Page 70 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURALISM 63

operation of language systems and modelling those systems in
abstract terms.
Y e t care is required here, since to stress the centrality of langue
is not necessarily to eliminate human agency among authors and
readers, even if, as we shall see, a tendency to 'decentre the sub­
ject' prevailed in the first phase of influence of structuralism upon
cultural studies. Though Saussurian ideas do orient us toward
developing a theory of the operation of language systems rather
than toward their users, the ontology underlying his thinking still
retains a concept of active agency. Langue, it will be recalled, is an
enabling system. To think in terms of langue and parole is to think
in terms of speakers and hearers actively using the resources of
their shared language system - restricted by codes and conven­
tions in what they are able to express, certainly, but also equipped
to combine elements inventively within and because of that con­
ventional framework. Of course it is true that the major
structuralist emphasis is on the system and its structuring capaci­
ties. However, the model is not one in which the structure
determines outcomes, but one in which agents are both 'con­
strained and enabled' (d. Giddens, 1984) by the language system.
Speakers and hearers remain active users of the cultural materials
at their disposal.
Now let us add to this account Saussure's conception of the
sign, decomposed, as he sees it, into a signifier and a signified
which stand in an 'arbitrary' relation to one another. Arbitrary,
remember, does not mean random or disordered. It is a way of
denying an intrinsic or 'natural' link between signifier and signified,
stressing instead the socially conventional and constructed char­
acter of signification processes. A text, then, itself composed of a
multiplicity of signs, is conventional in its very fabric. Though it
might purport to represent a 'real' external world, for example to
'reflect reality', such a representation is always precisely that - a

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