Prof: Last time I
lectured under the illusion
that--
I really should get in the
habit of looking at the
syllabus--
that all you had been assigned
for Thursday's lecture was the
Saussure.
 
Lo and behold,
I did take a glance at the
syllabus over the weekend and
realized that you'd also been
assigned the Levi-Strauss,
so we have a little bit of
ground to cover today.
 
I think we can do it.
 
I think I want to reserve
something like a critique of
structuralism for the beginning
of Thursday's lecture,
because it segues very nicely
into what we'll have to say
about Derrida.
 
I already promised that somehow
or another the critique of
structuralism just was
deconstruction.
I hope to be able to
demonstrate that on Thursday;
but I do want to get up to the
point of launching a critique of
structuralism on two or three
grounds,
and so I hope to be able to
move along fairly quickly today.
Now another thing that got left
out,
even given the proviso that it
was only about Saussure on
Thursday,
was an adequate account of the
relationship between synchrony
and diachrony and the pivotal
importance of this concept,
not only for semiotics but for
its aftermath in structuralism,
and also for its relation to
the Russian formalists;
because you remember that in
talking about function,
the formalists who undertook to
think about literary history and
the problems of literary
historiography were very much
engaged in the notion that a
function in a given text could
be understood in two different
ways.
 
There was the syn-function,
which was the relationship
between that function and all of
the other functions in the
text--
in other words,
viewed as an aspect of that
text,
but there was also of the same
function its auto-function,
which is the way in which it
persists and recurs throughout
the history of literature
sometimes as the dominant,
sometimes latent or recessive,
but always in one form or
another there.
 
Now in Saussurian linguistics,
the relationship between
synchrony and diachrony is very
much the same.
To consider language in
toto is to consider it at a
given moment synchronically.
 
That is to say,
you don't think of language as
a system if at the same time
you're thinking of it unfolding
historically.
 
Jakobson, you will notice,
introduces an element of time
into the synchronic analysis of
a semiotic system by saying that
you've got to take account both
of archaic and innovative
features,
but nevertheless they are
simply flagged as archaic or
innovative and not understood as
changing in time as long as they
are read or analyzed
synchronically.
 
But at the same token,
a system does change through
time.
 
A semiotic system,
language, the history of
literature,
the history of
poetics--whatever it might be,
changes through time,
and to analyze that change
through time you think of it
diachronically.
 
Now Saussure argues that the
relationship among the parts of
something viewed
synchronically--
a semiotic system,
let's say--are not necessary in
the sense that they might be any
number of other relationships,
but they are nevertheless fixed.
 
That is to say,
they are what's there and they
can't be other than what they
are,
whereas through time,
if you're studying a semiotic
system or studying language or
whatever it might be,
change takes place and it's
necessary.
You're looking back on it and
it simply did happen,
>
 
so change is determinant in
some sense.
But at the same time,
it's not regular.
This, by the way,
is a challenge to certain ideas
in traditional linguistics like,
for example,
the one you probably all know:
the great vowel shift.
A structuralist's view of
language has to argue that the
great vowel shift,
in which every vowel sound goes
up a notch in some mysterious
period between the medieval and
the early modern,
that this only has the
appearance of regularity but
that it is actually a diachronic
phenomenon that can't be
understood in terms of
regularity.
 
So the relationship between
synchronic and diachronic is of
that kind.
 
Now matters are complicated a
little bit on those occasions in
your reading when people are
talking about the way in which a
mass of material--
a system of language or other
semiotic system,
let's say--is inferred from
existing data:
in other words,
the way in which I infer
language, langue,
from a sentence,
parole--I'm actually
concealing from you that in fact
Saussure uses a third term,
langage,
to talk about the sum of all
sentences,
but we won't get into that--the
way in which language is
inferred from parole.
Now language,
in other words,
is viewed as something in
space,
that is to say--or as
Levi-Strauss calls it,
"revertible time,"
meaning you can go backward and
forward within it,
but the temporal unfolding is
not the important thing about
it.
So in space,
whereas parole,
speech, unfolds in time so
that parole,
because it is temporal--because
any speech any of us makes is in
a certain sense historical,
* because the
beginning of the sentence is
earlier in history than the end
of the sentence--
for that reason,
there's a relationship between
diachrony and the unfolding of
parole,
or of a sentence or of an
utterance which is parallel,
though at the same time
admittedly confusing.
 
