Page 17 - Culture and Cultural Studies

16 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

language itself. Thus, structuralism is concerned with how cultural meaning is generated,
understanding culture to be analogous to (or structured like) a language (Chapter 3).
The work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1960) was critical in the development of structur-
alism. He argued that meaning is generated through a system of structured differences in
language. That is, significance is the outcome of the rules and conventions that organize
language (langue) rather than the specific uses and utterances which individuals deploy
in everyday life (parole).
According to Saussure, meaning is produced through a process of selection and com-
bination of signs along two axes, namely:

1 the syntagmatic (linear – e.g. a sentence);
2 the paradigmatic (a field of signs – e.g. synonyms).

The organization of signs along these axes forms a signifying system. Signs, constituted by
signifiers (medium) and signifieds (meaning), do not make sense by virtue of reference to
entities in an independent object world; rather, they generate meaning by reference to each
other. Meaning is a social convention organized through the relations between signs.
In short, Saussure, and structuralism in general, are concerned more with the struc-
tures of language which allow linguistic performance to be possible than with actual
performance in its infinite variations. Structuralism proceeds through the analysis of
binaries: for example the contrast between langue and parole or between pairs of signs
so that ‘black’ only has meaning in relation to ‘white’, and vice versa.

KEY THINKERS

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)

Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose posthumously published work laid the basis for
structural linguistics or semiotics, the ‘science’ of signs. Saussure’s influence on cultural
studies comes indirectly through the work of other thinkers, like Roland Barthes, who
were influenced by him. The central tenet of Saussure’s argument is that language is to be
understood as a sign system constituted by interrelated terms without positive values (i.e.
meaning is relational). Langue, or the formal structure of signs, is said to be the proper
subject of linguistics. Cultural studies commonly explores culture as a grammar of signs.
Reading: Saussure, F. de (1960) Course in General Linguistics. London: Peter Owen.

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