Thursday, February 19, 2015

Lectures on Russian Formalism and Semiotics and Structuralism

Paul Fry gives two lectures in the videos below on (1) Russian Formalism and (2) the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, and its influence on other disciplines, such as Structuralism, semiotics, hermeneutics, and New Criticism. These theories dominated literary criticism, social and cultural studies before the turn to Poststructuralism and Postmodernism from the late 1960s and 1970s.





For a long time, Structuralism was an approach to linguistics. Then it spread to literary theory and other disciplines.

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) allied himself with the Russian formalists and then moved to Prague in 1920 and by 1926 was involved in founding the “Prague School” of linguistics, whose members were as follows:
Prague Linguistic Circle/School (1926– )
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982)
Nikolai Trubetzkoy (1890–1938)
Vilém Mathesius (1882–1945)
Jan Mukarovsky (1891–1975)
René Wellek (1903–1995)
Felix Vodicka (1909–1974)
Literary Structuralism seems to have begun in an important way in the Prague School. The formalists in Prague thought that literature and art in their historical development were governed by structural laws (Jackson 1991: 65): this sounds remarkably like the vulgar Marxist view of history as governed by necessary or “iron” laws.

This was a major flaw in Structuralism: the belief that just because human language has a formal structure (most famously described these days in Chomsky’s view of language as characterised by a “universal grammar” structure), that human history, literature or art must also have such an underlying semantical structure, when it does not.

Jakobson himself moved in 1939 to Denmark where a Copenhagen School (1931– ) also developed. Jakobson later went to New York and in 1941 met Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who introduced Structuralism into anthropology, and also Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), who introduced Structuralism into Freudian psychoanalysis.

It was Roman Jakobson’s version of formalist criticism, which developed de Saussure’s ideas, that led to mature Structuralism (Johnson 1992: 156). The video below reviews Roman Jakobson’s life and work.



The Structuralism inspired by Jakobson reached its apogee as a French intellectual movement in the 1960s. The major French Structuralists (or “Gang of Four”) were as follows:
Structuralist “Gang of Four”
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009)
Jacques Lacan (1901–1981)
Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
Michel Foucault (1920–1984)
To this list we can add the Marxist Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990).

The characteristics of French Structuralism by the 1960s were the rejection of (1) the idea of the correspondence theory of truth, and (2) the view that words refer to objects in the world (Olssen 2003: 190). In Structuralism, words are seen as referring to other words and they can have meaning by the differences between words. The Structuralists also devalued the notion of a self or subject as a rational being (Olssen 2003: 191).

Johnson (1992: 155) points to an important difference between Ferdinand de Saussure and the later Structuralists: de Saussure accepted the referential nature of language and how words can refer to objects, even though he emphasised that differentiation of “signs” is also an important element in reference (analytic philosophy does a much better job of describing this in terms of Frege’s theory of meaning with the emphasis on sense/intension versus reference/extension).

But the later Structuralists and Poststructuralists came to reject the object-directedness of language. This was a major flaw in their philosophy (Johnson 1992: 156).

It opened the floodgates to later nonsense such as the belief that the meaning of language is only determined by the internal relationship of signs, words, and texts to other signs, words, and texts. In its Poststructuralist height of folly in the work of Roland Barthes, it leads to the idea that we can ignore authors when doing literary criticism (Barthes 1977).

For good, critical accounts of Saussure and structuralism, see:
Merquior, Jose Guilherme. 1986. From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought. Verso, London.

Jackson, Leonard. 1991. The Poverty of Structuralism: Structuralist Theory and Literature. Longman, London.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barthes, Roland. 1977. “Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text (trans. Stephen Heath). Fontana, London. 142–148.

Jackson, Leonard. 1991. The Poverty of Structuralism: Structuralist Theory and Literature. Longman, London.

Johnson, Gregory R. 1992. “Without Sense or Reference. J.G. Merquior’s From Prague to Park: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought,” Reason Papers 17: 153–160.

Merquior, Jose Guilherme. 1986. From Prague to Paris: A Critique of Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Thought. Verso, London.

Olssen, Mark. 2003. “Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Neo-Liberalism: Assessing Foucault’s Legacy,” Journal of Education Policy 18.2: 189–202.

1 comment:

  1. "This was a major flaw in Structuralism: the belief that just because human language has a formal structure (most famously described these days in Chomsky’s view of language as characterised by a “universal grammar” structure), that human history, literature or art must also have such an underlying semantical structure, when it does not."

    Actually later Post-Structuralists -- notably Gilles Deleuze -- came to reject the universality of Chomskian grammatical rules. Since then there have been a number of linguists and psychologists that have rejected it; some going so far as to call it a non-falsifiable pseudo-science.

    I think that you're wrong that structuralism posited that human culture is subject to 'laws'. Some practitioners concluded this. But many saw it as a methodology; that is, a means to talk about the 'deep structures' of human culture.

    Do any of these deep structures actually exist? Some seem more plausible than others. Levi-Strauss' kinship relationships and the universality of the incest taboo are pretty widely accepted by anthropologists and I can see a great deal of truth in them. Lacan's ideas about the structure of the human psyche and especially around the differences in the way men and women structure their sexual desire are quite brilliant. Foucault's ideas about political theory -- most notably the biopower/sovereignty dichotomy and the ideas about 'disciplinary society' -- are absolutely path-breaking.

    Much of the other stuff was poor in my opinion. Barthes and Althusser were talking nonsense. (Zizek claims that he draws on the latter for his critiques of ideology; but really I think he's drawing on Levi-Strauss' more grounded work on myth).

    Anyway, the point is that this is not a unified field. It was a common approach in that language was seen as very important and 'deep structures' were sought. But many different research programs were generated. Some of these were, in my opinion, some of the most important work in the humanities in the 20th century; and their impact is proof of that. Others were misguided and driven by political and ideological motivations (Marxism, mainly). But that's just the way of the world.

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