From Myth to Metacosmos: Symbolic Orders of Possibility: 8 Structuralism and Semiotic Networks

With structuralism, symbolic construal took a decisive methodological turn: possibility itself came to be understood as patterned through the very relations among signs. No longer the unfolding of divine order, philosophical principle, or artistic intuition, the symbolic cosmos became a network of codes and differences—a system whose internal structures constrained and enabled meaning.

At the foundation lies Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic model, in which the sign functions not by essence or natural bond, but by difference. A word signifies because it stands apart from all others in the system, its value emerging only through relational contrast. This was not merely a linguistic insight but a semiotic revolution: possibility was no longer grounded in universal truths or singular narratives, but in the dynamic differentials of symbolic order itself. To speak, to construe, was to participate in a system that already shaped the range of potential.

Claude Lévi-Strauss extended this logic to myth and culture. Myths, in his analysis, were not timeless stories about gods or heroes, but structured transformations, variations of symbolic oppositions that reflected the architecture of human thought. The “savage mind” was not primitive but systematic, constructing symbolic order through binary contrasts and mediations. In this move, construal became less about individual creativity or divine revelation than about the collective, unconscious operations of symbolic systems.

Structuralism thus repositioned the symbolic cosmos as a kind of grammar of possibility. Language, kinship, ritual, narrative—each became legible as a network of relations, a code that ordered the field of what could be thought, felt, or actualised. Yet in this reconfiguration, agency shifted: the subject was no longer the autonomous creator of meaning, but a node shaped by structures that preceded and exceeded them.

This was both liberation and constraint. Liberation, because symbolic possibility could be mapped with scientific rigour; constraint, because the human agent appeared dissolved into the structural play of signs. Possibility was now abstracted into systemic differentials, networks of relational tension, where meaning could always be traced, but never reduced to presence or essence.

Where myth had once narrated cosmic beginnings, structuralism revealed the logic of narrative itself. The symbolic cosmos became not a singular order of being, but a networked architecture of differences—possibility refigured as relational code.