One doesn't really want to talk
about a sentence as diachronic,
but at the same time it does
exist on that horizontal axis in
which things in a combinatory
way unfold in time.
All right.
 
So much then for synchrony and
diachrony, something we can't
get away from.
 
It's in a way the central fact
of structuralism but which I
don't think I did adequate
justice to at the end of the
last lecture.
 
Now structuralism.
 
There was an incredible aura
about structuralism in the
1960s.
 
It crashed on the shores of the
United States coming in from
France in a way that stunned,
amazed, and transformed
people's lives.
 
People like Kant reading Hume
woke up from their dogmatic
slumbers or,
at least, that they felt that
that's what they were doing when
encountering structuralism.
I think to me it happened when
I was a graduate student at
Harvard and absolutely nobody
else was paying any attention to
it at all.
 
At Yale, Johns Hopkins,
and Cornell people were paying
attention to it,
but at Harvard I was initiated
to structuralism by a bright
undergraduate who seemed to be
the only >
 
person in Cambridge who knew
anything about structuralism.
Boy, did he know about
structuralism,
and he got me up to speed as
quickly as he could;
but it was a phenomenon that
was transformative
intellectually for people in the
academic, and beyond the
academic, world all over the
country.
Of course it led,
in all sorts of ways,
to most of what's been going on
in theory ever since.
The amazing thing about it is
that as a flourishing and
undisputed French contribution
to literary theory,
it lasted two years because in
1966 at a famous conference,
Jacques Derrida,
whom we'll be reading on
Thursday,
blew it out of the water.
I'll come back to that.
 
At the same time,
to say that it really only
lasted two years simply isn't
fair.
The lasting contribution of
structuralism as it's indebted
to semiotics,
but on its own terms as well,
is something one still feels
and senses throughout literary
theory.
 
The concrete contributions,
not all between 1964 when the
first structuralist texts were
translated in this country and
1966 when the conference in
Baltimore took place,
but the lasting concrete
contributions are also terribly
important.
 
There's a wonderful book called
On Racine by Roland
Barthes.
 
Those of you interested in
French neoclassical theater
cannot imagine,
if you haven't read it already,
reading a more bracing book.
 
There is an essay on
Baudelaire, "Les
Chats," or "The
Cats," written conjointly
by Levi-Strauss and Jakobson,
an extraordinary performance
which was the model of a good
deal else that was done in the
academy during that period.
 
The anthropologist Edmund Leach
wrote a structuralist analysis
of Genesis in the Bible.
 
Indeed, it's no accident that
he writes about Genesis,
as I will indicate in a minute.
 
Then subsequently,
and in addition to all of that,
probably the most lasting and
rich contributions of the
structuralists were in the field
that we know as narratology.
We'll be taking a look at that
when we read Peter Brooks' text
in conjunction with Freud a
couple of weeks from now,
but in the meantime the key
texts in narratology are,
again, by Roland Barthes in a
long,
long essay called "The
Structural Analysis of
Narrative"
in which he approaches a James
Bond novel as a system of binary
pairs and unpacks a deep
structure in the novel as a
result of this binary analysis;
important books by Tzvetan
Todorov,
crucial among them The
Grammar of The
Decameron;
and then a good deal of work
published in a series of books
called Figures by
Gérard Genette,
whom you will find quoted
repeatedly in the work of Paul
de Man that you'll be reading
for next Tuesday.
 
All of this work and a great
deal else in the theory of
narrative,
narratology,
is directly indebted to,
or is actually an aspect of,
structuralist thought.
 
Now I promised that I would
talk a little bit about the
relationship between formalism
and semiotics as it clarifies
itself in the work of writers
like Levi-Strauss and,
in particular, Jakobson.
 
Structuralism takes from
formalism, as you can see from
Jakobson's analysis,
the idea of function.
Jakobson is originally,
of course, himself a member of
the school of Russian
formalists.
He eventually immigrates to
Prague,
where he is in a circle of
people who are already calling
themselves structuralists,
and moves from there to Paris
and then to the United States.
 
So Jakobson,
of course, is the one figure
who definitely harkens back to
both worlds, having been a
formalist and having become a
structuralist.
One can see the amalgam of
these two sets of ideas in his
work.
 
