Structuralism

What makes a message intelligible before anyone explains it?

Suppose a university campaign places a student, a bright screen and a glass-fronted building beneath the line “The future belongs to the connected”. The poster invites a particular account of education: connection appears modern, desirable and closely linked with success.

Its meaning develops through relationships. The wording meets the image; the image draws upon familiar associations; “connected” gains force beside alternatives such as disconnected, isolated or excluded. Structuralism investigates the systems through which these relationships make sense.

A word belongs to a language. A character occupies a position in a story. An image draws upon codes of representation. A cultural distinction gains meaning through a wider pattern of classification.

Begin with relations

Think of a game of chess. A piece’s role depends on its relation to other pieces and the rules of movement. Its material and colour help identify it, while its function emerges within the game.

For media analysis, ask how a headline, image, character or category works within a larger arrangement. Compare what changes when one element is replaced, reordered or placed in a different setting.

Three questions to carry through the chapter

• System: which shared codes and distinctions make this expression possible?
• Relation: how do choices, combinations and contrasts organise its meaning?
• Consequence: which accounts of people, institutions and social life become familiar or authoritative?

In my lecture, I move from structural linguistics to anthropology, myth and the organisation of knowledge. This chapter follows that route and develops tools for analysing media texts, narratives and institutional practices.

Structures organise possibilities that people learn to use.

A structure is an organised set of relations. Structural analysis identifies the elements relevant to a question and examines the rules, differences and combinations through which they operate.

The approach grew from linguistic inquiry and became influential in anthropology, literary studies and cultural analysis, especially in the mid-twentieth century. French structuralism gained particular prominence during the 1960s.

The system and its particular expressions

People enter languages and conventions that already have histories. Learning them makes new expressions possible. A speaker can create a sentence that others recognise because they share enough of the system.

A media genre works similarly as an analytical example. Viewers learn expectations about a news bulletin, a thriller or a tutorial. Producers can use, modify or challenge those expectations through particular choices.

Organisation beyond explicit awareness

People often use patterns they can recognise in practice without being able to state every rule. A fluent speaker can identify an awkward sentence while finding its grammar difficult to explain.

Structural inquiry makes such relations available for analysis. It constructs a model that can be compared with further examples and revised where the evidence requires.

From expression to model

Begin with a bounded collection of material. Identify recurring units and relations. Propose an account of their organisation, then examine whether it explains variations as well as familiar examples.

A model becomes useful when it makes relationships easier to investigate. The campus poster offers one starting point: examine how its words and images organise a particular relationship among education, technology and success.

Shared linguistic relations make particular acts of speaking possible.

Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was published posthumously in 1916 from lecture materials assembled by editors. It became a central source for structural approaches to language and culture.

Langue and parole

Langue concerns the socially shared language system. Parole concerns particular acts of speaking or language use. Study their relationship to connect a recognisable expression with the conventions through which it becomes possible.

For a media project, collect several headlines. Examine the recurring conventions through which they identify actors, actions and events. Then analyse what a particular headline does with those possibilities.

Signifier and signified

Saussure’s linguistic sign joins a sound-image with a concept. Later semiological work extends analysis towards written, visual and other cultural forms.

A social institution

Language is learned through social life. Its conventions allow speakers to understand one another while also providing material for innovation, disagreement and change.

Suppose an institution begins using “learning partner” where it previously used “student”. Compare the expressions, the contexts in which they appear and the relationship each wording invites. Interviews can investigate how people understand the change.

Analysis at two levels

At the level of a particular text, identify the form and the concept it brings into play. At the level of the system, compare the distinctions and conventions through which that relation acquires value.

The move between these levels makes a structural explanation more informative than an isolated list of symbols.

Core source: Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. For extension into cultural sign systems, see Barthes, Elements of Semiology.

A sign gains value through the distinctions around it.

Structural linguistics examines how terms acquire identity through their relations with other terms. Meaning develops within a network of distinctions, contrasts and possible combinations.

Arbitrariness and convention

The relation between a linguistic form and its concept is conventional. Different languages can use different forms for a familiar concept. Speakers learn the relation through a shared language.

For a media example, compare the names given to an institutional role across languages or organisations. Ask which distinctions each naming system maintains and which relationships it makes available.

Difference and linguistic value

A term’s place in a system matters. “Public”, “private”, “commercial” and “community” can organise different distinctions depending on the domain. Analyse the relevant relations within the material you are studying.

