The Linguistic Turn and Continental Sociology:

the Question of Agency and Structure.

Vassilios Romanos

July 2013

Abstract
This paper examines structuralisms and especially poststructuralisms questioning of sociologys very conceptual structure, hence its whole project of conceiving the social in inquiring the relationship between
social agency and social structure. It shows, in particular, how Saussures semiotics and Derridas textualism
dispute the very distinction between agency and structure and thereby the specification of any possible
relations of determination, causality or hierarchy among them. They do so, by decentering agency and by
positioning social actors in fields of anonymous practices with no mediating import towards the world,
and by conceiving of social structures as inherently open and fluid systems of signs that lack the permanent and resistant nature which could limit action. I argue, however, that their radical linguistic constructivism disconnects arbitrarily the sign-structures from the actual realm of history and empirical reality and
henceforth from the extra-linguistic realms of everyday interactions embedded in institutions and networks of social relations. This stands out as a source of limitations not only because it negates any moment
in which agency could actually get free of codes and texts but also because it undermines the formative
and transformative of social reality role of the multiple power-struggles actors play, which cannot be conceptualized by reference to systems of semantic rules alone. I conclude, herewith, that the conventional
sociological dialectic between agency and structure rather than their transcendence is more suitable for
grounding a legitimate discourse on the social.

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I. Introduction.
The question of social constitution and thus the relationship between social agency and
social structure is certainly the problematic around which the entire history of sociology
is written. This history, as it is well known, embraces two major antithetical paradigms,
both questioning the very possibility of human agency in its constant tension with the
more fixed and enduring aspects of social life. The Durkheimean paradigm, on the one
hand, explains the social as an external constraint to individual or group agency setting
relational structures (networks of social relations characterized by mutual dependence
within divisions of labor) and institutional structures (systems of values, symbols and
cultural patterns that construe individuals beliefs) to produce general and structured
ways of thinking and acting.1 The Weberian paradigm, to the contrary, rejects any conceptualization of the social as a reality other than the sum of its individuals and their relations focusing instead on the dynamic ability of human agency to both produce and
transform the structural aspects of social life.2
What, however, has been brought into light in the various exchanges among these two
principal sociological traditions, is that they are both haunted by some form of determinism sociological or psychological respectively. From the viewpoint of contemporary and
especially Continental social thought, both Durkheims sui generis society and Webers exclusively subjectivist grounding of action, produce at the end an erroneous image of social reality because they set the two poles in an oppositional dualistic configuration
and thus as separate and independent to each other. It is precisely this postulated externality between action and structure that gave rise to more recent attempts at combining
or synthesizing them. Major contemporary theorists such as Anthony Giddens and
Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, share in common the desire to fuse together the elements
involved in the dualism by demonstrating their mutual constitution. From their point of
view, it is impossible to conceive of agency without a simultaneous reference to structure
and vice versa as the two are said to coalesce and inhere to the other. Thus, Giddens
handles the individuals that make up society at once with their social fabrication while he
conceives of social structures not as actions external events but as those normatively
regulated patterns of behavior produced by its own repetitiveness. He is, therefore, able
to argue that the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices they recursively organize.3 In a similar vein, Bourdieu reckons that
the unconscious dispositions and perceptual schemas a civilization infuses to its members (habitus) are both the transposed to the objectified human body social structures and
this elastic and polysemic sum of competences that would allow individuals for a multiplicity of innovating actions and thus to the redrafting of the various social fields.4
One major tendency within concurrent sociological discourse revolves around the
problems stemming from synthetic approaches such as the above, as it is indeed the case
that none of them has ultimately resolved the dualisms of the tradition.5 Contemporary
sociology, however, faces today a challenge of a very different sort. Poststructuralism, a
recent and constantly increasing movement within the Continental intellectual tradition,
is not concerned whether sociology has succeeded or failed to properly interweave agency with structure; it disputes rather its very conceptual structure, questioning whether its
idea of an agent-contra-a-structure can be actually inferred as a universal grounding
On the concept of social structure, cf. Lpez & Scott (2000: 1-13).
On the concept of agency, cf. Emirbayer & Mische (1998: 962-971) and Ritzer & Ryan (2011: 628-9).
3 Cf., Giddens (1979, 1984).
4 Cf., Bourdieu (1992).
5 See, for instance, Margaret Archers (1990) various objections to Giddens structuration theory. For
Bourdieus latent objectivism, cf., Jenkins (1992: 82-7), Mouzelis (1995: 101-113) and Sewell Jr (1992: 13ff).
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principle in speaking about the social world. Poststructuralisms somehow idiomorphic
epistemic suspicion is that the agency/structure polarity, as all polarities emanating from
the more substructural subject/object split of the Enlightenment reason, is an analytical
and thus conventional construction of the theoretical classifications of modern thought
alone and not a factual (objective) distinction immanent in social reality per se. In setting
it up, however, as an ideational representation mirroring presenting again in the language
of knowledge the social world, sociological thought simply repeats modern thoughts
hubristic conceptual make-up: it rests on a theoretical metalanguage which construes a
totalizing framework of universal premises and thus an epistemically privileged standpoint supposed to provide an unrelenting foundation for a scientific articulation of the
human condition in general.6
This charge of sociology as a foundational discourse, justifies poststructuralisms quest
to transcend all the dualisms immanent in the discipline. The representation of man as
both subject of action and as object of structure and the corresponding formulation of
the world as both constraining and as context within which subjects choose and act purposefully, hence, the two inevitable underlying preconditions of the discipline, ought to be
ceased.7 Thereby, all sociological articulations of the agency/structure problematique be it
a Durkheimean/Parsonian sociology of the social system, a Weberian/Meadean or phenomenological sociology of social action or even a synthetic sociology proposing their
reconciliation must be seen as arbitrary and equally incommensurable narrations
whose quest to uncover an overarching logic permeating the social conceals nothing less
than their latent essentialism.8 This very reasoning explains why poststructuralism insists
that sociological theory must give its way to a theoretical inquiry (to a social theory in fact)
which would invigorate knowledge on the social by detecting the fluidity and porousness immanent in radically dissimilar forms of life. Such a theory, must not only recognize its own contextual embeddedness that the theoretical categories by means of
which it captures the world are local, situational and constantly shifting but also that the
social object it interprets is construed as a meaningful object at the very act of interpreting it.9 Poststructuralist social theory sets thus world-realities as disclosed in particular
world languages (epistemic, textual or otherwise) and conceives of the subject and the
object of conventional sociological reasoning as their arbitrary linguistic effect.
In this essay I will attempt to explore this radical linguistic constructivism as exemplified in what I take as the most influential intellectual figures in the field, the linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure and the social critic Jacques Derrida, and show its relevance for
sociological theory as well as its major shortcomings. I will argue, in particular, that the
idea of a constructedness of signifying activities, rests on the questionable assumption that
the disclosed in language structures of signification, demarcate the social world with no
reference whatsoever to the extra-linguistic realms of everyday interactions embedded in
institutions, in networks of social relations and practices, in power-struggles and in the
deeper axial guidelines they all embody. Poststructuralisms major shortcoming, in other
words, is that it sets configurations of meaning as self-constituting and self-referential strucCf., Seidman (1994: 119-27) and Lemert (1994: 268-9).
Cf. Smart (1982).
8 See Ernesto Laclaus essay The Impossibility of Society in Laclau (1990) and Camic & Cross (1998:
466-7), Murphy (1988: 602), Mouzelis (1995: 41-2, 48-9; 2008: 178-9), Lucy (1997: 294-5).
9 For Michel Foucaults archeology, for instance, the object of the social sciences is manufactured in each
historical epochs epistemic language (epistme). It must be said, however, that this radical constructivism
has not left unaffected the more conventional sociologies. When Giddens, for instance, says that theories
interpret that which they also structure (the paradox of a double hermeneutic), or when Bourdieu proposes a reflexive sociology which would recognize its own intellectual enterprise as bending back on and
affecting the very situations it supposedly objectively describes, what they call into question is the existence
of an inherently meaningful world. Cf., Giddens (1984: xxxv) and Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992b).
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tures with no connection to the actual realm of history and empirical reality. The postulation, however, that language as a taxonomical code (Saussure) or in its cultural form as
text (Derrida) constitutes through its distinctions, classifications and rules the social object
of knowledge, is a source of limitations not only because it disentangles sign-systems
from the worldly reality but also because it divorces them from intermundane action as
well, which is supposed to have no formative influence upon them. As sign-systems are
external to individual mental states and therefore of the language-user as well,
poststructuralism undermines the moment of a competent agency that would counterpoise them in its free, intentional and voluntary form of speech. The decentering of
the thinking, speaking and acting subject, positions social actors in fields of anonymous
practices leaving somehow in the air a number of important issues addressed and partly answered by the more conventional tools of sociological discourse, the most important
of which is admittedly the question of historical change.
II. The linguistic configuration of the agency/structure relationship.
The linguistic turn underlying poststructuralist thought can be traced back to Wittgenstein and late Heidegger, who have set language as an ordering force of the world. Language, in their view, must be seen as a kind of meta-institution that shapes through its
demarcations, differentiations and distinctions the conceptual margins of a social world
producing thereby a primary and inaccessible to the subject frame of intelligibility within
which things are identified, talked and acted upon. This allegation is not only associated
with the relativistic contention that each particular language embodies a unique and irreducible version of world-reality. As grammatical categories and syntactic configurations
of meaning are considered to set out cognitive categories, linguistic structures affect both
the subjects patterns of immediate perception and the subjects identity itself as presumed to be by the humanistic viewpoint of traditional sociological theory an author of
its biography and ultimate arbiter of its own intentions, decisions and overall behavior.
With the linguistic turn, therefore, any explanation of the social world in terms of the
projects and strategies of individual and collective actors becomes obsolete.10
However, while playing a similar constraining role to Durkheimean collective representations or Parsonian cultural systems of meanings, linguistic structures should not
be confused with the former categories; nor should the linguistic turn be taken as a variation of the structure-oriented theories outlined above. This is for while they both focus
on the subjects determination, linguistic structures bring out the formal and not the substantive aspect of this determination. Their stress lies not on the subjects embeddedness
in specific cultural and institutional contexts of meaning which structure its identity
(Durkheim), assign its role requirements (Parsons) or shape its practical dispositions
(Bourdieu), but on the dependence of individual thought and speech on the linguistic
rules (grammatical, syntactic, etc.) that govern these meanings without the ever subject
being able to theoretically or practically control or even detect. The linguistic turn, therefore, is not concerned with the significative and normative content of social structures of
signification (the function of the signified) but with the hidden sign-codes that regulate this
surface structure; it does not examine how human reasoning is determined from what particular sociohistorical meanings declare or how these create a binding pre-understanding
that foreordains thought and predisposes behavior and action, but the formal configuration of these meanings (the function of the signifier). The logic of the symbolic, as
Nicos Mouzelis puts it, prevails in poststructuralist thought over the normative logic of
the subjects identity, or the practical logic of his role requirements and dispositions.11
10
11

