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Saussure and the Grounds of Interpretation
David Herman
North Carolina State University
dherman@unity.ncsu.edu
Š 2002 David Herman.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Roy Harris, Saussure and His Interpreters. New York: New York UP,
2001.
1. The author of a 1983 English translation of Ferdinand de Saussure's
Cours de linguistique générale, as well as two previous books
centering on Saussure's theories of language (Reading Saussure and
Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein), Roy Harris brings a wealth of
expertise to his new book on Saussure. More than this, as is amply
borne out in the early chapters of Saussure and His Interpreters,
Harris is deeply familiar with the various manuscript sources (i.e.,
students' notebooks) on which Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye
relied in producing/editing what became the Course in General
Linguistics, the first edition of which was published in 1916. [1]
Added to these other qualifications is Harris's stature as an expert
in the field of linguistic theory more generally. [2] From all of
these achievements emerges the profile of a commentator uniquely
positioned to interpret--to understand as well as adjudicate
between--previous interpretations of Saussure.
2. To be sure, Harris's background and research accomplishments--his
knowledge of the origins, details, and larger framework of Saussurean
language theory--are unimpeachable. [3] But while Harris's credentials
are unimpeachable, there remains the question of whether those
credentials have equipped him to take the true measure of Saussure's
interpreters, i.e., those who claim (or for that matter disavow) a
Saussurean basis for their work. This question, prompted by the tone
as well as the technique of a book cast as an exposé of nearly a
century's worth of "misreadings" of Saussure, is itself part of a
broader issue exceeding the scope of the author's study. The broader
issue concerns the exact nature of the relation between ideas
developed by specialists in particular fields of study and the form
assumed by those ideas as interpreted (and eo ipso adapted) by
non-specialists working in other, more or less proximate fields. Also
at issue are the nature and source of the standards that could (in
principle) be used to adjudicate between better and worse
interpretations of source ideas imported into diverse target
disciplines--that is, into domains of study in which, internally
speaking, distinct methods and objects of interpretation already hold
sway. Indeed, even within the same discipline in which the ideas in
question had their source, interpretations can vary widely--as
suggested by Harris's chapters on linguists who in his view
misunderstand or misappropriate Saussure (the list includes such major
figures as Leonard Bloomfield, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, and
Noam Chomsky). Although these deep issues sometimes surface during
Harris's exposition, they do not receive the more sustained treatment
they deserve. The result is a study marked, on the one hand, by its
technical brilliance in outlining the Rezeptiongeschichte of
Saussurean theory, but on the other hand by its avoidance of other,
foundational questions pertaining to the possibilities and limits of
interpretation itself. The salience of those questions derives, in
part, from the transdisciplinary legacy of Saussure's own work.
3. It is worth underscoring at the outset that Harris's account of
Saussure and his interpreters is not merely a descriptive one.
Granted, the author carefully traces the transformation and
recontextualization of Saussurean ideas as they were propagated within
the field of linguistics and later (or in some cases simultaneously)
migrated from linguistics into neighboring areas of inquiry. [4] But
Harris does not rest content with pointing out where an intra- or
interdisciplinary adaptation differs from what (in his interpretation)
is being adapted. Persistently, in every chapter of the book, and
sometimes in quite vituperative terms, Harris construes this adaptive
process as one involving distortion, i.e., a failure to get Saussure
right. [5] I discuss Harris's specific claims in more detail below.
For the moment, I wish to stress how this prescriptive, evaluative
dimension of the author's approach is at odds with what he emphasizes
at the beginning of his study--namely, the status of Saussure's text
as itself a construct, a constellation of interpretive decisions made
by those who sought to record and, in the case of his editors,
promulgate Saussure's ideas.
4. Indeed, Harris's meticulous analysis of the textual history of the
Course invites one further turn of the Saussurean screw: if the very
text on which all subsequent interpretations have been built is itself
the product of students' and editors' interpretations, then who,
precisely, is in a position to interpret Saussure's interpreters? Or
rather, where is the ground on which one might stand to distinguish
between the wheat of productive adaptations and the chaff of non- or
counter-productive misappropriations, whether these borrowings are
made within or across the boundaries of linguistic study? [6] In this
connection, there is a sense in which Harris seeks to have his cake
and eat it, too. The author advances the claim that, in the case of
Saussure's text, interpretation goes all the way down, meaning that no
feature of the Course is not already an interpretation by Saussure's
contemporaries. But he also advances the claim that at some point (is
it to be stipulated by all concerned parties?) interpretation stops
and the ground or bedrock of textual evidence begins (2), such that
those of Saussure's successors who engaged in particular strategies or
styles of interpretation can be deemed guilty of error, of violating
the spirit (if not the letter) of Saussure's work.
