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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)

.

---. 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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