David Herman

Department of English
North Carolina State University
dherman@unity.ncsu.edu

 

François Dosse, History of Structuralism, Vols. I (The Rising Sign, 1945-1966) and II (The Sign Sets, 1967-Present). Translated by Deborah Glassman. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

 

Believe it or not, this two-volume, 975-page history of French structuralism, originally published in French in 1991-1992 and based on interviews with some 123 French academics and intellectuals, reads like a good novel. Once you pick it up, it is hard to put Dosse’s History down. From the beginning, structuralism makes for an ideal protagonist, fighting against impossible odds and winning our sympathies throughout all its difficulties and vicissitudes. Indeed, in Dosse’s account the early structuralists come across as heroic revolutionaries, underdogs opposed by powerful reactionary forces visibly operative at the Sorbonne, but deeply entrenched in French academe at large (I: 191-201). In these postpoststructuralist times, it is easy to forget that the structuralists were in fact the Young Turks of their day. They were articulate champions of avant-garde literature and art (II: 154-55, 200-206), formidable analysts of specifically sociopolitical structures (I: 142-57, 309-15; II: 247-59), tireless promoters of intellectual revitalization, ingenious methodological innovators (I: 202-22), and fearless breakers-down of accepted disciplinary boundaries. At the same time, Dosse engrossingly emplots the structuralist adventure in France as a particular kind of rise and fall: after revolutionizing philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory and the social sciences, structuralism died a spectacular death, and no disciplinary tradition will ever be the same. This overarching plot allows the author to attach localized episodes to his ongoing historical narrative. Thus, whereas the structuralist dissolution of the subject proved untenable and was ultimately abandoned, it forced a rethinking of the kind of subjectivity that underwrote prestructuralist humanism (II: 324-63). The same goes for the banishment of history from the domain of structuralist analysis (I: 181-83; II: 364-375, 427-36); history is back, but it is not the same as it used to be. What is more, Dosse’s character vignettes make such reversals (or perhaps zigzags) of fortune come palpably alive. The two volumes are studded with portraits of major and minor figures who lived the structuralist revolution and its aftermath–from Roman Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Algirdas Julien Greimas, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Oswald Ducrot, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, to Gaston Berger, Jean-Marie Auzias, Louis Hay, Joseph Sumpf and Jean-Marie Benoist, among many others.

 

Here emerges a second assumption at the basis of Dosse’s account: that the history of structuralist thought reduces, at one level of analysis, to a collocation of the biographies of its proponents, fellow-travellers, and detractors. This is therefore a history that takes shape through an encyclopedic assemblage of highly memorable images: Lévi-Strauss being dazzled in the early 1940s by Roman Jakobson’s classes on sound and meaning at the New School for Social Research, while both men were in exile from Europe (I: 12, 21-24); Barthes finding his way to Greimas in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1949 and undergoing his fateful semiological conversion, like a Saint Paul converted on the way to Damascus (I: 68, 74); Lacan implementing his principle of “scansion,” or pointed break, by cutting short his sessions and thus multiplying the number of patients he could see and charge (I: 95-97); Foucault brilliantly defending his thesis on the history of madness in 1961, amazing a thesis committee that included Georges Canguilhem and Jean Hyppolite (I: 150); André Martinet lecturing to classes of six hundred students during the height of linguistics’ popularity as a “pilot science” for structuralist theorizing (I: 192); Nicolas Ruwet reading a text on generative grammar on the train from Liège to Paris and embracing the Chomskyean model by the time he arrived (II: 4); Derrida opposing Lacan’s candidacy to become head of the department of psychoanalysis being founded in the late 1960s at the then-experimental university at Vincennes (II: 148); Tzvetan Todorov being profoundly transformed, shifting from formalist to more broadly socioideological concerns, as a result of his 1981 translation of Bakhtin’s writings (II: 324-326); and the “master thinkers” of structuralism–Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Althusser–all dying in relatively quick succession in the span of a decade (II: 376-90). Such character profiles help make Dosse’s History of Structuralism a gripping, eminently readable account of a period that has proved foundational for subsequent work in literary and cultural theory. More than that, though, the biographical sketches ensure that the text will be an indispensable reference work for anyone interested in recent intellectual history, particularly the history of philosophy, literary studies, and the social sciences in postwar France.

