STRUCTURALISM
· Structuralists tend to not doubt the existence of ‘reality,’ that is some material, human, or socio-economic substratum that lies beneath the ‘ideas.’
· They tend to emphasize the coherence of a system as that which allows for meaning to be constructed.
· Similarly, structuralists tend to focus on how systems set limits to what can be thought, said, meant.
· Structuralists have a tendency to be reductive; in other words, they tend to reduce many complicated phenomenon to a few key elements that they argue, “explains everything.”
· Structuralists are reductive because they are often trying to find their own version of “universal truths.” They are searching for ‘universe structures’ that bind all humans together at some level (Chomsky)—or at the very least, some basic structures that all members of a given society (or possibly multiple societies) have in common (Levi-Strauss).
· Structuralists are radically anti-humanist; in other words, they tend to suggest the power of systems to structure our thought, word-view, sense of self, etc. Nearly all power is handed over to the system to the point of being rather determinist.
· In short, structuralists focus on monolithic structure, that is the systems meaning and how it functions.
POST-STRUCTURALISM
· Poststructuralists, on the other hand, do doubt the existence of reality, or at the very least they emphasize the extent to which the widely understood difference between “ideas” and “reality” is one constructed through discourse. In other words, if there is a reality, it many not have bearing on our sense of “truth” at all.
· They tend to emphasize the incoherence of the systems of discourse, or at least the tensions and ambiguities created by the existence of multiple systems.
· Poststructuralists will generally tend to focus on the polysemy, that is the plurality of meaning and, indeed, the tendency for meanings to mushroom out of control.
· Poststructuralists, as with the former, will be reductive in their own way. However, they will try to keep in focus the differences that are being ignored in carrying out the reduction. These differences, they suggest, create cracks or fissures in the system that can be utilized to challenge or even destroy the systems at work.
· Poststructuralists have given up the search for “universal truths.” Whereas structuralists look for things that bind us together, poststructuralists tend to focus on that which makes us different. In their minds, this emphasizes the malleability of human kind-a kind of revival of the existentialists “existence precedes essence “ just in a new guise.
· Poststructuralists are not humanists, exactly, since they also focus on the ways that language and discourse structures thought; However, they tend to try to restore some small amount of power or creativity to the subject. While they recognize the power of systems of thought and action to set out the limits of the playing field, they want to retain some small degree of spontaneity, or at least unpredictability, for individuals moving within the playing field.
· Poststructuralists focus more on the reader/speaker who is operating within the structure.
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