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    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners
    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners
    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners
    Ebook314 pages2 hours

    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners

    By Donald D. Palmer

    3.5/5

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    “What is Structuralism? How is it possible? And once the structures of Structuralism have been discovered, how is Poststructuralism possible?”

    Thus begins Don Palmer’s Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners. If Nobel or Pulitzer ever made a prize for making the most difficult philosophers and ideas accessible to the greatest number of people, one of the leading candidates would certainly be Professor Don Palmer. From his Sartre For Beginners and  Kierkegaard For Beginners to his Looking at Philosophy, author/illustrator Don Palmer has the magic touch when it comes to translating the most brutally difficult ideas into language and images that non-specialists can understand.

    “In its less dramatic versions,” writes Palme, “structuralism is just a method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, an overall worldview that provides an account of reality and knowledge.” Poststructuralism is a loosely knit intellectual movement, comprised mainly of ex-structuralists, who either became dissatisfied with the theory or felt they could improve it.

    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners is an illustrated tour through the mysterious landscape of Structuralism and Poststructuralism. The book’s starting point is the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Sausser. The book moves on to the anthropologist and literary critic Claude Lévi-Strauss; the semiologost and literary critic Roland Barthes; the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser; the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. Learn among other things, why structuralists say
    • Reality is composed of not Things but Relationships.
    • Every “object” is both a presence and an absence
    • The total system is present in each of its parts
    • The parts are more real than the whole
    The book concludes by examining the postmodern obsession with language and with the radical claim of the disappearance of the individual – obsessions that unite the work of all these theorists.< 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFor Beginners
    Release dateAug 21, 2007
    ISBN9781939994233
    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners
    Author

    Donald D. Palmer

    Donald Palmer is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the College of Marin in Kentfield, California. Currently he is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is also author of Sartre For Beginners, Looking at Philosophy, and Does the Center Hold?. 

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      It has enough information to let one know that is Structuralism and Poststructuralism, but is very shallow if you need something with more content. I miss Jean-François Lyotard in this book. He is not mentioned even a single time, and he was so important in the Poststructuralism.

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    Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners - Donald D. Palmer

    For Beginners LLC

    155 Main Street, Suite 211

    Danbury, CT 06810 USA

    www.forbeginnersbooks.com

    Text Copyright: © 1997 Donald D. Palmer

    Illustration Copyright: © 1997 Donald D. Palmer

    Cover & Book Design: Terrie Dunkelberger

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

    A For Beginners® Documentary Comic Book

    Originally published by Writers and Readers, Inc.

    Copyright © 1997

    Cataloging-in-Publication information is available from the Library of Congress.

    eISBN: 978-1-939994-23-3

    For Beginners® and Beginners Documentary Comic Books® are published

    by For Beginners LLC.

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    Contents

    What Is Structuralism?

    Ferdinand de Saussure: Structural Linguistics

    Claude Lévi-Strauss: Structural Anthropology

    Roland Barthes: Semiotic Cultural and Literary Criticism

    Jacques Lacan: Psychoanalysis, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism

    Michel Foucault: History, Structuralism, and Post-Structuralism

    Jacques Derrida: Post-Structuralist Deconstruction

    Glossary

    Bibliography

    Table of Citations

    Index

    In its less dramatic versions, structuralism is just a method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, a Weltanschauung, an overall worldview that provides an ORGANIC as opposed to an ATOMISTIC account of reality and knowledge.

    An atomistic view of the world sees reality as composed of discrete, irreducible units. The parts (atoms) are more real than the whole.

    An organic view of the world sees reality as a TOTALITY, as an organism. The parts are real only insofar as they are related to each other and to the whole.

    According to the most radical version of structuralist organicism, reality is composed not of THINGS, but of RELATIONSHIPS.