 

Yet a catalogue of the experiences of (more or less renowned) structuralist thinkers does not suffice to explain what structuralism was or why it exerted such a tenacious hold on the French imagination during the later 1950s, the 1960s, and the 1970s. Nor is the telling of structuralism’s rise and fall tantamount to an evaluation of its significance, an assessment of what its history might mean for those of us living in its wake. What makes documentation of the structuralist enterprise more than just antiquarianism in Nietzsche’s sense, an inert chronicling divorced from the concerns that define the epoch of the present? At the outset, Dosse points to

 

the necessity of illuminating the richness and productivity of structuralism before seizing upon its limits. This is the adventure that we will undertake here. Notwithstanding the dead ends into which structuralism has run on occasion, it has changed the way we consider human society so much that it is no longer even possible to think without taking the structuralist revolution into account. (I: xxiii)

 

Historicizing structuralist thought, then, also involves a reconsideration of the extent to which we can call ourselves “beyond” structuralism. To think today about language, literature, society, identity and their interconnections is to live a certain relationship to structuralism–to its origins, presuppositions, methodologies, and aims. Dosse’s achievement–no small feat–is to help us live that relationship more critically; his History expands the range of contexts in which the structuralist legacy can itself become an object of inquiry.

 

It is worth recalling that the provenance of the term structuralism is essentially linguistic (I: xxii). Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, and Hjelmslev, extending and refining the model developed in Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, all referred to a “structural linguistics” in their work during the years preceding WWII. Significantly, although Saussure used the word system 138 times in the Course, not once did he use structuralism, which apparently was Jakobson’s coinage (I: 45). Saussure’s model was distinguished by two major features, which Dosse also detects in structuralist extrapolations from the Course. First, the model emphasized the synchronic relations between the elements constituting the linguistic system, as opposed to the diachronic relations between earlier and later stages of a given system or between earlier and later versions of a particular linguistic variant. There is thus a conscious analytic decision to background the historicity of systems/structures, a decision that inflected the work of the French structuralists. In this light, Dosse describes Ferdnand Braudel’s focus on the longue durée as an effort on the part of the Annales historians to reconcile structure and history, i.e., “to slow down temporality” (II: 229) and frame a “history of inertias” (II: 230). Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) works toward an analogous neutralization of diachrony (II: 234-46). Second, Saussure’s model focused on signifiers (sound-images) and signifieds (concepts) to the exclusion of extralinguistic referents and, more generally, the circumstances of enunciation.¹ Hence, from a Saussurean perspective “the linguistic unit…always points to all the other units in a purely endogenous combinatory activity” (I: 48). Structuralists similarly favored the construction and formalization of abstract relational networks, in a way that often set structuralists and Marxists, for example, at odds with one another (II: 88-98: cf. I: 306-308).

 

Saussure’s approach was the governing paradigm for the linguists affiliated with the Prague and Geneva Schools in the 1920s and 1930s; but it was an article written in 1956 by Greimas, “L’actualité du saussurisme,” that generalized the appeal of Saussure’s ideas and highlighted connections between Saussurean linguistics and the work of Merleau-Ponty, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan (I: 45). An earlier event, already mentioned, was even more crucial in this context. Lévi-Strauss’s discussions with Jakobson at the New School for Social Research resulted in the former’s adoption of structuralist phonology as a model for anthropological research. Thus, in Structural Anthropology (1958) Lévi-Strauss wrote: “Like phonemes, kinship terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning only if they are integrated into systems” (quoted at I: 22).² Dosse identifies 1964, however, as the year of the real “semiological breakthrough” (I: 203-209). Communications published an issue that included articles by Todorov on formal techniques for analyzing literary signification, Bremond on the possibilities and limits of Propp’s groundbreaking Morphology of the Folktale (1928), and Barthes on Saussurean linguistics and Hjelmslev’s glossematics as tools for semiological analysis. In the same year, Barthes published Critical Essays, which included his programmatic statement of “The Structuralist Activity,” defined as an activity that transcends the division between science and art and that aims “to reconstitute an object in such a way as to reveal the rules by which the object functions” (quoted at I: 207). In this sense, Mondrian and Butor, as well as Troubetzkoy and Dumézil, could be brought under the structuralist aegis.

