Structuralist Geography

Structuralism/Structuralist Geography R. G. Smith, Swansea University, Swansea, UK & 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Glossary Antihumanism The emphasis in structuralism on explanation through ‘structural causality’ necessarily downplays the role of purposive action from individuals and groups. Structuralism stands in stark contrast to humanism in that its leading proponents – Le´vi-Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan – all call into question the theory of the subject and consequently its central role within social theory. La Langue The whole social linguistic system into which an individual is born. A master system of differences between signs – a higher principle of organization – that regulates all sign production above and beyond linguistics alone. Parole Individual acts of speech, or how language is actually practiced by a linguistic community. Saussurean Semiology/Peircean Semiotics The study of the life of signs within society (linguistics, fashion, rules of conduct, etc.). Semiology is the name given to such study by those following Saussure (primarily in Europe), while the term semiotics is associated with Charles S. Peirce and the American tradition of semiological analysis. Sign In Saussurean linguistics a term to describe a unit of meaning with two components: the signifier and the signified existing in an arbitrary relation. Consequently, the sign has a dyadic (two-sided) structure with both material and immaterial aspects. Signified The mental concept of the sign that is arbitrarily bonded to the signifier to form an internal relation. The signified is engendered by the signifier. Signifier The material aspect of the sign. For example, when our vocal chords vibrate sounds are produced that are material in nature. Structuralism A twentieth-century European (mainly French) school of thought that applied the insights of structural linguistics to social and cultural life. The approach briefly appealed to some human geographers in the 1970s because it was overtly anti-empiricist – being concerned with below-surface logics that have a causal efficacy over surface events – and consequently different to spatial science. Synchronic/Diachronic Structuralism is, broadly speaking, an approach that stresses the synchronic rather than the diachronic; in other words, an approach that is antihistoricist – not seeking historical antecedents or causes – because it is concerned with discovering the

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universal ‘timeless’ structures of human societies and human minds.

Introduction Structuralism is a philosophy and method that developed from insights in the field of linguistics in the mid-twentieth century to study the underlying patterns of social life. In the social sciences the structuralist mode of inquiry sought not simply to identify structures or relationships per se, but rather to look behind or beneath the visible and conscious designs (beliefs, ideas, behaviors) of active human subjects (surface manifestations) to expose or unearth how those designs are in fact outputs, effects, consequences, products generated by underlying causes, hidden mechanisms, or a limited number of ‘deep’ structures that are universal to the human mind; structures which while not directly visible or knowable – with no grounding in subjectivity – are nevertheless absolute, autonomous, and only accessible theoretically through the techniques of a structuralist analysis. In other words, any explanation of social life, of observed patterns, can only be found in the general mechanisms, structures, schemas, or systems that are assumed to underpin all observable events; these structures cannot be touched and measured and are not directly observable in the events, phenomena, or patterns themselves, but must be deduced from them to reveal deeper logics. Structuralism, the structural, stands in contrast to a reductionism because it holds that all forms of cultural expression – be they the domains of art, architecture, cookery, dress, human self-perception, kinship relations, language, literature, music, etc. – cannot be understood in isolation, as somehow separate, but rather must be understood as positions within a structure or system of relations. Indeed, structuralism is holistic (anti-individualistic and anti-empiricist) because of its insistence that while observable phenomena are present, they are also absent precisely because any object’s being is determined by its relationships, its relation to the whole structure to which it belongs; a structure that while not apparent is present in each of its observable parts. The structuralist approach (across the human and social sciences) claimed a fundamental importance to the task of identifying and analyzing (implicit and hidden) ‘deep structures’ which – as with Bhaskar’s realist philosophy – are theorized to underlie and generate (explicit

