Art of Communication 7.2

8/3/2019 Art of Communication 7.2

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Theory of Language

Structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure

Signifierand Signified

a 'signifier' (signifiant) -

theform which the signtakes

the 'signified' (signifi) -the conceptit represents


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No sacrosanct relationship between sign and meaning Meaning produced through difference The notion of value... shows us that it is a great mistake to

consider a sign as nothing more than the combination of acertain sound and a certain concept. To think of a sign asnothing more would be to isolate it from the system towhich it belongs. It would be to suppose that a start couldbe made with individual signs, and a system constructedby putting them together. On the contrary, the system as

a united whole is the starting point, from which itbecomes possible, by a process of analysis, to identify itsconstituent elements. (Saussure 1983, 112

; Saussure 1974,113)


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each language involves differentdistinctions between one signifierand another (e.g. 'tree' and 'free') and

between one signified and another(e.g. 'tree' and 'bush'). Chain of signifiers Red/blue/green/yellow p/b/t/d/k/g

Meaning of redness because of itsdifference from blue not because ofany intrinsic quality

Substitution of /p/ with /b/ bringsabout a change of meaning


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Arbitrary

Arbitrariness of the Relationshipbetween Signifier and Signified

Meaning produced through

agreement Signifiers do not have any

intrinsic meaning but themeaning accorded to them byconvention

tree/t r i:/ Combination of sounds or letters

does not automatically signify theobject it refers to


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Relationship between sound and meaning

Between vak sound and artha meaning

Mispronounciation can alter meaning


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Signs

representamen,

the objectand the interpretant

Sign vehicle: the form of the sign;

Sense: the sense made of the sign;

Referent: what the sign 'stands for'.


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Symbol/symbolic: a mode in which the

signifier does notresemble the signified but

which is fundamentally arbitraryor purelyconventional - so that the relationship must

be learnt: e.g. language in general (plusspecific languages, alphabetical letters,

punctuation marks, words, phrases andsentences), numbers, morse code, traffic

lights, national flags;I


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Icon/iconic: a mode in which the signifier isperceived as resembling or imitating the signified(recognizably looking, sounding, feeling, tastingor smelling like it) - being similar in possessing

some of its qualities: e.g. a portrait, a cartoon, ascale-model, onomatopoeia, metaphors,'realistic' sounds in 'programme music', soundeffects in radio drama, a dubbed filmsoundtrack, imitative gestures;


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Index/indexical: a mode in which the signifieris not arbitrarybut is directly connectedin someway (physically or causally) to the signified - thislink can be observed or inferred: e.g. 'natural signs'(smoke, thunder, footprints, echoes, non-syntheticodours and flavours), medical symptoms (pain, arash, pulse-rate), measuring instruments(weathercock, thermometer, clock, spirit-level),'signals' (a knock on a door, a phone ringing),pointers (a pointing 'index' finger, a directionalsignpost), recordings (a photograph, a film, videoor television shot, an audio-recorded voice),personal 'trademarks' (handwriting, catchphrase)and indexical words ('that', 'this', 'here','there').Icons

Likenesses


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For Peirce, a symbol is 'a sign which refers to

the object that it denotes by virtue of a law,

usually an association of general ideas, whichoperates to cause the symbol to be

interpreted as referring to that object' (Peirce1931-58, 2.249).


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Turning to icons, Peirce declared that aniconic sign represents its object 'mainlyby its similarity' (Peirce 1931-58, 2.276).A sign is an icon 'insofar as it is like thatthing and used as a sign of it' (ibid.,2.247). Indeed, he originally termed suchmodes, 'likenesses' (e.g. ibid., 1.558). Headded that 'every picture (howeverconventional its method)' is an

icon (ibid., 2.279). Icons have qualitieswhich 'resemble' those of the objectsthey represent, and they 'exciteanalogous sensations in the mind' (ibid.,2.299; see also 3.362).


