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.
