"Linguistics and Poetics"

“Linguisitics and Poetics”
Nicolas Ruwet

The object of linguistic theory will never completely coincide with that of literary study. There may be some overlap, but it’s a mistake to take linguistic structuralism – at this point, an obsolete fad – as the foundation of literary studies. The emphasis on linguistics can even be harmful because it leads us to focus on the aspects of a text that we can discuss with scientific rigor and precision, rather than the less tangible aspects.

Specifically, linguistic theory can never explain to us why a line is beautiful. It might suggest, as with the quote from Racine, “Le jour n’est pas plus pur que le fond de mon cœur,” that part of the appeal lies in a certain ratio of syllables, but the source of its beauty really escapes us.

Despite the inadequacies of linguistic theory, it was the linguist Jakobson, who articulated the first theory of the difference between poetic language and other forms. Namely, “poetic language projects relationships of equivalence which usually occur on the paradigmatic axis (the axis of selections or substitutions) along the syntagmatic axis (the axis of combinations or concatenations)” (301).

This is undermined by the fact that
a) “literary prose” and “prosaic versification” blue the boundaries, leaving the aesthetic dimension unclear.
b) The model of 2 axes is old structuralism, and thus obsolete
c) Analysis of discourse proves that all sorts of texts – conversations, newspaper articles, etc – can be described in these terms.
d) We don’t know which equivalences are pertinent and lack the objective procedures to figure that out.

We can solved the way L-S and Jakobson did, by working out equivalences through grammatical structure, but this ignores the fact that certain grammatical structures are considered mandatory at some times and optional at others.

And here is where I say fuck it in my notes. I sincerely doubt we need to understand how to analyze a sonnet by Baudelaire in exams. However, as the discussion is more helpful:

Discussion

Moraze: The project is a generalized poetics, which, if applied to the work of a given author, would make it possible to produce all of the work of the author. Is skeptical, thinking generalized aesthetic would simply give generalized logic.
Caws: Generative poetics makes the argument that language, in a creative sense, is posterior to the subject.

Ruwet: generative poetics is like the effort to create synthetic music; it’s mostly terrible, but in its inadequacy, we learn how far we are from understanding music/poetics.

Macksey: while sensitive to Ruwet’s caveat’s about the relation between linguistics and literary theory, it seems worth noting that some critics, like Benjamin, have anticipated certain structuralist theories (like Chomsky).

Todorov: literature as a system is yet to be described, but will probably be closer to other forms of discourse than linguistics.

Barthes: effort to specify relationship between semiotics and linguistics. Can’t simply try to derive something useful for literary analysis from linguistics as is; must sometimes demand a linguistics that hasn’t been invented.

“Greek Tragedy: Problems of Interpretation”

Jean-Pierre Vernant

Greek tragedy is not directly readable because we’re alienated from the original context which gave rise to it. While in one sense, the tragedy is readable today for anyone, in another it’s only accessible to the classicist.

The classicist is the one who understands the syntax, the significance of specific words in specific contexts. In addition, the historian is the one who knows that Greek tragedy can only be understood by recognizing it as a human invention responding to the institution of popular justice. The tribunals which judged the tragedies were popularly elected, part of the broader trend of moving toward a system that regarded individuals as individuals under the law. Tragedy poses the question of what constitutes justice, setting up the opposition between an older order (religious power, Antigone’s fidelity to the laws of the underworld) v. the ethics, the law of the city. As part of the effort to dramatize this conflict, tragedy uses a number of archaisms.

Tragedy, then, puts two systems of value in dialogue with each other through its use of the heros of the past. Man becomes a problem for himself in tragedy. (Rings of Augustine’s Confessions, no?) This is in contrast to older conceptions of guilt and error which don’t allow for any understanding of the will.

The tragic moment is a very specific one; one of distance from the heroic past, but enough closeness for it to still be pertinent, human action must have emerged, but the human can’t be too autonomous. Philosophy follows the tragic moment.

Discussion:

The discussion meanders a bit. Macksey asks about the idea that Aeschylus is optimistic; Vernant says that such a judgment is only relative, and that the triumph of the civic ideal is more a plea than anything. But then we get into a discussion about the Oedipus complex. Vernant is adamant that the text does not support the idea that Oedipus has an Oedipus complex. Someone pursues this. Vernant gets mad and ends the discussion in a huff, convinced that they had incompatible understandings of tragedy.

“Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”

Jacques Derrida, The Structuralist Controversy

Traditionally structure, or the “structurality of structure,” has been neutralized by giving it a center, meant to limit the “free play” of the structure.” Today the idea of a structure without a center represents the unthinkable. The center gives freeplay a ground, a sense of certitude and stability. It’s inherently contradictory, then, as it limits freeplay.

The history of metaphysics has been the history of presence and endless substitution of a center. (The center as the telos, ousia, aletheia, conscousness, man, God, etc).