Cf., Layder (2006: 117), Ritzer (2011: 606), Elliott (2009: 55).
Cf., Mouzelis (2008: 28).

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Further, unlike the various systems of meaning identified by the sociological tradition
which are said to reflect, affect, regulate or simply give form to a pre-constituted worldreality, linguistic structures are conceived as producing this reality. Whether the event
thunder, for instance, is taken as a natural phenomenon governed by objective laws or
as an expression of Zeus anger, is something depended on a specific linguistic order.12
Likewise, to use an example from Michel Foucaults studies, whether madness announces the nightmarish beyond (demonism) or the objective state of absent reason
(irrationality), hinges upon the dominance of a particular discursive regime. Whether
Man, finally, is the Sun of God or a self-constituting subject that endows the world
with meaning while being itself the empirical object of the human sciences, is a historical
fabrication of the demise of medieval society and the onset of modernity. Briefly, what
things in the world denote, according to this line of thought, depends on the order of
language itself and on the very especial domain of truthfulness it establishes.
This principal difference between poststructuralism and structure-oriented sociological theories, is quite significant not only because it sets the sociological problem of human agency (the agency/structure antagonism) as a historical construct concomitant with
the birth of Man as subject/object of history and the rise of the humanistic disciplines,
but also because it articulates the question of social transformation in terms of the altered
relationships between signs/symbols and their referenced world. To the extent that linguistic signifiers are always active in what they signify, social transformation dissociates
itself from the dialectic between actors and structures and becomes a question of the relation between language and the material world, a question, that is, of the arbitrary and
always shifting (though imperceptible and anonymous) ways words denote things and
events in the world.13 The linguistic turn, therefore, raises itself against the epistemological configuration within which the discipline of sociology is located not just because it
disassociates the understanding of social dynamics from the relationship between a subject in its more or less limitative contact with the rigid patterns of social life, but because
it incarcerates a priori subjects in self-referential and self-shifting systems of signification.
Although these allegations can be said to reflect both Wittgensteins and Heideggers
general thoughts, the uppermost intellectual figure behind poststructuralisms linguistic
configuration of social reality, is surely Saussure, whose Course in General Linguistics becomes the first important attempt at constructing a set of laws that inform the linguistic
system as such but which ultimately are claimed to govern the functioning of any signsystem whatsoever. Linguistics, with Saussure, becomes the privileged branch of the
much broader science of semiology aimed at analyzing social reality as a symbolic order a
field in which objects, events and the subjects perceptual experiences (the repertoires of
categories by which they become conscious of the world), are understood as structures
of signs.14 It is not surprising, thereby, why many found Saussures principles of semiology useful for social analysis. Roland Barthes, for one, is notable for developing them into
the study of culture; Claude Lvi-Strauss, for another, thought that institutions other
than language operate also as syntactic structures and sought to analyze both the institutional field and the various sociocultural practices from the viewpoint of hidden grammars. Even Anthony Giddens, more recently, considered from another point of view
and with different aims the Saussurean distinction between codified and spoken language

