Page 233 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

STRUCTURALISM

originally set up to challenge. The outcome of this transformation was
to produce at least three rather different fields of study.

. Semiotics, which had hitherto been synonymous with structuralism
but which became established as a major strand within the study of
popular culture.
. Deconstruction, which is overwhelmingly a mode of literary analysis,
derived from the writings of Jacques Derrida. Derrida, a
philosopher, showed how the philosophical assumptions that
underlie writings are not by any means the guarantors of their
meaning – on the contrary, the discourses in which such
assumptions are presented systematically undermine the philosophy.
This approach has given rise to an entire deconstructionist movement
that is particularly influential in literary studies in the US. In this
guise, the approach is a ‘method’ whose only precept is to take
nothing for granted – doubt and questioning raised to the level of
doctrine. Deconstruction is, then, one of structuralism’s logical
conclusions. Structuralism sought to challenge the common-sense
assumption that meanings are the result of their author’s intentions,
or that language is simply a referential nomenclature (an instrument
that simply names an already-existing world). Deconstruction takes
these notions further, and concerns itself solely with the signifier
(not the signified or the socially ‘fixed’sign). Applied to the study of
literature, deconstruction has produced a characteristic form of
criticism in which the verbal virtuosity of the critic is as much in
evidence as reflections on the object of study. The object of study (a
work of literature, for instance) is in fact given no especially
privileged status; it is not a warrant for its own reading. On the
contrary, deconstruction is dedicated to teasing out the repressed,
marginalised and absent in the chosen discourse.
. Post-structuralism, hard in practice to separate from structuralism. It is
more alert to psychoanalytical theories and the role of pleasure in
producing and regulating meanings than was the highly rationalist
early structuralism. Post-structuralism is also more concerned with
the external structures (social process, class, gender and ethnic
divisions, historical changes) that make meaning possible than the
early version, which was concerned mostly with internal or
‘immanent’ textual structures. Hence structuralism shifted its focus
from the text to the reader, but this should not be taken as a radical
break – post-structuralism is implicit in structuralism itself.

Structuralism has been seen as a characteristically twentieth-century

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