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Why Read Saussure? Learning to See the System

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  “Where there are signs there is a system.” — Jonathan Culler, Saussure (1976)   Part I — What Saussure Teaches the Reader to Notice   1. Why Read Saussure After Saussure? Why read Ferdinand de Saussure today, especially if what we want to understand is not linguistics but thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, or Jacques Derrida? At first, the answer may seem obvious. Saussure was a foundational figure in modern linguistics, and his ideas about the linguistic sign, langue , and the differential character of language became important reference points for structuralism and, later, poststructuralism. But this historical connection does not by itself explain why reading Saussure can make difficult later thinkers easier to approach. The more interesting answer is pedagogical. Saussure does not simply give the reader a set of concepts that can be transferred from linguistics to other disciplines. He develops a particular way of looking. He teaches the ...
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When Classification Becomes Power: Foucault on Knowledge, Normalization, and the Making of Subjects

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Part I —From Classification to the Individual 1. The Table Behind the Person What happens when a way of organizing knowledge becomes a way of organizing people? The question can be approached through one of the simplest operations of thought: classification. We classify in order to distinguish one thing from another, establish relations among things, and make a heterogeneous field intelligible. A table, taxonomy, or grid of categories can therefore appear to be a neutral device for arranging what is already there. Yet Michel Foucault's work invites a more difficult question: what becomes possible once a particular system of distinctions determines what can be recognized, compared, and named? In The Order of Things , Foucault approaches this problem at the level of the historical conditions under which knowledge becomes possible. His famous discussion of Borges's imaginary Chinese encyclopedia exposes the strangeness of classification by making an apparently coherent o...
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