Page 91 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

experiential reality, propels the entire structuralist enterprise in a
radically theoreticist direction. A science of stasis, marked from birth
by an inveterate anti-empiricism, becomes almost unavoidably
preoccupied with highly abstract theoretical, or formal, models. Hence
the near ubiquity of the binary opposition as a characteristically
structuralist trope. Theoretical anti-humanism arises from essentially
the same source: if neither change nor process nor even the particular
empirical instance are matters of real concern, then the intentions or
actions of human subjects, whether individual or collective, can easily
be disposed of as irrelevant to the structural properties of systems. In
this way, structuralism notoriously “decentres” the subject.
Before finally proceeding to an account of French high structuralism,
let us briefly recall the theoretical legacy of Russian Formalism. The
Formalists were directly influenced by Saussurean linguistics. The
Petrograd Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded by Victor
Shklovsky in 1916, and the Moscow Linguistic Club, founded a year
earlier by Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), had each aspired to establish
the study of literature on properly scientific and systematic foundations.
Suppressed by the Soviet government in 1930, the exiled Jakobson
continued the work of the Formalist School through the Prague
Linguistic Circle, from whence it was transmitted to France, notably
by Tzvetan Todorov, the Franco-Bulgarian literary theorist, who first
published a selection of Formalist writings in French translation in
Paris in 1965. 17
The Formalists aspired to understand literature as a system, just as
Saussure had language. Literary science, Jakobson argued, should
study not the supposedly empirical facts of literature, but rather
“literariness”, that is, whatever it is that endows literature with its
own distinctively systemic properties. Literariness, the Formalists
concluded, was that process by which literary texts defamiliarize, or
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make strange, both previous literature and also the world itself. The
central focus for their work thus became those formal literary devices
by means of which such defamiliarization is achieved. It should be
obvious, however, that that which defamiliarizes can itself become
familiar, and thereby cease to be literary, in Formalist terms at least.
Literariness is not, then, essentially a property of the text, nor even of
the particular devices that the text might deploy, but of the literary
system itself, of what later structuralists would term the relations of
intertextuality between texts. The literary text is thus to the system of

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