Page 68 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURALISM 61

fundamental terms of semiology - the scientific study of sign­
systems. However, as I have already suggested, the initial influence
of Saussure's ideas was heavily mediated, filtered through the work
of a group of mainly French scholars who extended and amended
his theories. In consequence, Saussurian concepts entered cultural
studies often disconnected from each other, and given different
inflections by different interpreters and translators. Rather than
chart the detail of this variation - which would be a very consider­
able task - I shall first try to draw out some of the general analytic
implications of Saussure's ideas, a strategy which will allow me to
examine in broad terms the potential that structuralism brought to
cultural studies without becoming bogged down in the minutiae of
'structuralist' scholarship. Then, equipped with this abstract and
post hoc account of structuralism's significance, I shall return to the
initial mediation of structuralist ideas by Barthes and Levi-Strauss
with a view to understanding their changing impact in the years
that followed.
Inevitably we begin with langue and parole, since that distinction
catches so much of what was important in Saussure's thinking.
Imagine the spirit of such a distinction applied not to the domain of
linguistics but to cultural artefacts more generally. We saw in
Chapter 2 that post-war thought, where it did not simply dismiss
whole reaches of modern culture as polluted by their mass ori­
gins, tended to focus on the detailed interpretation of the individual
'text'. In literary criticism, in film studies, in art history, the isolated
novel, film or painting formed the main focus for critical and inter­
pretive activity. Or, if not entirely the isolated text, then artefacts
united by their common authorship, since a presumption that art
was authored was also central to established conceptions of cul­
ture. Typically within this world view, the critic's task was to expose
and appraise the artistry of authorship and the transcendent sig­
nificance of the artist's creation. In effect, then, the cultural critic

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