Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Secular Transcendence and False Consciousness

Postmodernism is often confused with poststructuralism, a roughly contemporary development in linguistic and literary studies that overlaps with it in significant ways. It would be incomplete, but not inaccurate, to call poststructuralism a postmodern linguistic philosophy, and sometimes the two terms appear to be used interchangeably. While this is not the place to attempt a full accounting of the murky details of their differences, it is possible to sketch out a rough distinction that is suitable for our purposes, so long as it is not taken as more definitive than it is. Postmodernism carries an implicit historical dimension within its name, as the period or era that comes after modernity, although this raises problems of its own that will be addressed in a later entry. Poststructuralism also contains the temporal adjective “post”, but what is being followed in this case is a system of thought or theoretical approach rather than a specific historical period. The former is connected in  significant ways to the particular conditions of contemporary life, while the latter is development of what was presented as a universally applicable model of knowledge and communication.

Thomas Cole, The Dream of the Architect, 1840, oil on canvas, Toledo Museum of Art

Cole depicts architecture as a succession of historical period styles. Postmodernism fits uncomfortably at the end of historical timelines such as this. Poststructuralism, on the other hand, is universal in its claims about language and representation.

Poststructuralism, as the name implies, developed in reaction to structuralism, a twentieth-century intellectual movement in linguistics, the social sciences, and philosophy, and it shares important assumptions with its predecessor. Structuralists viewed all human action and understanding as products of broad patterns or structures rather than collections of random, individualized activities. For example, pioneering figures in structuralist anthropology such as Claude Levi-Strauss and James Frazier, observed similar myths and rituals in very different cultures. The obvious problem with this approach – promoting broad, hopelessly oversimplified “structural interpretations” that ignore meaningful distinctions – meant little next to the siren song of hidden insights. Because structuralism was not simply pattern recognition, but a claim to grasp the true nature of human experience beneath the appearances of everyday life. The structures are what constitute the fundamental level of reality, while what we take for the real world, including our existences as autonomous, free-willed individuals, are merely an illusion. Ironically, this places structuralism within a larger “structure” of intellectual movements peddling secret knowledge into “the true nature of things” that stretches back to the dawn of history.

The craving for a deeper meaning behind the random and chaotic world of appearances seems as old as humanity. It is certainly at the heart of any religious system that posits a divine order behind our own, and can likewise be seen in the contemporary notion of biological determinism, which holds that our genes are the true source of our natures. While you can’t get much further apart than the inner depths of the genome and the outer reaches of the heavens, both postulate a relationship in which our conscious impression of the world is merely a flawed expression of an invisible primal substructure. Western philosophy began with the Pre-socratics offering up various `candidates for ultimate reality before Plato devised his concept of the Forms, timeless, ideal essential versions of the shoddy, superficial world that our bodies inhabit. Plato’s philosophy is dualistic, meaning that is considers the human to be made up of two parts: body and soul, matter and spirit, with the latter being the source of knowledge. The notion of the soul striving to escape the bonds of the material world and rejoin its divine source is an essentially religious perspective, and Plato’s ideas became the foundation of a mystical philosophy known as Neoplatonism in late antiquity, before profoundly influencing the development of Christianity. Eastern philosophy began with sages such as Gautama Buddha and Mahavira abandoning worldly attachments for meditative unity with the infinite oneness behind visible reality. Desire for some higher meaning or purpose behind the chaos and decay of the everyday life is so ubiquitous throughout human history that it seems reasonable to assume some sort of innate human drive for transcendence. Structuralism would appear to be one answer to the question of what happens to this impulse in a culture where metaphysical beliefs such as religion or mystical enlightenment have become unfashionable. 

Seated Buddha, 1st to mid-2nd century AD, Gandhara, bronze with traces of gold leaf, 16.8 cm high, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art

The affinities between ancient Greek and Buddhist thought are apparent in the remarkable Greco-Buddhist artworks that appeared in Gandhara on the border of the Indian and Hellenistic worlds.

The idea of secular transcendence, of a higher order behind experience that is entirely material in nature is paradoxical, but its appeal reaches far beyond the structuralists. Higher, “special” understanding without the humility of subordinating the ego to a greater power, or the grinding years of hard mental work and self-abnegation, is intoxicating to the poseurs and careerists in our intellectually diminished institutions. Spiritual matters fall outside the scope of empirical evidence and logical interpretation, which is why this blog will leave specifically religious questions to the realm of faith. It does, however, require an almost pathological degree of narcissism to seriously think that the clever insight of a single, finite, historically limited human subject could provide a precise, actionable summary of the fundamental nature of reality. 

The Flammarion engraving, from Camille Flammarion's L'atmosphère météorologie populaire, 1888.