This is Laclau and Mouffes example (1985: 108).

Cf., Elliott (2009: 61). This means not, of course, that the signified of the things denoted changes in
its ontology or being. What shifts, is the relationship a particular epoch has with them because of a transfiguration in its symbolic settings.
14 Cf. Tompkins (1988: 739), Henry (1995: 647), Brown (1990: 191).
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to provide a very straightforward structuring of sociologys central dualism. 15 What all
these approaches have in common, is that they attempt to develop their respective analyses outside the subject/object dichotomy and moreover with the notable exemption of
Giddens to decenter agency as they think of social systems of signification to construct
by themselves a meaningful reality irrespectively of the speaking and acting subjects.
Saussure himself makes the point that language has no determinate correspondence to
the noumenal world in a number of ways, but principally in his contentions that [t]he
link between signal and signification is arbitrary (100: 67) and that in a language there
are only differences, and no positive terms (166: 118).16 The first contention, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, maintains that the signifying material (the signifier is the acoustic
image a word makes when pronounced) bears no intrinsic and thus not necessary or
natural connection to what it signifies the signified (100-1: 67-8). There is nothing, for
instance, in the word tree that necessitates its reference to an object with a trunk,
branches and leafs, as in French this same object is denoted by a-r-b-r-e, in Italian by a-lb-e-r-o, and so on. Saussure reckons that t-r-e-e stands for tree only because a community has decided to fix thus the combinatory bond between signifier and signified. What,
in fact, connects the sound image to the concept, is a tradition inherited from previous
generations (105: 72). As with Durkheim, therefore, Saussure proclaims the linguistic
sign to be social by nature (34: 16, cf. 41, 104: 71), i.e., a societal institution fashioned
within given historical contexts and coagulated through convention. He stresses, however,
that its conventional nature must be conceived as an anonymous accord and not as a
consensus between free-choosing agents, as speakers have no choice but to follow the
already established rules of language. Saussure, after all, undermines explicitly the
Lockean free-subject model of language which grounds meaning on the speakers pure
ideas. Language is not only indispensable for the distinction of the indefinite plane of
jumbled ideas pure thought produces, but for their very constitution: In itself, thought
is like a swirling cloud, where no shape is intrinsically determinate. No ideas are established in advance, and nothing is distinct, before the introduction of the linguistic structure // Thought, chaotic by nature, is made precise by this process of segmentation
(155: 110 // 156: 110).
Saussure further shows that this societal convention categorizes arbitrarily the external world. His allegation that the linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name,
but between a concept and a sound pattern (98: 66), indicates that the signified of the
linguistic bond is not the thing itself but a mental representation of it carved up in relation to a specific cultural framework and in different ways among varied cultures. This is
precisely why he holds that the referents of the linguistic mark tree may potentially form
a set of associations not necessarily equivalent and thus translatable to the one formed
by the referents of the word arbre. Tree may, for instance, enter the world of social
reality as an object of aesthetic appreciation or as a symbol of saving the planet from ecological disaster and arbre as a useful resource for satisfying human needs or as a good to
be bought and sold in the market, etc., in varied associations, therefore, not to be taken
as manifestations of the common essence of tree-ness supposed to capture the intrinsic properties of actual trees as vegetative objects (160: 114).17 Linguistic representations
do not mirror the reality out there but essentially create it.
15 Cf. Giddens (1993: 125-135; 1979: 17). Giddens, however, does not reduce the social to the linguistic. A conflation of language with society would be erroneous, given that the extra-linguistic structures of
domination and legitimation cannot be analyzed as systems of semantic rules. The former must be analyzed as
systems of resources [and] those of legitimation as systems of moral rules [or conventions] (1993: 130).
16 All citations refer to Saussures Course in General Linguistics. Publication details in the bibliography.
17 On problems associated with this radical linguistic constructivism, cf. Weber (1976: 918-24),
Kronenfeld & Decker (1979: 506-7), Tompkins (1988: 734-5), Harris (1983: 388-9, 393, 397), Collins &
Hoopes (1995: 629), Lucy (1997: 294-5), Howells (2001: 154-5) and especially Benveniste (1971: 43-8).

