The meanings of structuralism. Considerations on structures and Gestalten, with particular attention to the masks of Lèvi-Strauss

Structuralism was once the fashion in semiotics, and then it was abandoned without its advantages and disadvantages having been properly assessed. Poststructuralism, imperceptibly merging with postmodernism, perpetuated many of the latter, but spurned most of the former. In this sense, it never went beyond structuralism. In my book Pictorial concepts (1989), I have evaluated the contributions and the drawbacks of structuralism pertaining to the domain of pictorial semiotics. Here I want to make a more general point. Structure, as first defined in structural linguistics and generalized by the Prague school, is a very particular kind of whole, which for instance is not simply identified with the whole as defined by Gestalt psychology. Therefore, structure has to be studied within a more complete mereological framework, that is, within the science of parts and their relation to the whole, first defined by Tardowski and Husserl. As a case in point, we will consider use of the notion of structure in the work of Lévi-Strauss, which was an exemplary work in the transition from linguistics to other semiotic domains, but which already constitutes a deviation with respect to its meaning in linguistics.