5. As demonstrated by the early chapters of Saussure and His
Interpreters, no writer is more aware than Harris that the book often
viewed as the foundational document of (European) structuralism was in
fact a composite creation, a portmanteau assemblage of
more-or-less-worked-out hypotheses by Saussure himself, re-calibrated
for the purposes of undergraduate instruction; notes taken by students
not always consistent in their reports of what Saussure actually said
in class; conjectures, surmises, extrapolations, and outright
interpolations by the editors of the Course; and, later,
interpretations of Saussure by linguists, anthropologists,
semioticians, and others--interpretations because of which later
generations of readers came to "find" things in Saussure's text that
would not necessarily have been discoverable when the book first
appeared. As Harris puts it in chapter 1, "Interpreting the
Interpreters," "the majority of Saussure's most original contributions
to linguistic thought have passed through one or more filters of
interpretation" (2). As Harris's discussion proceeds, the emphasis on
Saussure's ideas as inevitably interpretively filtered gives way to a
series of attempts to dissociate Saussure's theories from a group of
filters that seem to be qualitatively different from those falling
into the initial group (i.e., students and editors). Harris
distinguishes between the two sets of filters by dividing them into
contemporaries and successors (3-4), although by Harris's own account
neither group can be exempted from the process by which Saussure's
ideas were actively constructed rather than passively and neutrally
conveyed. Given that (as Harris discusses in chapter 3) Saussure's
editors took the liberty of writing portions of the Course without any
supporting documents, it is not altogether clear why the parameters of
distance in time and intellectual inheritance (4) are sufficient to
capture what distinguishes a successor's from a contemporary's
interpretations. An editorial interpolation is arguably just as
radically interpretive as any post-Saussurean commentator's
extrapolation. In any case, in interpreting Saussure, neither
contemporaries nor successors have stood on firm ground, whatever
their degree of separation in time and tradition from the
flesh-and-blood "author" of the Course.[7]
6. Indeed, Harris's concern early on is with the difficulty or rather
impossibility of getting back to the solid ground of Saussure's
"true"--unfiltered--ideas. In chapter 2, "The Students' Saussure," the
author remarks that two separate questions must be addressed in
considering the students' notebooks as evidence concerning Saussure's
ideas: on the one hand, whether the students understood their
teacher's points; on the other hand, whether what Saussure said in
class always reliably indicated his considered position on a given
topic (17). With respect to the latter question, Saussure may have
sometimes been unclear, and he also may have sometimes oversimplified
his views for pedagogical reasons. The challenge of reconstructing the
Saussurean framework on the basis of student notes is therefore
considerable. Moreover, Saussure's decisions about what to include in
his lectures were in some cases dictated by the established curriculum
of his time, rather than by priorities specific to his approach to
language and linguistic study. Assuming as much, Saussure's editors
expunged from the published version of the Course the survey of
Indo-European languages that he presented in his actual lectures
(18-23), to mention just one example.
7. As for the editors themselves, Harris discusses their role in chapter
3. The author notes that, in statements about the Course written after
the publication of the first edition, Bally and Sechehaye came to
quote their own words as if they were Saussure's (32). The publication
of Robert Godel's Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique
générale de F. de Saussure in 1957, however, revealed that many of the
editors' formulations lacked any manuscript authority whatsoever. They
were imputations by Bally and Sechehaye rather than, in any nontrivial
sense, reconstructions of the student notebooks. Also, in selecting
which Saussurean materials to include in the Course and in making
decisions about which ideas should be given pride of place in the
exposition, the editors were inevitably biased by their own linguistic
training and theories. The editors' biases came into play in their
choices about how to present such key distinctions as those between
signification and value, synchrony and diachrony, and "la langue" and
"la parole."
