Russell
Van Edsinga
Professor
Gilliland
Philosophy
408: Phenomenology and Existentialism
Presentation #2
Before I cover structuralisms impact on the late
1950’s in the disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, and psychology,
Ill first go over the definitional aspect, in case some of you aren’t as
familiar with this theory.
-Structuralism is a theoretical paradigm (in the philosophy of science, a
generally accepted model of how ideas relate to one another, forming a
conceptual framework within which scientific research is carried out) that
emphasizes that elements of culture must be understood in terms of their
relationship to a larger, overarching system or structure. The philosopher by
the name of Simon Blackburn- a British academic philosopher known for his work
in quasi-realism- summarized structuralism as: "the belief that phenomena
of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These
relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface
phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture".
Structuralism rejects the concept of human freedom and choice
and focused instead on the way that human experience and thus, behavior, is
determined by various structures. It argued that human culture may be
understood by means of a structure-—modeled on language -that is distinct both
from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and imagination
The
structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields,
including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics
and architecture.
Structuralism originated in the
early 1900s, in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the
subsequent Prague, Moscow and Copenhagen
schools of linguistics. In the late 1950s and early '60s, when structural
linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and
thus fading in importance in linguistics, an array of scholars in the
humanities borrowed Saussure's concepts for use in their respective fields of
study. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss was arguably the first such
scholar, sparking a widespread interest in Structuralism.
The most prominent thinkers associated with structuralism include
Lévi-Strauss, linguist Roman Jakobson, and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. As an
intellectual movement, structuralism was initially presumed the heir apparent
to existentialism.
Throughout
the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism, such as that asserted by Jean-Paul Sartre,
was the dominant European intellectual movement. Structuralism rose to
prominence in France in the wake of existentialism, particularly in the 1960s.
The initial popularity of structuralism in France led to its spread across the
globe.
By the early 1960s structuralism as a movement was coming into its own
and some believed that it offered a single unified approach to human life that
would embrace all disciplines. Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida focused on
how structuralism could be applied to literature.
However, by the late 1960s, many of
Structuralism's basic tenets came under attack from a new wave of predominantly
French intellectuals such as the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the
philosopher and social commentator Jacques Derrida, the Marxist philosopher
Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes Though elements of their work necessarily
relate to structuralism and are informed by it, these theorists have generally
been referred to as post-structuralists.
Structuralism is less popular today
than other approaches, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction.
In the 1980s, deconstruction—and its
emphasis on the fundamental ambiguity of language rather than its crystalline
logical structure—became popular. By the end of the century structuralism was
seen as a historically important school of thought, but the movements that it
spawned, rather than structuralism itself, commanded attention
Structuralism
is less popular today than other approaches, such as post-structuralism and
deconstruction. Structuralism has often been criticized for being ahistorical
and for favoring deterministic structural forces over the ability of people to
act. The precise nature of the revision of structuralism differs with each
post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the
self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an
interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures. This
theory proposed that there are certain theoretical and conceptual opposites,
often arranged in a hierarchy, which human logic has given to text. Such binary
pairs could include Enlightenment/Romantic, male/female, speech/writing,
rational/emotional, signifier/signified, symbolic/imaginary. Post-structuralism
rejects the notion of the essential quality of the dominant relation in the hierarchy,
choosing rather to expose these relations and the dependency of the dominant
term on its apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly
understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and knowledge
systems that produce the illusion of singular meaning. This « deconstruction
can explain how male can become female, how speech can become writing, and how
rational can become emotional
Put briefly-
Structuralism was an intellectual movement in
France in the 1950s and 1960s that studied the underlying structures in
cultural products (such as texts) and used analytical concepts from
linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and other fields to interpret those
structures. It emphasized the logical and scientific nature of its results.
Post-structuralism offers a way of studying how
knowledge is produced and critiques structuralism premises. It argues that
because history and culture condition the study of underlying structures, both
are subject to biases and misinterpretations. A post-structuralist approach
argues that to understand an object (e.g., a text), it is necessary to study
both the object itself and the systems of knowledge that produced the object.
As for its
impact on psychology-
Structuralism in psychology refers to the theory founded by Edward B.
Titchener, who was a student of (Vil-heim Vunt) Wilhelm Wundt. Titchener said
that only observable events constituted science and that any speculation
concerning unobservable events has no place in society. he wrote- “It is true,
nevertheless, that observation is the single and proprietary method of science,
and that experiment, regarded as scientific method, is nothing else than
observation safeguarded and assisted.” which basically means that the
complex perceptions can be raised through basic sensory information.
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