Page 209 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

198 Conclusion

(synchronic, as opposed to diachronic linguistics), or to the material world
(internal, as opposed to external linguistics). De Saussure is the exact oppo-
site of Raymond Williams, who insisted that one must study not only the his-
tory of meanings of words but relate those meanings to changes in the lived
conditions. In de Saussure, then, we find the seeds of major contemporary
poststructuralist contentions: that we live in language and cannot extricate
ourselves from it, that the relation between language and outside reality is
broken, and that we can safely disregard history.
The “road not taken” was the semiology of the field’s other founder, C. S.
6
Peirce. Peirce grounded his semiotics in material reality, by insisting on a tri-
partite relationship among the sign (word), its object or referent in the mate-
rial world, and the mental image of the person experiencing the sign. Mean-
ing for Peirce, unlike de Saussure, comes not just from the structure of
language, but also from one’s experiences in the material world. According to
Peirce, moreover, language bears an interactive (dialectical) relationship to
material reality, as witnessed, for example, by the famous plethora of names
7
Inuit people have for snow and Trobianders for yam. Peirce made a direct
connection between sign and referent, which is precisely what de Saussure
rejected.
A major difference between Grossberg and Garnham, between Poster and
Innis, between Baudrillard and Williams, between poststructuralists and po-
litical economists/cultural materialists, one suspects, is that the former in each
case are at least implicitly descendants of de Saussure, and the latter of
Peirce.
Raymond Williams, the preeminent inaugurator of cultural studies, like
Harold Innis, has informed much of this book. It seems, then, only fitting to
conclude by citing him once more. As his final remarks in Culture and Soci-
ety, Williams wrote: “The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding. .
. . There are ideas, and ways of understanding, with the seeds of life in them,
and there are others, perhaps deep in our minds, with the seeds of a general
death. Our measure of success in recognizing these kinds, and in naming
them . . . may be literally the measure of our future.” 8

NOTES

1. Although the terminology differs, a related demarcation was made by Stuart
Hall. In his article, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,” Hall distinguished between
“culturalist” and “structuralist” modes. Derived from sociology, anthropology, and
social history as influenced by Hoggart, Thompson, and Williams, the “culturalist
mode” regards culture as a whole way of life; it is accessible through concrete (em-
pirical) descriptions which capture the unities of commonplace cultural forms and