Page 72 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURAUSM 65

are, of course, coded by the langue: we cannot simply choose
which units to use and in what order, at least not if we wish to be
understood by those who share our culture with us. But, again,
there are considerable degrees of freedom here. and although the
first task of a structuralist account may be to identify the units
from which a text is composed and thence the codes which govern
their arrangement - the goal of synchronic analysis - in application
to complex cultural forms, structuralist concepts do not exclude
change over time (the diachronic dimension) , differential applica­
tion of codes in different contexts, and different levels of coding.
All of which is no more than to say that the Saussurian inheri­
tance is not entirely unambiguous in the balance it proposes
between the constraints of structure and the inventive capacities of
agency. Its main thrust is clear enough, to be sure. and is con­
veyed by Saussure's stress on the paramount importance of
synchronically comprehending langue. Given this emphasis, the
major task of a structuralist analysis in cultural studies would have
to be that of modelling the workings of all the various language sys­
tems which intersect in forming cultural artefacts. In effect, to
extend and develop the project that Saussure sketched for semiol­
ogy. To do that requires above all the development of theory:
identifying the basic units of semiotic systems and building models
which embody the codes governing their operation. Such model
building, note, differs epistemologically both from the conventional
empiricist view of scientific theory, with its atomistic emphasis on
hypothesis testing, and from the looser sense of 'theory' found in
more literary traditions, where it has tended to suggest a concern
to explore basic 'philosophical' assumptions. Structuralist theory,
at least as it is implied in Saussure's thinking, fundamentally seeks
to model the relational structures that enable agents to involve
themselves in processes of communication. Its success is mea­
sured not by experimental test or by moral insight, but by the

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