Language

Language became a scientific object of study only in late modernity. According to Foucault (1966/1994: 322): ‘From the nineteenth century, language […] became one object of knowledge among others, on the same level as living beings, wealth and value, and the history of events and men.’ Language was consolidated at the same time organism and labour were, respectively, consolidated in natural sciences and political economy: ‘The analysis of wealth is to political economy what general grammar is to philology and what natural history is to biology’ (Foucault 1966/1994: 182). However, according to Cassirer (1945), linguistics gradually emancipated itself from German organicism that saw language as an object of study analogous to a form of life. Emerging from philology, linguistics became akin to a natural science studying a form of life, and only later a human science studying a cultural form.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the philosophy of language gained momentum through its variants of positivism (Frege 1879; Carnap 1928; Wittgenstein 1922), which are not covered here. The positivist break in establishing language as an object of study in human sciences outside philosophy came from the publication of Ferdinand Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) and of C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning (1923). The former inaugurated a dyadic theory of the sign that grounded French structuralist linguistics, the latter a triadic theory of the sign that consolidated interpretative semiotics in the legacy of Charles Sanders Peirce (Eco 1976). Structuralism, then, became more hegemonic than interpretative semiotics because of its well-tempered blend of positivism, reductionism and relativism—and because of financial support by US military interests (Heller and McElhinny 2017).

Saussure’s (1916) dyadic theory is based on four main oppositions that seem to resolve language as an entity across the coordinates of a Cartesian plane. First, the historical development of language is divided into synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Second, language is then separated into langue (a given language as a system of rules) and parole (the act of speech in itself). Third, the act of speech is divided across syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations that represent language as a system of differences. Fourth, the sign is separated into signifier and signified. The key aspect of Saussure’s linguistics is that it conceived language as an abstract system of differences. Actually, it is the system as such that projects language:In language, there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language, there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system (Saussure 1916/2011: 149).

Jameson saw linguistics taking part in the early twentieth century crisis of sciences and contributing to the shift from substantialism to formalism, in a similar way in which Cassirer (1910) recorded the shift from the concept of substance to function in physics. Jameson (1972: 14, 35) did not see a continuity between organicism and structuralism, rather a break with the organic obsession. Going beyond organicism, Saussure's structuralism is a theoretical turn in which objects become the effect of an extended field of relations—that is, of the system.

The linguist Roman Jakobson (1929/2023), (1961a), 1961b) played a central role in consolidating structuralism and exporting its worldview to other disciplines, above all anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1949). Structuralism took language as the foundational homology for all social structures—from kinship systems to mythologies, from design artefacts to ideologies (Dosse 1997, 1998). It sought to politicise these ‘structures’ and to reinterpret political economy (including Marxism) through a linguistic lens: capital itself was understood as a ‘semiotic operator.’ Ultimately, structuralism was contested by post-structuralism, which advanced a philosophy of subjectivity against its logocentrism. ‘Structures do not take to the streets’, declared a well-known graffiti from 1968. Post-structuralism exposed structuralism’s limitations, yet something was lost in the antagonism between them. Because of its harsh critique of linguistic abstraction, post-structuralism (see especially Deleuze and Guattari 1972) was left ill-equipped to confront the automation of language in late capitalism.

According to Jameson, structuralism was not a neutral scientific achievement, but rather a projection of the political composition of its days. The adoption of language as a model across disciplines other than linguistics had to be found not in scientific validity or technological progress, but:in the concrete character of the social life of the so-called advanced countries today, which offer the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs. There is therefore a profound consonance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture today. (Jameson 1972: viii)

Nevertheless, in the mediation of this ‘disembodied nightmare’, which is another name for commodity fetishism, one should not overlook the role of technology. In the years of structuralism, for instance, Lacan did not overlook this aspect and described the regime of the Symbolic (i.e. language) as a common ground between the unconscious and cybernetic machines.We are very well aware that this machine doesn't think. We made the machine, and it thinks what it has been told to think. But if the machine doesn't think, it is obvious that we don’t think either when we are performing an operation. We follow the very same procedures as the machine. […] Through cybernetics, the symbol is embodied in an apparatus—with which it is not to be confused, the apparatus being just its support. And it is embodied in it in a literally trans-subjective way. (Lacan 1955/1988: 304)

Structuralism and cybernetics emerged almost simultaneously, but the success of the former was also due to the influence of the latter on French thought (Lafontaine 2007; Liu 2010; Geoghegan 2023). Behind structuralism was not only Saussure’s linguistics, but also the formalisation of language enforced by early information technologies such as telegraphy. Jakobson presented at the Fifth Macy Conference on cybernetics and linguistics in 1948 (Van de Walle 2008), and later recognised that:‘There appear indeed striking coincidences and convergences between the latest stages of linguistic analysis and the approach to language in the mathematical theory of communication. […] The dichotomous principle underlying the whole system of distinctive features in language was gradually disclosed by linguistics and found corroboration in the binary digits (or to use the popular portmanteau, bits) employed as a unit of measurement by the communication engineers’ (Jakobson 1961b: 245).

His modernism and, at the same time, limit (as per Lacan) was to think that linguistics and information theory share the same principles. Structuralism and cybernetics surely shared a common root but this has to be identified in the controversial language–machine analogy, rather than in language per se.