As the arbitrary sign showed, a sign is at once immutable and mutable. Saussure cuts the two faces apart onto two axes. Part 1, chapter 3.
1. Two axes
Every science, Saussure says, should mark which axis its objects sit on. The axis of simultaneities (l’axe des simultanéités) concerns “relations among coexisting things, from which all intervention of time is excluded.” The axis of successions (l’axe des successivités) is one “on which one can never consider more than one thing at a time, but on which all the things of the first axis are placed, with their changes” (Part 1, ch. 3; French quotations rendered by L/LAB throughout).
2. The speaker does not see history
“For the speaking subject, succession in time does not exist: he is before a state” (il est devant un état). So the linguist who wants to understand that state must “wipe the slate clean (faire table rase) of everything that produced it and ignore diachrony” (Part 1, ch. 3). Saussure’s image: a panorama of the Alps is drawn from a single point, not from several peaks of the Jura at once. A language, likewise, can only be described from within one state.
3. The chess analogy
The most telling comparison, Saussure says, is “between the play of language and a game of chess” (le jeu de la langue et une partie d’échecs, Part 1, ch. 3).
n’importe quelle position donnée a pour caractère singulier d’être affranchie de ses antécédents ; il est totalement indifférent qu’on y soit arrivé par une voie ou par une autre … celui qui a suivi toute la partie n’a pas le plus léger avantage sur le curieux qui vient inspecter l’état du jeu au moment critique.
Any given position has the singular property of being freed from its antecedents; it is wholly indifferent by which route one reached it. … One who has followed the whole game has not the slightest advantage over an onlooker who comes to inspect the state of play at the critical moment. (Part 1, ch. 3)
There is one point where the comparison fails.
le joueur d’échecs a l’intention d’opérer le déplacement … tandis que la langue ne prémédite rien ; c’est spontanément et fortuitement que ses pièces à elle se déplacent.
The chess player intends to make the move … whereas a language premeditates nothing; its pieces move spontaneously and by chance. (Part 1, ch. 3)
4. Two linguistics
Synchronic linguistics deals with “the logical and psychological relations linking coexisting terms that form a system, as grasped by one and the same collective consciousness.” Diachronic linguistics deals with terms substituting for one another in time — which do not form a system. The opposition between them, Saussure says, “bursts out at every point.”
5. Set against Sapir’s “drift”
Saussure and Sapir answered the same problem — a language is both a present system and a change in time — in opposite directions.
- Saussure puts diachrony in brackets to see the system. To “enter the consciousness of speaking subjects” you must suppress the past. Change happens outside the system.
- Sapir finds a shape in that diachrony itself. The unconscious selection of variations that accumulate one way is drift, and a language has a “slope.”
They agree on things too. Both say change begins in parole / individual speech. And “a language premeditates nothing” (Saussure) is “an unconscious selection” (Sapir) — for both, change has no designer. Saussure set change aside to make the logic of the system precise; Sapir made the direction of the change itself precise.
6. Is there a panchronic point of view?
“Is there a view from outside time, a panchronic one?” Saussure’s answer is: hardly. You can speak panchronically only of “raw phonic material that carries no meaning”; nothing that has value in a system can be spoken of from outside time.
Next: that “value” — “in a language there are only differences.” It meets Sapir’s phonology.
