STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE

BY HAYDEN WHITE

tructuralism represents an important phase in

the development of cultural studies in the West,
and its theoretical and merhodoIogical implica-
tions should be of interest to students of popu-
lar culture; for it not only reconceives the
nature of culture in general, it also reconceives
0
the relation between the so-called “high” or
“elite” cultural endowment of a society on the
one side and its low, folk, or popular counter-
art on the other. This means that Structural-
ism represents an importantly new way of defining the tasks and
0
aims of the human sciences. Taken in its broadest formulation,
Structuralism represents a departure from the traditional human
sciences in at least three ways:
0
I. It rejects the search for general laws of culture
and society of the sort that had inspired both
Marxist and Positivist social sciences since the
middle of the 19th century.
2. And while, therefore, it tends to be descriptive,
dwelling on concrete detail, rather than synthe-
tic and law-producing it also eschews interest in
the effort to explain its data by telling a story
about the evolution of an idea or institution, in
the way that conventional historians seek to do.
Thus it is both anti-scientistic and anti-historic.
3. While always distinguishing between surface at-
tributes and deep structural characteristics,
Structuralism does not credit the subject-object
distinction-the presumed split between con-
sciousness and the world it inhabits-in the way
that previous social and cultural theory, from
Hegel and Mum to Durkheim and Freud-tended
760 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

to do. While cultural phenomena do appear to form them-

selves into patterns, these patterns are on the surface of the
data to be analyzed rather than hidden behind them. As
Nietzsche said: Things are just what they appear to be;
nothing more, nothing less. All cultural data have precisely
the same value as evidence of a culture’s fundamental form.
It is the observer of a given set of cultural practices who
must overcome an inclination to read into things observed
more than “meets the eye. ” Learning to “read” a culture is
like learning to speak (not read) a language. This means
learning the grammatical and syntactical rules of a culture’s
praxis. These rules do not lie behind or within the praxis;
but are manifest in the ways in which people relate to one
another and to nature in their daily and must mundane
activities, right on the surface of those relationships, just as
the rules of grammar and syntax are present on the surface
of any speech act capable of being understood as meaning-
ful by a native speaker of the language in which it is uttered.

Now, all this has two implications with which I shall be dealing at length
in what follows:

I} Structuralism is radically anti-essentialist in its conception

both of human nature and of human culture; and
2) Structuralism is radically anti-hierarchical in its conception
both of history and society.

This anti-essentialism and anti-hierarchism have important implications

for the way we define our tasks as students of culture-whether elite or popular
-and the way that we both formulate questions and provide answers to them.

Criticism, the science of judging, has become the dominant art in the
elite culture of our age. In part this is a result of the academicization of both
art and science; in part it is a result of the sheer volume of materials that one
is forced to consider during the course of a single day in modern urban life. So
often are we asked to judge, that juding in general has become a specialized
activity .
In a sense, Structuralism may be viewed as the theory of criticism par
excellence; or better, it is a kind of super-criticism, which not only analyzes
the critic’s relation to his subject, in whatever Geld, but works always toward
the collapsing of the distinction between criticism and its object, between the
reader and the work, the consumer and the creator, the subject and its context.
For the Structuralist, we are all critics and creators at one and the same time
as we move through the most mundane of our daily activities or the most sub-
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 761

lime of our experiences. The most humble user of ordinary speech utilizes the
same techniques and applies the same rules as the most sophisticated poet; T.
S. Eliot and Apeneck Sweeney are one, both poets, both critics, each neither
one nor the other exclusively but both participating in the disposition of that
mysterious “culture” of which they are agencies in equal measure.
For the structuralist, as for the Idealists of a previous day, the culture-
system Zives the individuals and groups caught within its mazes rather than the
reverse. We do not dispose the elements of culture as a set of instruments for
realizing specific personal goals; rather, culture disposes us for the purpose of
realizing its own potential for imposing order on a world. This means that we
never confront the world directly, but always indirectly, approximately, as
mediated by culture. And it is this mediation which is Structuralism’s true
subject. Structuralism, as it has been often said, destroys the myth of the
transcendental subject, the Cartesian ego, which stands over against the world,
judges experiences of it, and selectively arranges them for the realization of
immanent aims. The only true subject of history is culture itself. It lives its
life through us; it is the sole agent of history and we its agencies, even though
we do not recognize ourselves as such but persist, at least in the West, in think-
ing that it is we who live it.
Unlike the Idealists of a previous day, of course, Structuralists do not
assign this agent which lives through us t o a transmundane sphere of essences
by which the relative significance of the elements of culture might be judged
and their approximation t o the ideal or their failure to approximate t o it might
be determined. Nor do they, like certain psychological determinists, regard
history as an epiphenomenon of forces having their origin below the threshold
of consciousness, such that the conscious life can be analyzed so as t o reveal its
dependence on drives or instincts of the sort that would link us with other
animals and permit our study of them to illuminate the workings o f p u r
specifically human experiences. Although Structuralists certainly distinguish
between the deep and surface significances of any given human phenomenon,
between the latent and manifest meanings of cultural practices, they consistently
try to resist the reductionism that has characterized all previous systems of
cultural analysis, from Comte, Marx, and Hegel in the early 19th century t o
Freud, Durkheim, Weber, and Malinowski in the 20th century. This means that
the analytical movement of Structuralism is always lateral rather than vertical,
consisting of the heaping up of instances of cultural relationships that are
ontologically on the same plane and epistemologically of the same significance.
It is the meta-pattern, the paradigm of all relationships characteristic of a given
mode of cultural praxis, that interests the Structuralist.
In themselves then, historical events-of whatever sort-have no specific
significance; there is no hierarchy of events in world history. No one event is
inherently more significant than any other. Events are in fact perceivable only
within a context and are significant as cultural data only in a specific relation-
ship to a context. Or rather, not within a context but within the congeries of
contexts into which any given event can be inserted. For a culture is not a
simple structure but a palimpsest of many different structures, each of which
762 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

