Dear Students of MA
English,
This
is a follow-up, top-up, or supplement to what we discussed in class this past
week. I request that you get for yourself a copy of Terence Hawkes' wonderful
primer on Structuralism and start reading rightaway!
Excerpted from Terence Hawkes on ‘Structuralism’
Here we go…
Structuralism is fundamentally a way of thinking about the world
which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of
structures. The ‘new’ perception involved the realization that despite
appearances to the contrary the world does not consist of independently
existing objects. In fact, every perceiver’s method of perceiving
can be shown to contain an inherent bias which affects what is perceived to a significant degree. [Any
observer is bound to create something of what he observes]. In
consequence, the true nature of things may be said to lie not in things
themselves, but in the relationships which we construct, and then perceive, between them.
This new concept, that the world is made up of relationships rather than
things, constitutes the first principle of that way of thinking which
can properly be called ‘structuralist’. At its simplest, it claims that the
nature of every element in any given situation has no significance by
itself, and in fact is determined by its relationship to all the other elements
involved in that situation. In short, the full significance of any
entity or experience cannot be perceived unless and until it is integrated into
the structure of which it forms a part.
Saussure’s revolutionary contribution to the study of language lies
in his rejection of that ‘substantive’ view of the subject in favour of a ‘relational’
one, a change of perspective closely in accord with the larger shift in
perception mentioned above.
What is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of
constructing a language, i.e. a system of distinct signs corresponding to
distinct ideas.
If all aspects of the language are thus ‘based on relations’ two
dimensions of these relationships must assume particular importance. Saussure
presents these as the linguistic sign’s syntagmatic (or ‘horizontal’)
relations, and its simultaneous associative (or ‘vertical’)
relations.
The 'Cours' presents the argument that language should be
studied, not only in terms of its individual parts, and not only
diachronically, but also in terms of the relationship between those parts,
and synchronically: that is, in terms of its current adequacy.
Saussure’s insistence on the importance of the synchronic
as distinct from the diachronic study of
language was momentous because it involved recognition of language’s current structural
properties as well as its historical dimensions.
It has been pointed out that the mode of language is fundamentally one
of sequential movement through time. It follows from this that each word will
have a linear or ‘horizontal’ relationship with the words that precede and
succeed it, and a good deal of its capacity to ‘mean’ various things derives
from this pattern of positioning.
This constitutes language’s syntagmatic aspect, and it could also be thought
of as its ‘diachronic’ aspect because of its commitment to the passage of time.
from Structuralism and Semiotics by Terence Hawkes
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