(Post-) structuralism

There seems to be no limit to the number of ways in which the relationship between postmodernism and post-structuralism is portrayed in the literature.

For a start, there are those who want to identify them out of hand. Ree suggests, for example, that in the 1970s postmodernism ‘was adopted within philosophy as a rough synonym for deconstruct ion and poststructuralism’ (1991, p. 256). ‘There are’, Sarup tells us (1993, p. 144), ‘so many similarities between post-structuralist theories and postmodernist practices that it is difficult to make a clear distinction between them’.

Others, however, are anxious to distinguish the two. Thus, Fink-Eitel (1992, p. 5) goes to some pains to introduce Foucault ‘not as a postmodernist, but rather as a poststructuralist’. Conceiving Foucault as a postmodernist, he claims, ‘would be too much of a generalization and consequendy would not do justice to the complexity of his work’. It would seem that, for Fink-Eitel, post-structuralism is subsumed under postmodernism as a more specific form of thought under the more general. If this is so, Fink-Eitel certainly does not stand alone. According to Blackburn (1994, p. 295), postmodernism has ‘poststructuralist aspects’; indeed, post-structuralism is a ‘variety of postmodernism defined by its reaction against structuralism in France’. As it happens, a number of authors consider that post-structuralism, developed in France in reaction to structuralism, has provided orientations and ideas that postmodernism, a much broader movement geographically and conceptually, has made its own, enlarged, and applied to an extended range of subject areas. Nor has this happened only at the start. As Marcus (1994, p. 564) sees it, postmodernism, in the United States at least, ‘has been given theoretical substance by the works of the French post­structuralists (who themselves had litde use for the term, save, momentarily, Lyotard), which only became available through frequent translation in the early 1980s’.

Wolin strikes a different chord in discussing the work of Lyotard. From Lyotard’s point of view, he tells us, postmodernism is a ‘non- sentimental adieu—a farewell without tears—to the traditional metaphysical longing for totality, holism, and presence’, with post­structuralism becoming ‘the epistemological—or better: anti- epistemological—corollary of this epochal cultural transvaluation’ (Wolin 1992, p. 9). Then there is Patti Lather (1991, p. 4), who uses ‘postmodern to mean the larger cultural shifts of a post-industrial, post­colonial era and poststructural to mean the working out of those shifts within the arenas of academic theory’ (blithely adding that she also uses the terms interchangeably!).

Post-structuralism a corollary of postmodernism? A theorising of postmodernism? A strain within postmodernism? A synonym for postmodernism? Well, certainly not the last. Milner is surely right in asserting that ‘the two are by no means synonymous’ (1991, p. 110). As for post-structuralism being a corollary of postmodernism, it may well be the case that some post-structuralisms have developed in direct relation to the postmodern condition and are themselves instances of postmodemism-as-cultural-response. Whether they relate in any close way to postmodemism-as-theory, that is, to the ‘postmodern debate’, is another matter. ‘The major post-structuralist thinkers’, says Milner (1991, p. Ill) ‘have been almost entirely absent from the debate’.

The absence of major post-structuralist thinkers in the postmodern debate does not mean that their thought has not been influential. Postmodernists have certainly drawn on their thought, as we have seen Marcus indicating in the case of the United States. Waugh (1992, p. 189) writes of ‘a Postmodernism that has absorbed the lessons of post­structuralism’. It is therefore possible to envisage postmodernism and post-structuralism informing one another, each promoting the development of the other, without their becoming in any true sense identified. There are post-structuralisms that are not at all postmodernist. And there are forms of postmodernism that are neither structuralist nor poststructuralist (see Figure 6).

Those who see structuralism and post-structuralism as very much a French matter are surely correct. Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the ‘first French academic sociologist’ (Coser 1971, p. 143), is widely acknowledged as at least the precursor of structuralism. While Milner sees Durkheim as ‘protostructuralist’ (1991, p. 62), others are ready to attribute a more developed structuralism to his social theory. Lash, for example, describes him as ‘the structuralist among sociology’s classics’ (1991, p. x). Durkheim, in fact, invokes many systems to indicate how there is ‘a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once bom, obey laws all of their own’ (1976, p. 424). Language, whose Taws are not those of thought’ and which expresses ‘the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience’ (Durkheim 1976, pp. 75, 434), is one of them.

Durkheim’s contemporary, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) also understands systems as the decisive factor in human affairs. However, he replaces Durkheim’s emphasis on consciousness with an emphasis on language. For him, language is not only in itself a system, one of many (as with Durkheim), but the system, that is, the ultimately determining system.