8. In chapters 4-10, Harris's focus shifts from contemporaries to
successors, with chapter 11 attempting to take stock of "History's
Saussure." As the first group of interpretive filters, Saussure's
contemporaries already impose a layer of mediation between the
linguist's theories and modern-day readers' efforts to know what those
theories were. But the second group of filters imposes what often
comes across as an even thicker--and somehow more reprehensible--layer
of intervening (mis)interpretations on top of the layer already there
because of the contemporaries' (mis)interpretations. Thus, the
chapters in question portray a process by which a series of filters
get stacked one by one on top of Saussure's already-filtered ideas,
according to the following recursive procedure:
Filter 1 (Saussure's ideas filtered through students and editors)
Filter 2 (Filter 1(Saussure's ideas filtered through students and
editors))
Filter 3 (Filter 2(Filter1(Saussure's ideas filtered through
students and editors)))
etc.
As each successive filter gets pushed onto the stack, Saussure's ideas
(at least as they were interpreted by his contemporaries rather than
his successors) recede farther in historical memory. Even worse, the
filters continually being loaded on the stack are the handiwork of
commentators guilty of carelessness (Chomsky), incomprehension
(Bloomfield, Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss), confusion (Roland
Barthes), or even meretricious slander (Jacques Derrida), as the case
may be.
9. Again, though, this compilation of misreadings seems strangely at odds
with Harris's earlier emphasis on the instability of the Course as
itself an assemblage (one might even say stack) of more or less
plausible interpretations. Does Harris mean to imply that, in shifting
from contemporaries to successors, the interpretations of the former
become "evidence" on which the latter must base their own, later
interpretations? If so, by what mechanism (and at what point on the
continuum linking contemporaries and successors) does an
interpretation or set of interpretations achieve evidential status?
Though centrally important to Harris's study, these questions about
validity in interpretation are never explicitly posed (let alone
addressed) by the author.
10. To take the linguists first, Harris identifies a host of
misinterpretations of Saussure on the part of scholars who, as
specialists in Saussure's field of study, apparently should have known
better. None of the linguists included in the author's scathing series
of exposés emerges in very good shape. In "Bloomfield's Saussure,"
Harris suggests that the famous American linguist misunderstood the
distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, the
Saussurean conception of the sign, and, more generally, the
relationship between Saussure's theoretical position and his own.
"Hjelmslev's Saussure" characterizes the Danish linguist's theory of
glossematics as one that claims to be the logical distillation of
Saussurean structuralism but ends up looking more like a "reductio ad
absurdum" of Saussure's ideas: "Glossematics shows us what happens in
linguistics when the concept of la langue is idealized to the point
where it is assumed to exist independently of any specific
materialization whatever" (90), and thus stripped of the social
aspects with which Saussure himself invested the concept (93). [8] In
"Jakobson's Saussure," Harris notes that whereas Jakobson presented
himself as a Saussurean, the Russian linguist rejected a number of
Saussure's key tenets, including the crucial principles of linearity
and arbitrariness (96-101). More than this, Harris rather uncharitably
discerns a careerist motive for the fluctuations in Jakobson's
estimates of Saussure's importance over the course of his (Jakobson's)
career. Harris's argument is that while Jakobson was still in Europe,
he felt obliged to pay tribute to Saussure; but when Jakobson
emigrated to the U.S. and tried to establish himself as a linguist
during a time when anti-mentalist, behaviorist doctrines were the
rule, he shifted to an attack mode.
11. Even harsher than his comments on Jakobson, however, are the remarks
found in Harris's chapter on "Chomsky's Saussure." In the author's
view, "far from seeing himself as a Saussurean, from the outset
Chomsky was more concerned to see Saussure as a possible Chomskyan"
(153). But though Chomsky tried to map the distinction between "la
langue" and "la parole" into his own contrast between competence and
performance, and also to conscript Saussure's mentalist approach into
his campaign against then-dominant behaviorism,
Saussure's apparent indifference to recursivity showed that being
a "mentalist" did not automatically make one a generativist,
while at the same time Saussure's view of parole raised the whole
question of how much could safely be assigned to the rule-system
alone and how much to the individual. Thus Saussure's patronage
brought along with it certain problems for Chomsky. (155)
In criticizing Chomsky's attempts to extricate himself from these
problems, Harris seems to abandon constructive debate in favor of
sniping: "Chomsky's much-lauded 'insight' concerning the non-finite
nature of syntax turns out to coincide--unsurprisingly--with his poor
eyesight in reading Saussure" (166). This barb reveals a degree of
animus not wholly explained by even the worst interpretive slip-up
vis-ŕ-vis Saussure. Why is it that Bloomfield's incomprehension of
Saussurean ideas merits a far less severe reprimand than what appears
to be a careless misappropriation of Saussure on Chomsky's part?
