Culturalism and structuralism

Culturalism 

In the collective mythology of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart (1957), Raymond

Williams (1965, 1979, 1981, 1983) and Edward Thompson (1963) are held to be early

figureheads representing the moment of ‘culturalism’. This perspective is later contrasted

with ‘structuralism’. Indeed, culturalism is a post hoc term that owes its sense precisely to

a contrast with structuralism.

Culture is ordinary, culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the active, creative capacity of people to construct shared meaningful practices. Empirical work, which is emphasized within the culturalist tradition, explores the way that active human beings create cultural meanings.

There is a focus on lived experience and the adoption of a broadly anthropological definition of culture which describes it as an everyday lived process not confined to ‘high’ art. Culturalism, particularly for Williams and Thompson, is a form of historical cultural

materialism that traces the unfolding of meaning over time. Here culture is to be explored

within the context of its material conditions of production and reception. There is an

explicit partisanship in exploring the class basis of culture that aims to give ‘voice’ to the

subordinated and to examine the place of culture in class power. However, this form of

‘left culturalism’ is also somewhat nationalistic, or at least nation-centred, in its approach.

There is little sense of either the globalizing character of contemporary culture or the

place of race within national and class cultures.

Structuralism

Culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product of active

human agents. By contrast, structuralism speaks of signifying practices that generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any given person. Structuralism searches for the constraining patterns of culture and social life which lie outside of any given person. Individual acts are explained as the product of social structures. As such, structuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of human agents from the heart of enquiry. Instead it favours a form of analysis in which phenomena have meaning only in relation to other phenomena within a systematic structure of which no particular person is the source. A structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with the ‘systems of relations’ of an underlying structure (usually language) and the grammar that makes meaning possible.

Deep structures of language

Structuralism in cultural studies takes signification or meaning production to be the effect

of deep structures of language that are manifested in specific cultural phenomena or human speakers. However, meaning is the outcome not of the intentions of actors per se but of the language itself. Thus, structuralism is concerned with how cultural meaning is generated, understanding culture to be analogous to (or structured like) a language.

The work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1960) was critical in the development of structuralism. He argued that meaning is generated through a system of structured differences in language. That is, 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).

According to Saussure, meaning is produced through a process of selection and combination of signs along two axes, namely:

1 the syntagmatic (linear – e.g. a sentence);

2 the paradigmatic (a field of signs – e.g. synonyms).

The organization of signs along these axes forms a signifying system. Signs, constituted by

signifiers (medium) and signifieds (meaning), do not make sense by virtue of reference to

entities in an independent object world; rather, they generate meaning by reference to each

other. Meaning is a social convention organized through the relations between signs.

In short, Saussure, and structuralism in general, are concerned more with the structures

of language which allow linguistic performance to be possible than with actual performance in its infinite variations. Structuralism proceeds through the analysis of

binaries: for example the contrast between langue and parole or between pairs of signs

so that ‘black’ only has meaning in relation to ‘white’, and vice versa.

Culture as ‘like a language’

Structuralism extends its reach from ‘words’ to the language of cultural signs in general.

Thus human relations, material objects and images are all analysed through the structures

of signs. In Lévi-Strauss (see Leach, 1974), we find structuralist principles at work when

he describes kinship systems as ‘like a language’ – that is, 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.

Typical of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is his approach to food, which, he declares, is

not so much good to eat, as good to think with. That is, food is a signifier of symbolic

meanings. Cultural conventions tell us what constitutes food and what does not, the circumstances of their eating and the meanings attached to them. 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.

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). Here, binary oppositions of the edible–inedible mark another binary, insiders and outsiders, and hence the boundaries of the culture or social order. Later, Barthes (see Chapter 3) was to extend the structuralist account of culture to the practices of popular culture and their naturalized

meanings or myths. He was to argue 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:

• Culturalism focuses on meaning production by human actors in a historical context.
• Structuralism points to culture as an expression of deep structures of language

that lie outside of the intentions of actors and constrain them.

• Culturalism stresses history.
• Structuralism is synchronic in approach, analysing the structures of relations in a

snapshot of a particular moment. As such, it asserts the specificity of culture and

its irreducibility to any other phenomena.

• Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of understanding meaning.
• Structuralism has asserted the possibility of a science of signs and thus of objective knowledge.

Structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis rather than an all-embracing philosophy. However, the notion of stability of meaning, upon which the binaries of structuralism and its pretensions to surety of knowledge are based, is the subject of attack by poststructuralism.That is, poststructuralism deconstructs the very notion of the stable structures of language.

Poststructuralism (and postmodernism)

The term poststructuralism implies ‘after structuralism’, embodying notions of both critique and absorption. That is, poststructuralism absorbs aspects of structural linguistics

while subjecting it to a critique that, it is claimed, surpasses structuralism. In short, poststructuralism rejects the idea of an underlying stable structure that founds meaning

through fixed binary pairs (black–white; good–bad). Rather, meaning is unstable, being

always deferred and in process. Meaning cannot be confined to single words, sentences

or particular texts but is the outcome of relationships between texts, that is, intertextuality.

Like its predecessor, poststructuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of the unified,

coherent human subject as the origin of stable meanings.

Derrida: the instability of language

The primary philosophical sources of poststructuralism are Derrida (1976) and Foucault

(1984d) (see Chapter 3). Since they give rise to different emphases, poststructuralism

cannot be regarded as a unified body of work. Derrida’s focus is on language and the

deconstruction of an immediacy, or identity, between words and meanings.

Derrida accepts Saussure’s argument that meaning is generated by relations of difference

between signifiers rather than by reference to an independent object world. However,

for Derrida, the consequence of this play of signifiers is that meaning can never be fixed.

Words carry many meanings, including the echoes or traces of other meanings from

other related words in other contexts. For example, if we look up the meaning of a word

in a dictionary, we are referred to other words in an infinite process of deferral. Meaning

slides down a chain of signifiers abolishing a stable signified. Thus, Derrida introduces

the notion of différance, ‘difference and deferral’. Here the production of meaning in the

process of signification is continually deferred and supplemented.

Derrida proceeds to deconstruct the ‘stable’ binaries upon which structuralism, and

indeed western philosophy in general, relies. He argues for the ‘undecidability’ of binary

oppositions. In particular, deconstruction involves the dismantling of hierarchical conceptual oppositions such as speech/writing, reality/appearance, nature/culture, reason/

madness, etc., which exclude and devalue the ‘inferior’ part of the binary.

For Derrida, ‘we think only in signs’ and there is no original meaning circulating outside

of ‘representation’. It is in this sense that there is nothing outside of texts or nothing

but texts (by which it is not meant that there is no independent material world). That is,

the meanings of texts are constitutive of practices.