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and obvious) ‘surface’ or observable phenomenon. While structuralism resonates with the philosophy of realism in that it challenges the positions of empiricism and positivism, it does not agree – as in realism – that there is a knowable real world ‘out there’; for structuralism what is knowable is structures. In other words, ‘structuralism’ is a term used in general to denote any kind of analysis that is concerned with exposing structures and relations, with finding orders rather than actions. More specifically and ambitiously however, structuralism was promoted as a philosophy with a worldview (a Weltanschauung), a universal understanding of reality and knowledge. Indeed, there were high hopes that structuralism could provide a general framework – a solid common structural basis – for ‘rigorous’ and ‘serious’ work across all the human and social sciences. The hold of phenomenology and especially Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential Marxism in post-war France was the intellectual context from which structuralism emerged as critique in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s structuralism came to replace existentialism as the dominant intellectual movement and paradigm in France; an acceptance that can also be attributed to a broader general optimism as to the universality of science, with structuralism claiming to be a new science (albeit one that offered a structural analysis rather than the causal analysis common to the natural sciences). Structuralism represented a challenging critique, a radical break from previous philosophical traditions and theoretical methods/models (including those focused around beliefs in human intention, understanding, and consciousness such as phenomenology, humanism, and existentialism), with its rejection of metaphysics, its indifference to the human subject (including individual and collective action), and its interest in discontinuity rather than continuity and flux, or sociohistorical context. In general, structuralism was a method that was applied extensively in the study of language, society, art, and literature. However, whether or not structuralism can be described as a ‘movement’ is a subject of some debate given the differences between the so-called ‘first generation structuralists’ (i.e., Le´viStrauss, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault). Indeed structuralism has also been described as an ideology, a debate, a method, a ‘creative activity’, and an intellectual fad precisely because it was never consciously formed to be a specific school of thought. Structuralism became a highly influential strand of post-war French philosophy impacting – to varying degrees – a host of disciplines including (but not limited to) anthropology, linguistics, literary criticism and the sociology of literature, aesthetic theory, Marxism, mathematics, psychology, sociology, history, architecture, and human geography. The works of Le´vi-Strauss in anthropology, Roland Barthes in literary theory, Jean Piaget in psychology, Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis, Michel

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Foucault in philosophy, and Louis Althusser in Marxism were particularly influential (and controversial) in their respective fields pioneering the new approach in their respective disciplines and spawning a legion of followers. Indeed, structuralism had a number of independent leaders who – while often addressing common concerns – were also quite different in their specific enquiries. However, it can be said that it was above all the anthropological work of Le´vi-Strauss which was most responsible for making ‘structuralism’ both an intellectual fashion and almost a household word. The structuralist approach did not, of course, appear in the 1950s/1960s out of a vacuum, somehow spontaneously appearing on the French intellectual scene. Indeed, many of the themes of structuralism had precursors, earlier antecedents, in the works of Bachelard, Bakhtin, Canguilhem, Cavaille`s, Freud, Marx, Mauss, Merleau-Ponty, etc. In fact, the basic idea of structuralism can be traced back at least as far as 1725, to the writings of Giambattista Vico, and in many ways owes a debt to the core continental tradition of rationalist philosophy that was advanced by Rene´ Descarte, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Immanuel Kant. However, the true intellectual source of modern structuralism (even though the term postdates him) was the work of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). For while the works of structuralism differ considerably by author, Saussure provided the core lexicon – the technical vocabulary with terms such as semiology, la langue, parole, anti-essentialism, signified, signifier, arbitrary sign, synchronic, diachronic, paradigmatic, syntagmatic, etc. – common to many (but not all) structuralists (and poststructuralists). Indeed, it was also Saussure who called for the development of a new science of the study of signs (a semiology) that would be applicable not only in the field of linguistics but also directly or indirectly applicable to all aspects of human cultures and social institutions as systems of signs.

Structuralist Thinkers The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is widely credited as the founder or father of modern linguistics. The inventor of structural linguistics Saussure also made significant contributions to comparative and historical studies of linguistics through his work on Sanskrit and Indo-European languages. However, it was the posthumous publication (in 1916) of his Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale (Course in General Linguistics) that led to the development of both structuralism and a radical new methodology for the study of linguistics. That text was constructed by his students from a course in general linguistics that he taught at the University of Geneva from 1907–11. Saussure’s development of a structuralist

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theory of language led him to propose both a profound transformation in our conceptualization of language and a new science of the study of signs within society; a science which Saussure was to christen ‘semiology’ from the Greek se¯meıˆon ‘sign’. One of Saussure’s key insights was the structure of the linguistic sign. He noted an arbitrary relation between the ‘signifier’ (signifiant) (word or sound image) and the ‘signified’ (signifie´) (concept). Arbitrary because Saussure demonstrates that there is no natural or obvious connection between signifier and signified, only a social relation established by tradition and convention. In other words, the sign does not unite a thing and a name as in the process of nomenclature, but rather a concept and a sound image. Thus, signification (meaning) is a product of relations between signifiers and signifieds, and therefore not the product of an essential linguistic bond between word and thing. Saussure’s radical and important discovery was that languages function as sign systems that are relatively autonomous from reality precisely because any sign is radically arbitrary; with any signification only being determined by the historically constituted systems of conventions to which any sign belongs. Consequently, this discovery enables Saussure to draw a distinction between la langue (language) and parole (speech). The former describes the conventional relations between signs that are in the same system at any given time. In other words, la langue describes language as it exists as a structure without positive terms. In contrast, the latter is individual speech acts, or in other words, parole describes language as a process, how language is actually practiced by a community of speakers. For Saussure, parole (individual speech acts) cannot be understood in isolation from the system of conventions to which such acts belong (la langue). This distinction between la langue and parole is important for structuralists because it suggests a general model for research across a number of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Saussure uses the analogy of the game of chess to illustrate how languages function as differential totalities where what matters is the relationships between the various pieces and not the intrinsic value or essence as such of individual pieces. Because there is no ‘natural’ correspondence between word and thing, then any of the pieces on a chess board can in fact be substituted by any other object without changing the structural basis – the rules – of the game (i.e., a coin could be a bishop, or a matchstick, anything). What is more, the game of chess also helps illustrate how Saussure’s structural linguistics emphasizes a synchronic, rather than a diachronic (the view of historical linguistics), approach to the study of languages and societies. In chess it is the present configuration of pieces on the board that matters to the players (nothing is to be gained from knowing how the

