STRUCTURALISM, POST-STRUCTURALISM AND POST-MODERNISM:

MAIN TENETS
This essay will explain the main tenets of structuralism, post-structuralism, and post-
modernism, and address from their perspective the question of “what is wrong with
modern society?”

Structuralism tries to apply a scientific approach to the study of culture and

society. The goal is to make sense of the great amount of existing empirical data and
“try to find order behind (…) apparent disorder” (Lévi-Strauss, 1978, p.3).
Described as “the quest for the invariant or for the invariant elements among
superficial differences” (Levi-Strauss, 1978, p.2), structuralism uses the principles of
Saussure’s linguistics applied to culture and seeks to uncover the unconscious
structures and commonalities that underlie human systems.
Three fundamental ideas of Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics are (a) the
difference between langue and parole, (b) arbitrariness and (c) value. First, whereas
langue refers to a homogeneous, standardized, ideal system of speech, parole refers to
a more heterogeneous use that belongs to individuals and society. According to
Saussure, it is the systematic nature of langue that allows for a more scientific and
systematic study. The notion of arbitrariness suggests that meanings are not tied to
pre-existing universal concepts, whereas the notion of value refers to the idea that
language must be understood and studied as a system of interrelated relations and not
as independent units.
Based on this, structural linguistics thus studies “the unconscious
infrastructure” of phenomena, focuses on the relations between independent entities,
“introduces the concept of system” and aims at “discovering general laws” (Levi-
Strauss, 1963, p.33). It is praised by Lévi-Strauss for being closer to pure science than
any other discipline among the social sciences, hence its ability to yield rigorous and
systematic equations about the structures of human systems.
In his studies on myth, kinship and primitive and modern societies, Levi-
Strauss provides various examples of the homogeneity of underlying structures across
cultures.
The latter, in particular, serves best to answer the main question of this essay.
Here, he argues that when moving beyond the obvious and superficial differences
between people, and digging into the underlying structures that govern individual
behavior, one will find that those structures are the same across the world. The
problem with modern society is therefore that it believes to be more advanced and
developed whereas in fact it is equal and stands on the same level of development as
so-called primitive societies. The reason why there are superficial differences between
societies, he argues, is that individuals only develop the skills that are needed to
survive in the specific societies where they live.

Post-structuralists, on the other hand, address their criticism to the humanistic

values of modern Western society, which include notions of progress, freedom, the
centrality of the individual as well as a modern form of rationality that is regarded as
“reductive and oppressive” (Best & Kellner, 1991, p.43).
Foucault attempts to demonstrate this point by writing what he calls a Critical
History of Thought, where he traces the different forms of knowledge and ideas of
truth as well as the social institutions that have dominated the Western world from
1660 until the modern era. He wants to prove that what we regard and take for granted
as truths and modern ideas of progress are only the product of “contingent
sociohistorical constructs of power and domination” (Best & Kellner, 1991, p.41) that
he identifies as discourses. He analyzes different discourses in different domains and
from a historical perspective, to prove how power discourses that discipline subjects
have always existed. If individuals today believe they are free and that societies have
progressed, it is only because the power structures have only become more and more
sophisticated. Power for Foucault is a highly indeterminate, relational and pervasive
force masked under apparently neutral ideas of truth and progress (Best & Kellner,
1991, p.53). This has implications for his understanding of the individual, who is
interpreted “not only as a discursive construct, but as an effect of political technologies
through which its very identity, desires, body and ‘soul’ are shaped and constituted”
(Best & Kellner, 1991, p.50). As a result of this, Foucault does away with the modern
view of the free, cogent, emancipated individual. “The ultimate goal and effect of
discipline is ‘normalization’, the elimination of all social and psychological
irregularities and the production of useful and docile subjects through a refashioning
of minds and bodies” (Best & Kellner, 1991, p.50).
Derrida, on the other hand, criticizes the notion of fixity and structure
embedded in modern society’s way of thinking and inherited from Western
philosophical tradition. He launches an attack on what he calls the metaphysics of
Presence, which assumes that meaning can be located, grasped, and that individuals
can have direct, immediate and full access to it. In the social sciences, for example,
ideas such as the individual, society, environment, are given to us as fixed and taken
for granted, a phenomenon that “privileges them as essences and puts them beyond
critical analysis” (Cooper, 1989, p.489).
Derrida challenges this view with the notion that meaning is constantly
deferred and should be understood as process. For him, present ideas take shape from
what has taken place before and are only traces in a movement from past into future.
Derrida uses his theory of deconstruction to analyze and challenge our traditional
assumptions about meaning.
Deconstruction operates within the text, which refers to any type of discourse,
whether political, social, philosophical, etc… (Cooper, 1989, p.481). It consists of
overturning and metaphorization, where overturning refers to turning over the binary
oppositions that dominate our way of thinking and subverting the hegemony of one
term or idea over another. In other words, questioning how it would be like to see this
idea from a different angle. However, in order to guard ourselves against the trap of
falling again into a fixity of meaning, one must keep overturning. Metaphorization, in
this sense, suggests the idea that binary terms transform and inform each other in a
never-ending interchange of meaning.
Derrida dramatizes this idea through the term ‘différance’, which plays with the
French meanings of the words differ (in space) and defer (to postpone) (Cooper, 1989,
p.488). Différence is explained by Derrida himself as “infinite implication, the
indefinite referral of signifier to signifier” (Derrida, 1978, p.29). The notion of
différance suggests that meaning can never be understood in isolation, that it is
constantly referred to other meanings. In this sense, as explained by Cooper (1989),
meaning is “a continuous absence, a force that is continually beyond our grasp and
therefore never properly present” (p.448-449).
Derrida therefore attacks the orderly and static nature of modern thinking and
challenges this with a world of fluidity and constant transformation.