represents a possible pattern of relationships into which actions can be projected

for different purposes. And just as there are no privileged events in the totality
of events that make up world history, so too there are no privileged places in
the congeries of structures that constitute a given mode of cultural praxis.
Structuralism is quintessentially anti-essentialist. N o field of happening yields
unambiguously to its observers either the forms or the contents of the objects
inhabiting it or suggests empirically the methods that must be used for its
analysis. This is why the Structuraliit rejects all thought of a single, universally
valid methodology, takes refuge in methodological eclecticism and utilizes what-
ever comes t o hand in his efforts to determine the meaning of a given set of
cultural practices. The Structuralist, then, is not a scientist, but a bricoleur, a
handy man or tinkerer, who does the same thing that the ordinary member of
the society which he is studying does in getting through his day. He is a tac-
tician rather than a strategist, an artisan rather than an engineer, claiming no
knowledge concerning the way things really work superior to that of the most
humble member of the society which he is studying. And in fact Structuralism
represents an attack upon the arrogance of the self-styled scientist of both cul-
ture and nature. For most Structuralists, modern Western physical science is
not qualitatively different from the systems of magic, divination, and
necromancy of primitive peoples; it is simply a particularly oppressive, and
ultimately more tyrannous, means of coping with the world developed in the
West under the imperatives of the myth which has sustained it: the myth of
the transcendental ego which might exist apart from an experience of the
natural world.

I1

In this respect, Structuralism represents an attack on the modern

scientific world view-an attack manifested in C. L6vi-Strauss’s idealization of
the thought and praxis of primitive, or pre-literate, peoples; in Roman Jakob-
son’s conflation of folk and popular literature with what was formerly regarded
as high literary art; and Michel Foucault’s unmasking of the human sciences of
the modern age as nothing more than ideologies based upon a set of linguistic
misconceptions which are as tyrannous of people as they are destructive of
nature itself. I t was this anti-scientific thrust of Structuralism, as developed by
Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, and others on one side of the Struc-
turalist movement, that led the eminent psychologist Jean Piaget to take time
off from his “empirical” research in order to distinguish between a healthy or
analytical Structuralism and an unhealthy or global one, between a Structural-
ism that is scientific and one that is Eschtological in its interests and implications.
Michel Foucault especially comes under indictment as one of the more
irresponsible of those practitioners of a brand of Structuralism which threatens
to undermine the authority of science, not so much by stressing its similarities
to primitive thought as by revealing both the wholly arbitrary nature of its
classificatory systems and methodologies and the ultimately mythical nature
of its presumed object of study, life, labor, and language.
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 763

Nor is Piaget alone in his distaste for Structuralism and in his desire t o
salvage the conventional idea of “structure” from the incursions of those who
would collapse the distinction between structure and function and with it the
very possibility of distinguishing between cultural systems that are progressive
and rational on the one hand and those that are retrogressive and irrational on
the other. Marxist theorists especially have no sympathy for Structuralism,
even when practiced by a LcviStrauss who affirms his debt to Marx and Engels
or the critic Roland Barthes who purports to be a Marxist of a sort. They cer-
tainly have no sympathy for Michel Foucault who dismisses Marxism as an
insignificant chapter in the history of the human sciences and condemns Marx
for the naivet; of his conception of history and the superficiality of his self-
styled science of political economy. Structuralism, orthodox Marxists of what-
ever persuasion insist, is simply old idealism brought up-to-date and turned
with especially devastating effect on the efforts of enlightened social scientists
to construct a liberating science of man, society, and culture. This idealism is
manifested in what is conceived t o be the Structuralists’ tendency to endow
language with a special status among all the artifacts of culture and society. To
its critics, Structuralism invests language with all of the deterministic power
with which Idealists formerly invested ideas or consciousness in general.

There is a certain justice in this criticism. Ferdinand de Saussure, the

recognized “father” of the Structuralist movement, considered his most impor-
tant discovery t o be the virtual autonomy of the linguistic system with respect
to the historical ambience in which it functions and his most important analyti-
cal insight to consist of the discovery of the binary nature of linguistic signs.
De Saussure’s analysis of language, set forth in his classic Course of General
Linguistics (1915), proceeds by a series of binary oppositions within a structure
that is conceived to be whole (or self-enclosed), self-regulative, and self-tmns-
formative-not unlike that Geist or spirit which is always associated with world
views that are vitalistic or idealistic in their implications. T o be sure, Saussure’s
theory of language was advanced in conscious opposition to the comparativist
approach to language cultivated in the 19th century, an approach characterized
by an interest in the historical evolution of language and stressing the relation-
ship between the development of words and the cultural milieux through which
they passed and whose forms the words reflected as in a mirror. Saussure
wanted to consider language as a thing in itself, in much the same way that
economists wanted t o consider systems of economic exchange as things in
themselves, irrespective of local variations in those systems caused by the intru-
sion of extra-economic factors or considerations. In order t o conceive a purely
linguistic system, necessary for the development of a science of linguistics, it
was necessary t o disengage linguistic relationships from the extra-linguistic ele-
ments of their contexts, in much the same way that a science of pure mathema-
tics had to be disengaged from applied mathematics or the various practical
domains in which numbers were used merely as counters or modes of abstract
764 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