Again, the criterion for determining degrees of fit between
interpretations and Saussure's theories--the ground from which better
and worse interpretations might be held side-by-side and
adjudicated--is never explicitly identified in Harris's study. Hence
it remains unclear why Chomsky should be subjected to much rougher
treatment than Bloomfield, since both theorists are (according to the
author) guilty of misjudging the relation between Saussure's ideas and
their own. [9]
12. The chapters devoted to nonspecialist interpreters of the
Course--i.e., scholars working outside the field of linguistics--raise
other questions pertaining to Saussure and the grounds of
interpretation. At issue is whether a commentator based in the host
discipline from which a descriptive nomenclature, set of concepts, or
method of analysis originates has the license or even the intellectual
obligation to point out where others not based in that discipline have
gone wrong in adapting the nomenclature, concepts, or methods under
dispute. At issue, too, is just what "going wrong" might mean in the
context of such inter-disciplinary adaptations. I submit that such
considerations, barely or not at all broached in Harris's account, in
fact need to be at the center of any account of Saussure and his
interpreters.
13. Chapter 7 is devoted to "Lévi-Strauss's Saussure"; chapter 8 and
chapter 10 concern "Barthes's Saussure" and "Derrida's Saussure,"
respectively. Already in 1945 Lévi-Strauss had begun to characterize
linguistics as the "pilot-science" on which the fledgling science of
anthropology should model itself, but it was not until 1949, in
Lévi-Strauss's article on "Histoire et ethnologie," that Saussure's
Course was celebrated as marking the advent of structural linguistics
(112). As Harris points out, however, although both Lévi-Strauss and
Lacan regarded the development of the concept of the phoneme as the
crucial breakthrough made by modern linguistics, Saussure cannot be
given credit for this idea (117). Lévi-Strauss for one placed great
emphasis on the phoneme as a kind of paradigm concept, famously
adapting it to create the notion of the "mytheme" (or smallest
meaningful unit of the discourse of a myth) (Lévi-Strauss,
"Structural"). The problems with this particular recontextualization
have been well documented (see Pavel); Harris subsumes those problems
under a more general "anthropological misappropriation of the
vocabulary of structuralism" (126). Lévi-Strauss's misappropriation
encompasses not only the idea of phonemes but also Saussure's
opposition between synchronic and diachronic and the very notion of
system or structure. Thus, "although [Lévi-Strauss] constantly appeals
to the Saussurean opposition between synchronic and diachronic, he is
manifestly reluctant to accept Saussure's version of that crucial
distinction" (126). More broadly, whereas "both [Saussure and
Lévi-Strauss] use terms such as langage, société, and communication,
their basic assumptions with respect to language, society and
communication differ widely. For Saussure, it seems fair to say,
Lévi-Strauss would be a theorist who not only shirks the definition of
crucial terms but constantly speaks and argues in metaphors in order
to evade it" (130-31).
14. In conformity with the stacking procedure described in paragraph 8
above, the sometimes "wooly thinking" of which Harris accuses
Lévi-Strauss (131) becomes a deep, abiding, and unredeemable confusion
by the time Barthes embarks on his own neo-Saussurean program for
research. (Sure enough, although Lévi-Strauss's misinterpretations
looked bad in chapter 7, in chapter 8 [140, 142] they come across as
less pernicious than Barthes's.) Commenting on Barthes's proposal for
a translinguistics, which actually assumed several forms over the
years (135) and which Barthes seems to have based on Hjelmslev's
suggestion that a "broad" conception of linguistics would accommodate
all semiotic systems with a structure comparable to natural languages
(134), Harris notes that for the French semiotician Saussurean
linguistics stood "at the centre of a whole range of interdisciplinary
enterprises in virtue of providing a basic theory of the sign and
signification" (134). Yet because Barthes (b. 1915) probably did not
read Saussure until 1956, his interpretation of the Saussurean
framework "was an interpretation already shaped from the beginning by
the glosses provided by such linguists as Jakobson, Benveniste and
Martinet and, outside linguistics, by Lévi-Strauss and Lacan" (136).
