Saussure and the Grounds of Interpretation

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Saussure and the Grounds of Interpretation

David Herman

North Carolina State University

Š 2002 David Herman.

All rights reserved.

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Review of:

Roy Harris, Saussure and His Interpreters. New York: New York UP,

2001.

1. The author of a 1983 English translation of Ferdinand de Saussure's

Cours de linguistique générale, as well as two previous books

centering on Saussure's theories of language (Reading Saussure and

Language, Saussure, and Wittgenstein), Roy Harris brings a wealth of

expertise to his new book on Saussure. More than this, as is amply

borne out in the early chapters of Saussure and His Interpreters,

Harris is deeply familiar with the various manuscript sources (i.e.,

students' notebooks) on which Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye

relied in producing/editing what became the Course in General

Linguistics, the first edition of which was published in 1916. [1]

Added to these other qualifications is Harris's stature as an expert

in the field of linguistic theory more generally. [2] From all of

these achievements emerges the profile of a commentator uniquely

positioned to interpret--to understand as well as adjudicate

between--previous interpretations of Saussure.

2. To be sure, Harris's background and research accomplishments--his

knowledge of the origins, details, and larger framework of Saussurean

language theory--are unimpeachable. [3] But while Harris's credentials

are unimpeachable, there remains the question of whether those

credentials have equipped him to take the true measure of Saussure's

interpreters, i.e., those who claim (or for that matter disavow) a

Saussurean basis for their work. This question, prompted by the tone

as well as the technique of a book cast as an exposé of nearly a

century's worth of "misreadings" of Saussure, is itself part of a

broader issue exceeding the scope of the author's study. The broader

issue concerns the exact nature of the relation between ideas

developed by specialists in particular fields of study and the form

assumed by those ideas as interpreted (and eo ipso adapted) by

non-specialists working in other, more or less proximate fields. Also

at issue are the nature and source of the standards that could (in

principle) be used to adjudicate between better and worse

interpretations of source ideas imported into diverse target

disciplines--that is, into domains of study in which, internally

speaking, distinct methods and objects of interpretation already hold

sway. Indeed, even within the same discipline in which the ideas in

question had their source, interpretations can vary widely--as

suggested by Harris's chapters on linguists who in his view

misunderstand or misappropriate Saussure (the list includes such major

figures as Leonard Bloomfield, Louis Hjelmslev, Roman Jakobson, and

Noam Chomsky). Although these deep issues sometimes surface during

Harris's exposition, they do not receive the more sustained treatment

they deserve. The result is a study marked, on the one hand, by its

technical brilliance in outlining the Rezeptiongeschichte of

Saussurean theory, but on the other hand by its avoidance of other,

foundational questions pertaining to the possibilities and limits of

interpretation itself. The salience of those questions derives, in

part, from the transdisciplinary legacy of Saussure's own work.

3. It is worth underscoring at the outset that Harris's account of

Saussure and his interpreters is not merely a descriptive one.

Granted, the author carefully traces the transformation and

recontextualization of Saussurean ideas as they were propagated within

the field of linguistics and later (or in some cases simultaneously)

migrated from linguistics into neighboring areas of inquiry. [4] But

Harris does not rest content with pointing out where an intra- or

interdisciplinary adaptation differs from what (in his interpretation)

is being adapted. Persistently, in every chapter of the book, and

sometimes in quite vituperative terms, Harris construes this adaptive

process as one involving distortion, i.e., a failure to get Saussure

right. [5] I discuss Harris's specific claims in more detail below.

For the moment, I wish to stress how this prescriptive, evaluative

dimension of the author's approach is at odds with what he emphasizes

at the beginning of his study--namely, the status of Saussure's text

as itself a construct, a constellation of interpretive decisions made

by those who sought to record and, in the case of his editors,

promulgate Saussure's ideas.

