Structuralism, Levi-Strauss and Saussure

• Studies revolve around structuralism and figures like Claude Levi-Strauss.
• Claude Levi-Strauss touched on linguistics and Ferdinand De Saussure

Structuralism and Claude Levi-Strauss

• Outside of culture, there is no reality.
• We perceive the world through culture and categories.
• Knowledge is always mediated by culture.

Linguistics and Ferdinand De Saussure (1857-1913)

• Social and philosophical theories are based on linguistics.
• Language is viewed as a system of signs.
• Language can be studied at a given point (synchronic) or through its historical development (diachronic).
• Language: a system of communication and shared understanding of symbols and words.
• Language: a list of words with words corresponding to objects.
• Assumptions are that ideas exist before words and linking a name to a thing is simple.
• The linguistic sign is a two-sided entity connecting a concept and a sound image.
• The sound implies the concept and vice versa, forming something recognizable.
• A sign equals signified plus signifier.
• Languages differ and are determined by cultural and historical conventions.
• A sign is arbitrary and has no natural connection to what it signifies.
• The signified is the thing represented, and the signifier is a sound image.

Language as a System of Signs

• Signs only make sense because of their difference from other signs within a system.
• Meaning is the result of differences in relations between signs.
• There is no direct correspondence between a sign and external reality.
• Structuralism uses linguistic theory to understand human activities.

Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009)

• Focuses on the universal aspects of human cultures.
• Interested in the human mind, specifically, "the savage mind."
• Explores how the human mind operates and makes sense of the world.
• Knowledge is based on our senses.
• How our senses depend on how the human brain operates.
• The human brain brings order to all stimuli and divides things through arbitrary divisions.

Claude Levi-Strauss Cont.

• Relations existing in nature inform cultural practices.
• Relations offering information create meaning.
• The way we classify things reveals the thinking mechanism.
• Cultures are products of this mechanism.
• Minds operate by using a structure of combination and difference.
• Levi-Strauss focuses on how categories are created.
• Categories are pre-existing, not created.

Binary Opposition

• It's a fundamental approach to categorizing, where two related categories exclude each other.
• Binary opposition examples are hot/cold, short/tall, old/young, male/female, dark/light, and nature/culture.
• Binary opposition is universal.
• An example of binary opposition is food (edible vs. inedible).
• How cooking relates to culture is an example of binary opposition.
• Humans perceive the world in binary opposition terms.

The Mentality of Primitives

• Logic of the concrete differs from abstract logic of modern peoples.
• Constructed from observations, myths, and concrete objects.
• Primitives would say, "Sea water is opposite of rain water".
• Primitive mentality is complex; not solely based on needs.
• Magic is a way of ordering and acquiring knowledge.
• Abstract and concrete logic are parallel methods of learning.
• Myths vary around basic themes and have universal structures.

The Primitives: Science as Bricolage

• Bricoleur is French for “do it yourself".
• Bricoleur creates using available heterogeneous repertoire.
• Mythical thought uses signs, while scientific thought uses concepts.
• There is no discovery, but stays within meaning of signs.

Summary

• All languages have category structures.
• Categories create meaning to things.
• Implications of the individual is no longer a source of meaning.

Week 8: Roland Barthes (1915-1980)

• All semiological systems are connected to language and mediated by language.
• Semiology: a part of linguistics, concerned with all forms of communication, not just spoken or written forms.
• Speech communicates through photography, cinema, and advertising.
• Images convey myths without explicitly acknowledging them.

Mythologies

• Bourgeois values are conveyed by myths.
• The myths aren't natural and relationships exist.
• Images in society: Are images myths in our society?
• There is a link with Saussure.
• Signs are always arbitrary.

Images and Myths

• An artificial status of the sign is important in societies overtaken by images.
• Advertising and image construction.
• Signs appear innocent and natural, but they are not.
• Signs become ideological and authoritarian.
• Ideology is a kind of mythology.