Yet we have recently encountered the event of a rupture, where the structurality of a structure has begun to be thought. We began to think that the central presence was always being transported outside of itself in its surrogates. Soon we started thinking of a structure without a center, and from there, linguistics invaded, so everything became a form of discourse.

Historically, we see concrete examples of this in Nietzsche’s critiques of being and truth, Heidegger’s critiques of onto-theology, and Freudian critiques of self-presence. And yet all of these critiques are embedded in Western metaphysics and Western vocabulary. (Which Nietzsche seemed pretty aware of, so not sure what the problem is). The prime example of this is the language of the sign. As soon as we attempt to say there is no privileged signified, we need to extend this refusal to the concept of the sign. But this cannot be done; the sign is the limit which makes the whole meaningful. all of the concepts used to critique metaphysical systems drag the entirety of metaphysics with them through the back door.

Ethnology could only come about in this moment when everything is being de-centered. It too falls into the same trap of employing essentially ethnocentric categories to study its subjects, while at the moment of denouncing them.

Levi-Strauss makes all of these points clear through his discussion of the incest prohibition in relation to the nature-culture divide. In one sense, the incest prohibition seems obviously cultural, as the product of a social institution. Simultaneously, though, it is found universally, which suggests that it is natural. As something thought within the nature-culture divide, it is a scandal, undermining the categories. Thought, however, as something that escapes these divides, confounds them, and possibly even makes them possible, we see that it is almost designed to be left in the realm of the unthinkable.

There are two options at this point. First, to systematically question the origins of these concepts, presumably like Foucault. Derrida labels this approach sterile. Second, to treat these concepts as tools, which, while limited, can still be of use, at the same timr that we expose their limitations. This is the path of Levi-Strauss.

We see this effort to use what we have available in L-S’s concept of bricolage, the “practice of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined.” Every discourse, by these standards, is bricoleur.

Bricolage, for L-S is not only an intellectual activity, but also a mythopoetical one. He attempts not just to advance a structural knowledge of myth, but to make myth in his discourse reflect on itself and criticize itself. There is explicitly no unity or absolute source of the myth.

Totalization is conceived here as useless and impossible. One sense of understanding that is to see that as finite subjects surveying an infinite field. The other, though, is from the perspective of freeplay, “a field of infinite substitutions in the closure of a finite ensemble.”

Here Derrida introduces the supplement. Because there is no center in real freeplay, the sign which supplements it, takes its place, always adds something. But this supplement to the lack of the signified is always “floating.”

In the end, we’re left with two stances toward freeplay. First, that of Rousseau, which seeks to end freeplay by turning toward an origin, and “lives like an exile the necessity of interpretation.” The other is a nietzschean affirmation, which does not turn toward any origin, and tries to move beyond humanism.

Discussion:

Hyppolite: What does the center of a structure mean? Particularly, what if you think of a mathematical equation as a structure? Would the rules be the center?

Derrida: “I would answer you by saying that I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going.” The concept of structure is no longer adequate to describe the terms of the game. A structure can be thought classically, as something with a fixed creator, or as a loss which makes possible “free play.”

Lucien Goldmann: Accuses Derrida of being destructive.

Derrida: Deconstruction simply means to be alert to the “historical sedimentation” of the language we use.

Doubrovsky: how do you reconcile your dismissal of the center with the necessity of saying I, speaking as a subject?

Derrida: I have no interest in destroying the subject; I think it’s indispensable for philosophical and scientific discourse. I merely try to situate it.

“Structure and Infrastructure in Primitive Society: Levi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown”

Neville Dyson-Hudson, Structuralist Controversy

So Levi-Strauss has been responsible for making the term structuralism popular. However, anthropologists tend to be intensely ambivalent about him, skeptical of the popular interest in his work, and dubious about the enormity of the questions he tries to ask.

In particular, Dyson-Hudson resents the fact that his own master, Radcliffe-Browne, has been overshadowed by Levi-Strauss. In 1950, Radcliffe-Brown wrote what was meant to be the authoritative statement on kinship, however it was barely reviewed and only recently translated into English. In contrast, L-S received a long review in the Times Literary Supplement, along with even longer debates on his influences, from Leibniz to Durkheim, etc.

Basically, lots of this piece is an extended exercise in whining, but it’s pretty astute whining that seems to anticipate a lot of the trends and problems in contemporary anthropology. Here are the pertinent points of critique re: Levi-Strauss and efforts to explain the hostility he engenders in anthropologists.

1. Comp Lit Syndrome: Anthropologists are just irritated by people pretending to know something about the discipline, when really they’re just hopping on a new trend and know jackshit about good scholarship or the history of the discipline.
2. L-S takes the whole field of man’s activities as his subject, which is excruciatingly broad. In doing so, he invokes poorly defined categories like, “the human mind.”
3. Despite aligning himself with “social anthropology,” which has for a long time identified itself as performing detailed ethnographic studies, L-S increasingly practices armchair anthropology. His actual findings seem slight by contrast, and are often couched such that the observer seems more significant than the objects of study.

