Structuralism and Semiotics in Culture
How the science of signs and the structuralist method, born in linguistics and anthropology, were turned on advertisements, food, fashion, and myth to read culture as a system of meaning.
Definition
Structuralism is the method that explains cultural phenomena by the underlying systems of differences and relations that give them meaning; semiotics is the study of signs and signification. Applied to culture, they read practices and artefacts as languages organised by codes.
Scope
This area covers the application of Saussurean semiotics and structuralist analysis to cultural objects: Barthes's reading of everyday myths, Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology, the model of culture as a signifying system, and the post-structuralist critique that followed. It situates semiotics specifically within cultural theory; the linguistic and literary versions are treated under their own disciplines.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- Can culture be analysed as a language of signs?
- What hidden structures organise myths, meals, and fashions?
- How does denotation slide into culturally loaded connotation?
- Why did structuralism give way to post-structuralism?
Key theories
- The sign and the linguistic model
- Saussure's account of the sign as the arbitrary union of signifier and signified, meaningful only through difference, supplied the model for treating culture as a system of signs.
- Myth as second-order signification
- Barthes showed how everyday cultural images carry a second layer of mythic meaning that naturalises ideology, reading wrestling, steak, and advertisements as bourgeois myth.
- Structural analysis of culture
- Lévi-Strauss analysed myths and kinship as transformations of underlying binary structures of the mind, generalising the linguistic model to culture at large.
History
Saussure's posthumous Course in General Linguistics (1916) furnished the founding model of the sign. At mid-century Lévi-Strauss extended structuralism to anthropology and Barthes applied semiology to popular culture, reading everyday objects as ideological myth. By the late 1960s the structuralist confidence in stable systems gave way to post-structuralist critiques of the fixity of meaning.
Debates
- Stable structures versus the play of meaning
- Structuralism's assumption of underlying, stable systems of difference was challenged by post-structuralists who stressed the instability and endless deferral of meaning.
Key figures
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Roland Barthes
- Claude Lévi-Strauss
- Umberto Eco
Related topics
Seminal works
- saussure1916
- barthes1972
- levistrauss1963
- during2007
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between semiotics and structuralism?
- Semiotics is the general study of signs; structuralism is a broader method that explains phenomena by underlying systems of relations. In culture they overlap, since structuralist cultural analysis is largely semiotic.