I read something by Saussure recently. Found it dull. There’s a bit where he talks about language existing in individuals, and that the structure is composed of individuals speaking.
But then he says that the structure of language explains the things in common across individual speakers. Now, if one says it’s biological then this is less of a problem, but without making that move it strikes me that there’s a shift here: it’s one thing to say empirically “we identify the following sets of commonalities” and to give that the name “structure”. It’s another thing entirely to say “we identify the following sets of commonalities” and to say that they derive from/are caused by structure. He makes a similar move on a smaller level elsewhere - he says something like ‘when we encounter a language we don’t speak, we are unable to enter into the social world of that language because we do not comprehend the language;. My first question would be to ask what ‘enter into the social world of a language’ and ‘comprehend a language’ mean. There may be an extra-linguistic component to ‘entering into the social world’ (but if so, what does this have to do with linguistic structure?), I’d be happy to go along with that if it was layed out but Saussure doesn’t do so. From what I got out of reading him, ‘enter into the social world of a language’ and ‘comprehend a language’ seem to me to be synonyms for each other (just as on one version of the term ‘identified set of commonalities’ and ’structure’ seem to be synonyms). If that’s so, why attribute causality to one?
Ranciere talks about something like this in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, he take the example of siblings/twins with all the same experiences but one gets better grades then the other. He says people point to this kind of case and say “one is more intelligent than the other”. But what does that mean? It means that one gets better grades than the other. So “more intelligent” is a synonym for “gets better grades”. Fine and good, but there’s a next step - people say the one causes the other - “gets better grades because of the condition of being more intelligent”, but a synonym is not a cause or an explanation, it’s a synonym.
Hardt and Negri make a similar move in Empire (I need to look those passages over again), in the sections on “incommunicability of struggles”, which falls out of their work completely post-Empire. The argument went something like “struggles didn’t communicate, they were incommunicable.” The reason for their lack of communication? Incommunicability. The evidence for incommunicability? Lack of communication. But ‘incommunicable’ in that book meant ‘not communicating’, more synonyms, and again taken for causes and explanations.
My friend Tim likes to buy people shots of whiskey and set them down, saying “Jesus hates you.”
You have to drink this. Why? Jesus hates you.
Jesus hates you. How do I know? Because you have to drink this.
He should write a book.
You friends sounds like a riot.
On Sassure - it is odd that he is still so central to social theory takes on language. I’m not so sure why that is. But I don’t quite get what you’re getting at. You’re describing two situations. In one, the set X has structure S. This describes the relationships between the elements of X. For each element of X, the structure tells us what other elements are connected to it. In the other, set X has structure S as before, but this structure arises from the operation of one or more underlying principles P. It is essentially a mater of convention if S or P is ‘the structure’, but typically, in linguistics, S would be immense, since the set X of utterances in ridiculously large, and includes all sorts of muddled sentences like this one. So ’structure’ will mean the generative principles. Is that what you’re talking about?
As for ‘another social world’ - I am anthropologist, though a heretic, since I tend to think that there is a lot less difference between social worlds than my colleagues fear or desire. The question of language is a significant one. On the one hand, without understanding a language, it is very hard indeed to know what is going in a social world (but do you need to know Chinese to understand the Chinese economy, or government? Or German to understand Kant? Although admittedly I only know five languages, I doubt it). On the other hand, do you need to know someone’s social world to understand their language? That was often the claim - say in Wittgenstein (the example of the talking lion). But this stuff gets muddy very quickly. Is it really true that another culture’s struggles will not be comprehensible? eg. Donald Davidson “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”.
I tend to think that in fact, the interesting question here is that people actually can, and do, overcome these ‘incomensurability’ problems. Look at the struggles - people do get to a position of solidarity. Even when they reject solidarity, they do so not by thinking that activists are engaged in a kind of sport, but from disagreeing with their ends - or at least that is possibly and frequently so. What does that tell us? It tells us that we have a knack of some kind for piercing through cultural bubbles. It is hard, not always benevolent, but we can do it.
Comment by Capitan-General de la Republica de Nuova Australia-ML — November 19, 2005 @ 12:27 am
Querido Capitan-General Thiago,
My friend is a riot.
What I mean to say re: Saussure (and I should say, I’m not invested in this issue regarding language all that much - I am a little - it’s more that I’ve been encountering this type of move in general lately, it bothers me, and I want to understand it better in order to stop it when I encounter it). When my friend says “Jesus hates you” that’s a synonym for “you should drink this whiskey”. It’s not really a claim about causal priority (Jesus hates you therefore you should drink this whiskey.”) When Saussure says ’structure’ (at least this is how I took the point), it at first sounds like a synonym for ‘commonality across discrete language phenomena’, but then is taken to be the cause for this commonality. What I’m ultimately after here is not Saussure but a certain displacement of agency (from people onto something else - something else that is initially a synonym for a common trend in activity but then is turned into a cause for that commonality), which is hidden in this type of argument/rhetorical move.
It’s funny you mention that Davidson piece, I’ve been meaning to re-read it for a while alonside Quine’s Two Dogmas (or is it three, I can’t recall), I have a vague recollection that Davidson posed that essay as elaborating one more dogma that Quine missed knocking.
I’ve got the same interest as you here in a sense - people’s abilities to do things that they probably shouldn’t be able to do. I think in Davidson the bubble piercing as you call it (I like that phrase) is called ‘converging on a passing theory’, but I’m not sure, it’s been a while.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — November 19, 2005 @ 12:49 am