FAO Mastriani (re Saussure & Semiotics)

I don’t know if this is necessarily the done thing to address someone directly on ILP, so my apologies in advance if this is considered poor form (and moderators please feel free to delete or move as you see fit), but there is (I hope) a subtantive philosophical query at stake that may well be of interest to others, hence not simply taking this directly to PM.

Mastriani, I wanted to pick up on an observation you made in the “final answers” thread, but which I didn’t feel was appropriate to raise there, to wit:

I wonder if you would mind elaborating this as it is an issue of great interest to me (partly as a result of my concern for Derrida, but also given work I have done on social science in fin-de-siecle France). It especially interests me given what I read in the following article:

revue-texto.net/Saussure/Saussure.html
(Etudes → Bouquet, Après un siècle, les manuscrits de Saussure reviennent bouleverser la linguistique)

Now, accepting that this text is in French, allow me to offer a swift precis. Basically, the author discusses the limited perspective on Saussure which we have from the Course in General Linguistics (which was not written by Saussure himself, of course), but which has been thrown into a crisis of sorts by the discovery of a manuscript for a text of Saussure’s by the title Of the Double Essence of Language (translating roughly), which reveals a hitherto largely ignored “philosophical” bent to Saussure’s theories. As a consequence, the article suggests two conclusions that need to be drawn here: 1) that Saussure opposed the “scientific ideality” adhered to by most linguists; 2) that the best methodological strategy was for linguistics to open semiology to the insights of the other social and human sciences.

Given your referencing of the publication which contains this “undiscovered” Saussurian text - the Writings on General Linguistics - I would be intrigued to hear more with respect to your earlier assertion.

No harm, no foul matty. I think this is what this particular forum is for, in a disciplined sense.

I would like to read up on this more, this is a central theme that has arisen around Saussure and I’m not certain in either direction. Of course, his limited amount of published works could make this impossible.

Here is where the situation, (academically, unfortunately), can suddenly obliterate the value of semiotics.

Language is no less socio-culturally inclined than any other behavior in a contained environment. There are questions, or in my opinion there should be, as to the nature of study and any following conclusions that come from “soft” sciences. Sociology and psychology being examples, they often draw too many generalised assumptions. In a personal view, I find these generalisations to be rather less useful, and often times degrading to more empirical studies.

I think one of the primary issues for semiotics, even before expanding the field or disciplines of study, is that the arbitrary nature of the relationship between sign and signified has to have defined limitations.

From one of the other threads here, for example, the use of the word “consciousness”, although being lexical, suffers from intense and broad ambiguity. Any debates regarding this sign become so debilitated by the ambiguity as to not lend any fruitful discussions or information that can be framed outside of any particular individual.

Pragmatic semiotics has as included disciplines, at least to my knowledge, a study of behavioral linguistics. This already makes use of physiological, biological and physical gesture information.

I’m a bit of a stick for more “exacting” disciplines, but I would be interested to hear your rebuttal, if you dissent. The only thing I’m certain of is that Saussure is a hard fellow to follow, and any antecedents have necessarily taken their own route. Baudrillard strikes me as being more particularly in line with Saussure, but that’s just opinion.

Post edit: One rather interesting side note is that semioticians seem to find the study of linguistics to be a sub-study/discipline of semiotics … ?

Thanks for the post matty, and hopefully we can push this to expansive level.

Just to note, “scientific ideality” is my rather poor translation of the French phrase “l’idéal de la scientificité”, in case of any confusion.

While I agree with you here in principle, I think that in order for the social sciences to function succesfully, there has to be some level of abstraction built into their methodology (probably at an epistemological level) as a function of their inter-disciplinarity, if that makes sense. Of course, I accept that those generalisations must be rigorous in order to avoid lapsing into assumptions, but I maintain the importance of that task and am intrigued that Saussure (who worked in Paris at a time when these issues were first starting to be considered in earnest) might have had some insight to offer in that regard.

Do you have any thoughts on what those limitations might be? It sounds very interesting. Something involving “physiological, biological and physical gesture information”, I would guess?

I think you’re quite right about this, and the article I linked is really about just that issue - that our understanding of Saussure is so heavily condensed through the filter of his disciples and interlocutors that it is difficult to establish what Saussure himself had to say. In this respect, Baudrillard probably represents the most “Saussurian” of recent thinkers because he began his career as a linguistically-minded sociologist (the discipline with the closest institutional connections to linguistics in France at the time), in contrast to most of the other famous French thinkers of (post-)structuralism, except perhaps Barthes. However, this does still leave me wondering about the potential dialogue between the various social and human sciences.

Derrida certainly, whenever talking about Saussure, referred to “general semiology” and related it closely to his own idea of “grammatology”, which suggests that semiotics/semiology could have some kind of pre-linguistic theoretical function, but I am unfamiliar with how this situation has been defined by others.

