Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism

This is the fourth part of our survey on literary theory loosely based on Paul Fry’s Open Yale course. Last time we talked about Formalism. Today we’re going to talk about Structuralism, and we’ll move on to deconstruction and Post-Structuralism soon!

You can find the rest of this series here:
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 0: What am I talking about?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 1: What is Literary Theory?
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 2: The Hermeneutic Circle
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 3: Formalism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 4: Structuralism
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 5: Deconstruction
Introduction to Literary Theory Part 6: Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

Once again, we have a lot of complex theoretical foundation to cover if we want to really understand structuralism on a deep level, but I’d like to start off with a brief overview so we don’t get lost. You may have noticed that it’s been more than a week since my last post: this is partially because I’m trying to buy a house right now, but I’ve also been struggling to find a good way to cover this topic. Most of what we’ve covered thus-far has been of primarily historical value: you’re probably not going to find yourself directly referencing formalism or hermeneutics while discussing a piece of new media with your friends. As we move on to structuralism, post-structuralism, and beyond, we’re starting to discuss theories that are more directly applicable today, so I think it’s really crucial that we not only understand the broad foundation here but also gain a good working understanding that we’re comfortable with on a conversational level.

What is structuralism?

Let’s start off with the description from Wikipedia: “In sociology, anthropology, archaeology, history, philosophy, and linguistics, structuralism is a general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.”

If you’re working through this series in order, it might be helpful to think of structuralism in comparison to formalism: in some ways they’re very similar and in others they’re very different.

Like formalism, structuralism aims to understand a text (or any other cultural artifact) as an object separate from its author or intended goals. “Form” and “structure” are both words relating to somewhat concrete things. We want to be as objective and scientific as possible. We’re not looking for how a text makes us feel personally. We want to know how the text can be understood broadly. Formalism came out of a growing respect and adherence to science; structuralism’s foundation was likewise built on scientific advances in other fields, primarily semiotics, or the study of signs, which is itself closely linked with linguistics (linguistics is basically a subset of semiotics.) Structuralist theory played well with multiple scientific fields, not only semiotics and linguistics but also psychology, history, sociology, anthropology, architecture, and economics.

Where formalism and structuralism differ is in how willing they are to look outside the text. Formalism was, in a sense, very pure. It was really focused on the text in isolation: one thing at a time. Formalism doesn’t just get rid of the author, it also ignores other texts. Recall how some of the formalists felt it necessary to excuse their reliance on referencing well-known work by explaining that there’s nothing special about any particular work or author. Formalism sometimes needed referential texts to demonstrate various forms, but it treated this as abstractly as possible. This is part of why it was so controversial: it’s really a bit too abstract. In the case of Russian formalism, it was found elitist or even classist. It can start to feel like you’re talking about “form” with no basis in reality at all. Structuralism isn’t much concerned with the author or their goals, but it’s very focused on identifying structures that exist cross large collections of work and even in different fields. Genre is a good example of the sort of “structure” that structuralism is interested in and formalism wants no part of. When you think of “forms,” it might help to think of Plato’s theory of forms: form is a lofty, abstract, non-physical concept dealing with essence. Structures, on the other hand, are built. They’re constructed by taking existing materials and combining them into a new configuration.

So, in structuralism, what is a particular object of study constructed of and how is it put together?

Well, that question is what most structuralist theory attempts to discover!

We’ll step through things more carefully below, but on a high level, structuralism sees all of human culture as a sort of language. This language is built up of signs with relations to other signs and the whole thing only makes sense when considered as a system together: you can’t really pull just one piece of it out and hope to understand it without also looking at the rest of the system. This system is built up in two fundamental dimensions: it unfolds through time and with time, also known as diachrony and synchrony. These two dimensions are closely related to the way elements of a work are combined on one axis and how they’re selected on the other. Although the theory behind this is pretty complicated, and this is all very difficult to put into words, the actual concept is pretty intuitive. Let’s take a look at an example.

The soda example

It’s past midnight at a friend’s place and you’ve been talking for hours. You’re getting parched, so you ask: “Could I get something to drink?” Lucky you: they say “sure” and start walking off to get you something.

Well, getting any drink would be great, but now that you’re getting one, it wouldn’t hurt to be a little bit picky.

“Do you have any beer?”
“No, but I have soda.”
“What sodas?”
“I have Coke and Mountain Dew.”
“Do you have diet?”
“Diet caffeine-free alright?”
“Ah, caffeinated would be better.”
“Cool, be right back.”
“So, a regular coke?”
“No, I only have regular Mountain Dew and diet caffeine-free Coke.”
“Ah, yeah, I guess I’ll take the Coke.”

Let’s really take this exchange apart to see what structure exists in this brief exchange.

You start off by asking for a drink, then you ask for beer, then you settle with soda. “Drink” is very broad, obviously they have something, so you’re really just asking whether they mind you sticking around and using a glass or taking a can/bottle. Then you try for a beer, which they don’t have (or don’t want to waste on you.) If you had known that they wouldn’t mind getting you a drink and that they were willing to part with a soda, then you could have asked for that upfront, but you didn’t, so you chose another beverage. Once you establish that you’re getting a soda, then you narrow that down further into flavors: Coke and Mountain Dew.

