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STRUCTURALISM (FRENCH)

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2012, Rational Choice Theory, Structuralism, Exchange Theory

Structuralism refers to French social theorists such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Jean Piaget who claim that in the most ordinary of events there is a hidden structure or pattern (often called deep structure, a term taken from linguistics) which is not immediately apparent but can be discerned by careful analysis.

Structuralism became a fashion in France in the 1960s, coinciding with a decline in popular support for the FCP, and a move of the French Communist Party away from support for the USSR and a split between the intelligentsia and the organised working class culminating in the betrayal of the French General strike and the failure of the 1968 uprisings. Lévi-Strauss’s student Louis Althusser was among those who sought to merge Marxism and Structuralism in this period.

Ferdinand de Saussure's work concerning linguistics is generally considered to be a starting point of 20th century structuralism. Ferdinand de Saussure found, unsurprisingly, that the positivist approach to linguistics, analysing the use of individual phonemes, their various meanings and phonic form, was of little use for comparative linguistics. Saussure’s approach then was to treat the individual phonemes as “arbitrary”, and sought meaning instead in the structures of similarity and difference between phonemes in a given language. The study of these “structures” proved far more fruitful.

For example, what can be learned from the names given to pets; from food categories; from the way a child compares volume in two containers?

Structuralism refers to a method of analyzing phenomena, as in anthropology, linguistics, psychology, or literature, chiefly characterized by contrasting the elemental structures of the phenomena in a system of binary opposition.

Emile Durkheim as a precursor of structuralism in sociology, Vilfredo Pareto as a precursor of structuralism in economics, though clearly a positivist himself, and Wilhelm Wundt’s experimental psychology as a precursor of structural psychology.

Structuralism appeared in academic psychology for the first time in the 19th century and then reappeared in the second half of the 20th century, when it grew to become one of the most popular approaches in the academic fields that are concerned with analyzing language, culture, and society. 

For the early structuralists the hidden structures in these practices reveal the structure of the human mind. This being so, there should be some uniformity in the pattern found in these practices around the world.

Prominent figures in the structuralist movement are Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson, and Roland Barthes. Areas of study that have adopted and developed structuralist premises and methodologies include semiotics and narratology.

The Principle Features of Structuralism - Objectivism
Lévi-Strauss makes it quite clear that the “objective”, “non-judgmental”, non-interventionist attitude of the anthropologist cannot and must not be carried over by the anthropologist to her own society. The customs of a Bushman must be evaluated “objectively”, in just such a way as makes the Bushman’s actions and his view of the world intelligible - it is neither good nor bad, correct or mistaken. This is not necessarily to accept as fact the Bushman’s own view of the structures of her society, but whatever those views are, they are a fact. 

Back home, quite different rules apply. Thesis XI is alive and well.

Likewise, to the structural psychologist, it is no matter whether the light reported by a subject is red or green, if it is reported as green, then that is a fact, that is all. To the structuralist economist it is of no concern whether an economic model corresponds to “reality”, only whether the predictive capacity of the model in relation to the entities of which it is formed, is adequate. 

Deletion of Meaning
It is one thing to recognise that a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified cannot be rationally established in a way which will make sense in a cross-cultural context. Each given culture will form the world according to different structures of meaning. But since the entire world is grasped through such a system of linguistic terms, it is very easy by this route to arrive at a situation where the relation of the given society to the world has been reduced to one of the society to itself, to a closed system of terms. This certainly makes the world-view of the given society intelligible, but not necessarily comprehensible. 

Abstraction
Lévi-Strauss refutes the charge that structuralism is solely for the purpose of applying mathematics, but he does so solely on the basis of limiting the definition of mathematics to the “metric”, to number and magnitude. Mathematics has long since surpassed this limitation, and structuralism comes close to being identical with “mathematisation” of a given object. Understanding mathematics in Hegel’s definition as the “science of quantity”, we could say with some accuracy that structuralism is the study of quantity: “... the character external to being, [which] does not affect the being at all.” 

Just so long things remain as they are, then structuralism is a fine method of making things intelligible, and a great step forward from the dogmatic, normative, judgmental methods of European sciences when they have been required to objectively understand cultures other than their own. And certain types of dysfunction also become intelligible of course.

However, any living culture will be constantly confronted with that which it does not recognise; that which was formerly unknown and “beyond” may become known, and there is no reason to suppose that the structural transformations which may follow from a change of conditions will be “homologous”. Life is a material thing. Human beings are not abstractions.

Thought must abstract. In order to take a step forward in a separate branch of science, it is necessary to have an approach which makes it possible to put to the side inessential material and work for a time at least, with what may be deemed to be essential.

I remarked above that Lévi-Strauss appeared to have devised a meaning for the word “dialectical” which corresponded to his own conception of change. This is a pity, because it seems to me that it is precisely the notions of change and development first worked out by Hegel (see the Doctrine of Essence in the Logic, and in particular Hegel’s remarks about the Essential and Inessential) which is being missed out in the structural method. Despite his disclaimers, directed at a mode of reasoning long gone, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is as “mechanical” as that of the macro-economists.

The structuralists have worked out in detail the vision of the world as a giant machine or structure, a view “traditionally” imputed to Isaac Newton. The values of this view are not the normative values of the classical view, but those abstracted by their “value-free” methodology from the data of perception. - marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/structur.htm

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