CHRISTOPHER NORRIS
Structuralism, post-structuralism
The foundations of structuralist thought were laid by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in lectures delivered during the early years of the 20th century and later published from student transcripts as Course in General Linguistics (Saussure, 1916; Benveniste, 1966–74). His primary aim was to place the study of language on a more scientific basis by breaking with traditional, historically-orientated or ‘diachronic’ approaches of the kind that had dominated 19th-century philology, his own earlier work included. Instead it should seek to conceptualize language as a system of contrastive or differential features ‘without positive terms’, since the relationship between signifier and signified (or word and concept) cannot be understood on a straightforward, one-to-one order of equivalence. Rather it consists in the complex stucture of inter-articulated differences which enables a mere handful of phonemes (minimal distinctive sound-units) to serve for a vast, potentially infinite range of meanings. At the semantic level, the precondition for language is its structural capacity to distinguish between concepts, and thereby impose an intelligible order on the world of knowledge and experience. So these two dimensions of language (sound and sense) should be treated from a structural-synchronic standpoint which acknowledges the ‘arbitrary’ link between signifier and signified, or the absence of any natural (non-conventional) tie that would bond them. This relationship is always caught up in a play of phonemic/semantic differences and contrasts that vary from one language to another, or from one diachronic stage to the next in the development of a language.
Two further Saussurean distinctions are of crucial relevance to the structuralist programme and its pertinence to musical theory. One is the distinction between langue and parole, the former applying to language in its structural-synchronic aspect, the latter to the open-ended variety of speech-acts or particular (context-specific) items of utterance. Related to this is the ‘syntagmatic’/‘paradigmatic’ dualism, where the one has to do with the temporal unfolding of a chain of linguistic events in accordance with certain linear-sequential rules of combination, while the other concerns the selection of lexical units from a paradigm-class of possible alternatives in context (synonyms, antonyms, variant expressions, metaphorical substitutes and so on), conceived as belonging to a ‘vertical’ dimension from point to point along the verbal chain. This distinction came to exert greatest influence on later developments in literary criticism, narrative poetics, anthropology, cultural studies and the human sciences at large; for it offers a means of analysing texts (in the broadest sense of that term, taken to include, say, lyric poems, novels, myths, kinship-systems, culinary codes, fashions in dress, cinematic conventions or musical styles and genres) on the basis of structural features involving the interplay or relative predominance of syntagmatic and paradigmatic elements.
The Czech linguist Roman Jakobson pioneered this approach with his analyses of various texts, using broad typological-generic distinctions along structuralist lines (Jakobson, 1985, 1987). On the one hand were texts that foregrounded metaphor (i.e. the substitution of figural for literal terms) with the effect of ‘defamiliarizing’ language or creating novel realignments of signifier and signified. On the other were texts whose workings were chiefly metonymic, typified by relations of contiguity or linear-associative linkage between details of a scene or narrative situation that required no such metaphoric ‘leap’ since they followed the normal sequence of perceptual grasp. This made it possible to draw a series of critically pertinent distinctions, as for instance between lyric poetry (where metaphor predominates as a structural principle) and other genres such as epic poetry, realist fiction or modes of socio-documentary writing where metonymy typically provides a strong sense of narrative verisimilitude. Moreover it then became possible to avoid the cleavage between formalist and historical approaches by reviewing the sequence of stylistic shifts or ‘revolutions’ in literary language that marked this alternating pattern of predominance (see especially Lodge, 1977). Thus the period of high 1920s literary modernism witnessed a strong bias towards metaphor not only as a matter of localized stylistic salience but also as a large-scale structuring principle. Conversely, the reaction against high modernism took the form of a pronounced swing during the 1930s towards down-to-earth, realist or socio-documentary modes of narrative and likewise the adoption of a metonymic style which eschewed metaphorical complexity in favour of a direct engagement with the social and political issues of the time.
