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Timpanaro was by profession an editor and by training a philologist. His magnum opus explored the changes that occurred in the centuries of handwritten transcription of classical texts before the invention of the printing press, tracing the incremental errors and conscious or unconscious “improvements” made to texts by scribes.²⁷ Timpanaro’s focus was on the tangible manifestation of texts, and the agency of scribes who might otherwise have been expected merely to repeat text true to its source. His analysis reveals the fluidly changing character of texts and the historicity of their meanings.

So too in his reading of Saussure and his successors, Timpanaro questions the abstract separation of language system and structure from language behavior, where we find “language basking in its own internal coherence,” “a system unto itself.” This amounts to a dematerialization of meanings, “setting the ‘psychic’ off from the ‘physiological’.”²⁸ It also means Saussure neglects things that are crucial to our grammar of multimodality where the “physiologies” or material practices of speech^§AS1.4.1 and writing^§AS1.4.7 are very different, and so too are their affordances.

In the title of his 1972 book, Frederic Jameson calls structuralism a “prison-house of language”²⁹ – where received, static systems of meaning determine our social being. This was before the rise of poststructuralism – Derrida and others.^§MS0.4d But its weakness also is to over-emphasize language, even when framed more broadly as “discourse.” The danger in both cases is when, either in structural analysis or poststructuralist “deconstruction,” the structure of meaning in the abstract floats away from its points of reference in the material practices of meaning.

The aim of a transpositional grammar is to demonstrate the necessary traffic between text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech – without privileging any of these forms of meaning. Even in domains where a lot of meaning is purely arbitrary or conventional, meanings are expressed and limited by the materiality of media^§AS1.4 – the constraints of time in speech, and space in image, for instance.

Today we are only able to read Saussure, not hear him speak. Saussure had notoriously postponed writing. When he died, loyal students hastily compiled their lecture notes into the Course in General Linguistics. The transcription of his speech was marked by the same “irregularities” of redesign identified by Timpanaro in the work of scribes in the medieval scriptoria, refining or “improving” the text where it appeared this was needed.³⁰

In 1996 a stash of notes was found in the Saussure family home that seem truer to his intentions for being in his own hand.³¹ (It’s also ironical that lost, fragmentary, and partially reconstructed texts attract the interest they do – in this book, we have already worked over parts of the Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Wittgenstein legacies.)

In one of Saussure’s notebooks, there is the draft of an unfinished letter to a notoriously anti-Semitic Paris newspaper, eviscerating “these swarms of parasites,” Jews who had entered France from Germany. Perhaps this was a letter dictated by his father, a strident anti-Semite who was losing his eyesight. Perhaps it was written by his brother, Léopold, with whom Ferdinand was close and whose handwriting was similar. Léopold had written a book, The Psychology of Colonization, arguing that the peoples of the French colonies could and should never be assimilated to French civilization.³²

So we might ask of Ferdinand, could some language systems be conceptually superior to others? Or we could ask more neutrally, what is the nature of their differences? Some argue that compromising references to race and ethnicity may have been edited out by Ferdinand’s loyal students.³³ In Saussure’s classification of “Aryan” and “Semitic” languages, the former were posited to be superior. Loyalists today argue that surely, none of this could be true.³⁴

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²⁶ Sebastiano Timpanaro, 1970 [1975], On Materialism, translated by L. Garner, London, UK: New Left Books, pp. 135–220.

²⁷ Sebastiano Timpanaro, 1981 [2005], The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, translated by G.W. Most, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

²⁸ Sebastiano Timpanaro, 1970 [1975], On Materialism, translated by L. Garner, London, UK: New Left Books, pp. 142, 151, 161.

²⁹ Fredric Jameson, 1972, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

³⁰ John E. Joseph, 2012, Saussure, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 633–35.

³¹ Ferdinand de Saussure, 2002 [2006]. Writings in General Linguistics, edited by S. Bouquet and R. Engler, translated by C. Sanders and M. Pires, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

³² John E. Joseph, 2012, Saussure, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 415–16, 440–45.

³³ Robert J.C. Young, 2002, “Race and Language in the Two Saussures,” pp. 63–78 in Philosophies of Race and Ethnicity, edited by P. Osborne and S. Sandford, London, UK: Continuum, p. 67.

³⁴ Michael Lynn-George, 2004, “Writers, Intellectuals, Heroes: The Case of Ferdinand De Saussure,” The International Journal of the Humanities 2:1243–49, p. 1246.

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 269–270. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Sebastiano Timpanaro’s “Structuralism and its Successors” §MS3e