Friday, April 28, 2017

Structuralism and Structuralists

Says Foucault:

"Imagine a photograph representing a face. If you make this image go from positive to negative, in a way all the dots of the picture are going to be modified. That is to say that all the points that were white will become black and that all the points that were black will become white. None of the points, none of the elements therefore remain identical. And yet you can recognize the face. And yet the face remains the same even though it has gone from positive to negative, and you can say that it stays the same; you recognize it because the relations between all these different elements have remained the same. Relations between the points have stayed the same, or relations of contrast and of opposition between white and black have remained the same, even though each of the dot that was white has become black, and each point that was black has become white.

Deep down in a very broad sense of what structuralism is , we can say that structuralism is the method of analysis that consists of drawing constant relations from elements that in themselves, in their own character, in their substance, can change.

Structuralists are people for whom what counts in essence, are systems of relations and thus not all the lived individual experience of people... what I do belongs at heart like structuralism to this great questioning of the sovereignty of the subject..."

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