Part II: the Stakes

In 1944-45, Radcliffe-Browne was chosen to present at the Royal Anthropological Institute of the UK. In his speech, he corrected some of Durkheim’s findings, but endorsed the general direction he had set for anthropology.

Two years later, Merleau-Ponty wrote an essay critiquing Durkheim, claiming that to identify the sacred with the social was simply to defer the problem, and to avoid all of the awkward questions about the ambivalence inherent in that concept. Instead of trying to define the sacred or the social, sociology should consider both as aspects of the attempt by society to work out the relations between men. It should be seen as a manifestation of the problems and possibilities of intersubjective relations.

Merleau-Ponty’s shift from “collective consciousness” to “intersubjectivity” is the basic challenge set forth for the participants of this conference, and it is one that he believes L-S fails to meet.

Radcliffe-Browne is portrayed as believing that social structures were the empirical, observable relations existing between men. L-S believes that social structures are entities independent of man’s consciousness.

The options are these: “Either the reality that anthropologists should be concerned with is action - often purposive, apparent, repetitive, observable, and subject to demonstration; or it is the idea - often unconscious, immanent, refracted, and its pattern demonstrable only after being stripped down and reassembled.”

Conclusions

In essence, Dyson-Hudson thinks both Radcliffe-Brown and Levi-Strauss are only partial solutions. He thinks it ought to be possible to combine the two options, possibly by a more adequate understanding of the individual, complete with desires and interests.

"Of Structure as an Inmixing"

Jacques Lacan, Structuralist Controversy

*Disclaimer* I actually found this a little hard to follow, particularly at the end. So if anyone wants to hop in and clarify, I'd be grateful.

The essay is largely a rumination by Lacan on being misunderstood, followed by a Q&A session that was an exercise in being misunderstood. So, first misconception:

1) When Lacan says the unconscious is language, he means the unconscious is an assemblage of words.

Correction: In Freud, it becomes clear that words are the way we seek to handle the unconscious. Not simply the meaning of words, but their “flesh.” Words are “the material of the unconscious.” To say that the unconscious is structured as a language is to say that it is precisely structured. It is not to say that language can be in any way reduced to an abstract meta-language, because even the concept of a meta-language must be mediated through ordinary language. All of these misconceptions are due to his students.

2) Misconception 2: the unconscious is an ur-subject, something primal preparing the way for thought, which consciousness will eventually shed light on, then you’ve missed the difficulty.

Correction: The unconscious is really a barrier of sorts, which thinks thoughts that escape your vigilance. The unconscious does raise the question of the subject. In French, the subject cannot be identified with the pronoun. For example, in the sentence, “it rains,” il pleut, the subject is not part of the sentence/statement. Something thinks, but the unconscious troubles our understanding of what it is that thinks.

The subject must be sought as a lost object. The lost object is the support of the subject.

3) Misconception 3: Lacan’s use of the word structure can somehow be confused with that of the phenomenologists and other thinkers who claim that unity is the most important aspect of structure. zB., phenomenology begins with the assumption of intentional unity.

Correction: That only makes sense in an organism, not in terms of the mind. Life, looked at as a man, is something constantly going astray, and the idea of imposing any unifying structure seems absurd and false.

The best understanding of unity is that of counting. (note: this part gets a little obscure to me. Ben, any clarification?) You only need one repetition to constitute a subject. But repetition works by the creation of a mark that obliterates difference. (Counting replaces the heterogeneous objects with the homogeneous signifier). So each repetition evokes the lost object, precisely as it helps obliterate it.

And then I have no idea how we transition to the idea of jouissance. There's also some fairly useless discussion, where Lacan is accused and defended against the charge of obscurity.

The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (Part I)

