Page 85 - Decoding Culture

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

latter term remained descriptive and under-theorized in his work,
that was a deficiency for which later structuralists would more
than compensate. The problem of formulating an appropriate
theory of ideology was to dominate cultural studies for many years
to come. His concern with connotation also led him to begin to for­
mulate the role of cultural codes in the workings of semiotic
systems, a feature which is apparent in his study of fashion
(Barthes, 1983) and in the rather different concept of code
deployed in S/Z, where, he says, contra orthodox semiology, he is
'concerned not to manifest a structure but to produce a structura­
tion' (Barthes, 1990: 20) . The idea of code, too, was to play an
important role in subsequent cultural studies, though not always
with the processual emphasis that Barthes seems to intend here.
And lastly, in parallel with his displacement of authorship, he
begins to envisage the reading of texts more positively than in
much early structuralism, postulating a reader who is 'no longer a
consumer, but a producer of the text' (ibid: 4) , who is already
caught up in a plurality of texts and codes, and for whom reading is
work, 'a labour of language' (ibid: 10-11) . But by then, of course,
Barthes - the 'man of parts' - is no longer the formal semiologist of
his early years, and his structuralism is edging toward what will
come to be thought of as post-structuralism.
Barthes and Levi-Strauss bend structuralism (and hence early
cultural studies) in distinctive directions, not always consistent
with each other and, in Barthes' case, changing significantly over
time. Their motifs, the theoretical and methodological topics that
they emphasize, include formal analysis of texts, a concern with
unconscious structures, systematic binarism, a desire to decode
langue in multiple contexts, myth analysis, connotative semiotics,
deciphering naturalized messages of ideology, and displacing the
subject, all of which feature in the first flowering of structuralist cul­
tural studies. And their characteristic omissions - a fully theorized

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