structuralism • Buttondown
The idea of structure, as used in this newsletter, is nothing new. It was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916, in his enormously influential Course in General Linguistics. In it, Saussure describes language as a graph, and words as vertices. Between these vertices, there are negative edges representing difference, and positive edges representing signification and similarity.
To understand a word, then, we must understand the topology that surrounds it. The meaning of each word arises from its relationships. Language is not a mere collection of words, it is a structure; each part is defined by its relation to the whole.
Saussure's approach gave rise to structuralism, a school of thought in which a wide variety of systems — social, narrative, biological, mathematical — were modeled as structures.1 The structuralists were especially interested in paired concepts like masculine/feminine, which were defined through their mutual opposition.
These pairings are typically referred to as binary oppositions, or simply binaries. These binaries, however, aren't Boolean. Both "masculine" and "feminine" are continuums; our language simply places them on opposite ends of the same continuum. The structuralists were interested in the implications of these oppositions — to become less masculine is, necessarily, to become more feminine — and how they shaped our culture.
