WHAT IS STRUCTURALISM?
• Until late 1960s
• It is about structure, how things are organised/work in society
• Modernism existed in the same time period

FERDINAND DE SAUSSARE
• Linguist
• Looked at how language makes meaning/a system
• Communication structure of society
• Semiotics – structuralist system of analysis

SIGNIFIER: material aspect of the sign – what is actually written

SIGNIFIED: what you think of when the word is said/the meaning behind it

CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS
• How do families work?
• Anthropology – kinship structures

VLADIMIR PROPP
• Stories we tell as cultures
• Whether there was a structure underlying storytelling: e.g. boy meets girl, head of family dies – common themes that happen in stories
• Certain functions happen in certain genres

JOSEF MULLER-BROCKMANN
• Obsessed with grids

OTTO NEURATH AND GERD ARNTE
• Developers of isotype (pictorial language)
• Arnte – created pictures (the maker)
• Neurath – structure and organisation of the language (the thinker). Sociologist.

BEATRICE WARDE
• Compared typography to a crystal goblet. If you pour wine into it, then the clarity of the goblet allows you to see the wine in a pure way.
• Typography's job is to hold the information (typography is the goblet and information is the wine)
Nothing can get in the way of the meaning of the content.

POST-STRUCTURALISM
• Looking at how audience/users utilise/interact with structuralist systems.

MICHEL FOUCAULT
• Prison - madness and power. People who need to be locked up and watched because they are mad and power of people who lock them up.
• CCTV acceptable in society – most recorded nation in the world.
One voice dictating what is right and wrong.

JACQUES DERRIDA
• Writing is more valuable than speech e.g. asking for written proof of something rather than verbal.
• Can't have a letter without the space around it. Can't have one without the other because then it can't exist.
• Written language can't exist without punctuation otherwise it doesn't make sense or have any meaning.

WOLFGANG WEINGART
• Dialogue between work and audience
• Audience have to deconstruct it, the meaning is in their head. Gives them power.

Authors still have power e.g. designer labels. People still buy things because of the label.