28 August 2009
For Althusser:
A General Introduction to New Structuralism
Structuralism is a school of thought built on linguistic theories that Ferdiand de Saussure developed over a century ago. Saussure noticed that language is composed of signs and that those signs are further broken down into parts. It is from these parts, the signifier and the signified, that the sign derives its meaning. Each word in a language exists, therefore, as a symbol which points to a corresponding thought-concept.[1] In writing, the signifier is the written word (a series of characters), while the signified is the word’s associated definition (the idea that the word brings to mind). Structuralism as a literary theory is a method of interpretation that draws meaning of a text from the parts of text, just like the meaning of a word comes from its parts. However, this is a false analogy.
When a word is written and then read, the meaning does not come from its parts alone. Letters exist in a series, for example, and the succession of those letters provide the appropriate meaning (eg. D-O-G); yet even then the appropriate definition remains dubious.
This is best exhibited by Jacques Derrida’s use of Différance.[2] Derrida noticed that the French word différance means both “to defer” and “to differ.” The intending meaning is not gathered until the word is placed in the context of a series of other words; a translator would not know how to translate différance until after reading the complete sentence. Thus, appropriate meaning is summoned by analyzing a series of letters (in alphabetic languages, at least) and then further analyzing that series in the context of a sequence of additional series. In linguistics, this can best be described as pragmatics.
Pragmatics is the field of linguistics that analyzes the meaning of a speech act by examining its parts as they interact as a whole speech event.[3] A speech act describes the phenomenon in which the use of unphysical words create a physical reality.[4] For example, an employer can say to an employee, “You’re fired!” and in turn, the employee will be physically jobless. A speech event is in turn a collection of speech acts that form a culturally recognizable action as a whole. A common example of a speech event is a greeting.
A greeting is a series of speech acts that, when properly preformed, result in a reflexively recognizable saluter and saluted; for example, the one greeted recognizes herself as being greeted. This simple concept has profound implications, best expounded by Louis Althusser in his description of interpellation.[5] Through interpellation, individuals recognize themselves as subjects to ideologies. For example, a text can impart an ideology on a reader because the reader recognizes herself as the subject and acts as the consumer. Yet, if the structuralist approach were to be accurate, speech events in this nature would share a structure. In other words, all greetings, in order to be greetings, would have a similar structure for the theorist to point to.
Yet intercultural exchanges constantly highlight the structural difference between greetings in languages and cultures. No matter how different the practices are structurally, they remain greetings in effect. Derrida would be quick to point out that an individual word does not make a greeting (even if a greeting is just one word: hello). The greeting is formed by how that word appears in context. One can walk into an empty house, for example, and shout, “Hello?” while not greeting anyone. This distinction can also be said of literary works.
One type of literary work, for example, is the narrative. A narrative tells a story through the passage of time. A structuralist points to elements of a text to derive this conclusion. A structuralist will argue that a narrative is a narrative because it portrays the passage of time through its parts: it is made up of a beginning, a middle, and an end. A text that does not have a beginning, a middle, and an end, therefore, could not be a narrative. Yet intercultural exchanges again highlight the fallacy of this approach.
For example, a narrative produced by the Warlpiri, a people indigenous to northern Australia, may structurally consist of little more than a series of scenic images, and would thus appear to be nothing more than a text depicting the local landscape.[6] It will not structurally have a beginning, middle, or an end. Yet because of how the text interpolates its native Warlpiri consumers, it may indeed portray a narrative story, such as the history of their village. The narrative is thus not defined by its elements, but by how its elements appear in context. It is with in that specific context that a narrative is able to communicate a passage of time.
Greetings may not be made up of similar words or practices and may thus have a different structure, but they all convey the act of a greeting; narratives may not structurally have a beginning, middle, or an end, but they can still convey the passage of time.
This is because literature is a corpus of speech events, and the narrative is simply one type. As the study of literature becomes increasingly border-less and intercultural, it will become increasingly necessary to analyze texts not by their parts or structure alone, but by the social business that those parts achieve as a whole and in context.
If literature is re-contextualized as speech events, additional powerful theoretical devices can be applied like Roman Jakobson’s six constitutive factors of a speech event.[7] This would seem to ironically lead us back to a traditional structuralist approach, as a text could be parsed into those six factors: its Context, its Message, its Contact, its Code, its Addresser and its Addressee. While this may be structuralist, it is a step beyond traditional structuralism as it holistically considers the entire text as a speech event that achieves a social business.
A New Structuralist reader could see the stark difference between a text that a Structuralist would consider identical. An easy demonstration is the sentence, “John is smart.” Structurally, it is nothing more than a subject-predicate-nominative sentence. Yet it can have multiple different meanings once it is realized to be part of a speech event: it could be literal or sarcastic; it could be said with admiration, or jealousy. These caveats of meaning do not escape the New Structuralist reader.
[1] Saussure, Ferdinand de. (1983) Course in General Linguistics. Eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye. Trans. Roy Harris. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court.
[2] Derrida, Jacques. (2004) “Differance.” Literary Theory: an Anthology. Ed. Julie Rivkin. Malden, MA: Blackwell
[3] Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).
[4] Searle, John R. (1969) Speech Acts, Cambridge University Press
[5] Althusser, Louis P. (1969) For Marx. Ed. Allen Lane. Trans. Ben Brewster. Penguin Press.
[6] Michaels, Eric. (2002) “Hollywood Iconography: A Warlpiri Reading.” The Anthropology of Globalization. Eds. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell
[7] Jakobson, Roman O. (1960) “Linguistics and Poetics.” Style in Language. Ed. T. Sebeok. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press