1. Macksey: Anniversary Reflections (2007)
   1. Irony of the conference that it was meant to introduce American scholars to Continental Structuralism, but turned out to be a requiem for the movement and the birth of post-structuralism.
   2. Offers two other narratives that the conference has been placed in:
      1. Funded by the Ford Foundation, tool of American imperialism
      2. Struggle between Hegel and Nietzsche, representing structuralism and post-structuralism/deconstruction
2. Macksey & Donato: The Space Between -1971
   1. The conference was a major event in which leading proponents of structuralism, such as Derrida, Lacan, and Barthes, began to make evident their distancing of themselves from it.
   2. One measure of the stance between then (1966) and now (1971) is the decline of the methodological importance of linguistics and the displacement of Hegel.
   3. Linguistics had been thought to provide a "a theoretical methodological model and universal matrix for understanding all human phenomena" (xvii)
      1. Derrida has underscored the logocentric metaphysical presuppositions implicit in linguistics and thus the privileging of linguistics as a central model
   4. "Today's task for thinkers within this climate thus seems to reside in the possibility of developing a critical discourse without identities to sustain concepts, without privileging origins or without an ordered temporality to guarantee the mimetic probabilities of representation. The fundamental entities of such systems, adrift in radical discontinuity, are Events, which cannot be accounted for by transcendental idealities. For the interpreters of texts or codes as surrogate for the lost presence of a center the reader is forced (or freed) to interrogate the systematic absence of allegory or the distorting mirrors of parody. We are left with the necessity of articulating what Said has called "the vacant spaces between things, words, ideas." (xviii-xix)
3. Preface to the First Edition
   1. Historical Background for the Conference
      1. "The general title emphasized both the pluralism of existing modes of discourse and the interaction of disciplines not entirely limited to the conventional rubric of the humanities" (xxi)
   2. Basic problems to be investigated:
      1. The statues of the subject
      2. The general theory of signs and language systems
      3. The use and abuse of models
      4. Homologies and transformations as analytic techniques
      5. Synchronic vs Diachronic descriptions
      6. The question of "mediation" between objective and subjective judgments
      7. The possible relationship between microcosmic and macrocosmic social and symbolic dimensions
   3. Volume is dedicated to Jean Hyppolite
4. Richard Macksey: Lions and Squares: Opening Remarks
   1. Acknowledges the diversity of views that have been brought together in the conference
   2. Background to the conferences is "recent polemics…have raised serious and generalizable questions about the privileged status of our disciplinary languages and, behind the linguistic issue, the status of the subject and the so called "subject matter'" of the Human Sciences.
   3. Highlights the role of the Johns Hopkins University as the first research university in America and its early connections to European scholarship as a legacy for the conference.
      1. C.S. Peirce was among the earliest academics at Johns Hopkins
         1. His interests have many affinities with those at the conference.
            1. Including
               1. His quest for architectonic system
               2. A concern with the study of method
               3. Comprehensive theory of signs
               4. Semiotic status of the person and the interpretant
               5. Use of 'existential graphs
               6. Relationship of chance to purpose
               7. Focus on diachronic instead of synchronic description
               8. But also the idea of synechism, or universal continuity
   4. Compares the Conference to a sort of 'game' and then reflects on the ubiquity of the use of 'games' as theoretical models in contemporary thought, including decision theory and Wittgensteinian language-games.
      1. Focuses on the plurality of games in Wittgenstein's thought as a good analogy for the diversity of approaches held by the various participants.
      2. Also, two different approaches to the game of chess is analogous to a division among participants
         1. Chess can either be thought of as:
            1. A paradigm of convention rule following
            2. A means of expressing hidden personal and social impulses, historical evolution, etc.
         2. So too there are two major division in the approach to language
            1. Semiotic formalism
            2. Hermeneutic geneticism
      3. Also considers linking Wittgensteinian's approach to language-games with Austin's theory of speech acts
         1. This is basically what Brandom does
      4. Closes by considering some words by Wittgenstein about the possibility of breakdown of communication, which he sees as a possibility at the conference.
5. Rene Girard: Tiresias and the Critic
   1. The idea of the Sciences of Man as uniting the scholars in attendance at the conference despite their wide methodological divergences
      1. The development of the idea of the Sciences of Man have altered the distinction between subject and object that has been inherited from the nineteenth century
   2. Attempts to suggest the change that has occurred using metaphor and myth
      1. Uses the myth of Oedipus to illustrate the contrast between a point of view that claims to be all-knowing and transcendent from that which recognizes the partiality and situatedness of the observer
         1. Oedipus sets himself above his city and claims to occupy a transcendent position
         2. Tiresias suggests to him that he is implicated in the events that unfold in the city
         3. Oedipus would take this suggestion as an invitation to submerge himself into subjectivity, and thus rejects it
         4. In truth, what Tiresias encourages is not a submersion into subjectivity, as contrasted with objectivity, but a doing away of both Self and Other
         5. Oedipus would attempt to reject this encouragement by appeal to 'facts' that he has observed, without recognizing that his 'facts' are predetermined by his 'false assumption of absolute autonomy.'
         6. Tiresias does not respond to Oedipus in his own tenor, saying simply what he is, but engages in a more oblique angle of approach, he rearranges Oedipus's own words into a new structure in order to demythify them.
         7. Tiresias is symbol of the changes that have occurred in the disciplines of the Sciences of Man.
   3. The methodologies that make up the Sciences of Man, such as sociology and psychoanalysis, have wide differences, however, the structure of interpretation shared by them is similar.
