Larkin and Philosophy: Poststructuralism

Abstract

Structuralism became highly fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s as a means of analysing cultural phenomena in accord with the linguistic theories Ferdinand de Saussure formulated before the First World War. In other words, Structuralism may be regarded as a Modernist methodology dislodged from its proper moment in history. It emphasized the systemic relationships within a cultural discourse, the abstract codes and conventions that governed the production of meaning. Structuralist criticism was therefore less interested in interpreting what cultural artefacts mean than in explaining how they can mean what they mean. Each signifying element in the discourse was seen as deriving its meaning not from its reference to the world outside but from its relationships of contrast with other elements within the system. In particular, binary opposites (mind/body, good/evil, man/woman, presence/absence, nature/culture, left/right, up/down, on/off, etc.) were perceived as fundamental to the way cultural discourses generate meaning. Saussure himself built his argument concerning language around the distinctions between langue and parole, signifier and signified, diachronic and synchronic. Another linguist, Roman Jakobson, extended this vocabulary to encompass the oppositions between the metonymic and metaphoric, or the syntagmatic and paradigmatic poles of language. In the realm of narratology, A.J. Greimas proposed that the binary opposites subject/object, sender/receiver and helper/opponent are common to all stories. And in anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss sought to analyse different societies through the grid of such binary pairs as sacred/profane, myth/history, nature/culture, wild/tame, raw/cooked and inedible/edible.