Page 155 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Hjelmslevian and Peircean terms is significant. He accomplished a bringing together of structuralist methodology with semiotic and poststructuralist insights into the relations of texts to other texts. Eco provided, in his use of Hjelmslev, Jakobson, and Peirce, a detailed semiotically based account of the pragmatics and practical textual functioning of the constant 'deferral,' to use a Derridean deconstructive term,whichismeaning.UsingHjelmslev's(1961)con- cept of'connotative semiotic' and Peirce's articulation of the 'interpretant' (1986), Eco (1981a: 261ff.) developed the theory of 'infinite semiosis' and of the 'open' text in ways which used and supplemented Jakobson's structuralist/semiotic understandings of the nature of the literary text. Eco brings together many traditions to focus on writing, reading, and tex- tuality. His theory is profoundly linguistic and philo- sophical, and yet transcends both in its concern with general semiotics. It has much wider implications than the literary, but offers crucial insights into the struc- tures and semiotics of literary texts.
In A Theory of Semiotics (1977) Eco challenges the directions of Julia Kristeva's semiotics. She was the only other semiotician, in the 1970s, to be working as broadly as Eco himself, but her work had taken on psychoanalysis by this time (1984) and she had begun to insist on the semiotics of subjectivity, and on the subjectivity of the reading/writing subject as the means by which intertextuality interacts with the structures of texts. Eco's theory of codes remains in the arena of the social and the linguistic and he refuses both Kristeva's psychoanalytical move and the focus on subjectivity.
1.6 Semiotics in the 1990s
Semiotics has come to deal with the ways in which meanings are made in social systems and within cultures, and with the complex ways in which this social making of meanings in turn constructs the social and the cultural. Semiosis is seen, as predicted by Saussure, to operate not only through language and in forms mediated by language (e.g., literature and myth, history, science, and practices of educational transmission), but in and through other media (e.g., the built environment, architecture, art, fashion, music, gesture, film, the body). To study semiotics in the 1990s is to learn to read and write the world as text.
Historically, both structuralism and semiotics came to be identified with a primary concern with language and the literary, with what it was that constituted the literary as opposed to other kinds of verbal texts, with issues of reading the literary. This was always an important issue, but only one of many areas of inquiry that occupied the Russian formalists, and the Prague School semioticians. In Russia in the 1920s, there was already a trenchant critique of the dominant literary establishment. The aim to provide a 'scientific'
account of literature, within a Marxist framework, was intended to empower the proletariat and subvert the literary institution. That literary structuralism and semiotics became almost solely identified with the description and analysis of the aesthetic in later accounts has to do with the contexts into which the early work was received when it was translated and popularized by Jakobson and Levi-Strauss in the US in the 1940s. Their work was appropriated by the humanist traditions of literary study in the univer- sities, traditions which fostered the notion of a purely aesthetic realm where the literary, literary texts, and authors of great works are self-evident, given objects that do not become implicated in the 'other' realms of politics, economics, and ideology.
On the other hand, literary structuralism and semi- otics were frequently rejected outright by these same institutions, identified as linguistic and 'scientific,' and seen as inherently antagonistic toward the privileged realm of the private, the subjective, and the creative, which was the aesthetic. The language/literature debates of the post-World War I years in Cambridge, for example, saw the separation within English of traditions of language study derived from Germanic philology from a new focus on literary response brought about by close, but nonsystematic, and cer- tainly nonlinguistic, reading. What became linguistic stylistics and literary structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s could often only be located in the language sections of English departments, and thus became institutionally isolated from the literary which was their primary concern. These processes were repeated in the 1960s and 1970s with the second wave of influ- ence of these ideas (see Sect. 1.3 above). These debates and anomalies have continued in English studies in British universities. They are now complicated by fur- ther controversies about the role of theory, par- ticularly poststructuralist theory, and the relation of literary studies to more broadly based cultural studies (derived from semiotics) which would look at cultural artefacts and processes of all kinds, including the literary, as texts (film, the visual, popular culture forms like television and media, performance, and theatre).
It has in fact been the very ecumenical nature of semiotics that has slowly changed and rewritten both of these entrenched literary positions. As literary structuralism and semiotics have evolved alongside poststructuralist theory, it has come to be recognized that literary texts do not operate in isolation from social processes, the socializing practices, the disci- plines, or the institutional relations of power which affect all textual production, and within which sub-
jects and their practices are constituted. Literary texts, like all other texts, are forms of social discourse, in which meanings, often conflicting and contradictory meanings, are negotiated in an ongoing and pro- ductive dialogue with changing contexts and with
Literary Structuralism and Semiotics
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