Explain the differences between American structuralism and French Structuralism. Discuss how poststructuralist critique is built upon the work of de Saussure.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Poststructuralism is so named because it represents a challenge to the central European and American tradition of theory dominant in the mid-twentieth century—structuralism. Structuralist thought emphasizes that there are forces in social life that emerge out of human activity but stand outside of human agency or intervention. Often called “emergent properties,” these social forces are the external and constraining “social facts” that the classical sociological theorist Émile Durkheim described in his work, and a similar structuralist emphasis is echoed in many of the works of other classical theorists in sociology, particularly Karl Marx and Max Weber. Poststructuralism is not so much a coherent theory as an assemblage of converging themes developed by theorists in the 1960s. These common themes (to be discussed shortly) include the fragmentation of meaning, the localization of politics, the decline of the idea of Truth, and the decentering of the subject. A different version of structuralism emerged during the mid-twentieth century in France. French structuralism is most distinct from American structural functionalism in its particular emphasis on language. In contrast to Parsons’s structural functionalism which emphasizes the patterns of human social organization, French structuralism focuses on meaning and the role of language in the organization of systems of ideas. French structuralists seek to demonstrate how language has formal properties (such as grammar) that provide the structure not only for communication but also for broader aspects of human existence. In most accounts, the story of French structuralism begins with Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857–1913) development of what is today known as semiotics.4 Semiotics is the study of signs, those aspects of human communication that are used to indicate and convey meaning.