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Indexicalityis perhaps the most unfamiliar

concept. Peirce offers various criteria for

what constitutes an index.An index'indicates' something: for example, 'a sundial

or clock indicates the time of day' (Peirce1931-58, 2.285). He refers to a 'genuine

relation' between the 'sign' andthe objectwhich does not depend purely on

'the interpreting mind' (ibid., 2.92, 298).


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In respect of the Sign itself (what we have been calling the Sign-Vehicle), a sign may be either a (i)Potisign (ii)Actisign or (iii) a Famisign.(By the time of the final accounts, Peirce wasexperimenting with terminology so these types are perhaps more familiar as Qualisigns, Sinsignsand Legisigns).

In respect of the Immediate Object, a sign may be either i) Descriptive (ii) Designative or (iii) aCopulant.

In respect of the Dynamic Object, a sign may be either (i)Abstractive (ii)Concretive or (iii)Collective. In respect of relation between the Sign and the Dynamic Object, a sign may be either, (i) an Icon

(ii) an Index or (iii) a Symbol. In respect of the Immediate Interpretant, a sign may be either (i) Ejaculative, (ii) Imperative or (iii)

Significative. In respect of the Dynamic Interpretant, a sign may be either (i)Sympathetic (ii) Shocking or (iii)

Usual. In respect of the relationship between the Sign and Dynamic Interpretant, a sign may be either (i)

Suggestive (ii) Imperative or (iii) Indicative. In respect of the Final Interpretant, a sign may be either, (i)Gratiffic (ii)Action Producing or iii)

Self-Control Producing. In respect of the relation between the Sign and the Final Interpretant, a sign may be either a (i)

Seme (ii) Pheme or (iii) a Delome. In respect of the relation between the Sign, Dynamic Object and Final Interpretant, a sign may be

either (i) anAssurance of Instinct (ii) anAssurance of Experienceor (iii) anAssurance of Form.


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TheText is not to be thought of as an objectthat can be computed. It would be futile to tryto separate out materially works from texts. In

particular, the tendency must be avoided tosay that the work is classic, the text avant-garde; it is not a question of drawing up acrude honours list in the name of modernityand declaring certain literary productions 'in'and others 'out' by virtue of theirchronological situation: there may be 'text' ina very ancient work, while many products ofcontemporary literature are in no way texts.


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The difference is this: the work is a

fragment of substance, occupying a part of

the space of books (in a library forexample), theText is a methodological

field.The opposition may recall (without atall reproducing term for term)


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Lacan's distinction between 'reality' and 'the real': the one isdisplayed, the other demonstrated; likewise, the work can beseen (in bookshops, in catalogues, in exam syllabuses), the textis a process of demonstration, speaks according to certain rules

(or against certain rules); the work can be held in the hand, thetext is held in language, only exists in the movement of adiscourse (or rather, it isText for the very reason that it knowsitself as text); theText is not the decomposition of the work, itis the work that is the imaginary tail of theText; or again, theText is experienced only in an activity of production. It follows

that theT

ext cannot stop (for example on a library shelf); itsconstitutive movement is that of cutting across (in particular, itcan cut across the work, several works).


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In the same way, theText does not stop at(good) Literature; it cannot be contained in ahierarchy, even in a simple division of genres.

What constitutes theText is, on the contrary(or precisely), its subversive force in respect ofthe old classifications. How do you classify awriter like Georges Bataille? Novelist, poet,essayist, economist, philosopher, mystic?Theanswer is so difficult that the literary manualsgenerally prefer to forget about Bataille who,in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously onesingle text.


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If theText poses problems of classification(which is furthermore one of its 'socialfunctions), this is because it always involves a

certain experience of limits (to take up anexpression from Philippe Sollers).Thibaudetused already to talk -- but in a very restrictedsense -- of limit-works (such asChateaubriand's Vie de Ranc, which doesindeed come through to us today as a 'text');theText is that which goes to the limit of therules of enunciation (rationality, readability,etc.).


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Nor is this a rhetorical idea, resorted to forsome 'heroic' effect: theText tries to placeitself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa

(is not general opinion -- constitutive of ourdemocratic societies and powerfully aided bymass communications -- defined by its limits,the energy with which it excludes, itscensorship?).Taking the word literally, it maybe said that theText is always paradoxical.