pieces came to be organized as they are at any moment), and that is precisely how Saussure contends that languages should be studied if we are to grasp how language functions. In other words, Saussure downplays the importance of individual autonomy and the role of practice to focus on the differential value of signs within totalities. It was the generalization of this new way of thinking that came to be so influential in the social sciences and humanities in the mid-twentieth century. In 1967, the French Literary magazine Quinzaine Litte´raire published a cartoon by Maurice Henry that subsequently became extremely famous through its widespread reproduction as a synopsis of the increasingly influential ‘structuralist movement’. The cartoon became known as ‘The Structuralist’s Lunch Party’ and featured the leading figures of French structuralism, namely Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, and consequently we will briefly consider their contributions to that particular strand of social and cultural theory in the remainder of this section. The anthropologist, Claude Le´vi-Strauss (born 1908) is perhaps the world’s most famous anthropologist and certainly one of the twentieth century’s master thinkers influencing some of that century’s most famous thinkers, such as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault. The inventor of structural anthropology, Le´viStrauss’s innovative approach meant that his doctrine and influence also spread far beyond academia, France, and the Francophone world. His contribution to the development and reputation of anthropology is immense, but perhaps even more so has been his unswerving commitment to applying the insights of structural linguistics to social science. Indeed, in the wake of Saussure, Le´viStrauss is widely considered as the founder or ‘high priest’ of modern structuralism for in addition to advancing anthropology as a science (ordering masses of ethnological data), rather than merely an activity of description, he also developed an approach and model that others – working across the humanities and social sciences – could follow and develop. Le´vi-Strauss directly introduced ideas from Saussure’s structural linguistics into his anthropological studies to invent a structural anthropology that stood in sharp contrast to the functional anthropology developed by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) with its specific utilitarian empirical fieldwork-based studies. Le´viStrauss applied the principles of Saussure’s structural linguistic analysis to a range of cultural and societal phenomena: kinship, myths, rites, religion, ideology, cooking practices, ceremonies, totemic systems, the ‘savage mind’, etc. Analyzing both his and other anthropologists’ field data Le´vi-Strauss noted how fundamental symbolic structures underpin social and cultural life, structures that are extraordinarily universal and homogeneous across different people, cultures, and ages. In

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other words, Le´vi-Strauss was unswerving in his insistence that the most apposite means to understand human societies is to investigate the fundamental structures of their organization. Le´vi-Strauss’s structural anthropology was distinctive because it was antifunctionalist (i.e., not finding explanation in the intrinsic nature or value of phenomenon); antibiologist (i.e., not grounding social life in biology but in symbolic structures and exchange); and, anti-empiricist (i.e., ‘facts’ are not deemed to speak for themselves) because its concern was with differential relations and exchange; with how different elements combine together to form universal structures. For Le´viStrauss the starting point for structural analysis was methodological, to find differences so as to define any social and cultural phenomena of interest as a relation between two or more terms (cf. a causal analysis that would operate on a one-by-one basis), the possible permutations of which could be tabulated to eventually reveal a complete system, such as kinship or myth. Le´vi-Strauss’s work is rightly famous because of his identification and novel analysis of several fundamental underlying symbolic structures across different human societies (e.g., the incest taboo as a basis for kinship systems that enable the formation of social alliances). However, it is Strauss’s conceptualization of structures as ternary (the product of at least three elements) and consequently internally dynamic (not simply empirical, skeletal, architectural, an observable reality), open to the historical and contingent, which is fundamental to grasping why and how universal symbolic structures selfperpetuate. Indeed, Strauss has often been incorrectly critiqued – probably because his work emerged at a time when existential Marxism was the dominant intellectual paradigm in France – for interpreting structures as static systems of differences (as synchronic) and consequently in opposition to diachronic analyses. However, this critique is not true as such because in his key works Strauss sees structures as always containing an ‘empty’ third heterogeneous element – a floating signifier (like the phallus in Lacanian psychoanalysis) – that is perpetually open to take on new meaning and consequently introduces the historical and contingent (parole) into his analyses of such structures as kinship, myth, and face painting. Another key figure of the structuralist movement was the French semiotician, essayist, author, cultural critic, and literary theorist, Roland Barthes (1915–80) who in addition to his wide-ranging interests and international influence was particularly famous within literary criticism, primarily through his development of literary semiology, or a structuralist ‘science of literature’. In his early career Barthes’ interest in culture and language was influenced by the Marxism and existentialism – centered around Sartre – that was popular in France in the midtwentieth century. However, he subsequently moved

