Reflection: Structuralism and Poststructuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure

Chapter 3 in Cultural Studies, by Chris Barker, deals with the importance of language and culture.  I will post a YouTube clip pertinent to my discussion at a later date this week as I must refresh my knowledge on how to do that. Last week’s discussion in class, Barker’s Chapter 3, and our supplemental reading that Dr. Wexler has supplied us with, covers a lot of ground. Barker and the theorists in the chapter underscore the importance of language but at the same time discuss its limitation. Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) initiated the topic of semiotics which is the study of signs. “For Saussure, [and the structuralists] a signifying system is constituted by a series of signs that are analyzed in terms of their constituent parts,” namely the signifier and signified (Barker 76). A signifier can be a word, something physical—a picture for instance in an advertisement, or a sight of something, or a act of speech or sound—which connects you to an image of the signified. Of course, this is arbitrary, i.e. things mean different things to different people: red is designated at a traffic light in the USA to stop, and in the accounting world designated losses on financial statements. However, in China it designates a symbol for luck, happiness, and marxist unity. The red blush can also reflect embarrassment.

  Roland Barthes continues the discourses on this system of signification, namely, denotation and connotation. And the different above clips reflect the different connotations and signified results of the signifier "red."

Denotation is the dictionary or literal meaning of a word which within a culture is standard for everyone.  However, connotation is “meaning generated by connecting signifiers to wider cultural concerns” (Barker 79).  He gives an example for instance of a pig connoting a “nasty police office or a male chauvinist” (79). A pig can also connote succulent meat or a helpful farm animal. He makes an interesting point in exemplifying how the system can be continuous: as a signification process of a signifier and a signified which produces a denotative meaning can then serve as a signifier for second order of connotation. He terms this as a “spatialized metaphor” (79). Barthes later brought up the idea of signs being “polysemic” or having many potential meanings. Changes in culture in turn cause signs to be continuously dynamic. 

Structuralism evolved into postructuralism which maintained “there can be no denotative meaning that is clear, descriptive and stable; rather, meaning is always deferred and in process” (83). Barthes was among those whose views became more stringent and evolved into poststructuralism. Intertextuality, the impact texts have on each other, reflects this instability. Jacques Derrida’s work expounded on this frame of thought. However, he takes Saussure’s work and declares that “there is no original meaning outside of signs. He makes a distinction between speech and writing. He points out that” nature is a concept of language (culture) and not a pure state beyond signs.”  He stipulates that the “word of God is available only through the unstable signs of writing (the Bible) and literal meaning is always underpinned by metaphor—its apparent opposite” (84). Derrida refutes Socrates’ claim that speech is more truthful than writing and finds its argument fallacious. However, later Derrida chooses speech over writing in reflecting truth. Derrida’s Difference refers to “The production of meaning in the process of signification is continually deferred an supplemented” (85). His Deconstruction Treatise involves the dismantling the hierarchical binary oppositions such as speech –writing, reality-appearance. In essence, he is an anti-essentialist, in that words have no universal meaning “for Derrida, meaning has the potential to proliferate into infinity. 

In a few days I will continue with Michel Foucault, Lacan and Freud, Wittgenstein, Jean-Francois Lyotard,  Rorty,  and Simone de Beauvoir, regarding her essay “The Second Sex, Woman as Other” written in 1949.