STRUCTURALISM
By Moh. Haris Suhud
‘Structuralism’ claims to provide a framework for organizing and orientating any ‘semiological’ study, any study concerned with the production and perception of ‘meaning’. It derives the framework from linguistics, the primary semiological discipline, and extends it to the analysis of the literary arts, the analysis of the literary arts, the analysis of the non-literary arts and the analysis, in social psychology and social anthropology, of ‘customary arts’.
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, which was to be studied ‘synchronically’. Each sign was to be seen as being made up of a ‘signifier’ (a sound-image, or its graphic equivalent), and a ‘signified’ (the concept or meaning). The three black marks c- a- t are signifier which evoke the signified ‘cat’ in an English mind. The relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one: there is no inherent reason why these three marks should means ‘cat’, other than cultural and historical convention. Contrast chat in French. The relation between the whole sign and what it refers to (what Saussure calls the ‘referent’, the real furry four-legged creature) is therefore also arbitrary. Each sign in the system has meaning only by virtue of its difference from the others. ‘cat’ has meaning not ‘in itself’, but because it is not cap or cad or bat. It does not matter how the signifier alters, as long as it preserves its difference from all the other signifiers.
Structuralism in general is an attempt to apply this linguistic theory to objects and activities other than language itself. You can view a myth, wrestling match, system of tribal kinship, restaurant menu or oil painting as a system of signs, and a structuralist analysis will try to isolate the underlying set of laws by which these signs are combined into meanings. It will largely ignore what the signs actually ‘say’, and concentrate instead on their internal relations to one another.
Saussure’s linguistic views influenced the Russian Formalists, although Formalism is not itself exactly a structuralism. It views literary texts ‘structurally’, and suspends attention to the referent to examine sign itself, but it is not particularly concerned with meaning as differential or, in much of its work, with the ‘deep’ laws and structures underlying literary texts. It was one of the Russian formalists, however-the linguist Roman Jakobson- who was to provide the major link between Formalism and modern-day structuralism.
Jakbson’s influence can be detected everywhere within. Formalism, Czech structuralism and modern linguistics. What he contributed in particular to poetics, which he regarded as part of the field of linguistics, was the idea that the ‘poetic’ consisted above all in language’s being placed in a certain kind of self-conscious relationship to itself. The poetics functioning of language ‘promotes the palpability of signs’, draws attention to their material qualities rather than simply using them as counters in communication. In the ‘poetic’, the sign is dislocated from its object: the usual relation between sign and referent is disturbed, which allows the sign a certain independence as an object of value in itself.
References :
Eagleton, Terry (1996). Literary Theory An Introduction. Australia: Blackwell Publishing.
Pettit, Philip (1975). The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis. Barceley an Los angeles: University of California Press
0 Comments