Paper Summary:

This paper argues that language and ideology are inseparable due to the reciprocally constitutive nature of both. The paper looks at major works by Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Marx, and Althusser to explore how linguistic representation must be understood as constructed and mediated. In order to shed some light on language's relation to ideology, the paper begins with a look at how language is formulated from a material perspective.

From the Paper:

"To understand its relation to ideology, we must first examine how language is formulated from a material perspective. According to Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal analysis of the structure of words and their associated meanings, the former is never a transparent indicator of the latter. In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure maintained that language should be divided into two components: "langue," referring to the entire body of a language, and "parole," referring to a specific utterance or individual act of speech within a language. The latter can only be comprehended within the larger system of the former. That is, the meaning of words or "signs" is derived from their relation to one another within a cumulative structure or system of signification. To illustrate this principle, Saussure drew a clearly discernable distinction between the "signifier," or word, and the "signified," or that to which the word refers or claims to represent. For example, the word "tree" is only indicative of the external, material object of a tree insofar as we believe and regard it to be. The word "tree" can just as easily be applied to other external, material objects. In this way, the formation of words and their meanings is an entirely artificial, constructed, and enclosed relation."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological States Apparatuses (1970)" in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. by Antony Easthope and Kate McGowan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 42-50
• Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today" in Mythologies. Transl. by Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp. 109-59.
• Derrida, Jacques. "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in Writing and Difference. Transl. by Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 278-94.
• Glucksmann, Miriam. "The Structuralism of Levi-Strauss and Althusser" in Approaches to Sociology: An Introduction to Major Trends in British Sociology. Ed. by John Rex (London: Routledge, 1974), pp. 230-45.
• Kurzweil, Edith. The Age of Structuralism: Levi-Strauss to Foucault (New York: Columbia University Press 1980).

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