Structuralism, post-structuralism
These developments in structuralist linguistics and literary theory have been taken up and variously applied by writers on music (see for instance Nattiez, 1975 and Ruwet, 1972). Thus patterns of melodic or longer-range harmonic progression can be treated, on the structuralist model, as unfolding through a musical ‘syntagm’, or chain of successive events, whose every stage can be heard to involve some element of choice between various paradigm-specific possibilities. These latter may constitute either the ‘language’ of music (its range of harmonic-structural resources at any given time) or the composer’s more individual way of deploying those resources, that is, the set of background stylistic norms which make up his or her distinctive musical idiom. To this extent there is a certain ambiguity concerning the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole when transposed into musicological terms. Also, as with all such theoretical frameworks, any results thus achieved can only be as good or as musically convincing as the analyst’s perceptiveness in matters of detail or powers of trained musical response. Thus a frequent criticism of the structuralist method is that it amounts to just a different, more complicated way of making points that could well have been arrived at by intuitive means and without all that clanking theoretical machinery. Nicholas Cook voices this doubt when he asks: ‘how much of what matters about music is retained in the translation from sound experience to abstract categories such as “ascending conjunct line”?’, or ‘can we say anything important about the experience of a given line simply by classifying it as the opposite of lines which are descending or disjunct?’ (Cook, 1987, p.181). There is always a danger that the structuralist fixation on such binary terms of analysis will become just a substitute for genuine engagement with the music, or else just a different way of formulating insights obtainable by more straightforward application of Schenkerian or other analytic techniques.
Nevertheless, its proponents would argue, a structuralist approach can help to sharpen those perceptions by providing a firmer grasp of the various orders of relationship that constitute both the musical work and its background repertory of tonal-harmonic conventions. Moreover, it helps to clarify our sense of the different genres and period styles that involve a range of shifting emphases as between the vertical (paradigmatic) and horizontal (syntagmatic) axes of musical development. In this way music critics and historians may hope to overcome the well-known problem of combining a work-based immanent mode of analysis with an interest in matters of cultural change and stylist evolution. Thus, for instance, a sufficiently acute and historically informed mode of analysis might seek to explain the transformative process by which the Classical style provoked an emergent Romanticism, or by which the organizational complexity of post-Schoenbergian modernism gave rise to a series of reactive trends towards melody and linear counterpoint. Still the main focus of structuralist theory – inevitably, given its linguistic sources and analogues – has been on those formal aspects of music that lend themselves to treatment in synchronic terms.
Structuralism, post-structuralism
Post-structuralism shares this emphasis on language conceived (after Saussure) as a network of signifying contrasts and relationships ‘without positive terms’. However, it rejects the structuralist idea that the workings of language and other such semiotic systems – music among them – can or should be subject to the kind of analysis that aspires to ‘scientific’ status in the structural-synchronic mode. Indeed, this approach is avowedly ‘post’-structuralist in rejecting the drive for system and method and insisting rather on the open-ended play of ‘difference’ which exceeds and subverts all efforts to contain it (Barthes, 1970, 1973; Harari, 1977; Johnson, 1981; Young, 1981). These ideas were first developed during that phase of heady intellectual activity in Paris during the late 1960s when thinkers from various disciplines, including the composer-theorist Pierre Boulez, formed a close interdisciplinary grouping around the avant-garde literary journal Tel quel (Boulez, 1961, 1966). What they chiefly shared was an outlook of uncompromising radicalism with regard to the heritage of ‘bourgeois’ art-forms or literary/musical conventions, and a desire to transform those conventions through the alliance of cutting-edge theory with selfconscious artistic experiment. Thus one finds all manner of allusive cross-reference between notions of ‘the text’ (or certain kinds of text) as a powerful destabilizing force exerted on the codes of ‘bourgeois’ literary realism, and notions of music – post-serial music – as likewise subverting the received tradition of linear or tonal-harmonic development (see especially Barthes, 1970; Sollers, 1968).
Post-structuralism also has close ties with psychoanalysis, in particular with Jacques Lacan’s reading of Freud where the human subject is conceived as radically ‘decentred’, or as caught up in an endless slippage from one signifier to another along the metonymic chain which can never be brought to a halt since the signified, the ultimate object of desire, is forever beyond reach (Lacan, 1966–71). Such ideas have exerted their main influence in the field of feminist criticism where theorists argue for the musical equivalent of écriture feminine, that is to say, a distinctively female kind of writing (or compositional style) which avoids the typecast ‘male’ qualities of aggressive dynamics, strong rhythmic drive and self-willed control over every last detail of thematic development (McClary, 1991). Also influential are the late writings of Roland Barthes, who started out as a thinker in the high-structuralist mode but who later renounced the attractions of system and method in favour of an idiosyncratic approach which drew obliquely on a wide range of theories while avoiding any kind of orthodox doctrinal commitment. These writings include essays on music, especially on Schumann’s piano works, where Barthes displays an extraordinary skill at weaving theoretical allusions into a mode of subtly displaced autobiographical discourse that somehow reveals the most intimate aspects of his own erotic or libidinal involvement as amateur performer-listener. Hence his distinction between plaisir and jouissance, the one a reassuringly familiar sort of pleasure that comes of reading or listening in accordance with established cultural codes, the other a sharply disconcerting (even perverse) enjoyment that results from the disruption of those same codes by some shock to one’s normal, acculturated habits of response (Barthes, 1977, 1982).
