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Reading Saussure: A Critical Commentary on the Cours De Linquistique Generale

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Review of Harris, _Reading Saussure_

It is high time to expose distortions and misuses of the sciences on the part of deconstructionists, postmodernists, and the general lot of fashionable nihilists who make up such a large part of today's academic world. What Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have done for physics in this regard (_Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science_, 1998) now needs to be done for the much more central prop of much of this recent thought, "linguistics." I place the word in quotes because it is not the last century of actual linguistic research and theory-building that is so often appealed to in postist writings, but rather the ideas contained, or thought to be contained, in the 1916 _Course in General Linguistics_ of Ferdinand de Saussure.

Harris's book might well be a foundation for such an exposure, though it has no such intention. The author's aim in this work was simply to sum up the oversights, incoherencies and inconsistencies in Saussure's _Course_ which have been noted within the field from the beginning, to state them with maximum clarity, and to add some criticisms of his own. Unfortunately for its impact, _Reading Saussure_ is aimed at professional linguists, or at least at readers with some linguistics background, and may be unsuitable for the general reader.

Here is a quote from Ian Saunders which sums up, in an unusually clear fashion (I hope), what deconstruction owes to Saussure's flawed _Course_ (which by the way was never written nor intended for publication by him):

[begin quote] Saussure... insisted that words derive their meanings from their location within a system of other words... If a word has its meaning only by virtue of other words, then we could say that its meaning is its difference from other words. Take any word, then, and you could argue that its meaning is not _present_ in it, but only fixed by those _absent_ other words. 'Fixed' is not quite right, though, because if we recover the absent sign we don't get its meaning. After all, that is its difference from yet other signs. And so on. One sign leads to another, different sign, but with each arrival we find not meaning, but its deferral (Derrida coins the word _différance_ to suggest the intertwining of differ and defer). Instead of fixed, final or closed meaning, deconstruction sees openings, a chain of signifiers that offers movement from one signifier to the next, without ever settling on the one term (the 'transcendental signified') that would constitute bedrock. (_Open Texts, Partial Maps_, 1993, pp. 21, 22) [end quote]

Here is the same idea from Derrida himself:

[begin quote] Whether in written or spoken discourse, no element can function as a sign without relating to another element which is not simply present. This linkage means that each "element"--phoneme or grapheme--is constituted with reference to the trace in it of the other elements of the sequence or system. This linkage, this weaving, is the text, which is produced only through the transformation of another text. Nothing, either in the elements or in the system, is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. (_Positions_, 1981, p. 26 of U. of Chicago Press edition) [end quote]

All this is built on particular naïve and wholly uncritical understandings and misunderstandings of Saussure's _Course_ by people working in disciplines other than linguistics. For why it doesn't work, even for linguistics, and why it is a disaster _especially_ when extended to considerations of meaning, see Harris's _Reading Saussure_. But I warn again, the book is technical and not a popularization.

For linguistics itself, Harris's book is of mainly historical interest, though it is one of the two or three best books I have read in the field, whence the high rating. Saussure's model of language did not survive in the 20th century, even in phonology, where his notion of a system of pure oppositions comes closest to working.

Deconstructionism and postmodernism have had, as any working linguist can tell you, almost no impact on linguistics itself; this will, I hope, be made even clearer in some forthcoming work by Frederick Newmeyer.

Ken Miner