Page 232 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

STRUCTURALISM

STRUCTURALISM

An intellectual enterprise characterised by attention to the systems,
relations and forms – the structures – that make meaning possible in
any cultural activity or artefact. It is associated with a number of
French writers who became influential in and after the 1960s.
Structuralism is not an interpretative approach to meaning. Unlike
certain well-established kinds of literary and cultural criticism, it does
not seek to reveal the hidden, essential or intrinsic meaning of a text
or artefact. On the contrary, structuralists refuse the very idea of
essential or intrinsic meaning, together with the notion that
individual texts or individual people are the source of the meanings
they generate. Structuralism is an analytical or theoretical enterprise,
dedicated to the systematic elaboration of the rules and constraints
that work, like the rules of a language, to make the generation of
meanings possible in the first place.
Thus early structuralism was distinguished by the use of Saussurian
linguistics and its terminology: especially the notions of signifier and
signified; langue and parole; synchronic and diachronic; para-
digm and syntagm. These and other distinctive features of a language
structure were used to showhowdisparate and apparently unorganised
phenomena were actually instances of the same structural patterns and
relations, just as all the different things that can be said in speech
depend on the rules and constraints of langue. Further, structuralism
was dedicated to showing how such structures were to be found in all
kinds of cultural activity. Thus there are structuralist analyses of
architecture, fashion, food, kinship networks and the unconscious, as
well as of the more obvious signifying ‘systems’ of cinema, television
and literature.
The most prominent names in structuralism are Roland Barthes
(criticism) and Claude Le ´vi-Strauss (anthropology). Other influential
writers associated with the enterprise are Louis Althusser (Marxist
theory), Jacques Lacan (psychoanalysis) and Michel Foucault (studies
of sexuality, madness and incarceration in terms of theories of power,
discourse and knowledge) (see Sturrock, 1979).
During the 1970s structuralism underwent a transformation. This
was due partly to the proliferation of different positions within the
enterprise, which eventually became too diverse to be understood as a
unitary approach. It was also brought about by the unease expressed by
some of structuralism’s original proponents that structuralism was
becoming itself the very type of intellectual orthodoxy it was

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