The centrality accorded to language in Saussure’s thought has remained uncontested in the structuralism that forms his legacy. Language is a system of signs and later structuralists owe to him the notion of a ‘science that studies the life of signs within society’ (de Saussure 1974, p. 16). His theory of the sign expounds it as a union of signifier (a form, or symbol) with signified (an idea). This is an entirely arbitrary union. True, it stems from the web of relationships found within language as a whole but in that web the signified is not a thing but a concept. The units of language, as the discrete system that it is, ‘can be identified only in terms of their relationships to each other, and not by reference to any other linguistic or extra-linguistic system’ (Milner 1991, p. 63). It is a self-enclosed system. That is why, according to Saussure (1974, p. 67), ‘the linguistic sign is arbitrary’. This arbitrary sign becomes the focus of his efforts. In dealing with it, Saussure makes his well-known distinction between langue (language), a system shared by all speakers of a certain language, and parole (word), the individual speech-act in which language-as-system is expressed and embodied. Language is an institution; word is an event.

The structuralist movement emanating from Saussure received immense impetus from the use made of his thought by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908- ). In studying symbolic relationships— kinship systems, for example—in the lives of Indian communities in Brazil, Levi-Strauss found himself dissatisfied with the prevailing anthropological method of empirical observation. The technical elements in Saussure’s structuralist approach to linguistics and its purported scientific character had special appeal and Levi-Strauss conceived a role for a Saussurean approach within anthropology. This means an intersection of the linguistic and the social. Levi-Strauss now looks to essentially linguistic structures as the source of social meaning ‘on the assumption that however much one language may vary from another there is a fundamental structure common to them all, an essence without which no language could be a language’ (Sturrock 1993, p. 43).

Levi-Strauss’s work in the late 1950s encouraged other anthropologists, as well as researchers in other disciplines, to adopt more robusdy structuralist and more specifically linguistic forms of analysis. In the decade that followed, the ‘linguistic turn’ came very much to the fore. By this time there was plenty of material for structuralist-minded researchers to draw upon. Plenty of French material, at any rate. There was the work of Roland Barthes (1915-80), Louis Althusser (1918-90), and Michel Foucault (1926-84). Such thinkers led the movement into its moment of high structuralism and later, at least in the case of Barthes and Foucault, on into post-structuralism. Along the way they influenced, and were influenced by, a large contingent of other thinkers.

Structuralism? High structuralism? Post-structuralism? We are obviously at a point where some more ‘sorting out’ is in order. We may read ‘high structuralism’ as shorthand for the moment when an elite group of structuralists came to prominence and gave structuralism an edge. But what is structuralism? Not everyone is brave enough to venture a definition. Milner courageously offers us this:

… for our purposes, and very broadly, structuralism might well be defined as an approach to the study of human culture, centred on the search for constraining patterns, or structures, which claims that individual phenomena have meaning only by virtue of their relation to other phenomena as elements within a systematic structure. (1991, p. 61)

Milner goes on to narrow this definition. More specifically, structuralism is the claim ‘that the methods of structural linguistics can be successfully generalised so as to apply to all aspects of human culture’ (Milner 1991, 62).

The formal structure found in language thus becomes the source of meaning for the structuralist. Since this structure is considered a self­regulating entity, such that linguistic signs are independent of non-verbal reality, structuralism cuts human understanding adrift from its moorings in mundane reality and espouses, epistemologically, a thoroughgoing subjectivism. This subjectivism is inherent in Saussure’s emphasis on the arbitrariness of linguistic signs. What the signifier signifies is not a reality in the world but a concept. Rather than taking account of reality in any true sense, we conform to a system of social meaning embedded in language.

Milner (1991, pp. 65-6) points to five characteristics of structuralism:

• positivism (‘it can be described … pejoratively as scientistic’);
• anti-historicism (‘structuralisms typically inhabit a never ending theoretical present’);
• a possible, though non-mandatory, commitment to the demystification of experiential reality (‘a peculiarly enfeebled, and essentially academic, version of intellectual radicalism, in which the world is not so much changed, as contemplated differently’);
• theoreticism (a ‘science of stasis, marked from birth by an inveterate anti-empiricism, becomes almost unavoidably preoccupied with highly abstract theoretical, or formal, models’);
• anti-humanism (‘if neither change nor process nor even the empirical instance are matters of real concern, then the intentions or actions of human subjects, whether individual or collective, can easily be disposed of as irrelevant to the structural properties of systems’).

Milner proceeds to identify these characteristics in the work of the early Barthes, the early Foucault, and Althusser. He could have started with earlier structuralists, had he so chosen. Geertz has said of Levi- Strauss’s structuralism, for example, that it ‘annuls history, reduces sentiment to a shadow of the intellect, and replaces the particular minds of particular savages in particular jungles with the Savage Mind immanent in us all’ (1973, p. 355).

Barthes’s early interests had to do with the images and messages (he calls them ‘myths’) to be found in popular culture (Barthes 1972). Here he cuts a wide swathe, looking at advertising, consumer goods, wresding, striptease, the Negro soldier saluting the French flag, and other intriguing phenomena. His interests then extend to the general rules and constraints of the narrative and to the nature of literariness. In a well- known text (1977, pp. 142-8), he comes to declare ‘the death of the author’. When dealing earlier with the question of hermeneutics, we considered historical trends in literary criticism and reading comprehension theory, noting particular periods that privilege, respectively, the author, the text or the reader. In his essay on the death of the author, Barthes stands with those who, in their search for the source of meaning, look to the text rather than to authorial intent or the activity or abilities of any reader. Yet, even here, Barthes’s concern is ‘not with the intrinsic properties of the text, but with the conventions that render it intelligible to the reader’ (Milner 1991, p. 69). His structuralism represents a shift of interest from meaning to the conditions for meaning.

Foucault denies that he was ever a structuralist but there certainly seem to be structuralist elements in his early work. As Milner observes, in Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic, both published in the early 1960s, Foucault is concerned with the systematic nature of the understandings of madness and illness that were dominant in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He wants to contrast these with the equally systematic understandings that emerged later in the eighteenth century. In each case and on their own terms, Foucault views these understandings as possessing validity. Later in the 1960s, in works such as The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault becomes preoccupied with the notion of discourse. His focus is on discursive formations or epistemes. Milner explains epistemes as ‘systematic conceptual frameworks which define their own truth criteria, according to which particular knowledge problems are to be resolved, and which are embedded in and imply particular institutional arrangements’ (1991, p. 70). This too is structuralist enough.

Althusser, as we noted in Chapter 6, is a Marxist. He came to prominence in the 1960s at a time when a number of European Marxist intellectuals, disillusioned with Stalinism, were interested in forging new links to philosophical currents. There were efforts, for example, to link Marxism to a revitalised Hegelianism and to inject into Marxism elements of contemporary philosophical stances such as existential phenomenology. Some found the bridge they needed in the works of the early (and allegedly more humanistic) Marx. Set against the background of this intellectual thrust, Althusser’s attempt to defend Marxist orthodoxy while threading a pathway between Stalinism, on the one hand, and a humanist version of Marxism, on the other, takes a novel form.

Althusser sets the early Marx against the later Marx. The former is an ideologue, the latter a scientist. This fits with Althusser’s belief that ‘the theoretical practice of a science is always completely distinct from the ideological practice of its prehistory’ (1977, pp. 167-8). The science that the later Marx brought forth was dialectical materialism, as a theory of social formations and the manner in which they are structurally determined.

Here Althusser is introducing his own way of defending orthodox Marxism. He incorporates certain key concepts of structuralism into his explication of Marxism. As Milner tells us (1991, p. 70), Althusser proceeds to ‘reread Marx’s marxism as if it too were a structuralism’. Economics, politics, and ideology itself, as instances of society, are all presented as structures existing within an overarching structure of structures.

The complex and uneven relationship of the instances to each other was called by Althusser a ‘conjuncture’. Every conjuncture was said to be Overdetermined’ in that each of the levels contributed to determining the structure as well as being determined by it: determination was always complex. (McLellan 1995a, pp. 22-3)

It is not difficult to find a basis in the thought of each of these three philosophers for the five characteristics of structuralism that Milner has identified for us. We will not attempt here to substantiate this claim in terms of all five for all three. Suffice it to say, for a start, that their positivism has been widely acknowledged. Thus, Meszaros (1989, p. 182) writes of ‘the positivist Althusserian interpretation’ of Marxism and ‘the positivistic misconceptions of science ascribed to Marx by the Althusserian school’. ‘Foucault’s earlier writings are also deeply positivist in inspiration’, says Milner (1991, p. 70).

It may appear contradictory to describe structuralism as positivist. After all, we have already judged it to be, in epistemological terms, quite subjectivist. Have we not said, right back at the start, that positivism embodies an objectivist epistemology? How can we say that structuralism sees meaning as inherent in the object (objectivism) and, at the same time, that it imposes meaning on the object from elsewhere (subjectivism)? We can do so because we are talking about two different objects. In relation to one, structuralism is subjectivist; in relation to the other, it is objectivist. If what we have in mind as object are realities in the world to which meaning is ascribed, we are right to characterise structuralism as subjectivist, since the formal structure from which meaning is said to derive functions independently of those worldly realities. It is a self-enclosed, self-regulating system. But what if we take the formal structure itself as object? Now we are faced with an object that, according to structuralists, is in itself well and truly meaningful. Meaning resides in it independendy of any individual consciousness and it can be studied scientifically. In this respect, structuralism proves to be objectivist and arguably a form of positivism.

Another apparent contradiction arises when Foucault is accused of being ahistorical.¹⁶ After all, historical accounts loom large in what he writes, even early in his career. Nevertheless, as Milner insists (1991, p. 70), the thought of the early Foucault is not essentially historical and remains ‘unable to judge between epistemes or to explain the shift from one to another’.

As for the invitation to demystification found in structuralism, we should note Barthes’ attempts at structuralist demystification in his wide- ranging analysis of ‘myths’. Foucault does the same in his analysis of modem psychiatry and modem medicine. And the theoreticism of all three is clear enough from even a cursory study of their writings.

Nor can one doubt the anti-humanism they evince. Barthes is clearly anxious to remove the reader from centre stage in his study of the act of reading. By this move he impugns the more humanist understanding of the reading of literature. This is no isolated instance but typifies what is for Barthes a general anti-humanistic stance. Of Foucault’s anti­humanism there is evidence aplenty. That ‘philosophy is still—and again —in the process of coming to an end’ and that ‘the question of language is being posed’ are two facts, he declares, that ‘prove no doubt that man is in the process of disappearing’ (1970, p. 385).

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared . . . then one can certainly wager that man would be erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. (Foucault 1970, p. 387)

In a 1971 interview (1977, pp. 221-2), Foucault describes humanism as ‘everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power’. Indeed, ‘it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized’. He is not saying this in any laudatory sense: he goes on to advocate ‘desubjectification’ through political struggle and ‘the destruction of the subject as a pseudosovereign’ through an attack on culture. The latter would include:

… the suppression of taboos and the limitations and divisions imposed upon the sexes, the setting up of communes, the loosening of inhibitions with regard to drugs; the breaking of all the prohibitions which form and guide the development of a normal individual. I am referring to all those experiences which have been rejected by our civilization or which it only accepts in literature. (Foucault 1977, p. 222)

Althusser is no humanist either. In the complex ‘overdetermination’ postulated for every conjuncture of society, the ‘structured causality resulted in a reading of history as process without a subject—as opposed to the tendency of, for example, Sartre or the early Marx to see human beings as the active subjects of the historical process’ (McLellan 1995a, p. 23). In this respect, if we think back to what we discussed in Chapter 7, a striking contrast emerges between the anti-humanist Althusser and the humanist Freire, Marxists though they both claim to be.

Althusser never transcends his structuralism. At most, he may be seen as an intermediary figure between structuralism and poststructuralism. ‘Althusser’, says Crook (1991, p. 149), ‘attempts to hold the line between modernist radicalism and its “post-structuralist” critique; his is a liminal modernist radicalism’. Liminal or not, he remains structuralist and modernist to the end. It is not the same with Barthes and Foucault. They move on to become pivotal figures in the development of poststructuralism, joined by such eminent names as the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva.

Another eminent name warrants mention here, the name of a philosopher long dead. To date, you and I have not had occasion to talk about Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) other than in passing. He deserves far better. We have noted Nietzsche’s impact on Weber but, in fact, few thinkers since his time have escaped his influence. Harrison (1991, p. 175) describes this influence as ‘subterranean’. There have been political reasons for the long repression of Nietzsche’s thought. As Harrison points out, those political reasons no longer obtain and we have witnessed ‘Nietzsche’s return’, ‘a more direct appropriation of Nietzsche’s thought’. Where? ‘The two most important receptions of Nietzsche’s work in recent times have both occurred in the context of what is conventionally called French poststructuralist thought.’ What Harrison instances are Foucault’s ‘genealogy’ and Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’, both of them pivotal concepts within post­structuralism. Accordingly, as we move on to consider post­structuralism, including the thought of Foucault and Derrida, the figure of Nietzsche will loom large, even if we lack the space to spell out its impact in detail.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.