Structuralists often place the explanation of social facts at a deeper level than the facts themselves: at the level of “structure”. Consequently, any explanation placed at a superficial level will be irrelevant. Thus, structuralism is a reaction against humanism, subjectivism and historicism of philosophies in force in the first half of the century.
The Episteme of the Renaissance was based on the “likeness” between things and between words and things: the world is a great book and the books resemble the world. Just as Nietzsche will claim that God is dead, Foucault will say that he who is dead is man. According to Foucault, the first two epistemes were unable to think of man as it happens in “Las Meninas”: all eyes are directed towards the king, but he does not appear in the picture, he is outside and is only known through the mirror. The episteme that began in the 19th century has as its theme man, who is, therefore, a “newcomer”, but then, linguistics will no longer speak of man himself, nor psychoanalysis or ethnology. Man is in danger of dying as language becomes more important. In other words, the human being has been expelled from science by affirming the priority of the universal (the structure) over the individual. The structure happens to man, and it means his death. It is then an epistemological antihumanism.
According to Levi Strauss, the structures are supra-individual and unconscious, just as chess is not in the pieces but in the rules governing the structure of the game.
The subjectivism typical of Western tradition (originated with the Cartesian cogito) is no longer supported: “I think, where I am not, then I am, where I do not think,” Lacan says. “Who's this? , the Word itself” responds Foucault. That is, although there is an I who speaks and thinks, it is anchored in the structures of language and thought.
Like synchronous linguistics, structuralism dispense (at least initially) with the historical dimension. History is meaningless and is only one of the possible variations that the structure allows.