characterization of natural or social processes. Saussure asked, what are the at-
tributes of the linguistic system if one succeeds in thinking away all of the
extra-linguistic elements that give to specific speech communities their specific
lexicons or ways of using language for practical purposes? What, in other words,
would be the rules of the language system if we ignored the specific words used
in a given speech community and the specific ways of using speech to endow
experience with specific kinds of meaning? This is to ignore both the lexical
and the semantic dimensions of language and to concentrate on grammar and
syntax as a formal system of selection and combination, in which signs with
zero value as signifiers are manipulated in the interest of selection and combina-
tion alone.
As Saussure conceived it, the study of language would proceed in much the
same way that one-studied a game, the object of the study being to extrapolate
the rules of the game and the transformations that the rules might undergo ir-
respective of the conscious intentions or aims of its various players in specific
games actually played. I will not dwell on the distinctions that Saussure drew
in order to direct research into the nature of the language game. These are
familiar enough: these are the distinctions between language and speech, be-
tween the synchronic and diachronic axes of linguistic usage, and between the
signifier and the signified within the single unit of language use, which is the
sign conceived as a purely arbitrary vehicle of signification. The important
point is that the language game consists of a manipulation of signs that bear no
nutural or necessary relation t o the objects they indicate. It is not as if signs
are either imperfect indicators of things or indicate them more or less adequately.
It is that signs bring with them a fundamental ambiguity as to their referents. As
Peter Caws puts it:

What gives the sign its linguistic value is the system of

differences, on the one hand between signifiers, on the
other between signifieds. . . . [Saussure expresses
this by saying: J “In language there are only differences.
. . . A difference generally implies positive terms be-
tween which the difference is set up; but in language
there are only differences without positive terms.”
This quotation may be taken as a key to structuralism
in general. Thought o n the one hand, language on the
other, are not antecedently segmented, they do not
exist as separable atomic units; the structuring activity
creates the units, bringing definiteness to both sides
simultaneously. The same would apply to other
significative systems; Saussure himself envisaged a new
science of “semiology” that would study all systems
of signs and of which linguistics would be only a part.
(Art. “Structuralism,” Dict. of the Hist. of Ideas, IV, 324.)

It was not language as such, then, that Saussure proposed a science of; it was
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 765

the system of signs of which language was only one instantiation. It required
only that the whole world of culture be conceptualized as a structure of signifi-
cation, distinct from but similar to the game of language, to generate the Struc-
turalist movement which flowered during the period between the World Wars
and came to fruition, as an alternative to Positivism, Marxism, Existentialism,
and Psychoanalysis alike, over the past three decades.
In the thought of Claude L6vi-Strauss in particular Structuralism threatens
to become a super theory of culture, capabIe of accommodating all previous
systems of cultural analysis as illuminative of different aspects of any given
system of cultural praxis, but superior to them all by virtue of its ironic insight
into their limitations as themselves significative systems whose limitations are
set by the ambiguity of the sign-systems in which they both constitute and
analyze their specific objects of study. L6vi-Strauss sees all previous systems of
cultural analysis as captive of a fatal ambiguity that stems, not from the fact
that they arose within a specific historical context, but from the fact that they
must all use sigw in order to speak about a world which they purport merely
to find, describe, and analyze but which, in reality, they constitute in the very
process of naming its component parts. As a result, as Michel Foucault has
argued, those sciences which purport to be about man, society, culture, and
even nature are .victims of the very terms they use to constitute their subjects-
not because the subjects are mysterious but because language is opaque rather
than transparent, ambiguous rather than univocal, and therefore bewitching to
the intelligence who uses language unselfconsciously and unaware of its mythify-
ing nature. What they are really about is the language in which they are formu-
lated. As thus envisaged, the modern social and cultural sciences, not less than
their physical science counterparts, are hardly different from those primitive
systems of thought and expression that modern civilized man is at such pains to
overcome. This criticism of modernity and civilization, which is characteristic
of much of modern Structuralism, is what has brought down on them the ire and
resentment of both old fashioned positivists such as Piaget and modern Marxists
such as Henri Lefebvre alike. The point at issue has to do with the status of
language itself. Is language, as both old fashioned positivists and Marxists as-
sumed, capable in principle of being used as a value-neutral instrument for
describing data and for reporting fmdings; or is it inevitably another datum
among many, enjoying no privileged status as cultural artifact but at the same
time serving as the model for analyzing the whole of culture considered as a
communications system in which not one, but a host of alternative ways of
mediating between man and nature, are justified?

