Faits de parole, faits de langue (Was: Indirect objects, Saussure, etc.)

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13 Dec 2002, Nicholas Siemensma wrote:

1. Indirect and direct objects

"The indirect object is the thing or person affected by
the verbal action though not primarily acted upon, not
the primary object.  So Louis functions as the
indirect object in the following sentence: "Give Louis
the cup of coffee."  "

If I am not wrong, we are talking about two different conceptions
here. The fact is that some grammarians, in English in particular,
and, as someone already explained, in a very salutary reaction
against the Latinizing prescriptivists of the 19th. Century, decided
that _at least in English_ the direct/indirect object were defined by
their place in the word order, not by the _logical_ contents of the
idea. In Romance languages it is much easier because extensive usage
of prepositions (which, by the way, are generally less than in
English) make word order less important. By the way, my first example
was intentionally written in _bad_ English, just to translate the
_Spanish_ structure as much as possible.


2. Frozen structuralism and de Saussure

Nick:

"The critiques by Nestor, Anthony and Ed of the
diachronic perspective in grammar and its naive,
vulgar and frequently racist "evolutionism" are
correct as far as they go.  However, privileging the
synchronic over the diachronic (or separating them
strictly in the first place) as Saussure did reminds
me a little of the Althusserian attack on the
evolutionary perspective, or "historicism." "

Nestor:

"Ah, Structure, how many crimes are made in your name! "
Paraphrasing poor Marie Antoinette, Ferdinand would have wept bitter
tears at the usage the Althusserians made of his structuralist vision
of language. Because the link that Nick is pointing to here was
expressly stated by early Althusserians and in fact by the school of
Roland Barthes, et al.

The only Marxist that I know who battled seriously against this kind
of structuralism was Lucien Goldmann. I always wonder why nobody
reads him any more. His criticisms to Althusser and the linguistic
structuralists were excellent, and what's more interesting, he
demonstrates that the "Saussureans" were betraying Saussure in the
first place, when they "forgot" that old Ferdinand himself had
established a difference between "faits de langue" and "faits de
parole".  In Spanish this translates as "lengua y habla". Don't know
how is it said in English. But the idea is that while languages
cannot be understood without remission to their meaning and the
symbolic function (that is to philosophy and history, I add), words
and the system of words that people use to make those meanings a
common experience of speakers in their common task of building the
collective existence of the species can be analyzed in terms of -so
to say- their "mechanic" properties within the "aparato fonador"
(this is Spanish, meaning the system of bones, cavities and muscles
that allow humans to speak, don't know English translation).

That is, Goldmann stressed, in a deep Marxist criticism of the
"linguistic structuralists" that goes in the same sense as Nick's
observations (which I share to the last comma), that in the
"structuralists" there is a more or less intentional ellimination of
the basic distinction that their own purported teacher had made. This
can be understood when we look at the meaning of "meaning" in the
strictly _linguistic_ sense, and in its philosophical sense (Goldmann
holds that de Saussure was perfectly aware that when meanings in the
philosophical sense were at issue, his system was useless and...
meaningless as _per se_).

Let us begin by the non-philosophical, strictly phonological sense.
What de Saussure said was that if the sound produced by a given
articulation of tongue, throat, teeth, etc. _within a certain set or
structure of oppositions of sounds_ allows the speaker to convey a
different meaning than another articulation (pet/bet, set/met,
wet/let, jet/yet: this is a general example of de Saussurean basics)
then both articulations are _internally meaningful_.
But, and this the "structuralists" conveniently forget, this meaning
is restricted to the structure of oppositions of sounds, tickles,
chuckles, gestures and grimaces that, all of them, make up human
language (I am extending de Saussure a little bit here, but I am sure
he would be in agreement).

Then, this _meaning_ has _nothing at all to do_ with "meaning" in the
philosophical sense, that is as an expression of a tendency to solve
a given social and historic structure of action and mind in a certain
sense or in a different one.

Explaining this, and much more, and much better, was part and parcel
of Lucien Goldmann's battle against the formalistic structuralism
which he described as the ideology of the managerial elites of
regulated capitalism in Western Europe during the 60s and 70s. I
strongly recomment his work, but I have already given up in my hope
to hear someone tell us: "Yes, this Nestor was right, Goldmann does
not deserve his place as a 'minor member of the Lukacsian school'
only because he took pains not to write in an arcane style".

I fully agree that anti-philosophical structuralism " throws
the baby out with with the bathwater." I would add that this was not,
in fact, "de Saussure's anti-historicism" which "lead to the anti-
historicism of structuralism" but, conversely, that the anti-
historicist position of the managerial classes took their
intellectual representatives to adscribe to de Saussure ideas that he
had not held, not so firmly at the very least!

And I agree with "The materialist grammar
that Ed speaks of should be able to (it must)
re-integrate diachrony without falling into the
evolutionist or racist trap."  I strongly recommend a careful reading
of Lucien Goldmann's things if we want to help establishing the
foundations of such a grammar.

Obviously, I am against any form of anti-historicism. Only that I
believe that de Saussure's self-appointed followers weren't even
faithful to their teacher.

Hugs to all,

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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"Aquel que no está orgulloso de su origen no valdrá nunca
nada porque empieza por depreciarse a sí mismo".
Pedro Albizu Campos, compatriota puertorriqueño de todos
los latinoamericanos.
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