Page 39 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
tures that are fundamentally similar. A central idea deployed by
Structuralism is that of binary oppositions: pairs of contrasting
signs (light/dark, good/bad, active/passive, etc.) which suggest that
things can be defined in relation to what they are not. The first
term of a binary opposition is generally privileged as a positive
concept, whilst the second is marginalized as negative. Structural-
ism takes as its fundamental assumption the primacy of the
linguistic model, whereby all cultural systems are analysable as
languages. Thus, the strategies used to explore verbal language
have been applied by several critics to the study of non-verbal sign
systems, most notably by Roland Barthes. In Barthes's writings
inspired by semiotics and Structuralism, the tools of structural
linguistics are employed to decode systems such as fashion, archi-
tecture and cuisine. 3
Structuralism looks for reality in the relationships amongst
things rather than in individual things. In the field of literary criti-
cism, for example, it studies a text's structural properties in order
to relate it to a larger cluster of texts which share comparable
features and, ultimately, to culture as a whole: 'literature is not
only a collection of autonomous works, which may "influence"
one another by a series of fortuitous and isolated encounters; it is
a coherent whole, a homogeneous space, within which works
touch and penetrate one another; it is also, in turn, a part linked
to other parts in the wider space of "culture", in which its own
value is a function of the whole' (Genette 1988: 73). In all areas,
Structuralism aims at establishing systems to which particular
items could be connected: a system of literature embracing indivi-
dual works with common characteristics; or an anthropological
system based on universal principles which give rise to various
laws, rituals and prohibitions.
Claude Levi-Strauss (b. 1908) was the first to apply Structural-
ism to anthropology by defining this discipline as a broad theory
of cultural relationships, analysable according to the universal
laws that guide mental processes and, in particular, the human
tendency to articulate experiences symbolically. Amongst the
many symbolic systems used by cultures to define themselves,
mythology plays an especially prominent role. Myths are an

3
1*" Barthes's work is examined in detail in Part I, Chapter 6, 'Textuality'

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