Page 166 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
metaphorcity of all language was an inevitable conse- quence of Jakobson's position. This helped to break down the dichotomy Saussure's work had set up, and provided one of those crucial insights that would go on taking effect as the critical perspectives of post- structuralist theory developed to thinking about all texts and genres as essentially fictional in the sense of being always metaphors.
Jakobson made it clear that the denotative level of meaning, which was theorized as intrinsic to the linguistic system, actually operated connotatively, as Barthes argued, on the basis of metaphor (similarity and paraphrase relations), metonymy (part/whole relations), and indexicality (pointing relations involv- ing the overlap of code and message and again part/ whole relations).
of the fact/fiction, primitive/cultured, feminine/ masculine, rational/irrational dichotomies. Con- temporary French culture is rewritten as myth (Bar- thes 1983). Eco defines semiosis as everything that can be used to tell a lie, and rewrites presidential speeches as narrative strategies of lying (Eco 1985); history and anthropology are rewritten as literature, fiction (White 1978; Clifford and Marcus 1986). Eth- nography is relocated with 'us' not 'them' (Pratt 1986). The categories that emerge from all this structuralist, semiotic, and poststructuralist literary activity are reappropriated from poststructuralism as a met- alanguage for exploring the social semiotics of the metaphors and metonymies of text/reader/context interactions (Kress and Threadgold 1988) and this social semiotic and poststructuralist work negotiates and makes use of strategies of analysis that have a long and complex archaeology in structuralist texts which it is supposed to have moved beyond, and which continue to coexist alongside it in discontinuous and overlapping series.
Poststructuralism, feminism, deconstruction, lit- erary structuralism, and semiotics continue to coexist as never quite separable phenomena, characterized by discontinuities and incompatibilities that belie the usual stories of measured and logical evolution from literary structuralism and semiotics to its feminist, psychoanalytic, Foucauldian, and deconstructive 'posts.' That heterogeneity and difference are what
It was not so clear what would make connotative
semiotics (which would relate the patterns in a text
by way of the subjectivity of its readers, to contexts
extrinsic to it) any different. Such relations involve
paradigmatic relations of similarity which enable a
reader to 'gloss' metalinguistically the fact that this
word or larger chunk of text is similar to that one,
to read this as a metaphor for that. They involve
metonymy, relations of contiguity with contexts that
are recognized as part/whole relations: this chunk of
text is part of that whole context and can be made
sense of accordingly. And they involve indexicality.
These ideas were the basis for Barthes' later turning
to this kind of semiotic, instead of the intrinsically characterize literary structuralism and semiotics
linguistic, to decode or 'read' Sarrasine. The concepts are already theorized but never realized in Jakobson or in the structuralist textual work of Halliday. Miss- ing from both is the role of the reader (Eco 1981b).
These were the connections that Eco made when he used metaphor as an illustration of the process of unlimited semiosis. Metaphor as resemblance is only definable through the metonymic chains of associ- ation in which it is imbedded. These chains of associ- ation are, in effect, an infinite chain of interpretants, a network of culturally agreed metonymies, contiguities between signifiers and signifieds, in the code, in the co-text, and in the referent. The entire 'global semantic space,' to use Eco's formulation, becomes a network of metaphors built on contiguity.
Here, in essence, are the concepts that would lead to the radical unsettling of the order of things in literary structuralism and semiotics referred to in theprevious section. This is the moment when literary theories, theories of what it is to be literature, are suddenly recontextualized and used as technologies for rewrit- ing the rules of what it is to be not literature. What was ordinary or practical language in formalist, Prague School, and structuralist work suddenly becomes the focus of a new kind of literary activity. If everything is metaphor, or narrative, or myth, if everything is discursively constructed, if genres can be rewritten, then there has been a very considerable deconstruction
today.
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