I

For Saussure, the linguistic “sign” is a value (GL, 79-81, 111-22) established by its use in the “speech-circuit” (GL, 11-12). Two speakers exchange signs either for other signs or for the “things” or “concepts” they represent. The nature of the sign is determined by the practical economics of communication. Roman Jakobson diagrams this “communication situation” into a structure of constituents in the exchange of signs:⁵

This apparently obvious description of ordinary communication is in fact already dominated by the technological conceptions of semiology. The “addresser” and “addressee” are not empirical subjectivities, but rather the pronouns “I” and “you,” conceived as indexes, the existential “subject” of the utterance and the existential “non-subject” of the utterance (“existential” here means “determined by the utterance itself as utterance”).⁶ “Context” is not a world of things (Bedeutungen, objects of intention), but only of “signifieds” (Sinne, intentional objects). These “signifieds” are determined by their arbitrary association with the “signifiers” which make up the “message.” Arbitrariness is the first principle of the sign, according to Saussure (GL, 67-70), and in Jakobson’s “contact,” we see the second principle, linearity (temporal in the case of the spoken, phonetic representation of the signifier; spatial in the case of its graphic, written representation). “Code” is the system of a language, the langue internalized by the two speakers. To bring out the semiological conception which determines how language can come to appearance within structural linguistics, we can now relabel Jakobson’s diagram:

In semiology, the linguistic sign is brought to stand as an object. It is a “means of communication,” where communication is thought technologically as a distributional economics of exchange within the place of exchange (“marketplace”).

Jakobson retranscribes the positions in his diagram to yield a linguistics of “functions of language”:

Again, ordinary-language terms somewhat mask the essential technological conception indicated by the notion of “functions.” Jakobson makes clear that a particular utterance is not to be assigned wholly to one or another category in the diagrammatic map. “Functions” are internal constituents of any utterance. Nevertheless, one function “dominates”: that is, the functions are present in some determinate, hierarchical order. “Function” is not conceived empirically as “use,” but mathematically as the weight, relative to each other, of constituent factors (f(x, y, ...)). Within the terms of the diagram, Jakobson then answers the main question of the essay in which he introduces them: what is the differentia specifica of verbal art? The structural principle of the “poetic function” is the dominance of or “set” toward the message itself for its own sake.

Jakobson’s theory here follows the earliest thinking of Russian formalism. Victor Shklovsky conceived art as a way of breaking up automatized perception and thinking (I. A. Richards’ “stock responses”).⁷The poem used a linguistic sign as a “device,” making its perceptual qualities prominent instead of effacing the sign in the service of ordinary communication. In such a use, both the sign and the thing it stands for become “strange,” so that we “recover the sensation of life.” Art makes “the stone stony” (AT, 12). The poem is a technique for transforming a sign from an instrument of knowing and communicating to an object of perception: “Gore in art is not necessarily gory; it rhymes with amor — it is either the substance of the tonal structure or material for the construction of figures of speech” (AT, 44, see 18). In Jakobson’s words, the poetic function “by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (CS, 356). By drawing on language’s self-referential capacity, poetic function makes the linguistic sign into a reflexively self-constituting object. Thus purged of “extralinguistic” entities like reference, such a sign occupies a privileged status in Jakobson’s linguistics: the poetic sign is the pure sign; poetry is discourse generated out of pure signs.

Poetic function constitutes a discourse by projecting “the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (CS, 358). (This is, in Jakobson, an empirical criterion for recognizing poetic function, and not a generative principle.) This formula is best understood through Saussure’s distinction between the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic.⁸ A sign occurring at a given point in a speech chain is simultaneously the member of various classes: enseignement is part of the series “nouns ending in -ment,” of the series “nouns having to do with education,” of the series “words formed from the root theme enseign-,” and others. These series or classes of equivalent items are “paradigms.” A sign is also linked in the speech chain to the signs preceding and succeeding it, which, in their sequentiality, constitute the “syntagm.” In poetic function, paradigm dominates over syntagm, so that equivalence becomes the constitutive device of the sequence. In simpler terms, some perceptible unit recurs in the sequence of speech. That unit may be a certain clause-structure (the parallelism of Hebrew psalms), a certain number of syllables (French verse), a certain sound repeated in roughly equal-time intervals (Old English verse), and so forth. Some perceptible rhythm is the fundamental fact of poetic speech, and the rhythmic units become “equivalent.”

In this conception, the poetic function of language mirrors linguistic analysis. The metalingual function is used to establish a code, that is, to find equivalences in the sequence of speech, to determine exchange values. Poetic function reverses the process, making sequences out of equivalences of all kinds. Through reflexivity, the poetic sign makes the signifier its own signified, so that an arbitrary association of different entities (an ontologically heterogeneous sign) becomes a pure autonomous object, self-establishing as a self-same substance. At the same time, the distinction between significant and non-significant features in the sign’s structure disappears.⁹ In utterances, poetic function maximizes “motivation,” the internal reduplication of structure. Both the signified (the relation of arbitrariness) and the sequence (the relation of linearity) here derive directly from the autonomous sign. Like the aesthetic object for Kant, the poetic sign dissolves the fundamental antinomies of structuralist thought.¹⁰ When language is thought wholly within the pragmatics of communication, the poetic sign is not so much a deviation from the model of communication as it is a revelation of the most fundamental and constitutive truth of signs. In poetic function, the sign re-presents itself purely as technique. The poetic sign is an autotelic, bare perceptual particular. Standing forth in its essential purity, the poetic sign validates structural linguistics by its own internal consistency: poetry is pure, autonomous grammar.

Since the poetic sign is autonomous from all “extralinguistic” entities, a structuralist criticism essentially reduces articulation to taxonomy. There cannot even be a qualitative difference among signs: the fundamental principle is equivalence. Within poetry, signs must be related symmetrically, and symmetries must be parallel.¹¹ Criticism is the taxonomic analysis of verbal structure, designed to exhibit the maximum of perceptible technique. “Perceptible” has no meaning from empirical psychology (just as the phrase “how X is made” in Russian formalism is not a matter of empirical generation): it means simply the pure possibility of representing a symmetry.

