[Nowak] Structural Ism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

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Reports on

Philosophy

Reconsidering Aesthetics...

Edited by Krystyna Wilkoszewska

Nr l9 1999



Reports on Philosophy N° 19/1999

ANDRZEJ NOWAK

Structuralism andSemiotics in Philosophical

Aesthetics1

This article consists of four sections. The first deals with Peirce's serialsemio tics2. The subject of the second is the functional semiotics of thestructuralist Prague Circle. The third concerns Parisian generative

structuralist semiotics. The fourth deals with Polish semiotic andstructuralist aesthetics.

1. The Unfulfilled Project - The Fullness andOpenness of the Aesthetic Sign

One does not need any serious knowledge here to realise that weare dealing with the secret of Charles Sanders Peirce's aesthetics - anaesthetics which was in fact never created and which remained to theend the challenge that Peirce did not confront. What is so strange,though, about a philosopher who does not understand a particular subject? Nothing really, except that in this case we are dealing withsomething different. To explain this, one must consider Peirce'smetaphilosophical views. He believed that philosophy was structuredhierarchically in terms of a base, cre-

1To be more precise - I will be looking at both semiotic aesthetics and atstructuralist semiotic aesthetics. This specification is important, because not all structures arecomposed of signs, and so structuralism need not necessarily be connected withsemiotics. With a sufficiently broad understanding of structuralism such as that proposed byGerard Genette (G. Genette, Narrative Discourse, transl. J.E. Levin, Oxford:

Blackwell,1982, p. 12), one could consider whether Katarzyna Rosner is justified in her belief in thestructuralist character of Roman Ingarden's aesthetics (K. Rosner, Semiotyka strukturalnaw badaniach nad literatura. Jej osiagnipcia, perspektywy i ograniczenia [StructuralistSemioticsin Litterary Studies. Its Achievements, Perspectives and Limitations], Krakow: V\?ydaw-nictwo Literackie, 1981, p. 9).

2The relationsihip of serial thought to structural thought will be interpreted later.



162 Andrzej Nowak

ated by the descriptive disciplines3, followed by the construction of what

he termed the normative disciplines, and completed by metaphysics. The

main descriptive discipline was, for Peirce, phaneroscopy (phenomeno-

logy), while the three normative disciplines were aesthetics, ethics, and

logic. The main concept of phaneroscopy is the "phaneron". The phaneron

is a phenomenon which is considered from the point of view of its relational

structure rather than from that of its content or existence. Roman Jakobson

described phaneroscopy very well indeed when he called it a "structural

phenomenology". As for Peirce's aesthetics, it is based on the idea of

qualities of feelings. The pivotal component in his ethics is the category of

the non-ego. On the other hand, logic develops around the idea of laws.

Aesthetics thus amounts here to a theory of ideals which are felt as simple

qualities. Ethics searches for ways towards these, which direct man less

through his isolated journey through life as in his entanglement with

networks of dependencies and co-actions. Peirce described ethics as the

theory of rational and self-controlled action. Logic, to his mind, was the

theory of rationality - i.e. of thought's self-development salva veritate - and

also the study of laws and concepts which, importantly, mark out vectors

within the field of actions undertaken by man. To be more visual, and to cut

a long story short, one cannot describe the laws of movement if one does

not know the concept of a "road", and one cannot construct it if one does

not know where it is supposed to lead. This is why Peirce believed that

amongst the normative disciplines aesthetics supplies the base4. And this is

why he always regretted the fact that he never managed to capture it

systematically. However, the truth is that at no point did he really encapsu-

late anything in such a systematic way.

Although Peirce did not avoid terms such as "value" and "beauty", he

preferred to talk about "aesthetic ideals" in order to underline their belong-

ing to the world of pure possibility, meaning that they were in no way

relative to empirical conditions. It is clear that this was his reason for intro-

ducing the concept of "Firstness" - unhappy as he was with the deceptively

satisfying notion of simple possibility. Human activity is always an indi-

vidual endeavour, while Peirce's specific use of the term "existence" (the

realm of "Secondness") may be misunderstood if equated with "reality" in

the ordinary sense of the word. That which establishes a relation between an

ideal and an action, and intertwines a multiplicity of actions into a net-

3 For Peirce's view of how we should understand the normativity of a discipline, seeC.P. 5.39. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne and F'aulWeiss(eds.) (Vol. I-VI), Arthur W. Burks (ed.) (Vol. VII-VIII), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Har vard Univ. Press, 1958-1960.

4 See, however, Carl M. Smith, "The Aesthetics of Charles S. Pierce", in: The Journal

of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, Fall 1972, pp. 21-29.



Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics 163

work of rational behaviour ("Thirdness"), is a necessary law, a heibit, as wellas something that deserves to be called ultima realitas entis . The opening upof the horizon of ideals before man was perceived by Peirce to be theauthentic purpose of art. It is in this sense that one should understand him

when he says that "nothing is truer than true poetry" (C.P.I. 315) . Truth,however, is the subject of logic. Therefore, as the summum bonum combines

both aesthetics and ethics , veritas is a "bridging idea" for both aesthetics andlogic which, for Peirce, makes it tantamount to semiotics. This does not mean,however, that the only aesthetic issue he was interested in was that of truth inart. It is possible to recreate his conception of aesthetic signs, albeit only onthe basis of his rather scarce and disparate remarks.

Using a term borrowed from Mieczysiaw Wallis, one can say that anaesthetic sign is a semiotic pleroma: it is distinguished by its special qualityof fullness. What would this amount to? In order to answer a question such asthis it is necessary to recapitulate the basics of Peirce's semiotics: a sign is nota thing but a relation. It has its ground, a direct (immediate) object, and aninterpretant. The ground of a sign is an idea . Its direct object is that, and only

that, which the sign presents. The interpretant is another sign understood assignifying the previous sign. Peirce called these three elements the "relata" of the sign. A "relatum" is not constituted by a so-called dynamic object, if suchan object exists (i.e. a represented object which would be independent of theway in which it is presented, though not necessarily itself real). The ground of a sign can be a notion of quality, an individual fact, or a general law. Inrelation to this, the sign is then a quali-, sin-, or legi-signum. The direct objectof the sign manifests quality, existence, and in some cases correctness.Depending on this, it is either an icon, index or symbol. The interpretant can

be an unspecified possib lity of meaning, a specified meaning, or a full,"saturated" meaning. It is therefore called either a rhema, dicent, or argument.Viewed from a different perspective, there may be interpretants of anemotional, energetic (i.e. calling out for action) and logical (i.e. a thought)

kind.Using the abovementioned characteristics, Peirce divided signs into a

number of classes. One of them, the class of rhematically indexical legis-

5 Peirce's "habit" here is not a psychological category. It refers rather to thescholastic notion of habitus entis.

6 Peirce's view was more moderate than the only apparently similar view ol Giam- battisto Vico as expressed by his claim that, if necessary, the truth of physics mustgive way to the truth of poetry.

7T.A. Schulz, Panorama der Astlietik von Charles Sanders Peirce, Stuttgart 1961, pp. 66-67.8 A common mistake that is made is to interpret Peirce's view by seeing his

"ground" as equivalent to a "sign-vehicle" in the sense of Charles W. Morris.



164 Andrzej Nowak

igna, constitutes the proper domain of aesthetic signs. Although it has only

been articulated by Max Bense, it is not difficult to find a sufficient basis for

such a claim in Peirce's own studies. To understand the consequences of this

claim, one has to know that every sign - as a result of what it is rather than

what it says - thematises an ontology: i.e. it marks a thematics of being. For

example, the monistic reism of Tadeusz Kotarbiriski may be thematised in the

form of indexically dicentic sinsigna. We are dealing here with a

homogeneous but extremely impoverished thematics of being. In this respect,

the rhematically indexical legisigna, and therefore aesthetic signs as well, are

situated at the other extreme. Their heterogeneous ontology is saturated to the

maximum possible degree, and includes all three of the basic categories: i.e.

Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. The pleroma of the aesthetic sign is,

first of all, the fullness of the ontology thematised in it. Bense was himself

aware of this, but apparently it did not concern him. He was preoccupied with

the heterogeneity of the ontology on the basis of which he posited the

Mitrealitat of art9. This meant departing from Peirce and, to put it rather

boldly, displaying an obeisance towards conventional European aesthetics.Peirce did not have constraints of this kind, so he consistently claimed that

"the highest grade of reality is only reached by signs" (C.P. 8.327). This is

another meaning of his phrase "nothing is

truer...." and constitutes the second aspect of the fullness of the aesthetic

sign.

