Kula arm bracelet from Nabwageta Island, Papua New Guinea.
Reading Group: What Is Structuralism? Meeting IV: Wilden – “Nature and Culture: The Emergence of Symbolic and Imaginary Exchange”
Saturday August 3rd 3:30-5:30pm
Or Gallery 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver
What Is Structuralism? is a monthly reading group on the history and philosophy of structuralism, from foundations to contemporary developments. Meetings will be held on the first Saturday of each month.
This month we are reading Chapter IX, “Nature and Culture: The Emergence of Symbolic and Imaginary Exchange”, from Anthony Wilden’s 1972 book System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. In this chapter, Wilden uses the notion of information and the analog/digital distinction to reinterpret Lévi-Strauss’ foundational work on kinship structure. This is motivated by an account of meaning as dependent on an unconscious symbolic order, which on Wilden’s account is generated by a discrete mapping of continuous variation. Wilden was known for his work integrating French structuralist analysis with the second-order systems theory (or “social cybernetics”) of Bateson, von Bertalanffy, and McCulloch, as well as for his contribution to the psychoanalytic literature as one of the first English translators of Jacques Lacan.
Gravitational wave chirp spectrogram, from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) at MIT.
Reading Group: What Is Structuralism? Meeting 3: Worrall – “Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?”
Saturday July 6th 3:30-5:30pm
Or Gallery 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver
What Is Structuralism? is a monthly reading group on the history and philosophy of structuralism, from foundations to contemporary developments. Meetings will be held on the first Saturday of each month.
For our third meeting we are discussing John Worrall’s 1989 paper “Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?” This paper introduced Epistemic Structural Realism into the philosophy of science. Worrall uses the notion of structure to account for scientific theory change, using the shift from Newtonian to relativistic theories of gravitation, and the shift from Fresnel’s wave theory of light to Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory, to illustrate the preservation of truth content between physical theories. He traces this sense of “structure” back to the early 20th century work of Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem on the philosophy of science.
Reading Group: What Is Structuralism? Meeting 2: Deleuze – “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?”
Saturday June 1st 3:30-5:30pm
Or Gallery 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver
What Is Structuralism? is a monthly reading group on the history and philosophy of structuralism, from foundations to contemporary developments. Meetings will be held on the first Saturday of each month.
For our second meeting we are discussing Gilles Deleuze’s 1972 paper “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?” This text enumerates a set of characteristic properties of the structuralist project: symbolic order, localization, differential relationship, virtual genesis, seriality and “the empty square”. These properties are explained using examples from the work of Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and Lévi-Strauss.
Reading Group: What Is Structuralism? Meeting 1: Piaget- “Structuralism”
Saturday May 4th 3:30-5:30pm
Or Gallery 555 Hamilton Street, Vancouver
What Is Structuralism? is a monthly reading group on the history and philosophy of structuralism, from foundations to contemporary developments. Meetings will be held on the first Saturday of each month.
For our first meeting we are reading the Introduction and Conclusion to Jean Piaget’s 1968 book “Structuralism”. In this text, Piaget introduces structuralism as a unifying framework for psychology, mathematics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, physics, biology, sociology, anthropology and philosophy, relating the varying programs of Saussure, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Bourbaki, Foucault and others to the central ideas of wholeness, transformation and self-regulation.
Structuralism is a research program begun in linguistics and extended through anthropology, mathematics, logic, philosophy of science, aesthetic theory, psychoanalysis, and cognitive psychology. Its orienting claim is that any model of reality must take relations rather than objects as fundamental; if we want to describe something it is both necessary and sufficient to account for the set of relations that constitute it.
Beginning with Saussure’s semantic holism, in which the meaning of any sign can be understood only in relation to language taken as a whole, the human and formal sciences were revolutionized by similar attempts to decompose their objects of study into densely interconnected networks of universalizable relations. This conceptual shift unearthed similarities between previously disparate domains of knowledge, propelling interdisciplinarity in the study of complex and critical issues such as the relation of social structure to political agency, the nature of scientific investigation, the transformations of myth and its function within cultural narratives, the social and developmental basis of rationality, the transformations of grammar as a basis for language, cognitive dimensions of normativity, cybernetics, simulation, and the relationship between models and the phenomena they describe.
What Is Structuralism? seeks to recapture the radical potential of structuralism through both foundational texts and later developments, from Badiou and the post-Althusserian Cercle d’Épistémologie to structuralist methodologies in analytic epistemology, logic, and philosophy of science.
The discussion is open to everyone and no prior familiarity with the subject matter is expected. We’re interested in collaboratively piecing together an understanding of these texts, not dictating an interpretation. We welcome participant input and suggestions for readings.
Future readings could include selections from:
Claude Lévi-Strauss – The Structural Study of Myth; History and Dialectic Gilles Deleuze – How Do We Recognize Structuralism? Alain Badiou – Theory of the Subject David Chalmers – Structuralism as a Response to Skepticism Jacques Lacan – On Structure as an Inmixing Prior to Any Subject Whatsoever James Ladyman and Don Ross – Every Thing Must Go Luciano Floridi – Against Digital Ontology Anthony Wilden – System and Structure Fernando Zalamea – Peirce’s Continuum Noam Chomsky – Syntactic Structures Stewart Shapiro – Structure and Ontology
