Page 28 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 17

autonomy’ is more accurately characterized as the site where ‘structuralism’ and
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Marxism confront each other at their theoretical limits. It was precisely at this
juncture that Engels began his long, difficult and seminal ‘correction’ of the
economistic and mechanical applications of Marxism which had become
orthodox in his time. It is now commonly agreed that what Engels did was to
identify the core problem of a non-reductionist Marxism, and to provide the
elements only of a possible ‘solution’: the solutions he offered remain (as,
surprisingly, both Althusser and Thompson have recently acknowledged) 68
unsatisfactory. ‘Relative autonomy’ is/was therefore not an accomplished
position, theoretically secure against all comers. If anything, its inadequacies
only reinforced a general recognition of the major lacunae in classical Marxist
theory in relation to the whole problem of the ‘superstructures’. It signalled work
to be done, knowledge to be produced—an open Marxism—rather than the
application of ready-made schema.
If structuralism forced on us this question in a peculiarly urgent form, it was
certainly not alone in this respect. And its ‘solutions’ were also, themselves, open
to serious question. Its formalism and rationalism, its privileging of the highest
levels of abstraction as the exclusive mode of operation of ‘Theory’ with a capital
‘T’, its obsession with epistemological issues, themselves constituted formidable
barriers to the solution of problems which structuralism itself posed. In noting
the impact of structuralism, therefore, we are signalling a formative intervention
which coloured and influenced everything that followed. But we are not charting
a fixed orthodoxy to which we subscribed uncritically. Indeed, here we have not
a single influence but a succession, a series. Critiques and rejections of
structuralism are as significant in this part of the story as influences absorbed and
positions affirmed. We attempt to assess this formative phase and to indicate
something of its complexity, in a shorthand way, by taking four representative
instances, which reinforce the point.
The first can be identified with the initial impact of the early work of Lévi-
Strauss and Barthes. Both deployed the models of structural linguistics as a
paradigm (some would say, infinitely expandable) for the scientific study of
culture. Indeed, then and since language has been used as a paradigm figure
through which all social practices could potentially be analysed, in effect holding
out the promise —which long eluded the ‘human sciences’—of a mode of analysis
at one and the same time rigorous, scientific and non-reductionist, non-positivist.
Language, which is the medium for the production of meaning, is both an
ordered or ‘structured’ system and a means of ‘expression’. It could be
rigorously and systematically studied—but not within the framework of a set of
simple determinacies. Rather, it had to be analysed as a structure of variant
possibilities, the arrangement of elements in a signifying chain, as a practice not
‘expressing’ the world (that is, reflecting it in words) but articulating it,
articulated upon it. Lévi-Strauss employed this model to decipher the languages
(myths, culinary practices and so on) of so-called ‘primitive’ societies. Barthes
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offered a more informal ‘semiotics’, studying the systems of signs and