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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
Structuralism, Robert Scholes tells us, embodies “a ‘scientific’ view of the world as both real in itself and intelligible to man.” In order to achieve objectivity and descriptive adequacy in the human sciences, structuralists have generally adopted the linguistic model of Ferdinand de Saussure via Prague school structural linguistics. The common assumption has it that structural linguistics, given its method of abstracting language into an autonomous object for empirical analysis, now constitutes itself as a true science, worthy of emulation by other disciplines in the social sciences and in the humanities. However, there has been sparse inquiry into the validity of the general “scientific” foundations upon which the structuralist methodology rests. In response to this critical deficiency the present commentary will aim: (1) to subject the underlying presuppositions of structuralism to close scrutiny in the light of past and present scientific paradigms, and (2) to suggest, as a consequence of the first objective, that structuralism is based on premises which are not consistent with current scientific and epistemological lines of reasoning.
1 Structuralism in Literature, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1974, p. 3.
2 The basic premises of structural linguistics were first articulated, albeit rather sketchily, by Ferdinand de Saussure. This formulation may be understood primarily as a reaction against nineteenth century historical studies of language. Consequently, Saussure's concerns lie chiefly in the realm of synchronic aspects of linguistic phenomena. (Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1966.) During the 1930's N.S. Trubetskoy and Roman Jakobson of the Prague school of linguistics, attempted to account for historical change in language without discarding the fundamental tenets of Saussurean linguistics. (Trubetskoy, Principes de Phonologie, trans. J. Cantineau, Paris, Klincksieck, 1964; and Jakobson, "Principes de phonologie historique," in Trubetskoy, pp. 315-36.) More recently, the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev set the foundation for future linguist studies by reformulating the "structuralist" conception of language in an elaborate methodological scheme. (Prolegomena to a Theory of Languages, trans. R.J. Whitfield, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1963.)
3 See, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest, New York, Doubleday and Company, 1967, pp. 66-79.
4 For a perceptive critique of the particular methodologies of Lacan, Lévi-Strauss, and Piaget, see Anthony Wilden, System and Structure, London, Tavistock Publications, 1972.
5 Structural Anthropology, pp. 29-53.
6 "L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient," in Ecrits I, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1966, pp. 249-89. Trans. of this article by Jan Miel in Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann, Garden City, N. Y., Anchor, 1970, pp. 101-37.
7 " Introduction à l'analyse structurale des récits," Conamunications, 8 (1966), 1-27. See also Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike. Recherches pour une sémanalyse, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1969, p. 422.
8 I do not include in my generalizations the "genetic structuralisms" of Piaget and Lucien Goldmann, since their methodology constitutes a departure from the "static" variety of structuralism which I scrutinize. Nevertheless, on another level, "genetic structuralism" can be subjected to a similar line of inquiry.
9 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. J. Russell, New York, Atheneum, 1964, p. 61.
10 Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, Boston, Beacon Press, 1970, pp. 97-98.
11 " Saussure, p. 114.
12 Ibid., p. 81.
13 Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1972, p. 6.
14 Saussure, pp. 67-69. However, see Emile Benveniste's influential critique of Saussure's concept of arbitrariness. "La nature du signe linguistique," in Problèmes de linguistique générale, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, pp. 49-55.
15 See Barthes, Elements of Semiology, pp. 58-88.
16 See Hugo Nutini, "Some Considerations on the Notion of Social Structure and Model Building," in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, eds. E. Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes, Cambridge, The M.I.T. Press, 1970, pp. 70-107.
17 This intransigent synchrony-diachrony opposition is part of the Saussurean conception of language. On the other hand, Jakobson was one of the first to suggest that this opposition is to a large degree illusory, that it is a convenient device for analysis rather than a particular mode of being. "Principes de phonologie historique," pp. 333-34.
18 Saussure, p. 19.
19 Structural Anthropology, p. 31.
20 Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1966, pp. 269-70.
21 Jakobson, p. 334.
22 Saussure, p. 78.
23 Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, p. 62. This presupposition leads directly to the "principle of immanence" which limits structural analysis to that which occurs in the mind, a tentative basis for the accusation that structuralism in general, and Lévi-Strauss' structuralist methodology in particular, adheres to a Kantian approach to man and his cultural products. (Jean Dubois, "Estructu ralismo y lingüística," in Estructuralismo y marxismo, trad. Antonio G. Valiente, Barcelona, Ediciones Martinez Roca, 1969, pp. 46-60.) It is significant, there fore, that Paul Ricoeur refers to Lévi-Strauss structuralist method as Kantism "without a transcendental subject." "Structure et hermeneutiques," Esprit, 31 (1963), 596-652.
24 Lévi-Strauss proposes that it is "immaterial whether … the thought processes of the South American Indians take shape through the medium of my thought, or whether mine takes shape through the medium of theirs. What matters is that the human mind, regardless of the identity of those who happen to be giving it expression, should display an increasingly intelligible structure as a result of the doubly reflective forward movement of the two thought processes acting one upon the other, either of which can in turn provide the spark or tinder whose conjunction will shed light on both." The Raw and the Cooked, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, New York, Harper and Row, 1969, p. 13.
25 See Lawrence Krader, "Beyond Structuralism: The Dialectics of the Diachronic and Synchronic Methods in the Human Sciences," in The Uncon scious in Culture: The Structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Perspective, ed. Ino Rossi, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1974, pp. 336-61.
26 Floyd W. Matson, The Broken Image: Man, Science and Society, Garden City, N. Y., Doubleday and Company, 1966, p. 11.
27 James Jeans, The New Background of Science, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1959, pp. 1-2.
28 Milic Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, New York, American Book Company, 1961, pp. 7-53.
29 Louis de Broglie, The Revolution in Physics, New York, Noonday Press, 1953, pp. 14-15.
30 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1948, pp. 41-56.
31 Capek, p. 136. Similarly, Wylie Sypher, in his study of modern art and literature, maintains that an overemphasis on the visually perceptible qualities of art tends to "spatialize time." (Literature and Technology, New York, Random House, 1968, pp. 78-79.) Henri Lefebvre alludes to this "spatialization" in Lévi-Strauss' variety of structuralism as a "new Eleatism." ("Claude Lévi-Strauss y el nuevo eleatismo," in Estructuralismo y filosofía, ed. José Sazbón, Buenos Aires, Ediciones Nueva Visión, 1971, pp. 121-76.) It can be provisionally concluded, then, that this static quality of orthodox structuralist methodology, as well as any other analogous view of reality, is the result of an implicit "spatialization."
32 The Will to Power, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. Anthony M. Ludovice, London, T. N. Foulis, 1913, XV, p. 430. Quoted in Capek, p. 126.
33 Neils Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Science, New York, John Wiley, 1958, p. 95.
34 Jacob Bronowski, The Common Sense of Science, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1955, p. 46.
35 Jakobson, "Parts and Wholes in Language," in Parts and Wholes, ed. Daniel Lerner, New York, The Free Press, 1963, pp. 157-62. See also, for instance, Greimas, who maintains that the scientific conception of the universe is that of a great "semiotic hierarchy." "Sémantique, sémiotique et sémiologies," in Sign, Language, Culture, ed. C. H. van Schooneveld, The Hague, Mouton, 1970, pp. 13-27.
36 There has, however, been controversy concerning the respective positions of each system in the total hierarchy. For instance, Saussure originally forwarded the notion that the linguistic system is subordinate to general semiological systems. Barthes inverts this formulation suggesting the primacy of the linguistic system over all aspects of human activity. These two central proposi tions are antithetical, but tenable on their own grounds, as are the Kantian antinomies of thought. The argument could thus go on forever.
37 Capek attempts to demonstrate how this tendency of human thought to follow the "pathways of least resistence" is a psychological phenomenon and that psychology for this reason cannot be divorced from epistemology. He believes that epistemological conventions can become ingrained in the "sub conscious" such that it is well nigh impossible to go beyond these conventions to view reality in a different light. The Newtonian paradigm has over the centuries become ingrained so as to "condition our minds" and prevent us from eliminating it overnight. Newtonian subconsciousness is incompatible with the conscious convictions of those modern physicists who outwardly profess allegiance to the relativity theory. These subconscious barriers must fall. Hence, the epistemology of modern physics "would profit enormously from a sort of ‘psychoanalysis of knowledge' in Gaston Bachelard's sense which would unmask the inhibiting influence of our Euclidean and Newtonian subconscious in the minds of those physicists who sincerely believe themselves to be entirely free from them." (P. 299.) In conjunction with this view of the cultural "embedding" of ideas, see Gregory Bateson, "Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art," in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, New York, Ballantine Books, 1972, pp. 128-52.
