Wither Structuralism?

Structuralism is a theoretical project that analyzes, not hidden meanings, but the systematic rules which govern the social formation & are encoded into social artifacts. As a structuralist, for example, Roland Barthes analyzed a wide variety of texts in Mythologies: the world of wrestling, the face of Garbo, neither-nor criticism, and so forth. [I have tried to emulate Barthes in the previous entry.] As Barthes explains, "[m]ythical speech is made of a material which has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication....myth in fact belongs to the province of general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology." Semiology: the science of signs.

To be more specific myth refers to an unacknowledged series of concepts through which a culture comes to understand itself. It helps naturalize all aspects of culture: political, economic, social, etc.

However, have structuralism and semiotics/myth as concepts been written out of critical theory? In New Keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society structuralism, semiotics and myth don't appear.

Has the power of structuralism as a theoretical perspective withered, or have intellectuals in their desire to be up-to-date, dug it up only to discard it in favor of post-structuralism and/or postmodernism? I think the answer to this question is "yes," and I would argue that it's a loss for understanding the relationships between the exercise of power and the dominant ideology of a given social formation.

For a bibliographic essay on structuralism with many links to relevant online sources click here. And for another great web resource see this semiotics site which I found cited on Sobhan Rezaee's Culture and Communication blog.

Where in the whirl is Matt Lauer

Mythologies: I offer this brief essay as a Barthian mythology which will be followed in my next entry by a discussion of Roland Barthes' version of semiotics. Since I've never attempted this form, please accept it for what it is, an emulation of one who has greatly influenced my own research.


Matt Lauer, co-host of the Today Show, NBC-TVs AM news & entertainment show which boasts the highest ratings in its time slot, encapsulates the Ideal Male 21st century. Boy next door who made good as measured by impeccable clothing sense, beautiful former-model wife, a serious news reader and a playful soul whose Where in the World is Matt Lauer enlarges him to the status of World Citizen.

As he travels the beauty spots of the world, his back drop is his applauding fans. As metro-sexual New Yorker he's thin & neat but married so clearly, publically hetero-sexual.

He has no sharp edges, no angst and has perfected the news-readers quality of moving from human tragedy to slightly irreverent human interest seamlessly. He offers no opinions.

Unlike Hollywood celebrities, Matt Lauer invites us to share his celebrity status, reassures us when times are bad, and kids around every day whatever else happens.

Continuity, reassurance, success, desirable man, he's both a large public figure and the same as us: Matt Lauer is the fashion statement of American society. He is a norm by which we can measure ourselves and a non-judgemental friend.

Where in the whirl of American life is Matt Lauer? He exists at the circumference binding together a social formation the likes of which is as intensely personal as it is expansively global.

Content Analysis/Textual Analysis

Content analysis, rather obviously, examines the content of something: newspaper article, newspaper as a whole, advertising images, and so forth. Until recently, content analysis involved counting certain aspects that met specific criteria: news stories that referred to Native Americans as Indians.

More recently something called textual or discourse analysis has emerged, the principal adherent and promoter of which is T. A. van Dijk. In numerous articles & books van Dijk has encouraged what he calls discourse analysis as a kind of literary analysis of the words on the page (visuals, etc). As such it enriches traditional content analysis but falls within the same paradigm of knowledge, with all its strengths and shortcomings.

A word[s] about paradigms of knowledge.

American social science traditionally falls into the pluralist society/dominant paradigm. In which, the real world is known and measured through sense perceptions, power is understood as diffused among different groups with competing interests. These perceptions, distorted they may be, ultimately reflect reality. Ideology is understood without its capital letter, as a political spectrum, a series of individual beliefs.

A critical cultural paradigm views ideology as reproductive practices, not only a belief but a tool. Reality cannot be known directly, but rather it is the effects of reality that can be measured. Power is viewed as hegemonic, a powerful few shaping reality. The nature of the social formation is one of monopoly of power the the consent of the many.

Working within a critical cultural paradigm changes the the definition of text and the focus of analysis. A critical textual analysis is not concerned with content per se but with the evidence a text provides of social practices. The text, which is an abstraction, is defined by the researcher, studied less for its social effets and more for "the subjective or cultural forms that it realizes and makes available." [Johnson] The analysis provides documentation not of "underlying" or "latent" meanings, but of regimes of meaning[s] that construct the texts surface. [Rose] Thee regimes privilege certain ways of knowing while they marginalize others.

See these references: Richard Johnson, "What is cultural studies , anyway? Social Text 16:38-80 and Rose, Gillian. Visual methodologies. 2001 New York: Vintage.

For an application of critical textual analysis see my paper:
"Chimera Veil of 'Iranian Woman' and Process of U.S. Textual Commodification: how U.S. print media represent Iran," Journal of Communication Inquiry 28:1, 9-28, 2004.

What is a Text? More to come. Paradigms of knowledge? More to come. Please feel free to offer your opinions to those expressed here. And please do return to my blog.

Forthcoming, Qualitative Inquiry

“Peering Through the Crack & Good-Bye to All That:30 years of TV, Telephones,Sports, Drugs, Etc.”

Social relationships are enacted and remembered through interpersonal relationships and replayed through the media as the author uses a defining personal experience, that of her son’s drug addiction, to rethink, analyze, and resituate

herself in the world. The result draws attention to the messy juxtaposition of social structures and policies with personal loss, grief, anger, and episodes of joy and courage. Crack, whether drug, fissure, gibe, highlights remembered fragments which allow the author to tell her stories in ways other than those originally considered. As those personal stories are interwoven with public moments such as school desegregation and changes in telecommunications and popular culture, a social commentary is offered that defamiliarizes the familiar, evokes rather than represents, and therefore offers the reader entry into the narrative, the cultural critique.