Context specifies the distinction

Suppose a campaign contrasts “connected learning” with “isolated study”. Another text values “independent study” beside “guided learning”. Similar practices can enter different networks of evaluation through their relation to other terms.

Identify the contrast in the text and inspect its consequences. Ask which descriptions become positive, which become deficient and which possibilities receive little attention.

From contrast to an argument

A useful interpretation shows where the distinctions appear and how they connect. Quote short passages, describe the relevant images and compare alternative examples. This gives the reader a route through the evidence.

Conceptual guides: Saussure; Barthes, Elements of Semiology.

A message takes shape through available choices and their arrangement.

A structural analysis examines what is selected and how the selected elements combine. It can also distinguish a system at a specified time from the processes through which that system changes.

Paradigmatic relations

A paradigm is a set of alternatives relevant to a position or function. Saussure’s discussion of associative relations helped establish the broader inquiry into alternatives absent from a particular sequence.

Replacing “reclaim” with “redesign” changes the action attributed to the students. Replacing “students” with “officials” changes who appears to act. A substitution helps reveal which distinction carries meaning.

Syntagmatic relations

A syntagm is a combination of elements within an actual sequence or arrangement. A headline relates actor, action and object. A film sequence relates shots, sounds and transitions. A page layout relates text, images and position.

Apply the distinction to images

In the campus poster, the image of a screen is one selection among alternatives: a book, a workshop, a discussion circle or an open space. Its combination with the student, building and slogan organises the overall invitation.

Create a controlled comparison by changing one element. Ask how the altered arrangement changes the account of education offered by the poster. Explain which codes support your interpretation.

Synchronic analysis

A synchronic analysis examines relations within a specified state of a system. A study might analyse the terms, images and distinctions used across one campaign during one academic year.

Diachronic analysis

A diachronic analysis investigates change over time. Compare campaigns from different periods to examine how descriptions of learning, authority or institutional identity develop.

Use the two perspectives together when the question requires it. Establish the organisation within each period, then explain the changes through evidence about texts, practices and historical conditions.

Read Saussure and Barthes, Elements of Semiology.

Different cultural stories can organise related problems through transformations.

Claude Lévi-Strauss extended structural analysis into anthropology, especially kinship, classification and myth. He examined relations among cultural elements and sought patterns that could explain variations across examples.

Kinship as a system of relations

A kinship term gains meaning within a network of recognised relationships, classifications and rules. Structural analysis asks how these relations connect and how a change in one position affects the larger arrangement.

The analytical emphasis is relational: identify what a category does within the system being investigated and the evidence through which that role can be established.

Myth and relations among units

In “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955), Lévi-Strauss examines meaningful units and relations across versions of myths. His analysis seeks bundles of relations and transformations through which a myth organises a problem.

A mytheme is a minimal meaningful unit used in structural analysis of myth. Its analytical role emerges through relations with other units and versions.

Binary oppositions and mediation

Contrasts such as nature/culture, raw/cooked or belonging/exclusion can become organising relations in particular analyses. Identify how the material constructs the contrast and whether it introduces a mediator, reversal or transformation.

Suppose one recruitment story follows an individual who leaves home to achieve success. Another follows a group that improves its home community. Compare the relations among departure, achievement and belonging across the two accounts.

Classification and shared intellectual capacities

In La Pensée sauvage (1962), translated anew as Wild Thought, Lévi-Strauss examines classificatory thought and the intellectual complexity of cultural knowledge. His work challenges rankings that treat some peoples’ thought as inherently inferior.

Bricolage describes working with available materials and resources, recombining them for a purpose. The concept offers a productive question about how cultural expression uses an inherited repertoire.

The scale of the inquiry

Lévi-Strauss’s four-volume Mythologiques develops an extensive comparison of myths. A smaller media study can adopt a bounded comparative question and make its proposed relations explicit.

Primary readings: Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology; “The Structural Study of Myth”; Wild Thought.

Everyday representations can make historical choices appear natural.

Roland Barthes brought semiological analysis into everyday culture. Advertising, photographs, fashion, entertainment and public imagery became materials through which to examine how meanings are organised.

Three major French publications mark this work: Mythologies (1957), Elements of Semiology (1964) and The Fashion System (1967). They develop different applications of the analysis of signs and cultural systems.