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toward an interest in semiology and Saussure’s theory of the sign, making a substantial contribution to ‘structuralism’ by extending Saussure’s semiological analysis of meaning. For example, Barthes developed Saussure’s understanding of language as a system of internal oppositions or differences to study fashion as a system or language (langue) where what is crucial is the relations between signifier and signifier (the clothing sign) and not the arbitrary relation between signifier and signified famously identified by Saussure. Overall, Barthes defined structuralism himself as a way of analyzing cultural artifacts through methods that were originally developed within the study of linguistics, precisely because Barthes’ concern was with defining a number of nonlinguistic languages – such as fashion – through a series of structural analyses. Barthes is perhaps most famous for his proclamation of ‘the death of the author’ and ‘the birth of the reader’, arguing for the disentaglement of texts rather than the deciphering of authors. Barthes’ own texts served to undermine the idea that works of literature or critical thinking have a single ‘message’ or ‘meaning’, a univocality as perhaps intended by an original author (cf. the ‘naturalist’ view of language). Instead, Barthes demonstrates how any author is not a God over meaning because ‘texts’ are multidimensional spaces where a multitude of writings, none of them original, collide and merge. In other words, Barthes presides over a shift in power from author to reader, so that the reader becomes the central figure in literary criticism precisely because – through the eyes of literary semiology – any author is no longer understood as the source and arbiter of meaning: Barthes shatters the illusions of individualism and originality. Barthes is also famous for his numerous critiques of the – especially French – modern bourgeois social order. Within literary criticism he undertook structural analyses of some of the key texts from the canon of French literature – such as Balzac’s novella Sarrasine – to reveal their intertextual construction where no single ‘theological’ meaning is evident. However, while these literary studies were highly provocative, challenging, and controversial it was Barthes more popular critiques of bourgeois society that made him almost as famous as Sartre with the French public. In his Mythologies (1957) Barthes famously deconstructs a number (28) of apparently innocent instances of French culture and society to demonstrate their ideological contamination: from wrestling matches and striptease to advertisements for cleaning products and Einstein’s brain. In his analyses Barthes contrasts myth to ideology (moving beyond simple ideological critique) to demonstrate the importance of analyzing semiotically ‘how’ any myth (message) is communicated – rather than with what is said or hidden by a message as with ideology – and so

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consequently how myth is a product of parole (speech), rather than langue (the structure of language). Perhaps Barthes most famous demystifying essay was his analysis of a cover of the French magazine Paris Match that featured a young black soldier looking up to and saluting the French flag. Barthes’ analysis questioned the ‘naturalness’ or presumed ‘innocence’ of this image, the unquestioned relationship between signifier (the image on the front cover) and signified (Frenchness, militarism) to produce the total sign (i.e., loyal black French soldier), reading it instead as a mythical attempt by the French mass media to justify French imperialism and more generally a bourgeois worldview by ignoring historical fact. For Barthes there is in fact a second-order semiological system in play where the total sign (the loyal black soldier) is only the signifier, so that the signified is in fact France as a great empire served faithfully by all its subjects whatever their color or creed, and the total sign is the ideology of colonialism and imperialism. Jacques Lacan (1901–81) was a French psychoanalyst who exposed the field of Freudian psychoanalysis to Saussure’s structuralist approach to language. Lacan highlighted the structural aspects of Freud’s thought, and crucially noted how Freud was concerned with explicating the structures of the unconscious. Lacan transforms Freud’s approach through reference to the terms and concepts of Saussurian linguistics (and to some extent Jakobson) to argue that the unconscious is structured just like a language and consequently can be analyzed as such. In other words, while Freud was concerned with the structural organization of the unconscious mind, Lacan was concerned with linking language and the unconscious to argue that ‘‘the unconscious is structured like a language’’ (a famous Lacanian aphorism). Lacan’s psychoanalysis is concerned with the complex relationship between the subject and the signifying system. Lacan makes explicit the antihumanism of the structuralist approach through his argument that while any human subject is divorced from signification, he or she is nevertheless constituted by that very system of representation (Lacan famously developed the theory of the ‘mirror stage’ in infants). Lacan points out that for a subject to have a place in the social world he or she must also take a place within its language: to become a social subject any human must enter into the preexisting system of signification. Any subject is dominated by the signifier, by the internal differences of langue, precisely because the process of subjectivity is one of being entangled within the infinite web of signification. Thus, for Lacan the task of psychoanalysis is to examine the chain of signification. We have learnt how Saussure was concerned with the arbitrary internal vertical relation between signifier and signified. However, Lacan’s concern was with the division of the sign through an impenetrable bar so that the relations between signifiers are primary. For Lacan, the

subject is the subject of the signifier precisely because of his insistence as to the impenetrability of the Saussurean bar, effectively separating signifiers from signifieds. The autonomy of the signifier is guaranteed precisely because no signifier ever comes to settle on any signified. Thus, for Lacan the Symbolic order is the realm of the signifier, and it is within that order – of signs, symbols, images, representations, and significations – that any individual is produced as a subject. Through the publication of an astonishing series of books the French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault (1926–84) transformed the EuropeanAnglo-American intellectual landscape. Foucault’s ‘structuralism’ was not as inspired by the ideas of Saussure as that of Le´vi-Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan (although the work of Saussure did have a very significant influence upon his earlier studies). Instead, Foucault’s overall approach was more a kind of ‘quasi-structuralism’ with no specific theoretical or methodological unity as such, but rather a concern with specific problems and methods at different times in his working life (Foucault did not have one all-consuming model with which to explain everything). The approach evident in his early studies of psychiatry (Madness and Civilization, 1962), the social sciences (The Order of Things, 1966), and clinical medicine (Birth of the Clinic, 1963) was that of an antihumanist ‘archaeology of knowledge’ that understood these various systems of thought as ‘discursive formations’ independent of the beliefs and intentions of individual subjects. In other words, the legacy of Saussure is clear to see in early Foucault with different discourses all being understood as both arbitrary and autonomous. However, the approach evident in his later writings has far more to do with the ideas of the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche than Saussure. Foucault shifted his approach to analyze different discourses, or models/re´gimes of ‘truth’ (e´piste`mes), not just as languages (following Saussure) but as genealogies (following Nietzsche). This shift to a ‘genealogical approach’ – being in the spirit of Nietzsche in that it signaled Foucault’s lack of interest in developing totalizing or comprehensive explanatory schemas – enabled Foucault to explain changes in systems of discourse by linking them to changes in the nondiscursive practices of social power structures. Foucault first deployed his genealogical approach in his study of the discourse of penology (Discipline and Punish, 1975), a study of the psychological and sociological knowledge upon which modern prisons have been founded, and consequently effectively demonstrated the connection between knowledge and power; with how bodies of knowledge become systems of social control. The brief explication, outlined in this section, of some of the key ideas of perhaps the most famous structuralist thinkers was informative because it demonstrates how structuralism is best understood not as a consciously

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formed school, a readymade answer (self-enclosed and deployable as a fixed approach), but as a series of loosely connected relatively open interrogations across a number of disciplines which strive to introduce an explanatory order among seemingly incoherent phenomena. We have seen how while some structuralists followed Saussure’s ideas closely, others such as Foucault did not as such, preferring to develop a more idiosyncratic approach. Indeed, to end this section it is perhaps interesting to note just how detached Piaget’s definition of structuralism is from Saussure’s lexicon. Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was a Swiss psychologist, philosopher, and biologist who authored numerous articles and more than 50 books. He is most famous for his research on cognitive development in children; an analytical structuralist investigation into the structures that regulate the development of intelligence in humans. In his book entitled Le Structuralisme (1968), Piaget famously defined structuralism as a method of inquiry common to, not just linguistics and anthropology, but a wide range of disciplines including biology, mathematics, philosophy, physics, and psychology. Piaget noted three ways of identifying a structure: (1) wholeness, (2) transformation, and (3) self-regulation. Through the idea of ‘wholeness’ Piaget demonstrates how a structure differs from an aggregate: namely, any part of a structure has no independence outside of the structure in the form that it would otherwise have within the structure. In other words, wholeness for Piaget emphasizes the internal coherence of structures, so that structures are more than simply a sum of their parts precisely because all parts conform to a set of intrinsic laws which determine both their nature and the structure itself. Through the idea of ‘transformation’ Piaget notes how structures are not static, but have the ability to transform through their intrinsic laws: ‘structures are also structuring’. For structuralists structures are not passive, but rather have a transformational capacity to process new things passing through the system. For example, a living language produces new words and expressions without changing its essential structure. Piaget also notes that structures are ‘self-regulatory’ in their transformational procedures, valid in themselves in that they are closed. A structure such as language is ‘sealed off ’ from any need to reference ‘reality’, or other structures or systems, because the structure of language has its own internal and self-sufficient rules. Piaget’s transdisciplinary definition of structuralism is interesting because it outlines an understanding of ‘structuralism’ that is not directly connected to the ‘structuralist project’ initiated by Saussure and developed by researchers such as Le´vi-Strauss, Barthes, and Lacan for whom it made no sense to distinguish between structuralism and semiology precisely because their work made such serious recourse to the nomenclature –

