Page 77 - Decoding Culture

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

method was seen as the most promising way to extend structural­
ism into general cultural analysis. Little of this material has
survived the passage of time with any credibility, and where it
has - as in the case of Wright's (1975) study of the Western - it is
often because key modifications were made to the basic Levi­
Straussian framework. Wright, for example, understands his
structures as reflecting social circumstances rather than funda­
mental features of the mind, and draws upon other sources, notably
Propp, for his method of narrative analysis.
Nevertheless, Levi-Strauss' particular realization of structuralist
method did have significant longer-term consequences for cultural
studies. It played an important part in ensuring that the first impact
of structuralism emphasized the distinctively formalist potential of
the approach. A Levi-Straussian analysis, after all, demanded that
the analyst identified the units from which texts were constructed,
did so largely in isolation from the actual reading practices of con­
sumers of those texts, and arrived at an account of 'meaning' by
examining the formal combinations and permutations of those
units across the (trans-cultural) corpus of texts. Such an approach
is 'formalist' in several senses. First, and most obviously, it focuses
on the formal patterning of cultural materials across the whole set
of artefacts, treating this as revealing the most significant 'mean­
ings' which texts carry. In doing that, however, it abstracts texts
from their culture, reifying revealed form. The texts come to carry
meaning in consequence of the structures that the analysis uncov­
ers, a process which functions quite independently of the social
agents who make and use culture. In other words, both the social
and the individual recede into the background of such an analysis ­
the 'forms' themselves provide sufficient grounds for credible
interpretative conclusions. Accordingly, it is difficult to say any­
thing about the social role of cultural forms except at the most
general level - Levi-Strauss (1972: 224), for instance, proclaims

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