Page 85 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

Chapter 4
STRUCTURALISM

The culturalist tradition shares with the Marxist at least two major
theoretical presuppositions: first, the analytical postulate of a necessary,
and quite fundamental, contradiction between cultural value on the
one hand, and the developmental logic of utilitarian capitalist civilization
on the other; and secondly, the prescriptive imperative to locate some
social institution, or social grouping, sufficiently powerful as to sustain
the former against the latter. Culturalist hopes have been variously
invested in the state, the church, the literary intelligentsia and the
labour movement; Marxist aspirations in theory much more uniformly
in the working class, but in practice also in the state, as for communist
Marxism, and in the intelligentsia (and very often more especially the
literary intelligentsia) for Western Marxism. Structuralism accepts
neither analytical postulate nor prescriptive imperative. For the former,
it substitutes a dichotomy between appearance and essence, in which
essence is revealed only in structure; for the latter, a scientistic
epistemology which typically denies both the need for prescriptive
practice and the possibility of meaningful group action.
There are many different versions of structuralism, of course, both
in general and as applied to literature and culture in particular. But, for
our purposes, and very broadly, structuralism might well be defined as
an approach to the study of human culture, centred on the search for
constraining patterns, or structures, which claims that individual
phenomena have meaning only by virtue of their relation to other
phenomena as elements within a systematic structure. More specifically,
certain kinds of structuralism—those denoted very often by the terms
semiology and semiotics—can be identified with the much more precise
claim that the methods of structural linguistics can be successfully
1
generalized so as to apply to all aspects of human culture. Structuralism
secured entry into British intellectual life initially during the late 1960s
and the 1970s. But in France—and structuralism has been an

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