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signifier, signified, synchrony, diachrony, etc. – of signification. This difference is significant because it is indicative of a drift away from a strict definition of structuralism where the ideas and lexicon of Saussure are fundamental to a far more general definition of structuralism as simply any kind of analysis that emphasizes the importance of structures and relations: ‘among the ‘structuralists’ some are more structuralist than others’. And it is this distinction which is undoubtedly fundamentally important for understanding why ‘structuralist geography’ is in fact not strictly structuralist at all, but is instead a Marxist project that was above all concerned with how to couple together description and explanation (something that spatial science was failing to achieve in the 1960s): namely, with demonstrating how an understanding of underlying ‘structures’ allows for an understanding of ‘surface’ geographies.

Structuralist Geography? Structuralism entered Anglophone human geography in the early 1970s in a very limited way – with citations from the humanist geographer, Yi Fu-Tuan in 1972 and the Marxist geographer, David Harvey in 1973 – as a part of the humanist and Marxist projects of critiquing the empiricism and positivism of a spatial science that had come to dominate geography in the 1960s. While some human geographers subsequently went further to discuss the work of structuralists – for example, Le´vi-Strauss was mentioned and briefly discussed by Derek Gregory in his 1978 book Ideology, Science and Human Geography in which he attempted to relocate geography’s search for spatial order to Le´vi-Strauss’ conception of structure – the truth is that the work of structuralists has not been engaged with in any sustained way by human geographers; instead, their interest has been piecemeal and sometimes rather idiosyncratic. A few of the geographers who have flirted with the work of structuralists include: James Duncan who discussed Barthes’ structural and post-structural interpretations of landscapes as texts, systems of communication, object systems, where ultimately – for Barthes – signs come to be emptied of all cognitive meaning; Hugh Matthews who, through his work on children, cognition, and mental mapping, added, among other things, to a critique of the ideas of Piaget and the constructivist approach to understanding cognitive development in children; and, perhaps most significantly, Gunnar Olsson who since the publication of his famous book Birds in Egg (and then Birds in Egg/Eggs in Bird) in the mid-1970s has – among other things – worked within the horizon of Saussure, engaging with the work of many structuralists, to explore the limits of language and representation. However, despite these noteworthy individual efforts

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(and an interest by some human geographers in semiotics), a coherent structuralist geography has not been produced in any canonical sense. An examination of some undergraduate-level introductory texts about the philosophy of human geography is telling. In a selection from the 1990s one finds either no reference at all to Saussure, Le´vi-Strauss, Barthes, or Lacan (as in Cloke, Philo, and Sadler’s 1991 Approaching Human Geography); or a discussion of their ideas for no other reason than to note how human geographers have not significantly engaged with their ideas (as in Unwin’s 1992 The Place of Geography, or Peet’s 1998 Modern Geographical Thought). Furthermore, this neglect has continued into the twenty-first century in edited collections. The book Key Thinkers on Space and Place, edited by Hubbard, Kitchen, and Valentine, published in 2004 collects essays by geographers on 52 ‘key thinkers’, ranging from Benedict Anderson to Iris Marion Young, but contains only one chapter on a so-called structuralist, namely Michel Foucault. Similarly, the 2006 Approaches to Human Geography edited by Aitken and Valentine neither contains a dedicated chapter on structuralism, nor is there any mention of Saussure, Le´vi-Strauss, Barthes, Lacan, Piaget, or even Althusser; again only Foucault is mentioned in the book. Indeed, Foucault is by and large the only ‘structuralist thinker’ whose work a number of geographers have seriously engaged with (perhaps most notably by Felix Driver, Chris Philo, and Stuart Elden who between them introduced ‘Foucault’s geography’, his ‘spatial histories’). The reason for this lack of interest in, and engagement with, Saussurean structuralism is because in the 1970s many human geographers were becoming interested in Marxism. While one of the earliest citations of a structuralist in human geography was that of Piaget – by Harvey who attempted to demonstrate certain convergences between the genetic structuralism of Piaget and the historical materialism of Marx – it was the antihumanist ‘structural Marxism’ of Louis Althusser which was to become popular, and widely (mis)understood as ‘structuralism’, within Anglo-American human geography. Louis Pierre Althusser (1918–90), the Algerian-born Marxist philosopher and communist, is perhaps most famous for the circumstances of his later life which was ruined by bouts of mental illness (probably a manic-depressive psychosis), and his murder of his wife (Helene Rytman). However, it was Althusser’s work which was of interest to human geographers in the 1970s because it was a variant of Marxism, a philosophy which, after falling out of fashion in France after the events of 1968, became – rather belatedly it must be said – highly popular in 1970s Anglo-American human geography. While within some fields of study structuralism was brought into dialog with the works of Marx(ism) – e.g.,

