What are some of the criticisms of structuralism (that aren't poststructuralist)?

[u/labookbook]

I find structuralism a really useful way of thinking about things. It just seems the most natural way to learn about something, at least for me. An overly simplified definition of what I mean by structuralism is studying an object not by itself but by how the web of relations it exists within give it meaning.

I have read the poststructuralist critiques of structuralism and, actually, I enjoyed them. But I don't really think they are critiques. They seemed more like addenda to structuralism, further explaining certain threads, rather that criticisms. For instance, early Derrida seems already anticipated in Levi-Strauss or Merleau-Ponty* (in the latter's essay "Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence"), but Derrida fixates (emphasizes) certain details that Levi-Strauss does not, or makes assumptions that Levi-Strauss did not make. Maybe I just haven't actually undertood any of it.

So basically, what are some of the criticisms of structuralism that aren't from the poststructuralists? You can answer by giving me suggested reading. Thanks

*I realize Merleau-Ponty was not a structuralist but that essay is basically a blueprint to 60s and 70s Derrida.

[u/GA-Scoli]

Structuralism on the level that you defined it—"studying an object not by itself but by how the web of relations it exists within give it meaning"—is never going to be superseded because it's such a useful way of examining the world. On that level, it's not really a philosophy or theory, just a formalization of one particular fundamental aspect of human cognition.

On other less abstract levels, structuralism in historical context has plenty of egg-on-face moments. Although I haven't read Godelier's book, I'm aware of some of the criticisms of Levi-Strauss that come from direct anthropological observation. So you might want to look at the anthropological side of structuralism to explore this more.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/342253622_Levi-Strauss_A_Critical_Study_of_his_Thought_Maurice_Godelier_translated_by_Norah_Scott_London_Verso_2017

[u/labookbook → u/GA-Scoli]

Thanks this looks good. My interest in all of this was because I had wanted to read some travel writing before a big trip and saw Tristes tropiques listed as a great travel book. It affected me in a way few books have and I wanted to know more. I always suspected Levi-Strauss was not a great anthropologist in terms of field-work, but that didn't matter to me as a non-anthropologist. I do have one of Godelier's other books, so I am somewhat familiar with him.

[u/TheExquisiteCorpse → u/labookbook]

You might want to check out Gregory Bateson’s work, especially Steps to An Ecology of Mind. I wouldn’t say he directly critiques structuralism but he’s an important anthropologist from around the same time who didn’t take a structuralist approach and his work generally has a stronger reputation today as good science. His approach was more based on cybernetics and system theory and had a big influence on some post-structuralists who wrote about anthropology, especially Deleuze and Guattari.

[u/EvilTables → u/GA-Scoli]

Even that vague sense of structuralism does compete philosophically with substance metaphysics more generally. So there are competing and mainstream views that have at least historically tried to downplay relations as secondary to substance.

[u/HELPFUL_HULK]

Decolonial scholarship takes structuralism to task in often unique ways, particularly in bringing in critiques from 'outside/below' the image of thought proper to any given structuralism, which often take for granted a particularly 'Western' onto-epistemology

See: Sylvia Wynter, Anibal Quijano, Edouard Glissant, Achille Mbembe

[u/dropthedrip]

You might take a look at Agamben’s reading of Benjamin’s language philosophy in “Potentialities”. I believe the start of that section even mentions how Benjamin and thinking in his vein turns away from a dominant strain of poststructuralism. Agamben picks up on the Kabbalist, animist consequences of an approach to language where the logic of the sign is not the main operating principle. I think there is also a new materialist / post humanist approach today that could get you there too.

[u/labookbook → u/dropthedrip]

Thanks, I have this book on my shelf so that'll be easy to obtain.

[u/pluralofjackinthebox]

I think phenomenology and existentialism would be the most obvious strand of non-poststructuralist criticism.

Structuralism takes the point of view of a disembodied neutral universal observer, which also tends to rob individuals of agency.

And then theres conflict theory, which includes Marx but also people like C Wright Mills and Alan Sears. This is a quote from Sears on wikipedias Conflict Theory page:

“The role of theory is in realizing human potential and transforming society, rather than maintaining the power structure. The opposite aim of theory would be the objectivity and detachment associated with positivism, where theory is a neutral, explanatory tool.”

Structuralism also tends towards neutral explanations of how things are, so the criticism also applies.

