Exploring Structuralism

It was Ferdinand de Saussure who realized that language needed to be understood as a structural system of relationships among words, rather than a collection of individual words with individual histories and meanings. What he meant was that the components of a structure are not a collection of independent items. Rather, they form a working unit only because they exist in relation to one another. According to structuralism and Saussure, the human mind perceives differences most often using opposites. Structuralism refers to this notion as “binary opposition.” Essentially, “binary opposition” states that the way we understand an idea is through its opposition to another idea. For example, if we believed all objects were the same color, we would not need the word “black” at all. Black is black only because we perceive it to be different from other colors, such as “white” which some may define as the absence of color. Another example is how we understand the “down” as the opposite of “up” and “good” as the opposite of “evil”. The meaning of each idea is an effect of its binary opposite. This is what Saussure meant when he said “signs function not through their intrinsic value but through their relative position." In other words, we are able to perceive individual components only because we perceive their difference from other signs.
Signs are what makes up content in language. Structuralism looks at the system that makes content possible. Language assigns meanings to things which then makes them real. In this way, language shapes our reality rather than describes it. An example of this can be seen in the way that other cultures have words that don’t exist in our language. Every culture has words for the things that are important to them but because they have named them they become part of the reality. Because everything is defined by it’s relationship to something else, if one element changes, then that brings changes to all. As Saussure says, “…the value of a term may be modified without either its meaning or its sound being affected, solely because a neighboring term has been modified.” An example of this can be seen here at Emmanuel College. Last year, the addition of the Wilkens Science Center on campus changed the way the Administration Building floors were numbered. The floors of the old building were changed to line up with the floors of the new building. The ground floor became the first floor and because of this change, all of the names of the other floors had to change too. The floors changed only in name but in our reality the first floor became the second, the second became the third, and so on. Thus their value was changed.
Structuralism can be applied to many areas of study and people have different reactions to it. "You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids”, a verse form the song "The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure" is a response to Saussure's theory of structuralism and its incapacity to understand love. To the author of these lyrics, the concept of “structure” itself is like a bulldozer that cannot shed any light on the nature of love—to study or understand love under structuralism would be similar to studying orchids with a bulldozer. Obviously Saussure's theory has a much larger scope. His discussion is not from the perspective of somebody who merely doesn't believe in love. Rather, as we have voluminously discussed, he does not believe in the intrinsic meaning of anything at all. He believes that the sign “love”, like all other signs, can be understood only if contrasted by what it is not. In the chain of words “indifference”, “respect”, “admiration”, “love”, and “idol-worship”, love can be understood only through its relation to these neighbors. It follows that love is neither merely “admiration” nor is it as blind and self-sacrificing as “idol-worship”. Just like the 8:25 train that is just what will transport you if you want to leave after 7:25 but before 9:25, love for Saussure will be what you feel when you more than just admire somebody but do not raise her or him to the level of an idol.
It is not that the lyric writer necessarily disagrees with Saussure's notion of meaning as a difference between negatives. The narrator himself might even agree with De Saussure but yet he decides to kill him. Here is how the narrator excuses himself and explains his motivations in the last stanza:

I’m just a great composer
And not a violent man
But I lost my composure [20]
And I shot Ferdinand
Crying “it’s well and kosher
to say you don’t understand
but this is for Holland-Dozier-
Holland”

So "the great composer" kills Saussure for Holland-Dozier-Holland. Googling the song I found out that Holland-Dozier-Holland is a Motown production team whose song lyrics and text refer to love as something concrete, tangible, almost an object, a solid entity, attributes which not only doesn't Saussure see in something as abstract as love, but not even in something concrete as the 8.25 train. Thus the composer kills Ferdinand de Saussure not because he thinks he is wrong but potentially for the opposite reason. He knows Saussure is right and he finds this state of affairs too cruel to bear. Maybe like a Peter Pan who doesn't want to grow up he shelters himself in the naiveté of Holland-Dozier-Holland whose lyrics give us the comforting illusion of stable meaning.