Marx (alongside Freud) had some influence on the development of Le´vi-Strauss’ structural anthropology and consequently conveyed a certain Marxist orientation to anthropological studies – it was the work of Louis Althusser which is most significant in this regard because Althusser tried to synthesize his reading of Marx with a broadly structural viewpoint (or perhaps more accurately to read Marx anew as a ‘science’ along structural lines). It was Althusser who most directly (and controversially) introduced a structural perspective onto the central tenets of Marx’s oeuvre, namely the modes and relations of production, the relations between different levels of society (economic, political, and ideological), and the structural contradictions. Althusser’s work gained an international audience in the 1960s with the publication of two key works, For Marx and Reading ‘Capital’ (the later was coauthored with E´tienne Balibar). Althusser developed a structural Marxism that challenged and stood in stark contrast to the Hegelian (historicist) and humanist readings of Marx that were influential at that time. Most famously, Althusser identified an ‘epistemological break’ in Marx’s oeuvre between a young Hegelian Marx and a mature scientific Marx. According to Althusser, the later Marx espoused a theoretical antihumanism in that he rejected a universal human essence or nature to conceptualize history as ‘a process without a subject’. Althusser’s so-called ‘return to Marx’ was an attempt to counter what he saw as the distortion of Marx’s writings by the official communist movement to reveal the science of Marxism, historical materialism. For the purposes of our discussion here however it is enough to note that Althusser is only a structuralist thematically in that his ‘structural Marxism’ is anti-empiricist, antihumanist, anti-individualist, and antihistoricist, and consequently on a very superficial level ‘structuralist’. However, above all, Althusser is a Marxist precisely because he has little interest in Saussure’s approach to language and its subsequent deployment and development in fields such as psychoanalysis and anthropology. Indeed, ‘Althusser turns structuralism on its head’ because his approach is fundamentally different to that of structuralists such as Le´vi-Strauss. Althusser sought to develop theoretical abstractions of underlying ‘structures’ from which to then approach and explain ‘surface’ realities; whereas Le´vi-Strauss started with his, and other anthropologists’, empirical field data to then theorize the existence of underlying structures (cf. Derek Gregory’s attempt in the 1970s to link together Le´viStrauss and Althusser as practitioners of ‘structural explanation’). In fact, it is the post-structuralist, Jean Baudrillard who can be truly described as a ‘structural Marxist’ precisely because, unlike Althusser, he does read Marx through Saussure. In his third book, For a Critique of the

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Political Economy of the Sign (1981), he famously goes against Althusserian Marxism to argue that ideology is a form that traverses material production and sign production, in other words, ideology is not just content, the product of an infra-superstructural relation. To reach this brilliant insight Baudrillard reinterprets and combines both Marx’s description of the commodity form and Saussure’s description of the linguistic sign to show how ideology is present in both the very internal logic of the commodity form, in the relations between exchange value and use value, and in the sign form in the relation between signifier and signified: the latter terms – use value and signified – are the capitalist system’s ideological guarantee. Consequently, through recourse to Saussure Baudrillard places back on the theoretical agenda in France the articulation of culture and economy from the roots of the commodity form (the structural relation between commodity and sign forms). His astute observation is that in late capitalism commodity has fused with sign (the political economy of the sign), and that it is precisely the homologous relation of the commodity-sign form which now best describes the field of general political economy. Anyhow, the main reason why Althusser came to prominence in human geography was because of the influence of his ‘structural Marxism’ on the work of the urban sociologist, Manuel Castells who was concerned with developing a Marxist understanding of cities, an approach that had a profound influence on the development of urban geography. However, the structural Marxist geography that subsequently developed after Althusser and Castells – and which through critique by geographers such as Duncan and Ley came to lose its specificity, to be associated far more generally with ‘structures’ per se, anonymous ‘forces’, or ‘logics’ untouched by human agency – has little to do with either structuralism or with approaching what a structuralist geography would be after Saussure. Indeed, it is true to say that ‘structuralism has not taken place in human geography in any integrated, systematic, or paradigmatic sense’. And perhaps one reason for that lack is because of how structuralism came to be associated in a general sense with ‘structures’ to the detriment of ‘agency’, and so human geographers moved away from structuralism to become interested in those approaches (e.g., structuration theory, realism) that promised to reconcile the perceived split between structure and agency. In effect, the possibility of a fully fledged structuralist geography was strangled at birth, unjustly abandoned due to a supposed (and ungrounded) association with, on the one hand Althusser, and on the other hand, certain clumsy economistic versions of Marxism. However, at least from the 1990s onward a number of geographers have come to encounter structuralism retrospectively through their interest in first, postmodernism, and then second,

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post-structuralism. Indeed, this is precisely how Foucault (and Baudrillard) came to be received in human geography, not as structuralists, but as postmodernists and post-structuralists.

