Page 86 - Decoding Culture

E N TER STRUCTURALISM 79

sense of the social functioning of cultural texts, a coherent grasp of
the operation of agency and subjectivity in cultural production and
consumption, a conceptualization of the pleasures afforded by cul­
ture - come to be seen as problems of structuralism per se rather
than of their particular inflection of it. The term which, however
inadequately, was increasingly used to express these doubts about
the first wave of structuralist work was 'formalism', and in the
1970s various schools of thought within cultural studies tried to
reformulate their structuralist foundations in such a way as to
counter that charge. In Chapters 4 and 5 we shall examine some of
the terms of this reformulation. But however vigorously later schol­
ars may claim to transcend structuralism - and some have been
very loud in their protestations - the intellectual foundation pro­
vided by Saussure, and subsequently developed by Barthes and
Levi-Strauss, remains the single most profound source of theory
and method in cultural studies. Without structuralism, cultural
studies as we now understand it is all but inconceivable.

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