IV

These are, of course, metaphysical issues not resolvable by appeal to

empirical data, for Structuralism as developed by L’evi-Strauss in particular
brings under question the very notion of the empiricity of data-an idea extended
by Foucault to the point of branding the “empirical fact” as a particularly naive
form of fiction peculiar to 19th century scientism and as having been destroyed
766 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

by the bankruptcy of the sciences developed on the basis of belief in it. Foucault
in fact offers a full blown theory of the fundamental discontinuity of all scientific
thinking. For him-as for T. S. Kuhn-revolutions in science are little more than
quantum leaps from one linguistic protocol to another which occur when a given
system of verbal classification has exhausted its capacity to deal with the
anomalous cases that necessarily appear at the limits of its particular system of
encodation. Expanded into a general theory of cultural change, Foucault’s
ideas lead to an ab-andonment of historical inquiry, conceived as a search for a
mode for characterizing the continuities presumed to exist in all culturd experi-
ences across time. This same anti-historical bent is shown by L&i-Strauss who,
in his The Savage Mind, denies the utility of any spec$ically historical inquiry,
whether of the old fashioned positivist sort or the Marxist dialectical one. L6vi-
Strauss denies that history has any object peculiar to itself of which a story, in
the form of a continuous narrative, can be legitimately written. He suggests that
a history is nothing but the serial ordering of phenomena, with more or less
practical utility, depending, not on what it is written about, but on what it is
written for and whom it is written to. L6vi-Strauss suggests that the only
possible way of studying human culture in value-neutral, i.e., scientific, ways is
simply to take a given cultural configuration as it is found in a given time and
place and do a depth, i.e., synchronic, study of the uses of the signs that char-
acterize both its theory and practice as a cultural system.
Foucadt calls this method of studying past cultures as well as present
ones “archeology,” a term which he sets over against “history” as the appropri-
ate form that cultural inquiry must take if it is to fulfill the only valid aim that
a human science must aspire to, i.e., demythification. And, in Foucault’s view,
to demythify is to demonstrate the extent to which any given idea, institution,
value, belief, or practice of a society is not naturally related to its milieux but
is always unnaturally related, that is to say, is nothing but a social fact appearing
under the aspect of a natural or divine one.
Now, for the Structuralist, to demythify is to show the extent to which a
given thought or practice is a result of a human mediation with nature. From
the apparently simplest activities of daily life to the most complex, from the way
we prepare our food, divide up our houses, arrange furniture in our rooms, dress,
play, organize our work, make love, write poetry, conceive philosophical or
scientific theories, worship, bury our dead, and so on, we are engaged in a media-
tion with the natural world from which we spring and over against which we seek
to define our true or “essential” nature. This attempt at self-definition by dena-
turing, individual or collective as the case may be, is implied in all of the cul-
turally significant activities we engage in; and it is the basis of all the different
cultural codes met with in the study of man on a global scale. As thus conceived,
a cultural code is nothing but a mapping operation of the places through which
one might move in the effort to achieve satisfaction of basic needs, food, shelter,
clothing, sexuality, expression of aggressive instincts, and the like, and the rules
for moving through such places. In this respect to use a cultural code is precisely
like using a language system which is disposed along the two axes of selection
and combination, nominal and verbal, lexical and syntactical, in the uttering of
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 767

meaningful sentences in the speech community. This means 1) that aZ2 cultural
codes are as arbitrary as any linguistic code, and 2) that the method of decod-
ing them is the same as that for decoding language systems. Cultural codes are
classification systems that permit their users, first to differentiate among the
objects, natural and social, met with in daily life, according to some equivalent
of the rules of grammar used in language to distinguish between different kinds
of words, and then to relate them in such a way as to be able to perform mean-
ingful acts, according to some equivalent of the syntactical rules we use in
speech in order to fashion meaningful sentences or utterances. It is, therefore,
the mode of relating to the world predominating in a specific cultural code that
must be sought in the analysis of its structure.
Now, mode is a term with musical, as well as poetic, connotations-and
it connotes both measure and mood, a quantitative and qualitative aspect,
rhythm and tone. As thus conceived, what one says or does is not less important
than the tempo in which one says and does it, or the affective charge with which
one says and does it. And the meaning of words and acts can be understood,
the Structuralists maintain, only if we can identify the modality of their relation-
ships to one another. Thus, the Neo-Freudian Structuralist. Jacques Lacon
shifts the emphasis of the analyst from the analysand’s dream to the report of
the dream as the prime datum and suggests that it is not the dream’s content,
not the elements of the dream report, but the modality of its encodation that is
the significant datum to be analyzed. It is the modality of the language used in
fashioning the dream report that betrays the structure of the neurosis occasion-
ing the dream. This modality of the dream report, a purely linguistic phenomenon,
reveals the analysand’s lived relationship to the world which is the structure of
his (or her) neurosis.
So too for the products of consciousness, such as art, religion, and science.
These are all ways of relating to the world by classification of experience in dif-
ferent modalities of signification.
It is the mode of relating to the world that determines the nature of the
classification system used in the mapping of its various places and the set or at-
titudes that we shall have towards the objects presumed “naturally” t o inhabit
those places. We do not occupy a world whose true nature is given to us directly
by perception; we occupy a world which is preceived through the code that is
already prepared for us and into the use of which we are indoctrinated by
processes of socialization that are themselves manifestations of the code.
The fundamental nature of this code is twofold, consisting of the designa-
tion of some objects in nature and society as continuous with our own natures
as human beings and others that are simply contiguous with the places we oc-
cupy as specifically human beings. Some parts of the world are therefore
experienced as being “natural” insofar as they are conceived to be continuous
with our own sensed essence and others as “unnatural” insofar as they are con-
ceived merely to be contiguous with, happening to exist alongside of and as
differentiated from, that presumed essence. This idea yields the interesting no-
tion that, for example, cooked things are more natural to us than raw things,
rather than the reverse, or even more interestingly, that those things that can be
768 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

