The "Structuralist Controversy" at Fifty: Two Ways of Saying "Dead"

I. Introduction

Fifty years after the "Structuralist Controversy" took place in Baltimore in October 1966, we are offered the opportunity to look back at this mythical conference, and to see where structuralism stands today. My paper returns to the proceedings of the conference—originally titled "The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man," only to be usurped by its flashier subtitle, "The Structuralist Controversy"—to respond to an overlooked challenge issued by Johns Hopkins professor and conference co-organizer Richard Macksey in his opening remarks. Alluding to the division between "Continental" and "Anglo-American" philosophical approaches to language, represented by Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Macksey wagers that through the blinds of disagreement there might be common ground to serve as the basis for discussion: namely, he identifies their shared use of the metaphor of language as a kind of game. Wittgenstein's notion of Sprachspiel or "language game" in his Philosophical Investigations is, Macksey remarks, "perhaps the most seminal and probably the most relevant appeal to the game analogy in our time," and "the dominant image in Wittgenstein's development of the comparison is most often that of a board game such as chess" (Macksey, The Structuralist Controversy 10). The image of language as a chess game is also crucial for another "language-haunted" thinker, Saussure. His Course on General Linguistics refers to chess to "conceptualize the functioning of a language when one element, or 'piece,' effects the passage of the system from one synchrony to the next" (10–11). Macksey suggests these shared metaphors might form the basis for a productive engagement across methodologies.

In his introductory remarks addressed to the conference's mostly European participants and mostly American audience, Macksey expresses his hope that the diverse group of scholars participating in the Baltimore conference might be able to speak across disciplinary and methodological horizons, where the split between Wittgenstein and Saussure constitutes a major fault line. Macksey ends his remarks with a cautionary note, citing Wittgenstein's aphorism from the Philosophical Investigations, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him [Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen]" (§327). This remark is not about translating animal languages, rather it refers to the closed world of sense that is available from within a given Lebensform: to understand a language, we must have access to the "form of life" that it both reflects and composes. Speaking across disciplinary or methodological lines can seem as daunting as speaking across languages. Opening the fore of the "Structuralist Controversy," Macksey suggests the participants might discover "a little of the lion in each of us." Indeed, Wittgenstein "had to conceive of the possibility of the speaking lion before he could posit our incomprehension" (Macksey 14). Macksey surely did not expect the relationship between Wittgenstein and Saussure would be a central topic at the conference, but it is nonetheless disappointing that none of the participants took up his challenge.

Several reasons might explain the absence of Wittgenstein's name from the 1966 Baltimore symposium. Perhaps the time was not ripe to engage in this kind of intellectual border-crossing. The discovery of structuralism for its new American audience was already groundbreaking in its own regard, and the problematics internal to structuralism offered more than enough for the participants to debate at the Baltimore event. Furthermore, there is reason to doubt the French participants' level of familiarity with Wittgenstein's work due to the delay in the French reception of it. From our contemporary vantage 50 years after the Baltimore event, perhaps we may now take up the challenge Macksey issued in his opening remarks at the "Structuralist Controversy." What follows is a philosophical debate that did not take place in Baltimore in 1966 between Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, concerning the peculiar status of the expression, "I am dead."

II. Wittgenstein's Delayed Arrival in France

We might reasonably question the French participants' familiarity with Wittgenstein's philosophy owing to the curious delay in the French reception of his thought. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico...