structuralist theory...07/02/2014 13 levi-strauss’s structuralist theory • main theory: the...

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STRUCTURALIST THEORY

“The Signifier is Superior to the

Signified”

© Dr. Francis Adu-Febiri, 2014

INTRODUCTION:

SIGNIFIER AND SIGNIFIED

• According to Lecan (1977, p. 154), the

signifier and the signified are never unified

and the signifier is superior to the signified

because the signified is the secondary and

passive effect of the signifier

– (Cited in Choi, Jongryul. 2004. Postmodern

America Sociology: A Response to the

Aesthetic Challenge (Pages 57 and 58)

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INTRODUCTION:

THE IRONY

• The notion of “social structure” or “structure” is central to sociology. Yet, the concept of structure is only vaguely theorized. Attempts to theorize “structure” in sociology are evident in the works of

– structural sociologists:

• Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Louis Althisser, Nicos Poulantzas, Maurice Godelier, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens.

• Structuralism, however, has been very much theorised by linguists and anthropologists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Struass, and Radcliffe-Brown

PIONEER PROPONENTS OF

STRUCTURALISM

• Ferdinand de Saussure

• Claude Levi-Strauss

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GENESIS AND EVOLUTION OF

STRUCTURALISM

• The structuralism that swept through

French social thought in the 1960s was a

reaction against humanistic philosophy

that people are not subject to or

determined by any social laws.

• This structuralist theorizing focused first

on LANGUAGE but was later extended

to CULTURE and SOCIETY.

THE MAIN THEORY OF STRUCTURALISM:

The Iceberg Metaphor

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MAIN THEORY

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X

Y

Sig

nif

ier

(Ob

jecti

ve S

oci

al

Str

uct

ure

)

Invis

ible

Mac

ro S

oci

al F

orc

es

Signified (Subjective Social Action)

Human Behavior, Condition, Experience, Activity, and Agency

MAIN THEORY

• The signifier or centralized underlying,

invisible, objective structure determines the

signified, that is, surface or visible reality.

– Whatever the surface substance and content of social relations, there is a deep underlying form or structure.

– That is, a given surface phenomenon is explained in terms of some structure that lies beneath our conscious or perceptual awareness of the phenomenon in question. This structure causes the surface phenomenon to exist or operate, or conditions it strongly in some way.

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MAJOR CONCEPTS

• SIGNIFIER = Social Laws or Social

Structure: OBJECTIVE STRUCTURES

• SIGNIFIED = Human Experience, Activity,

and Agency: SUBJECTIVE ACTION

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PARADIGM SHIFT

• Contrary to the humanistic philosophy,

people (and their behaviors, experiences,

actions, conditions) are subject to or

determined by social laws.

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FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE’S


• MAIN THEORY: The mind, people and ultimately the social world are shaped by the structure of language, specifically langue rather than parole.

• Surface or Visible Phenomenon?

• Mind, people and the social world including Parole:

• Deeper or Invisible structure?

• Langue

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SAUSSURE’S STRUCTURALIST

THEORY

• MAIN CONCEPTS:

• Langue: The formal, grammatical system of language

• Parole: Speech—subjective ways in which language is used by actors).

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LEVI-STRAUSS’S


• MAIN THEORY: The structure of the mind determines language, kinship systems and society.

• Both phonemic system and kinship system are but a surface manifestation of fundamental code lodged in the neuroanatomy of the brain (the unconscious, logical structure of the mind) and existing before the material and cultural structure of society.


• Phonemic and kinship systems.

• Deeper or Invisible Structure?

• Neuroanatomy of the brain.

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LEVI-STRAUSS’S


• MAJOR CONCEPTS:

• Phonemic System: Parole-- Speech—subjective ways in which language is used by actors.

• Kinship System: Descent

• Neuroanatomy of the Brain: The unconscious, logical structure of the mind.

• STRUCTURAL SOCIOLOGY

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MAIN THEORY

Y S

oci

al R

elat

ions

Str

uct

ure

of

Thought

Material and Sociocultural Arrangements of Society X

Configuration of Interaction

PROPONENTS OF

STRUCTURAL SOCIOLOGY

• 1. Karl Marx

• 2. Emile Durkheim

• 3. Georg Simmel

• 4. Pierre Bourdieu

• 5. Anthony Giddens

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STRUCTURAL ELEMENTS IN KARL

MARX’S THEORIES

• MAIN THEORY: Contradictions in material arrangements of society determine patterns of social/cultural relations.


• Patterns of social/cultural relations.

• Deeper, invisible structure?

• Contradictions of material social arrangements—symbolic, material, and political resources that actors have and use in their encounters: competition, inequality and conflict.

• Material social arrangements contain patterns of social relations that are self-transforming…That is, over time the underlying contradictions of capitalism produce conflictual social relations—a revolution by workers—that change and transform the nature of social relations and, hence, the social structure.

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EMILE DURKHEIM’S

STRUCTURAL SOCIOLOGY

• MAIN THEORY: Structures of the mind reflect the collective material and cultural structure of society

• Specifically, society is the unique whole to which everything else is related. Thus logical hierarchy is only another aspect of social hierarchy, and the unity of knowledge is nothing else than the very unity of the collectivity, extended to the social universe.


• The mind: Logical hierarchy (structure of thought) and knowledge.


• Collectivity: cultural and material structure of society.

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SIMMEL’S FORMAL

STRUCTURALISM

• MAIN THEORY: Social structure is the configurations of interaction that undergird and make possible the wide variety of substantive activities of individuals.


• Substantive activities of individuals.


• Configurations of interaction.

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PIERRE BOURDIEU’S CULTURAL


• MAIN THEORY: Interaction is embedded in existing cultural-structural system, and this cultural structure determines what is possible.

• Structure and habitus exist independently of agents and guide their practice; yet they also create options, possibilities, and paths for creative actions and for the construction of new and unique cultural and social phenomena.

• There exists within the social world itself and not only within symbolic systems (language, myth, etc.), objective cultural structures independent of the consciousness and will of agents, which are capable of guiding and constraining their practices or their representations…Although people use their capacities for thought, reflection, and action to construct social and cultural phenomena, they do so within the parameters of existing cultural structures.

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PIERRE BOURDIEU’S CULTURAL



• Consciousness and will of agents as well as their practices and representations such as taste, speech, clothing, and manner.


• Field and Habitus:

• Field (External Constraints): Structured social space and connected social relations: Class position--Upper and Lower social classes and other external constraints that impinge on actors.

• Habitus (Internal Constrains): Character and way of thinking; internalized cultures.

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ANTHONY GIDDEN’S

STRUCTURATION THEORY

• MAIN THEORY: The creative aspect of human action—the individual side of the duality—makes impossible structural causation which will explain the determination of social action in general.

ANTHONY GIDDEN’S



• Relations across space and over time

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ANTHONY GIDDEN’S


• Deep or Invisible Structure:

• Structuration: the dual processes in which rules and resources are used to organize interaction across time and space and, by virtue of this use, to reproduce or transform these rules and resources.

• Structure: Rules and resources that actors use to create, sustain, reproduce or transform relations across space and over time

• Duality of Structure: Both the activities of a “free agent” and the structural constraints that set limits to free activity.

• POSTSTRUCTURALIST

THEORY:

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POSTSTRUCTURALIST

THEORY

• MAIN THEORY

• Poststructuralist Paradigm objects to and

deconstructs centered power/knowledge as

constituent part of organized systems of

economic and political hierarchies that

silence minority. These structured social

relationships that claim human agency and

causality are arbitrary or hyper-real

(Foucault, Lyotard, Bauldrillard, Derrida).

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POSTSTRUCTURALIST

THEORY

• MAIN THEORY:

• Poststructuralist Paradigm deconstructs modernist

discourses of binary opposites (culture/nature,

man/woman, speech/writing, reason/emotion,

good/evil) that keep metaphysical or moral centers

in power. The aim of the deconstruction is to

decenter these centers, to show how each center

contains some part of its margins, yet without

putting a new metaphysical structure in its place

(Mann 2008, p. 240).

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POSTSTRUCTURALIST

THEORY

• MAJOR CONCEPTS:

• Deconstruction

• Discourse

• Power/Knowledge

• Hyper-reality

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POSTSTRUCTURALIST THEORY:

Rejection of Structuralism

• PARADIGM SHIFT #1

• In direct contrast to structuralism's

claims of an independent signifier,

superior to the dependent signified, post-

structuralism views the signifier and

signified as inseparable but not united as

a structure (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-

structuralism).

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POSTSTRUCTURALIST

THEORY

• PARADIGM SHIFT #2:

• Anti-Structure

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POSTSTRUCTURALISTS:

Anti-structure

• THEORISTS:

• 1. Jean Baudrillard

• 2. Julia Kristeva

• 3. Michel Foucault

• 4. Jacques Derrida

• 5. Jean Francois Lyotard

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JEAN BAUDRILLARD:

Death of Structure (the Real and the Fake)

• The media and the entertainment industries have thoroughly saturated the postmodern cultures such that the differences between the real [signifier] and the images, signs, and simulations [signified] have dissolved into hyperreality.

• HYPERREAL (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality):

• A copy world that emerges from the ashes of the contestation between reality and fantasy that renders both the real and the representation inexistent – just the hyperreal.

JULIA KRISTEVA:

Rejection of Underlying Structure

• Kristeva rejects any understanding of the

subject in a structuralist sense, instead,

she favors a subject always "in process"

or "in crisis." In this way, she contributes

to the poststructuralist critique of

essentialized structures. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Kristeva

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JACQUES DERRIDA

• Anti-structure:

• Uncovering or decentering binary opposites (culture/nature, man/woman, reason/emotion, good/evil, etc.), that is, hierarchies where the first term in the pair is seen as superior to the second…These binary opposites support a variety of metaphysical or moral centres. Deconstruction aims to decentre these centres, yet without putting a new metaphysical structure in its place (Jacques Derrida, cited in Mann 2008, p. 240).

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JACQUES DERRIDA

• Rupture of structure:

• Since there are no symbols of constant and universal

significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a

means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_Barthes).

• In a postmodern society there is no transcendental or

privileged signified and the domain or play of

signification henceforth has no limit. There is erasure

of the radical differences between signifier and

signified; there is not a signifier referring to a signified,

a signifier different from its signified.

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MICHEL FOUCAULT:

De-centered Power

• One group does not always has power to use to the disadvantage of others:

• Power is dispersed, multidirectional, can be found everywhere, and is always at work without force or coercion in the state, knowledge, discourse, ideology, and all relationships.

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MICHEL FOUCAULT:

De-centered Power

• There is no single locus of great Refusal,

no soul of Revolt, source of all rebellions,

or pure law of the revolutionary. Instead,

there is plurality of resistances, each of

them a special case.

• These pluralities of resistances occur as

ruptures or cracks that unsettle the

smooth operation of disciplinary power

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MICHEL FOUCAULT:

De-centered Power

• In the postmodern society power

[signifier] and knowledge and discourse

[signified] are wedded into a new system

of de-centered and multidirectional

heightened surveillance

• Surveillance—acts of observing, recording, and

training—techniques that function without

relying on force or coercion, but capable of

producing docile people.

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MICHEL FOUCAULT:

De-centered Power

• http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseacti

on=vids.individual&videoID=695467423

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http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=695467423

http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoID=695467423

• POSTMODERN, POSTMODERNISM

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POSTMODERNIST PARADIGM

• MAIN THEORY:

• It decries the pre-constituted center and its

accompanying exclusion, marginalization and

oppression that the politics, representation, social

structure, and philosophy of modernity and

modernization-driven globalization produce (Roseman

1992). It is in this context that postmodernist paradigm

highlights and approves the fragmentary,

heterogeneous, and plural nature of reality and

inherently unstable and shifting nature of the subject

and individual consciousness that advanced/Post-

capitalism has produced (Wallace and Wolf 2006).

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POSTMODERNIST PARADIGM

• MAJOR CONCEPTS:

• Heterogeneity/Pluralism

– Egalitarian Cultural Pluralism

– Multiculturalism

• Deconstruction & Reconstruction – Cultural Hegemony.

– Modernization-induced globalization

– Advanced/Post-Capitalism

– Truth

– “Simulacra” 07/02/2014 43

POSTSMODERNISTS:

• Michel Foucault

• Jacques Derrida

• Jean Francois Lyotard

• Z. Baumann

• Frederic Jameson

• Daniel Bell

POSTMODERN, POSTMODERNISM

• Poststructuralism is the theoretical logic

of postmodernism.

• There is a major shift in the nature of

contemporary society from modern

capitalist to postcapitalist postmodern.

This shift mediated by the mass media

has killed the Real and the Truth.

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• The death of Unitary Reality or Single

Truth:

• There is a societal framework, but this

framework is discursive, nonrational [or

antirational?], fragmented,

heterogeneous, diversified, decentralized,

porous, inherently unstable and shifting,

but constraining.


• The blurring and breakdown of established

cannons (rules and standards), categories,

distinctions, and boundaries…a messier and

more playful world in which standards,

contrasts, groups, boundaries, and identities

are opening up, reaching out, and breaking

down (Kottak and Kozaitis 2004, pp. 42-

43).

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• What reigns in contemporary human

society is simulation (“Simulacra”)

represented by intuition, myth, fantasy,

subjectivity, fragmentation, multiple

cultures, micro-narratives, multiple

meanings, playfulness, image, style,

consumerism and the commodification of

culture.

SIMULACRA

• The simulacrum is never that

which conceals the truth--it is

the truth which conceals that

there is none.

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structuralist theory...07/02/2014 13 levi-strauss’s structuralist theory • main theory: the...

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