Port-Royal and the Production of Meaning: How Systems Create Their Objects
Port-Royal has an uncanny persistence in modern debates on language, knowledge, and human nature. A seventeenth-century grammatical and philosophical project, rooted in a specific historical moment, it nevertheless reappears in contexts that seem to pull it in opposite directions. Ferdinand de Saussure treats it as a distant methodological precursor, Michel Foucault situates it within a historically bounded episteme, and Noam Chomsky invokes it as an early articulation of an innate structure of mind.
At first glance, this recurrence invites a familiar question: which interpretation is correct? Yet this question already assumes that Port-Royal carries a stable meaning awaiting discovery. What if the persistence of Port-Royal tells us something else, namely, that meaning does not reside in sources themselves, but emerges from the systems that mobilize them?
This article argues that Port-Royal functions as a revealing case study for a broader theoretical insight: objects of knowledge are constituted by points of view. Far from undermining historical reality, this claim clarifies how intellectual meaning is produced.
Saussure and the Object Created by Synchrony
Saussure’s most radical gesture is often misunderstood. He is frequently assimilated to later structuralisms concerned with essences, features, or stable structures. Yet Saussure’s own claim is more unsettling: “In language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure, 1916/1983, p. 120). Meaning arises not from intrinsic properties, but from relational position.
This explains his insistence that linguistic origins are methodologically irrelevant. Language is always inherited; no speaker witnesses the moment when signifier and signified are first joined. What matters is not genesis but structure at a given moment. The point of view—synchrony—creates the linguistic object.
Within this framework, Port-Royal appears as a partial anticipation of synchronic description:
“Their writings show us clearly that they were concerned with the description of linguistic states. Their programme was a strictly synchronic one. The grammar of Port Royal, for instance, attempts to describe the state of the French language under Louis XIV and to set out the relevant system of values. For this purpose, it has no need to make reference to the French of the Middle Ages; it keeps strictly to the horizontal axis” (Saussure,1983).
Its focus on the internal organization of a language at a given time aligns with Saussure’s methodological priority, even if its philosophical commitments differ. Port-Royal here is neither foundation nor authority; it is an element whose value depends on its position within a theoretical system.
Foucault: Port-Royal as Episteme
Foucault approaches Port-Royal from an entirely different angle. In Les Mots et les choses, it becomes an object within what he calls the Classical episteme, a historical configuration governing how knowledge was possible in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His concern is not language as such, but the conditions under which representation functioned.
Within this episteme, words were understood as transparent names for things, and knowledge was organized through tables, classifications, and taxonomies. Port-Royal grammar exemplifies this logic. As Foucault writes, “Language is nothing more than the transparent medium of representation” in the Classical age (Foucault, 1966/1970, p. 73).
Foucault, however, does not endorse this view. He reconstructs it to show its historical contingency. Port-Royal thus becomes an epistemic object produced by archaeological description, not a timeless linguistic insight.
Chomsky: Port-Royal and the Question of Innateness
Chomsky’s invocation of Port-Royal moves in yet another direction. In Cartesian Linguistics, he presents the Port-Royal grammarians as early contributors to a rationalist tradition that anticipates the idea of an innate language faculty. What matters here is not historical specificity, but continuity of a problem: how humans can generate infinite expressions from finite means.
In the Chomsky–Foucault debate, this difference becomes explicit. Chomsky seeks answers to questions of biological origin—when language emerges in the species, and what mental structures make it possible. This orientation contrasts sharply with both Saussure’s methodological bracketing of origins and Foucault’s historical delimitation of epistemes.
Port-Royal, in this context, functions as a precursor of a theory of mind. Its value lies in what it can be made to support within a cognitive framework.
One Source, Three Epistemic Objects
What emerges is not interpretive chaos, but structural regularity. The same historical material is reinscribed three times, producing three distinct epistemic objects:
- Port-Royal-as-methodological-antecedent (Saussure),
- Port-Royal-as-episteme (Foucault),
- Port-Royal-as-precursor-of-innateness (Chomsky).
This confirms, rather than contradicts, a Saussurean principle: an element has no value in itself, only within a system. Port-Royal does not “mean everything,” but it means differently depending on the theoretical network that activates it.
Mediation Without Relativism
Does this imply that history dissolves into perspectives? Not necessarily. The historical Port-Royal existed. What is irretrievable is not its reality, but its presence as an unmediated object. Access to the past is always structured by conceptual models, archives, and languages.
Here Derrida’s insight is useful, if kept in the background: irretrievability does not abolish reference; it conditions it. We do not encounter the past directly, but through systems that render it intelligible.
Conclusion: The Point of View Creates Port-Royal
Port-Royal’s persistence across Saussure, Foucault, and Chomsky is not evidence of a hidden essence waiting to be uncovered. It demonstrates how meaning emerges from systems rather than sources. Each framework produces its own Port-Royal, governed by its internal logic.
This article, finally, is no exception. By adopting a Saussurean perspective, it too constitutes its object. The point of view creates Port-Royal—once again. Far from weakening the argument, this reflexive closure confirms it.
References
Chomsky, N. (1966). Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought. New York, NY: Harper & Row.
Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original work published 1966)
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in general linguistics (R. Harris, Trans.). London, UK: Duckworth. (Original work published 1916)
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