In each case, you’re asking for a “drink,” but there are a lot of kinds of drinks! Let’s call the set of various “drinks” a paradigm: it’s a pattern that you can take specific examples from. In your discussion, you try a few different options from the drinks paradigm before selecting either a Coke or Mountain Dew.

Well, we’re not done yet, because there are also some adjectives to consider combining with your selection of drink: “diet” and “caffeine-free.” Now, a “diet caffeine-free Coke” is still a “drink,” but you didn’t pull it directly out of our “drinks” paradigm, did you? No, you constructed the phrase “diet caffeine-free Coke” using multiple words. It looks like we also have a paradigm for “drink modifiers” and we can combine that with a drink to form a more specific request. Interestingly, the paradigm for “drink modifiers” doesn’t work quite the same as the paradigm for “drinks.” You can ask for a drink by itself, but you only use the modifiers in combination. Well, unless the context makes the drink clear: if they only have diet and regular Coke then you can just ask for a “diet” without specifying whether it’s a Coke or some unavailable option.

Ultimately, you wind up requesting a diet caffeine-free Coke. Now that you know what’s available, you can ask for it more directly next time: “Could I have a diet caffeine-free Coke.” Only… that’s kind of an awkward way to ask for it, given that both you and your friend know that the only Coke available is diet and caffeine-free. So, next time, you could just say “Could I have another diet soda?” or “Could I have another Coke?” or “Could I have another diet?” In each case the request has the same meaning in context.

The notion of selection and combination is really key here. When forming a sentence, you need to combine the words according to the rules of grammar (and your preferred construction) and you select each individual word from the paradigm of words that fit it.

“Could I have a [noun]?”
“Could I have a [drink]?”
“Could I have a [soda]?”
“Could I have a [Coke]?”
“Could I have a [adjective][Coke]?”
“Could I have a [drink-modifier][Coke]?”
“Could I have a [diet][caffeine-free][Coke]?”

We’re mostly just changing what we select, but we could also change how we combine it if we wanted.

“Could I have a diet caffeine-free Coke?”
“Gimme a goddamn diet caffeine-free Coke you bastard!”
“All your diet-caffeine-free Coke are belong to us.”

Note how things are more complex when you have more options. Since you know that the only diet soda your friend has is diet caffeine-free Coke, you don’t actually need to use all of these words to make your request: you need fewer paradigms and a less complex combination. Imagine a world where there’s no such thing as diet soda. We wouldn’t ever need to specify whether we want a diet soda or a non-diet soda! Well, in this world without diet soda… does all soda have sugar or does all soda have artificial sweetener? Given that we live in a world with both diet and non-diet soda, we consider “diet” to mean “soda sweetened artificially with no calories,” but in a world where all soda uses artificial sweetener, there wouldn’t be a concept of “diet” soda: it would just be soda. So, “a world with no diet soda” could really mean either a world where all soda is diet or a world where no soda is diet.

There are a few points here that we’ll explore in more detail shortly, but the really tricky one that I want to emphasize right now is that the meaning of words is built up in opposition to other words. In a world where all soda is sweetened artificially, “diet soda” wouldn’t mean what it means to us living in a world with both diet and non-diet soda. The meaning of words is built up negatively via the binary opposition of one thing against another. We don’t often think of words this way, we think of words as just meaning what we use them to mean, but that’s not really how words appear. In a world where all soda is diet, the word “soda” can be used to refer to any soda. Once we have both diet and non-diet soda, we either need to split the word “soda” in half or we need to add an extra word in our combination to filter down our results. To express more complex meaning, we either need more words in our combination or we need more options to select from. Adding more to either dimension steals some meaning from the rest of the words and allows us to be more precise. If you’ve ever tried to narrow down a web search, then you know what I mean here.

Asking for a soda or trying to find something specific online is one thing, but imagine how this concept applies to more complex cultural mediums, such as music or film. How many different super heroes are there now? They can’t all just be Superman, with an endless supply of powers and only one real weakness. If you want your superhero to stand out, or better yet, if you’d like your superhero to really demonstrate some cultural message, then you’ll need to make them more complex to set them apart from others. When describing a specific superhero, how often do you describe them based on what they can do as opposed to just comparing them to someone else? “Basically Wolverine, but more sarcastic and without the claws.” I’m trying to pick really obvious and broadly relatable examples here, but I think it’s clear how this applies to basically any form of expression.

Okay, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, we’re just trying to get a basic definition of structuralism here. The takeaway at this point is that structuralism sees not just text but all of human culture as a system built up from structures and these structures sort of press against each other to build up larger structures and eventually the whole system. This theory opposes the idea that things have inherent, independent meaning with little relation to anything else. This applies as much to soda as it does to colors, music genres, film tropes, races, religions, genders, etc. Basically anything that exists in human culture can be seen as a structure built up by selecting and combining parts.

I really want to emphasize here just how broad this is. We’re really not just talking about text and stuff that’s similar to text anymore, we’re talking about all of human culture. We’re talking about books, movies, music, psychology, economics, architecture, anthropology, sociology, etc. This broadened scope will continue as we move past structuralism as well: we started off mostly talking about scripture, then moved on to talking about literature, and now we’re moving even further beyond.

