Page 61 - Decoding Culture

54 DECODING CULTURE

in appropriate circumstances, it may be comprehended by those
who encounter it. Speech itself, of course, is individual - 'an indi­
vidual act of the will and the intelligence' (ibid: 14) - but the
capacity to speak in such a way as to be understood and, in turn, to
understand others' speech, is a social phenomenon, a consequence
of the shared, structuring character of language. So, the heart of
the matter lies in distinguishing, on the one hand, specific articu­
lations (parole or, in a generalized sense of the term, speech) which
are made using the terms of a language, from, on the other hand,
the language system (langue) , the structuring apparatus which
enables us to speak meaningfully in the first place. 'By distin­
guishing between the language itself and speech [En separant la
langue de la parole] , we distinguish at the same time: (1) what is
social from what is individual, and (2) what is essential from what
is ancillary and more or less accidental' (ibid: 13-14) .
For Saussure it is langue, linguistic structure, which is the
proper subject matter of linguistics. It exists independently of any
specific individual articulation for, as he repeatedly insists, langue
refers to the social and collective aspect of language. In effect, it
is the system of codes and conventions which makes intelligible
speech possible. If I speak and you understand, then that is
because we share access to a langue, and it is precisely that
shared access which enables us to communicate. Langue, then, is
crucially distinctive. 'It is not, in our opinion, simply the same
thing as language. Linguistic structure is only one part of lan­
guage, even though it is an essential part. The structure of a
language is a social product of our language faculty. At the same
time, it is also a body of necessary conventions adopted by society
to enable members of society to use their language faculty' (ibid:
9-10) . It is, Saussure adds, both a system in itself and a principle
of classification.
Saussure's insistence that the proper subject matter of

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