The third dimension is connected to the three references of the sign rela-

tion. Let us first emphasise what has de facto already been said: the class of

aesthetic signs is a full class, i.e. it is specified in terms of all its constitutive

references - to the ground, the object, and the interpretant. Consequently one

can say that "asemantic art" is an empty concept. This conclusion may be

hard to accept, but the difficulties it leads to are not insuperable. One solution

was proposed by Włodzimierz Ławniczak 10. It amounts to making a

distinction between sensory analogy and theoretical analogy while at the sametime pointing out the relative similarities between art and science. The fact

that Lawniczak did not refer to Peirce's writings that were written in a similar

vein is not important here - if it were, it would be in a strictly positive sense

(C.P. 1.383). This does not mean, however, that the positions of these two

authors are identical. A few remarks of the American philosopher - such as

the one referred to above - suggest a symmetry of rela-

9 M. Bense, "Realitatsthematik", in: Aestketica: Einfiihrung in die neue Aesthetik, Baden-Baden: Agis Verlag, 1965, pp. 33-34.

10 W. Ławniczak, "Orientacje filozoficzne w nauce a problem tzw.nieprzedstawiaja.cych dziel sztuki plastycznej" [Philosophical Trends of Science, and

the Question Concerning Abstract Painting], in: Studia Estetyczne 15,1978, pp. 185-198.




tions: i.e. of truth to the epistemic sign and "beauty" to the aesthetic sign. If this were the case, one would have to assume that the subject for the latter isan aesthetic ideal simpliciter 11. Despite being risky, this hypothesis explainsin a simple way the seemingly puzzling assumption that the aesthetic sign is

an index. An abstract ideal can be pointed out but cannot be presented in a purely sensory form. What should one do, however, with something like"breakfast on the grass". One could say that "breakfast on the grass" is not anobjective reference to "Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe" - it is the interpretant of anarrangement of colourful spots which establishes its reference to aestheticvalue. As one can see, there is no place here for any self-referentiality on the

part of the aesthetic sign. This irritating notion is only necessary if one wishesto defend the idea of the autonomy of art, assuming that qualitativespecifications of objects or experiences provide an adequate basis for values .Cutting a long story short, the aesthetic sign is treated as a replete triad withall the consequences that flow from this. But that is not the end of the story. Idealiter, at least, it is also a replete triad that possesses the trichotomies infull. It comes down to what Peirce, referring to the trichotomous nature of the

direct object, expressed as follows: "the most perfect signs are those in whichthe iconic, indicative ar.d symbolic characters are blended as equally as

possible" (C.P. 4.448). The same can be said about the other two trichotomies,ending up with the characterisation of the immanent triadic-trichotomousfullness of the aesthetic sign.

The pleroma of the aesthetic sign is not, however, exhausted by its onticsand its form. It also appears in its subject-like character. In one of his fewlectures Peirce sketched a semiotic anthropology whose foundation stone wasthe simple claim that "man is a symbol"14. The most eccentric conclusion to

be derived from this is his statement that the opinion that a human being, likea thing, cannot simultaneously be in many places, is a materialistic barbarism(C.P.7.591). Is Peirce talking about some kind of miracle here? Certainly not.Man is his spiritual work, so that where it is present, he is too. That is the

reason why we can, according to Peirce, be present in

11 A fuller justification of this conclusion would require an analysis of certain issueslinking Peirce's semiotics with that of Gottlob Frege.

12 A similar position to this was adopted by Henryk Markiewicz when arguingagainst Ingarden and the latter's conception of intentional objects.

13 We should add that Bense himself did not claim self-refentiality for aestheticsigns, which he was accused of doing by Janina Makota, a Polish pupil of Ingarden (J.Makota, "Estetyka informacyjna Maxa Bensego" (Informatic(s) Aesthetics of Max Bense],ti: Studia Estetyczne XX/XXI, 1983/1984, pp. 291-311. Bense only regarded them as"autothematic", i.e. he thought that their thematics of being is tantamount to the ontology of ttu: sign as a sign.

14 Because man is thought, and thought, for Peirce, is a model example of a symbol.



166 Andrzej Nowak

many places simultaneously. It is for this same reason that a poem, a paint-

ing, or a sonata possesses the structure of a subject, much as contemporary

advocates of "incontrology" (i.e. the "philosophy of meeting") would have

it15, rather than possessing the structure of a mere gwasz-subject, as Mikel

Dufrenne, for example, has claimed.The above-mentioned view of Peirce, as well as some of his other re

marks concerning death, give a picture of the semiosis of man's being as a

kind of skillful perishing on the part of a person, where "skillful" refers to the

idea that it is not a simple disappearance into the abyss of non-being. Art is

simply one way in which this may be accomplished. It is worth adding that in

this respect Peirce anticipated the thinking of Alfred. North Whitehead on the

subject of perishing (where "perishing" should be understood as the third

major, albeit neglected, subject of metaphysics after "becoming" and "being")

.

Probably the most important point to make here is that the pleroma of

Peirce's aesthetic sign, even when manifesting its immanent fullness, does not

cut this sign o'ff from the world, but rather it establishes a "full-blooded"

relationship with human life. This last point was exposed in his aesthetic by

John Dewey. Dewey, however, was an extreme nominalist who, on his own

admission, had no comprehension of Peirce's metaphysics. This is the reason

why attempts to develop Peirce's aesthetics through projecting it onto

Dewey's ideas, as undertaken by J. Jay Zeman, would appear to be mistaken.

Charles Morris also referred to Peirce to some extent, but in Morris' semiotics

two of the fundamental categories in Peirce's theory of signs are absent,

namely the "relation" and the "interpre-tant". The first of these is replaced by

the term "relationship" , the second

15 Andrzej Nowicki, a Polish representative of incontrology, claims: "[if we meetsomeone, having ourselves an open attitude]...the result of such a meeting is [...] the

appearance of a form of presence of the second person [...] amongst the subject-constituents of our personality" (A. Nowicki, "Metoda inkontrologiczna w histori: filozofiia policentryczna struktura'osobowosci filozofow" [Incontrology in Philosophy and thePolicentric Structure of Philosopher's Self], in: Studia Filozoficzne 4, 1983, p. 87). This resembles Charles S. Peirce's view: "When I communicate my thought and my sentimentsto a friend... so that my feelings pass into him.... do I not live in his brain as well as in myown-most literally?" (C.P. 7.591).

16 "Aristotle has some very relevant suggestions on the analysis of becoming and process. I feel that there is a gap in his thought, that just as much as becoming wantsanalysis so does perishing. Philosophers have taken to easily the notion of perishing.There is a trinity of three notions: being, becoming, and perishing". (A.N. Whitehead,"Process and Reality", in: Essays in Science and Philosophy, New York: Philosophical Li brary, 1948, p. 89).

17 Morris, of course, uses the same word "relation", but this does not alter what is

being said here.




with the term "interpreter". Although signs, for Morris, enter into variousrelationships without which they could not function, they remain physicalobjects no less that horses in a meadow . They do not carry any logicalthought, and only evoke thinking - psychophysiological processes that are

experienced by interpreters. It seems that both the aesthetics of Deweyand that of Morris which involves the conceptual apparatus of sign theorymore intensively, belong more to the pragmatist tradition recently revived by the publications of Richard Shusterman.

A position which is closer to that of Peirce, though still quite someway away from it, is that of Suzanne Katherina Knauth Langer. In her theory of meaning, Langer rejected the behaviouristic, binary schema"SR". She went back to the idea of "conceptions" in order to supplementthe reduced notion of the sign relation proposed by behaviourism with anelement that is functionally reminiscent of Peirce's interpretant. Langer chose to differentiate "signals" from "symbols", and feelings from their logical form, and on this basis she claimed that music has no emotive-symptomatic meaning, but only, emotive-symbolic (i.e. semantic)

meaning . Peirce, from within his perspective, distinguished individualfeelings from common emotions, the latter being signs of the former. Inthis sense, one might say that emotions are about feelings. Speakingsomewhat anachronisti-cally, it would seem to be a generalisation of Langer's well-known belief that music is about feelings - that it is their logical expression.

One should not, however, overvalue the above-mentioned similarities between Langer and Peirce. Above all, they are unintentional. They could

have occurred as a result of the philosophical education which Langer re-

ceived from Whitehead. The latter did admit to having been influenced bythe American realists. Moreover, the similarities are often fragile, even

sometimes superficial. Without wishing to get involved in the details of

this issue, one could nevertheless say that while Peirce sometimes sub-

scribed to scientistic beliefs, he was never a positivist, whereas Langer ad- justed her thought to fit a positivist - Wittgensteinian framework. And yet,

amongst the representatives of the generation of Dewey and Morris, it was

she who made the biggest step in the direction of Peirce's semiotics. Inthis respect only Ezra Pound was able to go further.

