Page 71 - Decoding Culture

64 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

representation constructed within the terms provided by the lan­
guage systems in use. Not only constructed, of course, but also
comprehended in terms of those sets of codes and conventions. So,
if Saussure's ideas of langue and the sign are writ large, they lead
us toward a heavily relativized understanding of culture, wherein
artefacts must always be understood in relation to the codes uti­
lized in their construction and interpretation.
This has several significant implications for traditional
approaches. To begin with, the conventional critical pursuit of a
final, 'true' interpretation of a work of art is seen for the illusion that
it is. The meaning of a text is not fixed, but depends upon context.
Texts become what they are because they are made and read in
specific coding environments, in relation to networks of language
systems. Language, Saussure tells us, is relational. Its terms take
their value from their position in the whole system. In such a rela­
tional system there is constant potential for polysemy, as texts are
used and understood in variable contexts. The more elaborate the
textual form, the more that potential is realised; both as a conse­
quence of the sheer complexity of highly developed language
systems and because so many forms of culture draw upon more
than one such system. So, while one emphasis within structuralism
clearly displaces the social agent in favour of the structuring capac­
ities of language-like systems, another recognizes that in their very
functioning those systems open up, rather than close down, poten­
tial for variation in meaning and in 'readership'. It is in this sense
that so-called post-structuralism - with its emphasis on the inde­
terminacy of meaning - is rooted deep in the tensions of the
original structuralist project.
Those tensions can also be seen at work in applications of the
Saussurian syntagmatic/paradigmatic distinction, which proposes
two classes of relations among the units from which a semiotic
system is constructed. These sequencing and associative relations

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