Introduction

It is difficult to cut a way through the various approaches and ideas which can be catalogued under the headings of this chapter. ‘Post-structuralism’ is comparatively straightforward in the sense that it is possible to limit the term to the work of those thinkers who were initially seen as structuralists of one sort or another and/or whose work developed from that position to a more fluid and complex set of arguments.

It is also unclear exactly to what the term ‘post-modern’ refers. Is it a style of architecture, of literature and art, a form of contemporary culture, a form of society, a form of personal identity or what? And can we actually talk about post-modern philosophy, or is it a contradiction in terms?

The simplest way into these ideas is to take up some of the ideas of structuralism, the movement which dominated French academia in the 1960s, which we can relate to approaches studied earlier in this book. We can see structuralism as in part developing the school of French epistemology discussed in Chapter 4, out of which critical realism developed (Chapter 8). It cut across different disciplines: anthropology (Levi-Strauss 1966, 1968), history and the history of ideas (the early Foucault (1970, 1972)), literature (Culler 1975), forms of analysis which would now be known as cultural studies (Barthes 1967), psychoanalysis (Lacan 1968) and (through Althusser’s Marxism) sociology (Althusser 1969).

Common to all these writers was an emphasis - often an overemphasis - on underlying structures and an underemphasis on the acting subject, or an even stronger dismissal of the significance of the acting subject. Often the power of agency would be attributed to the structure: people were read by books or spoken by language, not the other way around. This position is the diametric opposite of those discussed in the chapters on the interpretive approaches; the proper object of any social science is not, it is argued, people and their meanings but the underlying structures which generate those meanings and in some sense generate the people themselves. Moreover, it is often argued that a series of major thinkers in fact ‘decentred’ human beings: Galileo had shown that the earth was not the centre of the universe, Darwin that humanity was not the centre of creation, Marx that people were not the centre of their societies and Freud that individuals were not simple acting subjects but the product of unconscious drives.

The model for this was taken from linguistics, and read back into other theories such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. It was a theory developed by Ferdinand de Saussure (1959, 1983), a major figure in the linguistic turn in Western thought. Following the same course, it is argued that Saussure shows that people are not the speakers of their language, rather that there is a sense in which they are spoken by their language. Working during the early years of the twentieth century, Saussure made a series of methodological distinctions which enabled the development of a scientific linguistics, arguing that this could not happen as long as it concerned itself with individual speech acts and the history of language. Individual speech acts (‘parole’) are simply too variable to enable us to understand or explain anything about the language (‘langue’) as a whole, and language is not changed by individual speech acts, so we cannot understand its history through focusing on them.

To identify the structure of language, Saussure takes several steps. The first is similar to the phenomenological reduction we discussed in Chapter 5. We drop the common­sense assumption that words are somehow naturally attached to the objects to which they seem to refer: there is no necessary connection between the word ‘hand’ and the rather spidery fleshy things at the end of my arms that I use to type my manuscript. Rather, the connection is a convention - it’s as if native English speakers agree that this is what ‘hand’ will mean; of course, we don’t actually negotiate with anybody - speaking English and using its conventions is an offer we can’t refuse if we are born in England and want to talk to those around us. The language we speak exists before we are born and continues to exist after we die, and as individuals we have no effect on its underlying structure.

Separating language from its referents enables Saussure to identify an underlying structure of signs and rules governing the combination of signs. The sign is seen as a combination of a signifier - a material element, the marks on a piece of paper or the noise one makes when speaking - and a signified - the concept or idea to which the marks or sounds are attached. It is important to remember that it is the concept, not the object, which is signified and that the relationship is conventional.

For structuralists, a science becomes a science when it develops a coherent theoretical conceptual framework which identifies underlying structures. The structure of a language consists of signs and the rules which govern the combinations of signs. The meaning of a sign is defined not by external objects to which it refers but by its relationships to other signs.

Saussure suggests that these relationships can be analysed along two dimensions. The first, the syntagm, is the horizontal axis and consists of the rules which govern the ways in which signs follow each other. Saussure is talking about the smallest units of a language, so we can say that in English the sound h cannot (I think) be followed by the sound b but the opposite is possible (for example, in the word ‘abhor’).

We have also come across the notion of language and rules in relation to Peter Winch and Wittgenstein in Chapter 6, but it is by no means clear that the two theoretical systems are compatible, and Saussure is best seen as describing a deeper structure than Winch, below the level of intentional statements with which the latter concerns himself. Both share the implication that there is no absolute definition for any word, or any sign. For Saussure the meaning of a sign lies in its relationship to other signs, in between words and not in the words themselves. We will see the idea of difference becomes increasingly important as we move forward into post-structuralism.

To repeat: most structuralists held a strong sense of ‘science’, defined as the construction of a ‘theoretical object’ or theoretical grasp of an underlying structure. The work of the scientist is then to elaborate this structure as rigorously as possible. The criteria of whether a particular theory is scientific or not lie not in the relationship of its concepts to empirical reality (as it does for positivism), nor in the extent to which it grasps individual or cultural meanings (as it does for the interpretive approaches), but in the rigorous rational coherence of its structure. Science is about concepts which identify empirical realities, not about the empirical realities themselves. This again is the idealism of the linguistic turn in philosophy, but here it is not language as such but theory which creates the world.

Such an approach, in its purest form, could not last long. One can construct all sorts of rigorous, rational theories, but it does not follow that they are right because they are rigorous and rational, otherwise many people suffering from paranoia would be regarded as brilliant scientists. The development of critical realism (see Chapter 8) in Britain took the ideas close to a more orthodox philosophy, whereas the French development produced something very different.