Western Philosophy and the Becoming of Possibility: 10 Language, Difference, Relation: Structuralism and its Undoing

Following the perspectival turn, the 20th century foregrounded language, difference, and relationality as the primary axes of construal. Structuralism, beginning with Saussure, treated possibility as organised within semiotic systems: networks of signs whose relations, not intrinsic qualities, determined meaning. Reality, in this framework, was construed as a field of relational differences, and potential was structured by the rules and limits of the symbolic order.

Saussure’s langue and parole distinguished the systemic from the performative, revealing that meaning emerges from differences within structured systems rather than from correspondence to external reality. Possibility became relational: to be thinkable was to occupy a position within a semiotic system, to be intelligible was to participate in a network of oppositions, contrasts, and conventions. Construal itself was formalised, codified, and constrained by the architecture of language.

Structuralism reached its apogee in Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, and others who extended relational thinking to culture, myth, and social organisation. Possibility was no longer simply a matter of metaphysics, cognition, or historical process; it was distributed across systems of signs, codes, and practices. Knowledge, meaning, and identity were understood as effects of these relational matrices, revealing the deep structuring of potential in symbolic form.

Derrida, in turn, deconstructed these systems, exposing the instability, deferral, and undecidability inherent in every structure of signification. Difference (différance) undermined the idea of fixed reference, revealing that possibility is never fully secured within a system but continually displaced across relational networks. Construal became reflexive: to interpret is simultaneously to produce and to destabilise potential, and to navigate the semiotic field is to negotiate the indeterminacy built into its relational fabric.

The structuralist and post-structuralist turn thus reframed possibility as inseparable from semiotic systems and their deconstruction. Construal is no longer grounded solely in mind, world, or history, but in the differential relations that constitute meaning, alongside the reflexive awareness that these relations are inherently unstable. In this horizon, to think, to speak, and to act is always to engage with the contingent and relational architecture of potential itself.