Pound and Peirce, a poet and a philosopher respectively, interpretedthe concept of the icon almost identically. The authentic picture directsour

18 Ch.W. Morris, Symbolism and Reality, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Ben- jamins Publishing Co., 1993, p. 17.

J "The concept of 'semblance' ([Friedrich] Schiller's 'Schein') [...] defines the work of

art as a wholly created appearance, the Art Symbol") (S.K. Langer (ed.), Reflections on Art. A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, New York: Oxford Univ.Press, 1961, p. xi).



168 Andrzej Nowak

attention towards a certain quality and has little in common with recrea tingor copying, especially in view of the fact that its object can be a merely

possibly one20. That is why Pound and Peirce put forward algebraic curveequations as model examples of icons21. Both of them also emphasised the

simultaneously heuristic and creative power of this kind of sign. In the sameway, they backed up their positions by elevating the importance of the mainlyiconic language of children . In a brief fragment which nevertheless speaksfor itself, Peirce presents their upbringing as "an act of violence in the nameof stereotypes"23. Indeed, one should remember this, since otherwise onemay be prone to misunderstanding the concept of "habit" and, as aconsequence of this, the whole of Peirce's semiotics. The point here is that for Peirce a "habit" is a real interpretant of a sign thanks to which its meaninggoes beyond the world of purely nominal and intra-systemic senses. The habithas nothing to do with automatism, with the non-reflexive schemata of thinking or acting. "Habits" do not control man - man controls "habits" (C.P.5.487).

In this sense the semiosis that aims at producing a "habit" is open, i.e.

available for "heterocriticism" and self-control. And despite its having a basisin the form of its historical structure, i.e. the code, this structure which Peircehad in mind is posterius rather than prius in terms of its constitutive elements.This comes from the basic principle of pragmatic idealism, namely that"reality consists in thefuture" (C.P. 8.284).

Umberto Eco has made reference to those issues in Peirce's semioticsthat share a common denominator in the form of the open-ended character of signs in general and of aesthetic signs in particular. After having beenfascinated by structuralism, he realised its limitations. This he expressed in La Struttura Assente, where he opposed serial thinking to structural thinking.The following characteristics of serial thinking point to the inviolable division

between these two forms:a) serial thinking does not look for a primordial and a historical

generative code, but rather recognises, criticises, and modifies historicalcodes;

20 T.M. Olshewsky, "Realism and Antifoundationalism", in: G. Debrock and M. Hul-swit (eds.), Living Doubt. Essays Concerning the Epistemology ofCliarles Sanders Peirce, Dor drecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, pp. 25-32.

21 C.P. 2.282; E. Pound, "Vorticism", in: Fortnightly Review96,1914,573, pp. 461-471.22 The role of iconicity in creative thinking is not incongruous with the charac

teristics of the aesthetic sign as an index, because Peirce's three forms of referenc e to anobject do not exclude each other. On the contrary, each index rests upon an icon, andeach symbol rests upon an index and therefore indirectly also upon an icon.

23C.P. 1.349; E. Pound, "Vorticism", op.cit., p. 183.




b)it is multifunctional and so cannot be described according to the Car tesian binary axes, i.e. the semantic and the syntagmatic.

c) it has access to a metalevel on which it can direct itself towards andeven question the code that determines the thinking itself - each work

thus"appears [...] as a discussion of its own poetics" 4.

The above-mentioned theses are not Peircean, and yet in a sense they do belong to his thought. One can formulate them and justify them on the basisof his views in a way that would not be possible, for example, on the basis of the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. Having realised this, Eco - startingwith A Theory of Semiotics15 , which is a thoroughly transformed version of La Struttura... - aimed to develop the Peircean notion of unlimited yetintentional semiosis. Eco founded his subsequent conceptions -even of anaesthetic kind - on this basis. One of these concerns the problem of interpretations of literary works of art, which remained important even after writers such as Roland Barthes or Stanley Fish had presented persuasivearguments for the absence of literary meaning. Arguing against their

semantic-aesthetic nihilism, Eco announced his belief in three kinds of in-tention: that of the author, the text, and the reader. It is no accident that thisdifferentiation should remind one of the Peircean division of interpretants intodirect, dynamic, and logical ones. The analogy runs even deeper, though,indeed maybe as deep as it is possible to go. Interpreting his own conceptionof the openness of the work of art, Eco emphasised that this is not only aquestion of a certain indeterminacy pertaining to the artistic text. The mostimportant factor is the accessibility of its source code, which is hidden and yetrecognised by the recipient. If Eco's interpretation is not an over-interpretation, one could say that Peirce's idea of the open-ended-ness of semiosis (which in no way resembles the "claustrophobic" language games of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and also has nothing to do with "Structure" - Saussure's

pre-existing demon), and along with it Peirce himself, was thus already

present in Eco's thought even prior to his "conversion".Apart from Bense, Eco was the second aesthetician who consciously and

consistently made use of the legacy of Peirce's semiotics. Despite this,Peirce's projected aesthetics still remains an unfulfilled possibility. One of thereasons for this is probably the antimetaphysical spirit of our times. Thesystem of Peirce was to be fulfilled precisely by a semiotic metaphysics.Another reason, though, is more prosaic. European theoreticians and

philosophers of art were either not interested in the issue of signs, or theywere under the influence of Saussure's linguistics. As a result, all

24 U. Eco, La struttura assente, Milano: Bompiani, 1968, transl. A. Weinsberg andP. Bravo, Nieobecna struktura, Warszawa: KR Publishers, 1996, p. 306.

25 U. Eco, A Theory - Semiotics, London and Basingstke: Macmillan, 1977.



170 Andrzej Nowak

areas of aesthetics were taken over by a Cartesian-Kantian structuralism thatwas alien to the spirit of Peirce's semiotics. Perhaps this applies less to thePrague School since its representatives made a significant degree of ref-•erence to the German "philosophy of the Spirit" (Geistphilosophie) amidst

which the thinking of the creator of American pragmatism also developed.

2. The Aesthetics of Dialectical Structure

In 1926 Vilem Mathesius established the Prague Linguistic Circle. The

following people belonged to it: Bohuslav Havranek, Josef Hrabak, Jan

Mukafovsky, Bohumil Trnka, Jan Vachek, Felix Vodicka. They were joined

by the following Russians: Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Yuri Ty-

nianov. In this way two traditions met in Prague. One of them, through

Otokar Hostinsky and Otakar Zych, harked back to 19th century German

philosophy. The other one was Russian formalism, doubly grounded in both

Geneva linguistics and the Kazan school of Polish linguistics of Jan Ignacy Niecistaw, Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikcdaj Kruszewski. This meeting

turned out to be fruitful and produced a new brand of theorising — semiotic

functional structuralism26. From the point of view of its overall synthesis of

ideas, its identity was determined by the following four areas of reference: a)

the German philosophy of the Spirit; b) the phonology of the Kazan School;

c) the semiology of Saussure; and d) the formalism of the Moscow linguists

and Opojaz of St. Petersburg. The Prague Circle got from the German

philosophy of Spirit their historical sensitivity, which was something unusual

for structuralists, as well as their propensity for dialectical perspectives. From

Saussure, they took the differentiation of the language-system from the

speech act or speech event. From the tradition of

26 This fact was not appreciated by Victor Erlich, who thought of Prague structuralismas a simple continuation of Russian formalism (V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, The HaguerMouton, 1954). His unjustified opinion has become a canon, repeatedamongst Polish researchers such as Maria Renata Mayenowa and Rosner. The onlyexception was probably Stefan Zotkiewski, who realised that the contacts of the PragueCircle with representations of other tendencies were not of a merely social kind. Those whoco-operated with the Prague Circle included, for example, the biologist Jan Belehaadek andthe phenomenologist Hendrik Poss. Edmund Husserl had a lecture there on language,Rudolf Carnap on logical syntax, Ladislav Rieger on the relationship of phenomenology tostructuralism, while Ludwig Landgrebe talked about the concept of the semantic field.Among aestheticians the Circle invited, for example, Emil Utitz and Borys Tomaszewski.One would have thought that these facts alone should have altered Erlich's opinion. Thefact that they did not makes one suspect that he had an interest in defending the myth of the purity of the birth of structuralism along the lines of the geographical axis defined byGeneva, Prague and Moscow.




Russian formalism they got the idea that the function of normalising speech

is not the only function of language. From Baudouin and Kruszew-ski, they

took on board the elevated status accorded to phonology as the paradigmatic

branch of linguistics. There is more, however, Baudouin knew and discussed

the ideas of Jozef Mroziriski, and amongst these was included the one whichstates that "[the laws] for a language can only be adduced from the

mechanism of the language itself" . From the point of view of logic, this idea

is a general premise of Wiktor Szktowski's thesis: "the forms of art can be

explained by the laws of art"2 . One can accept that this similarity may not

have been accidental - Baudouin was active in Russia and he became a decent

at the St. Petersburg University. Anyway, this characteristic of the Prague

Circle requirement to maintain the immanent character of semiotic and

aesthetic analyses is entitled to the name of the "Kazan postulate".

The methodological backbone of Prague structuralism is created by two

rules. Firstly the language and its homological equivalents cannot be ex-

plained through reference to extralinguisric factors. Secondly, each research

procedure involves: a) separating out of the speech order a class of

phenomena with a common dominating function; b) the analysis of other

relations with other functions which modify this class; and c) the discovery

and description of the language which makes the given phenomena possible.

The first rule expresses the methodological principle of immanence, while the

second links inductionism to fuctionalism.

Although the Saussurean legacy of the Prague Circle is obvious, it is

paradoxical that the concept of structure, which had earlier been absent,

appeared in their writing. It was the Circle which produced probably the first

systematic questioning of the philosophical grounds of Geneva linguistics. As

a result of it, most of the concepts, distinctions and claims of Saussure were

rejected or modified. Because of its consequences for aesthetics, one should

first of all mention the fact that the Prague Circle were opposed to the

unconditional separation of language and speech. This objection took

different forms - ranging from the moderate to the extreme. Jakobson

gradually inclined towards a belief that even within the dominating social

dimension language maintains a trace of its individual dimension, and that

speech, with all its individual character, has a social aspect. It

27R. Jakobson, "Jozef Mrozinski - general-jezykoznawca: pamiajka i przypom-nienie" [Jozef Mrozinski -A General and a Linguist: Reminiscence and Reminder], in: W poszukiwaniu istoty jpzyka 2. Wybor pism [In Search of the Essence of Language], M.R. Mayenowa (ed.), Warszawa: PIW,1988, pp. 7-21.

28 T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, London: Methuen, 1977, transl. I.Sieradzki, Strukturalizm i semiotyka, Warszawa: PWN, 1988, p. 76.



172 Andrzej Nowak

was more explicitly stated by Mukafovsky, who in 1945 during one of hislectures, said: "language is a tool of practical application", so that "thestructure of language cannot be thought to be anything other than diversi-

fied language utterances appropriate to the fulfillment of our aims"29. Inthis way he implied that for him the boundary between language andspeech was logical rather than real - conventional rather than natural.

The second of the aesthetically significant elements of the questioningof the grounds of Saussure's linguistics was the rejection of its charac-teristic Leibnizian synchronic determinism. The idea that a pre-existingstatic language fixes all possible meanings until its displacement by an-other structure of the same kind was incomprehensible to Jakobson fromthe outset. Trubetzkoy confirmed Jakobson's doubts, suggesting that "thesensicality of the evolution of language stems directly from the tact thatlanguage is a system" . This thought was later supplemented by the thesisthat any evolution must flow systematically from its nature. This gave birth to the idea of a dynamic rather than static, and teleological rather

than deterministic, •semiotic system. Mukafovsky subjected this to stillfurther alterations. Above all, he rejected the rule of pre-existence of structure which, in his understanding, like that of Peirce, stands in an a posteriori relation to its parts31. We may quote two statements from theaforementioned lecture of Mukafovsky. Firstly, he said that "the basis of structuralist thought is an imagining of the acting together of forces whichenter mutual relations of agreement and opposition and which re-establishthe lost balance with the constantly repeated synthesis"32. Secondly, hestated that "contrary to the social sciences, biology is inclined moretowards an acceptance of emergence - i.e. the sudden appearance on thesurface of new structures"33. In the first of these statements, Mukafovskyspecified the sense of the dynamics of systems, which he described astheir inner ability for action directed at achieving further syntheses. In his

second utterance, he foregrounded the principle of continuity. In this way,the characteristics of the dynamic system initiated by Jakobson,Trubetzkoy and Tynianow -of "dynamic synchrony", as it was sometimescalled - were completed by pointing out clearly four key ideas: inner activity, teleology, continuity and synthesis. A relatively new and philosophically important concept was cre-

29 J. Mukafovsky, "Pojecie calogci w teorii sztuki" [The Notion of Totality and the Role it Plays in theTheory of Art], in: M. Glowirtski (ed.), Znak, styl, konwencja [Sign, Style, Convention], Warszawa: Czytelnik,1977, p. 95.

30 R. Jakobson/'Jozef Mroziriski...", op.cit., p. 17.31 K. Chvatik, "Estetyka strukturalna Jana Mukafovskyego" [The Structuralist Aesthetics of Jan

Mukafovsky], in: Studia Estetyczne 4,1967, p. 170.

32 ]. Mukafovsky, "Pojecie catosci...", op.cit., p. 94.33 Ibid., p. 93.




ated, which has either been undervalued or overvalued by linguists. The latter tendency can be observed in the work of Janusz Stawiriski - the Polish fol-lower of Prague structuralism. The definition of how structure may be orderedthat he was prepared to accept was so restrictive as to eliminate all forms of

atemporal structure' - something which does not seem justified.The core of the two elements of the Prague reform of the bases of Gene

va linguistics discussed above consists of a couple of developments Firstly,there was a shift from hypostatic to factorial, and maybe even to simplyfunctional differentiation between language and speech. Secondly, the tele-ological character of speech and other acts of communication was placed

beyond the particular determinism of the language. Both of these factors wereof considerable importance for aesthetics. They enabled Mukafovsky todevelop a conception of creativity and artistic personality as active, whilemaintaining the general framework of the structuralist ideology.

By removing the impossible barrier between language and speech, therule of continuity allowed the Prague Circle to accept a new, dialectical pointof view: "language normalises acts of speech; speech modifies linguistic

norms". Extending it to all semiotic systems gave Mukafovsky a justificationfor his claim concerning" the primacy of art over and above works of art,without diminishing the role of creative personalities.. Struc-turalistically

perceived art constituted what he thought of as living artistic tradition. This,he wrote, is how structure, correctly understood, is constituted35. Because of its development he saw particular works of art as small moments in thehistorical process of constant disruption of balance and renewed syntheses.He was convinced of the superiority of art as a norm in relation to which eachartistic utterance defines its identity, gaining by this the locally importantstatus (i.e. confined to within a given tradition) of a work of art. Mukafovskydid not, however, perceive the above-mentioned form of determination as aconformist procedure He believed that each work of art both affirms andnegates art - it no more confirms artistic norms than negates them.

Furthermore, it is only the synthesis of this affirmation and negation that canestablish the identity of the work of art. Because of this, the individual act of speech of an artist breaks the balance of the general structures of art throughthe sheer power of its own being. According to Mukafovsky the natural returnto a state of balance itself requires a new synthesis - a new interpretation, anew creative act, a new affirmation and denial. In short, Mukafovsky saw inthe conflict between the normative function of art and the deformativefunction of the

34 J. Siawiriski, "]. Mukafovsky: program estetyki strukturalnej" [J. Mukafovsky's Programme of Structuralist Aesthetics], in: Wsrod znakow i struktur [Amongst Signs andStructures], Warszawa: PWN, 1970, p. 15.

35 J. Mukafovsky, "Pojecie catosci..." op.cit., pp. 92-93.



174 Andrzej Nowak

creative personality the principal driving force behind the development of each of them. What is important here is that he did not regard this force as

blind. He accepted the teleological character of creativity, although he per-ceived it in a constructivist spirit which excluded absolutism. He did not

accept any pre-established harmony of aesthetic ideals, only claiming that artis confronted all the time by the requirements and goals specified by society.The fact that this occurs without having to occur was explained byMukafovsky in terms of the existential situation of man, who, faced with atranscendent reality, feels a need for self-confirmation from outside himself,such as may be achieved directly through action and indirectly in the realm of symbolic or aesthetic active self-assertion.

Apart from the activism discussed here, the important feature of Praguestructuralist aesthetics was its axiological commitment. This commitment isso sharply contrasted in comparison with later forms of structuralism, that itwas not the product of the sensitivity of the members of the school, .butresulted from certain accepted assumptions. The studies conducted by thePrague Circle concentrated on the functions of art. Although these functions

were regarded as signs requiring semiotic analysis, they were also perceivedas social roles. The roles which unfold in social space ("so-ciospace") dependupon it, so that if, as they thought, this is the space of human purposes andgoals, then art, in serving these, should serve the values that determine them.The values themselves then have no reality at all except as part of thechangeable current of social existence: they are relative, created under certainconditions,and disappearing in others. This relativism, however, whileweakening the position of values, cannnot undermine their relationship to art,which for the Prague Circle was obvious and inviolable. Vodicka wrote, withspecific reference to literature, that one cannot "imagine it merely as acollection of works; it is also a set of literary values""6. Mukafovsky, on theother hand, added that the particularity of the aesthetic sign concerned is itsevaluative relation to reality37 .