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The full import, however, of Saussures absolute detachment of language from objective reality, appears when he moves away from the function of identity (the linkage of
sound and concept) and conceives of meaning as radically depended on the signs reciprocal oppositions within the conventional structure of language as a whole (langue). According to the function of difference, the meaning of a term like knight, for instance, can
be captured only because it is related to kinship terms like bishop, pawn, queen or
king within an articulated system like the game of chess; taken by itself (taken, say, out
of the game and carried in ones pocket) the knight has not that meaning.18 Meaning,
thus, ultimately hangs on a self-reflexive process of internal reference and never on the
particular substantive nature of the denoted objects: The content of a word is determined in the final analysis not by what it contains but by what exists outside it //
[C]oncepts are purely differential defined not positively, in terms of their content,
but negatively by contrast with other items in the same system. What characterizes each
most exactly is being whatever the others are not (160: 114 // 162: 115).
Saussure finally considers that the holistic and self-dependant signifying chains of
langue are not only always-already present for an ongoing speech community,19 but also independent of their concrete realization in sound or script. Even more, he reckons that the
actual performance of speech (parole) in which the system is instantiated via the different
combinatory uses of its elements, does not have the imperative power of forcing an active system change in spite of the particular modifications it imposes. Whereas langue is a
homogeneous and self-contained system of pure values, determined by nothing else
apart from the temporary state of its constituent elements (116: 80), paroles utterances
(individual articulations of speech on concrete situations) form a mass of entirely accidental and particular in nature (131: 92) disparate events that is too amorphous and
heterogeneous to constitute an analogous social fact.
Saussures distinction, however, does not just drop a remark concerning the inner
structuring of language; for as the latter is said to disclose social reality itself, his thesis
becomes rich in implications for social analysis as well. Indeed, as Giddens convincingly
argues, the relation between langue and parole is structurally analogous to the relationship between social agency and social structure, given that speech is like action and interaction
spatially and temporally situated, subject-triggered, relational and purposive, and language
is like social structure perdurable and outside time, subjectless and unintentional.20
Saussures discussion of linguistic change, therefore, can be said to address the question
of social change. The latter, on the grounds of the priority he accords to synchrony over
diachrony, shows up as a succession of instantaneous (frozen) states in which the social
agent as player and speaker is extraneous.
Saussure discusses this priority when he compares linguistic play to social gaming. A
game like chess, for instance, is similar to linguistic play not only because it comports as a
class of invariable rules and conventions which exist in advance and remain in force after each move (126: 88) but also because the value of each of its pieces depends on
its contrast with all the other pieces in the structure (125-6: 88).21 Chess, in fact, presents
in artificial form what linguistic play presents in a natural form (125: 87) and as
Tompkins (1988: 737ff) discusses extensively Saussures own example.
Langue is the starting point, from which it becomes possible to identify its constituent elements
(157: 112). This is why Saussure laid down the overall function of differences as far more important from
the function of identity. Cf. Love (1989: 802, 807), Weber (1976: 921-7), Harris (1983: 387-94), Schleifer
(1987: 383).
20 Cf., Giddens (1993: 125-6). On synchronic and diachronic linguistics, cf. MacKinnon (1973: 224-5, 2289), Kronenfeld & Decker (1979: 508-11), Love (1989: 803).
21 Saussure distinguishes linguistic value (the validation of a sign through its position) from signification, the semantic-referential aspect of language ( 159-65). Cf. Kronenfeld & Decker (1979: 512),
Bannet-Tavor (1997: 665).
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such it can be said to lay down the way actors comport within institutional settings: in
spite of the repercussion any single move may have upon the course of the game, any
given [synchronic] state of the board is [at the end] totally independent of any previous
and the changes which supervene between one state and another have no place in either. For Saussure, in other, words, whether [a given structural] state has been
reached by one sequence of moves or another, is something irrelevant (126-7: 88).
It is this antecedence of system statics over and above the creative dynamics of human agency that has been interpreted by some critics as a radically deficient conception
of historical processes. Terry Eagleton and E.P. Thompson, for instance, regard Saussures account of change as a kind of blind accident which in fact erases time.22 This is
not quite accurate, however, as Saussure shows history to unfold through displacements
within the deep synchronic structure of langue. History is deployed through unconscious
alterations imposed by the use of metaphors and metonymies provoking a concatenating domino effect that restructures the whole system in another level. Where he insists
upon is that these changes are principally local and accidental and not effected by the
intersubjective elaboration of the inherited structure (hermeneutics thesis). But even if they
were conscious, Saussure could not have attached them to the individual speaker given
that a change in a term must be correlated to the system as a whole before being stabilized and thus transition is principally slow and indeed imperceptible.
Saussures insufficiency lies elsewhere. His supposition that a social game (albeit a social institution) is a self-contained entity that always-already finds itself in a purely synchronic state and in abstraction from change, obliterates the essential quality of social
games as games; and what is particular about social games is not only that they are governed
by rules that define the legitimate behavior, but principally that they implement entire
plans, calculations and strategies which may be not entirely arbitrary (as indeed designed by
rules) but are not entirely necessary either. If a game, however, is defined both through
structuring principles and through the strategies implemented, then its rules are not its
constraints alone but also the resources for its performance. Very rightly, Anthony Giddens
notes that systemic rules are not exclusively principles to be applied unreflectively, but
mediums for a rule-governed creativity serving to define possibilities of transgression.23
This fact, however, disrupts the entire comparison Saussure makes for it introduces the
diachronic dimension of alterity as immanent into what is supposed to be a closed system; for
if social games cannot be considered in abstraction from strategies and therefore from
who has each time the next move, the significance of any particular state in a game is inseparable from its past or future condition. Each state of the structure, as Samuel Weber
remarks, is inherently both a response and an anticipation.24
Saussures view of history as a formal structure, therefore, presents an erroneous picture of how agents comport within institutions. As it has been argued in addition, his
theoretical anti-humanism does not simply obliterate agency but imbricates an isomorphism to the extent it prevents equally the social players participating in institutional settings from making a difference within them: in precisely the same way as a knight can be
replaced with a taw without disrupting the playing of chess provided that the rules of the
game stay constant, subjects can be similarly interchanged within institutions on the condition that their rules of operation remain the same. This indifferent swap, however
(reminiscent of the late Parsons distribution of agents in various systemic positions), rules
out the whole set of associations that specifically human subjects carry. Whereas a knight
Cf. Eagleton (2008: 96) and Thompson (1978).
Giddens (1979: 18).
24 Cf. Weber (1976: 924, 932). Saussure, to be sure, recognizes the intentional aspect of gaming (127: 889). If, however, it does not matter at all whether [a] state has been reached by one sequence of moves
or another (126-7: 88), the presence or absence of conscious intention is indeed secondary.
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is substitutable because it each time acquires the value of the context in which it is immersed (if taken, for instance, out of the context of chess and thrown into the field of
art, it will acquire the new relative value of a carving which resides in the new systems
rules of differentiation in accordance with which carvings are appraised), human subjects
cannot be similarly replaced as they are only in an abstractive sense participants of a single game at any given time. As parts of a variety of frameworks, human subjects are endowed with multiple values, a multiplicity of identity that denotes their singularity rather
than their sameness.25
This problem of isomorphism, which haunts so decisively all subsequent structuralist
analyses most notably Lvi-Strauss anthropological studies and Louis Althussers structural analysis of the capitalist mode of production brings also into focus Saussures absolute detachment of language from any kind of grounding in objective reality. As it has
been argued, his excessive concentration on the condition of pure difference alone, neglects the multiple frameworks in which language operates and is practically used. There is always a gap between a sign and its application as even the simplest linguistic utterance can
mean different things on different occasions and can always involve features of the situation, the interlocutors and all the other elements of circumstance that take place at a given moment of speech. The question could you move that box?, for instance, can be
equally taken as a demand, as a request, as a comment on the interlocutors strength, or
even, if received ironically, as the presumption of something unfeasible.26 This means not
only that the language user is integral and not extraneous to the constitution of meaning
and that speech does not just reflect langues world as signify it; it means also that no
sign-system can be defined wholly internally as a formal structure set apart from the multiple and complex set of contexts in which parole appears; and these contexts, as Wittgenstein has shown, are inextricably embedded in networks of social relations and alwaysalready fashioned in relation to distinctions and oppositions grounded in situated social
practices.27 To understand the term triangle, for instance, is not enough to set its difference from the circle or the square, but to understand the particular practice lurking behind it and in which the term is implemented (say, measurement, geometry, architecture,
technology, etc.). In a similar vein, the terms money and equality are understood only if
associated respectively with the practices of changing currency in a bank, of buying
goods in the market-place, or with the practices of governance, of obedience to the enacted laws, of deciding and exercising power, etc.28 Behind language, in other words,
incubates the extra-linguistic realm of institutions, of social relations, of practices and the
deeper axial guidelines embodied in them, in short, the social and historical context in
and through which language is produced and modified.
III. The social as textual enactment.
The problems of Saussurean semiology have been rehearsed by almost all subsequent
analyses of society and culture that have implemented the linguistic approach, leading to
an almost total abandonment of structuralism. However, within the field of French in
particular intellectual scene, what has been taken to be wrong with Saussures semiology,
was neither its configuring of the social as a symbolic structure nor its escorted predilecCf. Tompkins (1988: 737-9).
This is Bannet-Tavors example (1997: 656). See also Culler (1981: 15-6), Ahearn (2001: 110-1),
Schieffelin (1990: 16), Shaw (2001: 6-7), Elliott (2009: 61-2).
27 [Linguistic] identity, says Giddens (1979: 16), cannot be specified independently of the context in
which the phrase is used; and this context is not the system of differences themselves but factors relating
to their use in practice. About language as a form of practice, cf., Wellmer (1993: 64, 67, 70), Collins &
Hoopes (1995: 637), O Neill (1995: 131, 141).
28 Charles Taylors examples (1985: 277ff). See also Mouzelis (1995: 48f; 2008: 178f), Lucy (1997: 294f).
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tion to go both beyond a subject-centered and structure-based analysis; the problem was
presumed to be in its postulation of closure alone. The interfusion, thereafter, of the social
with the linguistic was carried on and the conceptualization of everything social as having
the status of a sign went on unabated as a tool for the analysis of social phenomena.
Only in recent developments, because of an increasing interest in the study of cultural
objects, these signs are supposed to be linguistic only in an indirect sense and as such not
to be thought of as constituent segments of the structure of the mind but of extramental, cultural texts. As Andreas Reckwitz notes, what characterizes most profoundly
recent changes in continental social thought is the move from internal mentalism to external textualism.29 Further, because of the explicit emphasis in the temporal reconstitution of symbolic structures, the static grammars identified in structuralism are with the
aid of hermeneutics shown to be immanently fluid and open.30 As I am going to argue,
however, inspite of this explicit proclamation that the field of signification is inherently
transient, poststructuralism repeats structuralisms deadlock, namely, the dissociation of
the formal structure of signification from its content and therefore from the realm of
worldly social practices and the actors features. This can be seen in the work of Jacques
Derrida, the most prominent delegate of this trend in continental social thought.
Derridas antipositivist project does not directly tackle the action/structure relationship. It aims rather at deconstructing the more fundamental subject/object opposition on
which the logocentric (i.e., representational) western thought rests in its search for a
foundational system of thought. His understanding, however, of linguistic structures as
permanently displaced plays of difference that effect both subject and object, makes his
deconstructive enterprise directly relevant to the sociological problematique. He shows, in
particular, that if social structures are inherently open signifying texts and social agents
fluid ways of speaking within them, all conventional sociological dualisms should be
transgressed.
Saussure is definitely one of Derridas main influences both because he set out language as an ordering force of the world and because he displaced the field of signification
outside the subject. In contrast to him, however, who assigned this displacement to the
conditioning of speech by langue, Derrida translocates it to the inscription of speech in written
representations, i.e., texts; for as speech is engraved in written signs, it immediately alienates itself from the one who authored them, an alienation most evident in the fact that
texts continue to signify in the absence of their authors opening up other interpretations
from those originally intended. No author can thereby be at the centre of meaning as no
author is fully in control of the meanings conveyed by his work. 31 Derridas critique of
phonocentrism, therefore, and the epistemic priority it gives to writing, justifies his positioning of the text as a foretype for the subjects decentration.
Derridean texts, however, should not be taken in their narrow sense; for as he thinks
that any culturally situated statement, any lived or imagined experience, is a discursive
testimony open to as many different interpretations as there are its articulate readers, any
configuration of signs (iconic, indexical, compositional or otherwise) can be ultimately
modeled on textuality. Painting, film, music, archival records, novels, myths, rituals,
mathematical models, public programs, advertisements, culture itself indeed (if one esCf., Reckwitz (2002: 246-50).
Cf., Bohman (1996: 200-7), Hill & Mannheim (1992: 385-7), Shaw (2001: 5), Zavarzadeh & Morton
(1987: 6-7), Ritzer & Ryan (2011: 462-3).
31 Deconstruction is precisely this form of theoretical practice aimed at extracting the possible meanings
of a text. It does not attempt to reveal the hidden meaning of a text for such a meaning does not exist and it
resides absolutely to the reader to establish it. The presumption that meaning could ever be fully transparent is the foundational belief of the metaphysics of presence. Cf. Kearney (1986: 118f), Burke (2008:
114f), Schleifer (1987: 391-4), Gasch (1986: 279f), Hanks (1989: 95, 99), Brown (1990: 190f), Margolis
(1993: 197f), Elliott (2009: 111-3).
29
30

