Structuralism
A Brief Introduction to Structuralism
Zhu Gang
The English word “structure” comes from structum, the past participle of the Latin struere, meaning “put in order.” There are two kinds of structuralism: structuralism as a mode of thinking, a general tendency of thought, or a philosophical view, and the narrower definition relating it to a method of inquiry, deriving chiefly from linguistics. Structuralism as a way of thinking can be traced back at least to Aristotle, whose Poetica is an interpretation of literary structure. G. Vico’s The New Science may also be a modern structuralist work. The contemporary structuralists, in both senses of the term, include the French Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gérard Genette, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Jean Piaget, Roland Barthes, Algirdas J. Greimas, the Russian Roman Jacobson, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, and the American C. S. Peirce, Edward Sapir, and Noam Chomsky. All of them share the belief that “the reality of the objects of the human or social sciences is relational rather than substantial,” and practice a critical method that “consists of inquiring into and specifying the sets of relations (or structures) that constitute these objects or into which they enter, and of identifying and analyzing groups of such objects whose members are structural transformations of one another”. Structuralist linguistics was a more recent development. Until the turn of the twentieth century, language study was “philology,” i.e., the comparative study of language in its historical development, especially its actual use. Language in this study was taken to be the product of thinking, and language study, essentially the collection of empirical language data, was comparatively simple, transparent, and closed. Then a fundamental change took place: language, from the philosophical perspective, concerns the nature of meaning, and preconditions the way people think. This conceptual revolution was initiated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Zhu Gang
The English word “structure” comes from structum, the past participle of the Latin struere, meaning “put in order.” There are two kinds of structuralism: structuralism as a mode of thinking, a general tendency of thought, or a philosophical view, and the narrower definition relating it to a method of inquiry, deriving chiefly from linguistics. Structuralism as a way of thinking can be traced back at least to Aristotle, whose Poetica is an interpretation of literary structure. G. Vico’s The New Science may also be a modern structuralist work. The contemporary structuralists, in both senses of the term, include the French Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gérard Genette, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Jean Piaget, Roland Barthes, Algirdas J. Greimas, the Russian Roman Jacobson, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, and the American C. S. Peirce, Edward Sapir, and Noam Chomsky. All of them share the belief that “the reality of the objects of the human or social sciences is relational rather than substantial,” and practice a critical method that “consists of inquiring into and specifying the sets of relations (or structures) that constitute these objects or into which they enter, and of identifying and analyzing groups of such objects whose members are structural transformations of one another”. Structuralist linguistics was a more recent development. Until the turn of the twentieth century, language study was “philology,” i.e., the comparative study of language in its historical development, especially its actual use. Language in this study was taken to be the product of thinking, and language study, essentially the collection of empirical language data, was comparatively simple, transparent, and closed. Then a fundamental change took place: language, from the philosophical perspective, concerns the nature of meaning, and preconditions the way people think. This conceptual revolution was initiated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de