Reminding us of these opinions, Jerzy Ziomek also mentioned thecritique directed at Mukafovsky by Rene Wellek 38. The most significantcharge included in this concerned the absolutising of novelty as the mainqualification of art. Just or unjust, Wellek's critique exposed the second, thistime implied, level of axiological commitment of Prague structuralism. In thiscase as well, it neither resulted from individual preferences, nor expressedany form of modernist utopianism. Rather, this commitment came logicallyfrom the activistic conception of art and the creative personality.

36 F. Vodifka, "Historia literatury. Jej problemy i zadania" [The History of Literature.Its Issues and Objectives], in: Pamiptnik Literacki3,1969, p. 257; transl. J. Baluch.

37 K. Chvatik, "Estetyka strukturalna...", op.cit.

38 R. Wellek, Concepts of New Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.




Neither Mukafovsky, Vodicka nor Jakobson valued novelty in abstracto for its own sake. On the contrary they valued it because of the fact that realnovelty in art made new ways of seeing the world possible. This idea, whichwas quite new at the time, is relatively common these days and can be found

in the work of aestheticians as far removed from structuralism as MariaGolaszewska.

In summary, one can talk about both an explicit and and implicit (or impure) level of axiological commitment within Prague structuralist aes-thetics. On both levels it appeared as a consequence of assumptions or in-sights that had already been accepted or achieved. It is this feature whichdifferentiates the Prague Circle from the background of the diverse forms of structuralism that have appeared. It is different from other axio-aesthe-tics of the same period, such as Ingarden's, thanks to its linkage of values with thesemiotic functions of art.

The best known aspect of the legacy of the Prague Circle, which continues the tradition of Russian formalism, is the conception of the semioticfunctions of speech. These were characterised and typologised in a variety of

ways. Among the many proposed by Havranek, M^thesius, and Mukafovsky,the most influential turned Out to be Jakobson's typology. This includes thefollowing functions: a) the emotive, b) the epistemic, c) the conative, d) the

phatic, e) the metalinguistic, and f) the poetic. The first three of these weremodifications of Karl Buhler's functions, which were: a) the symptomatic, b)the symbolic, and c) signalling. Jakobson wanted, however, to avoid the

prosaic connotations of the term "symptom", and even the realist intuitionsincluded in the concept of expression. An utterance which has an emotivefunction need not be symptomatic of a real experience of the speaking subject.It is worthwhile noticing that while introducing the concept of emotiveness,Jakobson consciously went back to the terminology and opinions of AntonMarty - the heir of Franz Brentano. The "epistemic function" is sometimesdescribed as referential, in contrast to the "conative", as the function of

ordering, while the purpose of the "phatic" (a term taken from BronislawMalinowski) is merely to maintain communication. Meanwhile, themetalinguistic function is used to describe and control the basic code.Jakobson admitted that, while working on this theory, he was influenced bythe metalogical theorising of Alfred Tarski. The final function, the "poetic",

by highlighting the signifier at the expense of the signified, weakens thesemantic transparency of the message and focusses the attention of therecipient upon its form. One should emphasise here that the above-mentionedtypology is not a division into disjunctive classes. The semiotic functions canappear together, create hierarchies, and modify one another, and for thisreason there is no incongruity between the poetic and epistemic functions.

Nevertheless, when the former dominates, the object reference of the latter will become fuzzy. The poetic message



176 Andrzej Nowak

loses what Ingarden called "the moment of its truth-claim" - therefore itcan neither be true nor false. In this regard, the views of Jakobson werecloser to Ingarden's phenomenology than, for example, to Jerzy Pelc'ssemiotics. Pelc, who is a representative of the Lvov-Warsaw

Philosophical School, believed that literature can at times be a sound formof knowledge.

The Prague structuralists, then, believed that no adequatff.study of lit-erature or art can afford to limit itself to analysing its poetic or aestheticfunction. There were, however, two problems associated with the poeticfunction. Firstly, the mechanism of its fulfilment needed to be described.Secondly, one had to prove the existence of poetic language - not the language of a work of art, or even of a collection of works, but of a meta-indi-vidual structure. The first issue had already been discussed by theRussian formalists. The efforts of the Prague structuralists were focussedupon clarifying results which they already had in their possession.

Due to lack of space, it is only possible to add here that, for them, the poetic function is fulfilled through the following: a) overcoded phonic or

ganisation, and b) .the manner in which language is organised along itssyntagmatic axis according to the rule of similarity which wouldotherwise organise it along its paradigmatic axis. Both of thesemechanisms create a sense of the extraordinary, focussing the attention of the recipient upon the form rather than the content of the message. Facedwith the second problem, however, the Prague structuralists turned out to be powerless. After years of research, the American scholar William O.Hendricks concluded that, in relation to Jakobson, the structuralequivalent of a poetic function does not exist.

The factors that threw the functional-structuralist theory of literatureinto crisis did not cause any similar breakdown as far as the aesthetics of Mukafovsky was concerned. However, this was a consequence of the factthat he had departed quite early on from the orthodoxy of Prague Theses

9. From the theory outlined in this work he kept only the notion that thework of art is a complex sign and a structured whole of various semioticfunctions. Amongst these functions, he ascribed the role of the "dominant"to that which he regarded as a generalisation of the poetic function, andwhich he called the "aesthetic function". He characterised this, in the spiritof Jakobson, as free from the context of practical teleology. However, thesimilarities end here and a fundamental difference emerges. Mukafovskydid not postulate the existence of a universal language of art - the struc-tural equivalent of the aesthetic function. He did not postulate it because,amongst other things, he questioned the hypostatising differentiation be-tween language and speech much more strongly than did Jakobson. Ros-

39

See: U. Eco, La struttura..., op.cit., p. 264.




ner saw in this the betrayal of the basic ideas of structuralism40. Even if shewas right, due to the self-undermining nature of this direction, the issueinvolved here seems to have lost much of its pertinence.

After the dissolution of the Prague Circle the ideas which had been the

longstanding basis of its theoretical project were developed further byJakobson. Having left for the United States, he discovered the similarity

between his ideas, those of the Russian formalists, and the claims of repre-sentatives of American New Criticism. He tried to achieve a synthesis of American and Central European structuralism. Through the work of hisfollowers, who were also involved with the theories of Noam Chomsky, heinfluenced the emerging current of generative structuralism. The connectionof the Prague Circle and Jakobson himself to the Tartu School, whichcontinued to work with the idea of functional semiotics, is quite clear in thisrespect.

The wartime and post-war fate of the members of the Prague Circle wastypical of Central Europeans. Some left for the West (Jakobson), others madea self-critic along Stalinist lines (Mukafovsky), and many escaped from

ideological oppression into a labrynth of mathematical formalism inaccessibleto Marxist ideologues. Oldfich Leska reactivated the Prague Circle in the

breakthrough year of 1989. For some time Vachek was its honorary president.The tradition of Prague structuralism is currently maintained principally bythe Vilem Mathesius Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics under the direction of Eva Hajicova. Whereas the historicalsignificance of the Prague Circle is beyond dispute, the systematic value of itslegacy is sometimes called into question. The conception of the poeticfunction was most severely criticised by R.A. Sharpe: "banality does notrescue one from falsehood"41.

Even if this opinion is unjust, it is nevertheless impossible not to noticethat there exist certain rather banalised Kantian motifs behind this muchcriticised idea: aesthetic disinterestedness, teleology without telos, and so on.

Jeremy Hawthorn has suggested all the functions that with exception of the"phatic" are equally indispensible to literature. Having assumed theauthenticity of the aforementioned similarities between the ideas oi Jakob-sonand, for example, those of John Crowe Ransom, one can assume that thedevastating criticism by Hawkes impacts indirectly upon Prague structuralismas well. Therefore, bearing in mind the dangers of generalisation, one mayexpress the following opinion: a) the structuralist, Saussurean ele-

40 K. Rosner, Semiotyka strukturalna w badaniach nad literature}. Jej osiagnipcia, perspektywy i ograniczenia [Structural Semiotics in Literary Studies. Its Achievements, Per spectives and Limitations], Krakow: WL, 1981.

41 R.A. Sharpe, "The Private Reader and the Listening Public", in: J. Hawthorn(ed.), Criticism and Critical Theory, London: Edward Arnold, 1984.



178 Andrzej Nowak

ments in Prague structuralism has been invalidated; b) the dialectical,Hegelian elements have at least maintained the value of a living provocation.The rejection of the hypostatising interpretation of the differentiation betweenlanguage and speech enabled members of the Prague Circle to dismantle the

immanentism of the Geneva School. It gave them a real opportunity toconnect art with life. The very conception of a teleological system is achallenge for our era that has popularised amorphousness. It is refreshing tonote that Mukafovsky managed, even within the canon of structuralist ideas,to develop a conception of the creative subject as one who speaks rather thanone through whom language speaks. Yet what is most interesting in hisaesthetics - the conception of the meta-aesthetic function and the seeds of "serial thinking" - was left unelaborated - albeit for no apparent reason.Jakobson, introducing the meta-linguistic function, assumed that the act of speech could be directed towards its own bases. Mukafovsky, from his

perspective, claimed that there is a dialectical relationship between thestructure of art and the speech of an artist. This already created the conditionsnecessary for the question to be posed as to whether it might be the case that

an artist's utterance is or may be, at least sometimes, a meta-utterance - an actdirected towards the code which enables it, but at the same time questioningthis code in order to eventually transform it. As one can see, Mukafovskycould have reformulated the notion of the meta-aesthetic function to exposenot the form of the message, not even its basic code, but rather the dialecticalinterplay of message and code. He could also have clearly stated that therealness of a structure is future-dependent, yet in spite of his failure to do this,and in spite of his aesthetics being tainted by Kantian traditionalism, the latter remains more resistant to accusations of conservatism than the aesthetics of Claude Levi-Strauss. I will return to this last issue after a brief discussion of "Propp's Machine" - the work of the French generarivist of Lithuanian originAlgir-das J. Greimas.

3. The Generative Aesthetics of Propp's Machine (PM)

From the 1950's onwards, France became the centre for both structu

ralism and structuralist semiotics . In contrast to Prague, however, no single

homogeneous movement was created in Paris; even though one sometimes

hears about the "Paris school of formal semiotics", it is a refer-

42 For many western authors (Peter Barry, Eric Brunick, Francois Dosse, etc.) structu-ralism was born in the 1950's in Paris. Commenting on incompetent or biased opinions suchas these would be a waste of time.




ence only to the narrow circle of pupils of Greimas. It is in this sense that itis used by Eero Tarasti and Jacques Fontanille. In the broadest sense, one canidentify the members of this circle (as distinct from the idea of a schoolmentioned above) with the territorially uninstitutional - and by no means

entirely homogeneous (in terms of its ideas) - group of researchers predicting,realising or basing their analyses on the program of generative structuralism.Apart those already mentioned, one should perhaps then also mention thefollowing: Sorin Aleksandrescu, Barthes, Claude Bremonde, Jean Calloud,Levi-Strauss, and Tzvetan Todorov. One could also point to Teun A. van Dijk and - accepting the definition of narratology given by Gerald Prince43 - alsoto Gerard Genette. The two main factors uniting the genera-tivists are: a) a

belief in the algorithmic nature of cultural production; b) the acceptance of the tradition constituted, besides the heritage of Saussure, by the morphologyof Vladimir Yurievitch Propp, the glossemarics of Louis Hjelmslev andChomsky's linguistics.

Some people, such as Beata Szymariska and Jerzy Topolski, believegenerative structuralism to be a phenomenon that is loosely defined by the

ideas of Saussure. They do not seem to take under consideration the importance for this current of the Copenhagen School, who were faithful, albeitradical followers of generative linguistics. It seems rather to be the case thatthe importance of the generativist group entitle them to be consideredrepresentatives of the Paris structuralist orthodoxy. However, one can con-sider the Tel Quel group, including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and lateBarthes, as forming a schism within this current. Richard Harland mentionedthem as representing post-structuralism, alongside such authors as GillesDeleuze, Felix Guattari, and the later Michel Foucault. One of the goals of thedevelopments of the Tel Quel group was what Richard Rorty called"textualism", and what Alex Callinicos summed up in the thesis that we are

prisoners of the text - the new version of Plato's cave44. Such a view renderssemiotics impossible. One should, however, remember that prior to the

formulation of the diagnosis of facias hipocratic, Kristeva had proposed areform of the phenomenological basis of semiotics rather than the latter'sannihilation. To be more precise, she considered that the semiotics of systemsoriginating from Saussure and Peirce had reached its end. It was to bereplaced by a semiotics of subjectivity based on the theory of meaning as thetheory of the speaking subject45 - a divided one, however,

43 Narratology is defined by the following assumptions: a) the grammar of narrationis independent of the medium of narration; b) a narrative competence exists and may bestudied; G. Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology, Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1988, p. 65.

44 A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, London: Polity Press, 1999.

J. Kristeva, £r|fi£tamicri - Recherches pour une semanalyse, Paris: Le Seuil, 1969. Another authors,

for instance Teresa de Lauretis described the changes in the 1960 s to the



180 Andrzej Nowak

rather than monolithic as in the Kantian or Fichtean model of selfhood. Tocut a long story short, it was not the relation to semiotics, but rather to itsSaussurean source, that divided the schismatics from the orthodoxy. Thevoice of the schismatics was best expressed by Derrida, who accused Saus-

sure of logocentrism - of believing in the existence of a transcendental sourceof all meaning.

Between the extremes of the orthodoxy and the schismatics, there is alsoan area of what we might term heterodoxy. Theoreticians of the latter moulddid not question the Saussurean basis of structuralism or structuralistsemiotics, but linked these with more remote ideas. For example, JacquesLacan placed psychoanalysis at the centre of his area of interest, and JeanPiaget did the same with developmental psychology and epistemo-logy. LouisAlthusser, Lucien Goldmann and Nicolas Paulantzas, oh the other hand, triedto combine structuralism with Marxism. In addition to overtly heterodoxtheorists, there was also a large group of outsiders -those who were notinterested in philosophical polemics - who simply saw in structuralism a goodtool for solving problems that would be hard to solve in any other way. These

mainly were representatives of various specialised disciplines.Paris structuralism had an impact on many literary theorists, musico

logists, and cinematologists, but it would be difficult to find here an aesthe-tician in the strict sense of the word, equivalent to Mukafovsky within thePrague Circle. Barthes and Todorov would be closest to this type because of their project of structuralist poetics, which was not only modelled onlinguistics and its relation to language, but also expressed an implicit aes-thetics. This aesthetics, however, resulted from a general conception of cul-ture which was worked out most fully and radically by Greimas. To sum up,contrary to Prague structuralism, the Paris movement did not leave amidst itslegacy any explicitly defined aesthetics, although it did clearly imply a certainshape that any such aesthetics would take on. One may approach this in termsof the Greimasian mechanics of narration46.

It was clear to Greimas that culture is a hypertext whose core is created by narrative texts. The later recount rather than describe, or report, while poetry belongs to metaphoricising texts. This was his reason for thinking

model of semiotics less dramatically, but even she concluded that semiotics ceased at thistime to be a theory of systems of communication, and became instead a theory of meaning production, and consequently it went from being concerned with semiotic systems to beconcerned with the speaking subject (see: T. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism,Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

46 Conceiving Greimas as a representative model of Paris structuralism may seemquestionable, yet to include him amongst the Russian formalists, as Eric Brunnick does in atext available via the Internet, is quite unjustified.




that one can explain the rules of the creation and functioning of culture as awhole by revealing the mechanism of stories, because the latter, mutatismutandis, is the mechanism by which all texts are generated. Having thusdescribed the aim of his studies, Greimas approached the realisation of his

project by starting out from the following assumptions: a) that culture has anaxiological and ideological character; b) culture is not a reflection of nature;c) there exists a "pre-code" which generates the homogeneous process of cultural production. It emerges from the first of these points that themechanism responsible for the functioning of culture is a structure definingthe arrangement of signified elements rather than the combinatorics of signsdeprived of their meaning. At the same time it is the structure of semanticrelations which then points to the order of syntactic operations - as in the thirdof the above points. The second point, narrowed down and expressed in moretechnical terms, had the following significance for Greimas: meaning has anintra-linguistic character - so a realist, i.e. referential semantics, is not

possible. These, greatly summarised, are the salient points of the conceptionof Greimas, which eventually enabled him to construct something deserving

the title of "Propp's Machine" (PM) - a theoretical tool which made ittheoretically possible to generate all possible texts.