cooked for human consuption are “naturally” meant for human consumption
while those that cannot be cooked for such consumption are not, in the natural
order of things, meant to be so consumed. In other words, the various taboos
that set the limits on what is permissible and what is prohibited in all human
societies appear to be functions of the simple fact that language itself requires
that we set some things aside as simply unnatural (and therefore inhuman), that
we exclude as many things and actions as different as we include among those
that are similar to or consonant with our sensed natures as human beings.
The taboo on incest, for example, which is the subject of L’evi-Strauss’s
Elementary Structures of Kinship, is the most striking example of the variability
of the process of exclusion and inclusion which he sets at the center of the
practice of cultural coding. The near universality of the taboo on incest, in
some form or other, is not regarded by Levi-Strauss as a consequence of any
repugnance for sexual intercourse with near relatives innate to human, as against
animal, nature. Nor is it explained by him, as it was by Freud, as a consequence
of some primal crime resulting in the creation of the conditions for a specifically
human form of social organization. On the contrary, for L‘evi-Strauss, the taboo
on incest is merely the most obvious example of culture’s need to set some limits
on the satisfaction of instinctual drives, as a precondition of the creation of a
specifically social existence. If society did not prohibit at least one thing, then
men would be nothing but animals. That it arbitrurily determines what shall be
permitted and what prohibited in all of its various operations is attested by the
variability of the rules that define incestuous relationships in the hundreds of
cultures studied by anthropologists throughout the world.
This arbitrariness is precisely similar to that which prevails in the setting
down of the rules for determining what shall pass for proper and improper usage
in speech. And just as the rules which determine what shall pass for proper
usage in speech change from generation to generation, with what is prohibited
becoming permitted and the reverse, so too do the rules of society: what is
illegal in one generation may become legal in another, and what is legal become
illegal, without rhyme or reason, and certainly not by the operations of any
dialectic that would permit us to explain or predict the changing relations be-
tween the things sanctioned and those forbidden across time and space. The
most that a responsible cultural science can do is register the differences obtain-
ing across the spectrum of societies met with in the historical record and in
anthropological field work.
It is this interest in the essentially arbitrary nature of cultural codes that
lies behind Foucault’s study of Western beliefs about the nature of madness
from the late Middle Ages to the present (it4adnessand Civilization) and in his
“archeological” study of the different conceptions of life, labor, and language
in the human sciences during the same period (The Order of Things). The anti-
social and counter-cultural implications of this analysis are manifest; the nihilism
implied in it is much more radical than anything envisaged either by Rousseau,
Levi-Strauss’s admitted inspiration, or Nietzsche, the model appealed to by
Foucault. For unlike Marx, Durkheim, Malinowski, Weber, or any of the other
patriarchs of modern social science, Structuralism does not undertake its work
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 769

in the hope of discovering man’s true nature, the best or most functionul form
of social organization, the most human system of cultural values, or any uni-
versally valid model for determining what is desirable and what is undesirable
for mankind in general. On the contrary, it not only denies that such a deter-
mination is possible, it openly attacks the highest products of Western, and all
other, civilizations, as products of the same want of semiotic self-conscious-
ness that dominates the lives of primitive peoples. It collapses the distinction
between the human and the non-human, between civilization and culture, be-
tween art and life, between science and myth, between theory and practice, be-
tween legality and illegality, between morality and instinct, and all other such
dichotomies, in the apprehension of the tyranny that language exercises over
human consciousness in all its efforts t o make sense of the world it inhabits.
Thus, ending The Elementary Structures of Kinship, L‘evi-Strausswrites:

Modern civilization has acquired such a mastery of the

linguistic instrument and the means of communication,
and makes such a diversified use of them, that we have,
as it were, immunized ourselves against language, or at
least so we believe. We see language as no more than
an inert medium, in itself ineffective, the passive bearer
of ideas on which the fact of expression confers no ad-
ditional characteristic. For most men, language repre-
sents without falsifying: [But, as Cassirer says,] “Lan-
guage does not enter into a world of accomplished ob-
jective perceptions merely to give purely external and
arbitrary signs or ‘names’ to individual given objects
which are clearly delimited from one another; but it is
itself mediator in the formation of objects. It is in one
sense the supreme denominator.” This more accurate
view of linguistic fact is not a discovery or a new inven-
tion. It merely places the narrow perspectives of the
civilized white adult in a vaster, and consequently more
valid, human experience in which “the naming mania”
of the child, and the study of the profound upheaval
produced in backward subjects by the sudden discovery
of the function of language, corroborate observations
made in the field; from which it emerges that the con-
ception of the spoken word as communication, as
power, and as action represents a universal feature of
human thought.
(Lkvi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship, 493-4.)