From formalism then,
you get the idea of function
and the relationship between
syn-function and auto-function,
which becomes the relationship
between synchrony and diachrony.
From semiotics you get the idea
of negative knowledge--
that is to say,
in Levi-Strauss' analysis of
the Oedipus myth,
for example,
the notion that there is no
true version,
there's no originary version,
and there's no sort of positive
version of the myth of which
everything else is a version.
You simply know what you know
as it is differentiated from the
other things that you know--
one of the essential premises
of semiotics,
which is essential,
at the same time,
in structuralism,
because here's where
structuralism can be understood
as an entity in itself.
 
Unlike formalism,
structuralism has an ambition
with respect to the object,
to the nature of the object,
which is quite new.
 
I think that the best way to
epitomize that is to turn to an
aphorism of Roland Barthes' in
the essay "The
Structuralist Activity,"
on page 871 toward the bottom
of the right-hand column,
where Barthes says,
"Structural man takes the
real,
decomposes it,
then recomposes it..."
This is the moment in which you
can see the radical difference
between what structuralism is
doing and what formalism is
doing.
 
Formalism takes the object and
it doesn't decompose it.
It sees the object as it is;
it just breaks it down into its
respective functions,
showing them dynamically in
relationship with each other and
as a system of dominance and
subordination,
all of it understood as the way
in which something is made,
the way in which it is put
together--
but there's no question of
anything other than the object.
 
Gogol's "Overcoat,"
Cervantes' Don Quixote,
Sterne's Tristam
Shandy: these are
objects,
and there's no question of
somehow or another creating a
virtual object,
for example "the
novel," out of one's
remarks about individual texts.
 
In a way, though,
that's what,
as you can see again from
Levi-Strauss' analysis of the
Oedipus myth,
structuralism is doing.
As Barthes says,
"Structural man takes the
real,
decomposes it,
then recomposes
itâ€¦"
What he means by that is that
you take a bunch of variants or
versions,
you take a bunch of data--not
necessarily all the data,
but a representative amount of
the data relevant to any given
idea or concept--
and then you say,
and this is where he gets into
the idea of gross constituent
units: "What are the basic
constituent units of all of
these items of data?
Oh, yeah.
 
I see we can put them into a
pattern."
We'll work on this a little bit
in a minute.
"Yeah, I see how this is
working.
As a matter of fact,
there is a kind of virtual
object that I can begin to
observe as I organize the data
that I garner from all the
individual entities or versions
that fall under this
umbrella."
That's the recomposition not of
any particular object,
but of a kind of virtual object
which begins to emerge from
one's analysis:
in the case of Levi-Strauss'
text,
the meaning of the Oedipus myth.
That's the virtual object that
structuralist analysis arrives
at by arranging,
analyzing and classifying the
data that it can get from all of
the available versions of the
Oedipus myth.
 
So structuralism decomposes but
not just for the sake of seeing
how something works,
like taking apart the parts of
an engine,
but rather in order to lend the
parts to an analysis of a body
of materials that makes it
possible to recompose all of
those parts in a new virtual
object.
 
That's what's going on in what
Barthes calls "the
structuralist activity."
 
So quickly let's take a look at
the Levi-Strauss chart,
if you want to call it that,
of the Oedipus myth which is on
page 864 in your text and just
say a word or two about it.
He takes a lot of versions.
 
Let's not trouble ourselves
with how many.
He doesn't have nearly as many
versions by the way as he would
have if he were studying a North
American Indian myth or the
sorts of myths that he did study
in a variety of versions as an
anthropologist,
but he has some versions--one
of them,
by the way, Freud's version,
one of them Sophocles' version,
and a variety of versions
besides those.
 
He says, "Hmm,
as you look at these various
versions [gestures towards graph
on chalkboard],
you can see that certain things
are basically happening,
and they fall into certain
discrete categories.
We can put them in
columns--that is to say,
in terms of the way in which
they share a common theme,
but we can also put those
columns in a row so that we can
analyze the way in which the
columns relate to each
other."
 
