Ferdinand De Saussure

Rating:
Summary: Review of Culler, _Ferdinand de Saussure_
Review: Ferdinand de Saussure, an outstanding linguist of the late 19th century, lectured on general linguistics at the University of Geneva intermittently from 1907 to 1911. The _Cours de Linguistique Generale_ was not actually written by him, but compiled and edited by Bally and Sechehaye, who had not themselves attended his lectures, from lecture notes written by those who had been his students. As Culler remarks (p. 25), "Most teachers would shudder at the thought of having their views handed on in this way," and the fact that Saussure did not himself choose to publish a work on the nature of linguistics is significant. However, on the basis largely of the _Cours_, Saussure is often cited as the founder of modern structural linguistics.

Unfortunately for the 20th century, the _Cours_ is also the ultimate source of ideas which eventually settled into studies other than linguistics, such as sociology and anthropology, and most notably and most inevitably, literary theory and even philosophy. This in spite of the fact that Saussure's model of language did not survive, for very good reasons, in linguistics itself after the middle of the century, and has undergone, again within linguistics itself, severe criticism, of which perhaps the best summing-up is to be found in Roy Harris's _Reading Saussure_ (Open Court, 1987). Thus we have Jacques Derrida's deconstructionism, founded on a deeply flawed manner of dealing with human languages, at the very root of what is now widely known as the "post-modern" era. I recommend Harris's book highly to anyone with some linguistics background who is at all curious about the actual origins of so much fashionable contemporary thought.

Meanwhile, linguistics itself has been almost untouched by deconstruction and post-modernism. The term "linguistics," which frequently appears in the writings of such as Derrida, Barthes, Baudrillard and the rest of "the French intellectuals" and their many followers in academia seems to refer to Saussure of the _Cours_, rather than to the last century of actual linguistic work.

Unlike that of Harris, Culler's book can be approached rather easily by the general reader. It falls essentially into two halves, the first dealing with the ideas of the _Cours_ and the second with their impact on disciplines other than linguistics, the latter being handled mainly by describing the development of semiotics, the general study of sign systems. Culler is entirely uncritical of Saussure's ideas and merely attempts to describe them in a general way; if he sees the problems he does not say so. One of the most significant errors of the _Cours_, for example, is the notion that language creates concepts (rather than presupposing them). This Culler transmits without the slightest sign of awareness of its profound implications (such as that human beings with no full-fledged sign system-the congenitally deaf and those deafened in early life who due to isolation or other factors do not acquire a system of manual signing-have no concepts).

In fairness to Culler I confess I have not looked at his 1983 work, _On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism_ (Cornell University Press), which actually followed the first edition of _Ferdinand de Saussure_, mainly because my main interest is linguistics rather than literary theory.

I can recommend _Ferdidand de Saussure_ as very readable; but I must point out that Saussure has long since gone the way of a number of other still derivatively influential 19th-century thinkers.

Ken Miner