the system and it is this limitation of the individual’s free expression that has proved the most controversial of Saussure’s ideas. As the philosopher Richard Kearney has succinctly pointed out:

         It implied a fundamental rejection of the romantic and existentialist doctrines that the individual consciousness or ‘genius’ is the privileged locus of the creation of meaning. In answer to Sartre’s view, for example, that each individual existence is what each individual makes of it, the structuralist replies that the meaning of each person’s parole is governed by the collective pre-personal system of langue.5

         Saussure’s third important principle is founded on a further binary opposition, this time concerned with the question of history and its relevance to the underlying structure of language. As Saussure had dismissed the notion of meaning as a product of the relationships between words and things, he was thereby also able to dispense with the ways these might have changed with the passage of time. He thus made the distinction between the diachronic study of language, which looks at its development across historical time, and his preferred synchronic analysis which isolates the system at a particular moment in a “frozen” state. It is here that Saussure departs most dramatically from the traditional habits of linguistic study, with its usual emphasis on philology and etymology and the complex interactions of cultural forces. Saussure concluded that while particular acts of parole may be continually changing with the passage of time, beneath these “surface” effects lay the deep and timeless structure of langue. At any point in history this deep structure could be subjected to analysis and this would always yield the most informative picture of the systems of meaning at work in language.

         What Saussure laid out was a method of analysis which those who followed him applied in practice – he did not himself live long enough to develop the science of signs which he had already dreamt of and christened semiology:

Words like the French ‘whip’ or glas knell’ may strike certain ears with suggestive sonority, but to see that they have not always had this property we need only examine their Latin forms (fouet is derived from fagus, ‘beech tree’; glas from classicum, ‘sound of a trumptet’). The quality of their present sounds, or rather the quality that is attributed to them is a fortuitous result of phonetic evolution.4

         This lead Saussure to the observation that language operated as a “system of difference”, where the functioning of words depended on their relationships with one another, rather than any necessary connection to the objects to which they refer. For example, there is nothing particularly animal-like about the words “rat” or “cat”, whereas the difference between rat and cat is obviously quite significant to the meaning of a sentence. Communication is possible within this system due to the mutual agreement which governs its use, and this also depends on the user’s knowledge of the conventions, without which the letters r-a-t would simply be three black marks on a page. This principle frees Saussure to concentrate on the syntactic dimension of language, the internal rules of combination which structure its operation, as opposed to the semantic dimension or the external reference and meaning. In other words, what Saussure is studying is the form rather than the content of language, isolating what for him is the most important aspect of the problem.

         The second of Saussure’s three principles emerged from this notion of language as a system, and concerned the distinction between the system in general and particular uses of it in the act of speaking. For this he made use of another binary opposition, described by the French terms langue and parole, which are usually left untranslated, to avoid the ambiguities of their English equivalents. Langue refers to language as a system, with its underlying structure of rules and conventions, which are then deployed like pieces in a chess game, in the process of communicating a particular meaning. These specific acts of parole, or “speech”, are to some extent restricted by the potential of 

The reason for this turn towards language again – although in a way quite distinct from the turn in phenomenology – is the attempt to understand our relationship to the world in terms of the metaphors that we use to describe it. To get beyond the abstractions of science, as Gaston Bachelard tried to do, structuralism focused instead on the cognitive value of narratives, as a way of dealing with the fact that in everyday human terms, the universe is not made of atoms, it is “made of stories”.3

The “Deep Structures” of Language – Ferdinand De Saussure 

So what is this linguistic model that has proved so useful in so many disciplines and how does it differ from the treatment of language in the other philosophies considered so far? The model originates in the work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is described in his Course in General Linguistics which was assembled from notes and published as a book after his death in 1916. The three key principles of Saussure’s analysis of language all follow from his initial observations on the nature of the “linguistic sign”. The sign in language is the word or sentence, which operates by referring to the idea of an object in the mind, and can therefore be split into its two components – the signifier, or the word, and the signified, the idea of the object. Having devised this two-part structure he then developed the first of his controversial principles by insisting on the arbitrary nature of the connection between the two halves of the sign. Traditional linguistic studies had assumed a natural bond between sound and thing, such as in onomatopoeic words like “cuckoo”, “drip” or “splash”. By contrast, Saussure maintained that these formed only a small component of a language while the majority of the words we use were simply assigned to things by convention. As he writes in Part One of his Course:

dominant theme of this and subsequent chapters. Where Chapter 3 looked at the issue of what buildings mean, in terms of the existential predicament of humanity and the search for a sense of belonging, this chapter considers the question of how buildings mean, using the philosophy of language that has become known as structuralism.

         Our discussion of language so far in this book has centred on the issue of free will and determinism – the question of whether, as Heidegger suggested, it is man or language that speaks. Is man in fact the master of language or is language the master of man?1 The idea that we are somehow restricted by language to repeating the meanings that have been established before us is suggested by Heidegger’s etymological analyses that attempt to uncover so-called original meanings. This approach to the study of language as a continually developing historical phenomenon seems to ignore the way that the use of language alters meanings over time. The slightly arbitrary points in history that Heidegger chooses to look back to still suggest a rather unscientific understanding of the workings of language as a system. It was the problem of untangling these historically dependent issues that structuralism initially attempted to answer and in the process it created a much more systematic and scientific approach to language, which has since become a “science” of human culture. As critic Terry Eagleton has succinctly pointed out:

         Structuralism in general is an attempt to apply this linguistic theory to objects and activities other than language itself. You can view a myth, a wrestling match, system of tribal kinship, restaurant menu or oil painting as a system of signs, and a structuralist analysis will try to isolate the underlying set of laws by which these signs are combined into meanings. It will largely ignore what the signs actually ‘say’, and concentrate instead on their internal relations to one another. Structuralism, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is an attempt to rethink everything through once again in terms of linguistics.2

4

Systems of Communication

Structuralism and Semiotics

Phenomenology was introduced in Chapter 3 as emerging from Edmund Husserl’s dream of philosophy as a legitimate and “rigorous” science. In order to place philosophy on a firm foundation of scientific certainty, he had attempted a return to the study of “things in themselves”. This had led some philosophers to focus on the individual’s subjective experience and the influence that the body has on our understanding of the world around us. As a consequence of this, phenomenology has been charged with being too restricted in its interest, considering things as isolated objects cut off from the social context of reality. On the other hand a more deterministic version has developed which sees language as the source of all meaning – affecting our understanding by limiting the way we think. In more recent years this emphasis on language has proved attractive in the shift towards science, as linguistics has developed a series of far-reaching interpretive models which have since been applied more generally to the understanding of culture as a whole. The innovations that inspired this dramatic transition are still central to our understanding of architecture today, as modernism, post-modernism and even deconstruction have all been affected by this new conception of language.

         The discussion in Chapter 3 of the significance of places was intended to establish the importance of meaning in architecture. The fact that buildings, in a sense, can be “read” as cultural “texts” will now be the