For example,
there's a group of events,
happenstances,
sort of naming accidents and so
on,
that falls into a column called
"over-determination of
blood relations."
That is to say,
when Antigone tries to bury her
brother and goes to the wall for
that,
in ways that you might find
excessive,
that's an over-determination of
blood relations.
Then you notice that at the
same time,
there's a series of actions in
the myth--
going all the way back to
Oedipus' family history and then
down through the history of his
offspring and so on--
a series of actions which have
to do with the undervaluation of
blood relations.
 
People, well,
they don't really seem to care
as much about blood relations as
they should, and as a result of
that, bad things happen,
too.
Then there's a column of issues
which have to do with the way in
which recurrently,
in all of the versions of the
myth,
there seems to be a strange
preoccupation with that which is
born from the earth:
monsters,
the teeth of monsters that are
scattered and become the
alphabet in the story of Cadmos,
and the variety of ways in
which heroes have to confront
monsters as Oedipus confronts
the sphinx.
All of these monsters are
understood as not being born
from parents,
or as being born from two
things, but instead as emerging
from the earth.
They are thonic,
or "autochthonous"
in Levi-Strauss' word.
 
There seems to be a strange
preoccupation with autochthony
in this myth,
but this is offset by the way
in which--
that is to say,
with fending off autochthony,
as if the crucial thing were to
insist on the binary parental
relationship that produces us,
to be reassured in our humanity
by the idea that one of us is
born from two.
 
But then on the other hand,
there are all kinds of things
in the myth which are also
preoccupied with autochthony in
precisely the opposite way.
 
Lambda, the letter that begins
so many of the names of the
figures in Oedipus' genealogy--
Labdacus, Laius and so
on--lambda looks like a limping
person, right?
Oedipus means "swell
foot," "one who
limps."
 
What emerges in the fourth
column is the idea that there
are signs of autochthony in our
own makeup.
The reason we limp is that we
have a foot of clay,
that something of the earth
from which we were born sticks
to us,
and this is a recurrent
pattern, a recurrent idea,
in the unfolding of the Oedipus
myth.
 
It's a peculiar thing,
but notice that this is one of
those occasions on which the
myth explodes into other
cultures.
 
Adam means "red clay."
 
Adam is born from the earth in
the sense that red clay is taken
from the earth and he is
created,
and there seems to be this same
preoccupation with autochthony
in the Oedipus myth as well,
one of the interesting links of
that myth with the Christian
myth of the origin of man.
So you've got four columns:
over-evaluation of blood
relations,
under-evaluation of blood
relations,
denial of autochthony,
and persistence of autochthony.
 
I'm going to leave it at that
for now because we'll come back
later to see what interesting
thing is going on in the way in
which these four columns,
all about two versus one:
that is to say,
whether or not we are born from
two or born from one.
 
I want to come back to that in
the context of showing that in a
certain way,
the question of whether
things--ideas,
for example--come from two,
two different things,
or whether ideas come from one
object,
is after all this question is
itself an allegory of the
structuralist activity.
That's what structuralism
itself is about.
That's what makes it so
interesting and even perhaps
peculiar that Levi-Strauss is
able to find not just any
thought in a myth but the very
thinking that he himself is
doing about the myth.
 
That, of course,
may have something to do with
your sense that surely
decomposing in order to
recompose,
creating a virtual systemic
object--
notice that I have made this a
dotted line [gestures towards
chalkboard]--
that there is a kind of a
circularity in that.
I hope I have explained
Levi-Strauss' four columns
intelligibly,
but if you look at those
>
 
four columns you say to
yourself, "How on earth did
he come up with that?"
 
He himself says, "Oh,
well, maybe I could have done
it some other way,"
and you say to yourself,
"How can this become
decisive?
How can it become
authoritative?"
Right?
 
You can see what he's
doing--and by the way you can
confirm it by thinking of things
that he leaves out.
Jocasta hangs herself,
but he doesn't mention that.
It's not in any of the four
columns,
but obviously that has
something to do--
you can take your
choice--either between the
over-determination or
under-determination of blood
relations.
 
She feels guilty because she
committed incest,
right?
 
Oedipus at his birth is
hamstrung and exposed on Mount
Cithaeron.
 
Levi-Strauss doesn't mention
that either, but obviously
that's why Oedipus limps.
 
Oedipus is a limping person
like the letter lambda,
right?
 
So plainly that must have
something to do with the
persistence of autochthony.
 
