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Structuralism
Published in Anthony Elliott, Charles Lemert, Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory, 2022
Anthony Elliott, Charles Lemert
To say that we might be the ‘passive prisoners of signs’ is to move into territory that social theorists term ‘structuralism’. Structuralism flourished in the 1960s as an attempt to apply the insights of linguistics to the study of the impersonal effects of social structures and political systems. As its name suggests, structuralism proceeds from the notion that people live their lives within the context of larger structures – social, cultural, political and historical – and that such structures shape and even determine individual decisions, choices, beliefs and values. Structuralism in general is an attempt to shift away from the humanistic viewpoint that people are self-directing, autonomous agents and to focus instead on the structures which give coherence, regularity and meaning to social interactions. Language is taken as the central model of analysis in structuralism, on the grounds that individual speech – as a universal element of all societies and cultures – would not be possible without an enabling structure to give words meaning. The words that I am writing now, for instance, are able to convey meaning only to the extent to which they accord with the structural rules of language – and structuralism is thus an attempt to interrogate such linguistic rules governing objects, events and interactions in fields beyond language itself. In this chapter, we will look in detail at structuralist social theory, starting with the methods developed in structural linguistics. We will then turn to consider how these methods came to be applied to social analysis in the writings of influential public intellectuals associated with structuralism, principally Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. Throughout, the aim is to scrutinize the structuralist method for understanding the production of a social world teeming with signs.
A comparative longevity study of traditional buildings between rural and urban areas in Pearl River Delta, China
Published in Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 2023
In the 1960s, many theories and practices emerged with the aim of resolving the problems caused by the modernism movement and to achieve longevity, such as Structuralism, Open Building (OB), and Typology. They attempted to reveal and emphasize on the essence of the interrelation between human behavior and the built environment. Structuralism is the belief that the phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrelations. These relations constitute a structure, and behind local variations in the surface phenomena there are constant laws of abstract culture (Blackburn 2008). Many architects and researchers, especially the group of Team 10, have made many efforts to apply this method in architectural domain. As the key members of Team 10, Alison and Peter Smithson and Aldo van Eyck have advocated several major concepts with affinity of human being concerns, including “belonging,” “transitional space,” “in-between,” “growth patterns,” and the later comprehensive concept of “cluster”. These concepts are all closely connected to the human behavior (Yuan and Wang 2009). As a theory and methodology with strong connection to structuralism, OB theory offers clear illustrations by systematically integrating the built environment, people, and temporary dimension. It was proposed by N. J. Habraken in the 1960s that aimed at enhancing the efficiency of the building process, while increasing the variety, flexibility, and quality of the product. In general, the best buildings are those that are most able to provide capacity to changing functions, standards of use and lifestyle, and improved parts over time (Kendall 2012; Kendall and Teicher 2010).