Considering that I have zero capability to speak or write French, I’ll defer to your authority on the matter as sufficient for this case.

Understood. I think one thing important to highlight is that my determinations with regards to “soft sciences” are a direct cultural affectation of being in America. The hypersensitivity of those groups, (plus their incessant desire to label large groups with embellished language), here causes me to view them with a very discriminatory slant. Those groups strike me as being anything other than rigorous.

This is where things become verbose, and my apologies up front for that happening.

Due to the nature of human linguistics being part and parcel of virtually all other co-emergent properties with our species, and with respect to the fact that enumerating all of those facets can and does fall under a multitude of varying disciplines; it appears that there simply isn’t enough interdisciplinary discussion/discovery regarding the most fundamental process of language ~ “meaning”.

Take nothing said here as authority, I’m just working conceptually and theoretically from the state of knowledge apprehended, which is limited.

My first issue is one of academic uncertainty. With respect to the nature of global languages, and the broad separation between Eastern and Western languages, I have to look at the ability of individuals to ascertain socio-cultural effects upon sign, signified, denotative, connotative and modality with any real authority. Add to this that modality, possible to view through certain empirical methods, (possibly), is not just the simple matter of codifying physical gesture … with Eastern peoples that I am familiar with, the physicality involved in speaking carries very culturally specific “inflections”. The historicity of which may never be fully understood.

The next issue is one that I take more philosophically with “meaning”. As I alluded to with the “consciousness” example, it appears to me that due to the fact language is so culturally “taken for granted” as it were, “meaning” isn’t a factual or necessarily understandable reference ~ it’s a poorly constructed generalisation of an ambiguity. Even considering that most “developed” nations spend a fair amount of education on teaching the governance of language, there is nothing for meaning. Literally, how many people know the difference/relationship of morpheme, phoneme and grapheme and the significance of each to the use of language?

How do we reverse engineer the mind/language duality to better understand “meaning”? I haven’t any idea. Considering that the self-observing/self-reflective human brain requires language, and all the consequent brain mappings, to reach any determination of “self” and “others”, shouldn’t there be more emphasis put on meaning? Sign and signified carry generalised meanings within a certain geography, but even so, sometimes you can travel as little as 50 km, finding a similar sign for a common signified ~ and the relationship of “meaning” has become seriously altered. So not to sound too overly Clintonesque but “define the meaning of meaning”?

It’s a daunting prospect and task, well beyond my intellectual means, but curious and enthralling none the less.

then one understands that meaning is metaphysical and not in the symbols themselves…

-Imp

So would it be fair to say that the general philosophical query that is arising here is one about how we define and understand “meaning” and the functions it performs within our discourses?

As far as I understand the Saussure of the Course…, meaning is a function of the relationship between linguistic signs (in the broadest sense) and individual meanings can only be established on the basis of a kind of taxonomic process. In this respect, semiotics would be the attempt to trace and catalogue individual meanings across geographic, disciplinary and historical boundaries. This, in certain aspects at least, is the kind of work which I believe both Foucault and Reinhard Koselleck have attempted to undertake; I would be intrigued to hear of others who might have adopted a similar approach. What I am inclined to resist, however, given my personal academic background, is any attempt to abstract this process into some kind of universal language or logic along the lines of that which I imagine philosophers in the tradition of logical positivism or phenomenology to have undertaken; likewise, I would also be intrigued to hear the views of those more familiar with this context.

I’m still trying to gain access to more of Saussure’s work, but my direction would be that meaning is that relationship, plus more. Language is genetically programmed to be accessible; the really daunting aspect is the number of disciplines that would have to be involved to get an accurate taxonomy:

  1. Sociology/anthropology
  2. Genetics/game theory
  3. History
  4. Linguistics/Forensic linguistics
  5. Archaeology
  6. Geography
  7. Physiology
  8. Behavioral psychology
  9. Etymology
  10. Neurology
  11. Semiology

That’s just the ones I am certain about, there are likely other necessary inclusions that are being omitted due to my ignorance. Being that denotata is part of the semioticians direct discipline, that area would be the simplest at the onset. Connotata on the other hand, would certainly require a great deal of academic investment. Modality, in my estimation, presents the greatest number of difficulties.

That would be my slant on Saussure and what “appears” to be his intent, but no authority is claimed by me. The codification of signs can relatively be taken back to the central root of what defines geographic language development; I could be in error, but I believe we have a relatively high degree of certainty in this regard.

With respect Imp, I find no cause to induce that type of supposition into the equation. The signs are most often extensions of biological references and activities, and what is not would most likely be found anthropologically/sociologically.

found… discovered… uncovered… interpreted… invented…

we see the following symbol: |

what does it mean? 1? slash? not? vertical? capital I? lowercase l? shift-backslash? strike? something else?

does the author know the meaning?

meaning is posited by the reader, and it never is exactly that of the author nor of the symbols themselves…

ever see children creating their own systems of semiotics when they are asked to solve problems?