Myth as a second-order system

In Barthes’s account, an already meaningful sign can become a signifier or form within another system. Myth recruits that meaning to present a cultural or historical association as natural and self-evident.

Naturalisation

The campus campaign links connectivity with educational success. A structural reading can examine how the student, screen, architecture and slogan support the association, and how other accounts of learning become less visible.

Compare a second campaign that foregrounds a workshop, a library or a discussion circle. Ask what each arrangement presents as the exemplary educational experience.

Ideology in the ordinary

Myth analysis follows the work performed by familiar representations. Examine how they organise ideas about achievement, belonging, authority or desirable ways of living.

Suppose a recruitment film repeatedly makes an individual award the resolution of student life. Analyse the sequence and compare it with accounts organised around collective work, public contribution or intellectual discovery.

The fashion system

In The Fashion System, Barthes analyses the language through which fashion magazines describe clothing. The object of inquiry includes the relations among features, occasions and values established by written descriptions.

For a contemporary media study, examine how a product description connects a material feature with a social occasion or desirable identity. Compare the recurring patterns across a bounded set of texts.

Textual evidence and audience response

A myth analysis proposes how a representation organises an invitation to read. Audience research can investigate how people recognise, negotiate or contest that invitation. Define the evidence for each part of the account.

Read Barthes, Mythologies; Elements of Semiology; The Fashion System.

Stories organise actions and positions through recognisable relations.

Structural narrative analysis examines how actions, roles and sequences form a story. It makes comparisons possible across texts whose characters and settings appear different.

Propp: functions and sequences

Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, first published in Russian in 1928, analyses recurring functions within a defined corpus of wonder tales. A function identifies an action through its significance for the course of the story.

A helper can appear through different characters while occupying a comparable narrative role. Study what the action does in the sequence and how its role relates to the other functions.

Barthes and the analysis of narrative

Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives” examines narrative through different levels, including functions, actions and narration. It asks how the parts become meaningful through their integration within a larger organisation.

These questions guide a comparison. Establish the relevant functions and relations within the material selected. Propp’s original classification belongs to its corpus; later media applications need their own justification.

Genre as a repertoire of expectations

A genre supplies recognisable conventions about situations, roles, forms and outcomes. A producer can invite recognition through familiar arrangements and create surprise through variation.

Compare two institutional films: one uses a personal success story; another uses an investigative format. Examine how the form distributes knowledge, credibility and opportunities for identification.

The death of the author

Barthes’s essay redirects interpretation towards the codes, prior texts and relations through which writing and reading produce meaning. It gives the reader and the plurality of textual relations a central analytical place.

An author’s account can supply evidence about production. A reading also examines how the text draws upon conventions and becomes meaningful within a cultural setting. Support the interpretation through identifiable relations in the material.

The essay marks an important movement towards questions of textual plurality and later debates associated with post-structuralism.

Read Propp; Barthes on narrative; Barthes on authorship.

Knowledge takes shape through historically organised ways of seeing and speaking.

Michel Foucault investigates the historical conditions through which objects, categories, statements and speaking positions become possible. His work connects accounts of knowledge with the institutions and practices in which they operate.

Discourse

A discourse is an organised field of statements and practices through which objects are described, investigated and made available for judgement. Examine the categories, relations and procedures that establish what can count as a relevant statement.

Suppose an institution describes learning through “engagement”, “completion” and “performance”. Ask how those terms define the student, what counts as evidence and which experiences become difficult to express within the categories.

Archaeology

Archaeology examines the rules and regularities through which statements form a field of knowledge. It asks how objects, concepts and authorised positions become intelligible within a historically specific configuration.

For a media project, compare how a category such as “successful student” is described within a bounded set of institutional texts. Identify the objects measured, the positions entitled to speak and the relations among the concepts.

Genealogy

Genealogy investigates the emergence and transformation of practices through contingent histories, struggles and relations of power. It directs attention towards how an arrangement came to operate and how it became acceptable or authoritative.

A history of institutional metrics might follow changing records, technologies, administrative goals and disputes. Trace the transformations through documents and practices across time.

Power and knowledge

Foucault examines how ways of knowing and ways of governing conduct support one another. Classifying, observing and evaluating people can create objects of knowledge while shaping possibilities of action.

Ask who can establish a category, through which procedures it acquires authority and what follows when people are placed within it. Compare official descriptions with the experiences and responses of those classified.