But, let’s take a step back and start building up our concept of structuralism. Like any good structure, we should start with the foundation, and that means talking about semiotics. You’re going to discover that structuralism is heavily rooted in semiotics. We’re about to spend a lot of time discussing a very small portion of semiotics and by the time we’re done we’ll be pretty much done discussing structuralism as well. I wouldn’t say that structuralism is a proper subset of semiotics, but it’s close.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign processes. It’s a broad field, but for our purposes, we’re mostly focused on Saussure’s conception of it, which boils down to a few concepts. To start off, we should define the word “sign.” Note that I’ve been talking mostly about “words” so far, but what we’re really working with are “signs,” which are a bit more complex than mere words.

What’s a sign?

Let’s start with a diagram from Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics.

“Signified” designates a concept, the actual “thing” that you want to signify. “Signifier” is how you signify it. So, if I want to tell you about my keyboard, the word “keyboard” is the signifier I’m using to evoke the actual device that I’m currently typing on.

If we want to be very specific, then this is actually kind of complicated. The “signified” is pretty fuzzy: it’s basically just a concept. We have sort of an intuitive sense for what the signified is, but there are some weird edge cases that hint at us not actually understanding it all that well at all. Take Theseus’s ship, for example. If I break some keys on my keyboard and need to replace them, is the new device the same one that I mentioned in this paragraph? What if I replace every piece until nothing from the original remains, is it still the same keyboard? Well, if by “my keyboard” I mean “the keyboard that I use,” then sure. If I mean, literally, mass of various materials under my finger tips at this moment, then no. So, let’s just say that the signified is a “concept” that might only make sense in context, but it’s the concept that we’re trying to drag into our conversation.

The “signifier” is also a bit more complicated than it seems at first. Saussure calls it a “sound-image.” It’s a “word,” sure, but what about homonyms and homophones? Let’s just say that it’s the sensory representation we’re using to represent the concept we’re signifying. It’s the word spoken out-loud, the word written on paper, or maybe even a picture. I won’t waste the bandwidth uploading a picture of my keyboard, but it looks just like this one:

Of course, it’s not that exact keyboard from that picture, but it looks pretty much the same. Mine is a bit scuffed up from years of use, but it’s the same model. Though, even if it did look exactly the same, it still wouldn’t literally be the same keyboard. Hell, even if I took a picture of my keyboard, the picture wouldn’t perfectly capture its essence, would it? You couldn’t just print out that picture and start typing on it, you’d have to plug it in first! You wouldn’t download a car. Again, it’s surprisingly difficult to be specific here. You probably know what I mean when I say “my keyboard,” but it’s hard to be sure. In this case, does it even matter whether I actually have a keyboard? It’s unlikely that I’m writing all of this via some automatic transcription or by clicking the letters on an on-screen keyboard. It’s just an example, so does “my keyboard” even really mean my keyboard when I’m using it purely to illustrate an example? It could’ve been anything. It might be fair to say that, in this context, “my keyboard” really means “any physical object that I can see but you can’t.”

So, we have the signifier and the signified… but what’s a sign? Well, a sign is the couplet of signifier and signified. The two together and the relationship between them make up the whole sign.

This might seem kind of weird at first. If we were standing next to a stop sign and I asked you what the sign is, you’d probably point to it: the sign is the actual… sign, right? It’s the thing that represents whatever we’re signalling. In our definitions here, that would make the “sign” the “signifier.” But, that’s not really all that’s to it, is it? What would that stop sign actually mean? Is it just the shape, color, and materials? Of course not. A stop sign by any other name wouldn’t actually stop traffic. So, the sign really is the pair of the signifier and the signified. To talk of only the signifier without considering what it signifies is to discard the function of signalling altogether, and a sign that doesn’t signal isn’t much of a sign at all.

Whew, alright, this actually is pretty hard to describe in words, but note that although it’s difficult to be specific when talking about signs, it doesn’t feel nearly so difficult to actually use them. I don’t need to read a book to know what to do when I see a stop sign at an intersection, I’ve already learned that I’m supposed to check for cops, pedestrians, a blind corner, or cross traffic and come to a complete stop if I see any of those things or else just tap my brakes to slow down to around 3 MPH. When I talked about “my keyboard” just a couple of paragraphs up, you probably grasped the gist of what I was talking about almost immediately; if anything, your working understanding of what I said probably got worse as I dug into the specifics. When it comes to day-to-day life, communication doesn’t feel anywhere near as difficult as we’re making it here. Whether we’re actually communicating what we think we’re communicating and whether there are some much deeper problems here that we kind of just learn to gloss over… is something we’ll get to next post when we discuss post-structuralism.

Alright, so we have an idea of what a sign is, but how do we get one and what is its value in the system of multiple signs?

How does a sign get its value?

“Value is the sign as it is determined by the other signs in a semiotic system.” You can basically think of it as what makes the sign unique: the particular meaning of its signifies and the particular form of its signifier.

