redefining language post-saussurean linguistics and the question of difference

Redefining Language

Post-Saussurean Linguistics and the Question of Difference

What is language?

• At this point in our (Belsey’s) study we are in need of a theory of language which does not become immediately contradictory, as the “empiricist-idealist” model does.

• Empiricist Idealist: Language is the transparent medium through which ideas that are generated purely in the mind are communicated from person to person.

What is Meaning?

– Empiricist: Concepts and knowledge are held to the be the products of direct individual experience of the world

– Idealist: Ideas about that experience are simply communicated through language – in other words, that ideas precede language

• “Common Sense” (Expressive Realism): Encounters a problem with perception and “truth” in meaning

• New Criticism: Weak when trying to account for multiple meanings or meanings that change over time

• Reader Response: Has a hard time accounting for variation and uniformity in readings

What is language?

• For Belsey, Saussure supplies us with the theory of language which begins to resolve “communication model” inconsistencies:1. Language is an arbitrary system of signs and

signifiers2. Language is a system of differences3. Language is a social fact4. Language “speaks us”

Ferdinand de Saussure

• 1857-1913, Swiss linguist• Considered one of the fore-fathers of 20th Century

Linguistics, Semiotics (the study of signification and communication), and Structuralism (a movement in critical theory across the disciplines)

• General Course on Linguistics was published (posthumously) in 1916– The actual critical value of this text was not recognized

until much later

Language as an arbitrary system

• Saussure’s linguistic system sees language as a system of signs

• Signs are made of signifiers and signifieds• The Signifier (word, sound, written shape)• The Signified (the concept or thing)

Cow

Cow

Language as an arbitrary system• The Sign is what you get when these two

aspects of language are absolutely joined and made, in an important sense, inseparable.

Cow

Language as an arbitrary system• Important! There is no necessary or absolute reason why any one

signifier is linked to any one signified – it is, in a sense, arbitrary.• This is not to say that language has no meaning, but to note that

the sign is not in any way “natural” • If we all agreed (“all” as in all English speakers) decided that the

signified concept “cow” was linked to the signifier “moobug” then there is no reason why it couldn’t be so.

Moobug?

Language as a system of differences

• “The most revolutionary element in Saussure’s position was his insistence that language is not a nomenclature, a way of naming things that already exist, but a system of differences with no positive terms. He argued that, far from providing a set of labels for entities which exist independently in the world, language precedes the existence of independent entities, making the world intelligible by differentiating between concepts” (36).– Language is not a nomenclature/naming system– It is a system of differences– It has no positive terms (positive as in positivist)

• In other words, signs have meanings, not from their absolute attachment to real entities/objects, but from their difference to other signs and other meanings


• In other words, language does not innocently describe reality, it mediates our experience of reality

• Example #1: The Problem of Translation– We all know that translation is a problematic thing.– The problem is that words in English do not find their exact

equivalent in other languages.– If we think that language innocently describes reality, then we have

to have an argument about which language “got it right” in some absolute way

– If we think of language as a system of differences, then we have to realize that the important point is that these two languages literally divide up reality differently – different differences matter differently.


• This is NOT to say that there is no such thing as reality – that when I close my eyes the world disappears

• It IS to say that our experience of that reality is mediated (in a very loose sense, determined) by the categories, terms, and concepts found in language

Recap – New Theory of Language

• “Post Saussurean Linguistics” Model:1. Language is an arbitrary system of signs and


Language as a Social Fact

• Emphasis on “SOCIAL”• “Only a social group can generate signs. Noises which have

no meaning may be purely individual, but meaning, intelligibility, cannot by definition be produced in isolation” (39).

• “This suggests that while the individual sign is arbitrary there is an important sense in which the signifying system as a whole is not. Meaning is public and conventional, the result not of individual intention but of inter-individual intelligibility. In other words, meaning is socially constructed” (39).

• At this point, the signifying system includes not just words, but also other communally agreed upon differences signified in images, symbols, metaphors, etc.


• Lacan’s “laws of urinary segregation” example:

• We all recognize these doors as “signs.”• The easily read symbols on the doors “signify” gender/sex in order to

communicate to others who can legitimately enter• While the signifiers “ladies” and “gentlemen” express the world as a

binary option. But their signifieds are forced to incorporate a significant amount of difference.

