Structuralism and Postmodernism

Bowden, Bradley

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-76180-0_5

Bradley Bowden²

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Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s the view that there are linguistically fixed relationships between words (signifiers) and ideas (what is signified) was challenged by the literary deconstructionist analysis of Jacques Derrida; critiques that built on the earlier work of Emmanuel Levinas, Roland Barthes, and Martin Heidegger. Subsequently, postmodernists also challenged “structuralist” analysis (i.e. the view that social outcomes are influenced by economic, political, and cultural institutions and deeply embedded norms of behaviour) in history, politics, and anthropology. This chapter will therefore trace both the “structuralist” perspectives that attracted postmodernist ire and the subsequent postmodernist critiques.

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Notes

1.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1994), xiv.
2.
F.R. Ankersmit, “Historiography and postmodernism”, History and Theory, Vol. 28, No. 2 (May 1989), 149–50.
3.
Ferdinand de Saussure (trans. Wade Baskins; Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehays), Course in General Linguistics, (New York, NY: Fontana Collins, 1974), 15, 69.
4.
Ibid., 71, 73, 15.
5.
Jacques Derrida (trans. Alan Bass), Writing and Difference, (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 2001), 33, 30, 15.
6.
Jonathan Culler, “Introduction”, in Ferdinand de Saussure (trans. Wade Baskins; Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehays), Course in General Linguistics, (New York, NY: Fontana Collins, 1974), xiv.
7.
Fernand Braudel (trans. Immanuel Wallerstein), “History and the social sciences: the longue dureé”, Review, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2009), 178, 193. [This was an English translation and reprint of an article that first appeared in Annales in December 1958.]
8.
Ted Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and his Influence, (London, UK: Macmillan, 1984), 12; Louis Althusser, “Ideology and ideological state apparatus”, in Louis Althusser (trans. Ben Brewster), Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, (London, UK: New Left Books, 1977), 90.
9.
Foucault, Order of Things, xxi.
10.
Plato (trans. R. Hackforth), Phaedrus, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 124–25, 132–33, 138–39.
11.
Saussure, General Linguistics, 1–2, 16.
12.
Ibid., 112–13.
13.
Ibid., 66–67.
14.
Ibid., 118, 113.
15.
Ibid., 15, 8.
16.
Ibid., 69.
17.
Ibid., 27, 30–31.
18.
Foucault, Order of Things, 86.
19.
Jean-Francois Lyotard (trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi), The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1984), 40, 30.
20.
Foucault, Order of Things, xiv.
21.
Ibid., 87.
22.
Ibid., 158.
23.
Ibid., xxiii.
24.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 6, 12–13.
25.
Roland Barthes (trans. Katherine Pilcher Keuneman), Criticism and Truth, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 39. Barthes shifted in the course of his career from a “structuralist approach” that followed Saussure’s thinking to an increasingly critical “poststructuralism”. For details, see: Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 134–144.
26.
Roland Barthes (trans. Richard Howard), Empire of Signs, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1982), 9.
27.
Roland Barthes (trans. Annette Lavers), Mythologies, (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972), 115.
28.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 47.
29.
Ibid., 13.
30.
Jacques Derrida (trans. Gayatri Spivak), Of Grammatology, (Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins University Press, 1976), 10–11, 32; Derrida, Writing and Difference, 274–78.
31.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 121, 113; Saussure, General Linguistics, 112.
32.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 66.
33.
Martin Heidegger (trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson), Being and Time, (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1962), 78; Derrida, Writing and Difference, 100–01,
34.
John Storey, “Structuralism”, in John Storey (Ed.), Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, Fourth edition (Harlow, UK: Pearson Longman, 2009), 243.
35.
Writing and Difference, 47.
Ibid., 13.
Derrida, Of Grammatology, 19, 10.
36.
Fernand Braudel, “Preface to the first edition”, in Fernand Braudel (trans. Sian Reynolds), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol. 1 (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 21.
37.
Fernand Braudel (trans. Patricia M. Ranum), Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism, (Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins University Press, 1977), 7.
38.
Fernand Braudel (trans. Sarah Mathews), On History, (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1980), 75.
39.
Lucien Febvre, “Introduction”, in Marc Bloch (trans. Peter Putman), The Historian’s Craft, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1954), 3–19.
40.
Marc Bloch (trans. Peter Putman), The Historian’s Craft, (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1954), 50.
41.
Ibid., 183–84.
42.
Ibid., 60–61.
43.
Braudel “History and the social sciences”, 203, 196–97.
44.
Fernand Braudel (trans. Sian Reynolds), Civilization and Capitalism: The Wheels of Commerce, (London, UK: Collins, 1982), 510.
45.
Fernand Braudel (trans. Sian Reynolds), The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II, Vol. 2 (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 770–73; Braudel “History and the social sciences”, 188.
46.
Braudel “History and the social sciences”, 193.
47.
Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture, (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1995), 8.
48.
Claude Levi-Strauss (trans. Claire Jacobson and Brooke Schoepf), Structural Anthropology, (New York, NY: Basic Books), 208.
49.
Ibid., 21.
50.
Fernand Braudel (trans. Sian Reynolds), The Identity of France: People and Production, (London, UK: 1990), 186–87.
51.
Braudel, Afterthoughts, 81–82, 85, 92.
52.
Michel Foucault (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith), The Archaeology of Knowledge, (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1972), 8–9.
53.
Ibid., 11.
54.
Braudel, On History, 10.
55.
Braudel, The Identity of France, 176–80.
56.
Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 8–9, 25.
57.
Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, (Baltimore, ML: John Hopkins University Press, 1973), 283.
58.
Friedrich Nietzsche (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1970), 137.
59.
Michele Lamont, “How to become a dominant French philosopher: the case of Jacques Derrida”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 93, No. 3 (Nov. 1987), 593–94.
60.
Althusser, “Ideology and ideological state apparatus”, 89–90.
61.
Ibid., 104.
62.
Ibid., 99.
63.
Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 36.
64.
David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, (London, UK: Hutchinson, 1993), 39–40.
65.
Michel Foucault (trans. Robert Hurley), The History of Sexuality – An Introduction, (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978), 3, 8, 17–18, 92–93.
66.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 48–49.
67.
Ibid., 140–41.
68.
Ibid., 145.
69.
E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (Harmondsworh, UK: Penguin, 1963), 452–53.
70.
Derrida, Writing and Difference, 354.
71.
Ibid., 369.
72.
Hayden White, “The value of narrativity in the representation of reality”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Aut. 1980), 27.

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Griffith University, Brisbane City, QLD, Australia
Bradley Bowden

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Bowden, B. (2018). Structuralism and Postmodernism. In: Work, Wealth, and Postmodernism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76180-0_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76180-0_5
Published: 13 May 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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