Page 159 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

surean linguistics which prompted Voloshinov's cri- tique of the notion of intrinsic meaning and the linguistic system (1973:67ff).
3.1.2 Jakobson and the Linguistic System
Jakobson's concept of the linguistic system decon- structed many of the classic Saussurean dichotomies. Saussure claimed that the causes of linguistic change (diachrony) are extrasystemic, accidental, and to be excluded from synchronic description. Jakobson's linguistics was profoundly dialectic, and this made any separation of the system from its history imposs- ible. For him, linguistic change is triggered by con- tradictions within language itself, and is subject to the rules of the system. The axis of succession (see below for a discussion of syntagm in Saussure), the present synchronic moment of the linguistic signifier, is always impregnated with history. At the same time, the axis of simultaneity or choice (see 'paradigm' below), the potential that is the system in Saussure, consists in Jakobson of several simultaneous and overlapping systems, not one. These are the functions of language made famous in his 1960 paper, and the several sys- tems of functional registers they give rise to. The sys- tem for him is a complex field of synchronic and diachronic elements, revolutionary and conservative forces, and it is in a constant state of disjunctive equi- libriums and disequilibriums. It is both a state and a process of change.
This rewriting of the linguistic system in Jakobson derives from and is produced in interaction with his work on the literary system. It is linked with the con- cept of defamiliarization in his discussions of the evol- ution of verbal art. The oscillation between the old, which has become automatized, and the new, which defamiliarizes, is never conceived of as a linear pro- gression in which each new state of the literary system simply leaves the last one 'automatized': the inter- action of old and new which produces defam- iliarization in art is an essentially dialogic phenomenon—and dialogism here takes on in Jakob- son's work many of the characteristics Bakhtin (1986) will be attributed with having discovered. The system is an ongoing struggle between antithetical tendencies and heterogeneous elements, and it is not internalized, as in Saussure, uniformly and totally by every speak- ing subject. This difference allows change, but pre- serves the system.
Jakobson's expressionist debt to Husserl, which preserved his belief in the system which underpinned the potential subversiveness of dialogism, and his interest in the dialogic, began to become incompatible. The problem of the literary and its relation to the system was central. How far apart can a writer and his readers be before they cease to share anything? What are the limits of the system? The problem of writing became crucial, because writing makes it poss- ible for a literary work to transcend the moment of its
production and become available to a distant read- ership, which will project it against a poetic system different from the one that produced it. High literature was identified by Jakobson and Bogatyrev as distinct from folklore on the basis of its production and recep- tion. The immediacy of the oral performance of popu- lar culture, its closeness to speech, and to the demands of its conditions of production, made it a fact of langue. If it was to be successfully received it had to correspond to the normative structure of a system and fulfill its collective demands. Literature was more like parole, dialogic and able to interact with many con- texts (quoted in Steiner 1984:228). This statement would seem to be at odds with Jakobson's notion of verbal art as a social institution, like language and like Saussure's system.
The starting point of Jakobson's poetics was the concept of the expression, a sign which referred only to itself. The poetic function of language involved a focus on the message for its own sake, and was the centerpiece of a theory of the autonomy of the aesthetic. The problem arose when Jakobson con- ceived of the semiotic identity of this sign in terms of a Saussurean social and rule-governed system (which would preserve its identity) but then relativized this system by rewriting langue as a series of historically changing functional varieties. Poetic language, driven by its need for incessant defamiliarization, exhibited the highest degree of change, and was thus, para- doxically, the least reliable function in terms of long- term semiotic identity (or intrinsic meaning, to use the terminology used above).
This was the basis for the linguistic principle of Jakobson's poetics. It is related to the issues that became popularized as the differences between 'ordi- nary' and 'poetic' language in the Prague School (Mukafovsky 1977). In Jakobson the literary work is always perceived against the basis of contemporary 'ordinary' language. Poetic language is a super- structure built upon that system, and the aesthetic functioning of the literary text depends upon that system. The same metaphor is in Eco's (1977) much later formulation of the overcoding and extracoding that are required to make sense (a) of the literary conventions, the literary systems that constrain the production of literary texts, and (b) the hypothesizing and Peircean abduction that is necessary to make sense of the aesthetic text as invention, its radical 'deautomatizing' moments. What preserves the possi- bility of interpretation is the linguistic moment, the shared code of the common linguistic system. For Jakobson and Eco, the writer and reader cannot be totally isolated from each other as long as they share a language. The literary text will make sense as an utterance in that language, even projected against a set of poetic norms or an aesthetic code that is alien to it. The interpretation of any literary text, for Jakob- son, will therefore always involve meanings that are
Literary Structuralism and Semiotics
137