Roland Barthes Structuralist Activity
Hayley Sweigard
The Structuralist Activity" represents an early phase of Barthes', in which he sets forth- certain structuralist principles. In this essay, his ideas sound like structuralist and in The Death of the Author", he seems post structuralist.
Structuralism concerns with meaning but not absolute meaning, rather it is process of obtaining meaning. How we get meaning is more important than what the meaning is. In other words, deep structure is more important than surface structure. It focuses on underlying pattern of meaning. Structuralism believes in linguistic system, condition of meaning and binary opposition. As a structuralist his emphasis is on creative or re- constructive activity endlessly productive of meaning, though meaning itself as a substance is less important than the activity of producing it.
To be movement and school, there should be a certain norms, inherited system and other theoretical procedures. Since structuralism lacks these features and there is no shared theoretical perspective, it is neither a school nor a movement. It is rather a simulacrum activity. It means, Barthes views that literature is mimesis, creating the same. It is the structure that makes the object visible and intelligible. A structuralist takes the object, decomposes it and finally recomposes it. It implies the view that a structuralist performs two activities to make the text intelligible dissection and articulation. It is the articulation that further involves two related tasks: summoning and combination.
Dissection means separating each and every part of the text from each other. A structuralist breaks the whole poem in to different parts then he observes these fragmented elements in totality and these elements are again arranged properly, which is called articulation. Therefore, structuralists believe in totality and this very totality is structure. It means the structuralist activity is a bricoleur, which shows double functions. First, they dismantle the original structure without any apriori knowledge and reconstruct it. A critic's activity is productive, creative and even re- constructive, and thus there is the possibility of the production of the meaning. When a critic reconstructs, this new structure is simulacrum (photocopy) of previous structure. The meaning of text is based on surface structure, which is directly concerned with underlying pattern. Dissecting the elements and associating them certainly belongs to totality, which is after all structure. In this way, the goal of all structuralist activity is to reconstruct the object. Therefore, structure is actually a photocopy of the object. In addition, structuralism is in a way, process of reconstruction. Text itself is unintelligible and it is the structuralism that makes the text intelligible. Structuralism critic acts up on the text, so text is object whereas critic is subject. Critic performs certain work up on the text. Each and every parts of a text are always in conflict. They, in this sense, are in motion. Structuralist critics believe that the text is dynamic. They believe in binary opposition through which meaning is produced and each pair of binary opposition produces at least two meanings, which proceeds for the whole meaning of the text.
Now comes a very structuralist activity. LS takes the Oedipus myth and dissects it, as one might do in if you had to arrange a selection of numbers, and taking the various elements he presents them in columns of themes as such.
Structuralism is a way of thinking that involves the perception of everything as consisting of smaller entities that can further be divided into smaller basic forms. These entities are what control the thoughts of humans and their surroundings. Structuralism suggests that no activity is influenced by superficial components, as it may seem, but a deeper functioning of an internal system (Linnebo, 2008). Roland Barthes is among the greatest structuralists that have ever walked on the surface of the earth. This essay will discuss various factors that point to the fact that Roland Barthes was a structuralist.
According to Carter (2005), Roland Barthes was one of the early pioneers of structuralism. Of the seventeen books, he wrote in his lifetime, more than half of them were based on structuralism. He also wrote articles in scholarly journals and scientific publications in a bid to make clear the concept of structuralism. His literary work was especially crucial at a time when a number of scientists misunderstood structuralism and strived to poke holes into the concept (Griffiths, 1996). Although Barthes had not contemplated anything of the sort, his efforts and the efforts of others led to the establishment of the structuralism movement in the 1950s and the 1960s.
From the foregoing, it is evident that Roland Barthes was a staunch structuralist. His activities in the field of science and his literary works are concrete proof of this reality. His efforts to advocate for structuralism also led to the widespread acknowledgement of structuralism in the second half of the twentieth century.
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- Sciences of the TextDavid Herman
North Carolina State University
dhe...@unity.ncsu.edu 2001 David Herman.
All rights reserved.
- Sometime between 1966 and 1968, Roland Barthes began to lose faith that there might be a science of the text. This, to be sure, was not an individualized crisis of belief; it was part of a wider transformation at work in the history of literary and cultural theory--in France and elsewhere. Here I shall not try to document, let alone account for, every aspect of this sea-change in theory and criticism.[1] My aims are far more restricted. I mean, first, to conduct a partial genealogical investigation of the notion "science of the text" in Barthes's own discourse. On the basis of this inquiry, I shall then sketch arguments in favor of a research program that should not be dismissed out of hand, without a fair hearing. At issue is an agenda for research that rehabilitates textual science as a legitimate field of endeavor. And--provisionally, at least--I use the word science without scare-quotes.