The implication here is that Barthes's subsequent willingness to
"tinker" with the structuralist model (e.g., in the "simplified
version" of the Saussurean framework offered in Éléments de sémiologie
[1964]) resulted from Barthes's relatively high position on the stack
of interpretive filters and his proportional distance from the
historical Saussure. More than this, Harris suggests that Barthes
adopted the label of "trans-linguistique" for self-serving reasons: to
block criticism from bonafide linguists, and to present Barthes's
approach as being in advance of contemporary linguistics (146). But
from Harris's perspective, in a work such as Éléments Barthes only
succeeds in "demonstrat[ing] his own failure to realize that the
'basic concepts' he ends up expounding are, at best, lowest common
denominators drawn from quite diverse linguistic enterprises, and at
worst incoherent muddles" (148).
15. Harris's greatest scorn, however, is reserved for Derrida, whose
position among the non-linguist interpreters is parallel with (or even
worse than) that of Chomsky among the linguists. Focusing on De la
grammatologie and beginning with Derrida's efforts to link Saussure's
with Aristotle's conception of the sign, Harris affiliates Derrida's
expositional technique with what as known is the "smear" in political
journalism:
Rather than actually demonstrate a connexion between person A and
person B, the journalist implies connexion by means of lexical
association. This technique is all the more effective when the
lexical association can be based on terms that either A or B
actually uses. This dispenses with any need to argue a case; or,
if any case is argued, its conclusion is already tacitly
anticipated in the terms used to present it. (173)
But the dominant metaphor deployed by Harris in this chapter is that
of Derrida as unscrupulous prosecutor and Saussure as hapless
plaintiff, whose words and ideas are taken out of context and used
against him, but for whom it is physically impossible to mount a
proper defense.
16. After critiquing Saussure indirectly on the basis of his philosophical
and other "associates," Derrida, says Harris, finally puts "the
accused himself...in the witness box," with "some twenty pages of
Heidegger-and-Hegel" intervening between the insinuations concerning
Saussure's Aristotelianism and Derrida's direct examination of the
linguist himself (176). It is not just that Derrida gratuitously
blames Saussure for the concentration on phonology found in the work
of his successors (177). Further, when faced with statements from the
Course suggesting that sound plays no intrinsic role in "la langue,"
"Derrida attempts to present them as symptomatic of a conceptual
muddle" (178). What are we to make of the alleged contradictions, the
supposed "web of incoherence," that Derrida purports to discover in
Saussure's text?
As regards the web, it unravels as soon as one begins to examine
how Derrida has woven it. The [Course], as commentators have
pointed out, proceeds--in the manner one might expect from an
undergraduate course--from fairly broad general statements at the
beginning to progressively more sophisticated formulations. In
the course of this development, the terminology changes.
Qualifications to earlier statements are added. By ignoring this
well-crafted progression, Derrida finds it relatively easy to
pick out and juxtapose observations that at first sight jar with
one another. (179)
Much of the remainder of this chapter (183-87) is devoted to an
account of how Derrida quotes "selected snippets" of Saussure's book
out of context, in order "to make Saussure appear to say in the
witness box exactly what Derrida wanted him to say" (183). When, four
years later, Derrida denied that he had ever accused Saussure's
project of being logocentric or phonocentric, Harris calls this claim
an "astonishing display of Humpty-Dumptyism" (187) and a confirmation
that "Derrida's interpretation of Saussure is academically worthless"
(188).
17. Harris himself reveals a strong prosecutorial flair in his account of
the nonspecialist adaptations of Saussure, impugning Lévi-Strauss's
anthropological misappropriations, Barthes's incoherent muddles, and
Derrida's academically worthless interpretations. These are strong
words, and they invite questions about the interpretive criteria or
canon on the basis of which Harris's charges might be justified.
Harris waits until his concluding chapter on "History's Saussure" to
sketch some of the elements of the canon that has, up to this point,
implicitly guided his analysis of the specialist as well as
nonspecialist interpretations. Remarking that he does not share
Godel's confidence in being able to discern "la vraie pensée de
Saussure" (the true thought of Saussure), the author does think it
possible to recognize when a given interpretation of Saussure is "in
various respects inaccurate or mistaken. If there is no 'right' way of
reading Saussure there are nevertheless plenty of wrong ways"
(189-90). Whereas the first part of this claim (there is no right way
of reading Saussure) squares with some versions of relativism, the
second part of the claim (there are in fact wrong ways of reading
Saussure) is a corollary of Harris's avowedly anti-relativistic
stance. For the author, "relativism has made such inroads into
historical thinking that it is nowadays difficult to pass judgment on
interpretations of Saussure (or any other important thinker) without
immediately inviting a kind of criticism which relies on the
assumption that all interpretations are equally valid (in their own
terms, of course--an escape clause which reflects the academic
paranoia that prompted it)" (190). By contrast, "Saussure himself...
did not belong to a generation accustomed to taking refuge behind
relativist whitewash"--i.e., "a generation who supposed that any old
interpretation is as good as another" (190).