II

Against Jakobson’s theory may be set a later stage in Russian formalism itself. With Tomashevsky, the art-work began to be conceived as a sub-system analogous to language.¹² A concern for relation of part to whole replaces a definition of the art-work in terms of the immanent structure of the pure sign. The key notion is “motivation.” Again, as in Saussure, the term seems to cover loosely any conceivable or formulable reason for the appearance of anything in a work. But its more strictly technical sense is “structural reduplication.” Tomashevsky tried to analyze the whole work into various levels or strata, infra-structures within the work conceived as a whole. “Motivation” mainly registers the various relations between elements in different infrastructures. The work becomes a totality constituted by complex interactions between autonomous infrastructures (sound, diction, syntax, rhetoric, image pattern, theme, character, plot, and the like). “Autonomy” has meaning only in the relation of one infrastructure to another. Mediated by the whole, one stratum can “dominate.” The combination of “dominance” with the mediated autonomy of strata permits relations of asymmetry within the textual totality. Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art ¹³ develops a similar conception from a purely phenomenological standpoint. He describes rigorously four strata, whose “polyphonic” interrelations are integrated within the whole work.

The fullest development of this conception occurs in American formalist criticism. Like Jakobson, Cleanth Brooks assumes that communication in propositional statements is the basic form of language.¹⁴ Poetry deviates from this form toward “dramatic” structure, where the individual sign is not constituted by its relation to an external reality, but to the whole structure of the poem. This relation Brooks calls “propriety,” contrasting it with scientific “truth” (HP, 205). “Irony” is Brooks’s broadest term for poetic structure; he defines it as the qualification any element receives from its context (HP, 209). The poetic sign, for Brooks, retains a constitutive heterogeneity, but he substitutes the heterogeneity of part and whole for the heterogeneity of word and thing (or concept) characteristic of ordinary communication.

In the essays in The Verbal Icon,¹⁵ W. K. Wimsatt overcomes even this dichotomy of heterogeneities and thus achieves the most comprehensive (I believe, the most comprehensive possible) structural conception of poetry. The book’s title, as Wimsatt explains in a note, preserves the conception of the poem as a total structure, but only as related to the structure of a denoted object. The poem as verbal icon is “a bright picture” or “image,” but also “an interpretation of reality in its [presumably the poem’s] metaphoric and symbolic dimensions” (VI, x). The poem’s internal structure is “coherence”; its relation to external structure or structures is “correspondence.” Combining both sorts of structure, Wimsatt’s definition of poetry differs sharply from Jacobson’s:

Poetry is a complex kind of verbal construction in which the dimension of coherence is by various techniques of implication greatly enhanced and thus generates an extra dimension of correspondence to reality, the symbolic or analogical. (VI, 241)

The poem does not diverge from reference, but enhances reference into interpretation. The “total structure of verbal meaning” ranges from a basic stratum of substantive “stated meaning” (roughly, “denotation,” itself complex and stratified), shading toward varieties of “intimated meaning,” and finally thinning into “purely verbal style” (VI, 202-03). Though relatively rare and limited, directly iconic words illustrate purely verbal style: onomatopoeia or autologism (“polysyllable,” “word”), that is, words which exhibit the sound or property they name. More usually in poems, verbal patterns function “counterlogically”: they cannot generate a substantive meaning nor make a false one true, but they help concentrate on substantive meaning “whatever propriety there may be” in it (VI, 208). The referential force of words remains fundamental and irreducible. “Counterlogical” verbal patterns do not present substantive meaning by direct iconic echo, but rather by diagrammatic representation of substantive meaning’s own relational properties. Such diagrammatic iconicity is made possible by the systemic nature of language. Because language tends to distinguish different meanings by different sounds, the repetition of sounds invites an attention to possible similarities of meaning, as in the pun or various other “lurking and oblique elements of homophonic harmony” (VI, 216). If “language is a system of conventional norms” (VI, 215), it may nonetheless follow “certain laws of analogy and propriety in the relation of sound to meaning.” The arbitrary relation of signifier to signified is constrained by an analogical determination of the signifier mediated by the totality of the linguistic system.¹⁶

In a “poetic situation” (VI, 215), the systemic properties of a linguistic sign correspond to properties — real or plausibly supposable — in objects (“there has to be some fact behind a pun” [VI, 214]). In the open totality of language, the propriety of verbal pattern to substantive meaning is logical iconicity. Attention is concentrated onto substantive meaning. But since the poem is a conventionally closed totality, it can concentrate and multiply systemic relations between words, as in such devices as meter. The poem’s system must not violate the prior language system — a poet cannot shift a word’s accent for his own metric convenience. Rather, precisely because it concentrates in a finite compass the “poetic situations” or systemic properties of a language, a poem augments our double awareness of language’s native systematicity and of its potential for analogical relation to substantive meaning. Hence, poetic symbols “invite evaluation” (VI, 217) precisely of this analogical, iconic presentation of meaning. And at the same time, they encourage our awareness of verbal structure as verbal and therefore autonomous:

Poetry by thickening the medium increases the disparity between itself and its referents. . . . The symbol has more substance than a noniconic symbol and hence is more clearly realized as a thing separate from its referents and as one of the productions of our own spirit.¹⁷ (VI, 217)

In its structural autonomy, the poem is different from its referents; in its iconicity, it is like them. By mediating this simultaneous difference and likeness, the poetic symbol achieves “the total metaphoric relation between a good poem and the reality or the many circles of reality to which it refers” (VI, 217). As an iconic sign, the poetic symbol refers to something else; as an iconic sign, it must actually possess in its own right the property in virtue of which it refers; and these properties in the case of the poetic sign are mainly relational within the poem.

In ordinary language, the relation of word to referent is mediated by a concept. Poetic structure presents this concept indirectly in virtue of its own structural properties. Metaphor is a concrete abstraction which discloses a more general third class by asserting a relation of resemblance between members of two other classes. “This (third) class,” Wimsatt says, “is unnamed and most likely remains unnamed and is apprehended only through the metaphor. It is a new conception for which there is no other expression” (VI, 79). By approximate descriptions of the poem’s internal structure or “coherence,” the critic helps the reader approach that “something (an individual intuition — or a concept) which can never be expressed in other terms” (VI, 83). This internal structure is an interrelation of likeness and difference between two terms. Wimsatt departs from classical rhetoric, insofar as the latter takes metaphor to be a trope on a single word, the substitution of a less frequent for a more familiar name. Quoting Coleridge, Wimsatt asserts that metaphor is “the mesothesis of identity and difference.”¹⁸ The word in a poem retains its “proper” meanings, precisely so that in confrontation with other words it can release “indefinite radiations of meaning” (VI, 127). The multiplicity of a poem’s particulars does not collapse into sameness or equivalence, as in Jakobson. Poetic structure holds particulars distinct, but only so that by their interrelations within the poem those particulars can present indirectly a quasi-concept released by the intimation of likeness (this intimation is meter’s main role). In return, the quasi-concept mediates the coalescence of particulars into a unified whole. This identifying unity must therefore be based on two kinds of difference: the distinctness of particulars and the distinct autonomy of the poetic structure in relation to meaning.

In Jakobson, the self-reflexivity of language is reduced to equivalence, an absolute self-sameness which eliminates the difference necessary for meaning and models the sign on a pure perceptual object in itself. This is the final outcome of the technologization of the linguistic sign. Wimsatt founds poetic structure on a different model, which becomes explicit in the essay “The Concrete Universal.” Speaking of the “rounded” and substantially existing character Falstaff, Wimsatt suggests that

his attributes make a circuit and connection. A kind of awareness of self (a high and human characteristic), with a pleasure in the fact, is perhaps the central principle which instead of simplifying the attributes gives each one a special function in the whole, a double or reflex value. (VI, 79)

Wimsatt here recovers the rational tradition which begins with Descartes and which in Kant reaches a formulation that founds technological thinking and is then largely forgotten (or is reduced to pure method instead of a metaphysics of the object based on an analysis of the constitutive structure of experience). Probably most pertinent to Wimsatt is the formulation of this tradition in the ten theses from Chapter XII of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.¹⁹

Coleridge seeks some principle in which “object and subject, being and knowing” are identical. He finds it in self-consciousness: “Only in the self-consciousness of a spirit is there the required identity of object and of representation; for herein consists the essence of spirit, that it is self-representative” (BL, 153). This is not a passive registration of sameness, for the spirit must dissolve its self-sameness in order to become conscious of itself as object. This it does by an “act”: “it follows therefore that intelligence or self-consciousness is impossible, except by and in a will” (BL, 153). Striving toward self-representation, spirit generates the subject-object contradiction: “In the existence, in the reconciling and the recurrence of this contradiction consists the process and mystery of production and life” (BL, 153). The generation and reconciliation of the subject-object contradiction rests on “will or primary act of self-duplication.” Intelligence is therefore engaged in “a process of self-construction,” tending “to objectize itself” and then “to know itself in the object” (BL, 156).

The will to self-representation founds knowledge in the reconciliation of opposites. In the poem, imagination is first put in action by will and understanding and “reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities” (BL, 174). The synthesizing power of imagination binds part to whole in the poem. The holistic integrity of the poem is modeled on the holistic integrity of self-consciousness in perception. For perception is not the passive registration of sense impressions, as, Coleridge says, it is for the empirical tradition. Rather, “sensation itself is but vision nascent, not the cause of intelligence but intelligence itself revealed as an earlier power in the process of self-construction” (BL, 155). Perception effects its object by force of representation within the transitional or progressively unfolding subject, unified by the self-attribution of its own experience.²⁰

In Wimsatt, the poetic sign is an act of consciousness. The poem as a whole is the symbolic intuition of a concept that does not permit schematic intuition. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant gives the example of a monarchical state, which is incapable of direct sensible intuition, but may be represented as a living body when governed by a constitution or as a mere machine if ruled tyranically. The agreement thus instituted between a concept and an intuition, Kant says, is merely the rule of the procedure which supplies the symbol, and hence lies solely in the form of reflection upon both the concept and the symbol.²¹ As with Falstaff, the poetic sign in metaphoric structure achieves a “double or reflex value”: the internal coherence of self-consciousness and a grasp through symbolic intuition of poetry’s “subject matter,” “the moral realm,” in a broad sense (VI, 82). “Complexity of form is sophistication of content,” Wimsatt argues, returning us to Kant’s assertion that “the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good.” It is through complex form that the moral realm, transcending sense, is represented as harmonious with the understanding, which is not free. “Imagination, even in its freedom,” Kant says, is represented “as amenable to a final determination for understanding.” By returning to this Kantian model, Wimsatt surpasses Jakobson; for he grasps (even better than Ingarden) the structural integrity and yet ontological heterogeneity of the poetic sign, a double value modeled on and effected in self-consciousness.

III

To expound Heidegger on signs is complicated by the fact that his thinking passes through several stages, which are, I judge, consistent but distinct. I will begin with Articles 17 and 18 from Being and Time.²² Heidegger rejects any formalized classification of signs or of kinds or species of referring. He tries instead to interpret the sign ontologically, in order to approach an analysis of “reference” or “assignment.” Signs are a special kind of equipment for showing or indicating. They are “ready-to-hand within-the-world in [a] whole equipment-context” (BT, 109). An automobile’s turn-signal, for instance, acquires its significance within the whole context of automobile, driving, traffic regulations, and the like; and that significance is manifested not as an abstract formal relationship between thing (turn-signal) and some other thing (direction of movement), but rather by the on-going activity in which the driver of an automobile and drivers of other automobiles make use of the sign. Heidegger thereby connects the sign with two key constituent elements: a totality within which the sign acquires its significance; and an ongoing activity within which the sign is established and used. The sign achieves “an orientation within our environment” (BT, 110). Hence, “A sign is not a Thing which stands to another Thing in the relationship of indicating” (BT, 110). Rather, it is an item of equipment through which we can perceive that any item ready-to-hand, any item we use in our ordinary activities, is involved in a totality or ordered world.

In the process of “establishing a sign” we can see a little more clearly the nature of the relationship between sign and what it signifies. A sign is some ready-to-hand equipment which “takes over the ‘work’ of letting something ready-to-hand become conspicuous” (BT, 111). Heidegger had previously mentioned some ways in which a piece of equipment becomes conspicuous: when we cannot find the equipment we need, for instance, or when a piece of equipment is broken. A sign is a piece of equipment which in its own conspicuousness makes available by revealing it another piece of equipment or even the environment in general. “Revealing” is here an active process, making the signified available to us in our ongoing (and ultimately directed, including goal-oriented) involvement with an environing world. Hence, the totality within which the sign signifies is not just a heap: the indicating the sign does has a particular orientation founded on an “in-order-to.” The sign is especially helpful for Heidegger as a piece of equipment whose very being allows us to see that “reference or assignment” is constitutive for anything ready-to-hand. The power of the sign to indicate is not something added to its “mere” existence, but is rather its ontological foundation as what it is.

Reference essentially involves a “with . . . in” structure. Any entity has “with” it an involvement, namely, a “towards-which” of serviceability and a “for-which” of usability. Such ontologically constitutive purposiveness is framed by a totality of involvements. This totality rests ultimately on something different from a particular entity or thing and from a totality of involvements. This further foundation is a “for-the-sake-of,” a determinate “potentiality-for-Being” through which human existence (Dasein) establishes a world as an orientation of itself toward its own Being. The ordered totality of these relations — beginning with human existence’s establishment of a world and proceeding to the freeing of particular entities encountered within the world — is “signifying,” and this in turn makes up the structure of the world (BT, 120). Human existence grasps this structure in an act of understanding. “The Being of words and of language” rests upon the disclosure of “significations” in acts of understanding and interpreting (BT, 121). “The significance thus disclosed is an existential state of Dasein,” Heidegger adds (BT, 121). “Signifying” is therefore not just a formal relation of sign to signified nor does it exist simply as “something thought.” It is the ontological foundation for the existence of every actual entity. Heidegger thus argues that signification involves the totality of world; that such totality rests ultimately on human existence and the comportment it takes up toward its own Being; and that — by implication — words and language do not transcribe arbitrarily posited relations nor even pure “concepts” of thought,²³ but rather serve to disclose signification as ontologically fundamental for every entity.

Heidegger’s analysis in these early sections of Being and Time may seem oriented chiefly toward “significations” which are practical in nature or at most limited to purposes of understanding. A more complete exegesis would need to pursue the fuller characterization of “discourse” as that which articulates (segments, structures, and makes manifest) the “disclosedness” of human existence’s essential “Being-there,” which is constituted by the unity of understanding, mood, and falling, these three moments exhibiting respectively the temporal characteristics of futurality, the “having been,” and the present. Such an exegesis would acquit Heidegger of any charge that his view is narrowly practical or intellectualisé²⁴ For our purposes here, I think it will be more helpful to turn to a somewhat later stage in Heidegger’s thought and to the specifically aesthetic concerns of “The Origin of the Work of Art” (published 1950; based on lectures given in 1936-37).²⁵

Heidegger begins with the two-sided character of the art-work: in it, “something other is brought together with the thing that is made” (OW, 652). This bringing together is, in Greek, σνμβ'αλλϵιν: “The work is a symbol.” The art-work has a thingly character of its own, but this character is not a substructure to which some “higher” element is added. The nature of the art-work as a thing lies in its character as work: “the path toward the determination of the thingly reality of the work does not lead from thing to work but from work to thing” (OW, 667). Heidegger then explores the nature of “work.” Through work, a world is set up. This “world” is the open but ordered whole within which human beings live: “Wherever the essential decisions of our history are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, mistaken and re-examined, there the world worlds” (OW, 671). “World” is then essentially a verb, an active process of human existence and comportment, founded on human comportment toward the fundamental matter of its own existence. “Work” establishes the “place” of worlding: it liberates and establishes world. At the same time that work sets up world, it “sets forth” world. In ordinary equipment, its material is used up in serviceability: the equipment “wears out.” In the art-work, “world” is set back into a material medium which is persistingly manifested in its own nature and persistingly manifests world. This material medium is “earth.” The “work” is then a setting up (of world) and a setting forth (of earth). The relation between world and earth is a “struggle” (OW, 675); that is, the “art-work” never devolves into an inert thing, but maintains “the continually self-overreaching composing of the movement of the work,” what Heidegger calls “the intimacy of strife” (OW, 675).

In this striving intimacy, Heidegger finds, “the truth is set into work” (OW, 675). The art-work as truth discloses what is, and “what is is never, as may all too easily appear, our handiwork or even merely our representation” (OW, 678). Truth can be set into work in the art-work only because the unified strife of world with earth establishes a symbol. Any entity we encounter seems “familiar, reliable, ordinary” (OW, 679). But the entity is disclosed only through a twofold concealment: the entity refuses itself and dissembles or hides something else. Heidegger does not offer a detailed example. I take him as meaning something like this: normally, a word is “used up” in the process of naming. We pay no attention to it. In a poem — in a metaphor, for instance — the word “refuses itself” in its normal function. In that refusal, what it is stands forth. At the same time, the metaphoric word dissembles, standing in front of something else which it manifests. For instance, Heidegger frequently remarks that language is “the house of Being.” Is “house” a metaphor? Not in the classical sense of “metaphor”: “To talk of the house of Being is not to transfer the image of ‘house’ to Being, but from the materially understood essence of Being we shall some day be more easily able to think what ‘house’ and ‘dwelling’ are.”²⁶ The word “house” here refuses itself in its “ordinary” sense; at the same time, it dissembles or stands in front of the sense it manifests in this phrase. Its showing forth of a signification is ineluctably tied up with this double concealment. But we are not to think that “house” has a “proper” meaning which the phrase deviates from. The “proper” or “ordinary” meaning is itself taken within a world, and only once we begin to grasp “the materially understood essence of Being” will we be able to think “house” as a word used with the utmost exactness and precision in this phrase, and not as a rhetorically motivated deviation from conceptual meaning nor as the symbolic intuition of a thing not capable of schematic intuition — that is, neither as a way of supplying a gap in the set of names nor as a way of supplying a gap in sensory presentations. Rather, “Language is the clearing-and-concealing advent of Being itself” (LH, 279). The metaphoric literary sign records “a mode of thinking more rigorous than the conceptual” (LH, 297), because it always shows forth its revealing within the existential frame of human existence and its Being-in-the-world.

The active advent of Being in the art-work Heidegger sees as the “happening of truth,” where “truth” is understood as disclosing or un-concealing. The “happening of truth” comprises both “creating” and “preserving.” Heidegger understands creating as the establishing of conflict (between disclosure and double concealment) in the figure (the Gestalt, the structure or placing as framing and ordering) by means of the “rift” (Riss). “Rift” is that “intimacy of strife” which “draws the opponents (here, world and earth) together into the source of their unity” (OW, 686). Truth as conflict brings into itself an entity constituted by the setting forth of the conflict and the setting of the conflict back into earth. Thus, “Truth is present (in the work) only as the conflict between lighting and concealing in the opposition of world and earth” (OW, 685). Artistic creation is “an employment of the earth in the establishment of truth in the figure” (OW, 687). The other side of the “Happening of truth” in the art-work is “preserving.” Like creating, it is a knowing, again not as representation (either by copy or by concept). It is rather a maintaining of the conflict between unconcealment and double concealment which is already established by creation in the work’s earth. Just as the answer to a question “remains in effect as answer only as long as it is rooted in questioning” (OW, 692), so the art-work retains its character as art-work only so long as the establishing effected in creation is preserved in its essence as the working of truth. The art-work as doubly creation and preservation “is then the becoming and happening of truth” (OW, 693).

Such an art, Heidegger says, is “essentially poetry” (OW, 693). Not that the other arts are to be reduced to “poesy” (German Poesie, opposed to Dichtung). Rather, “poesy makes its advent in language because language preserves the original essence of poetry” (OW, 695). That original essence is to bring “what is as something that is into the Open for the first time” (OW, 694). “This naming,” Heidegger adds, “nominates what is, to its being from out of its being” (OW, 694). (That is, it should not be mistaken as a merely subjective process on the part of the naming human.) Naming here becomes “saying,” which is not just the speaking of words, but a “projecting” which transforms the ordinary by first disclosing what is and by serving as the occasion for us to “enter into what is disclosed by the work,” into its “world,” and thus to “bring our essence itself to a stand in the truth of what is” (OW, 695). The stand we achieve by preservingly entering the work’s world has the force of disclosing or unconcealing truth (about what is and about our own existence), and is not any merely self-amused toying with a “different way of looking at things.” As “projective speech,” “poetry is the saga of the unconcealment of what is” (OW, 695).

In the essay “The Way to Language,”²⁷ Heidegger applies the same terms to language, in particular connecting “sign” to Riss (“rift” or “rift-design”). The “unity of the being of language,” Heidegger says, is “design” (Aufriss). “The ‘sign’ [Riss] in design (Latin signum) is related to secare, to cut — as in saw, sector, segment. To design is to cut a trace” (WL, 121). The sign articulates within the wholeness of world. Heidegger continues,

The design is the whole of the traits of that drawing [Zeichnung] which structures and prevails throughout the open, unlocked freedom of language, the structure of a show [Zeigen] in which are joined the speakers and their speaking: what is spoken and what of it is unspoken in all that is given in the speaking. (WL, 121)

The sign as a showing is not here seen as an instrument in a “communication situation” between causally prior speakers. Signs “arise from a showing,” for “the essential being of language is Saying as Showing” (WL, 123). Showing saying is not a “linguistic expression added to the phenomena after they have appeared” (WL, 126). Only insofar as he himself abides in saying can the human speaker show forth through signs what is. The “moving force” which brings forward what is and grants the showing power of saying is “Appropriation” (WL, 127): “Appropriation is the way-making for Saying to come into language” (WL, 130). In modern technology, Appropriation shows itself in the mode of “Framing,” which provokes man “to order and set up all that is present being [sic] as technical inventory” (WL, 131). “Within Framing,” Heidegger continues, “speaking turns into information” (WL, 132). But the “most proper mode of Appropriating” is saying as showing (WL, 131). Since the way-making of appropriating is temporal even more than spatial, “All language is historical” (WL, 133). In the remainder of this essay, I will follow a somewhat indirect but, I think, necessary path toward a fuller characterization of the absolutely fundamental event of Appropriation and the consequent historicity of language.

Despite important shifts in emphasis and vocabulary, Heidegger’s assertions here are consistent with Being and Time. He always insisted that entities were never simply inertly “there,” but were primordially encountered as distinct and synthesized, that is, articulated in a structured world or whole, a “reference totality.” The articulation of totality by discourse is more fundamental or prior to any “putting into words,” even though it becomes most acutely visible in this further process. Ultimately, such totalities must be referred back to human existence. “Hence,” Heidegger insists, “only Dasein can be meaningful or meaningless” (BT, 193). Linguistic communication “speaks forth” an entity; what it shares with an other is not just the entity, but “our Being towards what has been pointed out” (BT, 197). This sharing may widen the availability of the entity pointed out or may tend to veil it, as in hearsay or rumor. Language “has its roots in the existential constitution of Dasein’s disclosedness. The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk ” (BT, 203). “Discourse” is here just as fundamental as “state-of-mind” or “understanding.” It is, Heidegger says, the “Articulation of intelligibility” (BT, 203). The ontological foundation of language denies that mere entities exist and that mere words exist and that the two get somehow “related” arbitrarily (or even mediated by some purely mental “concept”). The power of the word to disclose a thing rests on the articulation of human existence’s Being-in-the-world. “In ‘poetical’ discourse,” Heidegger adds, “the communication of the existential possibilities of one’s state-of-mind can become an aim in itself, and this amounts to a disclosing of existence” (BT, 205). “The Origin of the Work of Art,” insofar as it focuses on poetry in the narrower sense, essentially works out these ideas.

“Poetic language” cannot be described merely as some linguistic deviation from ordinary language — that is, it cannot be described adequately in Jakobson’s purely technological terms. Nor can it be described adequately in the more comprehensive terms of Wimsatt, though the conception of verbal art as presenting analogically certain truths or realities of the human, moral world — truths either too complicated or too experiential to be grasped conceptually — comes much closer. Poetic language can be adequately characterized only on the basis of a fully worked-out analysis of human existence and “the ontologico-existential whole” of the structure of its discourse. In Peirce’s terms, poetic language is not to be conceived on the model of the symbol, as an arbitrary rule for the understanding associating the sign with what it signifies; nor is it to be conceived as icon, where the sign in virtue of properties it possesses in itself or by its organization into an autonomous system presents (by analogy) experiential realities of what it signifies. If we adopt the remaining alternative, that poetic language reveals more clearly than any other the existential foundation of any “putting into words” of articulated discourse, we must understand the “existential” connection of sign to signified in other than simply causal terms. Peirce says that a “rhematic indexical legisign” (for instance, a demonstrative pronoun), “is any general type or law, however established, which requires each instance of it to be really affected by its Object in such a manner as merely to draw attention to that Object” (LS, 116). The phrase “really affected by its Object” may have a narrowly causal interpretation. But if we take the “existentiality” of relations between sign and signified in the index to cover a broader conception, then we approach Heidegger’s argument that the power of a sign to disclose an object (“draw attention” to it, but in a much stronger sense) rests on the articulation of human existence’s understanding of its world. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger helps us see poetic language as the place where “the happening of truth,” that is, the disclosure of what is within the establishment and preservation of human being’s world, can be most clearly grasped.

Heidegger’s notion of a “discourse” which, in its intimate connection with human existence, lies beneath ordinary language, finds a striking anticipation in Vico’s philology. Vico rejects the rationalist characterization of the word as an arbitrary concrete mark calling to mind by association an intelligible universal which can then be used to grasp a perceptual particular conceptually. Such propositional thinking, Vico asserts, is a late achievement of the philosophers. Instead, language historically went through three stages: first, a mute language of ritual gestures, including signification through real, existing objects; second, visual hieroglyphics, the heroic blazoning of signification in imprese or coats of arms; and finally, vocal language recorded in vulgar letters. The operative principle in the first stage is that in ignorance men attribute to things the feelings of their own minds (NS, pars. 120-23). Vico certainly does not intend any deliberate “animism”: the primitive does not first clearly grasp his internal feeling and then predicate it externally. Rather, he first grasps his own feeling in an alienated form which returns to him within ritual gesture. Hence, ritual gesture allows external reality to appear in a relation to human being. The primitive auspices constitute this gestural language which brings the hidden to appearance. The real is disclosed in its relatedness to man, but not as subjective. Gesture allows a god to signify to man by bringing the object indicated in the gesture to stand as a disclosure (rather than as the “objective” object of rationalism).

In “A Dialogue on Language,” Heidegger’s thought is remarkably similar to Vico’s.²⁸ Heidegger says that “gesture is the gathering of a bearing.” Heidegger notices explicitly that the bearing, which includes an idea of orientation within a structured whole, is both toward us and borne by us toward an encounter with what bears toward us. What is fundamental is not one or the other “side” of such an encounter, but the gathering disclosed in gesture. This gathering gesture opens the clearing within which each thing comes to appearance, and gesture becomes thereby the foundation of language. It is a primordial articulation by discourse, and to the opening or clearing it establishes, an actual name gets attached.

Heidegger develops this line of thought in his later writings, using a vocabulary that is difficult because it avoids most of the terms which have emerged in the historical tradition of philosophy. I will concentrate on the “Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking”, which seems to me to present in a concentrated way many of the later Heidegger’s central positions.²⁹ From the point of view of language, Heidegger distinguishes between “designation” and a different sort of naming, one “in which the nameable, the name and the named occur altogether” (CC, 71). Designation belongs essentially to representational thinking, which takes as assumed a framework or “transcendental horizon” within which emerge “objects” possessing an essence or “typical appearance” in relation to subjectivity (as in the traditional philosophical description of perception). Both Jakobson and Wimsatt stand within this kind of thinking, Jakobson one-sidedly emphasizing the object, Wimsatt grasping more fully the emergence of the object within experience, making self-consciousness the basic model of knowing.

