The Point of View Creates the Object: Saussure, Barthes, and the Residue of Linguistics

 « 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 General Linguistics are often remembered for introducing distinctions such as language and speech or synchrony and diachrony. Less frequently remembered is the fact that they are largely devoted to a different problem altogether: the difficulty of determining what linguistics should study in the first place.

For Saussure, language refuses to present itself as a simple object. It is simultaneously physiological and psychological, individual and social, historical and present. Sound cannot be separated from articulation, nor articulation from auditory impressions. Speech presupposes language, but language also presupposes speech. Every time he establishes a distinction, he immediately reminds his readers that both sides remain deeply interconnected. The problem, then, is not that one aspect of language matters and another does not. Rather, they appear so closely linked that separating them becomes extraordinarily difficult.

Again and again, Saussure arrives at the same conclusion: there seems to be no way out of the circle. If we attempt to study all manifestations of language in unison, our object of study dissolves into what he calls "a muddle of disparate, unconnected things." If, on the other hand, we isolate only one aspect of language, we inevitably leave others temporarily in the margins. Faced with this difficulty, he proposes what he explicitly describes as the only solution available to him. Linguistic structure must become the linguist's primary concern, and all other manifestations of language must be related to it.

This is an important moment, perhaps more important than it initially appears. Saussure is not discovering an object waiting patiently to be found. He is constituting one through a methodological decision. His famous remark that the point of view creates the object should be understood in precisely this sense. The object is not simply given in advance. It emerges because certain questions are granted methodological priority over others.

Notice, however, the modesty of his proposal. Saussure never suggests that everything else is unimportant. On the contrary, he repeatedly emphasizes the complementary nature of linguistic phenomena. Language and speech are, in his own words, "doubtless closely linked and each presupposes the other." Saussure's problem, then, is not how to separate what belongs to language from what does not, but how to grant methodological priority to one aspect of a phenomenon whose different manifestations remain inseparable in practice. Linguistic structure becomes the primary concern not because it exhausts the phenomenon of language but because no point of view can ever exhaust it.

There is something profoundly productive about this gesture. Structuralism, in many respects, is born from it. Once the object has been constituted, extraordinarily fertile questions become possible. Rather than asking what something means in isolation, one may ask what system makes that meaning possible. Relations become more important than essences, structures more illuminating than isolated phenomena. What appears at first as a limitation becomes the condition of possibility of an entire intellectual movement.

Roland Barthes's early work enthusiastically embraces this methodological perspective. Structuralism offered him much more than a new vocabulary; it offered him a new point of view. Literature, fashion, photography, and popular culture could now be approached as systems of signification whose underlying relations might be reconstructed and analyzed. The critic's task was no longer simply to decipher meanings but to understand the conditions that made them possible in the first place.

Purification, then, should not be understood as reduction or impoverishment. Thought proceeds through acts of selection. Without methodological limitations there are no objects of study, only an undifferentiated heterogeneity that constantly escapes our grasp. Every explanation necessarily leaves something in the shadow so that something else may become visible.

The success of structuralism, however, gradually produced another possibility. Once its methods became established and its concepts familiar, a different question began to emerge. What about those dimensions of language that had necessarily remained secondary once linguistic structure became our primary concern? What about everything that General Linguistics could acknowledge as important without making it the center of its attention?

It is here that Barthes's later work becomes particularly interesting. He did not cease thinking as a semiologist. Rather, he displaced his attention. In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he describes his semiology as "the labour that collects the impurity of language, the waste of linguistics, the immediate corruption of any message." Suddenly, "desires, fears, seductions, excuses, aggressions, and melodies" become philosophically interesting. Language returns not as an abstract system but as an active and heterogeneous phenomenon. It is almost as if Barthes were saying that the time had come to direct our attention toward some of the manifestations of language that had necessarily remained in the background.

This displacement of attention should not be understood as a rejection of Saussure's project. If anything, it takes one of Saussure's fundamental insights remarkably seriously. No point of view exhausts its object. If structuralism demonstrated the extraordinary productivity of methodological purification, Barthes's later work reminds us that every purification necessarily leaves other possibilities waiting to be explored. The object remains richer than any single perspective adopted toward it.

If one were compelled to provide a very general characterization of what came to be known as structuralism and poststructuralism, one might begin here. Structuralism asks what becomes visible once a point of view has constituted an object of study and granted methodological priority to particular questions. Poststructuralism asks what becomes visible when our attention is displaced toward what that same methodological decision had necessarily left unexamined. The two gestures are less opposed than they are complementary. They simply illuminate different aspects of the same heterogeneous phenomenon.

There are, of course, many things that have remained outside these pages. We have said almost nothing about the history of structuralism and poststructuralism and have ignored much of both Saussure's and Barthes's work. This limitation is not accidental. In attempting to make one relation visible, we have necessarily left others in the background. Our own argument has therefore performed precisely the operation it has been describing from the beginning. The point of view creates the object, but no point of view exhausts it.

References

Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies. Éditions du Seuil.

Barthes, R. (1964). Éléments de sémiologie. Communications, 4, 91–135.

Barthes, R. (1977). Leçon: Leçon inaugurale de la chaire de sémiologie littéraire du Collège de France prononcée le 7 janvier 1977. Éditions du Seuil.

Saussure, F. de. (2011). Course in general linguistics (W. Baskin, Trans.; P. Meisel & H. Saussy, Eds.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1916)