The critique of cultural productions and institutions based on an analysis of their
underlying forms or structures is not a uniquely modern idea: It can be traced all
the way back to Plato. However, Plato viewed forms or structures as independent
of the cultural phenomena that they were employed to analyze, as preexisting any
concrete exemplar, and as unchanging or invariant over any process of historical
change. After the intrinsically historical nature of cultural discourse and critique
came to be accepted during the nineteenth century, however, the operative notion
of form or structure was transformed as well. No longer viewed as autonomous
metaphysical entities occupying a separate realm (the Platonic world of forms or
ideas), the basic structures underlying culture and its expressions came to be seen
as firmly rooted in history yet sufficiently detachable from their concrete in-
stances to permit powerful new forms of explanation, interpretation, comparison,
and critique to be developed through their systematic analysis.

This transformation of the notion of form or structure resulted in a new, dis-
tinctly modern type of critical discourse that took as its basic question not what
meaning a cultural institution or product might have (as did the hermeneutic tra-
dition), but how any cultural phenomenon produces the meanings attributed to
it. Clearly, the question of meaning stands at the heart of any formal or structural
approach, bringing it closer in its basic aims and orientation to the earlier
hermeneutic and psychoanalytic approaches and distancing it somewhat from
those of the materialists and the Frankfurt School. However, in its own basic as-
sumptions and methods, structural analysis represents a novel point of departure
for critical discourse and constitutes a distinctive and continuous strand of cul-
tural critique during the twentieth century.

Before we explore these basic assumptions further, a brief comment about the
variety of methodological approaches discussed in this chapter may be helpful.
For purposes of the present discussion, we will distinguish between the formalist,
structuralist (in the more specific sense specified below), and semiotic strands of
a broader discourse that we will refer to as Structuralism. (In this chapter, I have

-155-