      1. It has been identified by Foucault in "The Order of Things."
         1. "The Sciences de l'Homme are the redoubling of interpretation upon itself. The necessarily include in their significant structures and contradict, since they reinterpret it, a first and more spontaneous interpretation more closely related to the original phenomena." (18)
         2. This is apparent in sociology, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, in which the new methodologies aim to expose hidden meaning that were missed or denied by the participants, analysand, or author.
         3. Contemplates whether this approach courts nihilism, but then dismisses this consideration, somehow.
      2. Returns to the idea of myth. Girard believes that myths present "a real matrix of diachronically ordered structures whose suggestiveness as metaphors of our individual and collective predicament - or should I say structural models? - appears almost unlimited." (20)
      3. "I am personally convinced that truly great works of art, literature and thought stem, like Oedipus's own reinterpretation of the past, arise from a genius's ability to undertake a radical destructive reinterpretation of his former intellectual and spiritual structures." (20)
      4. Ends with a note of caution, this process of reinterpretation is endless, the genius's reinterpretation should not be taken as final, it too can and perhaps must be the object of radical destructive reinterpretation. This it should not be mistaken for the absolute and transcendent view, but should be considered only partial.
6. Charles Moraze: Literary Invention
   1. Paper
      1. Discusses the relationship of literary invention to invention in general.
      2. Most centrally concerned with the relationship between the social, individual, and unconscious in the process of invention
      3. Begins with a discussion of invention of Mathematics
         1. Points out that in many discussions of the prominent mathematicians there is the notion that invention or discovery often has a large unconscious component to it.
      4. Three General Phases in the Process of Invention
         1. Informe - In this stage the creator familiarizes himself with the use of signs and methods in the area of inquiry that he is interested in. The collective contribution of society is important in this stage. Not just in terms of providing directly relevant information, but for providing models and inspirations for how to think about things.
         2. Cogitare - In this stage, the brain is put into a state of activity, organizing and reorganizing the data that it has. This process occurs both consciously and unconsciously.
         3. Intellegere - In this stage there is a sudden illumination wherein the solution is struck upon. Speculating about neurological aspects, Moraze claims that the suddenness and feeling of relief corresponds to a better organization of cerebral cells. On the other hand, there is an aspect of choice in intellegere, picking from amongst other possible solution. Moreover, there is an aspect of internal dialogue in this process, moving back and forth between possibilities offered and selection from among them.
            1. Moraze stresses that the two previous stages are not entirely separated, rather this is a constant movement back and forth between them.
            2. Moreover, there most be a process of evaluation and control in the process of intellegere. Much of this evaluation and control is structured by the standards of evaluation of the society surrounding the inventor. Thus, society plays an important role in both ends of the process.
      5. Difference between mathematical and literary invention
         1. Mathematics works with signs which mean nothing outside of mathematics, while literature uses signs that already have meaning, or power to effect those that encounter them emotionally.
         2. Literature consists in harnessing and modifying the power that are possessed by linguistic signs
            1. Linguistic signs have power by virtue of bearing images that effect us.
            2. Often it consists in recharging signs that have lost their power.
            3. Literary production consists in setting up relations and connections between signs that convey emotionally charged images
            4. This act is also situated in a social environment: words act by means of images on men who act on things.
         3. Moreover, in all types of creation there is a social relationship.
            1. "Work affords a certain means for men to situate themselves in the midst of society in such a way that society is located in the universe of things that it creates or that is offered it by nature." (32)
         4. He closes by saying, somewhat cryptically that, "the beautiful work is situated at the crossroads where what is accomplished comes forth from the possible and where certitude is offered as a reward for chances taken." (33)
   2. Discussion (highlights only)
      1. In response to a question about whether Mathematical questions only have one answer, Morave responds by discussing the indeterminancy or irrationality that is part of even mathematical inquiry
      2. Additionally, Morave discusses how, despite the indeterminacy in both mathematical and literary invention, there are periods when it exceedingly difficult to come up with answers or genres which differ from what everyone else is doing
      3. Furthermore, Hyppolite suggests that invention is not so much inventions of solution, but the invention of problems. This seems to mean that a truly inventive idea reorients the field, determining what the new issues and problems are.
      4. Goldman brings up the point that a different exists between the natural sciences and literature vis-a-vis invention, in that it is much easier to see what the practical problems are that invention is trying to respond to in the case of natural science. Furthermore, the problems are much more universal in the case of the natural sciences than in literature.
      5. Lacan questions the centrality that Morave assigns to the individual inventor as a person. He couples this question with a consideration of what requires solution in mathematics. What he seems to be driving at is a view that sees the system of signs as more autonomous, working towards solutions, then the individual persons working with them.
      6. Morave pushes back a little bit, saying that certainly the intellectual and social context makes problems as well as solutions salient, but it is not as if these problems and solutions would exist without humanity.
      7. Hyppolite claims that there are three entities involved in an invention, two communities engaged in a dialogue and then an individual that comes along and sees what is being missed in that dialogue.
      8. Another point that is made is the similarity between mathematical hypothesis and literature, in that in both there as an attempt to replace, to tell the story better, then previous hypotheses, stories, poems.