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TheText can be approached, experienced, in reaction to thesign.The work closes on a signified.There are two modes ofsignification which can be attributed to this signified: either it isclaimed to be evident and the work is then the object of a literal

science, of philology, or else it is considered to be secret,ultimate, something to be sought out, and the work then fallsunder the scope of a hermeneutics, of an interpretation(Marxist, psychoanalytic, thematic, etc.); in short, the workitself functions as a general sign and it is normal that it shouldrepresent an institutional category of the civilization of the

Sign.


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TheText, on the contrary, practises the infinitedeferment of the signified, is dilatory; its field is that ofthe signifier and the signifier must not be conceived ofas 'the first stage of meaning', its material vestibule,but, in complete opposition to this, as its deferredaction. Similarly, the infinity of the signifier refers notto some idea of the ineffable (the unnameable signified)but to that of a playing; the generation of the perpetualsignifier (after the fashion of a perpetual calendar) in

the field of the text (better, of which the text is thefield) is realized not according to an organic progress ofmaturation or a hermeneutic course of deepeninginvestigation, but, rather, according to a serialmovement of disconnections, overlappings, variations.


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The logic regulating theText is not comprehensive (define'what the work means') but metonymic; the activity ofassociations, contiguities, carryings- over coincides with aliberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die); the

work in the best of cases -- is moderately symbolic (its symbolicruns out, comes to a halt); theText is radically symbolic: a workconceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolicnature is a text.Thus is theText restored to language; likelanguage, it is structured but off-centred, without closure(note, in reply to the contemptuous suspicion of the'fashionable' sometimes directed at structuralism, that theepistemological privilege currently accorded to language stemsprecisely from the discovery there of a paradoxical idea ofstructure: a system with neither close nor centre).


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TheText is plural. Which is not simply to say that it .has several meanings, but that itaccomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an acceptable) plural.TheText is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answersnot to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination.The pluralof theText depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be calledthe stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a

woven fabric).T

he reader of theT

ext may be compared to someone at a loose end (someoneslackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls -- it is what happenedto the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of theText -- on the side of avalley, a oued flowing down below (oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling ofunfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected,heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air,slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the otherside, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are halfidentifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, foundsthe stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference.


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So theText: it can be it only in its difference (which does notmean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (thisrendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts -- no'grammar' of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with

citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (whatlanguage is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cutacross it through and through in a vast stereophony.Theintertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some originof the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of awork, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations whichgo to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yetalready read: they are quotations without inverted commas.


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The work has nothing disturbing for any monistic philosophy(we know that there are opposing examples of these); for sucha philosophy, plural is the Evil. Against the work, therefore, thetext could well take as its motto the words of the man

possessed by demons (Mark 5: 9): 'My name is Legion: for weare many.'The plural of demoniacal texture which opposes textto work can bring with it fundamental changes in reading, andprecisely in areas where monologism appears to be the Law:certain of the 'texts' of Holy Scripture traditionally recuperatedby theological monism(historical or anagogical) will perhaps offer themselves to adiffraction of meanings (finally, that is to say, to a materialistreading), while the Marxist interpretation of works, so farresolutely monistic, will be able to materialize itself more bypluralizing itself (if, however, the Marxist 'institutions' allow it).


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The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are postulated: adetermination of the work by the world (by race, then byHistory), a consecution of works amongst themselves, and aconformity of the work to the author.The author is reputed the

father and the owner of his work: literary science thereforeteaches respect for the manuscript and the author's declaredintentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation ofauthor to work (the 'droit d'auteur' or 'copyright', in fact ofrecent date since it was only really legalized at the time of theFrench Revolution).