Instead, Heidegger proposes a “recollective thinking” characterized by a “releasement toward things.” The terms and moves of Heidegger’s argument are not easy to follow here. But I take it the line of thought is to understand “releasement” as something precise and directed toward “things,” not just as a loose passivity or will-less indifference, and then to ask what makes such a releasement possible. The answer is “regioning.” It is important to notice that the word is a verb, containing a temporal component, though this verbal base tends to get lost in translation. A region, Heidegger says, “holds what comes forward to meet us.” But we should avoid characterizing the region “through its relation to us” (CC, 65). By exploring the root meanings of the word “region,” Heidegger comes to a sort of definition: “That-which-regions is an abiding expanse which, gathering all, opens itself, so that in it openness is halted and held, letting everything merge in its own resting” (CC, 66). Many of these terms we have already encountered. In one sense, Heidegger is here trying to characterize more cautiously and yet more rigorously the notion of “world” in Being and Time and the further notion of “clearing” or “open” we saw in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” “Regioning” now becomes the key term, for “Releasement comes out of that-which-regions” (CC, 73). Releasement occurs insofar as man “originally belongs” to that-which-regions, that is, “insofar as he is appropriated initially to that-which-regions and, indeed, through this itself.” The relation between regioning and releasement is “neither . . . ontic nor. . . ontological” (CC, 76). And the same is true of the relation of regioning to the thing.

In a short exploration, Heidegger also asks about the relation of man to thing. The goal of this question is evidently to conceive “knowledge” within the kind of thinking whose nature is emerging slowly out of this discussion of releasement and regioning. The relation of man to thing, Heidegger asserts, is historical. It “belongs to the history of man’s nature” (CC, 78). This assertion is immediately qualified: “Only so far as man’s nature does not receive its stamp from man, but from what we call that-which-regions and its regioning, does the history you presage become the history of that-which-regions” (CC, 78). Again, despite the change of terms, this remark bears a clear relation to Heidegger’s program in the 1930’s for exploring the “history of Being.” History emerges from the temporal nature of regioning, and hence, the more limited linguistic theory which takes names as designations (that is, takes them solely within the relation of ego to object), is inevitably founded on and traversed by history. Historical change as well as the temporal “stamp” of language is not an accident that occurs to a system, even when the system is conceived as generative rather than “synchronic.” On the contrary, the historicity of existence is fundamental to language, is, in fact, precisely what makes language possible.

Heidegger does not elaborate this discussion, but continues toward the topic of knowledge: “Here the concept of the historical signifies a mode of knowing and is understood broadly” (CC, 79). He returns to a further discussion of releasement, first bringing forward a revised version of the notion “resolve” from Being and Time. There is “a steadfastness hidden in releasement,” which shows itself in the “composure of releasement.” Heidegger proposes the word “in-dwelling” for this composed steadfastness. Secondly, releasement is rooted in a “prior”: it must be a steadfast abiding in the origin of man’s nature, that is, in regioning, which is the origin both of man’s nature and of the determinateness of the thing. Hence, truth can emerge in man: “man is he who is made use of for the nature of truth” (CC, 84-85). Through this exploration of releasement, Heidegger finally comes to the “nature of thinking,” which is “in-dwelling releasement to that-which-regions.” Thinking is “the essentially human relation to that-which-regions” (CC, 87).

Heidegger now proposes a name for this sort of “thinking and so of knowing” (CC, 87). This is a one-word fragment of Heraclitus, ‘aγχιßaσίη, interpreted as “moving-into-nearness.” This word for knowing, Heidegger pointedly remarks, “could rather... be the name for our walk today along this country path” (CC, 89). The advent of night, rather than any human deed, exemplifies “knowing,” for night “nears” the distances of the stars in the heavens: “night neighbors the stars,” “She binds together without seam or edge or thread.” This “gathering together in the nearness of a distance,” the emerging appearance of the starry night sky, suddenly stands forth as the goal of Heidegger’s mental “walk” along a “country path,” or trace of thinking.

What emerges from this conversation is a characterization of “recollective thinking.” But in the course of the conversation, something more is achieved implicitly. The slow and meditative uncovering of names which guides thinking exemplifies the sort of naming appropriate to recollective thinking. These are the names which, to repeat Heidegger’s words, “are owed to a naming in which the namable, the name and the named occur altogether.” The name “releasement” has not emerged as the result of any willed designation of an object. It has emerged because the thinker has abided in “the region of the word,” where his task is “only to listen to the answer proper to the word.” What Being and Time calls “putting into words” (of discourse) here becomes “a retelling of the answer heard.”³⁰ It is on this theme that the conversation closes, with a question whose answer, broken into phrases, is distributed among all the participants, indicating that it comes from “regioning” rather than from any single will: “Then wonder can open what is locked? By way of waiting . . . if this is released . . . and human nature remains appropriated to that. . . from whence we are called” (CC, 90). When man hears this call, that is, when he steadfastly and composedly abides in the originary appropriation of his nature to that-which-regions, he can then in language expropriate this hearing, that is, he can in manifesting it in words at once bring it forth and conceal it (the joint disclosure and concealment which is truth). The poetic word is, especially clearly, the enduring location of appropriation-expropriation, and in it we can trace the grant of Being with its epochal transformations in history.³¹ When philosophy is properly conducted, or rather, when philosophy yields to recollective thinking, a similar power is disclosed in the word. At the end of “The Way to Language,” Heidegger quotes Humboldt’s assertion that “time — by a growing development of ideas, increased capacity for sustained thinking, and a more penetrating sensibility — will often introduce into language what it did not possess before” (WL, 136). The resulting transformation of significance in existing words and syntax “is a lasting fruit of a people’s literature, and within literature especially of poetry and philosophy.” Hence, “all reflective thinking is poetic, and all poetry in turn is a kind of thinking” (WL, 136).

For Heidegger, the literary sign shows forth human being’s grasp of its own existence in the world. The sign is not to be understood simply as “present-at-hand” (as in Jakobson); nor even as an “object” within transcendental-horizonal, representational thinking, even when this object has the capacity to represent symbolic intuitions by analogy or metaphor. The literary sign is to be grasped neither as self-subsisting thing nor on the model of se If-consciousness. Again, “Poetry is the saga of the unconcealment of what is.” It will not be enough for criticism to unpack the immanent structure of the literary sign, conceived as a special variant of a functional model of communication. Nor will it be enough to explicate the systemic coherence of the poem, even when this is taken tacitly as correspondent to some objective substantive or moral reality. A Heideggerian criticism will try to grasp the literary sign as constituted by showing forth what is. Such a showing is possible only for human existence within a world. That world is legitimately an object for criticism, because criticism’s own signs must show forth the poem’s signs as an interpretation. Interpretation is here structural and historical, because it is a composed and steadfast abiding in the original appropriation of human nature to regioning.