-Imp

You are using a different sense of meaning. You are expressing variances of syntactics, which is a matter of the structural governance of language.

If not, then the author has poor language skills, not certain what the relevance is here … ?

That references pragmatics. The fact that meaning is not always properly conveyed or perceived is due to what I alluded to earlier in the thread; the condition of formal language education being almost exclusively concerned with syntactics. How much time is spent in teaching the etymology of signs? For all purposes, none.

That just references the fact that the behavioral cursors involved in language development are genomically encoded. It is a hardwired developmental drive, I’m not certain what you are attempting to angle at here?

the angle is that marks on a page, symbols, can represent anything… are you demanding a transcendent (metaphysical) meaning of exactly the equivalent “A” whenever that symbol appears?

I am simply saying that this is not the case… the symbol itself has no meaning…

-Imp

I don’t think Mastriani is arguing that signs have transcendental/metaphysical meaning, rather that their meaning can be posited and ascertained as the consequence of a series of physical, psychological and social practices that make up the system of languages, hence the necessity for incorporating such a diversity of disciplines into the study of these procedures. This does not exclude “context”, quite the opposite in fact.

However, I accept that there is an inherent risk in any analysis that might be undertaken as we need to use the system of language in order to make our study of it intelligible - language is both form and content, if you like. Mastriani has already identified this as a problem, and I think it goes to the heart of my query about Saussure’s possible “philosophical insight”. Indeed, I wonder what role philosophy is to play in this interdisciplinary project - my personal inclination is to see something inherently Derridean in it, but no doubt that would prove controversial.

EDIT: I think it is also important to point out that “the sign” means rather more than simply “the symbol” in this semiotic context, incorporating as it does both “the signifier” (the physical, vocal or graphical gesture) and “the signified” (the thing referred). In other words, “the sign” is a relationship - a state of affairs - rather than an object.

as an advocate of deconstruction, I see nothing controversial in it…

-Imp

Then apologies if any of that came across as me teaching you to suck eggs!

I think the difficulty arises when I keep the distinction between the signifier and the signified… they are never the same and the signifier is not always representative of the signified… that was the point I was hoping to make clear… I deny “the sign” as anything but a private event

-Imp

There are a couple of Derrida texts - Signature Event Context and Typewriter Ribbon - that I want to read properly because I think they have important insights about that very issue, but just to say for the time being that I think the idea that meaning is no more than a “private event” is too reductive because if this were truly the case then the system of language simply wouldn’t function.

Good thread. I’m with Matty here, making meaning an entirely private event creates far more problems than it solves.

1.) In Latin-Germanic based languages, the relationship between signifier and signified is almost always socio-cultural agreement, all symbols are syntactically created, modality is primary for meaning. In the case of Sanskrit based languages, (pictographic), the symbol is representative of some physical object first, then meaning assigned upon socio-cultural agreement, modality is still a definer, but less intense due to the pictographic nature of development.

2.) As both matty and Xunz have stated, meaning being assigned only by private event renders language unintelligible and therefore useless. The historicity of language inherently shows that it is much less private than it is genetic, social and cultural.

3.) Although you may in a private event find that signified and signifier do not properly compliment to your liking, the overarching sociality has already decided to the contrary. Your private event is unceremoniously negated, unless you can alter the socio-cultural state. A fair example of this was the attempt to assert “ebonics” as an actual language class. The socio-cultural and academic pressure removed this possibility from occurring, from the latter it was due to the fact that it has none of the syntactic components of an actual language and is simply a weakened dialectic from Creole and Southern American english.

This is certainly the view I would tend to ascribe to. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that is exactly how I would define the word “event” as well.

Couple of interesting things from the thread you referenced that I’d like to pick up on:

I think this is a manifestation of my earlier point about language being both form and content of semiotic analysis, and also relevant to the potential “philosophical” impulse that derives from the study of language, from which we can probably assert the following:

Thought can definitely be a risky pursuit, and the searching for meaning(s) even more so, but that should not preclude them.

But it is also the best way, in my view, to ask a question.

I think this is quite important: differences manifestly do exist, but at the same time are foundational to the very concept of meaning itself - that is to say, without differences there can be no meanings.

I don’t think that, at the philosophical level at least, there should be a problem with things being two apparently dichotomous things at the same time: this doesn’t prohibit meaning as such, for me.

the point is that agreement (and meaning) is not in the symbol itself…

“the overarching sociality has already decided to the contrary. Your private event is unceremoniously negated, unless you can alter the socio-cultural state.”

now we unceremoniously drink the kool-aid?

-Imp