Blackwell Reference Online

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Like postmodernism, this relatively recent coinage encompasses a wide range of intellectual schools and levels of analysis. These approaches tend to cluster around two somewhat overlapping camps: the “literary” theorists interested in describing the structure of language and culture, and the “sociological” camp consisting of sociologists and anthropologists interested in describing the structure of society and human agency. Linguistic and cultural uses of poststructuralism draw from linguistic and philosophical debates regarding whether the essential nature of language, and by extension human consciousness, is rooted in constantly shifting systems of meaning. The founder of linguistic structuralism, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), deviated from linguistic thinkers of the time who generally were interested in tracing universal systems of meaning within diverse languages, for example through the study of historical philology. Saussure founded the school of semiotics when he argued that language only has meaning in relation to a specific cultural framework. He argued that the system of meaning that underlies language or signifiers is always shifting and can only be studied synchronically (at a given moment in time). Signifiers only make sense in relation to other signifiers and have no fixed relationship to the real world they represent at a given time. To illustrate, consider ... log in or subscribe to read full text