ABSTRACT
The task of structuralism is to make explicit the rules and conventions (the structure) that govern the production of meaning (acts of parole). Structuralism is a way of approaching texts and practices that is derived from the theoretical work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Claude Levi-Strauss uses Saussure to help him discover the ‘unconscious foundations’ of the culture of so-called ‘primitive’ societies. Saussure’s model of difference is spatial, in which meaning is made in the relations between signs that are locked together in a self-regulating structure. Jacques Derrida’s model of differance, however, is both structural and temporal; meaning depends on structural difference but also on temporal relations of before and after. Post-structuralism is virtually synonymous with the work of Derrida. For Derrida, the binary opposition, so important to structuralism, is never a simple structural relation; it is always a relation of power, in which one term is in a position of dominance with regard to the other.