But, why do we need to consider it to be determined by the other signs in the system? Doesn’t a sign represent a thing? We often think of language as a method of naming things. You see a thing that you want to signify and you pick a signifier for it. If you see that thing, or something very similar to it in the future, you use the same signifier again. If I throw out my keyboard and buy a new one, I’ll call the new one “my keyboard” without missing a beat. If I started using two keyboards, I’d call them “my keyboards” and the plural suffix would make it easy to understand. When I bought my midi controller, I had no problem calling it a “keyboard” as well, though I’d probably add the qualifier “piano” to differentiate between the two types of keyboard. But, this understanding of language starts to fall apart once you try to come up with a new example.

If you had to come up with a new word for something… how would you do it? You wouldn’t just randomly combine sounds, right? You would consider other words first: similar words and contextualizing words. How would you differentiate the thing you’re naming from other things and how would you set the boundary? What grammatical role does your new word need to fill? Within that grammatical role, what other words are similar to it or different to it? Do you actually need a new word, or can you express the same meaning by combining some existing words? If “diet soda” works to describe a diet soda, then we don’t need a new single noun to describe a soda with artificial sweetener. If you really do need a new word, maybe you would see if there are words in other languages that you could steal; Latin and Greek are some common sources for English words. But… well, that’s just passing the problem elsewhere, isn’t it? Sometimes truly new signs need to be created: how does this happen?

This will make more sense as we continue on. To start off, there are two principle characteristics of signs.

Signs are arbitrary.

For some signs, this is pretty obvious. Why should an “apple” be named “apple”? Is there anything about an apple that looks like the word “apple” or sounds like the word when spoken out-loud? If apples were pears and pears were apples, things would be fine. In English, most of our words have an etymology. There’s often a Latin or Greek root. Even “yeet” has an etymology that goes back to a Proto-Indo-European root. But, if you follow these roots back far enough, you eventually hit a word that “just is.” Maybe we don’t have enough information to follow it all the way back that far, but at some point, how could the word have originated?

Well, there are onomatopoeia. This actually comes up in some of the reading for this post. The structuralist argument is that onomatopoeia seems to not be arbitrary, but given how different onomatopoeia is between different cultures, we can see that it’s actually a lot more arbitrary than it seems. This is easy to accept when looking at words like “bark” which… honestly doesn’t sound at all like any dog I’ve ever heard, but the similar sounds for “meow” between languages seems like an example of a word that isn’t entirely arbitrary to me. Bear in mind, however, that cats are also making that sound on purpose… so maybe cats gave us that word for some reason? In any case, the structuralist argument is that onomatopoeia is arbitrary. I don’t necessarily buy it, but I also don’t personally see what that’s a sticking point: if there are a small handful of words that aren’t arbitrary, then I don’t think that actually changes the theory here that almost all words are arbitrary. We just made them up. Some languages have many synonyms for things like “snow” because they have a lot more snow than places that only came up with one or two words for it: we come up with arbitrary signifiers as needed.

Bear in mind that when I say “signs are arbitrary,” I’m talking about the whole sign – not just the signifier. It’s the relationship between the sound-image signifier and the signified that is arbitrary.

Okay, so, signs are arbitrary, but that doesn’t explain why a sign’s value is determined by other signs in the system… or does it?

Binary Opposition and the Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic axes

Okay, so, we have definitions for “sign” and “value” and we agree that signs are arbitrary. At least, we’re working with this assumption. Now we’re going to establish that the value of a sign is determined negatively by the other signs in the system.

We already ran into this with the soda example from before. In a world without diet soda, the sign encompassing diet soda could not exist: it’s signified wouldn’t exist, so even if the sound-image “diet” existed, it wouldn’t be part of the same sign. BUT, this is just as true for a world where all soda is diet as it is for a world where no soda is diet. “Diet soda” only has meaning in a world where there is soda that isn’t diet. In a world where diet soda came first and sugar soda came second, we’d probably consider diet soda to be the default – “regular” – and use a qualifier for the sugar soda. Calling it “non-diet soda” would be pretty terrible branding, so we’d probably qualify the sugar soda by emphasizing how much better it tastes. “Premium soda,” “energy soda,” “soda snack.” Someone in marketing could probably come up with a better term, but you get my point: the words we choose are based on what we’re not saying as much as what we are saying. “This, not that.”

“Even outside language all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined”[1]. For example, consider a dollar. It can be exchanged for a candy bar, which is dissimilar to a dollar but has a value that is comparable, or we could compare a dollar to a quarter, something which is similar but has only one fourth the value.

In a linguistic sense, signs derive their meaning from two orthogonal axis: the syntagmatic axis and the paradigmatic axis.

The syntagmatic axis is about combination or sequence. It’s about syntax. On the scope of a sentence, the syntagmatic structure is found in the combined meaning of the words in the sentence, not in the individual words. On the wide scope of human communication, you can see this as the rules of the language at a point in time. Saussure calls this axis “langue.” This axis is synchronic: it is together with time, as opposed to through time. Certainly, language changes over time, but that’s incidental, due to outside forces. There’s nothing within the system of language that forces it to change through time. If you fix time, looking only at a single point, then you can still see the entirety of language. You can pin it down, force it to be static, and it would still make sense. You could encode its rules into a book. Likewise, on the smaller scope, you can look at an entire sentence as one single combination. The syntagmatic structure of the sentence is governed by the rules of grammar just as the syntagmatic structure of a story is governed by the laws of cause and effect and by expectations from the genre or tropes involved. The individual words or plot points aren’t relevant here, just the combination.

The paradigmatic axis is about selection or replacement. This is where the selection of particular words, plot points, or whatever comes in. A paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or patterns. In linguistics, this means a class of elements with similarities in their structural or contextual role. The alphabet is a paradigm and the rules that determine whether you’ve made a real word is the syntagmatic structure. Nouns form a paradigm and verbs form a paradigm, but the syntagmatic axis forms the grammar that determines whether the next word should be a noun, a verb, or something else. We use the word “tagmeme” to describe the smallest structural unit of this dimension: you can combine tagmemes to form a syntagmeme, such as a sentence. This axis is diachronic: it is through time. On the wide scope of human communication, you can see this as speech: the unfolding of sentences in real time. Saussure calls this axis “parole.” You could put all the members of a paradigm into a book, but that book wouldn’t be the paradigmatic axis: the selection of individual examples over time is the axis. If you were to start listing examples of a paradigm and then time stopped, you would be stuck on the last example you chose: whereas the syntagmatic axis only changes through time incidentally, the paradigmatic axis changes through time necessarily. The rules of language could theoretically be halted so we only use the same grammatical rules forever, but you couldn’t finish even a single sentence if you couldn’t select any new words.

To be perfectly honest, I found this whole concept just ridiculously hard to understand while researching this post, but some examples helped. Hopefully this makes more sense for you then it did for me when I first started.

Take our soda example from before: “Could I have a diet caffeine-free Coke?”

What’s the syntagmatic axis of this sentence? It’s the overall grammatical structure of it. “[aux verb] [noun] [verb] [noun]?”

What’s the paradigmatic axis of this sentence? It’s the specific terms. “Could [I, you, my dog] [have, buy, rent] a [soda, diet Coke, regular Mountain Dew]?”

You can sort of think of the syntagmatic axis as a collection of mad-libs and the choices on how to fill in the blanks as the paradigmatic axis.

You can think of the paradigmatic axis as a function that takes a paradigm and outputs a specific example of it. This axis occurs through time, diachronically. Imagine that you’re the paradigmatic axis on a team of speech writers for a politician. You stand backstage in a room filled with bins of paradigms. As time flows, you run around to grab specific examples as each paradigm is called. “We need a silly noun!” “Does “porpoise work?” “It’ll fit our purpose just fine.”

So, where’s the syntagmatic axis during this speech writing? Well, this axis doesn’t move through time: they finished their work before the speech even started. In a way, you can think of the paradigmatic axis as depending on the syntagmatic axis. Recall that the syntagmatic axis is also the language axis and the paradigmatic axis is also the speech access, so this means that you can consider speech dependent on language. You don’t “speak language,” you “speak with language”.

Alright, that’s a lot of examples, but I really did find this to be really hard to understand, so hopefully these examples helped illustrate things.

Before we move on, I want to come at this from one more angle.

Aphasia

Our fourth reading today looks at two types of aphasia to demonstrate how the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes work within the human brain. The really interesting thing here is that this actually isn’t as abstract and theoretical as it might seem: our brains are wired to work on these two axes. Damage to the brain can disrupt one more than the other.

Note that this reading is a bit out of date, so it might not apply perfectly to a modern understanding of aphasia. To my knowledge the science here is solid, but I’d be surprised if aphasia is classified in the same ways today. This should be sufficient for our discussion on structuralism, but you should definitely find something more recent if you want to understand aphasia specifically.

This study identifies two types of aphasia: “Similarity disorder” and “Contiguity disorder.”

Similarity disorder occurs when there’s a problem navigating the paradigmatic axis. This is also called “selection deficiency.” A patient with this disorder can still form sentences by combining words, but they struggle to select specific words. “Instead of saying ‘this is [called] a pencil,’ he will merely add an elliptical note about its use: ‘To write.'” “Even a simple repetition of a word uttered by the examiner seems to the patient unnecessarily redundant, and despite instructions received he is unable to repeat it. Told to repeat the word ‘no,’ Head’s patient replied ‘No, I don’t know how to do it.'” “Such an aphasic can neither switch from a word to its synonyms and circumlocution, nor to its heteronyms, i.e. equivalent expressions in other languages. Loss of polyglot ability and confinement to a single dialectical variety of a single language is a symptomatic manifestation of this disorder.” “From the two polar figures of speech, metaphor and metonymy, the latter, based on contiguity, is widely employed by aphasics whose selective capacities have been affected.”

Continuity disorder affects the syntagmatic axis and is also called “contexture deficiency.” “Diminishes the extent and variety of sentences. The syntactical rules organizing words into a higher unit are lost; this loss, called agrammatism, causes the degeneration of the sentence into a mere ‘word heap.'” “Words endowed with a purely grammatical functions, like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles, disappear first, giving rise to the so-called ‘telegraphic style.'” “The patient confined to the substitution set (once contexture is deficient) deals with similarities, and his approximate identifications are of a metaphoric nature, contrary to the metonymic ones familiar to the opposite type of aphasics. Spyglass for microscope, or fire for gaslight are typical examples of such quasi-metaphoric expressions”

I found this absolutely fascinating (though it also sounds just horrible to live with.) This really demonstrates that we’re not just talking about theoretical concepts divorced from reality: we’re talking about two real dimensions of language that are rooted in physical brain structures.

Alright, we’re just about ready to dive into structuralism directly, but first I want to make a quick stop at Roman Jakobson’s six functions of language.

Jakobson’s six functions of language

So, we have a decent understanding of signs now, but before we get to structuralism, let’s briefly consider what communication, particularly speech, actually is, or rather, what functions it serves. This is taken from our third reading listed below, by Roman Jakobson.

Jakobson defined six essential functions of language.

• Referential: This function relates to the context and describes something. This is probably the most common-sense function of language: to say something about something. Think of a meteorologist reporting the weather: they’re not trying to convince you to do something, express a personal feeling, etc. They’re really just trying to describe the weather.
• Emotive: Relates to the addresser or sender and their internal state. The simplest example of this would be an interjection: “Owch!”
• Conative: Engages the addressee or receiver directly, such as an imperative. “Get over here!“
• Phatic (or Contact): Keeps the communication channel open. This is communication for the sake of communication. “Well, here we are then.” “Yep.” “Lend me your ears!” Infants start doing this even before they really have anything to say.
• Metalingual: Checks on the communication channel and resolves any issues. “Can you hear me now?” This function also helps to negotiate the code by resolving any misunderstood words so both parties can use the same lexicon. “What does ‘tagmeme mean?” “It’s the smallest functional unit of a grammatical structure.” “Ah, so it’s just a ‘word’ then?” “Not quite, but that’s good enough for now.” I can’t help but think of the ways that communication in software and engineering works when I think of this function.
• Poetic: “The message for its own sake.” This is the dominant (but not sole!) function of poetry.

Jakobson further describes the poetic function thusly: “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” “Poetry and metalanguage… are in diametrical opposition to each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence.”

With that, I think we’re (finally) ready for structuralism!

Structuralism

Alright, we took a brief (relatively speaking) dive into the broad field of semiotics and learned a bunch about signs. So, how does this tie back to structuralism?

Well, once you have this understanding of signs, some patterns start to emerge in basically every aspect of human culture. How this applies to basic sentence structure and word choices is interesting to linguists, but the abstract way that signs are defined and the ways that humans communicate mean that this also applies not only to other forms of art, such as music and film, but also to other social structures such as class, race, and gender. If everything we know about signs applies here, then we can start making some really interesting observations, like, are the defining characteristics of gender as arbitrary as the relation between sound-images and concepts?

Now, before we get too excited, we should also consider how limited structuralism was by itself. As a dominant theory, structuralism only really existed from around 1964 to 1966. In 1966, deconstruction and post-structuralism started taking off. But, we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

A key observation of structuralism was that, although signs are abstract, there are some clear patterns that exist between very different cultures. Lévi-Strauss’s “The Structural Study of Myth” is a good example from our readings listed below. Lévi-Strauss examined accounts of various myths from across a wide range of cultures and time periods in an attempt to identify and reconstruct some of the patterns that are common to all people. This felt like a good humanist endeavor to show how humans across different cultures have some core similarities and how people from the ancient world were no less intelligent than modern people. Lévi-Strauss broke down myths into “mythemes,” the essential events that make up myths. Myths are interesting in that although they’re stories they are almost be definition retold many times with many variations. Lévi-Strauss argued that it doesn’t make sense to think of myths as having one true source that all other versions are mere deformations of: he saw myths as existing as the collection of many versions. Myths are never “done,” but continue to grow “spiral-wise” as they add on more versions and meanings. The really cool part is that humans are very good at telling when we’re seeing a new version of a myth even if many of the details are wrong. How easily can you spy a Christ figure in a modern story even if it has almost nothing to do with Christianity? I’ve gotten to the point where if the storyteller bothers to put an explicit cross in the scene then it kind of feels like too much. How many versions of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus are you familiar with? You can set it in a science fiction universe, add in a bunch of extra details, and cut out some major beats but we’ll still pick up on the theme of flying too close to the sun. Stories about old women who prey on children are found just all over the world. Same with the dangers of eating food from the underworld.

In analyzing myths, Lévi-Strauss attempts the same paradigmatic vs syntagmatic analysis that applies to language. He found that there are some implicit rules that determine the structure of a myth and that there are some paradigms of events that are shared a bit more specific to various cultures. I am heavily paraphrasing and reinterpreting here, but consider that some degree of structure is kind of necessary in how a story works. Children traveling through a dangerous place and finding something bad without their parents to protect them is a pretty fundamental structure. A hero being called to some quest and having to leave their home to encounter a sequence of more and more difficult challenges is another. You really don’t need to have heard of such a story before for this to make sense, it’s just a fundamental structure: how else would you even do it? On the paradigmatic side, we have some specific events to fill in the actual beats of a myth’s structure. Many of these are shared across culture as well, but they may be more specific to an area. Maybe the quest is one for treasure and the challenges are monsters, or maybe the quest is to reestablish a family name and the challenges are evil nobles.

