Page 88 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM: A GENERAL MODEL

terms…language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the
linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that
have issued from the system”. 11
Saussure also posits a very sharp distinction between so-called
synchronic analysis, of the structure of a given language at a given
point in time, and diachronic analysis, of the way in which language
changes over time. Given that every language operates at any given
time as an independent system, historical analysis is thus, for Saussure,
necessarily synchronically irrelevant: “Since changes never affect the
system as a whole…they can be studied only outside the system”. In
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this respect, as in so many others, Saussure is the archetypical proto-
structuralist thinker. For, where Durkheim had continued to adhere
to a residual evolutionism, Saussure, by contrast, initiates an in
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principle methodological antipathy to historicist modes of explanation,
which has proved characteristic of almost all subsequent structuralisms
and post-structuralisms.
Saussure’s single most daring theoretical move, however, was surely
to foreshadow the eventual creation of a semiology proper, that is, of
a general science of signification: “Language is a system of signs that
express ideas, and is therefore comparable to a system of writing, the
alphabet of deaf mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals,
etc… A science that studies the life of signs within society is conceivable
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… I shall call it semiology”. A general science of signs, using methods
similar to those of Saussure’s own structural linguistics, would thus
prove applicable to all meaningful human actions or productions,
since insofar as human behaviour is meaningful, it is indeed signifying.
Thus construed, semiology aspires to direct our attention toward the
basis in social convention of much of human life, and toward the
systems of rules, relations and structures which order it. For Saussure,
as for Durkheim, and for modern structuralism, what is at issue is not
the relation between culture on the one hand, and some other extra-
cultural structure of social power on the other, but, rather, the social
power of discourse, the power of the system of signs itself.

Structuralism: a general model

Structuralism, we have already observed, has been at its most
theoretically influential in the disciplines of anthropology and semiology.

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