Page 214 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

STRUCTURE

• Understands culture to be an expression of the deep structures of language that
lie outside of the intentions of actors and constrain them.
• Is synchronic in approach so that structuralist analysis focuses on the structures
of relations in a snapshot of a particular moment. 191
• Asserts the specificity of culture and its irreducibility to any other
phenomenon.
Links Culture, language, myth, poststructuralism, semiotics, structuration, structure

Structuration Structuration theory, which is associated with the work of Anthony
Giddens, centres on the way agents produce and reproduce social structure through
their own actions. Structuration offers a way to understand human social and
cultural activity as involving both agency and structure. Here regularized human
activity, or structure, is not brought into being by individual actors as such, but is
continually re-created by them via the very means whereby they express themselves
as actors. That is, in and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions
that make those activities possible. For example, having been constituted as a man
or a woman by the structures of gendered expectations and practices, and having
learned to be a father or mother, we then act in accordance with those rules
reproducing them once again.
Giddens argues that social order is constructed in and through the everyday
activities and accounts (in language) of skilful and knowledgeable actors (or
members). The resources that actors draw on, and are constituted by, are social in
character. Indeed, social structure (or regular patterns of activity) distributes
resources and competencies unevenly between actors. That is, regularities or
structural properties of social systems, which are distinct from any given individual,
operate to structure what an actor is.
Central to the theory of structuration as developed by Giddens is the concept of
the ‘duality of structure’ by which structures are not only constraining but also
enabling. That is, while individual actors are constrained and determined by social
forces that lie beyond them as individual subjects, it is those very same social
structures that enable subjects to act. For example, what it means to be a mother in
a given society may mean that we cannot undertake paid employment and in that
sense we are constrained. However, the structures of motherhood also allow us to
act as a ‘mother’, to be close to our children, to form networks with other mothers,
and so forth. Likewise with language: we are all constructed and constrained by a
language that pre-exists us, yet language is also the means and medium of self-
awareness and creativity. That is, we can only say what is sayable in language, yet
language is also the medium by which we can say anything at all.
Links Agency, determinism, holism, praxis, reductionism, structuralism, structure

Structure A structure can be understood in terms of regularity or stable patterns. Thus
the structures of language are said to be the secure and predictable rules and
conventions that organize language (langue). A social structure is constituted by the
recurrent organization and patterned arrangement of human relationships. Social