For a single myth, you can plot these elements out in two dimensions. Lévi-Strauss did this on notecards for the myth of Oedipus.

Lévi-Strauss described reading this as similar to reading music. “Were we to tell the myth, we would disregard the columns and read the rows from left to right and from top to bottom. But if we want to understand the myth, then we will have to disregard one half of the diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to right, column after column, each one being considered as a unit.” He uses this reading to show that there are deeper themes in the myth that aren’t apparent only from the chronological meaning. Specifically, he shows how the first column is a collection of mythemes showing family ties being too strong, the second column shows family ties being too weak, the third column shows a rejection of the autochthonous origin of humanity, and the last column shows tropes supporting the autochthonous origin of humanity (he notes that difficulty walking is a common theme in myths where people spring forth from the earth.)

Whether this specific interpretation sits well with you isn’t the point, rather, note how sensible this sort of approach is. You probably examined some stories like this in school. Lévi-Strauss goes on to explain that if you create a two-dimensional representation of a myth like this for each version of a myth, you can build up a three-dimensional stack that comprises the entire myth. Cross-cultural study of myths could then make further comparisons between different myths in a higher dimensional space, which he speculates would reveal even more structures.

The point here isn’t to do a deep dive into myths, but to show how structuralism is a useful tool for looking for the structures within human culture. Myth is just another – higher – form of language.

Music is another good example. You’ve probably discussed music in terms of genre before, right? Note how, although it can be tricky to define a genre in specific words, you can usually get a decent sense for what genres a song references. You might debate which genre fits better or what album marked an artist’s transition from one genre to the next, but you can generally throw out a couple of genres to give a good sense of what to expect. If I had to pick just one genre to describe Daft Punk, then I’d probably go with “electronic,” but if I can choose four – like Wikipedia does – then yeah, I’d definitely throw “disco,” “dance,” and “house” into the mix. It doesn’t fully describe the group, but it gives us a structure to work from, which allows us to talk about their specific features with some foundational structure to work from. On the creation side, if you wanted to make music similar to Daft Punk, you’d probably look for some electronic, disco, dance, and house sample packs. Maybe you’d listen to some other songs from these genres to come up with ideas on how to make it similar to Daft Punk, but not exactly the same.

Are there any problems with this?

We’re just about done with structuralism, so now would be a good time to ask whether anything here feels a bit… insufficient. Structuralism is definitely a great lens for examining human culture, but did anything with the signs seem a bit hand-wavy? In particular, the notion that signs are arbitrary and defined by binary opposition.

How solid can a structure be if nothing is actually rooted to reality?

Structuralist thought attempted to be very abstract and generic – applying to everyone everywhere – but there was still an assumption that the underlying basis was solid or fixed. This can easily lead to some dangerous assumptions about how things are supposed to be. Using structuralist theory and the concept of binary opposition, it’s easy to make assumptions such as that there are two options or that the options available are diametrically opposed. It’s also very easy to privilege the status quo by showing how the system is maintained via opposition without considering that sometimes a system isn’t limited to merely swapping around a few features, but could be uprooted entirely. Observing that the colors blue and pink for boys and girls is an arbitrary decision that doesn’t hold across cultures is fine, but are we still assuming exactly two gender roles?

Next time we’ll start talking about deconstruction, which asks us to consider whether language isn’t as reliable as we think it is and whether structuralism’s structures might be a bit more free floating than structuralism believes.

