Structuralism and its discontents

Hi, everyone. I'm going to post my lecture notes from Thursday's rather (a-HEM) sparsely attended class. The I'll post a wiki discussion entry. I'll give a link that I've run across for dialects, and you all can comment and give each other tips as you figure things out.

Lecture:

I. Principles and history of structuralism

• Founded by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1913-1915, but not translated into English until the 50s
• Structuralism looks at the larger principles of human patterning and thought.
• Structural linguistics examines the meanings of words in relation to each other, not historically over time. It only cares about what features make up the “deep structure” of the language rather than the historical accidents of its words.
• Language is a major structuring tool for human beings, which means that it influences the way they see the world. Words are not just transparent references to real thing, but are tied to our perception of these things. Since we only know by perception, and languages influence that, we only “know” things through language. Our knowledge is often shaped by separating concepts into “binaries” which are seen as antithetical to each other (day/night, evil/good, right/left).

II. Benjamin Whorf and the Eskimos

• One example that has been classically given for this is the Eskimo Snow Vocabulary. Basically, the claim goes, “Eskimos” have hundreds of words for snow in order to let them structure their notion of the environment. The example was made famous in the writings of Benjamin Whorf, and is called the “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis.

• However, this one has been busted. The Inuit (now the preferred term for the indigenous people of Greenland and other northern territories) don’t really have many more words (ie, individual roots) for snow than English!
• Does this bust the S-W hypothesis? This is actually not a valid question. First off, it isn’t really a “hypothesis” in the sense that scientists and most people use that term. It’s more an ideology, a set of underlying philosophical notions that Whorf was trying to clarify in his writing. As such, (as one commentator memorably noted) it can no more be proven or disproven than Buddism or Polish drinking customs.
• And Inuit words do hint at a different structure of thought from English: for instance, they differentiate snow in the air and snow on the ground more sharply than we seem to.
• Despite the whole furor over Inuit vocabulary, which served as a pretty big distraction, most modern theorists of language do assume that vocabulary has some shaping effect on perception. It accustoms us to thinking in certain ways

III. Feminists and language

• For instance, language can reinforce notions about empowered and disenfranchised groups, if it posits one as “normal” and the other (binary) opposite as “other”
• If “men” is normal (and the use of the word to encompass human experience suggests that it is), then anyone who does not fit the category of “men” is not-normal and inferior.
• One linguistic example that I’ve noticed the (fortunately dated) use of co-ed to mean female students. If co-educational means men and women, then why are co-eds only female? The use of the word suggests that “students,” the “normal” category, is male and female students are “co-ed”—different.
• The sort of sloppy thinking that such terminology invites has lead to sloppy thinking in research, such as:

1. Heart attack symptoms. The “classic” symptoms that (until recently) everyone was taught to identify are typically male. No one bothered to research heart attacks in women to notice that they have a much lower instance of chest pain. If men are “normal,” then only the normal people need to be studied for a representative sample. Heart disease remains the number-one cause of death in women, at least in part because it is often not identified in time.

2. Car air bags. All the crash-test dummies in the first few generations were “average” humans—ie, adult males. No one tested shorter dummies, because no one thought about women drivers. Turned out the airbags could decapitate shorter drivers. This hadn’t been tested.

IV. Post-structuralism

• Structuralism posited that words (signs) don’t refer to actual objects in the world, but to our mental construction of the objects, which is influenced by the words themselves
• Deconstruction goes further—words only refer to other words. We only understand a word by relating it to other words to which it is related or opposed to.
• So there is no actual “meaning” for a word. Meaning is “deferred” by the endless chain of signifiers that it relates to, and what passes for meaning is only the “difference” between it and other words. Derrida called this “différance", combining the French words for differ and defer.
• So we have no understanding of the “real world,” only of language—and we have no real understanding of any words, either.
• Because all our understandings of words is bound to what they aren’t, all of the binaries that Saussure noticed we use to shape our perception—they’re all false. Deconstruction is all about examining the ideologies and meanings we think things have (texts, and also our very notions of our identities) and seeing where there are tensions, ambiguities, or downright contradictions.

V. Post-structural identities .

• Post-structural criticisms (feminist, racial, disablity) often try to deny the categories that make discrimination possible (race, gender, ability, etc).

• One radical feminist, Mary Daly, has attempted to re-define the dictionary in feminist deconstructivist terms (handout). You’ll notice a lot of puns, breaking words, capitalization in order to defamiliarize the “meaning” of the word and uncover the layers of différance inherent in it.