18. Readers familiar with the work of Stanley Fish, for example, will
recognize here a caricature of the relativist's actual position.
Relativism is not, except in Harris's straw-person argument,
tantamount to the view that any interpretation goes. Rather, it
suggests that some interpretations should and do win out over others
because of the way they "gear into" more or less widely agreed-upon
standards of argumentation and proof procedures. What therefore need
to be spelled out, in a relativistic as well as a non-relativistic
model, are the criteria by which some interpretations can be evaluated
as less correct or less useful than others. In the present case, one
possible criterion, i.e., degree of faithfulness to Saussure's actual
formulations in the Course, is ruled out by Harris's own account of
how the text was saturated with extra- or at least para-Saussurean
interpretations before it ever made it into print. But as I have
already emphasized, the author advances (in explicit terms at least)
no other criterion or set of criteria for successful or useful
interpretation in this context. [10]
19. At this juncture, I am brought back to another of the deep questions
that needs to be explored in any study of Saussure's reception
history, but that is not considered by Harris: do the criteria for
successful or useful interpretation (whatever they might be) remain
the same for both intra- and inter-disciplinary adaptations of
Saussure's descriptive nomenclature, operative concepts, and methods
of analysis? This question is a necessary one because Saussure's work
actually has had two contexts of reception, two historical series of
interpretive adaptations, which have sometimes converged, intersected,
and even been braided into one another, but which should be kept
distinct for analytical purposes in a study such as Harris's. That is
to say, Harris's chronological arrangement of his chapters, by
intermixing specialist and nonspecialist interpretations of Saussure,
obscures another, arguably more important pattern subtending the
reception of Saussurean theory over the past one hundred years. This
pattern, rare in modern intellectual history, is the result of the
peculiarly dual status of Saussure's discourse--a status that the
account of "transdiscursive" authors developed by Michel Foucault in
"What Is an Author?" can help illuminate.
20. Recall that, for Foucault, the so-called "founders of discursivity"
need to be distinguished from the founders of a particular area of
scientific study (113-17). Like scientific founders, the initiators of
a discourse are not just authors of their own works, but also produce
the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other
texts--texts that relate by way of differences as well as analogies to
the founder's initiatory work. However, in the case of scientific
founders, their founding act "is on an equal footing with its future
transformations; this act becomes in some respects part of the set of
modifications that it makes possible" (115). Thus, "the founding act
of a science can always be reintroduced within the machinery of those
transformations that derive from it" (115). Newton's theory of
mechanics, for example, is in some sense continuous with any
experiments I might perform (e.g., using wooden blocks and inclined
planes) to test the explanatory limits of that theory. By "contrast,"
argues Foucault, "the initiation of a discursive practice is
heterogeneous to its subsequent transformations" (115). To expand a
type of discursivity is not to imbue it with greater formal generality
or internal consistency, as is the case with refinement of scientific
theories through experimentation, "but rather to open it up to a
certain number of possible applications" (116). In this Foucauldian
framework, clearly, a successful or useful interpretation will not be
the same thing across the two domains at issue--i.e., types of
discursivity and types of scientific practice.
21. Saussure, I suggest, was a Janus-faced founder. He was the initiator
of scientific (specifically, linguistic) discourse on the nature of
signification and value within synchronic systems of signs, on the
study of "la langue" versus "la parole," and on the concept of the
linguistic sign itself, among other areas within the study of
language. Successful linguistic interpretations of Saussure's ideas
about these topics, it can be argued, will adhere to a particular set
of interpretive protocols (which I have suggested remain
underspecified in Harris's account). But Saussure was also the founder
of a type of discursivity that came to be known as structuralism,
whose practitioners across several disciplines made constant returns
to Saussure in their attempts to test the limits of applicability of
his theories. This sort of return, as Foucault notes, is part of the
discursive field itself, and never stops modifying it: "The return is
not a historical supplement which would be added to the discursivity,
or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes an effective
and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself"
(116). Accordingly, interpretations of Saussure viewed as a founder of
discursivity, and in particular as the initiator of structuralist
discourse, can be deemed successful if they bring within the scope of
structuralist theory phenomena that were heterogeneous to that
discourse at the time of its founding. Thanks to the efforts of the
nonspecialists "returning" to Saussure, myths, narratives more
generally, fashion systems, and other phenomena were brought under the
structuralist purview. Again, however, this is not tantamount to
saying that any interpretation of Saussure as the founder of
structuralist discourse will be as good as any other. The
goodness-of-fit of such an interpretation will depend on a complex
assortment of factors, including its internal coherence, its relation
to previous attempts at broadening the applicability of the discourse,
and its productivity in terms of generating still other
interpretations.
