Saussure’s Laboratory: Learning to Read Modern Thought

1. The Problem Is Not What the Thinker Says

At a certain point in the televised debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, the commentator observes that the two thinkers seem to inhabit “different worlds of thought.” Their difficulty is not simply that they disagree. They appear to take concepts from one another’s arguments and immediately place them back into different frameworks, where they acquire different significance. The same words are heard, but they do not necessarily mean the same thing.

This suggests a problem that is easy to overlook. We tend to imagine thought as a direct relation between a thinker and what he says. A thinker has an idea, puts it into words, and the words express it. On this picture, understanding what someone says should ultimately mean getting behind the words to the thought that produced them.

But what if the relation is not so direct?

A speaker does not choose a language from outside language itself. The words available to him, the distinctions they permit, and the relations they establish with other words are already there when he begins to speak. A thinker likewise speaks from within a theoretical vocabulary, a set of distinctions, assumptions, and problems that gives particular terms their value. Beyond this, he may be situated within a broader historical configuration that conditions what can count as an object of knowledge, a legitimate question, or a meaningful distinction, often without this being explicitly recognized.

There are, then, several systems between the thinker and what he says.

This does not mean that the individual disappears or that what he says is simply determined by structures outside him. It means something more precise: an individual act cannot necessarily be understood by considering the act alone. Its intelligibility may depend upon relations that precede it and that the individual did not establish.

The problem, therefore, is not only what a thinker says. It is also the system within which what he says becomes intelligible.

This is where Saussure becomes important—not because Foucault simply transfers a linguistic model to history, but because Saussure provides an especially clear demonstration of what happens when we change the level at which we look. Faced with individual acts of speech, we can ask not only what has been said, but what makes those acts recognizable as linguistic acts in the first place.

Saussure’s importance, then, may lie less in a particular doctrine than in a discipline of attention. He teaches us to move from the individual act toward the system of relations in which that act has a value.

The question that will guide what follows is therefore simple:

What can Saussure teach us about the relation between an individual act and the system within which that act becomes intelligible?

2. Saussure’s Laboratory

Saussure’s answer begins with a deceptively simple distinction. Language (langage) as a human phenomenon is heterogeneous: it involves physical sounds, psychological associations, individual acts of speaking, and social conventions. If linguistics takes all of this at once as its object, the object remains difficult to delimit. Saussure therefore asks what point of view makes language into a coherent object of study.

His well-known formulation—“the point of view creates the object”—does not mean that the linguist arbitrarily invents the thing being studied. It means that an object of knowledge is constituted by the way relations within a field are selected and organized.

This becomes visible in the distinction between langue and parole. Individual utterances belong to parole: they occur at particular moments, are produced by particular speakers, and vary endlessly. Yet they are recognizable as linguistic acts because they participate in a system of distinctions and relations that exceeds any single utterance.

The crucial point is not simply that there is a system behind speech. It is that the individual act acquires its linguistic value through its relation to that system. A sound is not a linguistic unit merely because it has been uttered. It functions as such because it occupies a position within a network of differences.

The system is therefore both presupposed and reconstructed. A speaker does not first construct the language and then begin to speak. The system is already operative in speech. Yet the linguist can move in the opposite direction, from observed utterances toward the relations that make them intelligible as manifestations of a language.

This is the methodological lesson that matters here. Saussure changes the question by changing the level of analysis. Instead of asking only what an individual speaker has produced, he asks what must already be in place for that production to count as a linguistic act.

The move may seem modest, but it has wider consequences. Once we learn to distinguish an individual manifestation from the system of relations in which it functions, we can ask whether something similar occurs beyond language. Could an individual act of thought also depend upon an organization that is not created by the thinker who operates within it?

That is the question that opens the way to Foucault.

3. From Saussure to Foucault

Saussure’s importance for the present argument lies in this change of level. Instead of taking the individual utterance as the final object of explanation, he asks about the relations within which it can function as an utterance. What appears as an isolated act becomes more intelligible when we consider the organization that gives it its place and value.

If an individual linguistic act can be understood only through the system in which it functions, what happens when we ask a similar question about thought?

The answer is not to replace langue with another term. Foucault is not doing linguistics on a larger scale, and his episteme is not a historical version of Saussure’s linguistic system. The connection lies elsewhere. Both involve a change in the object of inquiry: instead of looking only at what appears, we ask about the relations that make its appearance intelligible.

This becomes especially clear in The Order of Things. Foucault is interested in the ways things can be ordered, classified, compared, distinguished, and related within a particular historical formation. His image of the “table” is useful here. A table is not merely a collection of things placed next to one another. It establishes positions and relations: it makes certain comparisons possible, separates some elements from others, and allows differences to be registered in particular ways.

The same applies to knowledge. Before asking what a particular thinker discovered, Foucault asks what sort of field made that discovery possible in the first place. What could appear as an object? What distinctions could be made? Which questions could be formulated? What counted as evidence, resemblance, difference, order, or explanation?

This changes the familiar picture of the history of science. The conventional narrative tends to run: individual → discovery → truth

A scientist observes something, formulates an idea, makes a discovery, and thereby adds a new piece of truth to the history of knowledge. The individual appears as the primary source of intellectual innovation.

Foucault does not simply reverse the arrows or deny the scientist’s contribution. His question is more unsettling. Before a discovery can take place, there must already be a field within which something can be recognized as discoverable. There must be objects that can be observed, distinctions that can be drawn, questions that can be asked, and procedures through which an answer can count as knowledge.

The archaeological question therefore moves in another direction:

historical configuration → possible objects, questions, and concepts → individual discovery

The individual remains present, but no longer occupies the position of sovereign explanatory origin. A thinker can formulate a new proposition without having created the entire field that allows the proposition to make sense. He can introduce a new concept into a vocabulary whose basic distinctions he did not establish. He can discover something previously unknown while relying on forms of classification and evidence that precede his particular contribution.

This is what makes Foucault’s notion of an episteme important. It refers to the historically specific configuration within which certain forms of knowledge become possible. It is not a set of ideas possessed by everyone at a particular time, nor a hidden doctrine consciously shared by thinkers. It is closer to a field of intelligibility within which different objects, statements, concepts, and forms of knowledge can enter into determinate relations.

That qualification matters. The field does not dictate every thought that can occur. Nor does it mean that every thinker simply reproduces the assumptions of his age. Historical formations contain tensions, exclusions, transformations, and possibilities for displacement. What archaeology brings into view is not a mechanical cause behind thought but the historical organization within which particular forms of thought and knowledge can emerge.

The question has therefore shifted once more. We began with the individual act. Saussure taught us to look at the organization that gives such an act its linguistic function. Foucault asks what historical conditions allow particular forms of organization, classification, distinction, and conceptualization to emerge.

This is why the relation to Saussure must remain methodological. The two thinkers investigate different objects, employ different procedures, and formulate different questions. Saussure nevertheless provides a way of seeing that becomes useful when approaching Foucault. Once we have learned not to treat an isolated utterance as self-explanatory, we can resist the temptation to treat an isolated act of thought in the same way.

The thinker is thus situated within several interconnected systems. At the most immediate level, there is language: the resources through which something can be said. There is also a theoretical system: the concepts, distinctions, problems, and relations through which a particular thinker organizes what he says. Beyond these lies a broader epistemic field—the historical space within which certain forms of conceptual organization can emerge.

These are not discrete layers or a rigid hierarchy. They are different levels at which the relation between a thinker and what he says can be examined. The crucial movement is therefore not from one doctrine to another, but from one level of attention to another.

This shift also changes how we approach disagreements between thinkers. If concepts acquire their significance through the relations in which they function, then two philosophers may use the same word without occupying the same conceptual space. Their disagreement may therefore concern more than the answer given to a common question. They may be organizing the question itself differently.

The Chomsky–Foucault debate provides a particularly revealing test of this possibility.

4. Chomsky and Foucault: A Test Case

The 1971 debate between Chomsky and Foucault offers a concrete instance of the problem with which we began. The subject was human nature, but the deeper difference between them becomes visible in the ways they organize the issues surrounding it. The published transcript begins with Fons Elders, the moderator, describing the two thinkers as working on opposite sides of the same mountain, with different tools.

What happens in the debate can be understood through the three levels developed above. Between a thinker and what he says there is not simply a direct relation. There is, first, a language in which something can be said; then a theoretical language in which particular terms acquire their function; and, beyond that, a broader historical field in which certain problems and questions become intelligible in the first place.

The first level is almost too obvious to notice. Chomsky speaks English; Foucault speaks French. This is not philosophically decisive, of course, and both thinkers are perfectly capable of understanding one another through translation. But the point is methodological: what is said is never independent of a linguistic system that precedes the individual speaker. Neither begins by inventing the language in which he speaks.

Consider the following passage from the Course:

“The French word mouton may have the same meaning as the English word sheep; but it does not have the same value. There are various reasons for this, but in particular the fact that the English word for the meat of this animal, as prepared and served for a meal, is not sheep but mutton. The difference in value between sheep and mouton hinges on the fact that in English there is also another word mutton for the meat, whereas mouton in French covers both. In a given language, all the words which express neighbouring ideas help define one another’s meaning.”

At first sight, when a French speaker says mouton and an English speaker says sheep, it seems that they are saying the same thing. Upon closer examination, however, we see that the relation between the two words is more complicated than it initially appears.

The more interesting level is the theoretical language. Consider terms such as human nature, creativity, freedom, knowledge, and justice. It would be tempting to assume that, because these words are recognizable to both thinkers, they are discussing the same concepts and simply disagreeing about them. But this is precisely the assumption that the Saussurean lesson allows us to question.

A term does not acquire its significance in isolation. Its value depends upon the relations it establishes with other terms within a system. Creativity, for example, has a particular function within Chomsky’s account because it is connected to his conception of human nature, freedom, and social organization. Human beings possess a creative capacity, and this capacity becomes a normative point of reference for thinking about the kind of society in which human beings might flourish.

Foucault approaches the same terrain from another direction. He is less interested in establishing a universal human capacity than in examining the historical and institutional conditions under which concepts such as justice, freedom, knowledge, and political authority acquire their particular forms and functions. His concern is not simply what human beings are capable of, but how forms of knowledge and power organize what can be said, known, and contested.

The difference, then, is not exhausted by the claim that Chomsky believes in creativity while Foucault does not. The more important point is that creativity occupies a different position within their respective theoretical systems. The word may remain the same while its relations to other concepts change, and its value changes with the system in which it functions.

This is where Saussure’s notion of value becomes useful as a heuristic. We do not need to claim that philosophical concepts are linguistic signs, still less that Chomsky and Foucault are “signifiers” in disguise. The narrower point is enough: a term cannot be fully understood apart from the system of differences and relations in which it operates. What appears to be the same concept may perform a different function when inserted into another theoretical organization.

But there is a third level: neither Chomsky nor Foucault constructs his theoretical framework from nothing. Each is also operating within a broader configuration of problems, assumptions, oppositions, objects, and possible questions. This is the level at which Foucault’s archaeological project becomes relevant.

The inquiry is no longer simply, What does Chomsky mean by creativity? What does Foucault mean by freedom? It becomes: What makes it possible for these concepts to function as they do?

This is the movement from theoretical system to epistemic field. The question concerns the historical conditions within which certain objects can become objects of knowledge, certain distinctions can become meaningful, and certain questions can be formulated as legitimate questions. The thinker does not simply choose among these conditions from outside them. He thinks within a historical field that precedes his particular statement.

This does not mean that the thinker is mechanically determined by his historical moment, nor that every concept is merely an expression of an age. The point is more precise: an individual thinker can transform a conceptual field without having created the entire field within which that transformation becomes intelligible.

Seen in this way, the apparent disagreement between Chomsky and Foucault becomes philosophically more interesting. They are not simply two individuals offering different answers to a single pre-existing question. They approach the issue from different theoretical organizations, and those organizations themselves belong to different ways of posing problems about human beings, knowledge, freedom, history, and power.

This helps explain why the debate can sometimes feel as though the participants are speaking past one another. The difficulty is not merely that they reach different conclusions. They do not always begin from the same conceptual organization. Chomsky can move from a conception of human capacities toward a normative vision of social possibility, whereas Foucault is more concerned with the historical conditions under which concepts, institutions, and forms of knowledge come to function as they do.

The debate therefore confirms the methodological lesson with which we began. To understand what a thinker says, it is sometimes necessary to move away from the statement itself and examine the systems within which its terms acquire their significance.

There are, in other words, several systems between the thinker and what he says:

language → theoretical language → epistemic field → statement

This is not a rigid hierarchy, but a set of different levels at which the relation between a thinker and his statement can be examined. Language makes certain forms of expression possible; a theoretical language organizes concepts into determinate relations; an epistemic field historically conditions which objects, distinctions, and questions can emerge as intelligible. The individual statement occurs within all three.

This is what Saussure can teach us about reading Foucault: not that langue becomes episteme, nor that Foucault secretly turns linguistics into a theory of history, but that the connection is methodological. Saussure teaches us to look for the system in the act; Foucault teaches us to look for the historical conditions that make the system itself possible.

The final question, then, is not merely What does he mean? That question remains necessary, but it is no longer sufficient. We can ask instead: What makes it possible for this to be said, understood, and recognized as meaningful here?

References

Chomsky, N., & Foucault, M. (2006). The Chomsky-Foucault debate: On human nature (J. Rajchman, Ed.). The New Press. (Original work published 1971)

Foucault, M. (1970). The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1966)

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