Finally, if you read Oedipus
at Colonus,
at the end of it Oedipus,
when he dies,
is swallowed up by the earth;
"dust thou art,
to dust thou shalt
return."
The equivalent of this in the
Oedipus myth is that "where
I came from [the earth]
is where I will go."
He becomes a kind of genius of
the place at Colonus.
As a result of having been
swallowed up there,
he becomes a kind of presiding
spirit or genius of the place.
So all of those things which we
ourselves thought of--
he didn't think of them and he
didn't put them in his diagram--
can, however,
be put in his diagram.
If that's the case,
we have to say to ourselves,
"There might be something
in this.
Maybe this is a plausible and
interesting way of arranging
these materials."
 
So I really do think that ought
to be said in defense of what
may seem, however,
to be a somewhat arbitrary
exercise.
 
Now turning to Jakobson,
you may say with all this
emphasis I've been throwing on
"decomposing in order to
recompose"
that you don't see that going
on in what Jakobson is saying.
 
You may say to yourself,
"Well, he seems to be just
doing formalism.
 
He breaks any speech act into
six functions.
He talks about the
inter-determinacy of those six
functions with a certain result.
 
That sounds just like
formalism,"
you say.
 
Well, one way to show the way
in which what Jakobson is doing
is structuralist is to say that
after all in this essay--
there's a lot more of the
essay, by the way,
which your editor doesn't give
you.
It's mostly about
versification,
which is the long-standing
specialty of Jakobson's work:
Russian versification,
Czech versification and so on,
a little technical,
but it is all about the poetic
function.
 
After all, this essay is about
the poetic function,
what the formalists would call
literariness.
But Jakobson has a real
contribution to make to this
notion of the poetic function,
and what it is is basically
this: the poetic function--
and I'm going to quote this for
the first time.
 
It's on page 858 in the
left-hand column and it's a
mouthful.
 
"The poetic function
projects the principle of
equivalence from the axis of
selection into the axis of
combination."
 
Now you understand.
 
"The poetic function
projects the principle of
equivalence from the axis of
selection into the axis of
combination."
 
What is the principle of
equivalence?
If you've got that,
you've got a good deal of it.
The principle of equivalence
can be understood as what
Jakobson in the
"aphasia"
essay calls
"metaphor,"
that is to say the way in
which--
you remember last time I talked
about how signs cluster in the
vertical axis [gestures towards
chalkboard],
and if we understand language
as a system,
there are some signs that
relate to other signs in ways
that they probably don't relate
to yet other signs.
Then I had an incredible lapse
of memory.
I couldn't remember a synonym
for "ship,"
but I hope that I got my point
across to you and indicated that
there are varieties of ways in
which any given sign clusters
with other signs.
 
Those ways of clustering are
what Jakobson calls "the
principle of equivalence."
 
What is it?
 
Well, it's the way in which
signs either are similar to each
other or are dissimilar to each
other.
If that sounds too vague,
maybe it's better not to use
language of difference or
similarity but actually to use
language of opposition:
in other words,
the way in which signs are
virtually synonymous,
or the way in which signs are
really and truly opposed to each
other.
 
Obviously, it stretches just as
in versification.
You don't just have full rhyme;
you have slant rhyme.
These relationships stretch in
varieties of ways of this kind,
but the principle of
equivalence is the way in which
signs understood as phonemes,
lexemes, tagmemes--how ever you
want to understand them--
the way in which signs are
similar or dissimilar.
 
The readiness with which we
combine signs of that kind is
what a person attending to the
poetic function looks for.
If the utterance seems to
involve a predominance of
equivalences of various kinds,
then this utterance,
which is unfolding on the axis
of combination,
right [gestures towards
chalkboard], is the result of
having projected that principle
of equivalence--
call it metaphor,
call it a principle of
similarity or dissimilarity--
from the axis of selection;
that is to say,
that axis, perhaps a virtual
one,
in which language is a system
to the axis of combination,
that real axis--because nobody
doubts the existence of speech--
that real axis in which
language is not a system but has
become speech unfolding in time.
The principle of the poetic
function, however,
can be understood then as the
metaphorization of what is
otherwise metonymic.
 
In other words,
if I put together a sentence,
what I'm doing is I'm putting
words next to each other,
and that's what metonymy is.
 