Postmodern thinkers’ main attack is on modern society’s fictionalization of

reality. They argue that contemporary societies and the theories derived from them try
to present logical, connected, cause-effect accounts which have completely lost
connection with reality. In this sense, it can be said that modern theory operates with
“a subject-object dialectic in which the subject [is] supposed to represent and control
the object” (Murray, 2013, p.62).
Baudrillard argues that whereas modern societies were organized around
production, post-modern societies are organized around what he calls ‘simulation’,
which refers to the cultural modes of representation that simulate and by doing so
mask reality, such as television, virtual reality, computers, media, etc. People now live
in this ‘hyperreality’ of simulation where there is no longer a connection between
signifier and signified. In a world ruled by simulation, codes, models and signs
unrelated to reality become the organizing principles of society and the basis upon
which individuals perceive themselves, relate to other people and construct their
identity (Kellner, 1994). Hyperreality, where “entertainment, information and
communication technologies provide experiences more intense and involving”
(Murray, 2013, p.61) than everyday life, thus becomes more real than reality itself.
It is this postmodern condition, he argues, that requires new forms of theory
and thinking. Baudrillard criticizes previous thinkers, such as Foucault, for failing to
recognize this situation and endorsing the so-called logic of production. He then
presents the principle of seduction as an alternative to the logic of production. In his
own words, “seduction is that which is everywhere and always opposed to production;
seduction withdraws something from the visible order and so runs counter to
production, whose project is to set everything up in clear view, whether it be an object,
a number, or a concept” (Baudrillard, 1977, p.37). Baudrillard is here again reacting
against modern society’s logic of representation and its insistence on generating
theory and on exposing reality as a series of connected and fully formulated facts.
Deleuze and Guattari also draw on this idea, particularly with their notion of
rhizome, defined in the following way:

The rhizome is reducible neither to the One nor the multiple. It is not the One
that becomes Two or even directly three, four, five, etc. (…) It is composed not
of units but of dimensions (…) It is neither beginning nor end, but always a
middle from which it grows and which it overspills (…) The rhizome operates
by variation, expansion, conquest, capture, offshoots” (Deleuze and Guattari,
1987, p.21)

Initially used as a metaphor to explain the way in which the two authors wrote
their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the notion of
rhizome is also a way to understand how society should be looked at. The rhizome
goes against the principle of cause-effect and logical connections that dominate
modern conceptualizations and representations of reality, which are regarded as
constraining and repressive forms of power (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.8). As
opposed to this, the rhizome is a locus for creativity, performance and multiplicity.

To conclude, the three theories that we have analyzed are highly critical of
modern society. By uncovering the sameness of underlying structures, structuralists
criticize the ego of modern society, which believes to be better than primitive societies,
when it is not; post-structuralists criticize the overarching structure of post-
Enlightenment values which has trapped individuals in a reductionist and limited way
of thinking. And finally, post-modernists criticize how modern societies, in their
emphasis to present the world as a well-connected, coherent whole, have completely
fictionalized and done away with reality.

Bibliography
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Guilford Press.
Cooper, R. (1989). Modernism, post modernism and organizational analysis 3: The
contribution of Jacques Derrida. Organization Studies, 10(4), 479-502.
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kellner, D. (Ed.). 1994. Baudrillard: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MA and Oxford:
Blackwell.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978). Myth and meaning. London: Routledge.
Murray, C. J. (Ed.). (2004). Encyclopedia of modern French thought. New York:
Fitzroy Dearborn.