Myth

• Myths are a type of speech and a system of communication.
• Myths are messages that convey meaning and formed through interacting parts.
• Signifier and signified together equal sign.
• Signifier is concrete, signified is abstract.
• Signified gives meaning to roses.
• Ex: Dove represents peace.
• Wedding Ring: signing loyalty
• Myths do not last forever.

Myths Deal With Signs

• All signs can become myths.
• 2 systems of signification is denotation and connotation.
• Denotation is what a sign means; connotation is how it means.
• When denotative and connotative meanings are not recognized, meaning becomes naturalized.
• A signified can find many signifiers.
• Myths make meaning seem natural - works to naturalize history.
• Myths distort more than hide things.

Importance Of Demystifying

• Myths can be used to convey ideological purposes.
• Ideology makes culture seem natural.
• Doing through the use of a sign that is taken to be natural
• As the science of signs, semiotics help decipher.

Michael Foucault (1921-1984)

• Some viewed him as a theorist or historian, but he studied philosophy.
• He can be seen as a structuralist.
• Interested in "linguistic practices" (rules guiding discourse).
• Discourse verbal expression of organization of knowledge.

The Order of Things

• Foucault's book divides intellectual history into periods.
• Each historical period is governed by an "episteme".
• The episteme provides a model of thinking across disciplines; a culture code.
• Discourse operates independently by the episteme.
• There are rules governing outside of the subjects that produce discourse.
• Example of application: institutions of knowledge production.

Madness and Civilization and Birth of the Clinic

• Discourses connected to the asylum and the hospital.
• "Sane" vs. "insane" and "healthy" vs. "sick" are discourses of exclusion.
• Discourses are binary.

Discipline and Punish (1975)

• Foucault's Book
• Emergence of discourse: Social institutions where the prison is a case.
• Institution generated the human sciences and linked between knowledge and power.

Bio-Power

• The power that works through the body and on the body.
• The body is the place to analyze power and its link to knowledge in modern society.
• Knowledge comes from discourse.

Knowledge

• Knowledge produced is in fields such as psychiatry and criminology.
• Experts create humans scenes and observe individual bodies.
• Individual is an object not a subject.
• Body is an object of science.
• How the body connects to power.
• Control the body by studying and manipulating it.
• Disciplinary power turns humans into docile bodies.

Disciplinary Power Development

• Disciplinary power developed from public spectacle torture to private prison.
• Spectacle led to hidden punishment during the 18th century.
• Torture was public for the community to enforce fear and for the one accused of guilt.
• Showed the power of the king.

Week 9: Why Did Disciplinary Power Arise?

• Historical shift was influenced by problems with the practice of torture.
• Humanist reformers sought humane punishment and normalization.
• Knowledge of crime and behavior was needed to become normal.
• Aim was to reform criminals so they would eventually enter into society.
• The body needed to be trained and disciplined.

For Foucault

• Discipline is how power operates in modern society.
• Disciplinary techniques are used in schools, barracks, and hospitals.
• Discipline functions on body.
• Body is always subject to control situated in space.
• Time is an important category of disciplinary power.
• Schedules help control bodies and disciplinary techniques.
• Techniques of control developed along with observation, experiments, and data from the human sciences.
• Power not just repressive, but transformative.
• There's an interplay between disciplinary techniques and science.

Modern Punishment and Discipline

• There was shift from torture as public spectacle to hidden punishment.
• Sentences aim to correct and cure, not just punish.
• Importance of understanding what crime is.
• Evaluate in order to treat, not punish.

A Whole Body of Knowledge and Techniques Develops

• Human sciences and penal law share a common origin.
• It uses micro-physics of power not possessed - exercised on the trained body.

The Panopticon

• Bentham's popularization
• Central tower surrounded by cells.
• Visibility is discontinuous and individual is aware of being controlled.
• The individual behaves despite force not being necessary.
• Surveillance makes effects even if paused.
• Power stems from how people are arranged in space.

