Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the morphologic linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. 1 Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism appeared in academia in the second half of the twentieth century and grew to become one of the most popular approaches in academic fields concerned with the analysis of language, culture, and society.The structuralist mode of reasoning has been applied in a diverse range of fields, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, and architecture. The most famous thinkers associated with structuralism include the linguist Roman Jakobson, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the literary critic Roland Barthes. 1 As an intellectual movement, structur alism came to take existentialisms pedestal in 1960s France. 2 Structuralism argues that a specific domain of culture may be understood by means of a expressionmodelled on languagethat is distinct both(prenominal) from the organisations of reality and those of ideas or the imaginationthe third order.In Lacans psychoanalytic theory, for example, the structural order of the Symbolic is distinguished both from the Real and the Imaginary similarly, in Althussers Marxist theory, the structural order of the capitalist mode of production is distinct both from the actual, real agents involved in its relations and from the ideological forms in which those relations are understood. According to Alison Assiter, four ideas are common to the various forms of structuralism. First, that a structure determines the position of each element of a whole.Second, that every system has a structure. Third, structural laws deal with co-existence rather than change. Fourth, structures are the real things t hat lie beneath the pop out or the appearance of meaning. 4 In the 1970s, structuralism was criticised for its rigidity and ahistoricism. Despite this, many of structuralisms proponents, such as Jacques Lacan, continue to assert an influence on continental philosophical system and many of the fundamental assumptions of some of structuralisms critics (who have been associated with post-structuralism) are a continuation of structuralism. 2