38 This line of reasoning follows Bertrand Russell's theory of logical types. To paraphrase and simplify (I hope without doing violence to a sophisticated and quite complex theory), all entities referred to in a corpus submitted for analysis may be thought of as a macrosystem which includes systems of systems, all arranged in a hierarchy of classes, or types. An individual of a particular class cannot be considered as the class itself, and conversely, a class cannot be a member of itself. To do so introduces paradox. The paradox of Epimenides the Cretan who said that all Cretans were liars effectively illustrates Russell's point. In this statement a member of a particular class is considered on the same level as the class itself and the sentence is for this reason rendered nonsensical. In the context of the present commentary, to treat, as does structuralism, myths, the mind, dress codes, narrative texts, etc., as if they were language is to establish language as a model. However, whereas the explanatory model for structural linguistics is binarism, structuralism generally adopts binarism as a sort of "second order" model, language being the primary model. Therefore, the binary principle is for linguistics the model while for structuralism it is a metamodel, the model of a model. It is the use of this model of a model that constitutes a violation of the boundaries separating logical types and brings about a fundamental methodological problem.
39 The Philosophy of Physical Science, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1958, pp. 109 and 112.
40 This is an apparent contradiction of Lévi-Strauss' notion that anthropology studies structures through space while history constitutes a "functional" study through time. The fact does remain that "primitive" societies in twentieth century Brazil exist simultaneously with comparable societies ten or more centuries past. On the other hand, Edmund Leach maintains that Lévi-Strauss culinary triangle and other similar devices do not depend on the temporal status of societies but apply equally well to the so-called "hot" (industrialized) and "cold" (preindustrial) societies. Similarly, Jakobson's phonemic triangle supposedly applies equally well to both "primitive" and modern languages. Claude Lévi-Strauss, New York, The Viking Press, 1970, pp. 15-52.
41 See Lévi-Strauss' essay entitled "History and Dialectic" in The Savage Mind, pp. 245-69.
42 Jameson perceives a paradox in Saussure's model (and it might be added that Saussure himself admits that "the comparison is weak"). The chess game analogy, "satisfying historically because it makes of the successive synchronic states a kind of meaningful continuity, is not at all in the spirit of Saussurean thinking, for in the chess game, the rules remain the same throughout: whereas in the evolution of language it is precisely the rules that change." Hence the idea that diachronic changes in language are the result of "some meaningful force immanent in phonetic history." p. 22.
43 The Raw and the Cooked, pp. 14-30.
44 Knowing and Being: Essays by Michael Polanyi, ed. Marjorie Grene, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1969, pp. 123-80.
45 This is Wittegenstein's early thesis in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. We may "intuit" a particular reality but on attempting to describe that reality we are lost, for its essence is, ipso facto, unutterable. The unutterability will be reflected in what is said but cannot be explicitly stated. Hence poetic discourse displays, but cannot tell in objective fashion, and the reader must "intuit" that linguistic display just as the writer intuited the reality he displayed through language.
46 Nevertheless, it was only on the basis of this Linnaean classificatory system that a viable model of evolution could be constructed. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, New York, Avon Books, 1967, p. 93.
47 See Jonathan Culler, "The Linguistic Basis of Structuralism," in Struc turalism : An Introduction, ed. David Robey, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973, pp. 20-36.
48 Lucien Seve, "Método estructural y método dialéctico," in Estructuralismo y marxismo, pp. 108-50.
49 Similarly, even though structuralism purports to be a holistic way of looking at man and at the world, in certain respects it is, as Capek says of the more "conservative" interpretation of relativity physics, still tied to the world view it attempts to supersede.
50 Wilden, pp. 230-73 and 302-50.
51 Cassius J. Keyser, "The Group Concept," in The World of Mathematics, ed. James R. Newman, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956, III, pp. 1538-57.