Read The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge and “The Subject and Power”.

An arrangement of visibility can help organise conduct.

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault examines practices through which bodies and conduct become observable, comparable and trainable. He connects these practices with institutions, records, standards and forms of judgement.

Bentham’s Panopticon

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon design places cells around a central inspection point. Foucault uses its asymmetry of visibility to analyse a disciplinary mechanism: the person may be observed while being unable to verify when observation occurs.

Observation, normalisation and examination

Disciplinary practices can combine observation with standards of comparison and individual records. An examination makes a person both an object of knowledge and a subject of evaluation within an institutional arrangement.

To investigate a contemporary institution, identify what is visible, which standards apply, who interprets the records and what consequences follow. Examine the experiences of those assessed as well as the official description.

A media and technology example

Suppose a learning platform displays attendance, completion and response-time records. Students believe that staff may inspect the records at any time. Some adjust how they participate to appear consistently active.

A study can investigate what the system records, how often the records are used, what students believe and how those beliefs enter practice. Compare differences across participants and settings.

Power and possibilities of action

Foucault’s “The Subject and Power” examines power through relations that act upon possible actions. This offers a way to investigate both the organisation of conduct and the responses through which people navigate, contest or change an arrangement.

Follow compliance, adaptation, misunderstanding, resistance and negotiation where they occur. Explain the relations that make those responses possible and the evidence connecting them with institutional practice.

Primary texts: Foucault, Discipline and Punish; “The Subject and Power”.

A strong structural account explains patterns while making variation visible.

Structuralism gives media research a systematic way to examine relations that make meaning possible. It helps connect individual texts with wider codes, compare variants and investigate the familiarity of cultural representations.

Its explanatory value grows when the analyst defines the material, makes the proposed relations explicit and tests the account against differences and contrary cases.

History and the limits of a bounded model

A synchronic model identifies relations within a specified state. Historical inquiry can examine how that state emerged and how its categories change. Define the scope of each account and connect them through evidence.

Practice and agency

Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice develops the relation between structures, dispositions and practical action. It helps ask how people acquire a feel for a setting and produce actions within its possibilities.

Giddens’s theory of structuration examines rules and resources through the ongoing production and reproduction of social practices. This extends inquiry towards how knowledgeable actors sustain and transform arrangements.

For the campus campaign, examine how designers, administrators and students use the available conventions. Interviews and production records can connect the textual pattern with situated decisions.

Post-structuralist questions

Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” examines assumptions about centres, ordering principles and the play of signification. It opens questions about what stabilises a system and how its organisation becomes unsettled.

Compare the stability proposed by an analysis with ambiguities, contradictions and shifts in context. A particular text may activate more than one code or invite several plausible relationships among its elements.

Audience interpretation

Hall’s encoding/decoding approach investigates the relationship between organised meanings and socially situated readings. It provides a route for examining how audiences accept, qualify or oppose an invitation to interpret.

A structural account of the campus poster can therefore become one part of a larger study: identify the codes and relations, investigate production and history, then examine reception.

Extensions and debates: Bourdieu (1977); Giddens (1984); Derrida (1978); Hall (1973).

Move from a striking detail to a supported account of relations.

Identify the units, the relations and the evidence in each case. Develop your interpretation before opening the discussion.

Case 1 · A campus campaign changes its image

Suppose one version of the campus poster shows a student alone with a screen. A second shows students discussing a book around a table. Both carry the line “The future belongs to the connected”.

Your task: explain how substitution and combination alter the meaning. Propose a mythic reading and identify evidence needed to support it.

Case 2 · Two stories about achievement

Suppose two recruitment films follow a newcomer facing difficulty. One ends with an individual prize after a competitive test. The other ends with a group building a resource for its neighbourhood.

Your task: compare narrative functions, oppositions and the relationship between achievement and belonging.

Case 3 · A dashboard defines engagement

Suppose a learning platform classifies students through logins, completion and response times. Its dashboard labels some students “highly engaged”. Students begin discussing which actions make them appear active to staff.

Your task: connect classification, knowledge and conduct. Explain how an archaeological question differs from a genealogical question.

Listen for the move from individual expressions to organising relations.

Watch my lecture on Structuralism. Follow the movement from language as a shared system to cultural classification, myth, discourse and the organisation of conduct.

