2010
Philosophical Standpoints on Language and its Significance
by Andrew GaleaSaussure’s idea of semiotics was the instigation of a new movement in the philosophy of language. Its central tenet of the arbitrary relation of reality to language, the notion of language as a conventionally agreed upon system used to map out the world, had obvious ramifications for the perception of the world and our relation to it, because it developed the idea of underlying socially accepted rules for communication which could be studied and understood by a scientific discipline. It posited that every ‘signifier’ (that thing which represents the ‘signified’ which is some entity in reality) determined its meaning in relation to other signifiers in a web of differences.1
Saussure therefore argued that the term ‘chair’ derives its meaning on the basis of how it differs to something else, say the term ‘table’, as there was no actual connection or link between the term used and the entity in reality.
Lacan, however, went one step further by synthesizing this subjectivity of meaning with his background in Freudian psychoanalysis to highlight a reflection of that same subjectivity within the human psyche. Freud argued in his evaluation of dreams, that language failed not solely in its arbitrariness, but in its inability to account for that aspect of ourselves which even we do not fully understand, that which he called ‘the unconscious’. He outlined the idea of deeply formative drives within the human psyche which the conscious could never grasp. This not only implied an instability and limitation within the language but with the person using the language.
Lacan, though, posited that ‘the unconscious is structured like language’2 and is therefore eliminating the idea of an integral, central part of the human psyche altogether, saying that even at the deepest psychological level, people are subject to constant self redefinition as a consequence of their innate psychical instability, and that reality is a human construct.
Lacan proposed the notion of the Other and the other. With the former he refers to the great space of existence that we never quite understood; that could never be understood – what Plato had once infamously called the Chora or Khora, which has been hinted at ever since throughout the history of theory and philosophy. In this respect the French psychoanalyst is applying the methodology assumed in the analysis of linguistics to psychoanalysis, while critiquing linguistics from the viewpoint of psychoanalysis, merging language and the psyche in a significant way.3
For Lacan, words highlight points of focus and automatically seem to differentiate one point of focus from the space it comes from, hence giving it a form and meaning. This outlining of an entity is what is understood when one says one is ‘defining’ something. One must necessarily forget one object when focusing on another and this in itself creates a lack. This necessary discrepancy, this distance between the soft-focus background and the focused foreground, is what generates meaning. It is not unlike the idea behind optical illusions, where an image can be understood in one regard and then again in another, but in which the perception of one aspect necessitates the back-grounding of the other. In much the same way do we come to understand an object by drawing it out of the undivided wholeness or entirety that is reality as we understand it.
Lacan is therefore indicating language as a quest to control and manipulate reality, as a need for power, which has had crucial and fundamental influence in the post-modern era. Once again drawing on Freud (this time his Oedipal complex theory), Lacan talks of the desire to find a wholeness and once again parallels the human psyche with language, so that when he talks of the desire to achieve a completeness, something to fill a void, he is simultaneously referring to the little goals or targets we set ourselves, that we believe will satisfy us, as well as the nature of language as a system that is always searching for some fundamental definition or meaning.
Therefore if Saussure blurs the connection between language and the world, Lacan undermines the notion of a firm and reliable human psyche that might connect fully with the world. In effect Lacan appears to be saying that language is an attempt to map and divide the great abstract that is existence.
It is not difficult then to trace the development of thought in theory, as it amplified the subjectivity of a text and killed off the author (as with Barthes who argued that ‘the modern scriptor is born simultaneously within the text […] and every text is eternally written here and now.’4 This almost organic perception of the text – as an entity to be considered as an analyzable structure and understood on its own terms – meant that a particularly rigorous critical practice could be used. This is what became known as New Criticism.
How then do these theories hold up in relation to Harold Bloom’s writing in Anxiety of Influence? His idea of the author as creating a deliberate misprision of his predecessors’ work would indicate, in light of the eradication of the author as a conveyor of meaning by French theorists, that there is instead merely a recycling of ideas and images. For this reason Bloom has often been related to deconstructionism (although he only admits to sharing only a few passing similarities to it) in that his idea seems to support the notion that a text can be reduced to a single fundamental notion that has been repeated through the ages. Derrida would call this idea in itself an ‘aporia’, because an idea constitutes a tension or impasse of sorts; it is something in itself disputable.
It is here at this point of discussion that a crucial aspect of what some might call the subjectivism and relativism of post-modernity is made most evident. In the absence of any solid meaning to be conveyed, and with the passing of any specific originator to which we can turn for signification, the power of the reader as an interpreter seems to greatly enhance the position of individuality, with no unifying basis to literature. What then is the point of studying literature if it is all merely open to interpretation? In response to the text-based theory of the structuralists came the post-structuralists, who felt this was too much of a simplification. Foucault, for one, is sceptical of claims to universal truths. He writes with a view to eliminating the immediacy of interpretation that the structuralists seemed to advocate, re-introducing the placing of a text’s significance within a historical context. The talk of erasing an author in consideration of a text is a naïve concept, he argues. Regardless what contemporary theory would argue, the source of authentication for much of what is in the text is often still sought in the author. Foucault states many reasons for this. Primarily, he argues, once a system of ownership was put in place that made an author answerable for his text, then the text in turn simply must reflect the author. He refers also to Searle’s theories on proper names to solidify the connection between text and author. Most importantly however, he places a text within a history of systems of thought.5
Julia Kristeva built up on this and introduced her idea of ‘intertextuality’, which advocates an analysis of any one text not simply on the basis of a ‘here-and-now’ understanding, but extends it to include the comparison to other texts, reference to the author, and a historical lineage or background. Effectively Kristeva could be said to regard the influencing factors of a multitude of predecessors and contemporaries in the evolutionary trajectory of a text as a positive function which neither detracts from nor affirms the significance of a text at the given time of evaluation, nor does it affix it any one specific meaning.
It is tempting to argue from a structuralist perspective that Kristeva’s intertextuality is less well-defined; some might almost be tempted to call it a ‘cop out’ in that her highly liberal or eclectic mindset towards the analysis or review of literature – one that in truth is the product of the emergence of post-structuralism – does not assume any one position but instead almost seems to employ a Quine-like ‘holistic’ approach to all texts. However post-structuralism has at its core a fundamental understanding that the structure of any given text is really only created and relevant to the present in relation to many other determining factors that centre mainly around the cyclical nature of meaning. In this regard, to review the significance and relevance of a text by placing it within a multi-dimensional, multi-faceted (never in any one regard ‘exclusive’ ) framework is , I would feel inclined to argue, not to undermine the notion of a structure, but to simply broaden it, making the process thus a far more scientific one in that it considers the specifics of a text by relating it to, and positioning within, a wider schema.
The expansion of the space of reference that Kristeva employs could be said to be her attempt to connect human literary efforts with the Platonic notion of the ‘chora’ (or ‘khora’) – that immeasurable frame of existence against which we create definition. Certainly, if nothing else, her argument advocates an awareness of, and participation in, a process of ever constant change, that can be studied in historical snapshots that are related to other historical snapshots by means of literary connectedness. Therefore she is simultaneously allowing for the cross reference of works throughout history while respecting the Foucault episteme system.
Endnotes
1 David Lodge and Nigel Wood, eds., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2008), pp. 43-50.
2 Ibid., pp. 184-209.
3 Ibid., p. 184.
4 Ibid., p. 315.
5 Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 34.
References
Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
Lodge, David, and Nigel Wood, eds., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 3rd edn (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2008)