This famous anonymous print captures the seductive allure of secret knowledge. Unfortunately, structuralist "transcendence" is relatively lacking in splendor.

No system of thought more closely resembles pathology than Marxism, a blood-drenched abattoir of a philosophy that has claimed more lives than any other ideology and is an important precursor to both structuralism and Postmodernism. On its face, its enduring popularity is difficult to believe. Marx allowed for no transcendence or divinity in his materialist world view yet saw no problem with positing a comically oversimplified economic relationship as the deepest substructure of human society on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. One would think the fact that he was simply mistaken would have dampened his popularity, but the opposite is true. His followers have continually attempted to implement his absurd misconceptions of human reality with two universally consistent outcomes: inevitable failures, and increasingly murderous frenzy as the failures mount.

Big fun in the People's Paradise, Soviet style.

There are actually several reasons that account for the sanguinary appeal of Marxism, beyond innate human depravity. Superficially, it aligns with a naïve impression of fairness, while tapping into the understandable anger and resentment of the disadvantaged. The childish simplicity of its basic precepts is within the grasp of the most ignorant, while the loathsome notion of false consciousness – the accusation that those rejecting the dismal, dishonest, two-dimensional characterizations are deluded – offers the dopamine rush of secret wisdom to those who submit. There is a similarity between the acceptance of Marxist fantasy and the way in which cults require their members to affirm obvious falsehoods as a sign of surrendering the self. Observing the behavior of these fantasists supports the hypothesis that they are disengaged from reality in ways that makes them especially vulnerable to manipulation and potentially prone to atrocities. Marxism is also a centrally planned and administrated system, which creates nodes of control that are easily leveraged by sociopaths who steer the useful idiots to their destruction with false blandishments and propaganda. The true danger in such a system is in the application it to real lived experience. The facile "theorizings" of a Marx or a Marcuse are easily ignored when confined to the world of philosophical thought experiment. But when the full force of state power imposes their barbarous “solutions” on the complexities and compromises on human society? 

Big fun in the People's Paradise, Venezuela style. 

It's almost like there's a pattern lying beneath the surface...

Structuralism follows Marxism in positing a deeper, though still purely material, level of reality beneath a false consciousness but recognizes that the structures of the former are much more complex than Marx’s foolish “means of production”. In other words, it maintains the form of secular transcendence while refining the quality of analysis. Whereas Marx proposed a crude economic relationship as the ultimate basis of reality, structuralism grew out of linguistic theory; particularly the speculations of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Saussure devised a new characterization of language as a self-contained system or structure, rather than an accumulation of individual symbols that are paired with and signify some concept(s) or thing(s). In both cases signs are arbitrary – tree and δέντρο appear different but refer to more or less the same thing – but the latter is essentially positive in that it treats each word as pointing to something or things other than itself. Saussure, on the other hand, sees language as a structuralist system, complete in itself and not pointing to anything external. This is not a surprising leap; language has rules of grammar and syntax and a network of informal conventions around connotation and figurative language that all suggest a systematic rule set. Even the assemblage of linguistic communications from letters to words to sentences and beyond reflects a structural operation. Yet for Saussure, these operations represent the sole ground upon which linguistic meaning happens.

Consider the following two sentences:

One is clearly literal and the other figurative, but the important question is how we determine in what sense the word is being used.  

He actually isn't wrong here.

In each case, we judge the meaning of the word on the basis of their role in the larger sentence. One pairing is literally incorrect and the other is not, so it is the role in a larger structure rather than anything inherent in the words themselves that determines how they are working in each instance. While it is true that this distinction is based on the truth-value of references to something outside the system, this can be set aside for the moment while we consider the primary enduring legacy of structuralist thought: If linguistic signs are arbitrary elements within a closed system, then the only sources of meaning are the operations of the system itself, or whatever it is that distinguishes one particular sign from all the other elements in the structure. In other words, meaning is transformed, on an essential level, from a positive association into an expression of difference. At heart, it is merely a void, or lack of similarity to anything else (within the system), rather than any sort of identifiable quality or essence. Any concept of “meaning” based on a positive identity is therefore illusory, a false consciousness masking a fundamental state of separation. 

  

Structural linguistics are like a spherical maze: a nearly endless array of structured paths and choices leading nowhere.