Watch my Structuralism lecture on YouTube ↗

After watching, write a 200-word structural reading of one media text. Identify its units, relations and codes, then formulate a question that would deepen or test the interpretation.

Choose the relationship that explains the example.

Choose one answer for each question before opening the explanation. Return to the relevant section whenever you want to clarify a distinction.

Build a structural explanation that another reader can assess.

Begin with a bounded collection of texts or practices and a question about their organisation. Define the units, explain the proposed relations and show how the interpretation handles variation.

Activity 1 · Analyse a campaign

Choose three to five related posters, advertisements or institutional messages. Define the collection and the period.

1. Describe the material. Record the wording, images, layout and context.
2. Identify units and relations. Map distinctions, combinations and recurring roles.
3. Try substitutions. Replace one element and explain how the meaning changes.
4. Develop a mythic reading. Examine whether a historical association is presented as natural.
5. Test the interpretation. Include an example that complicates the proposed pattern.

Suggested output: an annotated comparison and a 1,000-word analysis. Explain the route from particular details to the proposed structure.

Activity 2 · Compare versions of a story

Select three short narratives addressing a similar problem. Map actions, roles and resolutions, then examine relations across the versions.

Suggested output: a narrative table and an 800-word account of one transformation. State what is preserved, what changes and which evidence supports the comparison.

A historical and institutional extension

Choose a category such as “engagement”, “risk” or “success” within a specified institution. Examine its definitions, measures, authorised speakers and consequences across a defined period.

Connect textual records with interviews and observation where access and consent permit. Use archaeology to examine rules of formation and genealogy to trace emergence, disputes and transformations.

Strengths and limits of the evidence

Close analysis reveals relations within the material. Comparison examines variation. Historical records connect an arrangement with its development. Interviews and observation investigate production, interpretation and practice.

A strong account explains the boundary of the corpus and the criteria for coding or interpretation. Consider rival readings, ambiguous examples and changes that challenge the initial model.

Researcher reflexivity

Record how your own familiarity with a code guides the analysis. Ask which conventions other participants recognise and which require explanation. Preserve disagreements that reveal the limits or scope of the proposed interpretation.

Examination and seminar prompts

• Explain the relational conception of meaning in structuralism.
• Distinguish langue and parole, signifier and signified, and synchronic and diachronic inquiry.
• Apply paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis to a media example.
• Discuss Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of myth and transformation.
• Explain how Barthes’s myth naturalises a historical association.
• Compare Foucault’s archaeology, genealogy and analysis of discipline.
• Assess the strengths and limits of a structural approach to media research.

Find the relations that make an expression work.

Key terms

Structuralism

An approach examining how elements acquire identity, meaning or function through relations within a system.

Structure

An organised set of relations among elements.

Relational analysis

Explaining an element through its connections, differences and position.

System

A set of interdependent elements and relations defined for an inquiry.

Langue

The socially shared language system.

Parole

Particular acts or instances of language use.

Sign

In Saussure’s linguistic account, the unity of signifier and signified.

Signifier

The recognisable form or sound-image associated with a concept within a sign.

Signified

The conceptual aspect associated with the signifier.

Referent

The person, place, object or situation referred to in a particular use.

Arbitrariness

The conventional rather than naturally necessary relation between linguistic form and concept.

Linguistic value

A sign’s place and significance within relations to other signs.

Difference

A relation through which an element is distinguished from others.

Code

A socially available set of conventions through which expression becomes intelligible.

Paradigm

A set of alternatives relevant to a position or function.

Syntagm

A combination of elements within a sequence or arrangement.

Commutation test

A substitution used to investigate which difference changes a signifying relation.

Synchrony

Analysis of relations within a specified state of a system.

Diachrony

Analysis of change through time.

Binary opposition

An organising contrast between two terms within a particular analysis.

Mediation

A relation or operation connecting terms or tensions within a structure.

Transformation

A change that preserves, reverses or reorganises relations across versions.

Mytheme

A minimal meaningful unit used within structural analysis of myth.

Bricolage

Working with and recombining available materials or cultural resources.

Myth

In Barthes’s account, a signifying system that naturalises cultural or historical associations.

Second-order signification

The use of an already meaningful sign as a form within another system of signification.

Naturalisation

The presentation of a historical or cultural association as self-evident or natural.

Ideology

Ideas and representations through which social relations and values acquire coherence or legitimacy.

Narrative function

An action understood through its significance for the course of a story.