10
pouses Clifford Geertzs deconstructive anthropology), are open texts equally exhibiting this decentration: what they denote, is not the product of their own inherent
(brought by the author) properties but dispositions imposed by their interpretive readers.32 Derridas almost password statement that [t]here is nothing outside of the text (G:
158),33 signifies precisely that the social reality subjects confront is an endless chain of
always-already interpreted interosculating signs, occupying together a whole symbolic
universe. And what is especial in this construed space of signs, is that it represents
[nothing other than] itself; it is its [own] representation (SP: 57). Texts, according to
Derrida, do not reflect some free-standing world-reality. Things, to the contrary, take on
their meaning and value through some very particular frame of vision which shifts across
different works and interpretations: [t]he so-called thing itself is always already a
representamen shielded from the simplicity of intuitive evidence The thing itself is a sign
(G: 49). The general text thus becomes a limitless network of differentially ordered signs
which is not preceded by any meaning, structure, or eidos, but itself constitutes each of
these.34
Textuality thus goes hand in hand with an overall effacement of empirical reference.
As it is the case with Saussure, however, this effacement is quite subversive of the epistemological configuration within which conventional sociological discourse stands. With
no empirical data from the world that can serve as resource for theory, sociology must
proceed through interpretations of interpretations and find its criteria of correctness in
the already established theoretical practices: sociological representations, as Richard
Harvey Brown lays it down, become true descriptions not by correspondence to
noumenal objects, but by conformity to orthodox practices of writing and reading.35
Derrida is not only quite adamant on this point, but he repeatedly reproaches any attempt to close meaning under the mask of an objective and true description of world
experience, any theory, that is, calling on a privileged access to the noumenal world, as a
power game that necessarily partakes of the modernist distinction between a knowing subject and the object-world a thesis also found in late Foucaults power-knowledge complex where claims to truth are taken to conceal a will to master humanity.36
Derrida yet takes a step further from this typical poststructuralist thesis, assuming that
in the absence of any solid anchorage to empirical reality, the meaning conveyed by texts
is inherently incomplete. The full import of his work, therefore, is shown in his idea of a
permanently absent field of signification that spreads itself over the entire social horizon
of meaning. It is precisely this idea he founds missing from Saussures account, despite
his recognition that the latters founding principles of the arbitrary and the differential nature of the sign induce a crippling blow to essentialism (MP: 8).37
Where Saussures account falls short, according to Derrida, is to the historical dimension of structures of signification. As he was dealing exclusively with the synchronic
(spatial) successions of langue over time, he did not focus on how structures are permanently undone, decomposed [and] desedimented (L: 2) with every single nuance of
speech. Derrida considers, however, that the very way language functions over time is
not only essential for understanding the signs alteration but its very constitution. Thus he
Cf., Geertz (1973: 5, 452).
I am using the following abbreviations for Derridas texts: G for Grammatology, MP for Margins of Philosophy, WD for Writing and Difference, SP for Speech and Phenomena, D for Dissemination, L for Limited Inc. Publication details in the bibliography.
34 Critchley (1992: 38). Cf. Hanks (1989: 106ff), Margolis (1993: 194-7), Said (1978: 690, 693), Mouzelis
(1995: 48; 2008: 27-8, 179-81), Murphy (1988: 603-5), Collins & Hoopes (1995: 631).
35 Brown (1990: 188).
36 Cf., Seidman (1994: 119-27), Lemert (1994: 268-271), Elliott 2009: (110-1).
37 For Derridas critical acknowledgment of Saussure, cf. Culler (1979: 139), Schleifer (1987: 382-3,
391), Lamont (1987: 589-90).
32
33

