In this framework, linguistic identities are determined not by inherent qualities but by systemic ("structural") relationships.
I have said that phonology "followed the lead" of Saussure, because even though his analysis of the physiology of language production "would nowadays," as Harris says, "be called 'physical,' as opposed to either 'psychological' or 'functional'" (Reading 49), nevertheless in the Course he articulated the direction and outlines of a functional analysis of language. Similarly, his only extended published work, Memoire sur le systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-europeennes (Memoir on the primitive system of vowels in Indo-European languages), which appeared in 1878, was fully situated within the project of nineteenth-century historical linguistics. Nevertheless, within this work, as Jonathan Culler has argued, Saussure demonstrated "the fecundity of thinking of language as a system of purely relational items, even when working at the task of historical reconstruction" (Saussure 66). By analyzing the systematic structural relationships among phonemes to account for patterns of vowel alternation in existing Indo-European languages, Saussure suggested that in addition to several different phonemes /a/, there must have been another phoneme that could be described formally. "What makes Saussure's work so very impressive," Culler concludes, "is the fact that nearly fifty years later, when cuneiform Hittite was discovered and deciphered, it was found to contain a phoneme, written h, which behaved as Saussure had predicted. He had discovered, by a purely formal analysis, what are now known as the laryngeals of Indo-European" (66).
This conception of the relational or diacritical determination of the elements of signification, which is both implicit and explicit in the Course, suggests a third assumption governing structural linguistics, what Saussure calls "the arbitrary nature of the sign." By this he means that the relationship between the signifier and signified in language is never necessary (or "motivated"): one could just as easily find the sound signifier arbre as the signifier tree to unite with the concept 'tree'. But more than this, it means that the signified is arbitrary as well: one could as easily define the concept 'tree' by its woody quality (which would exclude palm trees) as by its size (which excludes the "low woody plants" we call shrubs). This should make clear that the numbering of assumptions I have been presenting does not represent an order of priority: each assumption - the systemic nature of signification (best apprehended by studying language "synchronically"), the relational or "diacritical" nature of the elements of signification, the arbitrary nature of signs - derives its value from the others.
That is, Saussurean linguistics understands the phenomena it studies in overarching relationships of combination and contrast in language. In this conception, language is both the process of articulating meaning (signification) and its product (communication), and these two functions of language are neither identical nor fully congruent (see Schleifer, "Deconstruction"). Here, we can see the alternation between form and content that Greimas and Courtes describe in modernist interpretation: language presents contrasts that formally define its units, and these units combine on succeeding levels to create the signifying content. Since the elements of language are arbitrary, moreover, neither contrast nor combination can be said to be basic. Thus, in language distinctive features combine to form contrasting phonemes on another level of apprehension, phonemes combine to form contrasting morphemes, morphemes combine to form words, words combine to form sentences, and so on. In each instance, the whole phoneme, or word, or sentence, and so on, is greater than the sum of its parts (just as water, H2O, in Saussure's example [(1959) 103] is more than the mechanical agglomeration of hydrogen and oxygen).
The three assumptions of the Course in General Linguistics led Saussure to call for a new science of the twentieth century that would go beyond linguistic science to study "the life of signs within society." Saussure named this science "semiology (from Greek semeion 'sign')" (16). The "science" of semiotics, as it came to be practiced in Eastern Europe in the 1920s and 1930s and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, widened the study of language and linguistic structures to literary artifacts constituted (or articulated) by those structures. Throughout the late part of his career, moreover, even while he was offering the courses in general linguistics, Saussure pursued his own "semiotic" analysis of late Latin poetry in an attempt to discover deliberately concealed anagrams of proper names. The method of study was in many ways the opposite of the functional rationalism of his linguistic analyses: it attempted, as Saussure mentions in one of the 99 notebooks in which he pursued this study, to examine systematically the problem of "chance," which "becomes the inevitable foundation of everything" (cited in Starobinski 101). Such a study, as Saussure himself says, focuses on "the material fact" of chance and meaning (cited 101), so that the "theme-word" whose anagram Saussure is seeking, as Jean Starobinski argues, "is, for the poet, an instrument, and not a vital germ of the poem. The poem is obliged to re-employ the phonic materials of the theme-word" (45). In this analysis, Starobinski says, "Saussure did not lose himself in a search for hidden meanings." Instead, his work seems to demonstrate a desire to evade all the problems arising from consciousness: "Since poetry is not only realized in words but is something born from words, it escapes the arbitrary control of consciousness to depend solely on a kind of linguistic legality" (121).
