At the heart of structuralism is the notion that all products of human activity – including ideas – are created and not naturally occurring. Their meaning and how they are understood derives from the language we use in relation to them – in other words, there is a complex underlying relationship between signifiers (i.e. words) and the signified (meaning). The study of these signs and symbols is known as semiotics. Post-structuralism, by contrast, comprises an array of philosophical and intellectual positions that broadly respond to what some regard as structuralism’s inflexibility.
The founding father of structuralism was the Swiss linguistic theorist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), and his ideas would spill over from linguistics into other disciplines including philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology. Key to understanding structuralism is the idea that language itself does not have inherent meaning but achieves meaning within a complex linguistic code, in which we ‘pick up’ on prompts.
One of the key structuralist texts is Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), in which Barthes examined how societies create myths through the use of language (verbal and non-verbal) and to what end. He considered, for example, professional wrestling, arguing that its elaborate staging renders it unlike other sports where the primary goal is to find a winner or else exhibit excellence. Wrestling, Barthes said, instead mythologizes society’s concern with concepts of good and evil, justice and retribution, all played out by a cast of social stereotypes. Wrestling, then, becomes not an expression of truth or reality, but a cultural product of a specific set of historic and cultural circumstances. And myth, he suggested, is a kind of propaganda that uses a discourse of widely accepted meanings to influence what we feel about ourselves and the world.
Post-structuralism and literature
In common with others such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes is variously identified as a structuralist and a post-structuralist. Whereas structuralism argues that meaning is created within a fairly rigid system of coded interrelationships and through the manipulation of signifiers, post-structuralism is concerned with the idea of unfixed meaning. For the post-structuralists, meaning is not within the gift of the author. Instead it is created by the reader, who brings their own unique set of experiences and perceptions to a text, along with a set of assumptions rooted in the wider cultural and literary context.
Again, Barthes authored one of the key post-structural works, The Death of the Author (1967), in which he argued that the true meaning of a text is contained entirely within itself as interpreted by the reader. Knowledge of the author – their life, opinions and historical context – results only in imposing ‘a limit on that text’ – ‘a text’s unity,’ he said, ‘lies not in its origins but in its destination.’ In What is an Author? (1969), Foucault made his own influential examination of how ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are produced and communicated within specific historical contexts. Among his striking conclusions was that the idea of ‘Man’ (as a figure representing the eternal, fixed nature of humanity) dates only to the 19th century.
Structuralism and post-structuralism, with their often-overlapping cast of thinkers, revolutionized the way that we seek to find meaning in cultural productions – not only books, but also songs, films, paintings, sculptures, architecture and even computer games.