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As for theText, it reads without the inscription ofthe Father. Here again, the metaphor of theTextseparates from that of the work: the latter refers to

the image of an organism which grows by vitalexpansion, by 'development' (a word which issignificantly ambiguous, at once biological andrhetorical); the metaphor of theText is that of thenetwork; if theText extends itself, it is as a result ofa combinatory systematic (an image, moreover,close to current biological conceptions of the livingbeing). Hence no vital 'respect' is due to theText: itcan be broken (which is just what the Middle Agesdid with two nevertheless authoritative texts --


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Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee ofits father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishingany legacy.

It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in theText, in his text,but he then does so as a 'guest'. If he is a novelist, he is inscribed inthe novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longerprivileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic. Hebecomes, as it were, a paper-author: his life is no longer the origin ofhis fictions but a fiction contributing to his work; there is a reversionof the work on to the life (and no longer the contrary); it is the work ofProust, of Genet which allows their lives to be read as a text.Theword 'bio-graphy' re-acquires a strong, etymological sense, at thesame time as the sincerity of the enunciation -- veritable 'cross" borneby literary morality -- becomes a false problem: the I which writes thetext, it too, is never more than a paper-I.


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The work is normally the object of a consumption; no demagogy is intendedhere in referring to the so-called consumer culture but it has to be recognizedthat today it is the 'quality' of the work (which supposes finally anappreciation of 'taste') and not the operation of" reading itself which candifferentiate between books: structurally, there is no difference between

'cultured reading and casual reading in trains.TheText (if only by its frequent'unreadability) decants the work (the work permitting) from its consumptionand gathers it up as play, activity, production, practice.This means that theText requires that one try to abolish (or at the very least to diminish) thedistance between writing and reading, in no way by intensifying theprojection of the reader into the work but by joining them in a singlesignifying practice.The distance separating reading from writing is historical.In the times of the greatest social division (before the setting up of

democratic cultures), reading and writing were equally privileges of class.Rhetoric, the great literary code of those times, taught one to write (even ifwhat was then normally produced were speeches, not texts).


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Significantly, the coming of democracy reversed the word of command: what the (secondary) School pridesitself on is teaching to read (well) and no longer to write (consciousness of the deficiency is becomingfashionable again today: the teacher is called upon to teach pupils to express themselves', which is a littlelike replacing a form of repression by a misconception). In fact, reading, in the sense of consuming, is farfrom playing with the text. 'Playing' must be understood here in all its polysemy: the text itself plays (like adoor, like a machine with 'play') and the reader plays twice over, playing theText as one plays a game,looking for a practice which re-produces it, but, in order that that practice not be reduced to a passive, innermimesis (theText is precisely that which resists such a reduction), also playing theText in the musical senseof the term.The history of music (as a practice, not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that of theText fairlyclosely: there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous (at least within the confines of acertain class) and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity; then two roles appearedin succession, first that of the performer, the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public (though still itselfable to play a little -- the whole history of ) the piano) delegated its playing, then that of the (passive)amateur, who listens to music without being able to play (the gramophone record takes the place of thepiano). We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is calledon to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'.TheText isvery much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. Which is an importantchange, for who executes the work? (Mallarm posed the question, wanting the audience to produce the

book). Nowadays only the critic executes the work (accepting the play on words).The reduction of readingto a consumption is clearly responsible for the Boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text,open it out, set it going.


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7.This leads us to pose (to propose) a final approach to theText, that ofpleasure. I do not know whether there has ever been a hedonistic aesthetics(eudaemonist philosophies are themselves rare). Certainly there exists apleasure of the work (of certain works); I can delight in reading and re-readingProust, Flaubert, Balzac, even -- why not? -- Alexandre Dumas. But this

pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remainsin part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption;for ifI can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that itis impossible today to write 'like that') and this knowledge, depressingenough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works, in the verymoment their remoteness establishes my modernity (is not to be modern toknow clearly what cannot be started over again?) As for theText, it is boundto jouissance, that is to a pleasure without separation. Order of the signifier,

theText participates in its own way in a social utopia; before History(supposing the latter does not opt for barbarism), theText achieves, if not thetransparence of social relations, that at least of language relations: theText isthat space where no language has a hold over any other, where languagescirculate (keeping the circular sense of the term).

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Art of Communication 7.2