Page 62 - Decoding Culture

ENTER STRUCTURALISM 55

linguistics is langue has radical consequences for the study of lan­
guage. It underlines the irreducibly social character of language,
an achievement in itself, but it also gives much greater force to the
argument for the necessity of theory and, thereby, to a more
deductively inclined epistemology than was common in nineteenth­
century thought. Since langue is the 'absent' system which makes
speech possible, it cannot be apprehended directly but only
through its instantiations in speech. In effect, then, the study of
langue requires us to develop theoretical models of its systems of
codes and conventions and to demonstrate that such models ade­
quately capture the capacity of language systems to enable speech.
And although Saussure himself (in the passage quoted earlier)
writes of discovering 'forces operating universally' and 'general
laws' when he characterizes the goals of linguistics, the thrust of
his detailed analysis suggests a rather more holistic relation
between model and evidence than might be expected from such a
mechanistically influenced view of science. It is the system as a
whole which enables speech, and its systemic quality cannot, with­
out loss, be reduced to the propositional form characteristic of
sciences primarily concerned to establish law statements. I am not
suggesting here that Saussure consciously anticipated changes in
scientific epistemology which would only become clear later in the
century - only that part of the innovative quality of his work is
that in its conceptual apparatus it presupposes a view of theory and
method which, at that time, was still relatively undeveloped.
He is also fully aware that the argument he advances for the
study of langue is more generally applicable to other systems of
signs. 'A language is a system of signs expressing ideas, and hence
comparable to writing, the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, symbolic rites,
forms of politeness, military signals, and so on. It is simply the
most important of such systems' (ibid: 15 . He envisages the pos­
)
sibility of a science which will examine all these sign-systems,

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