5.3 The attraction of structuralism We have met the term “structuralism” several times in the above pages, especially with
reference to the equivalence paradigm. We now take some time to explain what the term
means, and why it was so important in the twentieth century.
At its simplest level, structuralism means that instead of studying things in
themselves, as one might do under the influence of positivism, we study the
relations (“structures”) between things . The trick is that, while the things are visible to
everyone, the relations are hidden. Structuralism thus invites us to discover the secret
logics that lie somewhere beneath the surface of cultural products. In retrospect, it offers
the same appeal as did Marx when discovering the relations of production at the base of
the way societies work, or Freud revealing the principles of the unconscious mind. For
most structuralists of the first half of the twentieth century, the structures are really
there, within our languages and cultures; structures do not come from the subjectivity of
the individual researcher. Structuralism invites us to reveal objective verifiable truths,
reachable through patient discovery procedures. It offers a
scientific approach to culture (as in Russian Formalism). That was and remains a very appealing and
powerful invitation, extended to anyone in search of knowledge.
Examples of these underlying structures can be found in many of the approaches
that see languages as “world views.” One instance would be
Saussure ’s example of the
way English
sheep and French
mouton enter into different structures within their
language systems. We have seen how this idea initially created problems for the
equivalence paradigm, which had to argue that translation was nevertheless somehow
possible. For the descriptive paradigm, however, structuralism was something to learn
from, not to oppose. Rather than ask if
sheep could really translate
mouton , the initial
task in this paradigm was to describe the way historical translators effectively resolved
the problem.
Structuralism enters the descriptive story in much the same suitcases as Russian
Formalism, and more particularly through the Prague
Cercle (which was indeed in
touch with the legacy of Saussure). As we have mentioned above, the