7. Poulet: Criticism and Experience of Interiority
   1. Paper
      1. Poulet discusses the interiority that characterizes books as opposed to other objects.
         1. However, the interiority of a book is one that opens itself to its reader
         2. In a sense there is a dissolution of the distinction between subject and object. The book, divested of its materiality, exists as a subjectified object within the consciousness of the reader.
         3. In reading a book one thinks the thoughts of another. One says 'I,' but an 'I' that does not refer to himself. In a sense one is 'gripped' by another in reading. One is alienated from oneself.
         4. This other I is the author of the work. Not the author as known in his or her biography, but as he or she imprinted his or her mind into the work. In reading the author reveals himself or herself in us.
         5. The work forms the temporary mental substance the fills the reader.
      2. It is not the case, however, the consciousness of the reader is not present while reading. Instead the reader is there, but as if watching events unfold, passively recording them.
         1. The reader is in a state of astonishment at being witness to an experience that is not his or hers, but that she or he experiences as his or hers
         2. Criticisms consists in an alternation between identity and difference between the author and the critic.
         3. Poulet then discusses a number of French critics from the perspective of how much they identify versus how much they differentiate themselves from the author
            1. Another related factor is how much the critic deals with the language of the author and how much he attempts to penetrate through the language to the pure subjectivity of the author
            2. The basic opposition though is a union without comprehension or a comprehension without a union
            3. The critic that he seems to think the most highly of is Jean Rousset
               1. Rousset's goals is "to establish a connection the objective reality of the work and the organizing power which gives it shape. A work is not explained for him, as for the structuralists, by the exclusive interdependence of the objective elements which compose it….There is not in his eyes any system of the work without a principle of systematization which operates in correlation with that work and which is even included in it." (70)
               2. Rousset uses a method "which leads the seeker from the continuously changing frontiers of form to what is beyond form." (71)
               3. It is a way of moving from subject (reader) to subject (author) through the object (the text)
               4. At the same time, however, the 'author' is not the historical author, but the author that is present in the work and that reveals itself in the work
   2. Discussion (highlights)
      1. Poulet, in response to a question, distinguishes reading from a conversation, in that in a conversation there is a predominance of differentiation, one interlocutor asserting himself on the other
      2. Poulet also reemphasizes that one of his main points in discussing criticism was that there is a predominance of a moment of adhesion before any movement of differentiation
      3. Poulet claims that in his view interpretation should strive to achieve 'absolute subjectivity.'
      4. Girard questions whether the archetypal act of reading is identification with the author, instead he seems to suggest that it is fascination and identification with the characters of the story. Furthermore, he argues that the critical act is never immediate, but rather is a process of mediation.
      5. Poulet, though, reasserts the primacy of fusion in the act of reading.
      6. Goldman tries to bring up the issue the criterion of falsity in Poulet's approach to interpretation, but Poulet responds that a false interpretation is one that he cannot identify with.
      7. Finally, Holland, a psychoanalysist, tries to push back against the passivity of the reader, in that he claims that the reading of the book, the meaning that is put into the work, comes much more from aspects of the readers psyche than anything in the work
8. Eugenio Donato: The Two Languages of Criticism
   1. Donato defines the Sciences of Man as "expressing a preoccupation for the unity of all disciplines dealing with the human phenomenon, independently of their particular methodologies." (89)
   2. A common feature of structuralism, whether, psychoanalysis or anthropology, in opposition to phenomenology and existentialism, is the denunciation of the notion of the subject, a Cartesian subject rooted in the greater or lesser presence that it affords itself in consciousness. (90)
   3. Structuralism also has scientific ambition, as opposed to phenomenology and existentialism
   4. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty eventual developed towards views that encompassed intersubjectivity, but this was merely multiple Cartesian subjects
   5. A change was made with Levi-Strausses application of Saussure's linguistics to the study of kinship
      1. One of the basic ideas is that parts only make sense in the wholes within which they are encompassed
      2. Furthermore, it is a concern with the basic continuity between the signifier and the signified and an acknowledgement of the importance of the signifier as more than a mere means of conveyance
   6. Derrida goes further and claims that signifiers are interminable, they do not stop at some ultimate signified
      1. Interpretation is never final, but is always violent and overthrowing what came before it
   7. The subject of interpretation is thus, never the subject of the interpretation, but the interpreting subject
9. Lucien Goldman: Structure the Human Reality and Methodological Concept
   1. Paper
      1. Aim is to define the method of genetic structuralism
         1. Structure originates from real behavior
            1. Solution to practical problems encountered by living beings
            2. Patterns of behavior, or comportments, retained to grapple with similar problems
            3. Although the structure can be modified in particular circumstances
         2. Structure is between the individual in a particular event and the general and universal
         3. At the same time, when the researcher is trying to study a particular phenomena he or she engages in an act of circumscription
            1. This circumscription delineates who the subject is and what particular problems he, she, or they are confronting
            2. This will determine the types of structures that are searched for, whether individual, or social, or world-historic
               1. However, if the circumscription is overly local or overly general all structure disappears
