THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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may be considered self-enclosed and self-sufficient. One signifier is
explicated by another. I think it fair to say that structuralism is far
more concerned with
langue
than with
parole,
since language secretes
the several codes which define the practical possibilities of speech
and, indeed, sets limits upon them. The relation between language
and speech is deemed to be largely the dominance of the first over the
second. The first (language), is the only term which could be made
the object of a single science.
It
follows that structuralists are much
more interested in relations than in attributes; they are not concerned
with attributes or terms as independent entities, but with the relations
between them, and especially with dual or binary relations.
It
is
customary to say that for a structuralist a door is either open or
closed. And since the object of scientific attention is the system of
signs, structuralists are more concerned with the system as the present
state of its relations rather than with the process by which the system
has come to
be
thus and not other. Historical or genetic questions are
deemed to be secondary issues. In a linguistic system, the crucial
question is the relatedness of values at the present moment. Language
is not considered as nomenclature but as a structure of values in
mutual tension. Structuralists are not interested in the indicative or
univocal relation between the word "table" and the object on which
they lean to write their essays; they are interested in the word as
signifier, related by difference to all the other signifiers on the same
linguistic level.
The question we have to propose at this point is simple enough:
can we find any single motive which prompts structuralism toward
the several principles which join
to
define it? Suppose we argue, for
instance, that structuralism is an attempt
to
subdue the force of time,
or temporal pressure, in the understanding of the matter in hand:
what would follow? We can readily admit that people have been
willing to think that they understand something by understanding
how it has come to be.
If
one thing happens after another, we assume
that it has happened because of the other. In reading a novel, we
assume that the events in the fifth chapter depend upon the events in
the preceding four. Barthes has considered this question in one of the
fundamental essays of structuralism, his "Introduction to the Struc–
tural Analysis of Narrative" (1966). He conceded that opinions differed
on the question. Vladimir Propp insisted that the chronological order
is irreducible: the story is bound to the orthodoxy and consequence of
beginning, middle, and end. But other structuralists, including Levi–
Strauss, Greimas, Bremond, and Todorov continue to posit an
