Page 58 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURALISM 51
precisely what made structuralism distinctive, and in most disci­
plines the guardians of older traditions were determinedly resistant
to these exotic Gallic imports. Sociologists, for example, claimed
with some irritation that they had always been 'structuralist', but in
so doing failed to recognize that the concept of structure as it had
developed in sociology was quite different to the relational concept
that exercised Levi-Strauss and the other French structuralists. In
English literary studies, an area already well known for ferocious
academic invective, there was even a period when to be a struc­
turalist was tantamount to treachery, and those so labelled found
themselves marginalized by the critical orthodoxy. It was only
when the English-speaking world began to examine the roots of
structuralist ideas in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure that the smoke of battle began to clear and the full poten­
tial of structuralism became apparent. Saussure's work had long
been familiar in linguistics, but its more general implications for
the study of culture only emerged in Anglo-American scholarship
at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, and even then largely
in mediated form. It is to Saussure, therefore, that we must first
turn in seeking to understand the chequered history of structural­
ism's impact on cultural studies.

The Saussurian foundation

I shall not pretend to give a balanced and comprehensive account
of Saussure's ideas. Such exegesis is available elsewhere - as a
starting point Culler (1986) is as good as any - and, in any case, it
is Saussure's theories as they were modified and understood by
cultural studies that are mainly of interest here. Nevertheless, even
with this limited aim, it is worth observing that Saussure is not
entirely well served by the circumstances of publication of his most

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