 

It was during the 1960s, too, that structuralism developed the “ideology of rigor” (I: 219) for which it would later become notorious. In The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), Lévi-Strauss had already whetted the French appetite for scientificity. From the start he drew on linguistic and mathematical models in an effort to establish anthropology, and the social sciences more generally, on the same footing as the natural sciences (I: 23-24; cf. I: 259-61 and II: 197-99). Likewise, Lacan framed his “return to Freud” using linguistic and mathematical formalisms; both were part of an attempt to demedicalize the psychoanalytic project and rescientize it on other grounds. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957) included references to Saussure and Jakobson and diagrammed the operations of the sign to argue that the unconscious is structured like a language (I: 105-10). By 1970, though, Lacan had turned from linguistic to topological demonstrations:

 

Lacan gave more and more seminars on topological figures, including graphs and tores, and on stage he used string and ribbons of paper, which he snipped into smaller and smaller pieces to demonstrate that there was neither inside nor outside in these Borromean knots. The world was fantasy, and sat beyond intraworldly reality; its unity was accessible only through what is missing in languages. "Mathematization alone achieves a reality, a reality that has nothing to do with what traditional knowledge has sustained...." (II: 196-97)³

 

Meanwhile, Althusser and his followers (including Pierre Macherey, Michel Pêcheux, and Étienne Balibar) tapped into the “ambient climate of scientism” (I: 290). During what Dosse calls “The Althusserian Explosion” (I: 293-308), the scientificity of a properly Marxist discourse–a mode of theorizing that was to have fully extricated itself from ideology–became an explicit and canonical theme. Indeed, no longer content to measure its progress within specific disciplines, with Althusser structuralism broadened its horizons “to include a structuralist philosophy that presented itself as such, and as the expression of the end of philosophy, the possibility of reaching beyond philosophy in the name of theory” (I: 295-6). Thus Althusser did not hesitate to give lessons in scientificity to practicing scientists (I: 392).

 

What remains to be explained, however, is why the ideology of rigor, the climate of scientism enabling and pervading the struturalist revolution, became such a dominant force in France during this period. According to Dosse, the problematic status of the social sciences in postwar France created an environment especially–perhaps uniquely–favorable to structuralism. Volume I opens with the claim that the birth of structuralism came at the cost of the death of existentialism. Yet the reaction against Sartre is contextualized as only part of a larger antiacademic revolt (I: 380-93). This was a time when the social sciences were forcing their own institutional recognition, and Sartre’s philosophy of the subject had made no effort to establish a middle ground between the traditional humanities and the hard sciences (I: 4-5; cf. I: 382-83). Indeed, after the war “the weight of the humanities in France blocked the social sciences within the French university, contrary to the situation in the American universities, where they were triumphing” (I: 391). The structuralist revolution thus represented a broad-based attempt by the philosophical avant-garde and the nascent social sciences to make a place for themselves within a recalcitrant French university, notorious for its highly centralized and routinized modus operandi. To those embroiled in debates about how best to reconfigure instructional practice and the organization of the academic disciplines, structuralism appeared as a unifying, transdisciplinary project that could “confederate the human sciences around the study of the sign” (I: 388). Once those sciences established themselves methodologically and secured their institutional footing, disciplinary segregation set in again and weakened the hold of structuralism as a quasi-universal research paradigm (II: 276ff.).⁴ Domains of inquiry that fell outside structuralist theorizing now started to gain more attention: the dialogic and more broadly intersubjective aspects of communication (II: 325-31); ethical concerns (II: 282-87); biography and autobiography as routes to knowledge of the subject (II: 354-56); the role of events in a history once more viewed as dynamic and irreversible (II: 373-375).

 

Dosse addresses his main topic in this study–i.e., the philosophical and social-scientific contexts of structuralism’s rise and fall–in a remarkably compelling way, interspersing textual analysis with quotations from interviews, citations from reviews of major structuralist publications, and tabulations of the number of books sold by key structuralist authors from year to year. The two volumes weave a rich tapestry of biography, historico-institutional analysis, critical exegesis, and synoptic commentary on the migration of structuralist concepts and methods from one area of inquiry to another. This is not to say that the History is without flaws, however. For example, when the author turns from the analysis of particular structuralists and structuralist works and begins to make larger claims about precedents for structuralism, his account sometimes loses focus and cogency. Consider this passage from a chapter towards the end of the first volume, “The Postmodern Hour Sounds” (351-63), where careful argumentation sometimes gives way to stylistic exuberance:

 

Western society underwent a number of changes during the interwar years that...upset the relationship between past, present and future. The future was reduced by computerized programming to little more than a projected reproduction of the present, but it was impossible to think a different future....this atemporal relationship became fragmented into myriad uncorrelated objects, a segmentation of partial and disarticulated knowledge, a disaggregation of the general field of understanding, and the gutting of any real contents. This socioeconomic mulch would particularly nurture a structural logic, symptomatic reading, logicism or formalism that would find its coherence elsewhere than in the world of flat realia. (I: 357)

