Structure and Structuralism; To Strew or To Build?

Long time ago in ancient era, some of people who believe in Plato’s thoughts believe that all of the texts have its own “form” from God. All of the texts already have its own “form” since in the state of idea. But, along with the improvement and development of language and science, that way of thinking is change, and in the first decades of twentieth century, the term  “form”, which was much more commonly used by philosophers, linguist, and literary critics back then replaced by the term “structure”. And then, what is structure? What is structuralism? And what is structuralist?

According to John Carlos Rowe in Structure, the word “structure” is comes from the Latin word “structura”, the nominal formed from the past participle “structus”, and from the verb “struere” which means “to heap together, arrangement” or to strew. But in modern usage, the common meaning of the structure is to build or to construct which are etymologically at odds with to strew. According to Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory, it is difficult to place structuralism in a single meaning, but more or less the essence of structuralism is “the belief that things cannot be understood in isolation – they have to be see in the larger context of the larger structures they are part of.” (Barry, Page 39), and back to Rowe’s Structure, “structuralist means a set of relations among elements shaped by a historical situation.” (Rowe, Page 25).

Talking about structure, we can’t simply separate it with what Ferdinand de Saussure say about linguistic structures. Just like what Peter Barry writes on his book, Beginning Theory, Saussure has three arguments in particular. First, he highlighted that the meanings we give to words are arbitrary, it depending on individual rather than any system or reason. Second, he highlighted that the meaning of words are relational. No words can be defined in isolation from other words. The meaning of one word is depends on the meaning of other words. Three, Saussure assume that language constitutes our world. The meaning of one word is always attributed to the object or idea by human mind. For example, there are some words that would never been neutral, such as “corruptor” or “terrorist”, it is all because the human mind has been construct those words have negative connotation.

By these definitions above, we can define structure as something that is very contextual. The history and the larger context of the text that strewed here and there in the text build and construct the content of the text, and that is what called “structure”.

                                                                                                                             

Works Cited

Barry, P. (n.d.). Structuralism. In P. Barry, Beginning Thoery .

Rowe, J. C. (n.d.). Structure.