Page 161 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

secondary representation of sound, the written text must always be able to be read in relation to voice, the primary substance, and the basic structure of that substance is provided by the phonological structure of a given language. Phonology also solves the prob- lem of the second cause of semiotic slippage, the dis- tance between the participants in the literary process. Of all the systems of norms and stratal levels of organ- ization that constitute language, the phonological sys- tem is the one that interlocutors must share if any dialogue is to take place. This postulate derives from the Saussurean concept of the double articulation of language. This says that all linguistic signifiers that carry meaning are made up of smaller elementsthat do not signify in themselves but function to differentiate meanings. These meaning-differentiating elements are the phonemes that constitute the most elementary linguistic system, and are indispensable to the semiotic functioning of language.
Poetic violence cannot deform this system, or verbal art would lose its linguistic nature: thus the identity of the literary text is preserved from the relativism inherent in its dialogic interaction with different con- texts by the stability of the phonological system and its insistence on intrinsic meaning. On the other hand, the poetic function in Jakobson's formulation fore- grounds the phonological. What functions in ordinary language as a means to a communicative end, serves to defamiliarize the verbal medium in verbal art, and makes the structure of the verbal sign the focus of attention. As in the system itself, repetitions of sound in verbal art produce meaning: but here the repetitions are not constrained by the system, for the para- digmatic has already projected itself into the syntagm, and revolution is imminent.
The issues raised by these incompatible tendencies in Jakobson's work surface in Julia Kristeva's work on revolution in poetic language. Her arguments for the aesthetic as a place of revolution are not the same as Jakobson's, to which she is greatly indebted in all other respects. While he saw phonology as the means of containing 'poetic violence,' she transforms his understanding of the role of phonology in poetry, reading only its revolutionary poetic aspects in Jakob- son, its extrasystemic, transgressive potential. As she rewrites the linguistic metaphors with metaphors from psychoanalysis, phonology becomes the link with the body and the unconscious, and then with the repressed feminine and a rewritten semiotic. She refuses to ident- ify the phonological with that aspect of the linguistic system which is beyond deformation, what she calls the symbolic and identifies as the patriarchal order of language. For her the phonological becomes the semiotic, the excess which is responsible for disruption of the fixity and rationality of the symbolic, the patri- archal system of language. Poetic violence she takes from Jakobson, but the nature of her revolution is very different from his. The difference comes from the
psychoanalytic move which relates the Freudian or Lacanian conscious/unconscious binarism to her own symbolic/semiotic, the linguistic system/process, syn- tagm/paradigm, syntax/phonology binarisms and the cultural binarisms masculine/feminine, rational/ irrational, mind/body. In this scheme of things the unconscious is the place of the semiotic and all the repressed connections between the body and phonology. Phonology is the bodily source of, and not the rational and systemic constraint on, revolution.
3.1.5 Challenge and Deconstruction: Bakhtin and Prague School Positions
The phonocentrism and logocentrism of Saussure were the subject of critique and deconstruction long before Derrida. The Bakhtin Circle in Russia in the 1920s offered a trenchant critique of Saussurean linguistics, and thoroughly rewrote formalist theories of language and the literary. For Voloshinov (1973) every sign was an ideological phenomenon, a reality standing for some other reality. For Medvedev (1978) the literary was an ideological phenomenon, a system of metasigns which 'refract what lies outside them,' that is, nonartistic, ideological phenomena.
From a linguistic point of view, a sign that reflects another sign is exactly like an utterance that comments on, or replies to, or quotes another utterance. The process is inherently dialogic, and dialogue became a dominant metaphor in the semiotics of Bakhtin and Prague School members. V oloshinov argued that the formalists remained concerned with what he called the centripetal forces in language, the elements that make it systemic and monologic. The Bakhtin Circle was interested in the opposite tendencies: language as process, as an ongoing struggle between different points of view, different ideologies, a dialogue with other texts, and other voices; the heterogeneity of language. They took as their main target the formalist vision of a literary system independent of all other cultural domains. Bakhtin's late essays 'The Problem of the Text' and 'The Problem of Speech Genres' (1986) provide an overview of many of these concerns.
The Prague School also rejected this view of litera- ture as autonomous system. They argued that the poetic function never operated in isolation from the other contiguous structures with which it changed in time (the political, economic, ideological). Muka- fovsky insisted on the semiotic point of view which would enable the theorist to recognize the existence and dynamism of the literary system, and to under- stand its development as a movement in constant dia- lectic with the development of other spheres of culture. Prague School aesthetics reveals its debts to both for- malism and the Bakhtin School.
3.2 Signifier and Signified: Contrastive Meaning
The arbitrary nature of the linguisticsign wasessential to Saussurean linguistics. Arbitrariness was closely
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