Structuralism was inaugurated by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure; its influence resonates throughout almost all contemporary theory. A veritable revolution occurred for twentieth-century thought when Saussure conceived linguistic meaning as a function of differential relations between signs. Prior to Saussure,... [more]

Structuralism was inaugurated by the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure; its influence resonates throughout almost all contemporary theory. A veritable revolution occurred for twentieth-century thought when Saussure conceived linguistic meaning as a function of differential relations between signs. Prior to Saussure, language was thought of primarily in terms of its denotative or referential axis. A word derived its meaning from the thing to which it referred; meaning was thought to be as solid, substantial, and fixed as the thing itself. Saussure, by showing that a word depends only on its differential relations to other words for its meaning, lifted language from its foundation in things and gave it an autonomous existence as a self-consistent structure. This severance of the word from its referent was the impetus for the evolution of Structuralism. Levi-Strauss saw that Saussure's conception of language could be applied in the field of anthropology: he sought to discern within the customs, rituals, taboos, and mores of a culture a total structure with its own logic and coherence. Structuralism essentially transformed an entire body of questions. One no longer asked "Is it true?" or "Is it good?" but rather, "How does it work?" When it came back to language, however, the questions this revolution raised were rather vertiginous. How can a system of language be understood as a totality when language itself must be employed for that understanding? The trembling of such questions would be magnified by the subsequent development of Post-Structuralism. [show less]