Structuralism, semiology,

and culture
• 1929: Roman Jakobson – structuralism: a general
tendency in all sciences, including human sciences:
“Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is
treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a
structural whole, and the basic task is to reveal the inner
laws of its system. What appears to be the focus of
scientific preoccupation is no longer the outer stimulus, but
the internal premises of the development; now the
mechanical conception of processes yields to the question
of their function” (“Romantic Panslavism - New Slavic
Studies”).
• Change of focus from the diachronic to the synchronic,
from the individual item as a self-sufficient object of study
to the general laws that govern the system which enables
the existence of that item.
Major influence: the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure
(1913-1916) – the perfect model for the investigation of any field
of human culture
He operates with three major distinctions:
1. Langue vs. parole – language as an internally related set of
differentiated signs governed by a system of rules (language
as a structure) vs. language as an instance of communication,
in speech or writing – langue vs. parole:
The system of rules and conventions that can account for
particular meaningful sentences is not apparent to individual users
of the language.
Saussure: In separating language from speaking, we are at the
same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual;
and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less
accidental.
 2. Signifier vs. signified – components of the linguistic sign
– an analytical, not empirical, distinction –
This distinction accounts for the capacity of langue to confer
meaning.
Meaning: determined not by external material reality (the realm
of reference is not an object of study for structural linguistics),
but by the differences between linguistic units, which are in
their turn determined by the overall system of language
E.g. dog and god differ in meaning on the basis of a contrast
arising from the different order of phonemes.
The linguistic sign: arbitrary – the relation between the signified
and the signifier: unmotivated, purely conventional – a
matter of social consensus
In language there are only differences, without positive terms;
there are neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the
linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences
that have issued from the system (Saussure).
3. Synchronic vs. diachronic analysis – the study
of the system which enables parole must be
carried out on a synchronic level
Meaning: conferred by the place of the linguistic
units in the system, rather than in history.
Keeping diachronic (historical) and synchronic study
separate allows for the reconstruction of the
system of language as a relational whole.
• The structuralist approach to the sphere of culture: based on
similar distinctions.
• Culture: constituted like a linguistic system – the sum of shared
systems of signification which enable phenomena to have
meaning
• For an item to acquire cultural meaning it is necessary to
perceive it against a certain pattern of relationships.
• The distinction between Nature and Culture: fundamental for
structuralists – best explained by means of Saussure's notion of
difference
• Emile Benveniste: A fact of culture is such only insofar as it
refers to something else (1966, Problems of General Linguistics)
• When a phenomenon is considered in connection with
something else, when it is perceived against a pattern of
differential relationships, it ceases to be a “natural” object
and becomes a fact of culture.
• The concept of structure: central to the analytic activity.
• Structures = heuristic models; no empirical reality; they are
abstract, fictional constructs which organize certain series of
elements in configurations that will enable these elements to
mean.
• The structural model is basically relational; in it, meaning
arises from patterns of differences and oppositions; it is a
function of context.
• The structural activity: the building of a model, a simulacrum
of the object of study; the construction of this imitated object
makes something appear which remained invisible, or
unintelligible in the natural object (Roland Barthes).
• This simulacrum: intellect added to the object (Barthes) –
structuralism’s aspiration towards complete rationality.
• The concept of structure: central to the analytic activity.
• Structures = heuristic models; no empirical reality; they are
abstract, fictional constructs which organize certain series of
elements in configurations that will enable these elements to
mean.
• The main operations involved in the “structural activity” in general
are “dissection and articulation” (Barthes) – de-composition
and re-composition
• Steps in a structural analysis:
 segmentation and identification of minimal units of
signification,
 setting up patterns of regularity, parallelism or analogy,
 organising the perception of elements around patterns of
binary oppositions.
• The re-composition of these elements into a structure often results
in surprising interpretations – often in extremely formalized and
abstract language.
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural anthropology (1958)
• He discovered in Roman Jakobson's linguistic theories the
appropriate method for the investigation and understanding
of human culture and social interaction.
• His essay “The Structural Study of Myth” (1955; reprinted in
Structural Anthropology) made explicit use of Saussure's
structural phonological model in the analysis of mythic
thought in primitive, pre-industrial societies
• His conclusions: cultural meaning is not immanent and is
not a matter of content, but the result of a combination of
features governed by the laws of a specific code.
• It is only against this super-ordinate level of the code that
meaning is graspable, just as a concrete linguistic utterance
(parole) makes sense if it is perceived as the instantiation of
the general system of laws that govern language (langue).
• His study: meant to bring into relief the underlying universal,
unconscious structures of social and cultural life, by means of
logical grids of binary oppositions which classify and organize
empirical phenomena.
• For instance, his study of kinship systems in conjunction with the
general characteristic linguistic structures of the studied areas was
meant to point out “the basic similarities between forms of social
life, such as language, art, law, and religion, that on the surface
seem to differ greatly”
• Particular cultures are, for Lévi-Strauss, surface manifestations of
deeply internalized patterns, of universal validity, socio-historical
transformations of an unconscious, universal, and immanent rule-
system.
• The structuralist approach presupposes finding the homologies, the
similarities in configuration, between cultural phenomena which have
no apparent connection.
• For example, he mentions, in Structural Anthropology, a
certain myth among Northern American Iroquois and
Algonquin Indians which resembles the Oedipus myth –
• The question whether this is a coincidence, i.e. different
causes for the presence of the same motifs, or if these
two myths can be seen one fragment of a “meaningful
whole”.
• He pursues the incest theme into mythology and
uncovers a remarkable relationship between North
American folklore, Greek myth and the legend of the
Holy Grail.
• Such similitudes, found in cultures widely separated
both geographically and historically, demonstrate the
“universality of human nature”
 Semiology and mythology – Roland Barthes
(1915-1980)
• In the sphere of culture, the relationship between signifiers and
signifieds cannot be said to be arbitrary, as it is in language
• There are necessary factors linking conventions, codes and
ideologies – the association of specific signifiers with specific
signifieds.
• Saussure had anticipated a global science whose object was
to be “the life of signs in the context of social life”, which
he called semiology, of which linguistics was supposed to be
just a branch. Subsequently, this relation was inverted –
semiological/semiotic approaches were based on principles
derived from linguistics.
• Semiology is concerned with the production of meaning,
with “the process of signification” (Barthes).
 Distinction between semiology and structuralism
• STRUCTURALISM: a theoretical (and philosophical) framework
relevant to the social sciences as a whole –
 It stresses the universal, causal character of structures
 A preoccupation with deep structures, which underlie and
generate the phenomena under observation –
 Such mental and cultural structures are universal – they are
referrable to “basic characteristics of the mind” (Lévi-Strauss).
• SEMIOLOGY: the scientific study of sign systems, of the means
by which human beings – individually or in groups – communicate
or attempt to communicate by various kinds of signals (gestures,
advertisements, language itself, food, objects, clothes, music,
etc.).
• Semiology does not assume that there is a universal structure
underlying sign systems. The signs and codes which make the
world intelligible are seen as historically and culturally specific.
• Barthes: Mythologies (1957): a collection of journalistic essays,
mostly on various aspects of mass culture (films, photographs,
advertizing, children's toys, newspapers and magazines, cars,
popular pastimes, etc.), in which he proposes to “interrogate
the obvious”
• Aim: to show how these “myths” invite and encourage the
unexamined acceptance of a constructed reality as a given.
• For Barthes, semiology represented a strategy of
demystification – his analyses: meant to “denunciate” a series
of “petit-bourgeois myths”
• Semiology: the close analysis of the processes of meaning by
which the bourgeoisie converts its historical class-culture into
universal nature; semiology appeared to me, then, in its
program and tasks, as the fundamental method of an
ideological critique. (Mythologies)
• Material reality can never be taken for granted – it is
always constructed and made intelligible to human
understanding by culturally specific systems of
meaning
• Meaning is never “innocent” – not given, but
“manufactured” out of codes, conventions, and signs
which are historically circumscribed and carriers of
particular interests and purposes.
• Cultural meanings are therefore not universal; they are
closely linked to social conditions in which they are to be
found
• They tend to present themselves as universal when they
really are historically and socially fixed.
• Mythologies: the analysis of this process of transformation
of “history into nature”
• Myth – etymologically: speech, thought, story, myth,
anything delivered by “word of mouth”
• For Barthes, myth is “a system of communication, that is
a message […], a mode of signification…a type of
speech… conveyed by a discourse. Myth is not defined by
the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters
this message.”
• Myth is “a second-order semiological system” – it relies
upon signs in other first-order systems such as language in
order to engage in the process of signification.
• A sign in a first-order system – a word, a flower or a
photograph – becomes a signifier in the second-order
system of myth.
• Myth uses other systems, be they written or pictorial, to
construct meanings.
Barthes’ analysis of the Paris Match cover, in Mythologies

