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Speaking Subjects. Towards A Rapprochement Between Phenomenology and Structural Linguistics
Speaking Subjects. Towards A Rapprochement Between Phenomenology and Structural Linguistics
Towards a
rapprochement between phenomenology
and structural linguistics*
Beata Stawarska
Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon**
stawarsk@uoregon.edu
1.
It has become a truism deemed too obvious for mention that
Saussurean structuralism lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from
the tradition of phenomenology. Isn’t Ferdinand de Saussure the
official founder of the structuralist movement in linguistics,
subsequently extended to the human sciences and philosophy?
Doesn’t Saussure’s method consist in studying language as a
structured system of signs? Shouldn’t the subject which had been
previously assumed to be the single source of the signifying process be
sacrificed on a semiological altar once it is conceded that expression in
the present is determined by the received and sedimented linguistic
laws? Saussure’s general linguistics is usually heralded for having
made this sacrifice indispensible, and for having thus initiated a
methodological turn away from speaking subjectivity towards an
emphasis on structured semiological systems. A representative sample
of this established, polarized, view can be found in Sturrock’s
Structuralism, where he writes:
4 Cf. KRISTEVA 2006. I develop the interrelation between Kristeva’s and Saussure’s views of
signification and poeisis in more detail in ‘Language as poeisis. Linguistic productivity
and forms of resistance in Kristeva and Saussure’ (in press).
5 Cf. KRISTEVA 1984.
6 Cf. STURROCK 2008, cited above.
2.
It is still little known, in the philosophical circles at least, that scholarly
research on Saussure’s linguistics of the last five decades has radically
shifted the ways in which his intellectual heritage is interpreted. In
response to the documented discrepancies between the edited version
3.
The received structuralist view of Saussure’s general linguistics
foregrounds the signifier/signified distinction as the single most
important contribution made by the Course. The terminological
complex sign, signifier, and signified has been described as «perhaps
Saussure’s most influential gift to Structuralism»; 9 this distinction –
«once it has been successfully understood» – would provide an
unrivalled tool to the many discipline practicing textual analysis. 10 The
proper understanding goes something like this: by tying the graphic
and/or acoustic sign to the signified idea in a manner that is arbitrary
or unmotivated by reality, the signifier/signified distinction
establishes the autonomy of language with respect to reality. 11 The
autonomy of language with regard to reality is established by the
sign’s gathering of signification via the mainly contrastive relations of
difference from other signs embedded within the structured system.
Arbitrariness of the sign is therefore typically received as evidence of
the structuralist view that language is a closed and autonomous
system of internal relations. In Harris’ words: «The essential feature of
Saussure's linguistic sign is that, being intrinsically arbitrary, it can be
identified only by contrast with coexisting signs of the same nature,
which together constitute a structured system. By taking this position,
Saussure placed modern linguistics in the vanguard of twentieth-
century structuralism» .12
The according to which signification emerges solely within the
structured system leads to a hierarchy of the signifier (signifiant) over
the signified (signifié), since signification seems no more than a result
9 STURROCK 2003, 35.
10 STURROCK 2003, 35.
11 STURROCK 2003, 36.
12 Translator’s Introduction in SAUSSURE 1986, X.
4.
According to the materials from Saussure’s Nachlass (student lecture
notes, esp. those by Constantin (the most complete source), and
autographed sources), linguistic arbitrariness is not tied to the
5.
Turning now to the student lecture notes from Saussure’s course in
general linguistics, it turns out that a purely systemic understanding of
language is limited and ultimately highly abstract. The latter construes
the language system (la langue) as an object dissociated from speech
(parole). Such a partial focus is problematic because «that would only
be language (la langue) apart from its social reality, and unreal (since
comprising only one part of its reality). In order for there to be a
language, there must be a body of speakers using the language. The
language [...] is located in the collective soul right from the start». 27
This social fact is part of the definition of la langue;28 in fact, this weight
of the community would give language a center of gravity. 29 Saussure
re-affirms this point in the autographed notes for the course: language
(langue) divorced from social reality (réalité sociale) becomes unreal
(irréelle); importantly, a speaking collectivity (masse parlante) is part of
the «very definition» of language itself.30
Language emerges therefore as a dual entity comprising the object-
side: a systemic organization of signs, and the subject-side: a
community of speakers with its stable and yet evolving conventions of
usage. Yet even though the socius is the implied necessary subject, it is
not to be thought of as an inventor or creator but rather a recipient of
27 SAUSSURE 1993, 101.
28 SAUSSURE 1993, 101.
29 SAUSSURE 1993, 97.
30 SAUSSURE 2006, [334] 238.
language «is made for collectivity, not for an individual, like a vessel is
made for the sea».44 Saussure emphasizes that
Hence «only the ship at sea may yield information about the nature of
a ship, and, moreover, it alone is a ship, an object available for study as
a ship».49
A rationalist and individualist approach to language would then be
not unlike that of an engineer who designed the internal structure of
the ship but did not put it to use at the large sea, and so did not really
know the ship in its appropriate context where it is subject to the
many influences of the maritime environment. Saussure thus moves
deliberately away from a Kantian understanding of language in terms
of a priori categories and relations housed within an individual mind;
a Kantian approach to language would be comparable to one which
derives the trajectory of the vessel solely from its form, oblivious to the
many unforeseeable movements of the sea which effectively guide the
vessel on its journey. Forgetting the maritime environment in the case
of a ship at sea is thus as shortsighted as forgetting the social environ-
ment in which language runs its course; attempting to thematize lan-
guage via the categories of individual reason is akin to an engineer’s
attempts to narrate fantastic stories featuring sea monsters and pirate
attacks from the deck of a ship which had never left dry land.
