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Why, still today, do we find the name of Ferdinand de Saussure featuring prominently in volumes published not only on linguistics, but on a multitude of topics, volumes with titles such as Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies (Lee and Poynton, 2000), or the intriguing Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers (Kronenfeld, 1996)? It is to this question that the present volume attempts to bring at least a partial answer, by looking afresh at the intellectual background to Saussure's work, the work itself, its impact on European structuralism in general and linguistics in particular, and its changed but continuing influence today. The titles above, then, are enough to show that nearly a century and a half after his birth, the ideas of this Swiss linguist and thinker still excite interest. He is best known for his Cours de linguistique générale, edited after his premature death from the notes of students who had attended his lectures and first published in 1916. This 'Course in general linguistics' has gone through numerous editions in France, has been translated into numerous languages, and has had an influence far beyond the area of linguistics. This book, however, is far from being the sole reason for his importance as a thinker, the recognition of which has gone through various phases since his death. In his own lifetime, he was regardedand regarded himself-primarily as a historical linguist who had made his mark with a brilliant and precocious study in Indo-European linguistics. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, general linguistics, as a discipline that examines how language works and how best to describe the current state of a living language (as opposed to tracing the history of past language states), was barely constituted; Saussure was one of the main thinkers who contributed to establishing the principles of the discipline as we know it today. However, although the Cours, on first being published, was received with praise by a few, and with a more muted mixture of praise and criticism by others, it was largely ignored in many quarters. In particular, in the English-speaking world references to it were almost non-existent (see Sanders, 2000a). It would only be in the mid-twentieth century that the significance of Saussure's thought came to be realised, initially in the context of the structuralist movement. 1
Why, still today, do we find the name of Ferdinand de Saussure featuring prominently in volumes published not only on linguistics, but on a multitude of topics, volumes with titles such as Culture and Text: Discourse and Methodology in Social Research and Cultural Studies (Lee and Poynton, 2000), or the intriguing Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers (Kronenfeld, 1996)? It is to this question that the present volume attempts to bring at least a partial answer, by looking afresh at the intellectual background to Saussure's work, the work itself, its impact on European structuralism in general and linguistics in particular, and its changed but continuing influence today. The titles above, then, are enough to show that nearly a century and a half after his birth, the ideas of this Swiss linguist and thinker still excite interest. He is best known for his Cours de linguistique générale, edited after his premature death from the notes of students who had attended his lectures and first published in 1916. This 'Course in general linguistics' has gone through numerous editions in France, has been translated into numerous languages, and has had an influence far beyond the area of linguistics. This book, however, is far from being the sole reason for his importance as a thinker, the recognition of which has gone through various phases since his death. In his own lifetime, he was regardedand regarded himself-primarily as a historical linguist who had made his mark with a brilliant and precocious study in Indo-European linguistics. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, general linguistics, as a discipline that examines how language works and how best to describe the current state of a living language (as opposed to tracing the history of past language states), was barely constituted; Saussure was one of the main thinkers who contributed to establishing the principles of the discipline as we know it today. However, although the Cours, on first being published, was received with praise by a few, and with a more muted mixture of praise and criticism by others, it was largely ignored in many quarters. In particular, in the English-speaking world references to it were almost non-existent (see Sanders, 2000a). It would only be in the mid-twentieth century that the significance of Saussure's thought came to be realised, initially in the context of the structuralist movement. 1
Descriptions of society have changed during the preceding decades. Expressions such as "knowledge society" or "information society" are nowadays generally used. In science, and social science in particular, the concept of information has entered as fundamental concept. It is no longer relegated to special fields of inquiry, such as public opinion research, mass communication or educational technology (cf. Craig, 1999). Instead, this concept, and the closely related concepts of communication and knowledge, are replacing the fundamental analytical categories of social action, social exchange, social role, etc. As is well-known, the entry of these concepts into the foundations of science after World War II coincided with the diffusion of new technologies of information processing.It has been convincingly demonstrated that there is a relatively direct lineage from the early cybernetic information theories to the adoption of constructivist theories of information and communication in contemporary social theory (Hayles, 1999). In this paper, I want to argue that the potential of cybernetics has not yet been fully utilized. A careful (re)consideration of the insights of cybernetics opens up new horizons for social theory. The first sections of this paper will focus on the rise of second-order cybernetics and its constructivist epistemology. Special attention is paid to the epistemological consequences of the mathematical calculus of George Spencer Brown. Afterwards, I will highlight its impact on the writings of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. In the final section, I argue for a redefinition of social rationality that incorporates the insights of second-order cybernetics.
One measure of The Fly's modest cultural purchase is its generation of continuations and variants. Like Frankenstein, this breeding of further episodes has transformed a simple horror story into a collective fabulation-so this is a piece of modern mythology in the raw. The Fly's first author was George Langelaan, a British writer raised in France. 1 Its first appearance was in the form of a short story published in Playboy in June 1957. 2 Within a year it was rescripted by James Clavell and made into a Twentieth-Century Fox movie directed by Kurt Neumann. This was followed by Return of the Fly in 1959, and Curse of the Fly in 1965. The northern hemisphere was safe from Fly remakes for two decades, until Charles Edward Pogue and David Cronenberg cowrote and Cronenberg directed his major revision of 1986, followed in 1989 by The Fly II. Criticism has been focused on cinematic matters, particularly Cronenberg's transformation of Neumann, with little reference to Langelaan. 3 In contrast, I will use a combination of literature-and-169
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