Other critics have pursued a post-structuralist approach while avoiding Barthes’s somewhat narcissistic appeal to this private ‘image-repertoire’ of memories, impressions and fetishized details. Mostly they have understood post-structuralism as a means of liberating musical analysis from its over-concern with ‘structural listening’ (Subotnik, 1996) or its excessive regard for matters of long-range thematic, harmonic and formal organization. In consequence, these critics argue, analytic techniques have tended to devalue other, less ‘sophisticated’ modes of listener response which inherently elude all the concepts and categories of mainstream music theory. This often goes along with deconstructionist arguments to the effect that certain academically sanctioned musical values (such as those of complexity, organic form, motivic-thematic development and so on) are ideological constructs imposed upon music – and also on the history of music – by a kind of illicit metaphorical transfer from the realm of natural phenomena (see Deconstruction). Thus musical works are assumed to ‘develop’ through a process of evolution from germinal motifs which assures both their formal (organic) integrity as self-contained works of art and also their appointed place in a history – a universally acknowledged Great Tradition – to which they stand as exemplars. Post-structuralism rejects this way of thinking in favour of a strongly revisionist or anti-canonical approach which views the ideology of organic form as a potent source of aesthetic mystification in the service of hegemonic interests and values (Bergeron and Bohlman, 1992; Goehr, 1992; Solie, 1980). It thus sets out to make room for other, less ‘authorized’ (hence more subversive) modes of music enjoyment as well as for resistance to ‘structural listening’ with its strongly inculcated system of codes and conventions.
There are further parallels between post-structuralism in its literary-critical and its ‘new-musicological’ forms. One is the desire to open a door to all the winds of historical change by attacking any notion of the work (or text) as an autonomous structure possessed of its own, uniquely ‘aesthetic’ value, and standing quite apart from the vicissitudes of short-term cultural taste. In this respect it differs crucially from the thinking of a critic like T.W. Adorno, one for whom the essential condition of a truly radical (counter-hegemonic) art was its power to hold out against the blandishments of mass culture, and to do so, moreover, by containing in itself all the conflicts, resistances and stubborn contradictions that marked its irreconcilable distance from the sphere of popular consumption (Adorno, 1949). In Subotnik’s case there is a marked shift of outlook from her earlier work, much indebted to Adorno, to her later (more heavily post-structuralist influenced) writings where Adorno very often represents all the high-modernist values that she now seeks to deconstruct in the name of a democratic musical culture (Subotnik, 1996). Indeed, the chief difference between post-structuralism and critical theory in the Frankfurt School line of descent is the latter’s steadfast insistence that musical and other artworks can be subject to a mode of immanent critique which respects their relative autonomy while discovering in them all the symptoms and signs of a false social ‘reality’.
Elsewhere, post-structuralism has exerted a strong influence on sociologists of music, who reject any notion of autonomous form or of ‘the work’ as somehow existing quite apart from its various historically-changing conditions of production, reception and performance. Thus the so-called New Musicology has followed the New Historicist movement in literary studies by adopting a broadly contextualist or socio-cultural approach (Kramer, 1990; Shepherd, 1991; Treitler, 1989). That is to say, these critics make a programmatic point of annulling the prescriptive formalist line between structural features supposedly ‘intrinsic’ to the work and the kinds of ‘extrinsic’ (background-documentary) source material which analysts mostly consider irrelevant to their own more specialized or purely ‘musical’ concern. Very often this approach goes along with a claim to dislodge the canon of great works from its position of hitherto unchallenged cultural eminence by revealing the mechanisms of canon formation for what they are; a set of taken-for-granted aesthetic values which in fact have more to do with dominant social interests. Where post-structuralism lends support to such arguments is by offering a generalized theory of language, discourse, subjectivity and ideology that effectively dissolves the musical work, like the literary text, into its various circumambient cultural codes or its relationship to other kinds of signifying practice.