 

It would take a lot of work, doubtless, to substantiate these statements. Contrast with such hyperbolic claims problems of the opposite sort: more or less serious omissions, elisions, and foreshortenings.⁵ For instance, apart from two brief mentions of The Postmodern Condition (I: 354, 360), Dosse omits any discussion of the work of Jean-François Lyotard, whose intellectual biography (tracing a route from phenomenology to psychoanalysis and Marxism to post-Wittgensteinian theories of enunciation) in many ways parallels the history of structuralism. Later, Dosse too quickly assimilates the positions of Barthes and Foucault in their respective essays on “The Death of the Author” and “What Is an Author?” (II: 124). In actual fact, Foucault, far from belonging to the “strict structuralist orthodoxy” on this question, contested Barthes’ claim that authors have simply died off at the hands of modern-day écriture. Instead, Foucault argued for a genealogical approach to the author viewed as a function specifying how discourses can be produced and read in different eras.⁶

 

What is more, readers interested in learning about the historical relations between structuralism and feminism–or even about how women as a group responded to structuralist thought–will be disappointed by this text. It is true that, in the unmarked case, structuralism was gendered male. Yet feminists too have oriented themselves around the sciences of the sign and, inversely, the rethinking of structuralism as a dominant research paradigm was bound up with the development of feminism construed as a way of thinking about thinking itself.[7] Nonetheless, the only female figure to make more than a fleeting appearance in this History is Julia Kristeva. Note that she is introduced in a chapter subtitled “Julia Comes to Paris” (I: 343-48): women, it seems, are the only historical personages with whom we can presume to be on a first-name basis. Further, Dosse suggests that it was Kristeva’s marriage to Philippe Sollers that “sealed Kristeva’s intellectual place within Tel Quel” and quotes one of Sollers’ remarks about “‘her grace, her sensuality, [and] this union between grace and physical beauty and her capacity for reflection” (I: 344). In no other case does the author attribute a scholar’s “intellectual place” to marriage, and no other theorist is described in any physical detail, let alone as “sensual.”

 

Dosse’s overall achievement, however, should not be underestimated. This text contains a wealth of useful information, stylishly and convincingly presented. One of the most interesting chapters is an overview of the new journals founded during the heyday of structuralism (I: 273-83; cf. II: 154-63). Dosse describes the conditions of emergence of journals like La Psychanalyse (founded by Lacan in 1956), Langages (1966), Communications (1961), Tel Quel (1960), La Nouvelle Critique (1967), and Les Cahiers pour l’analyse (1966), reviewing the main editorial mission in each case. Equally illuminating is the author’s account of the radical protests of May 1968 and their effect on structuralism and individual structuralists (II: 112-132). Whereas Greimas was of the opinion that “‘All scientific projects will be set back twenty years'” (II: 114), Lacan boldly proclaimed during an argument with Lucien Goldmann: “‘If the events of May [1968] demonstrated anything at all, they showed…precisely that structures had taken to the streets!'” (II: 122). Lacan proved to be right: the protest movement sided with the structuralist critique of academic traditionalism and, in its dissatisfaction with received educational practices, reinforced the structuralist desire for scientific rigor (II: 128-30). One of the lesser-known episodes in the history of structuralism involves geography, and Dosse provides a fascinating glimpse into the delayed transformation of an “objectless discipline” via structuralism (II: 312-23). This incident confirms that the impact of structuralism on the separate social sciences was nonsynchronous. Even though structuralism prioritized spatial relations at the expense of historical analysis, creating an environment that would seem to favor a reexamination of cartographic techniques, geographers at first failed to structuralize their discipline. But there was a discipline-specific reason for this:

 

geography in the sixties had continued to be defined as a science of the relationship between nature and culture, between the elements of geomorphology and climatology and those belonging to the human valorization of natural conditions. Consequently, the structuralist ambition of basing the sciences of man solely on culture, modeled by linguistic rules, appeared somewhat foreign to the geographer's concerns for basing disciplinary unity on the correlationship [?] between levels of nature and culture. (II: 312)

 

Starting in the 1970s, however, geographers such as Yves Lacoste drew on structuralist ideas to distinguish between “space as a real object and as an object of knowledge” (II: 317). Foucault’s work on observation and the logic of spatial organization also came into play. By 1980, Roger Brunet had developed the notion of the “choreme,” the geographical equivalent of the phoneme and “the smallest distinctive unit for describing graphic language around elementary spatial structures” (II: 323). This latecomer to structuralist theorizing had revolutionized itself, even as the structuralist paradigm was on the wane.