LADIES GENTLEMEN



• The meaning and purpose of these doors is in their difference from one another – the difference of gender

• “The world which without signification would be expressed as a continuum, is divided up by language into entities which then readily come to be experienced as essentially distinct” (38)

• Sex = different physiologies, Gender = cultural assumptions (both differences are caught up in this particular signifying practice)

LADIES GENTLEMEN



• “The signifying system can have an important role in naturalizing the way things are” (40)

• The signifying system contains within it the values of the social formation that it is built to support.

• These signs naturalize one of the most basic (and complex) organizing principles of our social world – gender difference

LADIES GENTLEMEN



• Without this initial set of differences (conventional as signification practices) none of the gender binaries of masculinity and femininity would be possible. And these are evidently the only differences that matter.

• This set of differences also, of course, structures the relations between the genders as well.

LADIES GENTLEMEN

Language “speaks us” (41)


• These doors (signs) were there LONG before you were born.

• Assuming an identity means submitting to this system of differences and utilizing them to describe yourself.

LADIES GENTLEMEN



• Language is not the transparent medium through which we authentically describe ourselves.

• It is the limited number of terms that we are given with which to participate in the larger signifying order.

• We are “subjects” to (and in) language

LADIES GENTLEMEN



• Here is the criticism of the “desert island” model.• We do not, as individuals, invent language to express our own

conception of the world (ER).• Nor do we ever have a moment of formally “agreeing” to the

meanings which organize our reality (contract).• Instead, participation in this system is a precondition of being an

actor within it.

LADIES GENTLEMEN

Recap – History of Criticism

• The “Communication” Model:– Attempts to locate and “guarantee” meaning in a

stable location (author’s mind, text itself, reader’s choice or preconditioning).

– Largely sees language as a means of communicating ideas

– Neglects the “social character” of language – its reliance on interintelligibility and convention

Recap – New Theory of Language

• “Post Saussurean Linguistics” Model:1. Language is an arbitrary system of signs and


What does this mean for literature?

• “If signifieds are not pre-existing, given concepts, but changeable and contingent concepts, and if changes in signifying practice are related to changes in the social formation, the notion of language as a neutral nomenclature functioning as an instrument of communication of meanings which exist independently is clearly untenable” (41).


• “There is no unmeditated experience of the world; meaning is possible only in terms of the categories and the laws of the symbolic order. Far from expressing a unique perception of the world, authors produce meanings out of the available system of differences, and texts are intelligible in so far as they participate in it” (42).– Texts only have meaning at all because they participate in the

system– Texts are “realistic” not because they have a transparent

“authentic” account of reality.– They reflect not reality, but the signifying (symbolic) order – the

source of its “truth”


• Does this mean that nothing new can be said? Are we doing away with creativity or change?

• NO!• “Participation” is not the same as “determination”• It DOES mean that writing is never a purely individual

act – it is always, in some very basic senses, a social practice!

• Authors construct meanings out of the available differences, which are often, themselves, contradictory and multiple. We do the same when we are reading.


• Literary meaning is…– Plural! (but not subjective!)

• The author, text or reader is no longer the guarantor of singular meaning

• The signifying system is where meaning is “located,” and there are multiple meanings available within it

• “The meaning of [the literary work] is plural. But this is emphatically not to say that it is subjective. In reality we all participate in a range of knowledges – political, scientific, literary and so on – and these are subjective only to the extent that they – and the contradictions and collisions between them – construct our world of meaning and experience” (49).


• Literary meaning is…– Historical• The signifying system is, itself, not coherent, unified or

necessarily consistent with itself. It is made up of all of the available forms of meaning (scientific, philosophical, practical) which often conflict and contradict each other.• The system also changes CONSTANTLY to meet the

needs of new material conditions and forms of knowledge making• Meaning, in this sense, cannot be timeless or universal.

It only ever reflects the signifying system of its time.


• Literary meaning is…– Active!

• Language no longer “reflects” the world, but mediates and (in a limited sense) even can be said to produce it! It certainly lays out the “differences that matter”

• If literature is thought of as a social practice of signification, then it is active in (at the very least) reproducing the differences through which the world is understood.

• It can also mobilize the available system’s contradictions and gaps to posit different systems of difference!

Questions for Literature

• How do we read the novel as a signifying practice, whose meaning is in constructed difference?– What are the “differences that matter” in the text?– How do these differences “order” the social world of

the text? How is it signified over the course of the narrative?

– What are the potential contradictions or problematics that arise out of these ordering differences?

redefining language post-saussurean linguistics and the question of difference

Documents

theory of language

aspects of language

system of differences

arbitrary system of

system of signs signs

nomenclaturenaming system

arbitrary system important

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