The Canon of Structuralism

What is structuralism? Not a school, nor even a movement(at least, not yet), for most of the authors ordinarily labeled with this word are unaware of being united of any solidarity of doctrine or commitement. Nor it is vocabulary. Structure is already an old word, today quite overworked.[]. In fact, we can presume that there exist certain writers, painters, musicians, in whose eyes, a certain exercise of structure (and not only its thought) represent a distinctive experience, and that both creators and analysts must be placed under the common sign of what we might call structural man, defined not by his ideas or his languages, but by his imagination - in other words, by the way he mentally experiences structure.
ROLAND BARTHES: The Structuralist Activity, trans. Richard Howard. in Critical Essays (Evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1972).

Literary structuralism flourished in the 1960s as an attempt to apply to literature the methods and insights of the founder of modern structural linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure viewed language as a system of signs in which each sign was to be seen as being made-up from a signifier- a sound, image or its graphic equivalent, and signified- the concept or meaning. The relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one. The relation between sign and what it refers, what Saussure called referent, is therefore also an arbitrary one. Each sign in the system has meaning only from its diffference from another. Structuralism is, in general, an attempt to apply this linguistic theory on objects and activities, other than the language itself. It is, as Jameson Frederic has put it, an attempt to rethink everyething through once again in terms of linguistics. Saussures view influenced Russian Formalists, although Formalism isnt itself exactly a structuralism. It views texts structurally and focuses the attention upon the sign itself, but is not concerned with the meaning as being differential or with the deep laws and structures underlying litery texts. Roman Jackobson was the first who created a link between Formalism and the modern structuralism. For Jackobson, all the communication involves six elements: an addresser, an addressee, a message passed between them, a shared code that makes the message intelligible, a contact or physical medium of communication and a context to wich the message refers. Jackobson makes also the distinction between metaphorical and metonymic. In metaphor, one sign is substituted for another because is somehow similar to it, while in metonymy a sign is associated with another. Thus, in spoken or written language, signs are selected from a possible range of equivalences and then combined together to form a sentence and so on. This is why Jackobosn is able to say that the function of a text projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination. Then structuralism was furthered by Claude Levi-Strauss, who developed a structural theory in a consideration of myth, ritual and kinship, especially in his work Anthropologie Structurale. He sees social structure as kind of model and shows that the behaviour patterns

of kinship and the existence of institutions depend on methods of communication that are all characteristics of how the human mind works. He analyses modes of thoughts as well as modes of action, looking for the system of differences which underline practice, rather than their origins and causes. The Structuralist Analysis of Narratives was begun by Strauss in 1958. He believes that the totality of myths have some constant, basic and universal structures, through which all myths can be explained. He sees myth as language system, which can be broken into smaller individual units called mythemes by analogy with phonemes. Myths can be read in relation to each other rather than as reflecting a particular version. From that the concept of a kind of grammar or set of relations under the surface of the narrative. Later this theory was developed into a major part of critical theory. After that, two new views came in the context of structuralism: Derridas deconstruction and the post-structuralism of Barthes. Both these new perspectives came as complement for structuralism. Derrida published an essay titled: Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences which was later followed by his book Of Grammatology (1967). In these works Derrida argued that a text can be read as something quite different from what it appears to be saying. A text may possess so many different meanings that it can not have a meaning, there is no guaranteed essential meaning to a text. He also argued that the priority since the time of Plato was given to speech over writing, as it was believed that there is a gap in writing, which speech does not possess. But Derridas theory sustains both speech and writing are lacking in presence. Derrida proposed the theory of Differance, which he used to oppose logo centrism. In French language differer means to postpone, to delay and also it means to differ or be different from. Derrida uses differance in pushing Sassures theory to its logical conclusion and argues that to differ or differentiate is also to defer, postpone or withheld. The word itself illustrates his point that writing doesnt copy speech; the distinction between the two different forms differance and difference doesnt correspond to any distinction in their spoken form. Thus meaning is continuously and endlessly postponed as each word leads us on to yet another word in the system of signification. So, Derrida sees a text as an endless sequence of signifiers, which has no ultimate signifier. In 1967 Ronald Barthe published Elements of Semiology (1967), which stands as a temporal marker of post-structuralism. He proposed that structuralism is capable of an explanation of any sign system of any culture . But he also perceives that such an explanation necessitates a theology of meaning or explanation. This gave rise to the idea of Meta Language, which in fact beyond language or second order language which is used to describe, explain or interprete a first order language. Each order of language implicitly relies on a metalanguage by which it is explained. Regarding metalanguage Barthes says that when one language is interpreted there comes the indefinite regression. Thus the result will be that all metalanguages will be vanished in interpreting one another. Barthes used to defend structuralism, which stresses on binary opposition and on its idea that text has a meaning which is opposed to Deconstruction. He believed thus the signifying meanings of a text can be fixed and are need not to be diffused or disseminated as proposed by Derrida.This theory even puts Deconstruction in a place,against its principles and design, where deconstruction acts like a metalanguage. But as it is seen, discourse upon discourse in regression which is one aspect of Barthes post structuralist thinking is fundamentally, deconstructive. Barthes also introduces the concept death of author in his essay The Death of Author. He believed that the reader must be free of the concept of the author associated with

the text. Because, if the author remains a suppressing force, then the reader sees what the author wants to project, and thus he is unable to see the plurality of text. He also argues that a text should be readerly and writerly. A readerly text means a text to wich a readers response is more or less passive. A writerly text makes demands on the reader to work things out. He exemplifies Ulysses by James Joyce. In this case, the reader is no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. The concept of the dead of the author is related to the concept of a writerly text as the reader is more independent to see the plurality of the text in both cases. He also mentions about the experiences of plaisir and jouissance that a reader should have when reading. In conclusion, Barthes quotation from the beginning is contradicted. The structuralism became a school. The theories inspired by Saussure's linguistic theory have influenced the academic disciplines. Poststructuralism has also influenced materialist theory or Marxism by providing a way of understanding ideology and showing how important it is to the maintenance of any economic system. The poststructuralist theory produced cultural theories and cultural studies, including, in literature, new historicism and cultural materialism, in which the goal is to understand cultures as both material and discursive. In such theories, everything can be a text, everything can be "read." But no one kind of text is privileged over another. All texts are literary in a sense, as they are all produced in what we might call a self-conscious manner. On the other hand, no self produces any text; there is no authorial intention; language speaks through all of us, even the most "intentional" author.

Bibliography 1. Literary Theory, An introduction. Second Edition, Terry Eagleton, St. Catherines College, Oxford, 1996. 2. Modern Criticism and Theory, A Reader. Second edition by David Lodge and Nigel Wood, Pearson Education, 2000. 3. Critical Theory since 1965. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, University Press of Florida, Tallahassee, 1986 4. Critical Theory since Plato. Third edition, 1971 5. www.scribd.com 6. www.samirhomepage.wordpress.com