Structuralism vs. Poststructuralism

Framing

This debate concerns the nature of signs and meaning. Structuralism (Saussure) treats signs as binary oppositions (signifier/signified) within stable systems. Poststructuralism (Derrida) radicalizes this, arguing signifiers refer only to other signifiers in endless chains, never arriving at final signifieds.

Positions

Position A: Structuralism

Saussure's model treats signs as stable relationships between signifier and signified. Structure determines meaning through binary oppositions and difference. Key texts: source-notes/coyne-peirce-for-architects, source-notes/coyne-derrida-for-architects

Position B: Poststructuralism

Derrida argues that signifiers refer to other signifiers in endless chains (différance). Meaning is trace, never final presence. Metaphysics of presence must be deconstructed. Key texts: source-notes/coyne-derrida-for-architects

Key Texts

source-notes/coyne-derrida-for-architects — poststructuralism position
source-notes/coyne-peirce-for-architects — alternative (Peircean) semiotics
source-notes/baudrillard-1983-fatal-strategies — the poststructuralist position pushed to its object-centric extreme: the sign's circulation without referent, "the object is never innocent," and the reversal of the subject by the object (see supremacy-of-the-object, principle-of-evil)
The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the break inside structuralist Marxism: Baudrillard reads Althusser's retroactive structuralism as still "an ideological process, now in the sense of a structural reconstruction through a simulation model instead of empiricist, finalist evolutionism" (ch. III, "Epistemology III: Materialism and Ethnocentrism," p. 84), and turns the structuralist apparatus against its own object in "Structural Causality and the Primitives" (ch. III, p. 70) — the concepts of historical materialism "analyze only our own societies, which are ruled by political economy" (ch. I, "Epistemology I: In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts," pp. 47–48). Where the page's Derridean pole deconstructs the signified, Baudrillard relocates critique to the code as such: "it is the code that becomes the instance of absolute reference, and, at the same time, the object of a perverse desire" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy," p. 123) — structural determination become the system's own mode of domination (see determinant-instance, form-sign).
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the debate's periodization and its hinge: Baudrillard placed within the post-structuralist group whose common denominator is "thought as doubling" — "not so much a thinking of new thought as new reasons for the old thought" (p. 169); and the Derrida comparison grounded not in shared themes but in the shared paradox of the sign, via Plato's Cratylus and 'Plato's Pharmacy' (p. 14 and n. 5).

structuralism-vs-peircean-semiotics — the Saussure/Peirce axis: binary vs. triadic semiotics
phenomenology-vs-semiotics — the broader question of whether meaning is embodied or signified