That is, Saussure's attempt to discover proper names in late Latin poetry - what Tzvetan Todorov calls the reduction of a "word . . . to its signifier" (266) - emphasizes one of the elements that governed his linguistic analysis, the arbitrary nature of the sign. (It also emphasizes the formal nature of Saussurean linguistics - "Language," he asserts, "is a form and not a substance" [Course (1959) 122] - which effectively eliminates semantics as a major object of analysis.) As Todorov concludes, Saussure's work appears remarkably homogeneous today in its refusal to accept symbolic phenomena [phenomena that have intentional meaning]. . . . In his research on anagrams, he pays attention only to the phenomena of repetition, not to those of evocation. . . . In his studies of the Nibelungen, he recognizes symbols only in order to attribute them to mistaken readings: since they are not intentional, symbols do not exist. Finally in his courses on general linguistics, he contemplates the existence of semiology, and thus of signs other than linguistic ones; but this affirmation is at once limited by the fact that semiology is devoted to a single type of sign: those which are arbitrary. (269-70)
If this is true, it is because Saussure could not conceive of "intention" without a subject; he could not quite escape the opposition between form and content his work did so much to call into question. Instead, he resorted to "linguistic legality." Situated between, on the one hand, nineteenth-century conceptions of history, subjectivity, and the mode of causal interpretation governed by these conceptions and, on the other hand, twentieth-century "structuralist" conceptions of what Levi-Strauss called "Kantianism without a transcendental subject" (cited in Connerton 23) - conceptions that erase the opposition between form and content (or subject and object) and the hierarchy of foreground and background in full-blown structuralism, psychoanalysis, and even quantum mechanics - the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in linguistics and semiotics circumscribes a signal moment in the study of meaning and culture.
Ronald Schleifer
Приложение 2
Фердинанд де Соссюр (перевод)
Швейцарский языковед Фердинанд де Соссюр (1857-1913) считается основателем современной лингвистики - благодаря своим попыткам описать структуру языка, а не историю отдельных языков и словоформ. По большому счёту, основы структурных методов в лингвистике и литературоведении и, в значительной мере, семиотики были заложены в его работах в самом начале двадцатого века. Доказано, что методы и концепции так называемого "постструктурализма", развитые в работах Жака Деррида, Мишеля Фуко, Жака Лакана, Юлии Кристевой, Ролана Барта и других, восходят к лингвистическим трудам Соссюра и анаграмматическим прочтениям поздней римской поэзии. Следует заметить, что работы Соссюра по лингвистике и языковой интерпретации помогает связать широкий круг интеллектуальных дисциплин - от физики до литературных новшеств, психоанализа и философии начала двадцатого века. А. Дж. Греймас и Ж. Курте пишут в «Семиотике и языке»: «Аналитический словарь с заголовком «Интерпретация» как новый вид интерпретации появился в начале ХХ века вместе с лингвистикой Соссюра, феноменологией Гуссерля и психоанализом Фрейда. В таком случае, "интерпретация - это не приписывание данного содержания к форме, которая иначе испытала бы недостаток в том; скорее это - пересказ, который формулирует другим способом то же содержание значимого элемента в пределах данной семиотической системы" (159). В таком понимании «интерпретации», форма и содержание неразрывны; напротив, каждая форма наполнена семантическим значением («значимая форма»), поэтому интерпретация предлагает новый, аналогичный пересказ чего-то, значимого в другой знаковой системе.
Подобное понимание формы и содержания, представляемое Клодом Леви-Строссом в одной из программных работ структурализма, ("Структура и Форма: Размышления над трудами Владимира Проппа") - можно увидеть в посмертно вышедшей книге Соссюра «Курс общей лингвистики» (1916, пер., 1959, 1983). При жизни Соссюр мало публиковался, «Курс» - его основная работа - был собран по конспектам студентов, посещавших его лекции по общей лингвистике в 1907-11 гг. В «Курсе» Соссюр призывал к «научному» исследованию языка, противопоставляя его сравнительно-историческому языкознанию девятнадцатого века. Эту работу можно считать одним из величайших достижений западной мысли: беря за основу отдельные слова как структурные элементы языка, историческое (или «диахроническое») языкознание доказывало происхождение и развитие западноевропейских языков от общего, индоевропейского языка- и более раннего праиндоевропейского.
Это - точно это исследование уникальных возникновений слов, с сопутствующим предположением, что основная "единица" языка, фактически, положительное существование этих "элементов слова", что Соссюр подверг сомнению. Его работа была попыткой сократить множество фактов о языке, вскользь изученных сравнительной лингвистикой, до небольшого числа теорем. Сравнительная филологическая школа XIX века, пишет Соссюр, «не преуспела в создании настоящей школы лингвистики», так как «она не поняла сущности объекта изучения» ([1959] 3). Эта «сущность», утверждает он, заключается не только в отдельных словах - «позитивных субстанциях» языка - но и в формальных связях, помогающих этим субстанциям существовать.
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