Page 164 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
and of pleasure, drives, and the body in the later Barthes and Kristeva (Barthes 1975; Kristeva 1984). Eco's differently derived but related Peircean and Hjelmslevian construct of the open text was for- mulated considerably later.
As Jakobson and Levi-Strauss explain in the paper on 'Les Chats' (1962:385-86), the poetic text is described first, as consisting of patterns of variables (or paradigms) which exist 'on a number of super- imposed levels: phonological, phonetic, syntactic, prosodic, semantic etc.,' and then as consisting of 'systems of equivalences which fit inside one another and which offer, in their totality, the appearance of a closed system.' This is what gives the poem 'the value of an absolute object.' And yet there is another way of looking at it 'whereby the poem takes on the appearance of an open system in dynamic progression from beginning to end.'
The progress from the structuralism of Saussure is very considerable. The extension of these principles to other kinds of texts, to nonpoetic texts, is also imma- nent in this analysis. Referring to his own earlier use of Jakobson's work in his analysis of myth (1963), Levi-Strauss speaks of the opposition that he set up between poetry and myth. He argues that the differ- ence between poetry and myth is that the poetic text contains the system of variables which are the multiple levels of the paradigmatic projected into the syntagm, while the mythic text lacks this principle of equiv- alence. It can be interpreted only on the semantic level, and the system of variables which constitute it can only be established outside the text, in the multiplicity of versions of the same myth. What is important how- ever is that the system is to be found in texts, that is, in instances of parole, and that it is constituted by patterns of repetition. There is a version of the ordi- nary/poetic language binarism at work in the quali- tative difference that is perceived to distinguish the language of poetry and myth, but even that is ques- tioned when Levi-Strauss acknowledges that the methods of analysis of poetry and myth 'in the final analysis, can be substituted for one another' (1963:373). In 1963 he had argued that:
Among all social phenomena language alone has thus far been studied in a manner which permits it to serve as the object of truly scientific analysis, allowing us to under- stand its formative process and to predict its mode of change. This results from modern researches into the problems of phonemics... The question which now arises is this: is it possible to effect a similar reduction in the analysis of other forms of social phenomena?
This was the question that 'The Structural Analysis of Myth' set out to answer, and answered in the affirmative:
Myth is language... myth like the rest of language is made up of constituent units... The true constituent units of myth are not the isolated relations but bundles
of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce meaning.
(Levi-Strauss 1963:58-59, 210-11)
The analysis showed that the syntagm of any single version of a myth was a selection of choices from the bundles of paradigmatic relations that constituted the system of that myth as a whole in the form of its many different textual realizations.
These poststructuralist moments in classic struc- turalist texts had a number of consequences. They finally put paid to the old distinction between ordinary and poetic language, as structuralist semioticians extended the use of the structuralist methodology beyond the analysis of the literary to the analysis of cultural texts of all kinds, in not only verbal media, and took up the agendas of the Bakthin and Prague Schools to explore the relations of the literary as semi- otic system to other semiotic systems and institutional practices. This agenda became a particularly urgent one as poststructuralist theory—this time in the form of Foucault's work on discourse, power, subjectivity, and institutions—set out to explore some of the same questions from a perspective that polemically rejected linguistics, structuralism, and semiotics, but remained in many ways structuralist-functionalist and con- structivist in its major premises.
Another major consequence was the result of the correlation in Levi-Strauss's (1963) work of the poetic, the mythic, and the scientific. This correlation, sum- marized in his statement that 'logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science' (1963:230) had important ramifications in the decon- struction of a number of structuralist binarisms. The primitive/cultured opposition is the first to be at risk, but the prose/poetry, fact/fiction oppositions cannot be far behind in this context. Thus, paradoxically, while structuralist/semiotic research, following these early leads in Jakobson, Levi-Strauss, and elsewhere, took up the challenge of studying the literary as social institution in its relations of specificity and difference to other social institutions such as the law, religion, science, economics, specifying the register and genre of texts produced in and through these institutional practices, the very same classic structuralist texts also contributed to the poststructuralist deconstruction of the boundaries and framing procedures that would be so established.
The 'poststructuralist' effort, which is never entirely separate from the semiotics that is contemporary with it in the 1960s and 1970s, set about establishing the essentiallyfictional,metaphoric,andconstructed nat- ure of all language and of all texts and genres. It was not concerned, as Levi-Strauss was, with dem- onstrating the scientific nature of myth and poetry, but rather the poetic and mythical nature of science. The links had been made, and they were not insig- nificant in the later poststructuralist and feminist work
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