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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 98

Contemporary Cultural Theory

changed, as contemplated differently. And again, while struc-
turalism is certainly compatible with such radicalism, it does not
require it. Hence the rather peculiar way in which the major
French structuralist thinkers proved able to shift their political
opinions, generally from Left to Right, without much corre-
sponding amendment of their respective theoretical positions.
For structuralism, as neither for culturalism nor critical theory,
the nexus between politics and theory appeared essentially
contingent.
This combination of positivism and what we might well term
‘synchronism’ with a commitment to the demystification of expe-
riential reality propelled the entire structuralist enterprise in a
radically theoreticist direction. A science of stasis, marked from
birth by an inveterate anti-empiricism, it became almost unavoid-
ably preoccupied with highly abstract theoretical, or formal,
models. Hence the near ubiquity of the binary opposition as a
characteristically structuralist trope. Theoretical anti-humanism
arose from much the same source: if neither change nor process
nor even the particular empirical instance are matters of real
concern, then the intentions or actions of human subjects, whether
individual or collective, can easily be disposed of as irrelevant
to the structural properties of systems. In this way, structuralism
notoriously ‘decentred’ the subject.

RUSSIAN FORMALISM: FROM SHKLOVSKY TO BAKHTIN

Before finally proceeding to French structuralism, we should
briefly recall the theoretical legacy of the Russian Formalists, who
were themselves directly influenced by Saussurean linguistics.
The Petrograd Society for the Study of Poetic Language, founded
by Victor Shklovsky (1893–1984) in 1916, and the Moscow
Linguistic Club, founded a year earlier by Roman Jakobson
(1896–1982), had both hoped to establish the study of literature
on properly scientific and systematic foundations. Suppressed by
the Soviet government in 1930, the exiled Jakobson continued his
work through the Prague Linguistic Circle; it was eventually
transmitted to France by Tzvetan Todorov, the Franco-Bulgarian

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