Conclusion: Ex-Structuralists and Post-Structuralists Based on applying the insights of Saussure’s structural linguistics to all social and cultural phenomena structuralism developed from the 1950s to the 1970s to become a theory of human reality that is based on the argument that content (appearances) is reducible to form (structures). In addition, the focus of structuralism was upon relationships – the relations between terms, not the terms in themselves – that create their own autonomous spheres precisely because there are no extra-linguistic referents or realities (Platonic forms or essences) available to human cognition. However, in the 1960s and 1970s (the heyday of structuralism across the human and social sciences), human geography remained largely absent from the debate, in part because at that time human geography was not the interdisciplinary subject that it is today. Interest in the ‘structuralist movement’ in France proved to be short-lived, as intellectual life moved on in the late 1960s/early 1970s toward a post-structuralist approach. And some previously major structuralist figures – such as Barthes and Lacan – became ex-structuralists, proto-post-structuralists, or simply post-structuralists (much of post-structuralism was in fact already present in structuralist writings) dissatisfied with the confines of Sausserian linguistics (the foundation of structuralism) to destabilize it and shift their position (others also moved on, with Foucault rejecting not only Marxism and psychoanalysis, but also eventually his particular version of structuralism). Alongside the shift of ex-structuralists there was also the emergence of a new generation of post-structuralists whose work began with and subsequently developed from a critique of the structuralist approach (e.g., Jacques Derrida’s famous 1967 critique) to undermine, destabilize, and make undecideable our understandings of – among other things – language, meaning, social institutions, and the self. There is a final point to be made. The writing of this article inevitably reflects the particular demands of this encyclopedia. In other words, while this article has been written in a way that highlights and summarizes certain key structuralist thinkers there are other ways that this article could have been written, and consequently other ways that structuralism and its significance may be understood and gauged within human geography. Indeed, in his essay on ‘How Do We Recognize Structuralism?’

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Gilles Deleuze eschews the method of recognizing certain people as structuralist or not, the very method that has been followed here. Instead, Deleuze structures his essay around a question: ‘What do we recognize in those that we call structuralists?’ As an answer Deleuze identifies seven criteria for identifying structuralism (e.g., the symbolic; the serial; the empty square), and his essay is undoubtedly particularly useful as a guide for reading human geography today, for revealing how contemporary human geographers are engaging with structuralism retrospectively through post-structuralism. In other words, the ‘crisis of representation’ and the ‘cultural turn’ that took place in human geography in the 1990s has served to place much of human geography within the horizon of Saussure’s splitting apart of the sign, and Deleuze’s essay is instructive for helping us in recognizing that fact. See also: Poststructuralism/Poststructuralist Geographies; Semiotics; Structural Marxism; Structuration Theory.

Further Reading Althusser, L. (1969). For Marx. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Barthes, R. (1973). Mythologies. St Albans: Paladin. Baudrillard, J. (1981). For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis: Telos. Caws, P. (1988). Structuralism: The Art of the Intelligible. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Culler, J. (1975). Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2004). How do we recognize structuralism? In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, pp 170--192. New York: Semiotext(e).

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Driver, F. (1990). Discipline without frontiers? Representations of the Mettray Reformatory Colony in Britain, 1840–1880. Journal of Historical Sociology 3, 272--293. Duncan, J. and Duncan, N. (1992). Ideology and bliss: Roland Barthes and the secret histories of landscape. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, pp 18--37. London: Routledge. Duncan, J. and Ley, D. (1982). Structural Marxism and human geography: A critical assessment. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72(1), 30--59. Elden, S. (2001). Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History. London: Continuum. Foucault, M. (1973). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage/Random House. Gregory, D. (1978). Ideology, Science and Human Geography. London: Hutchinson. Harris, Z. S. (1951). Structural Linguistics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Harvey, D. (1973). Social Justice and the City. Oxford: Blackwell. Hawkes, T. (1977). Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock. Matthews, M. (1984). Environmental cognition of young children: Images of journey to school and home area. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 9, 89--105. Olsson, G. (1975). Michigan Geographical Publication No. 15: Birds in Egg. Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Geography, University of Michigan. Philo, C. (1992). Foucault’s geography. Environment and Planning D: Society & Space 10, 137--162. Piaget, J. (1971). Structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Robey, D. (ed.) (1973). Structuralism: An Introduction. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saussure, F. de (1983). Course in General Linguistics. La Salle, IL: Open Court. Strauss, L. (1963). Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. Sturrock, J. (ed.) (1979). Structuralism and Since: From Le´vi-Strauss to Derrida. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuan, Yi.-Fu. (1972). Structuralism, existentialism and environmental perception. Environment and Behaviour 3, 319--331.