L<vi-Strauss then goes on to assert that “Certain facts taken from psycho-
pathology already tend to suggest that the relations between the sexes can be
conceived as one of the modalities of a great ‘communications function’ which
also includes language.” (aid.)L’evi-Strauss notes that “For certain sufferers
770 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

from obsessions, noisy conversation seems to have the same significance as an

unbridled sexual activity” and then commenting on a list of primitive prohibi-
tions of dangerous acts which includes along with incestuous sexual relations,
noisy play among children, demonstrative happiness at social reunions, etc.,
L’evi-Strauss concludes that almost all of the prohibitions of society can be
conceived to constitute rules that define “a misuse of language.” (aid., 495)
Every exchange, whether of goods, women, gestures, or words, is also an ex-
change of signs. Hence the key to the understanding of any cultural system is
to be found in the rules it sets up for exchanging signs. How we use signs is
more important than what we intend to accomplish in the exchange of them.
“The respective attitudes of two individuals in communication acquire a mean-
ing of which they would otherwise be devoid. Henceforth, acts and thoughts
become mutally solidary. The freedom to be mistaken has been lost.” (Ibid.,
496)
We use language under the same imperatives, and with the same risks, that
we use our bodies. This is why what appears to be the misuse of language in
popular literature, like the misuse of bodies in pornography, is so offensive to
the custodians of civilization. Puns are “the lowest form of humor” because
they represent instances of linguistic incest.

V
No doubt by now you are beginning to wonder what all this has to do
with the study of popular culture. What I wish to suggest is that it sets the
general problem of cultural study within a totally new theoretical context,
which has implications not only for the way we view the history of culture but
also for our use of instruments of analysis inherited from the pre-Structuralist
social scientific traditions. First of all, Structuralism de-historicizes the study
of culture. As I have suggested, it has labelled the very idea of historical
analysis as merely a product of a misconception. All cultural artifacts are to
be considered simply as present ones, some of which have been arbitrarily
labelled as occupying the place reserved for objects that have come to the
present from the past, others as occupying the cultural “place” designated by
the word “present.” We may, some Structuralists insist, arrange all artifacts
known to us along a time line in such a way as to constitute a series, but any
pattern that we may think we perceive as inhering in the series is actually a
product of our own modalities of conceptualization, themselves given by rules
of linguistic combination that are peculiar to Western linguistic systems and
the myths which are formalizations of such combinatory strategies. This is to
suggest the ineluctably ideological thrust of all historical accounts, whether of
popular culture or of anything else. A specific history is a mythical account of
some current distribution of known events into the categories of significant
and insignificant without the explicit recognition that significance is itself a
category grounded in the practices of specific social groups, hence are little
more than rationalizations of such practices in the interest of such groups
which take them as “natural” or (what amounts to the same thing) quintes-
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 771

sentially “human.” This is why even so seemingly innocent an activity as merely

constructing a chronicle of the events to be historically analyzed and represented
in a narrative always displays a tendency to display “hot” and “cold” periods,
periods in which there are more or less events to be analyzed. This suggests, it is
argued, that in the very construction of the chronicle the shaping influences of
language and cultural self-interest is at work, so that the possibility of a universal
history of man or even an objective history of a given culture or society is denied.
Which leads to the revision of Hegel’s formulation, “The only thing you learn
from the study of history is that nobody ever learns anything from the study of
history.” The new verison is: “The only thing you learn from the study of his-
tory is what you already know from present experience.” What this does is shift
the interest of cultural history from the study of a culture’s evolution in time to
the study of present cultures’ different conceptions of their evolution in time
and, more importantly for historians, to the study of Western culture’s obsession
with the idea of learning something new from the study of history. In other
words, sciences of culture should be present-oriented, concerned to explicate the
relations between the various spheres of cultural activity currently distinguished
in present societies, but without any presumption that one sphere is any more
noble or any more reflective of the presumed shared humanity than any other.
So too, just as there are no privileged sectors of the temporal continuum
of world history, there are no privileged sectors in the currently established
cultural structure from which the historical series is studied. Low, folk, and
popular culture are, if anything, regarded as being more immediately reflective
of the actual praxis of a given social system than its high or elite counterpart.
And this because popular culture is regarded as the equivalent in culture in
general to speech in the language system; it is culture in its active, conative, and
optative dimensions. Unlike high culture, with its highly complex and ritualized
strategies for repression, sublimation, and deflection of thought or emotion
from its true object, low or popular culture is much more susceptible to the
kinds of surface analyses that reveal the structural patterns uniting its various
manifestations in their functions as elements of a single communications system.
Here the myths that sustain the rituals of daily life can be analyzed into their
component elements, and their functions within larger, socially determining sets
of attitudes and beliefs identified. High culture is not regarded as being different
in kind from low or popular culture, but simply different in the degrees of sub-
limation and repression and the subtlety of articulation of thematic contents
which characterize it.
Within the context of such a view, it would be impossible to imagine a
book such as Gillo Dorfles’s Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, with its snobbish
bias and adamant appeal to a particular conception of refinement, or the anthology
put together a few years ago by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White,
Mass Culture: The Popuhr Arts in America, in which the contributors are divided
up between those who deplore “popularity” on the one side and those who
idealize it on the other. On the contrary, from a Structuralist standpoint, a
responsible science of culture would explicate the relationship between high
culture and popular culture on the analogy of the relationship between the
772 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE

language system (langue)as it is codified by lexicographers and grammarians of

a given time and place and the speech (parole) actually used by members of a
given community in the performance of daily tasks of a practical nature. The
scientist of culture would not set himself up as a custodian of any given aspect
of either high or popular culture, as the censor trying to keep the one pure of
the influences of the other or as promoter of some set of practices conceived
to represent the “highest” manifestations of a given culture’s life, but simply
as the analyst of how the popular culture bears upon, feeds into, is confiscated,
repressed or otherwise sublimated by those who claim the role of being the
creators of the high cultural endowment. More importantly, neither high culture
nor popular culture would be regarded as things or entities, which would be
evidence of the operation of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, but as com-
ponents of a structure of relationships which includes all of the forms of thought
and action both sanctioned and forbidden in a given society.
Most importantly, however, the study of culture-in both its high and
popular manifestations-would be guided by a theory in which language in its
conative and optative, that is to say, language in its constitutive, rather than
its reflective, aspects would serve as the analytical model. This would mean
shifting our interest in cultural artifacts from their forms or apparent contents,
i.e., from their lexical aspects, to their functions as sense-making instruments,
i.e., their grammatical and syntactical aspects. What we need-Structuralism
suggests-is a veritable rhetoric of cultural artifacts, such that the modalities of
their uses within a given context might be identified.
It is not enough, for example, to discover what the thinkers of a given age
defined as, say, madness, savagery, criminality, childishness, or femininity. It is
more important to know how such definitions, conceived as formalizations of
certain practices in a given social group, functioned as directives for determin-
ing the ways in which individuals falling into such categories were to be treated.
For concepts such as these presuppose a certain modality of relating to what-
ever is considered to be both similar to and different from the group claiming
the right to designate which individuals of the society would be placed in such
categories.
Thus, Foucault has shown, in Madness and Civilization, how the mode of
relating to deviants from social norms reflects a more comprehensive linguistic
code for dealing with all things conceived by society to represent the “different”
in general. If, for example, the insane are conceived primarily t o exist in a
relationship of continuity with the normal members of society, that is to say,
within the mode of metaphor, then the treatment of them, consonant with the
apprehension of their simikzrity to the normal group, will tend to be more hu-
mane than that based on the conception of deviants as merely contiguous with
the normal group. The conceptualization of differentness in the mode of con-
tiguity, the linguistic mode of metonymy, sanctions a treatment of those
designated as different in ways calculated to reinforce the presumed difference,
whether the difference is religious, ethnic, social, or psychological. And he shows
how the shift from the characterization of the insane in the linguistic mode, or
trope, of metaphor to that of metonymy actually resulted in the treatment of
 STRUCTURALISMAND POPULAR CULTURE 773

the insane, in the places where they were confined, as if they were, not members
of a single humanity, but rather the opposites of human beings, specifically as
certain kinds of animals, i.e., not domestic, but wild, animals. So too he shows
how movements advocating the more humane treatment of the insane in the
19th century were guided by a new and different mode of characterizing the
relationship between similarity and difference, a characterization in the linguistic
mode, or trope, of synecdoche, which stresses the continuity between things in
the manner of variation within a norm rather than as an opposition of norms.
In this context, the work of Freud, in his studies of children, female hysterics,
and social deviants in general, was guided by, indeed determined by, the appre-
hension of a new way of characterizing the similarities between the neurotic
and the supposedly well-adjusted individual, between the states of waking and
sleeping, between dream and reality, sanctioned more by linguistic usage than
by any empirical discoveries resulting from experimental observations of the
phenomena to be analyzed.
The study of such subjects as childrearing practices, treatment of the
medically or psychologically ill, criminals and the poor, of such ludic activities
as sport, games, holiday festivals, and entertainment-the subjects studied by
contemporary social historians and students of popular culture-cannot afford
to remain guided by interest in either their exotic nature on the one side or by
a mindless allegiance to some putative conception of the universality of taste
of the sorts that have guided such study heretofore. As Roland Barthes has
shown in his Mythologies and other works, such cultural phenomena as wrestling
matches, bicycle races, fashion, fan magazines, television shows, movies, auto-
mobile design, national dishes, such as beefsteak and french fries, hamburgers,
sauerkraut, and borscht, not to mention pizza, matsohs, spaghetti, and stuffed
grape leaves, are much more than cultural practices which happen to prevail
within different national and social groups; they are also complex sign-systems,
which serve to communicate among members of integrated social groups and
which require the same subtlety for their decoding that the analyst of elite cul-
ture brings to bear upon the explication of a poem by T. S. Eliot or Alexander
Pope, a novel by James Joyce, a play by Ibsen, or a philosophical tract by
Wittgenstein. These are not only practices but messages from one to another
sector of a communications system which is the group itself. These messages
are sent and received in a code which is as complex as the styles of literary or
plastic artists, and like such styles are not only carriers of information but also
determinants of the affective mood within which that information is to be
received and of responses in the form of actions which are to be undertaken up-
on their receipt.
Here the ideas of Roman Jakobson with respect to the nature of the
linguistic field will be helpful. It is a characteristic of poetic utterances, Jakob-
son observes, that they draw attention to themselves as messages. High styles
not only tell us something, but tell us how we should feel about or respond to
the information received. They differ from low or popular styles, he suggests,
by virtue of the fact that the latter do not draw attention to themselves as
messages; they appear simply to be practices. But if Levi-Strauss, Barthes,
774 JOURNAL O F POPULAR CULTURE

Foucault, and Emile Benveniste are right, then all cultural practices are similar
to poetic utterances, but with this difference: they do not draw attention to
themselves but rather obscure their natures as messages. The problem in their
study is to uncover the conative or optative dimensions of these messages pass-
ing as practices, which means uncovering the myths which sanction their prac-
tices as rituals.
Cultural rituals tell us not only what reality is but how we are to think
about and relate to this reality. Barthes shows us how the Frenchman’s devo-
tion to beefsteak and french fries as a kind of national meal suggests a presumed
relationship between the animal and vegetable kindoms; and the way they are
prepared and served suggests what the French believe to be the appropriate
relationship between both of these and between them and the human beings
who consume them according to specific rules of comportment. The beefsteak,
charred on the outside and bloody within, signals the same relationship between
the outside and the inside of culturally processed things (processed by cooking
in this instance) that is recapitulated in the french fried potato, between the
hard and the soft, and the necessary relationship of difference which unites
them in a single object. The meat of the steak, product of that species which
also yields a life-giving milk, is the favored form of nourishment, in a way that
milk itself is not, for Frenchmen, inasmuch as it provides man a direct access to
that blood which is even more basic to him than milk. The potato, product of
the soil, “born underground,” as the proverb prevalent in Latin countries has it,
and therefore suspect because of the obscurity of its origin, is ambivalently
regarded; it is recognized as a source of nourishment, but one requiring special
processing, going through many more stages of preparation than the steak, for
its proper consumption: I t must be peeled, cut into strips, soaked in water,
boiled or parboiled in water, then fried in oil, drained and fried once more. It
must thus pass through a number of transformative processes before it can be
purged of that “viscous” quality which its grotesque form in its natural state
signifies. All of this, Barthes maintains, provides us with clues to the French-
man’s way of mythically relating to the world of nature, to the codes which
structure his movement through that world, and his practices in relation to it.
As thus envisaged, such humble matter as the Frenchman’s national dish gives
insights into the sustaining myths of France’s national identity that are more
revealing than those that might come from an analysis of the literature produced
by Flaubert, Proust, or Mallarm:. Or rather, just as revealing, since it must be
presumed that the high art of a people and its daily cultural practices share the
same code, the same language, and the same manner of responding to messages
sent and received in that code.
What these examples attest to is the necessity of rethinking the way we
use the data of cultural history as evidence and the uses we might make of the
data of popular cultural history. I have suggested that Structuralism, in its
insistence on language as a model for cultural analysis provides one way of
reconceptualizing cultural history in general. More: I have suggested that it is
specifically the rhetorical dimensions of language, language in its conative and
optative, its active, aspect, that Structuralism has reminded us of. Again: 1 have
 STRUCTURALISM AND POPULAR CULTURE 775

suggested that the linguistic model provides us with a basis for dissolving the
distinction, hierarchical and essentialist in nature, between high culture on the
one side and low, folk, or popular culture on the other. This distinction, as
long as it exists as a value judgment rather than as a simple description of a dis-
tinction peculiar to literate cultures, or civilizations, precludes the possibility
of a genuine science of culture. Finally, I have suggested that a true science of
culture can, as the Structuralists maintain, be based only on a rigorous suppres-
sion of the myth of the historical continuity of civilizational experience. These
are extreme measures but, in my view, worth what they provide us in amplitude
of scope and insight into the nature of culture in general.

*The Center for Twentieth Century Studies, Division of Humanities and

Communication, College of Letters and Science of the University of Wisconsin-
Milwaukee, is hereby recognized for its substantial support of the Fourth Annual
Meeting of the Popular Culture Association by inviting Dr. Hayden White,
Director of the Center for Humanities, Wesleyan University and visitor to the
Center, to deliver the keynote address, which is published here; by supporting
the work of the cochairmen, Dr. Robert C. Galbreath, Post-doctoral fellow in
the Center, and Dr. Melvin J. Friedman, Professor of English and Comparative
Literature and member of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center; by
supplying funds for publicity, mailing and telephone; by organizing the panel
discussion entitled Culture and the Prophetic Imagination, which included the
distinguished professors Ihab Hassan, Leslie Fiedler, Hans Mayer, Hayden
White, all of whom were associated with the Center at that time; by sponsoring
the panel discussion organized by the Athletic Director, Thomas Rosandich of
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in conjunction with athletes of the
Milwaukee area; by securing the total use of the Downtown Conference Center
of the Extension Division of the University of Wisconsin; and by carrying the
costs of supply and operation of all audio and video equipment; by financially
supporting Dr. Donald Yates, recently a fellow in the Center, in the presenta-
tion of the film Picnic; by financially supporting Dr. David Buck, Assistant
Professor of History, in the presentation of the program The Chinese Art of
T’ai-chi ch’uun: A Demonstration of the Yang School Teachings and thus
assuring the active support of a substantial number of University of Wisconsin
faculty members who read papers; by gaining substantial news coverage under
byline in the MilwaukeeJoumuZ and the Milwaukee Sentinel;by having Mrs.
Dolores Wiskow of the Center prepare the final typed manuscript of Hayden
White’s address.
In addition an expression of gratitude is in order for Dean William F.
Holloran of the College of Letters and Science, who read the statement of Dr.
Werner A. Baum, Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and
introduced the keynote speaker.