         4. The fundamental thesis of all genetic structuralist sociology is that all human behavior, and more generally the behavior of any living being of some complexity is significant. That is, it is a question of a subject who within a certain situation, will change this situation in way that favorable to his needs and, on the human level, to his affective needs and concepts. In very general terms, there is a disequilibrium and the behavior is significant to the degree that it tends to re-establish an equilibrium. (100)
         5. Structure is essentially defined by the necessity to fulfill a function in a certain situation. History is constituted by the fact that, in the changing situation created by the action of the subject and by exterior interventions, structures, which have been developed as being rational and having a chance to fulfill their function to allow a group or an individual to live in conditions that existed previously, are no longer rational, and must be modified to fulfill their function. (100)
         6. Many of these comportments are implicit and non-conscious.
         7. At the level of the social, once communication is introduced, there are no longer individual subjects. Communication between individuals engaged in coordinated action can be thought of as intra-subjective. The individuals constitute one subject that engages in the activity.
            1. Proposes the hypothesis "that individual subjects - or individual consciousnesses - by acting within behavior patters which in turn go through the division of labor - become transindividual…All activities connected with technology, civilization, or culture depend on the group" (102) as subject.
            2. Demarking the subject, however, is not something that is given, rather it is a the part of the researchers task, determined by his or her interests.
         8. There are many similarities between the genetic structuralist approach and psychoanalysis. However, they differ in that interpretation, in the sense of introducing structures that are not present in the date, such as the unconscious, is a necessary part of psychoanalysis, but not of genetic structuralism.
            1. Genetic structuralism restricts itself to explanation, which is the putting of a datum into a larger context which allows the function and structure of the datum within that context to become apparent.
            2. The method of understanding of a cultural work depends on extent to which that cultural work fits with its social context. The more it fits, the more a genetic structuralism explanation is appropriate. The less it fits, the more a symbolic psychoanalytic interpretation is appropriate.
            3. Between these two extremes there are mixtures of the two types of understanding. Those the dissolve the Cartesian ego into the social and those the fracture it into the subconscious as well as those that retain the personal individual.
         9. Goldman then considers various approaches to considering the aesthetic value of a work. He claims that aesthetic value belongs to the social order; and is related to transindividual logic.
         10. At the same time, reductionism should be avoided. Literary characters do not merely express a collective consciousness, rather they express the hopes and dreams of individuals in society that they as individuals are barely able to express.
   2. Discussion (highlights)
      1. Hyppolite questions the necessary connection between structure and social function. It is perfectly possible to demarcate structure without seeing structure as pointing towards a social function.
      2. Goldmann makes clear that, while there is not transindividual consciousness, in order to understand the consciousness of the individual one must understand the behavior of the transindividual subject.
      3. Goldmann distinguishes between the human sciences and the natural sciences, in that while the natural sciences are not purely objective, they have a value that is accepted by everyone - mastery of nature, the human sciences, in contrast, have specific and particular values given to them by their researchers.
      4. Lacan points out that lying behind Goldmann ideas of the subject, whether the individual or the transindividual, is the idea of a unifying unity, of knowledge or of action.
         1. Lacan argues instead that the idea of the subject arises on the level of the 'gap' instead of unity.
      5. Pratt questions whether the genetic structuralist theory that everything must be understood within a greater whole makes sense. In effect, he argues that it results in an infinite regress where each level needs to be understood within the context of a level above it.
10. Tzvetan Todorov: Language and Literature
    1. "Literature is, and can be nothing other than, a kind of extension and application of certain properties of language."
    2. Language is not just the medium of literature, but also the model for literature.
    3. Indicates some point of connection between literary prose and language in terms of their form
       1. Closed vs. Open forms of stories are related to the two ways propositions can be combined: coordination vs. subordination
       2. Other examples include different rhetorical devices, synonymy, and polysemy
    4. Beyond a connection in regards to their form, there is also a connection between the structure of both language and literary prose
       1. Meaning in language consists in the capacity of a linguistic unit to integrate itself into a unit on a higher level; it is the entirety of its possible relationships with other words.
       2. Applying this understanding of meaning to literature will help us to distinguish meaning from interpretation. The situation is more complex here, but it seems that meaning would be the integration of the work into a higher structure of the same type of as it, while interpretation would be integration of it into some other domain of discourse, such as sociology or psychoanalysis.
    5. Another connection is the distinction between discourse and story in language
       1. Discourse involves the author in the statement, whereas story is the presentation of facts.
    6. As well as the distinction between tale, or the sequence of events, and the plot, the particular relationship given to the events by the author.
    7. Another related issue discussed is the relationship of the protagonist in story to the author or what Todorov calls the point of view.
    8. In each of these cases Todorov does not make clear the connection between language and literature, but seems to suggest that an awareness of linguistics will shed light on these issues in literature.
11. Roland Barthes: To Write: An Intransitive Verb?
    1. Barthes also deals with the connection between language and literature.
    2. He notes that modern authors have begun to see writing as a critique of language.
    3. From this perspective, he wants to show how the activity of writing can be expressed with the help of certain linguistic categories.
