Roland Barthes
I.
THE STRUCTURALIST ACTIVITY
What is structuralism? Not a school, nor even a movement
(at least, not yet), for most of the authors ordinarily labeled with this
word are unaware of being united by any solidarity of doctrine or
commitment. Nor is it a vocabulary.
Structure
is already an old word
(of anatomical and grammatical provenance), today quite over–
worked: all the social sciences resort to it abundantly, and the word's
use can distinguish no one, except to engage in polemics about the
content assigned to it;
functions) forms ) signs
and
significations
are
scarcely more pertinent: they are, today, words of common usage,
from which one asks (and obtains ) whatever one wants, notably the
camouflage of the old determinist schema of cause and product; we
must doubtless go back to pairings like those of
significans
/
significatum
and
synchronic/diachronic
in order to approach what distinguishes
structuralism from other modes of thought: the first because it refers
to the linguistic model as originated by Saussure, and because along
with economics, linguistics is, in the present state of affairs, the true
science of structure, the second, more decisively, because it seems to
imply a certain revision of the notion of history, insofar as the notion
of the synchronic (although in Saussure this is a preeminently
0
pera–
tional
concept ) accredits a certain immobilization of time, and insofar
as that of the diachronic tends to represent the historical process as a
pure succession of forms. This second pairing is all the more distinctive
in that the chief resistance to structuralism today seems to be of Marxist
origin and that it focuses on the notion of history (and not of struc–
ture); whatever the case, it is probably the serious recourse to the
From
Essais Critiques
by Roland Barthes. Copyright
©
1964 by Editions du
Seuil.
