Structuralism

Culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product of active human agents. By contrast, structuralism speaks of signifying practices that generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that lie outside of any given person. Structuralism searches for the constraining patterns of culture and social life which lie outside of any given person. Individual acts are explained as the product of social structures. As such, structuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of human agents from the heart of enquiry. Instead it favours a form of analysis in which phenomena have meaning only in relation to other phenomena within a systematic structure of which no particular person is the source. A structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with the 'systems of relations' of an underlying structure (usually language) and the grammar that makes meaning possible.

An Introduction to Cultural Studies, 3rd Ed, Chris Baker, SAGE Publications Ltd.,  Pg 15.

Notes from the Underground

I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment.  Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave.This is his normal condition. Of that I am firmly persuaded. He is made and constructed to that very end. And not only at the present time owing to some casual circumstances, but always, at all times, a decent man is bound to be a coward and a slave. It is the law of nature for all decent people all over the earth, If any one of them happens to be valiant about something, he need not be comforted nor carried away by that; he would cower just the same before something else. That is how it invariably and inevitably ends


Notes from the Underground, Part II, Chapter 1.  Dostoevsky.