Theory and Resistance in Education: Towards a Pedagogy for the Opposition, Revised and Expanded Edition (Asor Books) by Henry A. Giroux

Author:Henry A. Giroux [Giroux, Henry A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2008-07-15T21:38:00+00:00

The Structuralist Tradition: Situating the Subject

Beginning in the mid-1960s, and continuing into the 1980s, a wideranging body of theories loosely labeled "structuralism" launched a major theoretical challenge against both orthodox Marxism and various versions of Western Marxism. Deriving its inspiration, in part, from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1974), structuralism registered an impact in a number of diverse fields and included among its followers both Marxists and non-Marxists. Its diverse tendencies and key figures could be found in the areas of film and literary criticism (Barth 1957, 1977), in French structuralist anthropology (Levi-Strauss 1972), in revisionist approaches to Freudian theories of psychoanalysis (Lacan 1977), in Marxist theories of the state (Poulantzas 1978), and especially in Althusser's (1969, 1971) reformulation of the Marxist theory of ideology. In spite of the differences separating these theorists, they all draw from a problematic that emphasizes the "force" of underlying structures or patterned material practices that "generate the surface appearances of cultural forms" (Bennett 1981). Since the range of structuralist writings is so immense, it is impossible to do anything more in this section than to summarize and analyze some of the major assumptions of structuralism and to compare the structuralist and culturalist problematics and to analyze the relevance each might have for developing a reconstructed theory of ideology and culture.

I want to argue that structuralist accounts are important in two respects. First, they have pointed to a number of significant, though incomplete, theoretical concerns necessary to reconstruct a critical Marxism. Their greatest value, however, lies in the critical analysis that they have brought to bear on both orthodox and culturalist versions of Marxism. At the core of the structuralist method is a rejection of the primacy of the human subject and the importance of consciousness and experience as the primary determinants in shaping history. The preference in this case is for more abstracted modes of analyses, particularly as these make visible the relations of structures that place, locate, and determine individual and group behavior. That is, the force of the structuralist argument rests in its rejection of consciousness, culture, and experience as adequate startingpoints to understand how a society functions and reproduces itself. Instead, it argues that consciousness and experience are only secondary in the unfolding of history and social relations and that the primary sources are to be found in the materiality of practices as they are represented in the political and economic structures of society. This becomes clearer if we analyze the structuralist view of determinations, totality, and the relations between class and ideology.

A major assumption underlying structuralist Marxism rests on a rejection of the anthropological notion that human beings are the subjects or agents of history. Power, in this view, is not an attribute of theoretically informed individuals or groups acting within prescribed conditions to make history. On the contrary, power is a characteristic of structures that not only constitute and position human behavior, but that deny the very efficacy of human agency. Put another way, it is the force

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