Hi, my name's Tom. Welcome back to my
channel to another episode of What The Theory?, my ongoing series in which I
provide some accessible introductions to key theories in cultural studies and the
wider humanities. Today, we're taking a look at Structuralism, an approach to
analyzing culture which seeks to reveal the underlying structures which sit
beneath literature, film, television and all other forms of culture and guide how
they are created and also how they are read. Before we get going, if you have any
thoughts, questions or suggestions as we go along then please feel free to pop
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With that out the way however, let's take a look at Structuralism: What The Theory? Structuralism, in short, is a label used
to describe a set of approaches to understanding culture which, rather than
approaching literary, filmic, televisual, performance or other cultural texts
individually, seeks to consider the relationships between them. It proposes
that, beneath the cultural texts with which we entertain ourselves,
there lie consistent structures which inform how those texts are created as
well as the meanings that we derive from them. Taking its inspiration, as we'll see
in a moment, from linguistics, it asks us to view culture (in the broadest possible
sense) not as a series of disconnected books, films, TV shows, albums and whatever
else but, instead, as itself a kind of language. In fact, although we might not
often think of it as such, many of us are fairly used to discussing cultural texts
in a structuralist manner. For the notion of genre is a definitively structuralist
lens; it asks us to consider how a wide range of different texts relate to each
other and employ similar conventions and tropes. Furthermore, the notion of genre
recognizes that the meaning that we derive from watching, say, Game of Thrones
is in some way informed by our wider knowledge of the fantasy genre. Genres set up certain expectations and, even when those expectations are subverted,
part of us comes to appraise the particular text we are reading or
watching in relationship to those. Genre, then, is a kind of cultural structure. In today's video, we're going to take a look at the origins of structuralist thinking
and at some further examples of structuralist approaches to analyzing
culture. It is a massive subject and so we won't be able to touch on everything
and my aim, as always, is to give an overview rather than an in-depth dive
into any specific scholar. By the end, however, you should have a decent
understanding of what we mean when we use the term structuralism, an overview
of some of the ways that its methodologies have been used in the past
and, hopefully, an idea of how you might be able to use these to inform your own
approach to analyzing and otherwise critically interpreting cultural texts. So, some background.
Structuralism first emerged as a school of literary theory in France in the 1950s. Yet it was inspired and, in its
methodology, deeply informed by the work of a 19th century linguist by the name
of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure had, to put it mildly, revolutionized the study
of language. Previously, linguistics had focused on what is referred to as the
"diachronic" study of language—the study of how particular words or grammatical
conventions have evolved over time. Saussure, however, forwarded what he
referred to as a "synchronic" approach to linguistics which put aside matters of
history to focus on how a given language functions at a given point in time. In
undertaking such a study, he sought to argue that language does not, as had
often been thought in the past, have any direct relation with the world around us
but is in almost all cases entirely arbitrary. There is, for instance, no
reason that the word "tree" should be used to describe a tall plant with
branches other than that, over time, speakers of the English language have
come to a sort of agree that it does. Language is, therefore, a self-contained
system and words, rather than acting as descriptors of certain objects, actions
or whatever else, instead work on a principle of differentation. Some of you
may have played the game Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral
as a child. The game works on the principle that I think of an object or
person and you have to guess what it is that I'm thinking of. Say, for instance,
I'm thinking of an oak tree. You begin by asking me whether it is an animal or
vegetable or a mineral and I reply that it is a vegetable. You might ask me
whether it is a tree and I reply yes. You might ask me whether it is a deciduous
or evergreen tree and I reply deciduous. Eventually, you identify that I'm
thinking of an oak tree. Along the way, however, you are likely to have made a
number of wrong guesses. Perhaps you asked me whether I was
thinking of a flower or a sycamore tree. In fact, your process of determining
what I was thinking of was based almost entirely upon wrong guesses; my answer
only had to be an oak because, potentially, you'd already discovered
that it was not a sycamore or a willow or a fir. Saussure argues that this
is how language fundamentally works. The term "oak tree" doesn't refer to a tree
which grows acorns because of some innate quality of the words "oak tree" but
largely because it doesn't refer to a sycamore or a willow or fir. Saussure, indeed, argues that 'the conceptual part of linguistic value is determined solely by
relations and differences with other signs in the language'. It therefore
follows that we can learn very little from looking at individual words or
phrases. Individual written phrases or verbal utterances which Saussure calls
"parole" only come to hold meaning due to their relationships and differences with
other phrases or utterances in the wider linguistic structure which Saussure calls the "langue". Analyzing what and how given parole come to mean something, then,
can only be achieved with reference to the langue of which it is a part. Structuralism
as a literary theory takes numerous influences from Saussure's work and
