Structuralism

Structuralism is a method and philosophical outlook, originating in Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, that analyzes meaning not by reference to things in the world or to individual speakers' intentions but by reference to the differential relations among elements within a self-contained system, such as the system of a language. Saussure's key claim that linguistic signs acquire meaning only through their systematic differences from other signs, rather than through any inherent connection to what they denote, was generalized far beyond linguistics from the 1950s onward by thinkers including Claude Levi-Strauss, who analyzed myth and kinship as structured sign systems, and Roland Barthes, who applied structural analysis to literature and popular culture. Structuralist method treats the surface content of a cultural practice as less philosophically significant than the underlying formal structure, often unconscious to its participants, that generates and organizes that content, a move that displaced the human subject's intentions from the center of explanation in favor of impersonal systems of relations. Structuralism dominated French intellectual life through the 1960s but came under sustained internal critique from the late 1960s onward by former structuralists including Derrida and Foucault, who argued that structures themselves are never as stable or self-contained as structuralist analysis assumed, a critique that gave rise to the loosely related current known as post-structuralism.