Page 157 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

a text. The Saussurean system used as metaphor is inadequate to deal with all the complex contextual matters outlined above. What Saussure excluded from the linguistic system as parole (i.e., all the social and contextual factors to do with language use) was pre- cisely what critical linguistics, social semiotics, and poststructuralism have later wanted to deal with.
Most forms of linguistics, even those that concern themselves explicitly with questions of context, main- tainaversionoftheSaussureansystemasthebasis for their analysis of texts. They have maintained a belief in the concept of linguistic value as Saussure formulated it, arguing that linguistic elements have an intrinsic value or meaning that derives from their relationships of similarity and opposition to other elements within the linguistic system (see Sect.3.1 below). They believe that the linguistic system they construct as linguists provides an objective meta- language for establishing the intrinsic value or mean- ing of linguistic elements in texts. But for post- structuralism and many kinds of semiotics, all met- alanguages, languages about language, theories of language, including the linguistic, are themselves texts. Poststructuralists therefore argue that grammars or linguistic systems, like other texts, are always an interpretation from someone's perspective. As such they cannot be any more objective than contextual criticism, which in its most recent forms includes the subjectivity of the interpreter as an essential part of understanding the analytic and interpretive process. On these grounds, they refuse the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic value or meaning, and even go so far as to argue that there is no meaning in texts, only meaning that results from the interaction between texts and the speaking subjects (subjectivities) who read and write them, and in so doing provide the links with contexts that quite literally 'make meanings.' Poststructuralists therefore relocate value or meaning in the social processes in which texts are made, and deny the reality of the abstract linguistic system, which they see as a theoretical fiction.
2.1 Reading as Rewriting
In critical linguistic and poststructuralist readings, the reader maps from the language of the text being ana- lyzed to other interpreting codes or texts (meta- languages). There is no qualitative difference between the linguistic and the other practices. The linguistic theory isjust another code. The authority it carries however means that its effects in interpretive contexts cannot be discounted. That was one of the things Barthes (1974) was saying in S/Z in his reread- ing of Hjelmslev and his refusal of the then normal modes of linguistic analysis. His approach was to take chunks of Balzac's text, explore his own techniques of making sense of them, and then categorize his responses as involving five specific codes, or theories of the world; 'grammars,' that gave him the resources
to 'make meanings' with this text, to make sense of bits of it by relating them to bits of other codes/texts with which he was familiar. In S/Z all 'decoding' became not only connotative, but inherently sub- jective in that it was always mediated by the subjec- tivity, the socially constructed and positioned subjectivity, of the reader.
So 'analysis' became a productive reading process, in which reading involved rewriting. The recognition thatreadingisarewriting,andthatlinguisticreadings are also rewritings, went along with the decon- struction of the opposition between denotation and connotation, and the theorizing of the openness of texts to new interactions with their environments. It was one of the first performances of what it was to rewrite a story and tell it differently as a form of literary and culturalcriticism.
As such, it has important links with research that was going on elsewhere on the essential narrativity of all texts (the Greimas school in Paris: Greimas 1987); on the binary structures that characterize and struc- ture all narratives (Propp 1958; Levi-Strauss 1963); on the relationships between narrative, poetry, and myth (Jakobson and Levi-Strauss 1962), on the consti- tutive nature of metaphor and metonymyin all types of discourse (Jakobson 1971); on the fact that not only the text-types (genres) that constitute a culture, but also its larger discursive formations and institutions, are constituted of narrativity and binarisms (Foucault 1972; Derrida 1976; Kristeva 1984, 1980). These con- nections linked the denial of the possibility of denot- ative meaning in Barthes (1974) to what eventually appeared to be a quintessential^ poststructuralist dis- covery of the narrativity, metaphoricity, and fic- tionality of all texts.
The work of Jean-Fran9ois Lyotard (1984) is exemplary here. Its consequences for literary work were the interesting extension of theories and models developed for the analysis of the literary into the analysis of the social sciences generally, on the assumption that all texts are stories, written from some position, and for some specific purpose; that they are therefore in a very real sense fictions, and can be expected to be analyzable like other fictions such as myths or literature. So the theories and practices of a modernist literary institution—literary structuralism and semiotics—were appropriated by the practices and theories of poststructuralism.
Poststructuralists have not, by and large, 'used' linguistics as a tool of analysis. Reoriented by the work of Hjelmslev, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva,whocanbelocated respectivelywithinstruc- turalism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, semi- otics, and feminism, they read and rewrite, they perform their texts, remaking meanings in and through the doing of language. Poststructuralist prac- tice has reconstructed the reader as empowered to rewrite the primary text from the intertextual
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