- My definition of the term science is, admittedly, a fairly broad one, closer perhaps to the sense of the German word Wissenschaft than to the narrower range of meanings associated with its English cognate. By science I mean the principled investigation of a problem (or set of problems) within a particular domain of inquiry. I acknowledge that "problems," "domains of inquiry," and the principles according to which investigation can be "principled" are historico-institutional constructs, not necessarily reflections of the way things truly are. That said, the present essay attempts to reinflect social-constructionist arguments pursued by proponents of the social study of science, for example. Scholars such as Malcolm Ashmore, David Bloor, and Steve Woolgar have demonstrated that scientific practice is always embedded in a particular social context. What counts as scientific, and more specifically what marks the border between "scientific" and "nonscientific" (e.g., humanistic) modes of inquiry, is historically variable. Thus, for Woolgar, "there is no essential difference between science and other forms of knowledge production" (Science 12). Rather, scholars must now "accept that science cannot be distinguished from non-science by decision rules. Judgements about whether or not hypotheses have been verified (or falsified), as to what constitutes the core or periphery in a research programme, and at what point to abandon a research programme altogether, are the upshot of complex social processes within a particular environment" (17). In this way "the ethnographic study of science... portrays the production of scientific facts as a local, contingent accomplishment specific to the culture of the laboratory setting" ("Reflexivity" 18).
- But by the same logic, the boundary between humanistic and (social-)scientific research should be viewed not as fixed and impermeable but rather as shifting and porous. My essay centers around a particular instance of this general proposition, examining how the structuralist method articulated by the early Barthes involved an attempt to redraw the border between the science of language and the theory of literature. That attempt can now be reevaluated in light of more recent research in discourse analysis, the field of linguistics that studies units of language larger than the sentence. There were, it is true, important precedents for the structuralists' efforts to span the disciplinary divide between linguistics and literature--a divide that might be better characterized as an unstable seam in the architecture of inquiry. For example, whereas Ferdinand de Saussure distrusted written data as a basis for the structural analysis of language (23-32), the great speculative grammarians of the Middle Ages used literary language to develop theories about the homology between vox (words), mens (mind), and res (things) (Herman, Universal Grammar 7-14). In contrast to the speculative grammarians of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, however, twentieth-century structuralists like the early Barthes were adapting linguistic methods and ideas at the very moment when language theory was itself undergoing revolutionary changes.
- Those changes stemmed, in part, from emergent formal (e.g., generative-grammatical) models for analyzing language structure (cf. Chomsky's 1957 and 1964 publications, Syntactic Structures and Aspects of the Theory of Syntax). But the changes also derived from an increasing concern with how contexts of language use bear crucially on the production and interpretation of socially situated utterances--as opposed to the decontextualized sentences (or "sentoids") that are still the staple of many linguistics textbooks. In the first instance, even as Barthes and Claude Lvi-Strauss were drawing on the linguistic structuralism of Saussure, Roman Jakobson, and Louis Hjelmslev to write texts such as Elements of Semiology and Structural Anthropology, linguistic science was moving from the Saussurean-Hjelmslevian conception of language as a system of similarities and differences to a Chomskyean conception of language as a "discrete combinatorial system" whereby "a finite number of discrete elements [e.g., words] are sampled, combined, and permuted to create larger structures [e.g., sentences] with properties that are quite distinct from those of their elements" (Pinker 84). New, quasi-mathematical formalisms were required to model the workings of this recursively organized system, which has the capacity to operate on its own output and thereby produce such complex strings as The house that the family built that stood on the shoreline that was eroded by the storm that originated from a region that.... At the same time, language theorists working on a different front began to question what they viewed as counterproductive modes of abstraction and idealization in both structuralist linguistics and the Chomskyean paradigm that displaced it. From this other perspective, generative grammarians had perpetuated Saussure's foregrounding of la langue over la parole, language structure over language use, by taking as their explicandum linguistic competence and jettisoning a host of phenomena (conversational disfluencies, nonliteral usages, differences in speech styles, etc.) that generative grammarians viewed as ignorable--i.e., as matters of linguistic performance only.