Episode 51: Semiotics and Structuralism (Saussure, et al)

Summary: On Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) (Part I and Part II, Ch. 4), Claude Levi-Strauss's "The Structural Study of Myth" (1955), and Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" (1966).<br> What is language? What is the relation between language and reality? Saussure argued that a language at a given time has a structure, where you can only really understand the meaning (or "value") of a word by contrasting it with other words. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss generalized this to all of culture, and Derrida, while rejecting the structuralist project, takes the notion of "difference" between words to uproot all meaning from any non-linguistic reality. (Probably... even our guest <a href="http://skepoet.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">C. Derick Varn</a> who's read the Derrida essay dozens of times isn't sure what it means.) <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/02/01/now-taking-questions-on-semiotics-and-structuralism-saussure-levi-strauss-derrida/" target="_blank">Learn more about the topic and get the readings</a>.<br> End song: "Slipped into Words," written and recorded by <a href="http://marklint.com/" target="_blank">Mark</a> in 1991, released on <a href="http://marklint.com/maytrick.html" target="_blank">The MayTricks</a>, which you <a href="http://marklint.com/MayTricksAlbum.html" target="_blank">can freely download in full</a>.<br> If you enjoyed this episode, please consider a <a href="http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/donate" target="_blank">donation</a>.<br>