In the literary sign especially we encounter the indexical foundation of language. In the index, the sign has an existential connection with what it signifies. Through Heidegger, we approach a full understanding of what “existential” can and must mean here, and in particular we discover the connection between the “existential” and the “historical.” In this discovery lies the possibility of overcoming the presumed opposition of philological to formalist criticism, an overcoming that is neither eclectic nor a blurred “synthesis.”

University of Iowa

NOTES

1I use and cite the revised trans, of the 3rd ed. by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1968). For the three stages of language, see pp. 127-53 (paragraphs 400-55). Additional references cited in text as: NS.

2Ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966). Additional references cited as: GL.

3See Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 19-26.

4In Philosophical Writings, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 98-119. Additional references cited as: LS.

5“Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics”, in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1966), pp. 350-77. The diagram occurs on p. 353. Additional references cited as: CS.

6Strictly, the pronoun is an indexical symbol. See Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” in Selected Writings. II. Words and Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 131-32. For the interpretation of all pronouns in terms of the subject and non-subject of the utterance, see Emile Benveniste, “Relationships of Person in the Verb,” Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Florida: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 195-204.

7See Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, Nebraska: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965). Additional references cited as: AT. For Richards, see Principles of Literary Criticism (1925; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, n.d.), pp. 202 ff.

8Actually, Saussure used the terms “syntagmatic” and “associative” (GL, 122-27). His followers later proposed the parallel term “paradigmatic,” thus exemplifying Saussure’s notion of “motivation.”

9In Jakobson’s analyses of poems, the exhibition of patterns of features frequently gets quite out of hand, because it is not controlled by any notion of meaning. See the objections to Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss’ reading of Baudelaire’s Les Chats in Michael Riffaterre, “Describing Poetic Structure: Two Approaches to Baudelaire’s Les Chats,” Yale French Studies, No. 36-7 (1966), esp. pp. 200-13.

10See Georg Lukacs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1972), p. 137.

11See Riffaterre, p. 201 of the article cited in n. 9. See also Michael Shapiro, “Two Paralogisms of Poetics,” forthcoming, Poétique.

12See his essay “Thematics,” trans, in Russian Formalist Criticism (cited, n. 7 above), pp. 61-95.

13Trans. George G. Grabowicz (Evanston, III.: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973).

14See especially “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947; rpt. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, n.d.). Additional references cited as: HP.

15(1954; rpt. New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1964). Additional references cited as: VI.

16Benveniste makes a similar point in an attempt to qualify Saussure’s principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic signifier. See “The Nature of the Linguistic Sign,” pp. 43-48 of Problems in General Linguistics, n. 6 above.

17The combination of substantive, referential meaning with an awareness of language’s systemic autonomy as a “spiritual” product has here a decidedly Kantian flavor. Kant transformed the perceptual object of classical empiricism into an object of experience constituted within categories granted by transcendental consciousness. In Kant, this process is not discursive, but Wimsatt’s terms apply essentially the same structure to language. On Kant, see Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, trans. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch (Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1967). There is a clear spectrum from the Russian formalist view that the poem transforms language from an instrument of knowing to an object of perception (see the references to Shklovsky in n. 7 above); to Brooks’s more complicated view that the poem does not “communicate” a theme but “communicates an experience” (see p. 75 of The Well Wrought Urn , n. 14 above; and see Kant’s argument that the beautiful pleases universally apart from a concept, that is, remains a singular representation, like an experience, but is communicable, like conceptual universals: Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, Sec. I, Book I, Second Moment); and finally, to Wimsatt’s full characterization of the constitutive structure of language.

18In Greek, “mesothesis” names the number which is a proportional mean between two other numbers; for example, 2:4::4:8, “4” being the mesothesis. Coleridge (and Wimsatt) here brush against a topic — the relation of analogy to metaphor — which is of great importance, but would carry us too far afield. I would argue that a fully Heideggerian theory would see metaphor as deriving from collapsed analogy, rather than from comparison with the sign of comparison (“like” or “as”) omitted. For an extensive bibliography on analogy, see James F. Anderson, Reflections on the Analogy of Being (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967). See also Ralph Mclnerny, Studies in Analogy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), and — richly suggestive in relation to Heidegger — the historical survey in Hampus Lyttkens, The Analogy Between God and the World (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells Boktryckeri AB, 1952).

19Ed. George Watson (London: Dent Everyman’s Library, 1956), pp. 149 ff. Additional references cited as: BL.

20The terms in which I analyze Coleridge depend heavily on Heidegger, The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), esp. pp. 32-54.

21Critique of Judgement, trans. Meredith, Article 59, “Beauty as the symbol of morality.”

22Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Additional references cited as: BT.

23“Concept” here means the appearance of the object in a transcendentally determined “experience.”

24For such an interpretation — a subtle misemphasis, in my view — see Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, n. 13 above, p. 281, n. 7.

25Trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (New York: The Modern Library, 1964). Additional references cited as: OW.

26“Letter on Humanism,” trans. Edgar Lohner in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, ed. William Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, III (New York: Random House, 1962), 298. Additional references cited as: LH.

27Trans. Peter D. Hertz in On the Way to Language (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Additional references cited as: WL.

28Included in WL, n. 27; see esp. p. 18.

29Trans, of Gelassenheit by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). Additional references cited as: CC.

30. Heidegger makes the same point in “The Way to Language,” in WL, n. 27 above, p. 123: “But speaking is at the same time also listening. . . . Speaking is of itself a listening. Speaking is listening to the language which we speak.”

31 See The End of Philosophy, n. 20 above, pp. xiii-xiv.