how everything got so serious
image: critical-theory.com
Modern thought has taken a decidedly structural turn in recent decades. Concepts that were once loosely scattered about willy-nilly are now being rigorously organized, arranged, and categorized according to their interrelations and deep structures.
But has all this structuralism gone too far?
It all started innocently enough in the early 20th century when linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure began peeling back the surface of language to reveal the systematic patterns and differences that give words their meaning. Suddenly, language wasn't just a collection of words - it had a hidden grammatical framework.
But then other scholars got a whiff of structure, and things took a serious turn. The structuralists of the 1960s, led by folks like Claude Lévi-Strauss, decided everything in the human experience had deep structures lurking beneath - from kinship relations to myths and fairy tales. Before we knew it, weddings and monster stories were being treated like algebraic equations to be solved.
Literary critics joined the structuralist fray. They started deconstructing texts with such rigor you'd think every poem and novel contained secret codes for taking over the world. Nothing was left unanalyzed - not word choice, syntax, genre, narrative perspective - no sir, it all meant something. Soon, readers feared picking up a book in case they'd be quizzed on its deep symbolic structures afterward.
Structuralism spread its reigns further.
Philosophers interpreted reality through structures of language. Anthropologists unearthed cultural structures in far-flung societies. Psychoanalysts plumbed the depths of the human mind for its underlying patterns. You couldn't so much as sneeze without some structuralist declaring it a signifier for repressed childhood trauma.
NO. We're not done yet.
The fun police known as Poststructuralism arrived in the late 20th century to make things even more tiresome. Thinkers like Derrida poured salt in the intellectual wounds by undermining any pretense of definite meaning or grounded truth. Everything became an endless play of slippery signifiers and undecidability. You couldn't state a simple argument without feeling compelled to acknowledge its inherent instability, internal contradictions, necessary failures, and so on.
So, in summary, thanks to structuralists and their offspring, the ivory tower intelligentsia have lost the ability to kick back and shoot the breeze.