Readings

1. Saussure, Ferdinand de. “Selections from Course in General Linguistics.” In The Critical Tradition. Published 1917 posthumously from lecture notes.
   • Description of Saussure’s conception of semiotics and linguistics. Focuses on the definition of a sign and the formation of signs via binary opposition.
   • “The psychological character of our sound-images becomes apparent when we observe our own speech. Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to ourselves or recite mentally a selection of verse.”
   • “the linguistic sign is arbitrary”
   • “every means of expression used in society is based, in principle, on collective behavior”
   • “even outside language all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are always composed: (1) of a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (2) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined.”
   • “The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line”
   • “Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others”
2. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth.” In The Critical Tradition. Originally published 1955, this is a translation from 1963.
   • Discussion on breaking down and reconstructing myth in two dimensions: synchronic and diachronic. The actual discussion on Oedipus here seemed kind of weak to me, but it’s only provided as an example of this method of structural thinking. Myths can be broken down into “mythemes” (units of significant event) and laid out in two dimensions. Reading it chronologically builds the story, but arranging the mythemes by meaning reveals deeper cultural themes. Lévi-Strauss assets that myths are built up “spiralwise,” where chasing after an original version and treating others as deformations is incorrect as the real myth is revealed in all its versions. If we lay out our mythemes in two dimensions, we can then stack these dimensions to create a three-dimensional space that defines the myth in totality. Lévi-Strauss also comments on how the structural process of creating myths via binary opposition explains how myths from distant cultures often have similar forms, even if the actual meaning is quite different.
   • “We have distinguished langue and parole by the different time referents which they use. Keeping this in mind, we may notice that myth uses a third referent which combines the properties of the first two. On the one hand, a myth always refers to events alleged to have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past as well as the future. This can be made clear through a comparison between myth and what appears to have largely replaced it in modern societies, namely, politics.”
   • “To sum up the discussion at this point, we have so far made the following claims: (1) If there is a meaning to be found in mythology, it cannot reside in the isolated elements which enter into the composition of a myth, but only in the way those elements are combined. (2) Although myth belongs to the same category as language, being, as a matter of fact, only part of it, language in myth exhibits specific properties. (3) Those properties are only to be found above the ordinary linguistic level, that is, they exhibit more complex features than those which are to be found in any other kind of linguistic expressions. If the above three points are granted, at least as a working hypothesis, two consequences will follow: (1) Myth, like the rest of language, is made up of constituent units. (2) These constituent units presuppose the constituent units present in language when analyzed on other levels – names, phonemes, morphemes, and sememes – but they, nevertheless, differ from the latter in the same way as the latter differ among themselves; they belong to a higher and more complex order. For this reason, we shall call them gross constituent units.”
   • “If a myth is made up of all its variants, structural analysis should take all of them into account.”
   • “Myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process, whereas its structure remains discontinuous. If this is the case, we should assume that it closely corresponds, in the realm of the spoken word, to a crystal in the realm of physical matter.”
   • “Prevalent attempts to explain the alleged differences between the so-called primitive mind and scientific thought have resorted to qualitative differences between the working processes of the mind in both cases, while assuming that the entities which they were studying remained very much the same. If our interpretation is correct, we are led toward a completely different view – namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied.”… “In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers.”
3. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In The Critical Tradition. Published 1960.
   • More discussion on how poetics relates to semiotics and linguistics. This essay helps to clarify some of the other readings, but its primary contribution is in separating communication out into a set of six functions:
     • Emotive: Relates to the addresser/sender. Most obviously seen in interjections like “owch!” that convey the feelings of the addresser with no other meaning.
     • Conative: Directly engages the addressee/receiver. Most obviously seen in imperatives like “get over here!”
     • Referential: Relates to the context and describes something. Conveys information. Think of a meteorologist reading off the weather.
     • Phatic (or Conact): “Messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication.” “Lend me your ears!” You can see animals like birds do this. Human infants do this even before they have anything else to communicate.
     • Metalingual: Checks on the communication channel and resolves any issues in communication. “Can you hear me now?” “Do you know what I mean?” “What does that word mean?” That this can be used to agree on the lexical code is really interesting to me. This function reminds me of the handshakes uses in communication in software.
     • Poetic: The message in itself. This is the dominant function in poetry. “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” “Poetry and metalanguage, however, are in diametrical opposition to each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence.”
4. Jakobson, Roman. “Two Types of Aphasia and Two Types of Language Disturbance.” In Fundamentals of Language. Published 1956.
   • This is basically the second half of the book Fundamentals of Language. It explores two forms of aphasia and through them demonstrates some of the mental processes behind structuralism. This was an absolutely fascinating read and really helped to put the other readings into context. The two forms of aphasia explained here correspond to issues in selecting along the two axis of langue and parole as conceived by Saussure.
     • Similarity Disorder or Selection Deficiency
       • Can still form sentences by combining words into sentences, but struggles to select words.
       • “As numerous tests have disclosed, for such patients two occurrences of the same word in two different contexts are mere homonyms.”
       • “Instead of saying “this is [called] a pencil,” he will merely add an elliptical note about its use: “To write.””
       • “Even a simple repetition of a word uttered by the examiner seems to the patient unnecessarily redundant, and despite instructions received he is unable to repeat it. Told to repeat the word “no,” Head’s patient replied “No, I don’t know how to do it.””
       • “Such an aphasic can neither switch from a word to its synonyms and circumlocution, nor to its heteronyms, i.e. equivalent expressions in other languages. Loss of a polyglot ability and confinement to a single dialectal variety of a single language is a symptomatic manifestation of this disorder.”
       • “From the two polar figures of speech, metaphor and metonymy, the latter, based on contiguity, is widely employed by aphasics whose selective capacities have been affected.”
     • Contiguity Disorder or Contexture Deficiency
       • Can still select words, but struggles to combine them into sentences.
       • “Diminishes the extent and variety of sentences. the syntactical rules organizing words into a higher unit are lost; this loss, called agrammatism, causes the degeneration of the sentence into a mere “word heap.””
       • “Words endowed with a purely grammatical functions, like conjunctions, prepositions, pronouns, and articles, disappear first, giving rise to the so-called “telegraphic style.””
       • “The patient confined to the substitution set (once contexture is deficient) deals with similarities, and his approximate identifications are of a metaphoric nature, contrary to the metonymic ones familiar to the opposite type of aphasics. Spyglass for microscope, or fire for gaslight are typical examples of such quasi-metaphoric expressions”
     • “The less a word depends grammatically on the context, the strong is its tenacity in the speech of aphasics with a contiguity disorder and the sooner is it dropped by patients with a similarity disorder.”