modified versions of his specific methodologies which we haven't touched
on here can be found throughout structuralist cultural criticism. Some of
these we will touch on later in this video. For now, however, it's enough to
know that structuralist cultural criticism seeks to apply this broad
insight, that language is inherently structural and determined by
relationships and differences, to the analysis of culture. It suggests that we
can only truly understand how an individual cultural text—like parole—
comes to mean by observing its relationships with other texts in the
broader langue of culture. Structuralist cultural criticism is, then, fairly
diverse in its methodologies yet Robert Scholes has argued that we can usefully
differentiate between two dominant approaches. The first he describes as
"high structuralism" and the second as "low structuralism". The former, he writes, is
'high in its aspirations' and comes to some fairly grandiose conclusions about
how cultural texts come to infer meaning. We'll come to this "high structuralism"
shortly but we'll begin with its "low" counterpart which, as Scholes writes,
'aims to be more immediately useful' to those of us looking to understand how
cultural texts come to mean and is thus a little easier to comprehend. The 'discipline par excellence' of low structuralism is, according to Scholes,
what we refer to as "poetics". Taking its name and some of its methodological cues
from Aristotle's 335 BC treatise on Greek tragedy, poetics seeks to uncover
an underlying structure common to a range of (and often all) narratives. The
early examples of such an approach attend to the study of folk tales and
myths and proceed from the hypothesis that, no matter where in the world a
single myth originates, it never seems to be too dissimilar in its narrative
structure from other myths. Claude Lévi-Strauss, for instance, writes that
'mythology confronts the student with a situation which at first sight appears
contradictory. On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth
anything is likely to happen. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness
is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in wildly
different regions. Therefore the problem: if the content of a myth is contingent,
how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are
so similar?'. Lévi-Strauss' own work on myth is certainly interesting and we'll
touch on it briefly later. However, for today's purposes, I'd like to focus on
the approach of Vladímir Propp who, though writing some decades prior to the
advent of the European structuralism proper, took an approach which we can
fairly accurately describe as structuralist. To understand Propp's
argument, it's useful to return very briefly to linguistics. For what Propp was
trying to uncover in his 1928 book The Morphology of the Folktale can usefully
be likened to a "grammar" of human storytelling. Take these three sentences:
"The man ran down the road.", "The cat hissed at the mouse." and "The rain fell on
the field.". The meaning inferred by each of these sentences is vastly different
and, usually, it's this that draws our attention. What we tend to think about
less is the fact that they share the exact same grammatical structure or what
linguistics refer to as a "syntagmatic relationship"—here, a subject does
something to an object. Beneath the almost unlimited potential meanings that
a folktale could possibly have then, Propp sought to find a similar syntagmatic
relationship between plot elements. On studying a range of different
folktales, Propp identified 31 different 'plot functions' which, in his words, 'serve
as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are
fulfilled'. These include 'one of the family members absents himself from the
family home', 'the villain causes harm or injury to a member of a family' and 'the
hero returns'. Propp does not argue that all of these plot functions will appear
in every single tale, however he does suggest that, where they do appear, they
will tend to happen in the same order. Of course, just as with our three sentences
above, the use of different characters, different settings and so on allows one
example of a function to appear very differently in one tale to how it does
in another. Yet Propp suggests that we can often identify a similar "grammar", a
similar set of syntagmatic relationships at work beneath much of
human storytelling, a consistent structure under what initially appears
to be limitless variation. If "low structuralism" in the vein of Vladimir
Propp seeks to uncover a "grammar" or "poetics" of literature, film and other
narrative forms, then, what are the aims of "high structuralism". Well, it's useful
here to go back to those example sentences we looked at a moment ago. For,
if low structuralism was interested in the syntagmatic relationships present
in a cultural text—that is, the relationship between different plot
elements in a manner analogous to the
relationship between words in a sentence— then what Scholes refers to as "high
structuralism" is interested in what linguistics call the semantic
relationships within a text. Terence Hall explains this concept of semantics by
suggesting that as well as having relationships with the other words
present in a sentence, 'each word will also have relationships with other words
in the language that do not occur at this point in time, but are capable of
doing so'. The sentence "The cat hissed at the mouse.", for instance, has a different
meaning to the sentence "The cat hissed at the lion." or "The cat hissed at the
vacuum cleaner." One seems fairly ordinary, the other has an air of danger to it,
the latter is mildly comical. And structural linguistics holds that,
whichever of these words is present in the sentence in front of us, it also invokes
the others which are not. The cat hissing at the vacuum cleaner, for instance, is
mildly comical precisely because we would expect a cat to be hissing at a
mouse. The meaning we derive from that sentence is thus driven by the absence
