H199 The Linguitic Turn

[Begins in the early 20th Century with Saussure but really comes into its own in the 1970s-1980s.]

We can define the linguistic turn, in general, as the rejection of any approach to meaning, value, sense, or concepts that would lie beyond linguistic systems. Language, in this view, is capable only of being self-referential, meaning it can only refer to other things within its own closed system which French linguist Ferdinand Saussure (1857–1913) called a "chain of signifiers." Nothing more, nothing less.

Language for Saussure, then, is a closed system of binary oppositions that produce arbitrary meanings. Or, as scholar Jane Caplan summarizes, “’Saussure claims...that meaning in language is the product not of reference to things exterior to it, but of a system of difference internal to language as a code...these emphasize the arbitrariness of any system of signification, and to detach it from external reference, whether to the past or to the real, as the guarantee of its meaning or truth.’” (From “Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, and Deconstruction: Notes for Historians,” Central European History 22, no. 3/4 (1989): 271. Italics mine.)

Saussure is best known today for the development of a radically different conception of language and of the methodology of linguistics which became central to twentieth-century structural linguistics. He approached a new theory of language from two different perspectives. On the one hand, language is a system of signs. That is, a semiotic system; or a semiological system as he calls it. On the other hand, a language is also a social phenomenon: a product of the language community. Saussure disagreed with the common notion that each word corresponds "to the thing that it names" or what is called the referent in modern semiotics. Rather, in Saussure's notion, the word 'tree' does not refer to a tree as a physical object, but to the psychological concept of a tree. The linguistic sign thus arises from the psychological association between the signifier (a 'sound-image') and the signified (a 'concept'). 

According to his conception, then language is nothing more than a system of signs--a"chain of signifiers"--which are basically arbitrary, so that their significations are determined only by the historically constituted systems of conventions to which they belong. Without that context all the words and phrases we rely on have no real meaning.

Saussure would be influential in reviving not only language studies but also in changing the paradigm of research and our worldview. In the early 60’s and 70’s, scholars like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Claude Levi Strauss were quick to apply Saussurean Linguistics in their own fields of study.

Foucault, for instance, would declare that the history of western civilization is a function of its history of madness or the birth of its asylums. Derrida would challenge philosophy for its logocentrism. Barthes would study popular culture and see it as an arena or contestations of meanings. Kristeva would foreground the problem of feminine ecriture. Levi-Strauss would debunk the superiority of Western civilization and extol primitive societies as equally scientific and rational.