Page 18 - Decoding Culture

THE STORY SO FAR 11

social and psychoanalytic context. Provided not too much weight is
attached to the terms themselves, these two phases can usefully be
thought of as 'structuralist' and 'post-structuralist' cultural studies.
In the structuralist phase the informing ideas are those found in
a series of famous Saussurian concepts. I shall not examine those
ideas here; they are given a full discussion in Chapter 3. Their
import was to focus attention on the systems of 'language' that
enabled communication in diverse cultural forms. If people com­
municated, the reasoning ran, then that was a consequence of a
shared set of codes and conventions upon which they drew. So,
whatever the cultural form on which analysis focused - film, tele­
vision, fiction, photography, or any other communicative mode -
the structuralist goal was to uncover the underlying system upon
which communication depended. Saussure had envisaged a sci­
ence of signs to which he had given the name 'semiology'. In this
first phase of structuralist cultural studies that semiological ideal
loomed large, even if in actuality it was rarely, if ever, achieved.
In analytic practice, as seen in the work of Levi-Strauss, early
Barthes, and a host of enthusiastic borrowers of their ideas, this
gave rise to complex analyses of 'texts' of all shapes and sizes. At
last cultural analysis had found a new method, and one, further­
more, that transcended disciplinary restrictions in the name of a
'scientific' decoding of the workings of culture. It was also a
method that encouraged a dominantly formal approach to the texts
under analysis, one in which the operation of the signs that made
up a text was all too easily rendered as an emergent product of the
significatory system alone. Although the original Saussurian
theory viewed language very much in its social context, the first
phase of its application to cultural studies rather neglected this
social potential in favour of using his concepts in formal textual
analysis. Quite quickly, however, exponents of the new method
became aware of the problems arising from this formalism, and by

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