Genre

A recognisable repertoire of conventions concerning form, situation, roles and expectations.

Textual plurality

The multiple codes and relations through which a text can produce meaning.

Discourse

An organised field of statements and practices through which objects become describable and knowable.

Discursive formation

Regularities governing relations among objects, concepts, statements and speaking positions.

Archaeology

Foucault’s inquiry into historical rules and regularities of discursive formation.

Genealogy

Historical inquiry into the contingent emergence and transformation of practices through power relations.

Power/knowledge

The interrelation of ways of knowing and ways of organising conduct.

Normalisation

Evaluation and regulation through standards that distinguish and compare conduct.

Examination

A practice combining observation, judgement and the production of individualised knowledge.

Panopticism

A disciplinary mechanism in which asymmetric possible observation can contribute to self-regulation.

Subject position

A position from which a person is invited or authorised to speak, act or understand within a discourse.

Agency

The capacity to act within, reproduce, negotiate or transform conditions.

Structuration

Giddens’s account of the ongoing production and reproduction of social practices through rules and resources.

Further reading

Begin with the linguistic distinctions, then follow their extension into anthropology and cultural analysis. Read Foucault’s historical projects in their own terms and use the later debates to examine practice, history and interpretation.

1. Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.; P. Meisel & H. Saussy, Eds.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916) Read ↗Begin with the language system, signs, difference and linguistic relations.
2. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural anthropology (C. Jacobson & B. G. Schoepf, Trans.). Basic Books. (Original work published 1958) Read ↗Explore the relational method across kinship, classification, myth and other cultural forms.
3. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955). The structural study of myth. The Journal of American Folklore, 68(270), 428–444. Read ↗Study relations, versions and transformations in myth analysis.
4. Lévi-Strauss, C. (2021). Wild thought: A new translation of “La Pensée sauvage” (J. Mehlman & J. Leavitt, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1962) Read ↗Examine classification, bricolage and the complexity of cultural thought.
5. Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957) Read ↗Study second-order signification and the naturalisation of historical associations.
6. Barthes, R. (1977). Elements of semiology (A. Lavers & C. Smith, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1964) Read ↗Connect linguistic distinctions with the study of cultural sign systems.
7. Barthes, R. (1990). The fashion system (M. Ward & R. Howard, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1967) Read ↗Examine the structural analysis of written fashion descriptions.
8. Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the folktale (L. Scott, Trans.; 2nd ed.). University of Texas Press. (Original work published 1928) Read ↗Study narrative functions and sequences within the original corpus.
9. Barthes, R. (1977). Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives. In Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans., pp. 79–124). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1966) Read ↗Investigate functions, actions and narration as related levels of analysis.
10. Barthes, R. (1977). The death of the author. In Image, music, text (S. Heath, Trans., pp. 142–148). Hill and Wang. Read ↗Examine authorship, reading and the plurality of textual relations.
11. Foucault, M. (1973). The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1963) Read ↗Study the historical organisation of medical observation and description.
12. Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. Tavistock Publications. (Original work published 1966) Read ↗Examine historical orders of knowledge and their conditions of intelligibility.
13. Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1969) Read ↗Investigate rules of formation, statements and discursive practices.
14. Bentham, J. (1791). Panopticon; or, the inspection-house. T. Payne. Read ↗Read the inspection principle and proposed arrangement in a primary historical source.
15. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1975) Read ↗Read the chapter on panopticism and its disciplinary mechanism.
16. Foucault, M. (1982). The subject and power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. Read ↗Investigate power relations, conduct and possibilities of action.
17. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967) Read ↗Read “Structure, Sign, and Play” for questions about centres and signification.
18. Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham. Read ↗Connect organised meanings with socially situated audience readings.
19. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1972) Read ↗Extend the inquiry towards dispositions, conditions and practical action.
20. Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press. Read ↗Examine rules, resources and the reproduction or transformation of practice.

My lecture: Structuralism Made Easy ↗

Six statements to retain

1. Elements acquire identity, meaning and function through relations within systems.
2. Shared linguistic conventions make particular acts of language use intelligible.
3. Selection, combination and difference organise a message’s possibilities.
4. Structural comparison investigates relations through variation and transformation.
5. Cultural signs can naturalise historical associations, while discourses and institutions organise authoritative knowledge.
6. A strong account makes its model explicit and connects it with evidence about texts, history, practice and interpretation.