Surveillance

• The gaze and surveillance is fundamental to power.
• Panopticon works on a day-to-day basis.
• Power is not based on violence, but is more efficient and omnipresent.
• Discipline becomes the way to use power.
• All are integrated: Knowledge, power, control of body, and control of space.
• The increase in 18th century pop rate was a factor in the emergence of discipline.

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

• She was the author of The Second Sex (1949).

Existentialism (Jean-Paul Sartre)

• Existentialism as attitude towards life.
• Focus on the individual.
• Individuals must make their own values through choices.
• Our destiny of one’s own making.

De Beauvoir's Existentialism

• Focus on individual freedom.
• The individual can create their own destiny.
• Human condition: freedom and constant search for meaning.
• Subject gives meaning through power of choice.

The Second Sex (Book: 1949)

• Women in relation to men.
• What is a woman???
• No problem with men in society.
• Traditional answers were wrong.
• A woman "is not born, but rather becomes."
• Women oppressed differently, as they cannot go back to when the oppression began.

The Second Sex: Woman as the Other

• Men are the oppressor group (not all men).
• Women participate in their own submission.
• Women accept status as oppressed.
• Women possess is the ability to pursue in freedom a project and acting in the world.
• Women are stuck in repetition.

Homework vs Writing

• Women are relegated where transcendence is hard.
• Do not act as subjects.
• If you see you are inferior, it will happen
• Dismantling myths is important
• Especially nature myths of menstruation, virginity, childbirth, and death.
• The individual is human above all else.
• Women's situation shapes character.

Collective Liberation

• Liberating requires economic freedom, sexual liberation, and civil liberties.
• Men will not like women's transformation.

Week 10: Pierre Bourdieu 3/11/25

• Bourdieu Responded to Structuralism.
• Believed there was a need to overcome the dualism between individual and society.
• Sought to understand the interaction between social reality and the mental world of social actors.
• Social practices determined reciprocation.

Habitus

• Habitus - habitual condition that transcends the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism.
• Bourdieu: a system of dispositions mediating social structures and practices (habit forming forced that we assimilate unconsciously).

Symbolic Violence

• Order in society created by indirect cultural mechanisms
• A system of culture imposed in a way that becomes legitimate.
• Process of misrecognition.
• Internalize "legitimate" culture by way of action.

Action that Works

• Three ways pedagogic actions work is through peer groups, family, and schools.
• Tend to reproduce the uneven distribution of “cultural capital.”
• Cultural capital is amount of money owned, social honor one obtains, prestige and all that one contains.
• Habitus and acquired dispositions
• The habitus internalized through family edu is basis for what we learn in school: differences remain.
• Power transmitted by way of education.
• Dominant culture is recognized as legitimate.
• The roles of school and knowledge of class relations are fundamental.
• The transmission of power, privilege, and the structure of class relations occurs through education.
• Schools transmit cultural capital of the classes with cultural capital and ability is a "gift".
• "It is not the system that excludes you, but you and your idea of not being good"; this is how habitus works.

Weak View of Power?

• Why inequality?
• Reproducing social relations is a role of cultural reproduction.
• Edu is not neutral.

3/13/25 Consumption and Distinction

• Consumption creates differentiation with a distribution of people.
• Choices keep people in social class - natural social construction of taste choices.
• social agents construct social reality.
• How we do this depends on our position in society.

Taste and Power

• Occupy certain divisions.
• Def of the social world by the position we formulate.
• Struggle over the dominant def.
• Choice are based on what connects to our taste.
• The product of our upbringing and what we consume.
• Linked to origins and to who has better choices, for the right reasons: It cannot be changed.
• Culture determines the way we relate to culture.

Food as an Example

• Taste for what we condemn to consume
• We like habitus to an objective position
• Make choices
• Freedom is an idea
• Focused on objective conditions of what to make choices on.
• Fattening and filling cheap food = beans, associated with a certain type.