of mouse as much it is by the presence of vacuum cleaner. Again then,
structuralist cultural theorists in the "high structuralist" tradition seek to
apply this notion of semantic relationships to cultural texts. Often,
though not always, this takes the form of considering how the meanings that we
derive from individual texts might be reliant not only on the words, images or
sound that are present in that specific text but also upon ideas dominant in the
wider culture of which they are a part. Just as, to Saussure, the individual parole
or instance of speech or writing is reliant upon the wider langue, so too does
the individual text only infer meaning in relationship to the wider culture in
which it is either produced or read. Where the previously dominant school of
thought in literary theory, the New Critics, had sought to bracket off
context as a kind of distraction to uncovering the true meaning of a
literary text, then, the high structuralists saw
context as essential to the meaning that a text infers. Indeed, though sharing an
interest in myth with Vladímir Propp, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss primarily
focuses on what the myths told by what he saw as "primitive" societies might
reveal about the societies which told them. In his book Structuralist
Anthropology, he dissuades us from reading the story of Oedipus as simply
the story of a king coming to terms with having slept with his own mother. Instead,
on breaking the myth down into its constituent parts and considering the
various thematic or positions contained within it, he suggests it might be better
read as a collective debate over the origins of humankind. In this manner, the
myth itself becomes a single parole within a societal langue in which such a
question is a current cause of consternation with what Foucault might
describe as the 'structure of thought' of the society which engendered that myth
revealed to be shaping the meaning of the myth itself. Perhaps the most famous
proponent of this high structuralism, however, was Roland Barthes. Although later
coming to question the structuralist approach, many of his early- to mid-career
works including The Fashion System and S/Z sought to make the case that the
meaning inferred by texts as disparate as pieces of fashion journalism or the
novels of Balzac are never, in fact, self-contained but always reliant upon
context or what he referred to as 'cultural codes'. A cultural code to Barthes
was any piece of knowledge or maybe a value statement so widely accepted by
society that a cultural text can kind of use it as a shorthand to invoke certain
meanings. In S/Z, for example, he analyzes a passage in Balzac's Sarrasine
in which a character doodles in their book during a lesson. Barthes posits that,
without the influence of cultural codes, we might think little of this.
Nevertheless, the fact that we are likely aware that such an activity is, in his
words, 'outside regulated class activities' enables the act of doodling
to reveal the character to be lacking in studiousness.
Perhaps more interesting, however, is Barthes' analysis, in his earlier book
Mythologies, of the cover image on an issue of the magazine Paris Match. He
writes that 'on the cover, a young [black man] in French uniform is saluting with
his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour [the French flag].
All this is the meaning of the picture. But, whether naively or not, I see very
well what it signifies to me: that France is a great empire, that all her sons,
without any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag and that there is
no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown
by this [black man] in serving his so- called oppressors. Barthes' argument here
is that, without the influence of cultural codes, again, the image might
mean little more than "here is a person saluting a flag". Yet the intervention of
cultural codes surrounding race, colonialism and national identity in
post-war France intervene to make it a defiant response to calls for the
decolonization of the remainders of the French Empire. Furthermore, the cultural
codes here are fairly clearly reliant on the kind of semantic relationships I
described earlier. For the fact that it is a black man saluting the flag is
notable largely because, in a context in which the French colonies were calling
for independence, it would likely have been surprising that it was a black man
rather than a white one saluting the flag. The idea that it could have been a
white man in this image thus influences our reading of it as much as the fact
that it is a black man. This excerpt from Mythologies is a fairly early product of
both Barthes' work and structuralism as a whole. However I think it's useful to
raise towards the end of this video for, partly due to its subject matter, it
reveals some of the underlying political implications of this approach. For, as I
mentioned towards the beginning of this video,
Saussure was adamant that language is fundamentally arbitrary and, rather than
allowing us to express our experience of the world in
some kind of objective manner, instead shapes how we come to know the world.
Structuralist approaches to culture hold the same to be true of cultural texts. And,
if, as Barthes suggests here, the meaning we derive from cultural texts is heavily
reliant upon the influence of the dominant structures of thought of the
societies in which they are produced, then it raises questions about why these
structures might exist. It prompts us to ask in whose interest such structures
might serve and to consider how they might change over time. Many who embraced
structuralism were somewhat hesitant to answer such questions, confining
themselves instead to simply describing what they saw. And it's largely this
hesitancy that would eventually see structuralism challenged by a new
theoretical movement which we now know as poststructuralism. But that's for a
future video. Thank you very much for watching this video, I hope it has been
interesting and useful if you're currently looking to understand
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