Metonymy is a selection of
signs, if you will,
that go appropriately next to
each other according to the
rules of grammar and syntax and
according to the rules of logic,
right;
but also perhaps in the ways in
which the rhetorical device of
metonymy can be understood.
If I say "hut"
instead of "house"--
I'm using an example actually
taken from Jakobson's
"aphasia"
essay--
and if I say,
"The hut is small,"
there is a metonymic
relationship implied with
houses,
shacks, mansions,
and other sorts of edifice,
but which can only really be
resolved,
perhaps, by the unfolding of
the logic of the sentence as in
when I say,
"The hut is small."
 
So combinatory
processes--borrowing the
rhetorical term
"metonymy"
as "that which is next to
each other"--
are basically metonymic.
 
The available signs to be
selected, on the other hand,
on the axis of selection are
selected for certain purposes if
they are metaphoric.
 
Obviously, if I'm just making a
sentence, I'm not selecting
signs because they're
metaphoric.
I select them because they go
easily next to each other,
either for reasons of grammar
or syntax or logic.
Now let's look at Jakobson's
six functions [gestures towards
board]
taken all together.
I think this is by no means
difficult, and I think that
Jakobson's analysis of the six
functions is just absolutely,
totally brilliant.
 
In fact, I'm so profoundly
convinced by what Jakobson says
about these six functions that I
really think there isn't much
>
 
else to say about an utterance.
 
Obviously in different
registers there's lots to say,
but in the spirit of
Jakobsonian analysis there's no
possible complaint you can make
about this except possibly one,
which I probably won't get to
until next time.
In the meantime,
it's just staggeringly
effective.
 
Let me use the example of an
expression which is surely as
uninteresting--
I've groped as much as I could
to find the most uninteresting
possible expression to show the
way in which any utterance
whatsoever entails these six
functions: "It is
raining."
Oh, boy, "Excitement
rains," as they say.
In any case,
let's say that I am an
addresser--that is to say,
I'm a Romantic poet.
I say--probably ill advisedly
if I'm a poet,
but I'm a Romantic poet--I say,
sort of waking everybody up
when I say it,
"It is raining."
All right.
 
What do I mean
>
if I'm a Romantic poet?
 
What I mean to say is "I'm
singing in the rain"
or "It's raining in my
heart."
In other words,
I'm expressing something
emotional in saying "It is
raining,"
so that sense of the expression
"It is raining"
is what Jakobson calls the
emotive function.
Now I'm being addressed.
 
The thrust of the message is
toward the addressee.
It's being spoken by an
addresser, but it's aimed at an
addressee.
 
That addressee is a small child
going out the door without his
coat on,
and his mother or father says,
"It is raining,"
right,
which means--of course as a
conative function,
as a command,
as something which has a design
on the addressee--
what it means is "Put your
coat on."
 
But you don't necessarily say,
"Put your coat on."
You say, "It is
raining,"
and that's the conative
function.
That's what Jakobson calls
"the set to the
addressee":
that is to say,
the basic dominant bearing that
the message has,
the "set,"
is a set to the addressee.
Now there's a context for any
utterance.
This much I suppose none of us
would think to disagree with:
I'm a weatherman,
I'm a meteorologist,
right?
 
I don't even have to look out
the window.
I look at my charts and I
announce confidently through the
microphone, "It is
raining."
Right?
 
Everybody takes me seriously.
 
The referential function of
"It is raining"
is supposed to convey
information.
I'm a weatherman,
and I'm supposed to know what
I'm talking about.
 
So if a weatherman tells me
"It is raining,"
I believe that it is raining.
 
I put my hand out the door and,
sure enough,
it is raining,
and the referential function--
the dominant in the expression
"It is raining"
as referential function--
has been confirmed.
I don't expect the weatherman
to be telling me somehow
secretly that he's crying when
he says "It is
raining,"
right?
>
 
Right?
 
I expect him to tell me the
truth about the weather,
right, and that's what I'm
listening to him for.
All right.
 
Now "the set to the
contact."
Jakobson gives you those
wonderful examples from Dorothy
Parker's representation of a
date: "Oh,
boy.
 
Well, here we are,
yeah, here we are,
>
 
yeah, we sure are here,"
and so on,
right--in other words,
in a state of abject and acute
nervousness filling the air with
words,
right, so that you're on a
date, right,
and you can't think of anything
to say.
>
 
I really feel sorry for you.
 
