Structuralism vs. Post-Structuralism
Today I spoke to the cultural critic and professor Ted Friedman about, among other things, Roland Barthes, and as we discussed how Barthes’ concept of myth might be synonymous with Althusser’s ISA and arrived at the strange conclusion that Joseph Campbell, Barthes, and Althusser were all really pointing at the same thing (for a full explanation of this read Friedman’s essay at Flow on the subject), Friedman pointed to a move from structuralism to post-structuralism that could be discerned in Barthes’ essays. This sent me reaching for what I consider to be the definitive book on the subject of both Structuralism and Poststructuralism, and I was glad to discover I had not already sold it (Donald Palmer’s Structuralism and Post-Structuralism for beginners) back to Powells already.
According to Donald Palmer one possible exemplar of both Structuralism and Post-Structuralism is the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Palmer wrote:
“If ‘structuralism’ turns out to be the application of Saussurean linguistics to explain the inherent structure of all forms of human activity, including mental activity and pathological behavior, then Jacques Lacan is a structuralist. And if Post-Structuralism is the radicalization of Saussure’s linguistics to challenge the notion of structural stability, then Lacan is also a post-structuralist.”
In today’s blog entry I thought I’d quickly illustrate what this means with nostalgic youtube videos. According to Lacan our unconscious itself is structured like a language. That is, our unconscious is made up of signs that are arbitrary both in the way they are embodied and their meaning. For instance, the word river is a set of sounds with an intricate etymology, but no amount of analysis can explain how the noises involved in making the word ‘river’ connects to the concept ‘river.’ To understand the arbitrary character of the concept as opposed to the sign or word one can turn to the Indonesian word Jayus because it has no corollary in English, but means something like the “a joke so poorly told that one has to laugh.”
Lacan claims that our unconscious is shaped by these kinds of arbitrary signs and concepts and their relationships. According to Lacan the unconscious is collective or public, not because of any quasi spiritual substance, but merely because it was historically and collectively produced.
However, Lacan moves to post-structuralism when he claims that there is no meaning outside of these arbitrary signs. This move can be easy to misapprehend…it may lead to an ambition to become the arbitrary sign or to be real by denying meaning. This is perhaps why resistance to authority today is mostly conformist and/or limited. We struggle today to become arbitrary, to remain small, and finally to evaporate all together. We become the arbitrary or contingent signs that we are attempting to resist.
