Page 213 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

lie outside of any given individual. Durkheim rejected the empiricist view that
knowledge is to be derived from direct experience seeking instead for what he called
‘social facts’ that are socially constructed, culturally variable and sui generis of
190 particular consciousness. That is, they exist beyond individuals. For example, the
beliefs, values and norms of religions, specifically the contrast between Catholicism
and Protestantism, are said to account for variable patterns of suicide. In other
words, the most individual act possible, suicide, is accounted for by normative social
structures of belief.
However, it has been the work of Saussure rather than that of Durkheim which
has been most influential within cultural studies. Structuralism in this sense takes
signification or meaning production to be the effect of deep structures of language
that are manifested in specific cultural phenomena or human speakers. Here
meaning is not the outcome of the intentions of actors per se but of the language
itself. Thus, structuralism is concerned with how cultural meaning is generated and
understands culture to be analogous to (or structured like) a language. Saussure
argued that meaning is generated through a system of structured differences in
language so that significance is the outcome of the rules and conventions that
organize language (langue) rather than the specific uses and utterances which
individuals deploy in everyday life (parole). In short, Saussure, and structuralism in
general, is concerned more with the structures of language that allow linguistic
performance to be possible than with actual performance in its infinite variations.
Structuralism extends its reach from ‘words’ to the language of cultural signs in
general so that human relations, material objects and images are all analysed
through the structures of signs. In the work of Lévi-Strauss we find the
manifestation of structuralist principles when he describes kinship systems as ‘like
a language’ so that family relations are held to be structured by the internal
organization of binaries. For example, kinship patterns are structured around the
incest taboo that divides people into the marriageable and the prohibited. Also
typical of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism is his approach to food that he declares to be
not so much good to eat, as good to think with. That is, food is a signifier of
symbolic meanings wherein cultural conventions tell us what constitutes food and
what does not, the circumstances of its eating and the meanings attached to it.
Lévi-Strauss tends towards the structuralist trope of binaries: the raw and the
cooked, the edible and the inedible, nature and culture, each of which has meaning
only in relation to its opposite. Cooking transforms nature into culture and the raw
into the cooked. Further, the edible and the inedible are marked not by questions
of nutrition but by cultural meanings. An example of this would be the Jewish
prohibition against pork and the necessity to prepare food in culturally specific
ways (kosher food). Thus binary oppositions of the edible–inedible mark another
binary, insiders and outsiders, and hence the boundaries of the culture or social
order. During the late 1960s and 1970s Barthes was to extend the structuralist
account of culture to the practices of popular culture and their naturalized
meanings or myths. He argued that the meanings of texts are to be grasped not in
terms of the intentions of specific human beings but as a set of signifying practices.
In sum, structuralism: