Page 87 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

always suppose a bipartite division of the whole universe…into two
classes which embrace all that exists, but which radically exclude
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each other”. These two classes are, famously, those of the sacred and
the profane. What matters, for Durkheim, is not the specific content
of either, but rather the relation between each and the other. Sacred
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things are thus “things set apart and forbidden”, whatever they may
be, and defined only in relation to the profane, that is, to things not
set apart and not forbidden.
Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics was first published in
1916, only a year after The Elementary Forms. Its central thesis,
strikingly reminiscent of Durkheim, is that every language is in itself
an entirely discrete system, the units of which can be identified only
in terms of their relationships to each other, and not by reference to
any other linguistic or extra-linguistic system. Saussure distinguishes
between langue, the social and systemic rules of language, and parole,
the individual and particular instance of speech, or utterance. Only
the former, he insists, can properly be the object of scientific study, for
it alone is social rather than individual, essential rather than accidental.
“Language is not a function of the speaker”, argues Saussure, “it is a
product that is passively assimilated by the individual… Speaking…is
an individual act. It is wilful and intellectual”. This distinction between
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institution and event is of central importance to almost all subsequent
structuralisms, for it is the institution—the structure—which comes
to constitute the defining preoccupation of structuralist analysis.
Just as Durkheim had insisted on the essential arbitrariness of the
specific content both of sacredness and of profanity, so too Saussure
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insists that “the linguistic sign is arbitrary”. For Saussure, language
is a system of signs; and a sign is the union of signifier—or symbol—
and signified—the idea or concept, as distinct from the thing, which
is symbolized. Thus: “The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a
name, but a concept and a sound-image”. This suppression of the
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referent, or “thing”, frees the signifier both from the referent itself
and from the signified. Language is thus entirely a matter of social
convention, in which the signifier and the signified, and the relations
between them, are all radically arbitrary. Each element in the language
is definable only in terms of its relation to other elements in the system
of signs. And, just as Durkheim had defined the sacred and the profane
in terms of their difference from each other, so too Saussure insists
that “in language there are only differences without positive

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