52 Wilden, pp. 351-94.
53 Georg Lukacs' critique of Western empirical science is analogous to my own critique, even though from a distinct vantage point. Lukacs maintains that the traditional empirical method wrenches "facts" from their living content, isolates them, and fits them into an abstract theory. Phenomena, by means of this method, are reduced "to their purely quantitative essence, to their expres sion in numbers and numerical relations." (History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, The M.I.T. Press, 1971, p. 6.) A method of analysis based on immediately perceivable facts fails in so far as it cannot, as does dialectical materialism, take account of the historical character of the facts and glimpse their underlying reality. Both "bourgeois science" and "vulgar Marxism" abstract the parts and prevent them "from finding their definition within the whole and, instead, the whole was dismissed as unscientific or else it degenerated into the mere ‘idea' or ‘sum' of the parts. With the totality out of the way, the fetichistic relations of the isolated parts appeared as a timeless law valid for every human society" (p. 9). These "timeless laws" have become an ideological weapon. For the bourgeoisie, " it is a matter of life and death to understand its own system of production in terms of eternally valid categories: it must think of capitalism as being predestined to eternal survival by the eternal laws of nature and reason. Conversely, contradictions that cannot be ignored must be shown to be purely surface phenomena, unrelated to this mode of production." (pp. 10-11) Although Lukacs is referring to empirical "facts" in contrast to my criticism of "isolated structures," the timeless character ultimately implied in both methodologies is analogous. Julia Kristeva's contention that one must consciously rise above the ideologies that are implicit in traditional Western World heuristic models is also comparable. (Semeiotike, pp. 27-42). Furthermore, Capek's "ingrained Newtonian mentality" prevents integration of the concrete and the abstract just as does Lukacs' ideo logically motivated bourgeois science.
54 And in Goldmann's case, structure is conceived within a deterministic Marxist framework which becomes, in the long run, a "static" explication of the "static" relationships between instantaneous structures of a given point in history.
55 According to Lévi-Strauss, "Mythological analysis has not, and cannot have, as its aim to show how men think. In the particular example we are dealing with here, it is doubtful, to say the least, whether the natives of central Brazil, over and above the fact that they are fascinated by mythological stories, have any understanding of the systems of interrelations to which we reduce them … I therefore, claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact." The Raw and the Cooked, p. 12.
56 Newton compared the function of space to the function of the Supreme Being. See Capek, pp. 7-10 and 12-15.
57 "L'instance de la lettre."
58 See Jacques Derrida's commentary on Lévi-Strauss. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, eds. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1970, pp. 247-65.
59 Wilden, The Language of the Self, trans. and notes on Lacan's "The Function of Language in Psychoanalysis," Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1968, pp. 218.
60 Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, New York, Philosophical Library, 1956, p. 21.
61 Cited in Peter Caws, "What is Structuralism?," in Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Anthropologist as Hero, pp. 197-215.
62 I have taken the liberty of constructing a "structural scheme" of the relations between the Newtonian, existentialist, and structuralist world views, aware of the fact that it might appear that I am employing the very analytical method I criticize. I do, however, believe that structural schemes are economical and potentially illustrate relations between structures and between elements in a structure more effectively than the conventional expository method. My criticism in this article is not directed toward the use of such schemes but toward the purpose for which they are used.
63 While Frederick Suppe in a penetrating essay comments on various Weltanschauungen analyses of science, I will summarize what I consider the two approaches most applicable to the present study. See Suppe, "The Search for Philosophical Understanding of Scientific Theories," in The Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. F. Suppe, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1974, pp. 3-232.
64 The Philosophy of Science, London, Hutchinson's University Library, 1953, pp. 13-16 and 159-170; Foresight and Understanding, New York, Harper and Row, 1961, pp. 62-98.
65 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed., Foundations of the Unity of Science, No. 2, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1962, pp. 52-91.
66 Suppe, p. 221. It is worthy of note that Michel Foucault develops a "structuralist" method of historical analysis which bears resemblance to that of Kuhn. Language, according to Foucault, constrains and limits human mental capacities, and only within this limiting horizon can human thought processes be properly understood. These constraints reduce the parameters of mental activity to invariant "epistemes," which are used much as Kuhn's "paradigms" to portray particular Weltanschauungen. (The Order of Things, New York, Random House, 1970.) Compare also this line of inquiry to Althusser's "epistemological breaks," a concept introduced by Gaston Bachelard in his La formation de l'esprit scientifique which describes "the leap from the pre-scientific world of ideas to the scientific world; this leap involves a radical break with the whole pattern and frame of reference of the pre-scientific (ideological) notions, and the construction of a new pattern." For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, New York, Random House, 1970, p. 249.
