Structuralism

Structuralism

The order of the world effects the way we understand and communicate. We interpret the world according systematic structures that exist within our language and culture.

If structuralists were to study the way in which a culture organises its rules on food as a system. They might consider:

Rules of exclusion (the English might see eating frogs and snails as a barbaric French custom)

Signifying Oppositions (savoury and sweet courses are not eaten together in most Western cuisine)

Rules of association (steak and chips followed by ice cream; okay steak and ice cream followed by chips; not okay

Only within such structures can particular combinations or menus be valued or seen as wrong: or rebellious or innovative.

Come up with some other structures in food systems from other cultures.

List some oppositions or rules of combinations in the way you and your friends dress.

Link normality with ideology.

Structuring Oppositions/Binary Opposites

Qualities in narratives can be grouped into pairs of opposites.

These produce key boundaries within cultures, usually with unequal weight or value attached to one side of the pairing.

Structuralism accepts that films are made by film-makers (who have three choices) but it also seeks to remind us that film makers are themselves ‘produced by culture’.

It is a theory that allows us to reconnect film with the culture from which originates.

The structure of society determines the products of society and so all texts are some how affected and understood in terms of the structure as a whole.

nature/culture

animal/human

mind/body

art/science

male/female

old/young

us/them

good/bad

hero/villain

rich/poor

old/new

words/deeds

order/chaos

freedom/constraint

dominant/subordinate

individual/society

inner/outer

ephemeral/permanent

private/public

appearance/reality

form/content

active/passive

negative/positive

inclusion/exclusion

We define and take meaning from signs by relating them to other signs.

Genre often operate through related formal pairings that become fixed within a given culture. This works through a process of repetition and difference.

Structuralism is "Study of text as a whole and the kinds of interrelationships/contrasts that the system builds into itself to give it meaning. Contrasts are often times highlighted by calling attention to their basic oppositional/binary structure. For instance in a newspaper the idea of front/back: front page/ back page/ important, less important. More interesting might be news/ads. But could also be very basic categories of cultural experience (although there could always be an argument about "who’s" cultural experience): up/down, culture/nature, male/female.
"As Terry Eagleton puts it "Structuralism proper contains a distinctive doctrine... the belief that the individual units of any system have meaning only by virtue of their relations to one another...."
"T. Eagleton has remarked that one of the primary drawbacks to structuralist research is that it is "hair-raisingly unhistorical."" Need to focus on where categories and structures come from.

Orientalism

Orientalism  Edward Said

Said takes a structuralist approach to global politics and culture. He divides the world into the Occident and the Orient. Essentially West and East.

The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Said argues that every encoder of a text pertaining to the orient assumes what he calls an Oriental Precedent, ie some previous knowledge of the Orient to which s/he refers and on which s/he relies.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases.

Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar and the strange ‘us and them’.
Said argues that writers like Flaubert, Nerval etc were constrained in what they could say or experience or say about the Orient – the decoders are further constrained by the encoders representation. It is not a conspiracy theory as such but a hegemony derived from an information imbalance.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless cultural and national boundaries.

Once conventional depictions of others become a hyper-real representation then how does an encoder make a representation without reference to a previous representation?

Ultimately then Said argues that every European who spoke of the orient was consequently a racist, an imperialist and almost totally ethnocentric.

Nietzsche once said that ‘truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are’