Page 101 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

not actually constitute an oppositional force at all, but might rather
find itself progressively reconciled to its position of particular privilege
within the social structures of late capitalism.

Structuralism, post-structuralism
and British cultural studies

In the United States, structuralism secured entry into the national
intellectual life mainly through the liberal academy rather than through
its more radical opponents: Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics
won a large audience within the American intelligentsia for an
appropriately depoliticized version of structuralist theory as early as
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1975. Similarly, the institutionally dominant North American response
to post-structuralism was to prove that of the Yale School’s singular
appropriation both of Derrida himself and of Derridean deconstruction.
In this reading, which acquired both the shape of a collective enterprise
and the apparent stamp of Derrida’s personal approval with the
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publication of Deconstruction and Criticism, deconstruction became
yet another depoliticized literary formalism.
Anthony Easthope insists that British post-structuralism, by contrast,
remained heavily indebted to Althusserian Marxism. There is an
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element of exaggeration here: Marxism was by no means so obviously
the “parent discourse” of British post-structuralism, nor the latter so
obviously committed “to political purposes”, as Easthope supposes. 57
Terence Hawkes’s Structuralism and Semiotics, a widely used textbook
published in 1977 as one of the first titles in Methuen’s influential
“New Accents” series, inaugurated a much less overtly politicized
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variant of structuralism. Though Hawkes’s later work has had
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much post-structuralist fun with the “Bardbiz” of the Shakespearean
canon, and much of it to some real political effect, there is nothing
very obviously “Marxist” about all this. Moreover, Hawkes himself
was by no means a marginal figure in British semiotics: Professor of
English at the University of Cardiff, general editor of the “New Accents”
series, and later editor of the journal Textual Practice, he has probably
exercised at least as much influence over literary post-structuralism
as has Terry Eagleton, for example. Still less Marxist and much less
political has been the work in cultural studies of Hawkes’s one-time
colleague at Cardiff, John Fiske. 60

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