While there is value in systematic analyses of linguistic function, structuralism, like “theory” in general, manages to transform interesting observations into ossified, simplistic formulae that fail to capture the complexity and nuance of that they purport to theorize. It is simply not smart enough to account for the fullness of human reality, which is why in invariably fails miserably whenever implemented in real life. The world is infinitely complex, an aggregate of countless unpredictable actions and reactions, and yet patterns are visible within this chaos that enable understanding and even prediction. Structuralist thought, like secular transcendence in general, is sensitive to patterns (or, more accurately, a pattern) but is incapable of accounting for the complexity that necessarily limits the applicability of any theoretical abstraction. It's not a square peg that it is trying to jam into a round hole, as much as a flock of butterflies. Nevertheless, these structures were awarded the unearned truth value and almost totemic reverence that is given to any system of secular transcendence. In fact, slavish adherence to the structuralist model actually led educated individuals to claim, straight faced, that works of literature do not originate in an author but are aspects of the structure expressing themselves through a certain person. Were this the case, perhaps I would be the system expressing an antidote to shoddy thinking.  

  

Giotto, The Exorcism of the Demons at Arezzo, 1297-99, fresco, 270 x 230 cm, from the Legend of St Francis series, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi

History is replete with dishonest peddlers of secret knowledge into the true nature of things. The forms vary, but the cure remains constant. 

This detour through structuralism is necessary to properly contextualize poststructuralism, an approach most often connected to Jacques Derrida, who is a legitimate handful to deal with, and the subject of more than one future post. Unlike many Postmodern heroes, Derrida is devilishly clever and very hard to pin down, but the structuralist notion that meaning is fundamentally an absence/void/aporia defined only by difference, is one unifying theme throughout his work. One problem with structuralism is that is cannot account for change, and it is well known historically that language evolves rather than remaining in fixed structures. Derrida imagines a system that remains essentially cut off from any external reference but is fluid and evolving. A philosophical oversimplification, though not an unfair one, would be to say he marries Saussure to Heidegger's notion of being as something constantly unfolding, rather than a fixed state, in our time-bound world. However, where Heidegger imagines some sort of transcendence or ultimate reality beyond the range of our understanding or representation (in the later stages of his career, Heidegger recalls Plotinus, or even Eckhart, for the mystical cast to his thought), for Derrida, the recursive, structuralist notion of language is all there is. It is not transcendence hiding behind our flawed apprehension, but an endless, self-referential chain that ultimately leads to nowhere.   

Luca Signorelli, Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, detail, 1499-1504, S. Brixio Chapel, Orvieto Cathedral

There is something diabolical in the way Derrida weaves complicated textual webs that hint at meaning, but are, at the end of the day, purely self-referential. The jury is out on whether or not he invalidated "meaning" in general, but it is clear that his work at least manages to remain resolutely solipsistic.

By setting structuralism in motion, Derrida was able to account for some of other shortcomings in the older system. Returning, for a moment, to the comparison between the two sentences made earlier, we will recall that we differentiated between literal and figurative language on the basis of their references to things or subjects outside the system. This is a problem, since the very concept of structuralist difference depends on the complete lack of external associations. Derrida maneuvered around this with something he called “the Trace,” a ghostly hint of positive reference based on previous associations and usages, despite those earlier references being no more than false assumptions or illusions. While there is no outside the text in reality, as he famously remarked,  the Trace preserves the illusion of external meaning to enable the functional interactions that make up society. 

There is a sinister genius in this formation, since it accounts for the sense of meaning we feel in lived experience, while retaining the notion that reality as we assume it to be is fundamentally empty. This right here is a primary root of all the attacks on culture and knowledge associated with poststructuralist thought, which differ wildly in detail but a common form:

A closer glance reveals a familiar pattern: a false consciousness of the way things are that masks and interacts with the hidden true nature of reality. In other words, a secular transcendence; a top down system where highly speculative, and quite often spurious readings of various phenomena enjoy a toxic, unearned reverence. Derrida’s obsessive insistence on the primacy of language in human communication alone ought to disqualify his speculations from serious consideration for real world guidance. 

Wall Painting With Horses, Rhinoceroses, and Aurochs, c. 32,000-30,000 BC, Chauvet Cave. Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche Gorge, France

This painting is over 32,000 years old and greatly predates complex language development. Historical and archaeological indicate that mimetic representation, or imitative associations with external objects, is the primary human basis for interacting with the world. This is exactly the sort of developing factual picture that totalizing ideologies ignore. It is true that this knowledge post-dates Saussure, but any modern thinker who proposes a linguistic foundation for understanding without addressing human cognition is deliberately dishonest. 

At the same time, Derridean thought has spawned some useful critical tools that are highly effective in the appropriate circumstances. The most famous of these is commonly known as deconstruction for its use of internal contradictions within a text to undermine its assertions, rather than attacking it from the outside with competing facts and arguments. The next post will adapt a  deconstructive method to lay bare the fundamental incoherence and hypocrisy at the heart of Postmodern theory.