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

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