Page 90 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM: A GENERAL MODEL

into a historicist insistence that this type of civilization is only one
amongst many, so as to be able thereby to invoke either the past or an
ideal future against the present. By contrast, structuralisms typically
inhabit a never-ending theoretical present. The only important exception
to this observation is Durkheim, whose residual evolutionism we have
already noted. But so structuralist is his conception both of primitive
“mechanical solidarity” and of complex “organic solidarity”, that
Durkheim cannot actually account for the shift from the one to the
other, except by a badly disguised resort to the demographic fact of
population growth, which entails, on his own definition, a theoretically
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illegitimate appeal to the non-social, in this case, the biological. So
structuralist are Durkheim’s fundamental preoccupations that this
account of the dynamics of modernization becomes, in effect,
theoretically incoherent, an accusation that could be levelled neither
at Marx nor Weber, Eliot nor Leavis. And after Durkheim, even this
residual evolutionism disappears from structuralism.
Structuralism’s anti-historicism leads it to take as given whatever
present it may choose to study, in a fashion quite alien both to culturalism
and to non-Althusserian Marxism. This certainly makes possible a non-
adversarial posture vis à vis contemporary civilization; it does not,
however, require it. A stress on structures as deeper levels of reality,
submerged beneath, but nonetheless shaping, the realm of the empirically
obvious, can very easily allow for a politics of demystification, in which
the structuralist analyst is understood as penetrating through to some
secretly hidden truth. For so long as this hidden reality is seen as somehow
confounding the truth claims of the more obvious realities, then for so
long can such a stance remain compatible with an adversarial intellectual
politics. Even then all that eventuates is a peculiarly enfeebled, and
essentially academic, version of intellectual radicalism, in which the
world is not so much changed, as contemplated differently. And again,
while structuralism is certainly compatible with such radicalism, it does
not require it. Hence the rather peculiar way in which the major French
structuralist thinkers have proved able to shift their political opinions,
generally from left to right, without any corresponding amendment to
their respective theoretical positions. For structuralism, as neither for
culturalism nor for Marxism, the nexus between politics and theory
appears irretrievably contingent.
This combination of positivism and what we might well term
“synchronism” with a commitment to the demystification of

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