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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
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read. Before we get going, if you have any thoughts, questions or suggestions as we go along then please feel free to pop those down below in the comments and, if you're new around here and this seems like your kind of thing, then please do consider subscribing and hitting that notifications button. Also maybe check out my Patreon? I'll link it below. With that out the way however, let's take a look at Structuralism: What The Theory?
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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"
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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"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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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'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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 structuralism for whatever purpose. Thank
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you as always to Ash for signing up to the top tier of my Patreon. If you'd like to check out my Patreon page, I will link it down below. I really appreciate you supporting what I do here and there's also some perks that come alongside the different levels including copies of the scripts for each of these videos with references and footnotes etc. If you've enjoyed this video then a thumbs up on the like thing down below is always
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appreciated but, other than that, thank you very much for watching once again and have a great week!
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