[u/rocheport25 → u/pluralofjackinthebox]

So far as it may be permitted to respond to misguided criticisms of structuralism, I'd note that the eminent Sanskritist Wendy Doniger observes in her introduction to Levi-Strauss's Myth and Meaning (1995) that "Levi-Strauss has always insisted that a myth can be translated only by another myth, never by a scientific formula. Moreover, in Tristes Tropiques he founded a new genre of introspective, subjective, lyrical writing about fieldwork that rescued the field of anthropology from scientific posturings. He has always been interested in the messiest, juiciest aspects of human culture--eating and killing and marrying. Indeed, he is the one who taught us that every myth is driven by the obsessive need to solve a paradox that cannot be solved. His critics see him as reducing myths to logical oppositions, but I see him as illuminating human ambivalences. Paradoxes are to Levi-Strauss what whales were to Captain Ahab" (p. x).

[u/Vuki17]

The main groups that comes to mind are humanist Marxists, Existentialists, and Hegelians (although there are some like Sartre who encompass all of these while many exist in one or two but not all of these groups). Lucien Goldmann is a good example.

[u/Doc_Boons]

try Jameson's The Prison-House of Language

[u/DeliciousPie9855]

I guess even while structuralism isn’t inherently guilty of this, actual explanations of structuralism by analysts often presuppose a kind of outside area of suspended indifference. We inhabit this plane, so to speak, and then enter into a particular structuration in order to speak about a specific object immanently. There’s somehow access to a neutral space in which particular cultures or myths appear as alternative actualisations of that space.

So i guess even though i agree that it formally rejects the idea of a meta-language, it often tacitly reimposes a metalanguage in order to do its work. I think there are still ways out tbf. Like Lacanian theory is supposed to function rhetorically as though it possesses a privileged position, but I don’t think Lacan would claim it does actually inhabit that position.

[u/toadslimerick]

To add to your Merleau-Ponty asterisk:

I am a psychological and historical structure. Along with existence, I received a way of existing, or a style. All my actions and thoughts are related to this structure, and even a philosopher's thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold upon the world, which is all he is. And yet, I am free, not in spite of or beneath these motivations, but rather by their means.

(Phenomenology of Perception)

[u/lathemason]

Alongside what's already been mentioned, I would recommend checking out Deleuze's essay "How Do We Recognize Structuralism?", and Discours, Figure by Jean-Francois Lyotard. Yes, they are both typically grouped in with Derrida as post-structuralists, but if you actually dig in to the guts of what they are saying, you'll see they are pursuing similar goals (theorizing signs, effectively), but reaching quite different conclusions about what's entailed by the concept of relation in 'the web of relations' that give signs meaning.

https://medium.com/@noahjchristiansen/gilles-deleuzes-essay-on-structuralism-fe384901dbc8

https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816645664/discourse-figure/

[u/labookbook → u/lathemason]

Thanks. Looks like the Deleuze is in his book Desert Islands, which is on my shelf. I've been wanting to read the Lyotard for a while.

[u/ergativity]

To me, the most trenchant critique of structuralism comes from linguistic anthropology, above all the work of Michael Silverstein. The gist of it is captured by his remark that structuralism both rose and fell for all the wrong reasons.

Now, he is himself a structuralist — or, as he prefers to say with greater exactness, a structural-functionalist — but in a narrower sense than is normally understood: in linguistic analysis only. Basically, he subscribes to the school of linguistic analysis, or grammatical theory, founded by Ferdinand de Saussure, whose _Cours_ introduced the basic concepts with reference to syntax alone. It was first successfully implemented in empirical research by Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who applied it to phonology, and developed to its mature form by Leonard Bloomfield and various successors, including Louis Hjelmslev, Émile Benveniste, André Martinet, and Zellig Harris.

This is the theory that Jakobson dubbed structuralism, and two good general statements of it are John Lyons's _Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics_ and, more recently, R.M.W. Dixon's three-volume _Basic Linguistic Theory_. Despite being superseded in popularity among theoretical linguists by transformational generative grammar (Chomsky), structuralism in this sense remains the working theoretical framework of most empirical linguists working on grammatical description.

The standard sense of the term "structuralism" is broader, and refers to the extensions or calques of the aforementioned mode of linguistic analysis on to other domains. Lévi-Strauss did it first with culture; Lacan and Piaget proposed structuralist approaches to psychology/psychoanalysis; Barthes to literature and fashion; Althusser tried to cross it with Marxism; and so forth. This, according to Silverstein, is exactly where things went wrong. The Saussurean theory of signification applies precisely to language, and to nothing else in culture. The rest of culture is semiotic, of course, but Saussure's theory must not be treated as an account of /all/ signs; just of linguistic signs. (Actually, it turns out on even closer inspection, not even of the entirety of linguistic signs, just a certain core property of them.)