>
 
>
 
You're on a date and you can't
think of anything to say so you
say,
"It is raining,"
and of course your interlocutor
says,
"Yeah, it's raining,"
and you say,
"It's raining hard,"
and she says,
"Well, yeah.
 
Maybe it'll stop soon."
 
So the conversation continues,
and that's phatic
function--checking to make sure
the contact is working:
"testing one,
two, three;
can you hear me?"
 
That's what the set to the
contact is: anything that
confirms that you're actually
sort of in communication with
somebody,
and anything we can say has
that component.
 
I mean, if I'm a physicist and
I'm going out on a date with
another physicist,
I say, "E equals MC
squared."
 
Only I'm not saying "E
equals MC squared";
I'm filling the air with words.
 
So once again,
it's the set to the contact,
and any message in the right
context has that function.
The set to the code is when
we're not sure that we
adequately share the code with
another person on a given
occasion so that we back away
from simply saying things to
make sure that what we're saying
is clear,
in other words to define them.
 
I say, "There's a mare in
the field."
Somebody says,
"What is a mare?"
"Well, it's a female
horse."
"Well, it's a female
horse" is the metalingual
function.
 
But we're talking about
"It is raining."
This is where it really gets
interesting.
>
 
The most interesting thing
about "It is raining"
in terms of these six functions
is metalingual,
because what on earth is
"it"?
Right?
 
Somebody tells me "It is
raining."
I say, "What?
 
What are you talking about?
 
What is 'it'?
 
I have absolutely no idea what
you're saying."
I've noticed that other
languages have this same weird
phenomenon"
"Il pleut,"
"Es regnet."
 
What on earth does any of that
mean?
What is "il"?
 
What is "es"?
 
What is "it"?
 
Is it God?
 
Is it Jupiter Pluvius?
 
Is it the cloud canopy?
 
Well, it sort of is the cloud
canopy, but that's sort of
clearly not what's meant by
"it,"
right?
 
"It"
is a kind of grammatical and
syntactical anomaly which is
extremely difficult even for
linguists to analyze and to
explain;
so that when I try to say,
"It is raining,"
I can expect,
if I am talking to a
literalist, of course,
the metalingual function to
kick in and,
in fact, bite me in the shin.
It's no picnic with the
metalingual function in mind
saying, "It is
raining."
What kind of a definition of
"it"
is "It's raining?"
 
>
 
So problems arise but they're
interesting problems,
and they are a function,
one of the six functions,
of the expression "It is
raining."
Poetic function is
unfortunately not very
interesting.
 
That's the one drawback of this
example,
but there's still plenty to
say: "ih-ih"
and the "ih"
in raining,
which one can hear--the double
"ih"
in raining,
the monosyllables suggesting a
kind of a quick declaration of
something followed by a sense of
duration that one always feels
when one is aware of rain
coming: that "It is
rainnnnnnning,"
so that the duration of
prolongation of the word has a
kind of semantic value
indicating to us that this is
something ongoing--
in other words,
a variety of ways in which the
poetic function of "It is
raining"
can be considered.
For the poetic function to be
dominant--
as I suggested when I said a
Romantic poet wouldn't be very
smart if he or she said "It
was raining"--
would really be taxing for
anyone who wanted to make it so.
But any function could be the
dominant in a certain situation
of any given utterance.
 
So that then,
sort of, perhaps serves to
suffice as an analysis of
Jakobson's understanding of the
structure of an utterance.
 
It has a structure
insofar--that is to say a
metaphoric as opposed to a
metonymic structure insofar as
we observe the presence of some
kind of pressure from the axis
of selection,
the principle of equivalence
and the axis of selection,
bringing itself to bear on the
way in which the combination
takes place.
It's just incredible that you
say, "It is raining."
What could be more prosaic than
"It is raining?"
All of a sudden you notice that
string of "i's."
You notice all kinds of other
things about it.
The way in which the most banal
utterance is combined is likely
in one form or another almost
unavoidable.
I suppose I should use the
strong argument and say
"unavoidably":
is likely unavoidably to entail
aspects of the poetic function.
 
