Page 158 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
resources of her own subjectivity and experience. The text itself, its linguistic and semiotic stuff, is not irrel- evant to this enterprise. It is however theorized differ- ently. It becomes the trace of a writing which can be remade, rewritten as the processes of semiosis begin again with the interaction of the language traces of this text with those of the embodied, sexed, speaking subject/text who is its reader. Reading and writing cease to be qualitatively different processes. There is also an important difference, effected through the work of Michel Foucault, in the position of the intel- lectual/cultural critic. The author has lost her insti- tutional authority. The intellectual/critic can no longer be an objective observer. She is now in the middle of her own textual productions. There is no outside of ideology, and therefore only a practice, a doing, and never a mode of analysis, is actually possible.
That is the textual politics of poststructuralist cri- tique: to subvert and remake, from some position other than the dominant one, the hegemonic and soci- ally ratified versions of the world which are the culture and the social narrativized. The whole enterprise is, if not profoundly linguistic, at least profoundly semi- otic; nor are its politics so different from those of a critical linguistics or a social semiotics.
3. Archaeology of a Metalanguage: Continuitiesand Discontinuities
This section focuses on particular texts and writers in order to trace the patterns of continuity and dis- continuity that characterize the apparent 'evolution' of the metalanguages of literary structuralism and semiotics into the metalanguages of post- structuralism.
the most important ideas borrowed from Saussure. The related dichotomy langue/parole, which func- tioned in Saussure to exclude from the domain of linguistics what people actually did with language, in favor of an attempt to construct the abstract system which made that activity possible, has been a source of constant controversy. This dichotomy also involved the exclusion of the diachronic or the historical from the description of the synchronic or current state of a linguisticsystem.
The notions of system and value have come in for much criticism in poststructuralist circles, and were already criticized by the Bakhtin Circle in Russia in the 1920s (Voloshinov 1973). Both concepts have to be seen in the context which produced both Saussure's linguistics and the early formalist work for which it became a model. The central tenets of both enterprises were in keeping with the latest ideas in the philosophy of science at the time, in particular Husserl's phenom- enology and its links with and critique of nineteenth- century positivism. The crucial aspect of this phil- osophy for both Saussure and the formalists was its emphasis not on the sensory experience of 'facts' as in positivism but on the role of intuition in enabling 'the direct grasp of the essences underlying the phenom- enal world which provide it with its categorial identity' (Steiner 1984:255).
This was the basis for Saussure's proposing a strict separation of what is linguistically phenomenal, indi- vidual, and accidental from what is essential, social, and rule-governed: langue (potential linguistic system) versus parole (actual speech). Langue would be the sole object of linguistics. In this, Saussure's Course in General Linguistics provided the young formalists with a program for what they wanted to achieve in literary studies: a science generated intrinsically on the basis of its own subject matter. Like language, literature is a social institution, a system governed by its own regularity and more or less independent of contiguous fields of culture. This was a conception of literature that informed Tynjanov's notion of literary history, Jakobson's poetics, and Tomashevsky'smet- rics (Steiner 1984: 175-85).
Even within formalism, there was much variation in the way these ideas were used. The semiotic concept underlying Husserl's or Saussure's expressionist model is absolutely antidialogic. The identity of intrin- sic linguistic meaning can only be preserved within the linguistic system, the potential that underlies linguistic activity: Saussurean linguistics is monologic. Even though the Course begins with a discussion of a dia- logue between two disembodied heads, these heads are two identical instances of the same social con- sciousness: they are two terminals whose semiotic input and output are one, monologic. In these heads is langue, the set of all linguistic elements internalized by the linguistic community at any one time. All minds have the same content. These are the aspects of Saus-
3.1 The Heritage
ofSaussure
Saussure's (1960) formulation of synchronic linguis- tics as constituting an important part of a semiology which would study the life of signs in a society pro- vided the basic concepts for the twentieth century's early structuralist/semiotic inquiry. His theory of language provided the terminology and, indeed, the methodology. The specific aspects of Saussure's linguistics which were borrowed as a model/metaphor for analyzing systems of meaning analogous to language, including the structure of literary texts and the nature of literariness, were small in number but have remained central to most literary and textual analysis.
3.1.1 Language as Synchronic System: Uses and Rewritings
The concept of language as a synchronic system and the notion of linguistic opposition (the patterns of similarity and difference which determine the value of individual elements within the system) were among
136