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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 109

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism

governed by rigorous combinational rules’ (p. 146). In a classically
structuralist analysis, he identified five levels of narrative struc-
ture, each ruled by value oppositions such as ‘Free World-Soviet
Union’, ‘Duty-Sacrifice’, ‘Love-Death’, and ‘Loyalty-Disloyalty’.
These binary oppositions are combined with only minor varia-
tions in a plot structure that recurs from novel to novel, in which
Bond foils yet another plot by an evil madman, in the process
winning the sexual favours of the beautiful woman he frees from
the villain’s clutches. Eco wittily summarised the eight basic steps
in this repetitive schema as ‘Bond moves and mates in eight
moves’ (p. 156). Unlike the typical leftist criticism of the period,
which saw in Fleming’s novels only reactionary ideology, Eco
had discovered ‘a narrative apparatus...remarkably close in
tone and structure to the classic fairy tales of Western culture’
(Bondanella, 1997, p. 64). But he clearly underestimated the
sophistication of popular texts and popular readers. As Bennett
and Woollacott would later observe, he construed popular
reading as ‘socially and culturally unorganized’ only because he
lacked familiarity ‘with the determinations which mould and
configure’ it (Bennett & Woollacott, 1987, p. 79).

Foucault’s archaeology
Where Barthes and Eco had happily declared themselves as struc-
turalists, Foucault repeatedly denied any such theoretical
affinities and predilections (Foucault, 1980, p. 114). In the most
specifically Saussurean of senses, we might very well endorse
such protestations. But in a more general sense, Foucault’s earlier
work was indeed structuralist. His first truly influential books,
Madness and Civilisation and The Birth of the Clinic, were published
in French in 1961 and 1963 (Foucault, 1965; Foucault, 1973). In
both, Foucault was concerned to establish the systematic, and in
its own terms perfectly valid, nature of the dominant under-
standings of madness and illness in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries, and to contrast these with the new, equally
systematic, and equally internally valid, conceptions that
emerged, very rapidly, in the late eighteenth century. For
Foucault, the later conceptions were merely different, not better.

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