Culture is decipherable as structure with time arrested, like Saussure’s langue

Evidence

Structuralist linguistics (especially Saussure, but also Jakobson’s seminal work on the contrastive features of the phonetic system) was of critical value in helping Lé vi-Strauss to develop a method for “decoding” their production. … In these ways, what appeared as articulated through time (diachronic) could only be scientifically grasped and studied when it had been re-expressed as a “structure and its variations”—that is, with time arrested (synchronically). Saussure had argued that the body of real and potential utterances (paroles ) were not amenable to scientific study, precisely because they did not constitute a closed field. Only “the social part of language”—what Saussure called langue —could be the object of scientific linguistic study. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 360

Categorization

• XREF: The langue/parole and synchronic/diachronic distinction connects to structuralist economics and to Hall’s later encoding/decoding model of media.
• DEFINE: Clarifies the Saussurean distinction that underwrites structuralist method in cultural analysis.