If we accept the structuralist opposition between la langue and la
parole, we are likely to view the relation between the social and the
individual dimensions of language as being similarly oppositional (la
langue would be made up of social conventions, la parole of individual
acts of speaking). We would then need to assume that the speaking
individual is to be evacuated from a structured language system in
Saussure’s linguistics. The source materials offer however a more
complex narrative; la langue is defined as a social product, 50 tied to the
many conventions and customs relative to usage; furthermore, the
notion of la langue gets fleshed out in the context of speech (la parole),
which itself is undecided between an individual act and a social act
since it is inter-individual, and composed of a minimum of two
participants («as far as language is concerned, the individual act
The individual and the social, the spoken and the structured
dimensions of language intersect therefore in a chiasm-like relation,
and are not radically opposed.
The socius is historicized; it is the necessary subject of language so
long as it is figured as recipient of signifying conventions from the
past generations, who similarly received and transmitted an
inheritance via a trans-generational chain without a determinable
beginning. Language is therefore not purely linguistic – it is enabled
and reinforced by social conventions of use which have been
transmitted from mouth to ear and from one generation of speakers to
another. Language is an ongoing contract within a speech community
which endures and is relatively resistant to change; even if this relative
stability cannot be explained naturalistically, it supposes an inertial
effect of shared investment in a tradition that arbitrary system of signs
considered on its own cannot account for. This receptive stance and
acknowledged passivity of the language user before the sign removes
any remnants of voluntarism from language, considering that
historically sedimented social practice largely constrains individual
free choice in language use:
origin of language does not have the importance one usually attributes
to it, in fact, it does not pose itself since the moment of genesis cannot
be seized or seen.60 The notion of social contract is better thought of as
a permanent condition of language rather than an originary event;
taken in this manner, the term highlights the collective dimension of
language, an ongoing contractual relation between language users,
which could be understood as a basic investment and trust in the
signifying potential of language for oneself and one’s community. The
philosophical idea of contract suggests a voluntary decision, but
neither individuals nor social groups can change language at will. 61
The contractual dimension of language does not therefore issue from a
voluntary agreement enacted at a zero point in time; it is traceable
neither to a temporal nor to an agentive source point. To be sure, an
invention of a full blown language system like Esperanto would have
«an assembly of logicians and grammarians» as its necessary subject 62
but a successful artificial language still depends on the social
sanctioning by the language community across generations to exist.
As a collectively sanctioned medium, language is therefore amenable
to social analysis and social critique; it figures as a vehicle of
traditional values which can be both empowering and oppressive for
the individual.63 While Saussure does not develop an approach geared
specifically at such analysis and critique, his notion that linguistic
signification and value bear the stamp of collective approval exposes
their contingency and opens up possibility of creating a non-
traditional set of linguistic and social values. Differently put, as a
socially constituted medium, language is open both to the possibility
of transmission and revision through the evolving practices of usage
(see concluding remarks for practical considerations). It follows that an
exclusively systemic focus on the signifier/signified distinction within
the structuralist tradition leads to a disregard of the concrete, social
and historical reality of language. The structuralist view contains and
60 SAUSSURE 1957, 22.
61 SAUSSURE 1957, 17.
62 SAUSSURE 1993, 96.
63 See also THIBAULT 1997, 216.
6. Concluding remarks
Consider how the basic bond between language and the social reality
of its users can be made more concrete by strategies of resistance to
socially harmful language, like racial slur and sexist speech. There is a
debate in contemporary scholarship about what constitutes a most apt
strategy of responding to words that hurt: regulation, including
government censorship of derogatory expressions, or reclamation
wherein the expression gets re-signified within alternative practices of
usage, and loses some of its historically accumulated potential to
induce harm. The first approach could be deemed a top-down, since
the state is called upon to intervene between the citizens and is
charged with the power to prohibit linguistic expression and punish
their users. The second is a bottom-up approach, since social groups
themselves are empowered to negotiate what words signify and what
effects they produce; in a felicitous case of reclamation like that of
queer, an expression that previously carried the force of exclusion and
contempt shifts to a celebratory term of self-affirmation within the
LGBTQ group.65
is tied to the basic view that language is performative, a way of doing (and redoing, and
undoing…) things with words.
References
BOUQUET, S. 1998. «Les Deux Paradigmes éditoriaux de la linguistique
générale de Ferdinand de Saussure». Cahiers Ferdinand de
Saussure 51, 187–202.
BUTLER, J. 1997. Excitable Speech. A Politics of the Performative. New
York: Routledge.
— 1999. «Performativity’s Social Magic». In Shusterman, R. (ed.).
Bourdieu: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 113-128.