Linguistic structuralism

Language is form rather than substance: a combination of sounds means something only inside a particular linguistic system, so meaning is a matter of relations, not of things.

Put simply Saussure: language is a pattern, not a stuff. A combination of sounds means something only inside a particular language, so meaning comes from how words relate to one another, not from the things they name.

Every state a language passes through has, in Saussure's phrase, an "ever fortuitous nature": languages arise through arbitrary contingencies, not by anyone's design, Esperanto being a partial exception.

Put simply Saussure: chance shapes a language at every stage. Nobody designed languages; they arose through countless accidents. Esperanto, an invented language, is a partial exception.

Nothing natural or God-given ties a signifier to its signified: the word dog refers to dogs only by differing from cat and hog, and by sheer convention.

Put simply Saussure: nothing in nature or from God ties a word (the "signifier") to what it means (the "signified"). "Dog" means dog only because it differs from "cat" and "hog", and because speakers have settled on it.

Shore places structuralism with the other answers to God's death: one more attempt to fill religion's empty place and quiet the alienation and groundlessness it left behind.

Put simply Shore: structuralism is another answer to the loss of God, one more attempt to fill religion's empty place and ease the feeling of homelessness and having no firm ground that it left.

Structuralism responds to problems that preoccupied earlier thinkers, teleology and subjectivity, by diminishing both: in some ways it brackets history and the subject.

Put simply Shore: earlier thinkers worried about where history is heading and about the individual self. Structuralism handles both by making them matter less; in a way it sets history and the self aside.

Structuralists meet Hegelians on totality: a sign means something only within a whole that holds everything in place, so faint echoes of Hegel persist even on the synchronic plane.

Put simply Shore hears a faint echo of Hegel in structuralism: a sign means something only inside a whole system that holds everything in place, even when the system is studied at a single moment.

As Shore reports the structuralists, language need not voice or mirror a meaning already present: it produces that meaning, and signs structure the way we think.

Put simply Shore's account of the structuralists: language does not just express or mirror meanings that already exist. It creates meaning, and words shape how we think.

Kinship can be read as a language: its relations form a system on Saussure's model, where each term has value only by differing from the others.

Put simply Lévi-Strauss: family relationships work like a language. As with Saussure's words, each relation means something only through how it differs from the other relations in the system.

In structuralism the subject is radically decentered: meaning is not something people produce; language produces people, more than the reverse.

Put simply Shore: in structuralism the individual is pushed from the center. People do not make meaning; language makes people, more than the other way round.

Bracketing subject and object alike and studying only how signifiers interact is structuralism's own route past the bridge problem of how subject reaches world.

Put simply Shore: philosophy long asked how the mind can reach the world outside it. Structuralism sidesteps the question by setting aside both mind and world and studying only how signs relate to one another.

Structuralism is ahistorical, and amoralizing too, in that it tends to steer clear of value judgments.

Put simply Shore: structuralism sets history aside, and it tends to avoid judging things as good or bad.

Foucault, in Shore's placement, sits on the threshold: no longer quite a structuralist, but not as radically post-structuralist as Derrida.

No statement is neutral or free-standing; each sits within a series, leans on other statements while setting itself apart from them, and means what it means through that network.

Put simply Foucault: no statement stands alone or neutral. Each belongs to a series, leans on other statements while marking itself off from them, and gets its meaning from that web.