Page 105 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 96

Contemporary Cultural Theory

characteristic of almost all subsequent structuralisms and post-
structuralisms.
Saussure’s single most daring theoretical move, however, was
to foreshadow the eventual creation of semiology, a general
science of signification, itself: ‘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 ...I shall call it semiology’ (Saussure, 1974,
p. 16). A general science of signs, using methods similar to those
of Saussure’s own structural linguistics, would thus prove app-
licable to all meaningful human actions or productions, since
insofar as human behaviour is meaningful, it is indeed signify-
ing. Thus construed, semiology aspired to direct our attention
towards the basis of human social life in convention, and towards
the systems of rules, relations and structures that order it. For
Saussure, as for Durkheim, and for later structuralisms, what is
at issue is not the relation between culture and some other extra-
cultural structure of social power, but the social power of
discourse, the power of the system of signs itself.

Structuralism: a general model
Structuralism has been at its most theoretically influential in the
disciplines of anthropology and semiology. Durkheim had
tended to think of his field as ‘sociology’, a French word coined
originally by Comte. But his own most important work, and
much of the later intellectual effort of the French Durkheimian
school, was directed towards what is customarily regarded as
‘anthropology’ in the Anglophone world. The obvious instances
included Durkheim’s nephew, Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), and
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939). The key figure, however, was
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Professor of Social Anthropology at the
Collège de France, whose anthropological researches were
indebted not only to Durkheim but also to Saussure. During the
late 1950s and the early 1960s, this continuing tradition of post-
Durkheimian anthropology coincided with a positively
Saussurean revival of semiology, initiated in the first place by

96