Page 163 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

The cattle drink from the creek (3) Those mice meet near those bushes
Cats sleep on every branch All felines frolic
In the examples in (3), the horizontal sequences are formed grammatically, according to rule, by choosing from the paradigms of elements which form the system, which can be identified with the vertical columns. The, those, and all are all choices of the same kind, which can fill the first slot in this kind of sequence: similarly cattle, mice, cats, and felines, and so on.
This concept of language as system is based on the idea that what is paradigmatic, the alternative sets of equivalent choices availablewithinthe system,isnever constitutive of the syntagm, which is by definition characterized by difference not similarity, by the com- bination of significantly different elements. It is difference that constitutes value or meaning at the level of the syntagm, just as it is at the basic level of the phoneme. When Jakobson (1960:27) defined the poetic function of language as projecting 'the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination,' he argued that in verbal art, in contradistinction to the normal state of affairs in language, 'equivalence becomes the constitutive device of the sequence' (italics added). Parallelism at all levels of phonological structure, from stress, alliteration, and rhyme to intonation constitutes the poetic syntagm. The phonological structure is built around patterns of binary oppositions, stress/unstress, same- ness of sound, and difference in meaning (e.g., rhyme), rising and falling tones or beats, and the parallelisms that arise from recurrent metrical, stanzaic, and other generic forms such as the sonnet.
Jakobson showed that within the system which is the poetic text, 'equivalence in sound, projected into the sequence as its constitutive principle, inevitably involves semantic equivalence' (1960:40). Words simi- lar in sound are drawn together in meaning. Phono- logical parallelism is frequently accompanied by grammatical parallelism which serves to increase the ambiguity and semantic richness of the 'double-sensed message' (1960) and 'The supremacy of the poetic function over the referential function does not oblit- erate the reference but makes it ambiguous' (1960:42).
The split reference of the double-voiced message finds its correspondence in a split addresser and a split addressee. Hence Jakobson's enduring interest in linguistic shifters, particularly pronouns, and in the issue of a subjectivity constructed in language. Shifters were of interest to him, as they were to Benveniste (1986), because they are distinguished from all other constituents in the linguistic code by their compulsory reference to the message and its context. They are a complex category where code (langue) and message (parole) overlap, wheremeaningcannot be established
without reference to the context. They therefore offer another instance, like the poetic function of language, where the strict separation of langue and parole will not work (1957a: 132). Jakobson's analysis of split subjectivity was of particular interest to later struc- turalists and semioticians in the 1960s and 1970s, as subjectivity, and the construction and positioning of the subject in language, became issues for a semiotics and poststructuralism that were rethinking the humanist subject in the light of linguistic, semiotic, discursive, narrative, and psychoanalytictheories.
3.4 Jakobson and Levi-Strauss: Textual Analysis
Jakobson's analysis of the poetic text as system, and of the poetic function of language, inevitably ques- tioned the Saussurean notion of system, particularly if it is remembered that the poetic function is consti- tutive of but not limited to poetic texts. The emphasis on the sound/meaning nexus in poetry meant that the 'arbitrariness' of the linguistic sign had to be ques- tioned and rewritten. The projection of the para- digmatic into the syntagmatic meant that the text as utterance contained the system, was indeed the only place where the system could be. The text became both product and process, and this weakened the opposition between langue and parole. These were the subversive elements in Jakobson that Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, and Jacques Derrida would find most compatible with their own poststructuralist enter- prises. For Kristeva they were elements that also con- nected with her discovery of Bakhtin, whose work in these areas was in fact much earlier than Jakobson's.
These ideas were expressed by Jakobson quite late, much later than his work with the formalists. For him these were the characteristics of the poetic function of language, not of all functions and, as suggested above, he sought to contain the subversiveness of these elements (see Sect. 3.1.4 above). The relevant analyses are (with L. G. Jones) 'Shakespeare's Verbal Art in "Th'Expense of Spirit"' and (with Claude Levi- Strauss) '"Les Chats" de Charles Baudelaire.' They are among many such analyses published in various languagesinVolumeIII ofJakobson's SelectedWri- tings (1981), but they are the two best known in the English-speaking context. Both are typical examples of the binary structuralist methodology, relying on the patterns of variables that constitute the texts to provide meanings intrinsic to the texts as systems. The paper on 'Les Chats' describes the poetic text in ways which anticipate Barthes' later 'discovery' of'readerly' (closed) and 'writerly' (open) texts (1967a). The pos- ition taken by Jakobson and Levi-Strauss anticipates by some considerable time later versions of the 'open' text. These derive variously from linguistics-based structuralism, from the revivalof Bakhtiniancarnival in Kristeva's work, or from the insertion into the reading process of the psychoanalytic unconscious
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