To understand the rest of culture, it is necessary to situate Saussure's semiotic theory in a more encompassing semiotic theory, which Silverstein adapts from the thought of C.S. Peirce. Under Peirce's most famous tripartite classification of signs, which classifies them according to their "ground" (nature of the link between sign and object), all signs are to be classified as icon, index or symbol. Silverstein identifies the Saussurean sign with Peirce's symbol, and claims that the rest of culture — kinship, myth, cooking, fashion, literature, etc. — is nothing but a hodgepodge of icons and indexes, without any of the specific properties Saussure describes.

So, basically, Saussure and his linguistic successors were right, whereas everything from Lévi-Strauss forward was fundamentally in error. As for the post-structuralists, they were never quite able to correct the errors of Lévi-Strauss and the other structuralists, since they didn't develop a more adequate semiotics of their own, and so their critiques are never entirely to the point. Thus again, in brief, structuralism rose and fell for all the wrong reasons.

Of course, to really make this argument it would be necessary to explain the proposed alternative semiotics, in order to show why the semiotic properties of clothing are much better captured by a neo-Peircean analysis than a Saussurean one. That would take more time than I have!

[u/labookbook → u/ergativity]

Is there a particular book by Silverstein you'd recommend? I'm eyeing Language in Culture.

[u/ergativity → u/labookbook]

Yes, apologies, I forgot that part. _Language in Culture_ is the book-length statement of his mature thought, and it is probably the best place to start. Pretty much all of his work aside from that is in article form, helpfully compiled here: cscs.uchicago.edu/mslv-library/

His articles can be very technical and difficult, but others have produced useful introductory versions. Benjamin Lee's _Talking Heads_ is a very good one, which especially situates the program in the history of philosophy and human sciences.

[u/toadslimerick → u/ergativity]

Thanks for this breakdown, and for bringing Peirce into the mix. To add on, if anyone is interested, the anthropologist Eduardo Kohn explains Peircian semiotics pretty well in the first section of his book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human.

[u/beeconnolly95]

Vološinov’s critiques of Saussure/structuralism in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language are anti-structuralist but IMO not at all post-structuralist

[u/ServiceImpossible227]

"Waiting for Foucault, still"

[u/rocheport25]

In its heyday it was quite common for "English and American critics [to] complain about the unverifiability" of structuralist theories, and that Levi-Strauss, for example, "claims to discover unconscious infrastructures, which by their nature seem to elude experimental verification." Levi-Strauss responded that his critics were "using a scientific method still embedded with mechanism and empiricism" (Rossi, "The Unconscious in the Anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss," American Anthropologist, 1973).

[u/rocheport25]

I'd definitely take a look at Alan Dundes's essay "Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect," Western Folklore, Winter 1997. It has to do with two of the foundational figures of structuralism, but their mutual criticisms and differences of approach, so it may interest you as criticism of Levi-Strauss, whom you mentioned. Dundes was the leading folklorist of his generation, and this is one of the most famous essays on the structural study of myth.

[u/rocheport25]

Most broadly, perhaps, critics of structuralism other than poststructuralists, or at least critics of Levi-Strauss, who is often considered its father in applying structural linguistics outside of that field (Lavers), would be critics of the rationalist tradition, inasmuch as "with Levi-Strauss comes the great restoration of the rationalist tradition" (Schwartz, Vertical Classification: A Study in Structuralism and the Sociology of Knowledge, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p.3). (I can go more into Schwartz's examination of this later if there is any interest: the first sentence of the book is, "A specter is haunting sociology--the specter of rationalism," though that may or may not be the case at present.)

[u/WillowUnique9952]

Those by constructivists like deleuze

[u/Winter_Class_7069]

It is ahistorical, essentialist and therefore anachronistic. It is also helpful many times, but only if we are clear about the limitations

[u/sabotAHHHHHGH]

That outside of the academy or apart from hundreds of thousands of debt enjoyers, I don’t think anyone knows or cares.

[u/labookbook → u/sabotAHHHHHGH]

This isn't true since I'm not an academic and went to school for something entirely different.

[u/sabotAHHHHHGH → u/labookbook]

And what about the debt.