    4. This discipline is Semio-criticism, which is not just stylistics, rather it concerned by the very relationship between writer and language.
    5. Anthropological linguistics has taught as a number of important principles about language:
       1. No archaic language, older languages are not necessarily more simple
       2. Language is not a simple instrument, man does not exist prior to language and then use language to express his thoughts
       3. Linguistics has its own objectivity, it forces us to distinguish levels of analysis, at the same time cultural facts, unlike natural facts, always point us to something beyond themselves
       4. Culture is a general system of symbols, culture is a language
       5. Homology is therefore a central methodological principle in studying culture, the structure of the sentence is found homologically in the structure of literary works
    6. Confrontation of certain categories of language with the situation of the writer in relation to his writing
       1. Temporality: Linguistic time always has its center in the present statement, so too in literature while there are two temporal orders, one centered on the discourse - the expression of the author, the other centered on the story - the narrative time, the former determines the temporal system of the discourse as a whole.
       2. Person: Language has two broad pairs of opposites: person (I, thou) to non-person (he, she, it), and I and non-I (thou)
          1. Whatever persons appear in the literary work, the literary work as an expression by an author is submitted to this divisions of person
       3. Voice: Active, passive, middle. 'To write' is a middle voiced verb in the sense that the agent is making him/herself the center of the action, not purely active or passive, but involved in the action
          1. The subject is contemporary with the action, being effected and affected by it
12. Discussion: Barthes and Todorov
    1. Goldmann argues that the difference between existentialist thought and structuralist thought is a dispute over the role of history. For Sartre it was necessary to accede to history from the standpoint of the cogito. For the present structuralists the important thing is to avoid history or historicity. He also objects to the idea that man does not exist before language, he claims that man does many things that are not linguistic.
    2. Vernant raises the question of whether the renewal of the middle voice implies a decline in the idea of the agent as entirely responsible for his or her action, in this case, writing, just as the rise of active voice indicated the rise of the notion of the autonomous agent who wills action.
    3. Schnechner raises the issue of the relationship of the performance of a literary work to language, Barthes claim that a similar relationship is maintained, though in contemporary culture theater is too naturalistic to be interesting.
    4. Derrida claims the present-day literature is an attempt to think the adventure that was Western history, the history of metaphysics. He also questions the issue of whether there is a ever a true present in language, or whether language is always past, even when the statement is made in the first person singular present.
13. Jean Hyppolite: The Structure of Philosophic Language According to the "Preface" to Hegel's Phenomenology of the Mind
    1. Paper
       1. Aim to discuss whether there is a literary style or character proper to philosophic thought and language
       2. Hegel is an interesting case study because he is possibly last great metaphysician
       3. Two major differences separate literary discourse from philosophic discourse
          1. Philosophic discourse is subject to a norm of truth
          2. Philosophic discourse contains within it its own criticism
       4. The Preface to the Phenomenology is interesting because it was written after the rest of the work and denies its own possibility, it claims that it cannot explain the Phenomenology, because the work of the Phenomenology can only be done in the form of the Phenomenology
       5. Hyppolite insists on studying the Structure of Philosophical LANGUAGE in Hegel's Preface as oppose to THOUGHT because for Hegel there is no thought outside of the unity of signifier and signified. There is no Thought outside of Language.
       6. Indeed, the organization of the world is achieved through the ordinary language that we use.
          1. "It is in language that the world takes on means and that thought is for itself both subject and object. The linguistic environment is the universal consciousness-of-self, of Being; it is the Logos. (162)
          2. Language is the fundamental expression of a culture.
       7. Hegel tries to take up philosophically a problem that in former ages only religion dealt with. That is scrutinize and to express the ordinary language, consciousness, and experience.
          1. He also wants to reconcile ordinary consciousness with scientific knowledge in way that enables them both to recognize each other as themselves.
          2. For Hegel true knowledge is where there is no division between the subject and the object of investigation.
             1. Hegel tries to create a discourse the reflects this, one which the discourse is the rhythm of things themselves.
       8. Hyppolite also tries to rehabilitate Hegel from the charge that he tried to achieve an infinite, unattainable God-eye perspective.
    2. Discussion
       1. Lowenberg raises a number of problems with the Preface, including: that it cannot be understood without the rest of the work, that it explains common consciousness in a language which is incomprehensible to common consciousness, but which Hegel claims is the only philosophic language. He also stresses the linguistic nature of Hegel's work, viewing the Phenomenology as an exploration of how far various languages can be pressed before they become self-contradictory. He also questions the idea that there could be one true philosophical language, as Hegel seems to claim there is. Further, he claims that dialectic, even Hegel's dialectic, undermines any such claim to the absolute.
       2. Hyppolite remarks that the reason that people have difficult with Hegel's language is that in his language the subject disappears. Hegel is interested in the dynamic movement of thought as opposed to the subject that provides support to language.
       3. Girard makes the connection between the Phenomenology and Bildungsroman.
       4. Hyppolite claims that he avoids the term structure because "a structure is whole in which the terms are determined by the whole and mutually determine each other within the whole." While, in "Hegel there is no method separable from the from the development, taken in of itself. That is, there is not structure of method anterior to the structure of the discourse itself." (183)