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Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

DURKHEIM AND SAUSSURE

We have referred to semiology as ‘structuralist’, and so it was, at
least in its earlier phases. But there are many different versions
of structuralism, both in general and as applied to literature and
culture. For our purposes, however, structuralism is best defined
as an approach to the study of human culture centred on the
search for constraining patterns, or structures, which claimed that
individual phenomena have meaning by virtue of their relation
to other phenomena as elements within a systematic structure.
More specifically, semiology—or semiotics, as it is sometimes
known—also claimed that the methods of structural linguistics
could be applied to all aspects of human culture (Robey, 1973,
pp. 1–2). Structuralism was until comparatively recently an over-
whelmingly Francophone affair: a perfectly plausible case can be
mounted for Auguste Comte (1778–1857) as a central precursor
to the structuralist tradition; much less controversially, the title
belongs to the French anthropologist (and sociologist) Emile
Durkheim (1858–1917), and, more importantly, to Ferdinand de
Saussure (1857–1913), the French-speaking Swiss linguist.
Saussure’s work on language and Durkheim’s on ‘primitive’
religion directly anticipated the subsequent histories of the two
academic disciplines most directly implicated in structuralism:
semiology itself and ‘structural’ anthropology.

Durkheim and the collective consciousness
Durkheim made no strong claim for the special significance of
linguistics, though, interestingly, he did nominate language as an
important instance of the archetypal ‘social fact’ (Durkheim, 1964,
p. 3). But his general social theory was quite significantly proto-
structuralist. His last major work, The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, first published in 1915, is as much concerned with
knowledge itself as with religion. Here he explicitly rejected both
the empiricist view, that what we know is given by experience,
and the rationalist, that the categories of knowledge are somehow
immanent within the human mind. Rather, he argued, these cate-
gories are constituted by and through systems of thought that

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