EDWARD SAID
One of the
founders of the field of post-colonial studies--itself based
heavily upon French cultural theory--Said is best known for writing
about orientalism and conceptions of "the Orient" as a particular
discourse constructed by the West. Said's widely influential
1978 book Orientalism "stands as the essential book of
post-colonial theory, a case study of discourse as domination"
(Russell Jacoby, "Marginal Returns", 30). Said's work is
based fundamentally on Foucault's
notions of discourse
and power. In Orientalism Said defines
orientalism as a subgenre of the post-colonial obsession with
"otherness". As described by Said, orientalism was the mechanism by
which the West tried to understand, or at least manage its relations,
with the "East". It denoted the Western "corporate institution for
dealing with the Orient -- dealing with it by making statements about
it, authoring views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it,
ruling over it: in short . . . a Western style for dominating,
restructuring, and having authority over the Orient"
(Orientalism, 1978:3).
So Said is
essentially outlining how the West, and in particular England and
France, "represented"--in effect created--something called the Orient.
This was nothing but a construct, however. What the West called the
Orient never in fact existed except in the minds of Westerners. It was
simply a tool that aided in Western subjugation of the region.
More recently,
Said's work has come under heavy criticism. Critics such as Bernard
Lewis and Aijaz Ahmad have attacked the thesis that the
West simply invented "the Orient", as well as Said's supposedly
oversimplified dichotomy of "East" and "West". Colonial reality was
much more multifaceted than Said seems to suggest, so the rebuttal
goes. Nevertheless, Orientalism stands as one of the seminal
texts in post-colonialism. Its methodology has been applied by many
authors to other recently decolonized or subjugated areas of the world
(even including, in some cases, parts of Europe) and cannot be
ignored.
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EXTERNAL
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![PHOTO OF SAUSSURE]()
FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE
Swiss
linguist credited with formulating the concept of structuralism
and modern linguistics,
by positing that the principles of linguistics (the science of
understanding language) applies also to all social phenomena. Also,
with American Charles Peirce, he helped to found of the theory
of semiotics.
According to Saussure, language is a system of signs in
which words (the signifier) have only some arbitrary relation to what
they signify (the actual "meaning" of the word). A cat, for
example, has no link with the sound of the word "cat." "A word,
therefore, gets its meaning from the way different signs relate to
each other -- just as, to use one of Saussure's own analogy, the
'meaning' of a move in chess only arises out of its context within a
game" (Woolley, 180). This system of language consists of a deep
structure of meanings--hence the appeal to
structuralism.
Saussure's ideas
about language can probably best be understood in relation to Plato.
Plato argued that words don't relate directly to everyday objects, but
rather to ideas (their "essences"). Saussure agreed with this,
but there he parted company with Plato. For Saussure, what defines a
word is not its relation to some eternal essence, but to its
relationship with other words in the language system. However
-- and this is the weird part -- these relationships with other words
are negative, not positive. Also, the word does not have an
absolute, "essential" relationship with the thing it describes; the
relationship is rather purely arbitrary. The thing we call a "cat" we
could just as easily call a "dog" or a "plop" or a "boinng" or
whatever.
What? Well,
according to Saussure, each word (like "bat" for example) is defined
by what it is not (i.e., a "bat" is not a "bit" or a "cat" or
"bought" or "but" or whatever). Thus it is the sound of the word
itself that produces the concept of the thing it's describing.
However, there's more to come. Saussure believed that different
languages produce different concepts of things. Thus, a French speaker
or a Swahili speaker not only speaks differently from an
English speaker, but also thinks differently.
Now for the
linguistic/structuralist part. This is where Saussure weaves his ideas
about language into a unified philosophy. First off, language and
everything around us in the world is made up of signs which we
interpret to make sense of the world. Each of these signs is made up
of a signifier and signified. The signifier might
be a sound, like "bat", and the signified would then be the
thing it represents (the idea, or concept of a bat). The two combined
give us an idea of what the sign refers to in the "real world", or
external reality.
Saussure's ideas
set the groundwork for modern linguistics, structuralism, and
semiotics, and have been pursued by later linguists such as Claude
Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky.
~~~~~~~~~~
IVAN SUTHERLAND
One of
computing's most influential figures, Sutherland has been hailed as
the "father of computer graphics" and a central figure in the
development of computer simulation (Woolley, 41). Cyberspace
itself is really an extension of Sutherland's original concept of a
form of display that supplies information to all the human senses in
an interactive environment.
CT. Author Index
Ss