sbinkley@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>
> Omar:
>
> These are very important questions which people often pass over too
> carelessly. What precisely is the difference between structuralism,
> post-structuralism and post-modernism? And where does F belong in
> this scheme?
>
>
> Well I think it's fair to say that structuralism represents a distinct
> shift in anthropological writings after the second World war in France
> which used Saussure's reformulations of linguistic theory. Saussure
> understood the construction of linguistic meaning not as the singular
> effect of an intending speaker but as the function of signs and
> symbols within a meaning system - or structure.
This from Geoffrey Sampsons article, "That Strange Realm Called
Theory," in *Critical Review* (Vol. 3, No. 1):
[begin excerpt]
Among the gurus of "theory," few names are as numinous as that of
Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structuralism--probably the most
successful of the many isms that have competed for the Small Worlders'
attentions. Cognoscenti will tell you yhat structuraism has had its
day; but then, in the forefront of the trands that have supplanted it is
"deconstructionism," which as its name suggests is consciously defined
in reaction to structuralism and thus owes perhaps as much to Saussure
in a negative fashion as structuralism does positively. If there is any
substance in "theory," a goodly portion of it must surely be found in
Saussure.
Yet Saussure, so far as I know, had no professional interest in
literature at all (if one discounts an engagingly dotty unpublished
investigation of the idea that Roman poets hid anagrams of people's
names in their poems). Indeed, to describe Saussure as a guru is quite
unfair if one considers that the central use of that word at present
seems to be as a self-description of various South Asian operators who
manipulate the religious yearnings of naive young people in order to
enrich themselvesin what looks like a pretty cynical fashion. Saussure
had no notion what hois name would come to stand for in the late
twentieth century; if anyone told him, I guess he would have been
flabbergasted. He died in 1913 (aged 56), having spent his career
teaching linguistics in Paris and Geneva. All his publications were
about the history and pre-history of the Indo-European language family:
he was famous for making a major advance at the early age of 21 in the
task of restructuring the sound-system of the Proto-Indo-European
language from which most European languages ultimately descended (the
theory which he put forward then was later corroborated by tangible
evidence discovered after his death). All this work was highly
technical, and scarcely anyone reads it today. But, towards the end of
his life, Saussure several times gave a course of lectures on the
general nature of language considered from an abstract, philosophical
point of view; and although he himself deliberately refrained from
publishing this material, some of his colleagues collated his students'
lecture notes and turned them into a book after Saussure's death. It is
that book--A Course in General Linguistics--that all the fuss has been
about.
The general idea of the Course is that a language is s system of units
which cannot be considered in isolation from one another because they
mutually determine each other's values: the Course frequently draws an
analogy with a game of chess, where the potentiality of a given piece at
any moment depends not merely on what piece it is but where is relative
to the positions of the other pieces, so that moving one piece changes
the values of all the others. As a linguist myself I recognize a
measure of truth in this. For instance, the range of shades we call
"red" in English is limited by the existence of various other wrods
naming adjacent colors--"orange," "pink," "purple," "brown"; in a
language which possesses markedly fewer color words, the translation of
"red" [words in quotation marks italicized in original] will typically
cover a larger share of the spectrum. At the same time, the validity of
the point has its limits. The translation of "four" surely means
precisely four even in a language lacking names for large numbers.
Saussure's Course discusses a number of general ideas about language as
abstract systems of relationships, and in my judgement most of his ideas
are broadly acceptable but by no means absolute truths.
[end excerpt]
What I find significant here is that, on this writer's reading of
Saussure, the main idea of the course is not that *subjects* (i.e.,
individual human minds) cannot mean something, but rather that the
linguistic signs used to intend meaning can only have significance
relative to other terms within the language.
Just a point.
Nicholas
>
> Omar:
>
> These are very important questions which people often pass over too
> carelessly. What precisely is the difference between structuralism,
> post-structuralism and post-modernism? And where does F belong in
> this scheme?
>
>
> Well I think it's fair to say that structuralism represents a distinct
> shift in anthropological writings after the second World war in France
> which used Saussure's reformulations of linguistic theory. Saussure
> understood the construction of linguistic meaning not as the singular
> effect of an intending speaker but as the function of signs and
> symbols within a meaning system - or structure.
This from Geoffrey Sampsons article, "That Strange Realm Called
Theory," in *Critical Review* (Vol. 3, No. 1):
[begin excerpt]
Among the gurus of "theory," few names are as numinous as that of
Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of structuralism--probably the most
successful of the many isms that have competed for the Small Worlders'
attentions. Cognoscenti will tell you yhat structuraism has had its
day; but then, in the forefront of the trands that have supplanted it is
"deconstructionism," which as its name suggests is consciously defined
in reaction to structuralism and thus owes perhaps as much to Saussure
in a negative fashion as structuralism does positively. If there is any
substance in "theory," a goodly portion of it must surely be found in
Saussure.
Yet Saussure, so far as I know, had no professional interest in
literature at all (if one discounts an engagingly dotty unpublished
investigation of the idea that Roman poets hid anagrams of people's
names in their poems). Indeed, to describe Saussure as a guru is quite
unfair if one considers that the central use of that word at present
seems to be as a self-description of various South Asian operators who
manipulate the religious yearnings of naive young people in order to
enrich themselvesin what looks like a pretty cynical fashion. Saussure
had no notion what hois name would come to stand for in the late
twentieth century; if anyone told him, I guess he would have been
flabbergasted. He died in 1913 (aged 56), having spent his career
teaching linguistics in Paris and Geneva. All his publications were
about the history and pre-history of the Indo-European language family:
he was famous for making a major advance at the early age of 21 in the
task of restructuring the sound-system of the Proto-Indo-European
language from which most European languages ultimately descended (the
theory which he put forward then was later corroborated by tangible
evidence discovered after his death). All this work was highly
technical, and scarcely anyone reads it today. But, towards the end of
his life, Saussure several times gave a course of lectures on the
general nature of language considered from an abstract, philosophical
point of view; and although he himself deliberately refrained from
publishing this material, some of his colleagues collated his students'
lecture notes and turned them into a book after Saussure's death. It is
that book--A Course in General Linguistics--that all the fuss has been
about.
The general idea of the Course is that a language is s system of units
which cannot be considered in isolation from one another because they
mutually determine each other's values: the Course frequently draws an
analogy with a game of chess, where the potentiality of a given piece at
any moment depends not merely on what piece it is but where is relative
to the positions of the other pieces, so that moving one piece changes
the values of all the others. As a linguist myself I recognize a
measure of truth in this. For instance, the range of shades we call
"red" in English is limited by the existence of various other wrods
naming adjacent colors--"orange," "pink," "purple," "brown"; in a
language which possesses markedly fewer color words, the translation of
"red" [words in quotation marks italicized in original] will typically
cover a larger share of the spectrum. At the same time, the validity of
the point has its limits. The translation of "four" surely means
precisely four even in a language lacking names for large numbers.
Saussure's Course discusses a number of general ideas about language as
abstract systems of relationships, and in my judgement most of his ideas
are broadly acceptable but by no means absolute truths.
[end excerpt]
What I find significant here is that, on this writer's reading of
Saussure, the main idea of the course is not that *subjects* (i.e.,
individual human minds) cannot mean something, but rather that the
linguistic signs used to intend meaning can only have significance
relative to other terms within the language.
Just a point.
Nicholas