Page 29 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

18 INTRODUCTION

representations in an array of languages, codes and everyday practices in
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contemporary societies. Both brought the term ‘culture’ down from its abstract
heights to the level of the ‘anthropological’, the everyday.
If the weakness of the positions outlined earlier was their tendency to dissolve
the cultural back into society and history, structuralism’s main emphasis was on
the specificity, the irreducibility, of the cultural. Culture no longer simply
reflected other practices in the realm of ideas. It was itself a practice—a
signifying practice— and had its own determinate product: meaning. To think of
the specificity of the cultural was to come to terms with what defined it, in
structuralism’s view, as a practice: its internal forms and relations, its internal
structuration. It was—following Saussure, Jakobsen and the other structural
linguists—the way elements were selected, combined and articulated in language
which ‘signified’. The stress therefore shifted from the substantive contents of
different cultures to their forms of arrangement—from the what to the how of
cultural systems. 71
This was a radical departure. In Sartre, the link between signification and
praxis had been founded theoretically on the intentional and expressive project
of men (fetishized, masked by their objectivated, alienated appearance in ‘the
order of things’: see above). Modern structuralism proposed instead to think of
men as spoken by, as well as speaking, their culture: spoken through its codes
and systems. The latter aspect (the linguistic system, the social part of language,
the langue) rather than individual utterances (paroles) was what could be studied
systematically. In this, as in much else, Lévi-Strauss recapitulated, within
structuralism, many of the conditions of a ‘science of society’ first proposed in
Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method (for instance, the suicide rate, not
individual suicides, was for Durkheim the properly constituted ‘social fact’). In
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the same way Lévi-Strauss established the ‘rule’ as central in the construction of
all ordered human systems. He imposed ‘difference’ and ‘distinction’ where
previously there had been correspondences and unities (compare Goldmann’s
protocol for a sociology of literature in The Hidden God).
Structuralism thus constituted a fundamental decentring of cultural processes
from their authorial centre in ‘man’s project’. Culture was as much constituted
by its conditions of existence as it constituted them. It established constraint
and regulation alongside expression and agency in the analysis of structured
practices. Structuralism thus marked a radical break with the dominant forms of
theoretical humanism. It bracketed the terms ‘consciousness’ and ‘intention’.
Culture was better understood as the inventories, the folk taxonomies, through
which social life is ‘classified out’ in different societies. It was not so much the
product of ‘consciousness’ as the unconscious forms and categories through
which historically definite forms of consciousness were produced. This
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brought the term ‘culture’ closer to an expanded definition of ideology—though
now without the connotations of ‘false consciousness’ which the term had
previously carried.