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The Protean Nature of Language: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and the déchet of Linguistics

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“It would be absurd to try to draw a panorama of the Alps as seen from a number of peaks in the Jura simultaneously. A panorama must be taken from just one point. The same is true of a language”. — Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics The Problem of Delimitation Every science begins with a question that is often forgotten once the discipline has become established: what exactly is its object of study? Before a science can explain anything, it must first determine what it is trying to explain. This task may appear straightforward, but it is rarely so. The world does not arrive already divided into neatly bounded objects waiting to be investigated. On the contrary, phenomena tend to appear as complex, interconnected, and resistant to clear classification. The constitution of a field of inquiry is therefore not the discovery of a pre-existing entity but the result of a methodological decision. No example illustrate this problem more clearly than Ferdinand de Sauss...
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The Point of View Creates the Object: Saussure, Barthes, and the Residue of Linguistics

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  « La sémiologie serait dès lors ce travail qui recueille l'impur de la langue, le rebut de la linguistique, la corruption immédiate du message : rien moins que les désirs, les craintes, les mines, les intimidations, les avances, les tendresses, les protestations, les excuses, les agressions, les musiques, dont est faite la langue active. » Roland Barthes, Leçon Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and the déchet of Linguistics Every attempt to understand something begins with a limitation. We decide, consciously or not, where our attention will be directed and what will remain in the background. This is not a defect of thought but one of its conditions of possibility. No science, discipline, or theory can study everything at once. To explain something is also to establish its boundaries. What becomes visible is inseparable from the point of view we adopt. No thinkers understood this problem more clearly than Ferdinand de Saussure. The opening chapters of his Course in Gene...
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