Page 56 - Decoding Culture

3 E n ter

St u cturalism
r

As befits a topic as vast and as often misrepresented as structural­
ism, let me begin with a sweeping generalization. The most
striking developments in twentieth-century thought, at least in the
humanities and the social sciences, derive much of their force and
originality from the so-called 'linguistic turn'. This is not to say
that there are no significant developments in psychology, in literary
studies, in philosophy, in history, in sociology, which do not
emerge from this century's fascination with language. Of course
there are. But if one were to seek a single intellectual common
cause, a shared thread of thought which has influenced so many of
the disciplines concerned with human activity and its products,
then language would surely be that topic.
Most of these disciplines have not, however, conceived lan­
guage in uniform terms. Indeed, at different times the published
works of scholars as diverse as Whorff, Wittgenstein, Chomsky,
Bernstein, Saussure, Austin, Garfinkel and Hjelmslev (to select a
wilfully mixed bunch) have contradicted each other while also
influencing academic worlds far beyond those envisaged by their
original authors. So, although language has indeed emerged as a
shared cross-disciplinary focus, the concepts invoked for its

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