22. For his part, Harris develops what might be termed a contextualist
explanation of "why, outside the domain of linguistics, Saussure's
synchronic system was such an attractive idea" (194). Specifically,
the author argues that "synchronic linguistics was eminently suited to
be the 'new' linguistics for an era that wanted to forget the past"
(195), especially the barbarity of the first world war and its
negation of "virtually every Enlightenment idea and ideal of human
conduct" (195). In other words, Saussure's synchronic approach could
be construed as a "validation of modernity" (196), "for the values
built into and maintained by the synchronic system are invariably and
necessarily current values: they are not, and cannot be, the values of
earlier systems" (195). Harris thus selects historical context as a
ground for interpreting Saussure's nonspecialist interpreters, at
least.
23. Although this contextualist explanation perhaps identifies historical
conditions that necessarily had to be in place for the Saussurean
revolution to have taken hold, it does not suffice to account for how
Saussure's ideas (and not those of others similarly positioned in
history) have functioned as a magnet for (re)interpretations anchored
in such a wide range of disciplinary fields. It is just possible that
the rare, synergistic interplay of Saussure's "scientific" and
"discursive" foundings were required to generate the extraordinary
level of interpretive activity directly and indirectly associated with
the Course. More than this, Saussure's dual status as a scientific and
a transdiscursive author have arguably led to a rethinking of the very
concept of interpretation--a rethinking that should be a major focus
of any study of Saussure and his interpreters. If claims about the
ideas of one and the same author must be judged in accordance with
different interpretive protocols, depending on the context in which
the claims were formulated, then validity in interpretation becomes a
matter locally determined within particular domains. To put the same
point another way, in the still-unfolding Saussurean revolution, the
necessity to interpret becomes the constant, whereas the grounds for
interpretation vary.
Department of English
North Carolina State University
dherman@unity.ncsu.edu
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Notes
1. Harris himself edited for publication the notebooks of one of the
students who attended Saussure's Third Course (see de Saussure,
Saussure's).
2. In particular, Harris is a proponent of "integrational
linguistics," an approach to language-in-context that seeks to
overcome the limitations of both structuralist and generativist
models. See Harris, Introduction, Harris and Wolf, and also Toolan.
3. Jonathan Culler's Ferdinand de Saussure provides an excellent
introductory overview of Saussure's main ideas, a familiarity with
which Harris's study presupposes.
4. Harris is careful to distinguish the term Saussurean idea from the
term idea attributable to Saussure, construing the latter term as
narrower in meaning than the former. I do not make this distinction
here, particularly since, as Harris himself shows so effectively, it
is not altogether clear which ideas are attributable to Saussure and
which ideas are the product of interpretations by the students and
editors. Harris's third chapter portrays this interpretive filtering
of Saussurean doctrine as ineliminable, i.e., built into the very
process by which readers try to make sense of Saussure's Course.
Hence, by Harris's own account, the distinction in question, although
valid in principle, is one that proves difficult to maintain in
practice.
5. Harris's remarks concerning a passage about Saussure in Fredric
Jameson's The Prison-House of Language are not unrepresentative of the
tone adopted by the author in some of his more biting critiques: "This
gives the impression of having been written by someone who had many
years ago attended an undergraduate course in linguistics, but sat in
the back row and whiled away most of the time doing crossword puzzles
instead of taking notes" (10-11).
6. For accounts of the porousness (i.e., historical variability) of
the boundaries of linguistic inquiry vis-ŕ-vis other fields of study,
see Herman, "Sciences" and Universal.
