Page 69 - Decoding Culture

62 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE
took individual instances of 'speech' - particular 'texts' - and sub­
jected them to close analysis with a view to their evaluation and
appreciation. What s/he did not do, however, was to ask in any
thoroughgoing way about the system, the langue, which under­
wrote their operation. For if these discrete cultural artefacts can
indeed be treated as 'speech', then extension of Saussure's ideas
suggests that their very realization as communicative experiences
depends upon a 'language system' - or, more likely, several inter­
locking language systems, since novels, films and paintings draw
upon varied semiological resources.
So, to map culture directly in terms of the langue/parole dis­
tinction leads away from the traditional approach, which is
primarily concerned to expose the meaning and value of discrete
artefacts, and toward a concern with the system(s) which enable
those artefacts to have meaning in the first place. A 'structuralist'
approach, then, is one which transcends individual texts and,
indeed, disciplines. Any texts are grist to the mill for a mode of
analysis which primarily seeks to understand the system of codes
and conventions through which particular texts are constructed
by their creators and understood by their consumers.
Accordingly, Saussure's emphasis on langue has the potential to
redirect cultural studies just as radically as it redirected linguis­
tics, providing a framework within which cultural materials
normally considered the province of this or that discipline may be
analysed in terms of trans-disciplinary, semiological concepts.
Also, of course, it undercuts the familiar commitment to individu­
alism in orthodox cultural criticism, so clearly given expression in
the traditional centrality of the author, that figure derided by
structuralist critic Roland Barthes (1977a: 146) as the 'Author­
God'. It is not necessary to go as far as Barthes in proclaiming
'the death of the author' to appreciate quite how significant a shift
it is from celebrating the creative work of authors to analysing the

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