PM is a complex construct, and it has probably never been described as ahomogeneous whole. Structuralist analysts usually treat its particular parts asthough they were independent elements within the conception of Greimas - asRosner, for example, did. This fact should be further emphasised becausethere is no place left here for any polemics justifying a different point of view.PM can be functionally schematised as follows. The core is the so-called"fundamental model" (FM). In addition to this, there are two sets of interpretative rules: syntactic rules (SR) and anthropomorphic rules (AR). Thewhole thing is completed by mainly modal categories such as "to want", "toseem", "to know". FM is really a semiotic square. Its morphological content iscomposed of four terms, existing in paired oppositions matched according to

principles of contrariness and contradiction. In addition to contrariness andcontradiction, they are also intertwined within a network of implications. Thetask of FM is to distribute morphological values and establish the initialstructure of meaning. The rules from the collection SR make it possible totransform FM into a syntactic order of transformations of the initial meaning(STM). The rules, AR, make it possible to ascribe to the morphologicalelements of FM and the operations of STM the significance of antagonisticsubjects of actions as well as of the corresponding actions themselves. In thisway one goes, for example, from contradiction, through negation, to conflict,and, generally speaking, from the fundamental model to the actantial modelalso known by the term "ac-tional". The roles are then determined: shiftingfrom actions and their abstract subjects, i.e. actants, to concrete events andactors, and, finally, to



182 Andrzej Nowak

complete the generation of the story, placing a sonorous linguistic flesh ontothe actorial skeleton. This finishes the work.

In addition to recently recognised weaknesses, PM has some featuresthat are important to the shape of the aesthetics implied by Greimas's con-

ception. These include: a) determinism, b) self-completeness, c) unreflex-iveness. PM is deterministic because with a given structure of meaning itunambiguously defines the entire course of its subsequent transformations.The same applies to the unfolding of the narrative. Even at the points where a

bifurcation is permitted, there is no freedom of choice - as there is in thealternative proposal by Bremond47 - because even then the course of telling is

precisely defined by its previous states. Greimas claimed that with thesemantic outline of a story known, one can generate all its versions, i.e. a "fullversion". The question of why it is that in such a situation incomplete texts arecreated was answered by him through pointing out various limitations,ranging from lack of imagination to taboo constraints. This may sound banal,

but in fact is not. It means that although PM is perfect in itself, its humanvessel is imperfect, and this is why "complete" literary works are not created.

PM is not subjected to any external influences, nor does it intervene directlyin a metalinguistic reality. It is self-complete. The products of its action donot modify the rules - they do not change the structure of the machine. If someone were to say that after Franz Liszt composed the Sonata in B minor the sonata form ceased to be what it had been, it certainly would not beGreimas. It is easier to imagine Todorov in this role - someone whosegrammar of genres allows for a dialectics of structure and utterance. AlthoughPM is supposed to generate all texts, it does not generate the text about itself.It is unreflexive. The language of narration is flat - deprived of a metalevel.One can recount through it. but not where the basis of the story is concerned.

Because PM generates the narrational core of the hypertext of culture,the features of this tool allow us to observe the characteristics of Greimas'simplied aesthetics. The fist series of consequences here concern our under-

standing of creativity and the author. If the machine described here transformsrather than produces meanings and narrational streams, creativity

47 One can ascribe to Bremond: a) the opinion of Mukafovsky that it isimpossible to separate out the knowledge of the parts of a structure from knowledgeregarding the whole of it; b) the prospective conception of meaning as "fabula", i.e."fabula" meanings are given to us independently of the results to which they areleading. The function (the meaning) of a series of quarrels between lovers is always afight (the trial of love) independently of whether it leads to victory (the strengtheningof the relationship) or not. The idea of Bremond was vehemently opposed by JonathanCuller, whose arguments, though evidently circular, were considered conclusive byRosner. The latter went even further, saying that Bremond is the author of only "atrivial ontology of human behaviour" (K. Rosner, Semiotyka strukturalna..., op.cit., p. 142).




cannot be understood as creatio ex nihilo. It also cannot be understood asinventio, because determinism limits the area of creative invention as far asdesigning narrational sequences is concerned to zero, where the latter are not

predicted by the algorithm of PM. It could be the case that the concept of

"worldmaking" introduced by Nelson Goodman might help to clarify thesignificance of Greimas's conception of creativity. Yet it is hard not to noticethat it has two main dimensions: as conservatio, creativity means maintainingthe replicated pre-existent structure; as reprehensio, it means restrainingoneself from grasping its fullness - creating incomplete versions of replicas.Greimas's creator is not Acteon. The author, however, is, in a sense, thenegative author. His copyright mainly consists of that from which herestrained himself rather than what he did. PM has the right to claimownership of copyright in the more positive sense of this word. One could saythat Greimas worked out the semiotic-philosophical staging of the ideologicalcritique of the concept of the author conducted by Barthes and Foucault.

The second series of consequences concern the character of art itself. Theself-completeness of a PM which is based on intralinguistic semantics

removes the problem of realism, getting rid of realistic art. Levi-Strauss, closeto Greimas in his position, made a claim with similar consequences. Heconsidered the belief in the existence of a single reality independent of itslinguistic articulation to be a symptom of futile empiricism. What should onedo, however, with a belief in the existence of, for example, the realist novel?The answer was supplied by Barthes in his S/Z. He assumed that the deepstructure of the literary work could be presented within the surface structure,

by dividing the work into "units of reading" (lexia). This technique wasapplied to Saracine by Honore de Balzac, to "prove" that the realism of thisnovel was questionable. The last feature of PM referred to wasunreflexiveness, which leads to a conclusion that no artistic utterance can be ameta-utterance, meaning that it can neither establish nor question nor modifythe basic code on which it is founded. From this position, amongst other

things, Levi-Strauss criticised serialism in music and serial thinking ingeneral. For him it was a "structuralistically impossible" type of thinkingwhich, expressed as an act of speech, would have to contain an element of discussion regarding the language enabling this act of speech itself. Inconnection with these opinions of Levi-Strauss, Eco came to the conclusionthat methodologically avant-garde structuralism is unable, in its nature, togenerate a theory of the artistic avant-garde48. It is he who is right rather thanRosner, who explained the conservatism of Levi-Strauss's

! U. Eco , La struttura..., op.at., pp. 303-320.



184 Andrzej Nowak

aesthetics by saying that by viewing art in the context of social communication he was obliged to privilige comprehensibility as a value .

Barthes as a theoretician of literature owed most to Todorov, but hefound a philosophical basis in the works of Greimas. Thanks to these, he

confirmed his belief that the originary authorial idea is a mirage, and the auth-orial interpretation is only ever one of many. Whereas Greimas thought thatfinished products leave PM because it is not important for the text how it ismanifested on the level of signs. Barthes thought that if someone tellssomeone something in some way, it has a meaning. Put another way, thetransformation of the meaning lasts continuously outside of PM at the level of sign manifestation, at the point of convergence of language and speech. Thereading itself means entering the territories of what has been left out by thewriter; it means further writing, not confined by any source or author's idea.This claim has strengthened Barthes' reputation as a defender of the freedomof the interpreter, and Terry Eagleton included him as part of the "Front for Liberation of the Reader". This is rather mistaken.

Barthes's readir\g is steered by codes that are insensitive to the inten tions

of the reader and which nevertheless give him "orgasmic" bliss. One of these,the code of cultural context,- means that reading-writing is also constituted bya "tautological reading" which copies the text in its literal form.Independently of Barthes, this motif was instructively used by Jorge LuisBorges, in the story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.

To sum up: a) reading has no end-point; b) it is writing; c) it is not a freeact of the subject but a coded process; d) it is independent of the authorialidea; e) it is unreflexive — it does not thematise the codes that enable it tooperate. Out of these points, only the first has an anti-Greimasian character.As one can see, by questioning the self-completeness and finalism of the PM

production process, Barthes in effect complemented the automatism of text-generation with the automatism of its interpretation, merging these two ideasinto a single conception of reading-writing. This constitutes a modification of

Greimas's theories rather than a major departure from them, and does notchange the main features of the profile of the aesthetics implied by the work of the authors belonging to the circle of generative structuralism. This profilealso confirms the opinions of Eco, marked as it is by conservatism, passivism,and unreflexivity. This may be seen most clearly in the locating of art belowthe level of techne. The Platonic conception of techne refers to self-knowledge - something not required by Greimas's version of artistic

production. Its organisation reminds one of the stages of mass-production in acar factory. One should not see in it

49 K. Rosner, "Tworczosc Levi-Straussa jako zrodio inspiracji w badaniach este-tycznych" [Levi-Strauss' Output: An Inspiration for Aesthetics Inquiries], in: Studia Este-tyczne 9, 1972, p. 309.




a trivial idea: here a "transcendental" concept is at stake. Greimas, indirect lyand in a Kantian way, justified the opinion directed against Kant, that thedeterminism of nature is no different from the determinism of culture, andthat in both cases the final claims to Tightness come with the social

infrastructures of consciousness. Like no-one before him, he showed thetechnological aspect of transcendentalism — which enables one to better un-derstand the growing interest in Kant observed nowadays. The paradox of thislies in the fact that while the myth of a semiotic-artistic production line isfulfilled, aesthetics has been dominated by the influence of the schismatics,who rejected structuralism and considered semiotics to be impossible.Unfortunately one has to admit that a much more sober evaluation of thelegacy of the Tel Quel group was performed by the Polish Marxists, who werenot deceived by the attempt to replace the class struggle with the struggle

between the signifier and the signified conducted under the banner of lecriture.