67 Percy W. Bridgman, Reflections of a Physicist, New York, Philosophical Library, 1950, p. 103.
68 Capek, p. 264.
69 Wilden, System and Structure, p. 230. Einstein once said, " If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the methods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don't listen to their words, fix your attention on their deeds." (Quoted in Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science, p. 16.) In many cases that same advice may apply to leading structuralists, for the language they themselves use in building their models is perhaps not entirely conscious.
70 Bridgman, p. 95.
71 Werner Heisenberg, Natural Law and the Structure of Matter, London, Rebel Press, 1970, pp. 27-29.
72 The Philosophy of Physical Science, pp. 16-27.
73 Lawrence Krader, "Beyond Structuralism," p. 352. It is conceded that structuralism generally assumes a subject who is incapable of taking an "objective" stance vis-à-vis the object under study. He is himself an "activity" rather than an entity, when observing the object, and as such rests on a level coequal with the object. Hence subject and object apparently become mutually inclusive and complementary, and neither has any being apart from the reciprocal activity between both. Nevertheless, the picture becomes confused, for it becomes difficult to "classify" without maintaining a distance from the corpus. Lévi-Strauss himself states that structures can appear only as the result of observation from outside. "Les limites de la notion de structure en ethnologie," in Sens et usages du terme structure, ed. R. Bastide, The Hague, Mouton, 1962, pp. 40-45.
74 Capek, pp. 157-87.
75 Ibid., p. 184.
76 Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, New York, Random House, 1971, p. 43.
77 Bridgman, The Way Things Are, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1959, pp. 197-98.
78 See Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Robots, Men and Minds, New York, George Braziller, 1967, part II.
79 Physics and Philosophy, New York, Harper and Row, 1962, pp. 180-81.
80 "Structure, Word, Event," Philosophy Today, 12 (1968), 114-29.
81 Jeans, pp. 104-05.
82 Capek, p. 212.
83 Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life?, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1945, p. 175.
84 Capek, pp. 328-29.
85 Hermann Weyl, The Open World, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1934.
86 Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, New York, Dutton, 1958, p. 181.
87 Wiener, p. 19.
88 Capek, p. 337.
89 Saussure, p. 133.
90 Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler, New York, Harper and Row, 1970, pp. 3-16.
91 "Structure, Word, Event," p. 126.
92 It has been as much as demonstrated that language is not the determinant of thought (or, by extension, world view) but that language is grounded in thought. See the studies of: Piaget, synthesized in The Child and Reality: Problems of Genetic Psychology, trans. Arnold Rosin, New York, Grossman, 1973; Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Thought and Language, trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, Cambridge, The M.I.T. Press, 1962; and Adam Schaff, Language and Cognition, trans. Olgierd Wojtasiewicz, New York, Mc Graw-Hill, 1973.
93 Eddington, p. 85.
94 This concept relates indirectly to one aspect of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Contrary to the thesis forwarded in this paper, Whorf believes that language governs an individual's perception of the universe to provide him with a particular world view. However, bracketing out this aspect of the Whorfian hypothesis, it might be stated that a language, given its syntactic structure, the breadth of its lexical repertoire, and its semantic scheme, is limited in its capacity to describe the universe from divergent and contradictory perspectives, a concept which is in line with Eddington, Bridgman, Capek, Toulmin, et. al. The Hopi language, for example, contains a particular "metaphysics," just as our language reveals the "naive" Newtonian view of space and time all Western languages are specifically designed to describe. On the other hand, the Hopi language describes a particular structure of the universe which cannot be perfectly duplicated in Western languages. In the Hopi view, "time disappears and space is altered, so that it is no longer the homogeneous and instantaneous timeless space of our supposed intuition or of classical Newtonian mechanics." To extrapolate, Western languages, fettered as they are by Newtonian categories, are incapable of effectively describing the Einsteinian universe of space-time continuity, and they inexorably manifest what Capek calls "semantic inertia." See Benjamin Lee Whorf, "An American Indian Model of the Universe," in Language, Thought and Reality, ed. John B. Carroll, Cambridge, The M.I.T. Press, 1956, pp. 57-64.
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