4. Indeed, Harris's meticulous analysis of the textual history of the

Course invites one further turn of the Saussurean screw: if the very

text on which all subsequent interpretations have been built is itself

the product of students' and editors' interpretations, then who,

precisely, is in a position to interpret Saussure's interpreters? Or

rather, where is the ground on which one might stand to distinguish

between the wheat of productive adaptations and the chaff of non- or

counter-productive misappropriations, whether these borrowings are

made within or across the boundaries of linguistic study? [6] In this

connection, there is a sense in which Harris seeks to have his cake

and eat it, too. The author advances the claim that, in the case of

Saussure's text, interpretation goes all the way down, meaning that no

feature of the Course is not already an interpretation by Saussure's

contemporaries. But he also advances the claim that at some point (is

it to be stipulated by all concerned parties?) interpretation stops

and the ground or bedrock of textual evidence begins (2), such that

those of Saussure's successors who engaged in particular strategies or

styles of interpretation can be deemed guilty of error, of violating

the spirit (if not the letter) of Saussure's work.

5. As demonstrated by the early chapters of Saussure and His

Interpreters, no writer is more aware than Harris that the book often

viewed as the foundational document of (European) structuralism was in

fact a composite creation, a portmanteau assemblage of

more-or-less-worked-out hypotheses by Saussure himself, re-calibrated

for the purposes of undergraduate instruction; notes taken by students

not always consistent in their reports of what Saussure actually said

in class; conjectures, surmises, extrapolations, and outright

interpolations by the editors of the Course; and, later,

interpretations of Saussure by linguists, anthropologists,

semioticians, and others--interpretations because of which later

generations of readers came to "find" things in Saussure's text that

would not necessarily have been discoverable when the book first

appeared. As Harris puts it in chapter 1, "Interpreting the

Interpreters," "the majority of Saussure's most original contributions

to linguistic thought have passed through one or more filters of

interpretation" (2). As Harris's discussion proceeds, the emphasis on

Saussure's ideas as inevitably interpretively filtered gives way to a

series of attempts to dissociate Saussure's theories from a group of

filters that seem to be qualitatively different from those falling

into the initial group (i.e., students and editors). Harris

distinguishes between the two sets of filters by dividing them into

contemporaries and successors (3-4), although by Harris's own account

neither group can be exempted from the process by which Saussure's

ideas were actively constructed rather than passively and neutrally

conveyed. Given that (as Harris discusses in chapter 3) Saussure's

editors took the liberty of writing portions of the Course without any

supporting documents, it is not altogether clear why the parameters of

distance in time and intellectual inheritance (4) are sufficient to

capture what distinguishes a successor's from a contemporary's

interpretations. An editorial interpolation is arguably just as

radically interpretive as any post-Saussurean commentator's

extrapolation. In any case, in interpreting Saussure, neither

contemporaries nor successors have stood on firm ground, whatever

their degree of separation in time and tradition from the

flesh-and-blood "author" of the Course.[7]

6. Indeed, Harris's concern early on is with the difficulty or rather

impossibility of getting back to the solid ground of Saussure's

"true"--unfiltered--ideas. In chapter 2, "The Students' Saussure," the

author remarks that two separate questions must be addressed in

considering the students' notebooks as evidence concerning Saussure's

ideas: on the one hand, whether the students understood their

teacher's points; on the other hand, whether what Saussure said in

class always reliably indicated his considered position on a given

topic (17). With respect to the latter question, Saussure may have

sometimes been unclear, and he also may have sometimes oversimplified

his views for pedagogical reasons. The challenge of reconstructing the

Saussurean framework on the basis of student notes is therefore

considerable. Moreover, Saussure's decisions about what to include in

his lectures were in some cases dictated by the established curriculum

of his time, rather than by priorities specific to his approach to

language and linguistic study. Assuming as much, Saussure's editors

expunged from the published version of the Course the survey of

Indo-European languages that he presented in his actual lectures

(18-23), to mention just one example.

7. As for the editors themselves, Harris discusses their role in chapter

3. The author notes that, in statements about the Course written after

the publication of the first edition, Bally and Sechehaye came to

quote their own words as if they were Saussure's (32). The publication

of Robert Godel's Les Sources manuscrites du Cours de linguistique

générale de F. de Saussure in 1957, however, revealed that many of the

editors' formulations lacked any manuscript authority whatsoever. They

were imputations by Bally and Sechehaye rather than, in any nontrivial

sense, reconstructions of the student notebooks. Also, in selecting

which Saussurean materials to include in the Course and in making

decisions about which ideas should be given pride of place in the

exposition, the editors were inevitably biased by their own linguistic

training and theories. The editors' biases came into play in their

choices about how to present such key distinctions as those between

signification and value, synchrony and diachrony, and "la langue" and

"la parole."