4. Appendix - Structuralism and Semiotics in Polish Aesthetics

The influence of Pierce's semiotics on Polish aesthetics is simply under valued, due to uncritical interpretations of western philosophers whose outputdistorted the content as well as meaning of original insights on the part of Polish thinkers in this respect. That is why some of them zealously uphold aview that Peirce is an heir of the so-called British empiricism, paying no heedto his severe criticism of Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, David Hume,etc. (C.P. 8.11-38). On the other hand there are Polish philosophers who try toapproach Peirce's thought through its post-modern, Derridian, readings. Thoseare usually drawn to a conclusion that Peirce cut language off reality. This is,however, an untenable point of view for one thing, Peirce emphasised thattruth is a matter of facts, and, oddly enough, charged Husserl with making

truth the matter of language structures (C.P. 8.189). Finally there arerepresentatives of Polish philosophy who take for granted Habermas' andApel's over-interpretations of Peirce's idea of "scientific community", whichusually results in reducing his philosophy to what might be called"transcendental sociology". Leaned against the authority of theaforementioned German philosophers, such a reduction seems to be at leastquestionable as seen against the late writings of Peirce in which an attack against transcendentalism is evidently carried out. Although less than toPeircean semiotics, Polish aesthetics turns out immune to semioticstructuralism as well.

Concerning structuralist semiotics, neither its functional nor generativevariety could influence Polish aesthetics, for its representatives either ne-glected semiotic issues entirely, or approached them in ways characteristic




xism they made every endeavour to show that structuralism could be reconciled with historicism. Needless to say, for this reason Polish neostructu-ralists used to make avowal of theirs affinity to the Prague Circle instead of setting forth ideas they actually shared with Paris School.

In 1966 Glowiriski published an article in which he elaborated his no tionof virtual reader. He believed he was the first to work it out. However, onecan hardly deny that Glowiriski's finding essentially resembled WayneBooth's idea of mock reader as described in his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). Afew years later Gtowiriski came to a conviction that there were styles of reading apart from styles of writing. Following Barthes' famous claim, hecompleted it with a thesis that there was no degre zero of reading. Slawiriskiwho was Gtowiriski's colleague also took lesson from generative structu-ralism. Consequently he sketched out his conception of literary competence,which echoed probably the most celebrated idea of Chomski53. Okopieri-Stewiriska endeavoured in turn to discriminate textual Ego from writer's onein terms of semantics54. Bartoszynski used to mention Bre-mond andTodorov while examining structures of literary fiction. To sum up, although

Polish neostructuralists were tightly wedded to the Prague functionalism, theydrew lessons from French generativism too.

Neostructuralist bias was characteristic not only of theorists of literature but also of Polish cinematologists. A group of them was drawn round AlicjaHelman and Hanna Ksiazek-Konicka. Its representatives were WiestawGodzic, Andrzej Gwozdz, Maryla Hopfinger, Lukasz Plesnar, EugeniuszWilk, and many others. Needless to say, Christian Metz's thought served asthe point of departure for almost all of the above-mentioned. At first Polishcinematologists concentrated on issues evoked by iconicity of speech acts.They were also interested in ways of co-ordinating different codes within atleast apparently consistent work of art. They tried to unearth deep grammar of film. With all these tendencies and goals, Polish cinematologists resembledsome western groups, for instance the Glasgow University Media Group.

Unfortunately, they also shared theirs fate. That is to say, investigations of Polish thinkers resulted in a view most dramatically expressed by JamesMonaco - "film has no grammar". This calamity pushed Helman's formationto reshaping the methodological background of theirs inquiries. They gave upFrench structuralism and turned towards Peirce's semiotics and Morris'

pragmatism. However, this turn did not yield results which were expected byPolish cinematologists.

53J. Stawiriski, "Socjologia kultury a poetyka historyczna" [Sociology of Culture andthe Historical Poetics], in: Dzieto, jpzyk, tmdycja [History, Language, Tradition], Warsza-wa: PWN, 1974.

54A. Okopieri-Stawinska, Semantyka wypowiedzi poetyckiej [The Semantics of PoeticSpeech-Act], Warszawa: PAN-IBL, 1985.



188 Andrzej Nowak

Oddly enough, it seems nowadays that former representatives of Helman'sgroup set theirs hopes on hermeneutics. This fills the story of defeat.

Writings of Leszek Polony and Michal Bristiger could represent semi-otic drift within Polish musicology. While Polony was close to Langer, Bris-

tiger preferred more exact and formal research methods. However the mostoriginal and extreme strategy of structural investigations was worked out byMieczystaw Por^bski. Por^bski, whose main interests were in the history of art, counted formal generativism of Greimas for little. He believed thatstructural analyses should be based upon mathematics. (His favourable

proposals were: Eresmann's theory of categories, Georg David Birkhoff'stheory of lattices, and mathematical theory of games.) Incidentally, Por^bski's

project betrays a trait of strictness so characteristic of the Lvov-WarsawSchool. Probably for this reason it turned out to be of no importance for aesthetics.

By way of summing up, Polish semiotic structuralism was an importantmovement comparable to Ingarden's phenomenology and Marxism. The roleit played in Ppland could be hardly overestimated. Due to struggles

undertaken by structuralists Polish aesthetics was enriched with ideas workedout in Prague and Paris. However, there is something Polish structuralismlacks. I dare say it is originality of thought which, for instance, makesIngarden's theory a unique one. To put it in a nutshell. While the output of Polish structuralists is rich with (over)sophisticated writings, it is scant of irreplaceable works.

Only small people die a quiet death. The same concerns ideas. Semio ticsand structuralism are two of the great philosophical ideas of the 20th century.They contained a spirit of sometimes extreme anti-individualism, and atendency to look for universals where few expected to find them, e.g., in art.

The fact that this search ended up in a fiasco does not mean it was a futileendeavour. During its realisation, many social meta-individual mechanismsinvolved in the production of culture were revealed, which had beeninaccessible to researchers with traditional methodogical outlooks. On theother hand, however, the over-interpretation of a priori roles and commonstructures for generating cultural products meant that structuralism at leastimplied conservative, if not trivial, axiologies. It aimed, explicitly, for acomplete reduction of issues of value. This project, however, should beinterpreted as political rather than theoretical. Many influential westernstructuralists, with their self-declared relativism,, wanted to be critics of

bourgeois consumer society. A relativist, however, is not able to opposeanother relativist by presenting a positive system of values - this is obvious.He can only oppose him with axiological emptiness. Therefore,




in all probability, the actant of the hidden axiology of structuralism is nihilism, and the actor, relativism. While structuralism collapsed, semiotics de-generated. Many contemporary observers of this phenomenon have em-

phasised the political involvement of semiotics. On the other hand, certain

notions are put forward which, by trapping man in the world of signs, disableits systematic studies. One cannot analyse that which one stands in arelationship of mystical unity with. Yet, all this should not come as a surprise.It seems that the development of the theory of signs has manifested certainconsistencies in the history of philosophy described by Twardow-ski,according to whom four stages regularly follow on from one another: thetheoretical, the sceptical, the practical, and the mystical. Using this schemaone can divide up the history of 20th century semiotics into the following

periods: a) theoretical studies, from Peirce and Saussure to Grei-mas and Eco; b) sceptical reaction as associated with post-structuralism; c) practicalinterest, i.e. political concerns expressed during the 1980's and 1990's; and d)the concurrent mysticism of thinkers who, having acquired elements of theHeideggerean philosophy of speech, consistently rejected the possibility of

systematic study of semiotic structures. It is difficult to say what the futurewill bring. One thing is sure: the world of signs is getting denser and denser,which does not make theoretical reflection any easier, but does make it morenecessary. We certainly need a new semiotics, a new semiotic metaphysics -something Peirce himself gave thought to.

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