an appreciation of literature as an institution, as a coherent and related set of codes and practices, and so one sees also that reading is situated reading, that is, it is in a certain meaning-domain or set of codes. It follows that when literature is written, it will be written under these codes (it can break or alter the codes to create effects, but this is still a function of the codes).
c. Consequently one can be more open to challenges to and alterations of literary conventions.
d. Once one sees that reading and writing are both coded and based on conventions one can read 'against the grain' in a disciplined way, and one can read readings of literature -- reading can become a more self-reflexive process.
http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/struct.html
A.J. Greimas
Greimas applied the system of language into literature in the form of narrative theory. He did not make any limitation. Starting from Saussure and Jakobson’s concept of binary opposition, Greimas described that the oppositions include what he called the elementary structure of signification. He later argued that the binary opposition is the basis of an actantial model, the superficial surface structure, from where individual stories derived and generated. Thus his binary opposition and actantial model are parallel with Saussure’s concepts of langue and parole and later Noam Chomsky’s concept of language competence and performance.
He theorized that within narrative there are three pairs of binary oppositions, the first being subject/ object, which is connected with desire, search and aim. Secondly there is sender/receiver, which is connected with communication. The last opposition is helper/opponent, connected with auxiliary support and hindrance (Hawkes 92-93). Greimas thought of narrative in terms of relationships between entities. He broke down Propp's thirty-one functions into twenty, which can be divided into the following three categories (Hawkes 94):
1. Contractual: concerned with establishing or breaking of contracts or rules
2. Performative: concerned with the actions of the characters
3. Disjunctive: concerned with the sequence of events and how they relate to each other
"Structuralism" can be viewed as an extension of "Formalism" in that both "Structuralism" and "Formalism" devoted their attention to matters of literary form (i.e. structure) rather than social or historical content; and that both bodies of thought were intended to put the study of literature on a scientific, objective basis. "Structuralism" relied initially on the ideas of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure. Like Plato, Saussure regarded the signifier (words, marks, symbols) as arbitrary and unrelated to the concept, the signified, to which it referred. Within the way a particular society uses language and signs, meaning was constituted by a system of "differences" between units of the language. Particular meanings were of less interest than the underlying structures of signification that made meaning itself possible, often expressed as an emphasis on "langue" rather than "parole." "Structuralism" was to be a metalanguage, a language about languages, used to decode actual languages, or systems of signification.
Tzvetan Todorov
Todorov believed the existence of a ‘grammar’ of narrative from which individual stories ultimately derive. He believed that the relations between the elements in literature can be divided into two types, the syntagmatic or in-praesentia and paradigmatic or in-absentia. The first type is the configuration or contruction relation in which there exists the causality between the elements which support the theory. This relationship often focuses on the syntactic aspect in narration. The second type is the relation between the presence and absence in a text. Basically, Todorov indentified three aspects of the narrative.i.e. the semantic aspect (its content), syntactical aspect (combinations of various structural units); verbal aspect (manipulation of the particular words and phrases).
The work of Tzvetan Todorov shifts from an emphasis on literature as writing to an emphasis on the connected activity of reading (Hawkes 95). He is another major critical thinker who seeks to establish a scientific account of narrative structure. He believes that all narratives need proposition, which is the smallest, most basic unit of narrative. This can be an agent (i.e. a person) or a predicate (i.e. an action). He also uses the story of Oedipus Rex, an abstract yet universal myth to stress his theory, which could also be referred to as an algebraic formula (
-X is King -X marries Y
-Y is X’s mother -X kills Z
-Z is X’s father
In this example, the first three (king, mother, father) propositions denominate agents. These are specific people or nouns. The first and last two propositions contain predicates or actions: to be a king, to marry and to kill. He then goes on to present two higher levels of organization:
1.) Sequence: a group of propositions form a sequence
2.) Text: a group of sequences form text.
The basic sequence is made up of five propositions which outline a basic state of narration that is "disturbed" and then "re-established." For example (
EQUILIBRIUM¹ (stability or peace)
FORCE¹ (a disruption of peace i.e. enemy invades)
DISEQUILIBRIUM (climax i.e. war)
FORCE² (in order to restore peace i.e. enemy is defeated)
EQUILIBRIUM² (peace on new terms or a form of compromise)
A succession of sequences form a text and this text can be organized in several different ways:
1.) Embedding: a story within a story, digression
2.) Linking: a string of sequences
3.) Alteration: interlacing of sequences
4.) Conglomeration: a mixture of all these forms
Todorov tried to identify the fundamental narrative units which come together to form larger structures in text. He aimed to develop a "universal grammar" which not only underlies all languages and signifying systems, but also acts as a guidebook for all language and lays out even the most basic functions and responsibilities of all human beings (Hawkes 97).
Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes focused on the role, function, and contribution of the reader and the relation between the signifier and the signified. Barthes identified two types of readers, the first was called writerly, i.e. when the reader is not only a consumer but a producer of a text, and the second type the readerly, when the reader is left with very poor freedom, i.e. simply to accept or reject the text. It was in the first type that Barthes saw the function as agencies which modify, determinate, and generate meaning closer to the ways in which language works. Therefore Barthes believed in the plurality of a text. A text should divide into a series of lexia or reading units of conderable length. A lexia can include a few words or several sentences. It’s determined by understanding the meanings, dimensions, connotations that appear in each of the words, phrases, and sentences.
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