 

What does it mean, though, to talk about the “fall” of structuralism? Arguably, like other falls in other myths, this fall has not been a bounded, discrete event; it remains a fall in progress, one that we continue to live. Granted, developments in the human sciences during the last twenty-five years have enabled us to demystify the structuralists’ idealization–and ideologization–of scientific rigor. As Dosse’s study reveals, a discipline’s valorization of science does not ipso facto make that discipline scientific. Nor, for that matter, was Saussurean linguistics the best candidate for a pilot science, even during the glory days of structuralism. By the 1950s and 1960s, linguistic praxis (outside France at least) had already superseded the theory of language that the structuralists took over from Saussure.⁸ Judged on the basis of criteria internal to structuralist theory, then, structuralism fell short of the absolute rigor to which it aspired. Its future-looking scientism masked a nostalgia for the Saussurean sign. Paradoxically, however, structuralism’s undoing marked a first step towards the lofty goals that it had envisaged, the tough investigative standards that it had set. A theory can be exact only insofar as it knows where its exactness breaks down. The structuralists, in passing through “The Mirage of Formalization” (II: 191-99), have taught us some of formalization’s limits. At the same time, it is at our own peril that we ignore the richness and fecundity of their efforts to formalize–to frame explicit models for the description and explanation of a wide variety of phenomena, literary, linguistic, anthropological, historical, geographical, socioeconomic. Indeed, the history of structuralist thought is the history of a refusal to view languages and texts, human beings and cultures, as random assemblages of inexplicable elements. That refusal amounts of course to an infinite task. But structuralism’s fall has made it easier to grasp both the impossibility of wholly rigorous explanations and the necessity of attempting them.

 

Notes

 

1. In 1939, however, Émile Benveniste argued that despite Saussure’s stated position, his approach presupposed a concept of the referent. For Benveniste, Saussure’s arguments about the arbitrariness of the sign did not prove that concepts and sound-images are only arbitrarily related; indeed, if the signifier-signified relation were truly arbitrary, languages would lack the systematicity that enables communication. (In such a scenario, if I said structuralism you would have no way of knowing whether I meant lukewarm, Montana, postmodernism, or indefinitely many other possible candidates.) What Saussure’s arguments demonstrated, rather, was that different systems of signification–i.e., different languages–relate to referents in a merely conventional way. Thus referring expressions from different languages are inter-translatable precisely because no single language stands in a natural, non-conventional relation to a given domain of referents.

 

2. For a devastating critique of Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to use phonological notions to build a theory of the combinatory patterns of “mythemes,” see Pavel 18-37.

 

3. Dosse takes this quotation from Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XX, Encore (1973-1974) (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 118.

 

4. The author identifies other causes for structuralism’s decline as well. For example, Dosse discusses the shock waves set off by the translation of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago into French in 1974. This book had an especially powerful effect on those who followed Althusser in propounding a structural Marxism (II: 269-75).

 

5. A third class of problems must be ascribed not to Dosse but to the translator. Usually supple, lively, and accurate, the translation does have a few glitches, as when Glassman offers nonstandard translations of well-known titles (e.g., Logical Searches for Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen) and contorts English syntax in sentences like “The avoidance of a certain number of properly philosophical questions, by choosing the social sciences, had led people to think that with structuralism, questions on ethics and metaphysics were made obsolete once and for all” (II: 282).

 

6. In other places, however, Dosse writes persuasively about Foucault’s complex relationship with structuralism. There is for example an excellent assessment of The Order of Things in Volume I (330-42).

 

7. The formulation is Myra Jehlen’s (95).

 

8. Pavel (125-44) discusses ways in which structuralism grew out of the delayed exposure of French linguistics and philosophy of language to ideas developed elsewhere, particularly in the neopositivist tradition associated with the Vienna Circle and in Anglo-American language theory.

 

Works Cited

 

• Benveniste, Émile. “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Eds. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: UPs of Florida, 1986. 725-28.
• Jehlen, Myra. “Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991. 75-96.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” Untimely Meditations. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 59-123.
• Pavel, Thomas G. The Feud of Language: A History of Structuralist Thought. Trans. Linda Jordan and Thomas G. Pavel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989.