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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 97

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

Roland Barthes (1915–80), and with the translation into French
of a series of texts from the Russian Formalist school of literary
criticism, which together generated, finally, the theoretical
moment of French (and Italian) high structuralism. This was,
above all, the moment of Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault
(1926–84) and, in Italy, Umberto Eco, but tangentially also that
of Louis Althusser (1918–90).
Before we proceed to a more detailed exposition of the work
of particular structuralists, let us attempt a brief sketch of what
we mean by structuralism in general. It seems to us best char-
acterised by five major characteristics: its positivism; its
anti-historicism; its adherence to a (possible) politics of demys-
tification; its theoreticism; and its anti-humanism. As to the first,
it should be obvious that from Durkheim and Saussure on, the
structuralist tradition has exhibited both a habitual aspiration
to scientificity and, normally, a correspondingly positive valor-
isation of science—described either pejoratively as scientistic
or, more neutrally, as positivist. This understanding of itself as
a science sharply distinguished structuralism from both cul-
turalism and critical theory. So too does anti-historicism. Both
critical theory and culturalism translate their antipathy to
utilitarian capitalist civilisation into a historicist insistence that
this type of civilisation is only one among many; they are then
able to invoke either the past or an ideal future against the
present. By contrast, structuralism typically inhabited a never-
ending theoretical present. The only important exception to this
observation was Durkheim, whose residual evolutionism we
have already noted.
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. As long as this hidden
reality is seen as somehow confounding the truth claims of the
more obvious realities, such a stance can 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

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