Any discussion of poststructuralism will need to revisit, however briefly, the intellectual event known as structuralism. According to Michel Foucault, structuralism is about problematizing – or denaturalizing – the centrality of the human subject: “[D]uring the mid-sixties,” he said in an interview, “an entire series of intellectual figures were defined as 'structuralists' who had conducted completely different kinds of investigations, but having one point in common: the need to oppose that set of philosophical elaborations, considerations, and analyses centered essentially on the theoretical affirmation of the 'primacy of the subject.'” Foucault's remark was made with the privilege of hindsight, and what remains important to our discussion is how the structuralist method accomplishes this task that he summarizes so succinctly.

The problem of the subject is enunciated in structuralism by way of the investigation of the age-old philosophical question, meaning. To perform its tasks, structuralism specializes in isolating and articulating the synchronic organizational relations that underlie, that give coherence to, observable phenomena. To cite two common examples from linguistics and anthropology: speakers of a particular language are often able to use it fluently without being entirely conscious of the rules that inform their utterances; similarly, peoples living within particular kinship arrangements can conduct their social relations without being entirely conscious of the rules that define their customs. Structuralism, in seeking to explain how languages, kinship systems, and other such collective behaviors work, aims methodologically at uncovering the logic that holds them together despite their superficially fragmentary appearances, that makes them function systematically, as it were.