"The Familiar" Revisited: Saussure, Weber, and the Status of Synchrony

Synchronic and Diachronic Linguistics. AI image

Questioning "the Familiar"

“If I take the liberty of recalling a distinction that has doubtless become familiar, indeed all too familiar, it is precisely in order to question that familiarity. For what has become familiar is only part of the story.” With this remark, Samuel Weber opens his discussion of Ferdinand de Saussure in Closure and Exclusion. The gesture is hermeneutic: return to what seems settled and reopen it.

Yet Weber’s own interpretation of Saussure arguably relies on a “too familiar” image of the Cours de linguistique générale: Saussure as the architect of rigid oppositions—signifier versus signified, synchrony versus diachrony—and as the theorist of pure system, and structural closure. A closer reading of the Cours complicates this picture. Saussure does not present synchrony and diachrony as substantial domains, nor does he treat the bracketing of history as metaphysical exclusion. Rather, he frames the distinction as a methodological operation grounded in the phenomenology of the speaking community. If there is closure in Saussure, it is provisional and analytic, not ontological. What has become familiar about Saussure, too, may be only part of the story.

Weber’s Reconstruction: Synchrony as Closure

Weber’s interpretation is subtle and philosophically ambitious. Beginning from Saussure’s thesis that linguistic value is differential—“The value of each term is determined by those which surround it”—he asks what limits the play of difference. If meaning arises from relational contrasts, what prevents differentiation from dispersing indefinitely? What makes a system a system?

Weber locates the answer in Saussure’s privileging of synchrony. Synchronic linguistics studies “a system of pure values determined by nothing outside of the momentary state of its terms.” This perspective, Saussure writes, “takes precedence,” since for the mass of speakers it is “the true and only reality.” The linguist who wishes to describe this state must “disregard everything that has produced it and ignore diachrony. He can enter the mind of speakers only by completely suppressing the past.”

For Weber, such suppression is not neutral. The synchronic system appears coherent only by excluding historical movement. Closure depends upon bracketing what would otherwise destabilize it. The “institution of language” maintains the parallelism between signifier and signified, but this stability rests on a constitutive exclusion of diachronic forces. The system holds together because something is left out.

This reading is powerful. Yet it risks attributing to Saussure a metaphysical commitment that the Cours explicitly resists.

“The Viewpoint Creates the Object”

One of Saussure’s most striking claims undercuts any substantialization of synchrony and diachrony: “The viewpoint creates the object.” The linguistic object is not given prior to analysis; it emerges through the angle from which it is approached. There is, he insists, “nothing to tell us in advance whether one of these ways of looking at it is prior to or superior to any of the others.”

Synchrony and diachrony are therefore not ontological strata. They are methodological cuts across a complex phenomenon. Language, Saussure repeatedly affirms, is at once system and evolution. “At any given time,” it is “an institution in the present and a product of the past.” The connection between these dimensions is so intimate that “it is hard to separate them.” Indeed, he concedes, “There is no way out of the circle.”

These are not the declarations of a thinker unaware of tension. The circularity that Weber dramatizes—the system grounded in collective consciousness, which is itself shaped by language—is already acknowledged. Saussure does not pretend to escape it; he thematizes it as intrinsic to linguistic inquiry.

Exclusion or Analytical Bracketing?

The decisive question, then, concerns the status of the synchronic reduction. When Saussure urges the linguist to “disregard” diachrony, is he enacting structural exclusion, or is he performing analytic bracketing?

Saussure’s justification is empirical rather than metaphysical. For the speaking subject, the synchronic configuration is the operative reality. Speakers do not consult etymologies when they communicate. They respond to a system of contrasts that functions in the present. “In order to know to what extent a thing is a reality,” Saussure writes, “it will be necessary and sufficient to discover to what extent it exists for the consciousness of subjects.” The synchronic state is not ontologically privileged; it is phenomenologically primary.

The linguist brackets historical development in order to describe what is functionally active in a community at a given moment. This is not a denial of diachrony’s importance. Saussure explicitly maintains that linguistic change affects isolated elements and that each modification can reverberate across the whole configuration—an insight dramatized in the chess analogy. What he suspends is not becoming itself, but its relevance for a particular analytical aim.

To treat this suspension as metaphysical repression risks conflating methodological discipline with ontological claim.

The Double Nature of Language

Far from presenting language as a seamless totality, Saussure insists on its dual constitution. Language has “an individual aspect and a social aspect. One is not conceivable without the other.” It is both a structured system and an evolving process. The attempt to isolate one dimension from the other is necessary for clarity, yet always artificial.

Even the delimitation of units poses difficulty. A language “does not present itself to us as a set of signs already delimited.” It appears rather as “an indistinct mass,” from which attention and habit carve out elements. Speakers sense distinctions without theoretical articulation; systematic analysis must labor to reconstruct what practice already negotiates implicitly.

This acknowledgment of complexity complicates Weber’s portrait of a cleanly closed structure. The Cours does not suppress instability; it stages it. The “institution of language” is not an external guarantor imposed upon difference but the name for the social crystallization of differential relations themselves.

Turning the Gesture Back

Weber’s methodological provocation remains invaluable. He compels us to see that every system draws boundaries, that intelligibility requires delimitation. Yet his account may rely upon a stabilized image of Saussure inherited from later structuralism: the theorist of self-contained systems insulated from history.

A more attentive reading reveals a thinker acutely aware of entanglement, circularity, and methodological artifice. Synchrony and diachrony are not rival territories but perspectives carved out for analytic purposes. The bracketing of history is a heuristic decision grounded in the lived experience of speakers, not a metaphysical erasure of becoming.

To question the familiar distinction between synchrony and diachrony is indeed necessary. But so too is questioning the familiar Saussure. What has become familiar in structuralist reception—the image of rigid closure—captures only part of his project. And if Weber teaches us that familiarity conceals complexity, the lesson applies equally here: the familiar is only part of the story.

Bibliography

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Roy Harris. London: Duckworth, 1983.

Weber, Samuel. “Closure and Exclusion.” In Institution and Interpretation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.