7. As Harris points out (3), even apart from his ideas about language,
the name Saussure denotes three different entities, sometimes
conflated by scholars and critics: "the putative author of the
[Course], even though [a]ttributing a certain view to the Saussure of
the [Course] is in effect little more than saying that this view
appears in, or can be inferred from, the text... as posthumously
produced by the editors... (2) the lecturer who actually gave the
courses of lectures at [the University of] Geneva on which the
[Course] was based... (3) the putative theorist behind the... lectures
[themselves]... trying out [his] ideas [in] a form that would be
accessible and useful to his students" (3). As his study unfolds,
however, many other Saussures come to populate Harris's universe of
discourse: Oswald Ducrot's Saussure (2, 5-7), René Wellek's and Robert
Penn Warren's Saussure (8-9), F. W. Bateson's Saussure (9-10), Antoine
Meillet's Saussure (54-58), Bloomfield's Saussure, Barthes's Saussure,
etc.
8. Interestingly, as Harris points out (90), it was Hjelmslev who
coined the term paradigmatic relations as a substitute for Saussure's
"rapports associatifs." Part of his attempt at an overall
formalization of Saussure's ideas, Hjelmslev's coinage was designed to
replace a focus on mental associations with a focus on definable
linguistic units and their relations. Later, in his famous essay on
"Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,"
Jakobson used Hjelmslev's terminology, mistaking it for Saussure's
(95).
9. Internal evidence (cf. 106-7, 169-70) suggests that Harris objects
to the early version of Chomsky's transformational generative paradigm
mainly because of its postulate that language can be treated, for
descriptive and explanatory purposes, as a univocal code shared by an
idealized speaker and hearer, viewed in abstraction from their status
as social beings deploying a socially constituted and enacted language
system. If this conjecture is warranted, then in turn an implicit
criterion or ground for judging interpretations of Saussure seems to
emerge from Harris's account: given two or more candidate
interpretations of Saussure's approach, then ceteris paribus the
interpretation that most closely adheres to Saussure's insight that
"la langue" is a social fact will be the best, most appropriate, or
most correct of those interpretations. My point is that, because his
book centers on the practice of intra- as well as inter-disciplinary
interpretation, Harris is obliged to engage in argumentation along
these lines--i.e., to make explicit the protocols for his own
interpretive practice.
10. The "justification of the method" offered in the final chapter
does not in fact articulate Harris's criteria for successful
interpretation of Saussure's ideas, but rather explains why the author
draws together in one book a set of interpretations that he deems
erroneous: "questionable or flawed interpretations, precisely because
they are questionable or flawed, can be important as historical
evidence. Particularly if, as in the cases that have been considered
here, what emerges from studying and comparing them is that they were
not the products of random error or personal idiosyncrasy, but are
related in a coherent pattern" (190-91).
Works Cited
Culler, Jonathan. Ferdinand de Saussure. Revised edition. Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1986.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger.
Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959.
---. Course in General Linguistics. Ed. Charles Bally and Albert
Sechehaye, in collaboration with Albert Riedlinger. Translated and
annotated by Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.
---. Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics
(1910-1911), from the Notebooks of Emile Constantin / Troisičme cours
de linguistique générale (1910-1911) d'aprčs les cahiers d'Émile
Constantin. Ed. and trans. Eisuke Komatsu and Roy Harris. Oxford:
Pergamon, 1993.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of
Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul
Rabinow. Trans. Josué V. Harari. New York: Pantheon, 1984. 101-20.
Godel, Robert. Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique
générale de F. de Saussure. Geneva and Paris: Droz, 1957.
Harris, Roy. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Oxford:
Pergamon, 1998.
---. Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein: How to Play Games with
Words. London: Routledge, 1990.
---. Reading Saussure. London: Duckworth, 1987.
Harris, Roy, and George Wolf, eds. Integrational Linguistics: A First
Reader. Oxford: Pergamon, 1998.
Herman, David. "Sciences of the Text." Postmodern Culture 11.3 (May
2001)
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---. Universal Grammar and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.
Jakobson, Roman. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic
Disturbances." Fundamentals of Language. Ed. Roman Jakobson and Morris
Halle. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. 52-82.
Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of
Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. "Histoire et ethnologie." Revue de Métaphysique
et de Morale 54 (1949): 363-91.
---. "The Structural Study of Myth." Critical Theory Since 1968. Ed.
Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: UP of Florida. 809-22.
Pavel, Thomas G. The Feud of Language: The History of Structuralist
Thought. Trans. Linda Jordan and Thomas G. Pavel. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989.
Toolan, Michael. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistics Approach
to Language. Durham: Duke UP, 1996
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