#socia studies

[alex-and-rambling]

Summaries before and after I started studying. A lot of Politics, Sociology and Media & Communication on my mind right now.

[shrinkrants]

The cultural meaning of any particular act or object is determined by a whole system of constitutive rules: rules which do not regulate behaviour so much as create the possibility of particular forms of behaviour. The rules of English enable sequences of sound to have meaning; they make it possible to utter grammatical or ungrammatical sentences. And analogously, various social rules make it possible to marry, to score a goal, to write a poem, to be impolite. It is in this sense that a culture is composed of a set of symbolic systems. When one takes as object of study not physical phenomena, but artefacts or events with meaning, the defining qualities of the phenomena become the features which distinguish them one from another and enable them to bear meaning within the symbolic system from which they derive. The object is itself structured and is defined by its place in the structure of the system, whence the tendency to speak of ‘structuralism.’

Jonathan Culler, from Structuralist Poetics (via heteroglossia)