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reads the Saussurean principles in a way that shows meaning to be inferred from its very
temporal structuring. He reckons in fact that if signs never function in accordance to
the compact force of their nuclei (MP: 10) but are instead in relationships of reciprocal presupposition (MP: 8), both containing each other, supplementing and partially
expressing one another, then signs are radically dependent on their dissimilarities to all
the things that they are not. Signs are defined in their common absences, in an omission,
however, that plays a constitutive role in their self-presence: The sign represents the
present in its absence The sign, in this sense, is deferred presence; it has a virtual
character with no special place in the space-time continuum and thus with no final arrival
to an object represented in social communications (MP: 9).38
Derrida maps out this never-ending and unfathomable play of differences governing discourse, with the idiosyncratic term diffrance (the ineffable a shown only in writing justifies
its epistemic primacy). Diffrance is precisely this spacing inherent in the Saussurean principle of difference which restricts itself to the signs spatial distinctness without ever addressing their temporal deferrence. Derrida insists, however, that while the signs
processual movement to alterity is irrevocable and can never [be] presented as such to
the present (MP: 3), it is at the same time the condition sine qua non for their functioning
and thus what allows subjects to think in terms of relational/comparative relationships
and understand each other. Diffrance, in other words, is a subjectless generator of structures; a non-origin which is originary, // [a] playing movement that produces these effects of difference within the order of thought (WD: 203 // MP: 11).39
Derridas picturing of the social through the metaphor of textual enactment and his
emphasis on the permanently unsettled aspects of signification have immense implications for conventional sociological theory both because they de-constitute the idea of a
permanently restraining social structure and also because they disrupt the epistemic and
ontological primacy of a subject as constitutive author of meaning. Both social structure
and social agency, as I will come to show, are simultaneous products of this selfmodifying movement of diffrance.
Derridas idea that the social structures of signification are indeterminate, does not
mean that meaning remains permanently disorderly, random or chaotic; it even less insinuates an impossibility of coherent interpretations.40 Relative fixity is always achieved as
the anonymous linguistic community repetitively applies a sign to a class of cases and potential plurality of situations. This movement of repetition suggests, for Derrida, a certain
continuity and stability serving thus the practical purpose of everyday communication. He
insists, however, that the iterative practice points by the same token to the inherently
open-ended status of any sign or text.41 For as speakers do not follow a compelling mechanical law which could bind them to conform to and obey in all respects, some fixed,
invariable, uniform, or necessary manner of application, they are endowed with the freedom of a multiple, inexact and indeterminate use of language to deviate from rules by
error or design, to circumscribe words for particular purposes, to use one word rather
than another (slippage), to use signs in a plurality of ways or for that matter any type of
material form as any other, to configure things differently, etc. and thus to infinitely
See also MP: 13, SP: 152 and Murphy (1988: 605-6), Williams (2001: 115), Said (1978: 689), Barnett
(1999: 287), Tompkins (1988: 739-40, 744-5), Descombes (1989: 143-5).
39 Derrida notes, however, that diffrance, should not be conceived of as some sort of hidden ground and
is careful enough to tell it apart from the mystical origin of negative theology. Cf., MP: 22-3, WD: 203, 303
n. 18, SP: 159 and Brogan (1988: 31-7), Tompkins (1988: 740-3), Williams (2001: 129-30), Schleifer (1987:
391), Barnett (1999: 287). See, however, Jrgen Habermas (1985: 181-4) reading of diffrance as a cabalist
category.
40 Interpretations are anyhow constrained by their situatedness. Only certain meanings can, for instance,
spring out of a love poem. Cf. Bannet-Tavor (1997: 665-9), Ahearn (2001: 111), Ritzer & Ryan (2011: 132).
41 On iterability, cf. Schleifer (1987: 392), Barnett (1999: 285-7), Bannet-Tavor (1997: 665-9).
38

12
subvert conventions and reshape meaning. Derrida even thinks that as signs are taken
out of an existent context and transposed or inscribed into other semiotic chains (grafting) not an exceptional condition but one inhering in all normal language use (MP: 317,
D: 220-1) language is delivered over to unforeseeable destinations. If one thus could
ever speak of the meaning of a linguistic utterance, as Albrecht Wellmer puts his point,
then this identity of meaning must be provided within an index of otherness both
with respect to the relationship between speaker and speaker and also to that between
language and reality. Indeed, nothing in grafting is permanently identified as merely a
signified as the whichever objective reference is in the new chain another potential signifier, so all that remains is an incessant and unremitting play of floating signifiers permanently freed from a final arrival to the thing itself.42 Despite their relative stability,
therefore, the social structures of signification can never be finally objectified to acquire the
status of Durkheimean things; they are not only characterized by a pattern of openness
without anticipated trajectory (de-solidification) but also by a pattern of dispersal (dissemination), released in and through a multiplicity of heterogeneous semiotic contexts.
Derridas account is quite significant for sociological theory because it sets off the social structures of signification as both constraints and as resources for performance. This is
exactly where synthetic sociological theories find their grip to formulate an elastic and
thus malleable by the agent concept of social structure. Giddens understanding of structures as having a dual character that both prohibits and facilitates social action, is surely one
of them. In contrast to Giddens, however, Derridas scope is not to set out a convenient
environment for accommodating agency. He thinks, in fact, of social agents as ways of
speaking within social texts, as extensions, that is, of the inherent in texts constituting
code of diffrance that envelops them governing their perception. As inaccessible, however, diffrance forever prevents the subjects attempts to become one and thus a failure of
constitution, as Caroline Williams puts it, always accompanies subjectivity.43 By the
same token, he reckons that any conceptualization of the subject as ontologically given
(as self-present) be it the certain of its existence Cartesian I, the Kantian intelligible
self or, for that matter, the intentional sociological agent who constructs and transmutes structures of meaning on the basis of choice, preference and decision must be
deconstituted. Because self-awareness are for him available only from within another interpretive code from the one that has constituted the subject,44 the concept of a conscious self would convert subjectivity to a transcendental entity capable to see itself
through the very same text (code of diffrance) that allows it to be in the first place. Similarly, Derrida considers that subjects never exactly express or fully communicate what
they intend; not because language deviates their pure intentions, but because there are
no such already present to consciousness pure intentions, pre-existing their textual articulation.45 When he thereafter argues that interpretive indeterminacy renders closure structurally impossible, he implies anonymous processes and not a disengaged from the world
(autonomous) agent who remoulds world-meanings by critically or hermeneutically
42 Wellmer (1993: 66). In Derridas words: The representamen functions only by giving rise to an
interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself
unceasingly and is always on the move (G: 49). Cf. WD: 288-293, Collins & Hoopes (1995: 629, 637).
43 Williams (2001: 134). On the subjects decentering, cf., SP: 146-7, MP: 15 and Tompkins (1988: 7456), Mouzelis (2008: 27-8, 34, 39), Murphy (1988: 603-5), Collins & Hoopes (1995: 631), Brown (1990: 190),
Lucy (1997: 292, 294-5), Hill & Mannheim (1992: 390-1), Henry (1995: 635-6), Zavarzadeh & Morton
(1987: 1-3, 6), Coward & Ellis (1980: 68), Elliott (2009: 110, 113), Smart (1982).
44 This is precisely why the meaning of a text can be recovered only indirectly, through another tradition
of interpretation and in a kind of [inter-textual] juncture where other texts meet and work upon each
other (Iser 1987: 219). Cf., Tompkins (1988: 746-7), Collins & Hoopes (1995: 630), Brown (1990: 190-1),
Lamont (1987: 590), Culler (1979: 138).
45 Cf., MP: 16, SP: 146-7 and Howells (2001: 155), Barnett (1999: 283).

13
appropriating them. Derridas understanding of the subject as spoken through texts,
shows agency to be both textually shaped and permanently deferred with regard to itself. He lines up a determination, to be sure, not to be confused with those conditioning
factors the mainstream sociological tradition inflicted upon subjectivity be it predetermined positions imposed by a consolidated division of labor (Marx), role requirements commanded by an institutional structure (Parsons) or behavioral dispositions
compelled by processes of socialization (Bourdieu).
What Derridas account also de-constitutes, is any possible theory of the social. Indeed,
with the apparent fluidity permeating both social agency and social structure, any attempt
to identify a priori their relations, is in principle unthinkable. As Charles Lemert argues,
poststructuralism replaces the original modernist pair between author and product with
the couplet of practices taking place within intertextual fields.46 This latter couplet, however,
has the form but not the substance of a conceptual dichotomy because the relation between its poles is always merging and thus outside an absolutist subject/object split. In
this account, action must be thought of more as anonymous practices oriented to fields, but
the latter, being modeled on writing, lack the limitative rules that would shape them as
determinate objects; their rules behave more as mediums (resources Giddens subsequently put it) that define possibilities for infraction. In fact, social fields differ from Parsonian
systems not just because of their elastic character (as Bourdieu came on to argue) but
because their rules have at the end a virtual and conditional character to be realized in the
time-space only when instantiated in practices (as Giddens, again, has put Derridas
point). Poststructuralism, therefore, outstrips the agency/structure dualism because it
construes social action as intransitive subjectless practices taking place within open-ended
fields of play which they produce and are produced by. This is not a move, however,
freed of problems for, as I will argue, it interprets change as a disturbance or as a disequilibrium that takes place in an essentially conflict-free environment.
As a lot have rightfully argued, the positioning of the subject as an inherently unstable
and contingent form is a deeply troubling aspect of Derridas work because it dispenses
altogether with any project of subjectivity just in arguing that there can be no disengaged
or transcendental subject. On behalf of critical theory, for instance, Peter Dews and Axel Honneth point out that Derridas stark choice between a view of the subject as an
immobile center, a core of self-certainty, or the acceptance that there is no subject at all,
except as an effect of the play of the text,47 necessitates abandoning once and for all
the modernist ideal of individual autonomy on the sole grounds that it can no longer
simply stated in what way the subject is to attain a higher degree of self-determination or
transparency.48 Inasmuch, however, as he deprives subjectivity from any mediating import towards the world, his project ends up in a series of flaws: it cannot assess the relative weight different texts have in shaping differential types of subjectivity, examine how
actors create or use texts or explain why only certain texts happen to have greater effectiveness than others in inflicting particular realities, why, that is, certain meanings arise,
persist and collapse at particular times leading from the dominance of one type of textual
regime to another an issue all the more decisive as Derrida takes texts to be incommensurable.49 This last remark raises the question of the dissimilar competence, the variable

Cf., Lemert (1994: 266-7).

Dews (1987: 32).
48 Honneth (1998: 198). It is surprising from this point of view that the critical theorist Albrecht
Wellmer (1993: 68) accuses Derrida for subjectivism: only if an intentionalist perspective is presupposed
can we assert that each individual use of a sign carries an index of indeterminate otherness.
49 Many have raised such questions. Cf. Collins & Hoopes (1995: 629), Mouzelis (1995: 45, 48, 55-6;
2008: 28-9, 39-40, 180-1), Burkitt (1999: 96ff).
46
47

14
mediating efficacy different actors have in achieving particular ends and thus the question of power.
Derridas idea that social relations in all their variable forms are layered into texts,50
assumes that social agents are free-standing involved in non-hierarchical relationships
precisely like the elements of a semantic structure which function interchangeably given
the always open possibility of [their] extraction and grafting (MP: 317). However, although an antithetical social space (observed in the various divisions in the field of distribution, income, life-chances, political rights, etc.) is indeed portrayed in (historical, philosophical, sociological, literary, cinematic) texts, it cannot be reduced to textual differences
because it emerges from the ordinary activities of people the laypersons first-order
discursive and non-discursive (non-representational) practices, as put by Nicos
Mouzelis and embodied in institutional structures of domination and legitimation, thus
in given extra-textual (socio-institutional, economic, etc.) realms, which cannot be analyzed as systems of semantic rules.51 In fact, as Peter Dews notes, there is a fundamental
disanalogy between the institutional region and the way it is depicted in textual narration,
given that institutions are not simply textual structures, but rather consist of a powerful system of forces and multiple antagonisms Given that institutions are traversed
by relations of force, it is difficult to see how [p]olitical antagonisms [could ever] be
reduced to logical contradictions.52 The socio-institutional field, in particular, as William
Sewell argues, is more directly implicated in power relations because it does not solely consist of signs (following Giddens, Sewell calls them schemas) and the (phonological, morphological, syntactical and semantic) rules that underlie them, but in addition of resources
which it mobilizes and unevenly distributes. With respect to power, however, semantic
structures have relatively modest effects and minor consequences because the
enactment of signs and rules principally serves to sustain the sociolinguistic competence of the
speakers (their membership in a linguistic community even if this is permanently deferred), without sharply shifting resources toward some speakers and away from others.
Semantic structures, in other words, are slightly implicated in power relations and in a
sense neutral with respect to the different participants: Assuming that an utterance is
made to other competent speakers of the language, the speaking of a grammatical sentence in itself creates no significant power disparities but rather establishes an equality
among the conversants. Language, of course, serves as a medium for all kinds of enactments of power relations, but at the level of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, it is as close as we are likely to get to a neutral medium of exchange.53 If this is so,
however, and the extra-textual arenas of life more permeated by power relations find no
analogy in the textual realm, Derridas general textuality is questionable the least.
It is true that in his later work he refashions his strong proposition that there are no
unmediated by texts events in the world, suggesting instead that there is nothing outside context. As he clears out, however, this is not to impugn the formalist split between
the pure interiority of the textual field and the absolute exteriority of contexts, as experience is acquired only through textual intercession: one cannot refer to this real except
in an interpretative experience (L: 153).54 To say so, however, is to obliterate all possible
relation to circumstantial reality; for if a text is nothing but the traces found by the reader and thus always in the air or in suspension until the arrival of the act of interpretation, the text at the end is eradicated from the actual realm of history. This is to ignore,
Williams (2001: 113).
Cf., Mouzelis (2008: 24-6).
52 Dews (1987: 35). Cf. Mouzelis (2008: 29), Burkitt (1999: 99ff), Williams (2001: 133, 221), Collins &
Hoopes (1995: 635).
53 Sewell (1992: 23).
54 Cf. Critchley (1992: 38-9), Williams (2001: 114), Barnett (1999: 282-3).
50
51

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however, as Edward Said rightly comments, that texts have ways of existing that even in
their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society
in short, they are in the world burdened with [their] occasion, with the plain empirical
realities from which [they] emerged Whether a text is preserved or put outside for a
period [is a matter that has] to do with the texts being in the world, which is a more
complicated matter than the private process of reading [After all] critics [themselves]
are not merely the alchemical translators of texts into circumstantial reality for they
too are subject to and producers of circumstances in their capacities as readers and
writers in the world.55 Derridas general textuality, in brief, remains within a selfreferential, Alexandrian universe.
IV. Conclusion.
As exemplified through Saussure and Derrida, the linguistic turn has forced European
social thought to analyze the symbolic dimension of social systems and in particular the
structuring of social reality role of the meta-institution of language. As I have argued,
however, this great contribution to sociology went too far in its untenable split between a
semantic and an extra-semantic realm and in the latters implication that there is no
moment in which agency actually gets free of codes and texts. If one accepts, however, that systems of domination and legitimation cannot be reduced to systems of semantic rules, then one can draw the provisional even if negative conclusion that empirical
social action can never be determined by default or in advance. This is so, because the multiple struggles actors play over the control of the means of production, the means of
domination and the means of identity construction spring out of the structural interests established by an extra-textual division of labor with no analogy in texts. To say so, however, is also to say that the conventional dialectic between agency and structure rather than
their transcendence is more suitable in capturing the relationship of man with the world.
Even if this is true, however, such a dialectic must be backed up with a theorization
of the subject per se, a theory, that is, which does not deduce subjectivity from its social
beliefs, roles, positions or dispositions. Many contemporary sociologists understand
indeed that the space of the subject cannot be inferred from the theorization of social
structures alone. This is why Giddens, for instance (definitely not Bourdieu), infuses in
his approach to agency the psychoanalytic category of desire in order to transmit to the
subject the power of acting otherwise. In saying so, however, one should not assume
that the present synthetic sociologies provide a way out of the impasse. Giddens belief
that the social structures are at the end enacted by knowledgeable human agents, i.e.,
by subjects who have both the practical and the reflective consciousness to know what they
are doing and how to do it, or Bourdieus postulation of agency as being capable of putting its habitual knowledge into practice and work it in innovative ways, seam to repeat
the foundational assumption of an agent possessing analytic autonomy vis--vis societal
structures. Assuming that the very possibility of agency and therefore the resolution of
dualisms is sociologys very condition of possibility, this sociology has yet to be written.
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