00109--How do Saussure's views become radical?

            A movement or theory is radical when it is capable of favouring fundamental or extreme change in scientific, social or cultural spheres.  Structuralists argue that the entities that constitute the world we perceive (human beings, meanings, social positions, texts, rituals....) are not the works of God or the mysteries of nature.  It is an effect of the principles that structure us.  The world without structures is meaningless.  It will then be a random and Chaotic continuum.  Structures order that continuum and organise it according to certain set of principles.  And thus we make sense of it.  In this way structures make this world meaningful and real.  Many of the proportions put forward by Saussurian linguistics was radical in substance and result.  The foundational argument about the arbitrariness of the sign is a radical concept because it proposes the autonomy of language in relation to reality.  The Saussurian model, with its emphasis on internal structures within a sign system, can be seen as supporting the notion that language does not 'reflect' reality but rather constructs it.  We can use the language 'to say what isn't the world, as well as what is.  And since we come to know the world through whatever language we have been born into the midst of, it is legitimate to argue that our language determines reality, rather than reality our language' some  later critics have criticised Saussure for 'neglecting entirely the things for which signs stand'.  They have lamented his model's detachment from social context.  Robert Stam argues that by 'bracketing the referent', the Saussurean model 'severs text from history'.  More over, it was the Saussurian concepts that led to the most radical assumptions of Deconstruction.