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Date:         Tue, 1 Sep 1992 11:05:08 +0200
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From:         "Alfred Lang, U.Bern" <lang@PSY.UNIBE.CH>
Subject:      first crack at poststructuralism....

Gary, well done, I think, your short piece on structuralism and post-
structuralism. Despite pressing duties, I cannot resist, however,
adding a point that time and again strucks me in the history of
semiotics and structuralism and psychology.

In fact, Saussure has been read much too specifically by most of those
defining the field, Gary has sketched. True, Saussure was a linguist.
But this did not keep him from looking over fences and proposing
semiology (semiotcs) as a general case, language and some other formal
sign systems or social institutions being special cases, however
important they are. Saussure said, in the section on semiology of the
Course in General Linguistics:

"To determine the exact place of semiology is the task of the
psychologists. The task of the linguists is to find out what makes
language a special case within the mass of semiological data. ... If I
have succeeded in assigning linguistics a place among the sciencies,
it is because I have related it to semiology." (quoted from the
excerpts in the anthology by R.E. Innes (1985) Semiotics. Indiana Un.
Press).

Now it took quite long, for some people up to the present and maybe
even longer, to accept that taking language as the model for
semiotics one runs the risk of putting into one's theories what one
wanted to find out. Looking at the world through linguistic glasses is
great, except yo miss anything more general. And this is exactly what
a semiotic of a general nature can promise. The irony is, that, at
about the same time around the turn of the century, but having started
the endeavour in the mid-60ies already, C.S. Peirce was constructing a
general semiotic that has only very slowly and often distortedly
entered the minds and theories of scholars, and of especially few
psychologists, in spite of Saussure's very clear vision and task
setting.

This is all the more regrettable and not easy to understand or accept,
because, again at about the same time, a general structuralism had
arisen in psychology (perceptual, cognitive, memory, action,
motivation, development, person etc.) in the form of the Gestalt
movement which has been heavily distorted in the history of the field
by inside (e.g. Wundt was no "structuralist", he was a mechanist, a
wrongly attached name, a sign, has created a lot of confusion here)
and outside (esp. the German tragedy) forces. The central idea is that
we cannot conceive of elementary entities but rather have necessarily
to relate every unit to others, understand it on the basis of contrast
and similarity and place in some organized whole. And thus, everything
in our understanding is apt to change meaning depending on context.
Signs conceived in a way that they are forbidden to change meaning by
context are very special cases, they are logical rather than
psychological, such as abstract numbers, some scentific concepts, and to a
 certain extent linguistics signs, etc. The latter perhaps often  more in
 whishful thinking than in everyday reality.

I for one believe that the Gestalt idea in principle embraces both
structuralism and poststructuralism. But these are matters that need
more than a brief appendix to a good note.

Sincerely, Alfred

Alfred Lang, Professor of Psychology
Psychol. Institut, Univ. Bern, Switzerland
Laupenstrasse 4, CH-3008 BERN
Office: Phone: (031) 65 40 37, Fax: (031) 65 84 15
Home (preferably): Phone & Fax: (031) 24 53 42
e-mail: lang@psy.unibe.ch
_________________________________________________
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