Page 17 - Decoding Culture

10 DECODING CULTURE

afford to popular culture the attention that it was presumed to
merit. This move was driven by some of the same considerations
that had formed the terms of traditional cultural analysis, at least in
as much as it evinced a desire to demonstrate the aesthetic and
moral quality of the likes of Hollywood cinema or popular music.
But, influenced also by less art-centred views of culture and by
those, like Williams, who argued that culture should be under­
stood as deeply embedded in the lives of ordinary people, there
was also pressure to examine cultural artefacts and their users in a
more holistic and systematic way. It was in this project that the first
tentative steps toward cross-disciplinary fertilization were seen,
and it was here also that there was growing awareness of the need
for a new framework and method of analysis. By the later years of
the 1960s this search was beginning to focus on the concept of
'language'. Processes of communication, whether in art, film, tele­
vision or fiction, were clearly language-like in some sense. Perhaps
it would be around the concept of language that a new unity of
approach could be forged.
So it proved, for it was only when attention turned to the theo­
ries of language and culture developed in French structuralism
that diffuse resistance to traditional modes of analysis found a pos­
itive theoretical focus. As we shall see in Chapter 2, the break with
tradition heralded by Hoggart, Williams and the new analysts of
popular culture was incomplete. It needed the structuralist input to
shift discussion onto a radically different terrain - that of significa­
tion. At this point the story becomes much more complicated and
I shall have to skate over details that will be given lengthier con­
sideration later. Minimally it is necessary to distinguish two
successive phases of structuralist influence, the first of which
revolved around the attempt to apply Saussurian ideas to all kinds
of processes of signification, while the second sought to relocate
the resulting over-formal analysis of cultural texts into its historical,

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