Page 30 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

CULTURAL STUDIES AND THE CENTRE 19

Lévi-Strauss helped to rehabilitate the work of Durkheim and to demonstrate
his varied lineage: where Parsons had worked towards the structural-
functionalist synthesis via the Durkheim of Suicide, Lévi-Strauss directed
attention to Durkheim and Mauss’s Primitive Classification, which he identified
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as an integral part of structuralism’s ‘uncompleted programme. In polemical
fashion, Lévi-Strauss privileged the synchronic level of analysis over the
diachronic—an anti-historical inversion with which, from the outset, we were far
from happy. For, while it powerfully moved the level of analysis back to that of
‘system’ and ‘structure’, this was at the cost (never fully reckoned with by its
devotees) of reconstituting some of the fundamental positions of structural-
functionalism (for example, society as a ‘system of systems’) which earlier
positions had correctly contested. With these costs Cultural Studies had at once
to reckon. In a wider sense, Lévi-Strauss tilted the intellectual pendulum sharply
from German to French influences and models, and from a neo-Hegelianism to a
distinctive variant of neo-Kantianism. Yet the impact of structuralism, one must
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repeat, does not consist of positions unqualifiedly subscribed to. We must
acknowledge a major theoretical intervention. Whatever else it could not do,
structuralism displaced ‘man in general’ from the full intentional centre of the
cultural project. It thus ended a certain theoretical innocence, whatever the
critiques of structuralist theories which had then to be made. It made culture, in
its expressive sense, conditional—because conditioned. It obliged us really to
rethink the ‘cultural’ as a set of practices: to think of the material conditions of
signification and its necessary determinateness.
This may seem strange since Lévi-Strauss, by concentrating so absolutely on
the internal relations of ‘the cultural’, effectively side-stepped the issue of
determinacy. He resolved the problem cognitively by reference to a set of
universal elements and rules common to all cultural practices, which he ascribed
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to the structure of the human mind as such—l’esprit humain. In this sense—as
Ricoeur observed and Lévi-Strauss acknowledged—he remained a ‘Kantian
without the transcendental imperative’ (that is, God). He was also, if only in a
deep sense, a ‘Durkheimean’, founding culture at the level of reciprocal
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exchange rather than on production. His work also exemplified a sustained
formalism—the price of his proper attention to forms. Nevertheless, a conception
of determinate practice lay somewhere near the centre of his work. It could not
be constrained for long inside its Kantian and Durkheimean brackets, the limits of
his structuralism.
This is clearly demonstrated by what rapidly succeeded it—the work of
the Marxist structuralists, here personified in the example of Althusser. Marxist
structuralism looked initially like a take-over bid; but it is important to see the
internal logic which drove structuralism from its Durkheimean to its Marxian
inflexion. If language is a social practice, it can be adequately reduced neither to
the mere sum of the individual speakers nor to the individual utterances spoken
in it. It must be defined in terms of the ‘systems of relations’ which make these
individual interventions possible and which structure, determine and limit them.