Structuralism and Its Discontents: From Saussure to Poststructuralism

Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916 by his former students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from lecture notes taken at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911, laid the foundations for structuralist thought across the twentieth-century human sciences. Saussure argued that the linguistic sign unites a signifier (the sound-image) and a signified (the concept) in a relationship that is fundamentally arbitrary rather than natural — there is no inherent reason why a given sound-image should designate the concept it does, since other languages designate the same concept with entirely different sound-images (French "arbre," German "Baum," both meaning "tree"). He further distinguished langue, the abstract, shared system of a language, from parole, its individual instances of speech, and insisted that meaning arises not from any positive property of a sign in isolation but from its differential position within the whole system — a sign means what it means because it is not any other sign. This purely relational, differential model of meaning, later termed structuralism, supplied a method that could, in principle, be exported from linguistics to any signifying system: myth, kinship, fashion, narrative.