Where the poetic function is
dominant you have literariness,
and that of course,
is the old object of scientific
attention of the Russian
formalists;
but it is refined in a way
that, I think,
is structuralist by Jakobson
because he insists on the binary
nature of the process of
combining elements from the axis
of selection if they are
equivalent--
binary being "same,"
"opposite,"
"similar,"
"dissimilar,"
and the variety of patterns in
which those relations,
"same,"
"opposite,"
"similar,"
and "dissimilar,"
can be launched into use.
 
Now I've actually reached the
point at which possibly I could
get involved in some elements of
critique, and I suppose I'll
begin.
 
I may not finish but we can
always carry over into the next
lecture.
 
So since we've been talking
about Jakobson,
let me call your attention to
one problem in what seems to me
otherwise to be a truly
remarkable exercise of thought.
That problem arises on page 858.
 
He himself recognizes that it's
a problem.
He acknowledges it's a problem,
but he wants to say that he's
solved it in saying what he
says.
It's about two thirds of the
way down the page and it's about
the relationship between the
poetic function and the
metalingual function,
between the set to the message
and the set to the code,
as he puts it.
This is what he says:
It may be objected [Yes,
and here we are objecting,
right?]
that metalanguage also makes a
sequential use of equivalent
units when combining synonymic
expressions into an equational
sentence: A = A
("Mare is the female of
the horse").
 
Poetry and metalanguage,
however, are in diametrical
opposition to each other
[They're not the same,
right?
 
They're in diametrical
opposition to each other]:
in metalanguage the sequence is
used to build an equation [in
other words,
to prove that one term can be
understood in terms of other
terms],
whereas in poetry the equation
is used to build a sequence.
Okay.
 
Now in one sense this is true,
obviously.
Yes, that is,
I know when I'm speaking
metalanguage and I know when I'm
speaking poetry.
Maybe you know it too,
but what Jakobson has actually
done is he's sort of exposed a
structuralist nerve,
because he has appealed to
intention: that is to say,
he's said the metalingual
expression has one intention and
the poetic expression has
another intention.
What does that mean?
 
It has a genesis;
it has an origin in an
intending consciousness just as
in traditions that are not
structuralist,
things have origins in prior
causes and not in their
structural relationship between
two things.
 
In other words,
if structuralism is a critique
of genesis,
as is the case with Edmund
Leach's analysis of the biblical
text Genesis,
as is the case certainly with
Levi-Strauss' understanding of
the Oedipus myth,
from two and not from one--if
structuralism is a critique of
genesis,
what happens when you have to
make a distinction between two
entities in your system,
the poetic function and the
metalingual function,
in terms of their genesis:
that is to say,
in terms of the intention that
stands behind them?
 
As I said, the example seems
trivial because we're all more
than prepared to agree with
Jakobson that we know the
difference when we see it
between the metalingual and the
poetic functions,
but he's not actually saying we
know the difference when we see
it.
Maybe it would have been better
if he had said,
"Well, anybody can see
what's metalingual and what's
poetic."
 
Maybe it would have been better
if he had.
What he says instead is that
metalingual is intended to do
one thing;
poetic is intended to do
another thing.
 
That opens, actually,
a can of worms about all six
functions.
 
I stand here in front of you
and I say "It is
raining."
 
How do you know what I am
intending, right:
whether I'm nervous and sort of
just being phatic;
whether I am really unhappy or
happy;
whether I think you're
crazy--it is in fact raining
outside and I don't see any
coats;
or whether I am actually sort
of just masquerading as an
English professor--I am really a
meteorologist?
You don't know any of these
things.
You have to infer an intention,
right?
If you infer an intention in
order to make these
distinctions,
how can the structuralist
imperative of structure rather
than genesis be preserved
intact?
 
How can we insist that we know
things negatively and not
positively if we have to infer a
direct cause,
a positive cause,
in order to grasp distinctions
even between the six functions?
 
That's a rhetorical question
with which I don't necessarily
agree but it is a potential
objection that you may wish to
explore on your own.
 
Now the critique of
Levi-Strauss I have already
hinted at, but there's another
aspect of it too.
That I will defer until next
time because you'll find that
the essay of Derrida's that
you're reading is largely about
Levi-Strauss,
so it will make a natural segue
between what we're talking about
today and what we'll be talking
about Thursday,
to return first to certain
aspects of Levi-Strauss'
argument and then get going with
what Derrida is saying.
 
Thank you.
 
See you then.
 
