Continental
Introduction by translator: not composed by Saussure, but posthumosly by editors who had access to his students’ notes.
The translator bashes Saussure. Saussure was incsonsistent and his examples are bad, his choice of words are poor.
Sometimes it’s a bit too trivial, sometimes it’s obscure.
In the beginning, nothing is very interesting.
Synchronic and static linguistics.
He says it’s not about the physical nature of language, not the corporeal part, nor is it the psychological aspect of language which deals only with concepts.
It is rather about langue, which is linguistic structure.
The structure of the body is irrelevant for linguistics.
If the symphony fucks up, it’s not a problem for rachmaninov.
Linguistic structure: synchronic: the rules
Speech: diachronic: enactment of the rules
Language is collective.
Speech is not.
Signifier= that which refers
Signified= that which is referred to
Signifier + signified = sign
The sign is arbitrary
There is nothing telling you that one thing is related to another, words do not derive from things.
Speakers however have no power over language. It just means that it is contingent upon what is currently the case, and this could easily not be the case.
The nature of the linguistic structure part of our chart: To synchrony belongs general grammer, and static linguistics.
Husserl also speaks of static analysis, and genetic analysis, especially at the end of his life.
Language doesn’t refer to something that takes place in reality, but is a structure that structures language in reality. Language is a language insofar as it maintains stability.
Linguistics states are only an approximation.
Similar to Marx: it is not a history of capitalism, it is a synchronic analysis of capitalism, as in Althusser etc. There are some beats that point towards theoretical developments that have and will later take place.
What it means for something to take on an identity? Saussure and Nietzsche seem to have the same opinion.
Whatever is a signifier/signified comes into being by virtue of limitation.
Diachrony is merely a line, a ribbon of sounds with no marked divisions. So recourse must be had to meanings.
When you know the structure of a language, you can notice where limits in that speech are, where delimitations end and begin in speech.
Reality has nothing to do with the process, it has no foundation in the real. When we say that there are no foundations, we get to a kind of nihilism. Nihilistic lingusitics. It still moves and works however, without referens to material/real aspects.
Language is an indistianct mass, where habit alone lets us distinguish particular limits.
It is a kind of closed system.
The limits are given not by reality as such, but by eg. culture, the fact that any unit of speech has a correlate in linguistic structure.
Spectral objectivity (marx): non-physical objectivity. Value only appears if certain structural conditions are met.
To have the same identity is to have the same value.
Thinking is also shapeless outside of language, there does not seem to be such a thing. Whether or not the thing is thought.
Neither thought nor language are an instrument of another, they are mutually codetermined.
To seperate the two would amount to ”pure psychology” or ”pure phonology” but not linguistics.
Meaning is signifcation.
Value has a relationship to both signification and sginifier.
A sign gains its value from its relation to other signs.
Meaning is based on difference.
In virtue of their relative position.