Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

chapter 2
Saussure, Signs, and Semiotics, or
Lots of Words That Begin with S
With that broad description of cultural theory behind us, we will now turn
to a more detailed and diagrammatic comparison of essentialism and semiotics.
We take as our starting point the turn of the twentieth century, when
empiricism achieved its greatest infl uence on the humanities. This is the
era when architecture and art took an industrial turn, as seen in French
art nouveau and art deco; when ethnographic studies merged science with
humanistic anthropology; and, perhaps most notably, when the naturalistic
movement in literature asserted that novels are akin to laboratories in
which authors, like scientists, conduct experiments on their subjects (characters
and plot) to discover new laws of existence (denouements).
Linguistics also witnessed a scientifi c turn in the early twentieth century.
At the center of this movement was Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913),
a Swiss linguist whose approach came to be known as semiotics, or the
language of signs. 1 Before Saussure, linguistics tended to be an exercise in
etymology. Scholars believed the meaning of a language could be discovered
by seeking out the historical origins or genealogy of words. The modernist
foundations of etymology should be quite clear. Believing that languages
had ontological meaning that could be scientifi cally discovered, etymologists
were prototypical hermeneuticians, or essentialists. Saussure ruptured
this approach by defi ning words as belonging to a system of what he called
signs. He insisted that everything in the world, every sound, image, gesture,
thing, etc., is a sign. In short, Saussure argued that the entire material world
and every attempt by human beings to communicate with one another
about it consist of signs. This might sound like the ranting of a harmless
academic, and Saussure’s ideas did indeed remain relatively unknown and