Abstract
‘Functionalism’ and ‘structuralism’ have been perhaps the leading broad intellectual traditions in social theory over the past thirty or forty years. Both terms have long since lost any precise meaning, but it is possible none the less to identify a number of core notions which each invokes. Functionalism and structuralism in some part share similar origins, and have important features in common. The lineage of both can be traced back to Durkheim, as refracted in the former instance through the work of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, and in the latter through that of Saussure and Mauss.1 Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski reacted against speculative, evolutionary anthropology; Saussure against not too dissimilar notions held by his predecessors, the neo-grammarians. Each of these three authors came to place a stress upon synchrony, separating the synchronic from the diachronic. Each came to accentuate the importance of the ‘system’, social and linguistic, as contrasted with the elements which compose it. But from then on the characteristic emphases diverge. In functionalism, the guiding model of ‘system’ is usually that of the organism, and functionalist authors have consistently looked to biology as a conceptual bank to be plundered for their own ends.
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Notes and References
The nature and extent of the influence of Durkheim over Saussure has been a matter of some dispute. See, for example, E. F. K. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure (Braunschweig: Hunold, 1973) pp. 45 – 71 .
Cf., for example, Barthes: ‘I have been engaged in a series of structural analyses, all of which are concerned to define a number of extra-linguistic “languages” …’ Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964) p. 155.
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (London: Peter Owen, 1960) p. 14.
Cf. for a relevant recent discussion, David Lewis, Convention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969).
Emile Benveniste, ‘The nature of the linguistic sign’, Problems in General Linguistics (Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971) p. 44.
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976) pp. 6ff
Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1974) pp. 32–3.
C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1960) pp. 5–8.
Noam Chomsky, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague: Mouton, 1964) p. 23.
For Lévi-Strauss’s early thoughts on Durkheim, see his article ‘French sociology’, in Georges Gurvitch and Wilbert E. Moore, Twentieth Century Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1945). On Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss,
See also Yvan Simonis, Claude Lévi-Strauss ou la passion de l’inceste (Paris: Aubier, 1968) pp. 81ff.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (London: Allen Lane, 1968) p. 62.
Ibid., p. 280. Compare also Jean Piaget, Structuralism (London: Routledge, 1971) upon which Lévi-Strauss has commented approvingly.
Lévi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) p. 98.
Interview with Lévi-Strauss, Le Monden, 13 Jan 1968. See also The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) pp. 31ff.
Cf. Ino Rossi, ‘Structuralism as a scientific method’, in Rossi, The Unconscious in Culture (New York: Dutton, 1974) p. 77.
Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966) p. 252. See also the comments on psychoanalysis in L’Homme nu (Paris: Plon, 1971) pp. 561ff
Ibid., p. 236, Cf. also G. Charbonnier, Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss (London: Cape, 1969) pp. 39ff.
Lévi-Strauss, ‘J.-J. Rousseau, fondateur des sciences des hommes’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Neuchâtel: Editions de la Baconnière, 1962).
Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977) p. 5;
cf Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: New Left Books, 1976) pp. 479ff
Cf. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Structure and hermeneutics’, in The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). Ricoeur remains one of the most penetrating critics of structuralism. On the other hand, even in his later publications he confines his remarks on structuralism mainly to Saussure, the Formalists and Lévi-Strauss. Ricoeur, it seems to me, gives too much and too little to structuralism, thus defined. Too much, because he seems prepared to accept major features of structuralist thought en bloc, within defined limits; too little, because in trying to fit structuralist analysis within a more encompassing hermeneutics, he does not sufficiently take into account the radical nature of the challenge that structuralist thought poses for hermeneutic phenomenology. Some of the differences between phenomenologists and structuralists were aired at a symposium at Cerisy-la-Salle in 1966, reported in J. Ricardou, Les chemins actuels de la critique (Paris: Pion, 1967).
George Steiner, After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1975) ; cf. also Dufrenne, who confronts ‘the problem posed by the extraordinary diversity of languages’, pointing out that ‘the arbitrary character of language, having been shown to be of comparatively little significance at the level of the elements of a language, reasserts itself quite definitely at the level of the language taken as a whole’,
Mikel Dufrenne, Language and Philosophy (New York: Greenwood, 1968) p. 35.
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge, 1975) p. 48;
cf. also Tzvetan Todorov, Poétique de la prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971) p. 247.
R. Jakobson, ‘Principes de phonologie historique’, in N. S. Trubetskoy, Principes de phonologie (Paris: Klincksieck, 1964). According to Lévi-Strauss, the distinction between synchrony and diachrony ‘is the very aspect of the Saussurian doctrine from which modern structuralism, with Trubetskoy and Jakobson, has most resolutely diverged, and about which modern documents show that the master’s thought has at times been forced and schematised by the editors of the Course’. Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, p. 16.
Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology (London: Cape, 1967) pp. 27ff
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1967) p. 62.
Jacques Derrida, L’Écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) p. 411.
Derrida, Positions (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972) p. 28.
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
On ‘pyramid’, an allusion taken from Hegel, and ‘tomb’, see Derrida, ‘Le puits et la pyramide’, in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).
Julia Kristeva, Semiotike: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969).
Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974) p. 33.
Cf. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 1975) p. xix and passim.
See ‘Signature, événement, contexte’, whose title echoes that of Ricoeur’s article, in Derrida, Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1972); this is translated in Glyph, vol. I (1977). (See also footnote 67).
Cf. the various discussions in Gareth Evans and John McDowell, Truth and Meaning: Essays on Semantics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). But see also Putnam’s analysis in Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge, 1978) pp. 97ff.
Derrida says (L’Écriture et la différence, p. 413) that it is because we cannot finally escape metaphysics altogether that the signified cannot be done away with: ‘For the paradox is that the metaphysical reduction of the sign needs the opposition [of signifier/signified] which it reduces.’ Cf. also Derrida’s comments in an interview with Lucette Finas, in Lucette Finas et al., Écarts (Paris: Fayard, 1973) pp. 303–12.
Jacques Lacan, ‘The agency of the letter in the unconscious’, Écrits (London: Tavistock, 1977) p. 166.
Julia Kristeva (interview with J.-C. Coquet), ‘Sémanalyse: conditions d’une sémiotique scientifique’, Semiotica, vol. 4 (1972) pp. 328–9.
One focus of debate is that involving Gadamer, Betti and Hirsch. For Hirsch’s latest contributions, see E. D. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago University Press, 1976).
Ward Goodenough, Description and Comparison in Cultural Anthropology (Chicago: Aldine, 1970).
Goodenough, ‘Cultural anthropology and linguistics’, in Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper, 1964) p. 36.
Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’, in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977) p. 116; cf. Williams’s remarks on the origins of the term ‘author’,
in Raymond Williams’s, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977) pp. 192–3.
Cf. Henri Lefebvre, L’idéologie structuraliste (Paris: Anthropos, 1971). Still one of the more interesting discussions of structuralism and Marxism is Lucien Sebag, Marxisme et structuralisme (Paris: Payot, 1964).
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (London: Macmillan, 1977) pp. 4ff.
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© 1979 Anthony Giddens
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Giddens, A. (1979). Structuralism and the Theory of the Subject. In: Central Problems in Social Theory. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16161-4_2
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