However, there is an obvious problem with this theory when it comes to explaining how works (or indeed human agents) could muster resistance to prevalent, ideologically-conditioned habits of response. It is here that post-structuralism is most closely akin to postmodernist ideas about the current transformation of beliefs and values which – so it is argued – signals an end to the discourse of old-style ‘enlightened’ critical modernity. In musical terms, this tends to work out as a defence of passively pleasurable listening, and a rejection of anything that stretches the mind beyond such routine, acculturated modes of perception. In short, there is a certain elective affinity between post-structuralist–postmodernist theorizing and the kinds of present-day minimalist or neo-romantic music which are likewise regarded as marking a break with the elitist values of high modernist culture. Adorno wrote witheringly of the ‘culture-industry’ and the way that it encouraged ‘regressive listening’ through the ceaseless churning-out of a totally commodified (mass-market orientated) music which demanded nothing more than the passive registration of stereotyped melodic and harmonic formulas (Adorno 1991). While post-structuralism is not necessarily aligned with any such regressive tendency still one may suspect that its radical rhetoric conceals an absence of genuine critical-emancipatory force. At any rate, its claims are heavily compromised by a failure to envisage any role for music other than those of Barthesian hypercultivated pleasure on the one hand or subjection to a repertory of pre-established codes and conventions on the other.
Structuralism, post-structuralism
F. de Saussure: Cour de linguistique générale (Paris, 1916, 5/1955; Eng. trans., 1959, 2/1974)
T.W. Adorno: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949, 3/1967; Eng. trans., 1973)
P. Boulez: Penser la musique aujourd’hui (Paris, 1964; Eng. trans., 1971 as Boulez on Music Today)
P. Boulez: Relèves d’apprenti, ed. P. Thévenin (Paris, 1966; Eng. trans. 1968)
J. Lacan: Ecrits (Paris, 1966–71; partial Eng. trans., 1977)
E. Benveniste: Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris, 1966–74); Eng. trans. of vol.i (Miami, 1971)
P. Sollers: L’écriture et l’expérience des limites (Paris, 1968; Eng. trans., 1983)
R. Barthes: S/Z (Paris, 1970; Eng. trans., 1974)
M. Lane, ed.: Structuralism: a Reader (London, 1970)
F. Jameson: The Prison-House of Language: a Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, NJ, 1972)
N. Ruwet: Langage, musique, poésie (Paris, 1972)
R. Barthes: Le plaisir du texte (Paris, 1973; Eng. trans., 1975)
J. Culler: Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London, 1975)
J.-J. Nattiez: Fondements d’une sémiologie de la musique (Paris, 1975)
R. Barthes: Image, Music, Text, ed. S. Heath (London, 1977) [selected essays]
T. Hawkes: Structuralism and Semiotics (London and Berkeley, 1977)
D. Lodge: The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (London, 1977)
J.V. Harari, ed.: Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (Ithaca, NY, 1979)
R. Solie: ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Musical Analysis’, 19CM, iv (1980), 147–56
B. Johnson: The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore, 1981)
R. Young, ed.: Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader (London, 1981)
R. Barthes: L’ovie et l’obtus (Paris, 1982; Eng. trans. 1985, as The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation)
J. Dunsby: ‘Music and Semiotics: the Nattiez Phase’, MQ, lxix (1983), 27–43
R. Jakobson: Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (Oxford and Minneapolis, 1985) [rev. from Poetics Today, special issure, autumn 1980]
N. Cook: A Guide to Musical Analysis (Oxford, 1987)
R. Harland: Superstructuralism: the Philosophy of Structuralism and Poststructuralism (London, 1987)
R. Jakobson: Language in Literature, ed. K. Pomorska and S. Rudy (Cambridge, MA, 1987)
L. Treitler: Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1989)
L. Kramer: Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley, 1990)
T.W. Adorno: The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J.M. Berstein (London, 1991)
S. McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991)
J. Shepherd: Music as Social Text (Cambridge, 1991)
K. Bergeron and P.V. Bohlman, eds.: Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago, 1992)
L. Goehr: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford, 1992)
R. Selden, ed.: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, viii: From Formalism to Poststructuralism (Cambridge, 1995)
R.R. Subotnik: Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis, 1996)