Page 89 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

Durkheim himself had tended to think of his field as “sociology”, a
French word coined originally by Comte. But both his own most
important work and much of the later intellectual effort of the French
Durkheimian school were directed towards what is customarily
regarded as “anthropology” in the anglophone world. The obvious
instances here include Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel Mauss (1872–
1950), and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939). But the key figure is
nonetheless that of Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose anthropological
researches are indebted not only to Durkheim but also to Saussure.
Hence the way in which a communication model, a linguistic model
in fact, is substituted for the more strictly Durkheimian notion of a
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collective consciousness in his Structural Anthropology. During the
late 1950s and the early 1960s, this continuing tradition of post-
Durkheimian anthropology comes to coincide with a positively
Saussurean revival of semiology, initiated in the first place by Roland
Barthes (1915–80), and with the translation into French of a series of
texts from the Russian Formalist school of literary criticism, which
had briefly flourished in the early 1920s, so as to generate, finally, the
theoretical moment of French high structuralism. This is, above all,
the moment of Barthes himself and of Michel Foucault (1926–84),
but tangentially also that of Althusser and the Althusserian Marxists.
Before we proceed to a more detailed exposition of certain particular
structuralisms, let us attempt a brief sketch of what I take to be the
five major characteristics of structuralism in general: its positivism;
its anti-historicism; its adherence to a (possible) politics of
demystification; its theoreticism; and its anti-humanism. As to the
first of these, it should be obvious that, from Durkheim and Saussure
onwards, the structuralist tradition has exhibited both a habitual
aspiration to scientificity and, normally, a correspondingly positive
valorization of science, such as can be described either pejoratively as
scientistic, or more neutrally as positivist. This understanding of itself
as a science, in the strong sense of the term, sharply distinguishes
structuralism from both culturalism and “critical” (that is, non-
Althusserian) Western Marxism, although somewhat analogously
positivist themes clearly saturate the more orthodox versions of scientific
socialism, and are indeed present in the later Marx himself.
Anti-historicism is a much more distinctively defining feature of
structuralism. Both Marxism (in all but its Althusserian variant) and
culturalism translate their antipathy to utilitarian capitalist civilization

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