Gilles Deleuze and the Structuralist Spirit of 1967

Part 3: Examples, examples

Dear Reader,

How do structuralists recognise the language hidden in people and things? This is the question that guides Gilles Deleuze’s 1967 essay: “How Do We Recognise Structuralism?” Structuralism grows out of twentieth century linguistics’ analysis of language, which, as Deleuze says, “is the only thing that can properly be said to have structure.” In the post World War II period, the concept of language extends beyond the purely spoken into the esoteric—secret, and the non-verbal; languages of the unconscious and of bodies. It is these secret, non-verbal languages that structuralists recognise, and by which we recognise them as structuralists.

Structuralism is marked by the diversity of the disciplines that its practitioners work in: psychoanalysis, linguistics, philosophy, etc. The practitioners themselves, Lacan, Jakobson, Foucault, Althusser, etc. are also marked by a diversity of ages, backgrounds and the influence they have exercised on others. Despite these differences, the problems, methods and solutions that they discover in their areas of study have a certain resemblance. This resemblance reflects the spirit of the time they are working in, the 1960s, which was marked by an atmosphere of free and open inquiry. It is their adherence to the countercultural spirit of the time that marks these practitioners as structuralists, meaning they can all be gathered under the banner of structuralism; despite the individuality of their solutions to the problems they identify in their areas of study. Therefore it is appropriate for Deleuze to ask the following questions about structuralists and structuralism as a whole:

What do we recognise in those we call structuralists? And what do they themselves recognise? How do the structuralists go about recognising a language in something, the language proper to a domain? What do they discover in this domain?

In order to answer these questions, Deleuze proposes to “release” certain formal criteria of recognition by calling on “the example of cited authors, whatever the diversity of their works,” Deleuze’s essay, therefore, proceeds by examples. At this point it will be useful to consider the role of examples in philosophy, as they are the key to understanding Deleuze’s essay.

According to Michael Summa, in his essay “On the Functions of Examples in Critical Philosophy – Kant and Husserl,” examples have two functions, they can either be illustrative or guiding. The illustrative example connects universal concepts or rules to direct experience through exemplification—by referring to a model that embodies the concept. For example, a teacher might use the circular movement of the second hand of a watch to exemplify the circular law of motion—that all objects moving in a circle do so at a constant speed. This example allows pupils to experience the abstract circular law of motion in the concrete form of the watch. Alternatively, guiding examples force us to think by subsuming something under a law not yet known. If we are asked what good manners are, we might reply with an example, which is not itself a definition, but an example of good manners that has the effect of guiding our interlocutor to reflect on the answer given, in order to arrive, by their own efforts, at a universal definition of good manners. Furthermore, guiding examples are also exemplary, i.e. paradigms, but their paradigmatic nature relates to both the subjective—the individual, and the intersubjective—the understandings shared between individuals. Therefore, the guiding examples used by Deleuze, drawn from the work of individual structuralists, enable the resultant judgment to be understood as normative, applicable to structuralism and structuralists as a whole.

Deleuze’s essay is divided into seven sections, one section for each criterion of recognition. My previous letter covers the first section, and its use of examples to exemplify the symbolic as the first criterion by which structuralists recognise the language proper to their domain. Examples from the thinking of Foucault, Althusser, Lacan and Tel Quel magazine are employed to guide us to an understanding of the symbolic object as the theoretical object specific to these structuralists’ individual domains: philosophy, Marxism, psychology and rhetoric. This leads directly to the second criterion of recognition: “Local or Positional,” the subject of this letter.