Structuralism

Structuralism

So today I’m going to talk about structuralism. I’ve decided to take a stab at the quote

"the bond between the signifier and the signified is radically arbitrary" (35)

from the list Dr. McGure put up on her blog. While trying to talk about structuralism having read the chapter about post structuralism proves to be a challenge (in that everything is now more confusing and complicated), I feel that this quote represents the most important part of structuralism by which post structuralism was born. It’s no big secret that signifiers and things that are signified have no direct correlation in language (except for words like buzz, but that’s not really the point and there’s only like a dozen of them anyways), but I like the fact that if you really sit down and think about it, the consequences of such can have radical implications as to the meaning of language. If structuralism argues that all meanings to words, or anything in a culture for that matter, are arbitrary, then no meaning is predetermined, and so all meanings can change in any way at any point for any reason. Now while this might not seem obvious to so many people is because it feels like meanings are fixed; the language that we speak is very similar to our parents’ and our children’s language will differ little from ours. As a matter of fact, those elements of language that do change rapidly and unpredictably (like slang and catch phrases) are considered to be of little value to that big scary thing we like to call the “Dominant Ideology”. If all meanings can change, then there is no fixed center of meaning, and there are infinite interpretations of almost any kind of text. Follow that logic to its end, and I believe that we get to that even bigger and scarier thing we’ve now started to call post structuralism.

I’m not going to pretend that I understand post structuralism yet, but while I was working on a video for a friend I came up with this little analogy. I like to think of structuralism as being like a radical hippie or something that challenges all of the conventions and predetermined notions of its elders in pursuit of ever expanding knowledge, understanding, and more ways of thinking. With that being said, post structuralism is kind of like structuralism’s free spirited child, except as soon as it was born it promptly turned around and strangled its mother to death, arguably taking many turbulent years for the last air to finally escape its poor open-minded lungs.

I know that doesn't actually explain anything about post structuralism, but I liked it. I even called my friend who's video I was working on, and he thought it was clever, so there you go.