    When structuralists and post-structuralists make the apparently outrageous claim that every object is both a presence and an absence, they mean that an object is never fully There— it is there to the extent that it appears before us, but it is Not there insofar as its being is determined by its relation to the whole system of which it is a part, a system that does not appear to us. In this sense, each object, even in its quasi-absence, reflects the total system, and the total system is present in each of its parts.

    Because structuralism claims to discover permanent structures behind or beneath things, its analyses tend to be SYNCHRONIC (ahistorical) rather than DIACHRONIC (historical). Its most extreme practitioners deny the significance of history, or are nostalgic for primitive cultures that are oblivious to the existence of change, cultures that are themselves ahistorical.

    Because structuralism is concerned with a universal, unchanging order of things (what one of its members, Jacques Lacan, called the Symbolic Order), it is in many respects opposed to the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre that preceded it on the intellectual scene in Europe, or to any other form of humanism that emphasizes the individual.

    In structuralism, there is a disappearance of the subject, as she is spawned by, and absorbed back into, the general structure.

    THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SUBJECT

    Because of these features, structuralism can claim as its ancestors the classical Continental rationalist philosophers of the seventeenth century rather than the British empiricists who are the creators of the Anglo-American intellectual environment.

    The empiricists (John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume) believed that knowledge of the world was IMMEDIATE. The mind is a blank slate at birth, and reality impresses itself upon that slate in the form of the data of the five senses. These sense-data are the given. They are the building blocks of our knowledge of the world. (Sense-data are the atoms of the empiricists’ atomism.)

    On the contrary, the rationalists (René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Immanual Kant), taking a cue from Plato, claimed that knowledge of the world is MEDIATE. It is mediated by innate ideas or innate structures (ideas or categories that are present at birth.) By attending to these innate components, we can deduce the universal structure of reality, a structure that will contradict the mere appearances provided by the senses and show itself to be a UNIVERSAL, unchanging truth, one best articulated in terms of mathematical formulas.

    Ever since the seventeenth century, British and American thinkers have almost always been more influenced by the EMPIRICIST philosophers, and Continental European thinkers have been more influenced by the RATIONALIST philosophers.

    Two modern examples of such Continental thinkers (and ones who have had a direct impact on structuralism) are KARL MARX (1818-1886) and SIGMUND FREUD (1856-1939). Both of these men thought of themselves as scientists, hence as empiricists in some sense, but they were clearly much more influenced by the rationalist philosophers than by the empiricist philosophers.

    There is, according to Marx, AN UNDERLYING STRUCTURE THAT DETERMINES SOCIAL REALITY, AND THAT MUST BE GRASPED IF SOCIAL REALITY IS TO BE UNDERSTOOD. For him, this underlying structure was an economic one. Its foundation is:

    This underlying structure is tantamount to the sum total of all the RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION. Furthermore, everything else in society must be understood as being built upon that foundation. This superstructure is a reflex or a sublimate of that underlying structure.

    It is essentially an ideological reflection of the forces at work in the socio-economic foundation. For example, a POLITICAL CONSTITUTION is just a legalizing of the privileges of the social class that owns the economic foundation of the society.

    The police are just heavily armed hired thugs who enforce the rights of the owning class. So-called morality is also the ideological defense of these advantages. The same with most art, literature, poetry, religious preaching, and what passes for science.

    They are all CAPTIVES OF A PRIMARY STRUCTURE but are unable to understand themselves as anything but free.

    Like structuralism, Marxism is a form of organicism and is anti-individualistic. Nevertheless, despite being almost a form of structuralism, ultimately Marxism is not, because of its obsession with HISTORY. Structuralism is a SYNCHRONIC science, hence it is ahistorical. Nevertheless, Marxism deeply influenced structuralism, and a famous French Marxist, Louis Althusser, tried to synthesize his Marxism with structuralist arguments.

    SIGMUND FREUD’s psychoanalysis also has some important similarities with structuralism, and strongly influenced it. In psychoanalysis, too, what appears in consciousness is often very different from the truth

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