8. In chapters 4-10, Harris's focus shifts from contemporaries to

successors, with chapter 11 attempting to take stock of "History's

Saussure." As the first group of interpretive filters, Saussure's

contemporaries already impose a layer of mediation between the

linguist's theories and modern-day readers' efforts to know what those

theories were. But the second group of filters imposes what often

comes across as an even thicker--and somehow more reprehensible--layer

of intervening (mis)interpretations on top of the layer already there

because of the contemporaries' (mis)interpretations. Thus, the

chapters in question portray a process by which a series of filters

get stacked one by one on top of Saussure's already-filtered ideas,

according to the following recursive procedure:

Filter 1 (Saussure's ideas filtered through students and editors)

Filter 2 (Filter 1(Saussure's ideas filtered through students and

editors))

Filter 3 (Filter 2(Filter1(Saussure's ideas filtered through

students and editors)))

etc.

As each successive filter gets pushed onto the stack, Saussure's ideas

(at least as they were interpreted by his contemporaries rather than

his successors) recede farther in historical memory. Even worse, the

filters continually being loaded on the stack are the handiwork of

commentators guilty of carelessness (Chomsky), incomprehension

(Bloomfield, Jakobson, Claude Lévi-Strauss), confusion (Roland

Barthes), or even meretricious slander (Jacques Derrida), as the case

may be.

9. Again, though, this compilation of misreadings seems strangely at odds

with Harris's earlier emphasis on the instability of the Course as

itself an assemblage (one might even say stack) of more or less

plausible interpretations. Does Harris mean to imply that, in shifting

from contemporaries to successors, the interpretations of the former

become "evidence" on which the latter must base their own, later

interpretations? If so, by what mechanism (and at what point on the

continuum linking contemporaries and successors) does an

interpretation or set of interpretations achieve evidential status?

Though centrally important to Harris's study, these questions about

validity in interpretation are never explicitly posed (let alone

addressed) by the author.

10. To take the linguists first, Harris identifies a host of

misinterpretations of Saussure on the part of scholars who, as

specialists in Saussure's field of study, apparently should have known

better. None of the linguists included in the author's scathing series

of exposés emerges in very good shape. In "Bloomfield's Saussure,"

Harris suggests that the famous American linguist misunderstood the

distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, the

Saussurean conception of the sign, and, more generally, the

relationship between Saussure's theoretical position and his own.

"Hjelmslev's Saussure" characterizes the Danish linguist's theory of

glossematics as one that claims to be the logical distillation of

Saussurean structuralism but ends up looking more like a "reductio ad

absurdum" of Saussure's ideas: "Glossematics shows us what happens in

linguistics when the concept of la langue is idealized to the point

where it is assumed to exist independently of any specific

materialization whatever" (90), and thus stripped of the social

aspects with which Saussure himself invested the concept (93). [8] In

"Jakobson's Saussure," Harris notes that whereas Jakobson presented

himself as a Saussurean, the Russian linguist rejected a number of

Saussure's key tenets, including the crucial principles of linearity

and arbitrariness (96-101). More than this, Harris rather uncharitably

discerns a careerist motive for the fluctuations in Jakobson's

estimates of Saussure's importance over the course of his (Jakobson's)

career. Harris's argument is that while Jakobson was still in Europe,

he felt obliged to pay tribute to Saussure; but when Jakobson

emigrated to the U.S. and tried to establish himself as a linguist

during a time when anti-mentalist, behaviorist doctrines were the

rule, he shifted to an attack mode.

11. Even harsher than his comments on Jakobson, however, are the remarks

found in Harris's chapter on "Chomsky's Saussure." In the author's

view, "far from seeing himself as a Saussurean, from the outset

Chomsky was more concerned to see Saussure as a possible Chomskyan"

(153). But though Chomsky tried to map the distinction between "la

langue" and "la parole" into his own contrast between competence and

performance, and also to conscript Saussure's mentalist approach into

his campaign against then-dominant behaviorism,

Saussure's apparent indifference to recursivity showed that being