“I am at the barber's, and a copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On

the cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his
eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the
meaning of the picture. But …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 Negro in serving his so-called oppressors. I am
therefore…faced with a greater semiological system: there is a
signifier, itself already formed within a previous system (a black
soldier is giving the French salute); there is a signified (it is here a
purposeful mixture of Frenchness and militariness); finally, there is a
presence of the signified through the signifier…. French imperiality.”
Myth works through the relationships
between form (signifier), concept
(signified) and signification (the
sign).
The form of this specific myth of
French imperiality, the black
soldier, is taken from one system,
his real history, which gave him
his meaning, and placed in
another system, that of the myth,
which denies his history and
culture, and thus the real history of
French colonial exploitation
“We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into
nature... In the case of the soldier-Negro... what is got rid of is
certainly not French imperiality (on the contrary, since what must
be actualized is its presence); it is the contingent, historical, in one
word: fabricated, quality of colonialism.
Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk
about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it
gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a
clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement
of fact. If I state the fact of French imperiality without explaining it,
I am very near to finding that it is natural and goes without
saying: I am reassured.
In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it
abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the
simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any
going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organizes a
world which is without contradictions... Things appear to mean
something by themselves”
(“Myth Today”, in Mythologies)
• For Barthes, “signification is the myth itself” – the coming together of
form and concept in the cultural sign.
• This is attended by a process of deformation: “myth hides nothing: its
function is to distort, not to make disappear…there is no need of an
unconscious in order to explain myth…the relation which unites the
concept of the myth to its meaning is essentially a relation of
deformation…in myth the meaning is distorted by the concept.”
• Unlike the linguistic sign, the “mythical signification…is never arbitrary;
it is always in part motivated” – this motivation of form by concept
relates to the social and historical characteristics of myth.
• Explaining the relation of myth to a particular history, to the interests of
a definite society, means passing from semiology to ideology.
• Barthes analyses the way in which myth transforms a specific social
reality (the interests of the bourgeois class) and a specific historical
context (capitalism) into something which is made to appear as natural
and inevitable, so as to be accepted as a matter of fact
“The myth-consumer takes the signification for a system of facts: myth
is read as a factual system, whereas it is but a semiological system.”