INTRODUCTION: THE SEMIOTIC REVOLUTION

1. Gerald Graff (1979) has argued in no uncertain terms for a reversion to “mimetic” literature (and criticism) and has expressed suspicion not only of critics engaged in “deconstructing” literary fiction, but of primary literary works, like Robbe-Grillet’s nouveaux romans, which are anti-mimetic. A more sophisticated meditation on mimesis occurs in the recent writings of René Girard and his defense of the Judaeo-Christian tradition against modernism.

2. In the academy, semiotics has the most direct relevance for the institutional “reforms” which began in the 1960s: those tentative experiments (begun at great social cost) in recognizing, intellectualizing and accommodating non-Anglo-Saxon, even non-Western cultures into our curriculum, to say nothing of our awareness. Many new fields are appearing on this horizon: American studies, ethnic studies, women’s studies, community studies, international studies, communication. These reforms have, for the most part, failed because pre-semiotic paradigms for the interpretation of culture made absolute distinctions between modes of analysis of art, music, drama, politics, etc., on the one hand, and ethnicity on the other. We are trying to fit new peoples and ideas into old institutional frameworks and they do not fit. A few scholars in the new disciplines have managed to break free of stereotypes and produce some excellent writings, but there has been very little institutionalization of excellence in the post-disciplinary avant-garde. This has been due, for the most part, to a healthy hesitation and uncertainty about the best direction to take. The growth of ethnic studies programs and applied and interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities has not produced intellectual prestige necessary for leadership. We do not think that the lack of prestige of the new programs reflects any real differences in the quality of the research between the new programs and the old, which is the conventional view held on campus. Rather, it reflects difficulty in articulating, staging, and framing the post-disciplinary setting.

There comes a point, and we think we have reached that point, where indecision is more destructive than any decision at all, even one that is based on half-knowledge. We are suggesting that semiotics offers the strongest, indeed the proper, vocabulary and methodology for institutionalizing post-disciplinary understanding. It is a coherent framework that has the power to transcend old disciplinary boundaries. Viewed from this standpoint, it has no competitors.

3. Modern physicists freely admit the constructions they put on physical matter may be less appropriate as far as real matter is concerned than they are as projections of mind: see for example Gary Zukav’s (1979) popularization of current speculations in quantum physics in The Dancing Wu Li Masters. Yet here, no less than in Descartes himself, we find projections taking the form of metaphor.

4. A recent book that makes this tendency in semiotics explicit is Marc Eli Blanchard’s Description: Sign, Self, Desire (1980). Here he calls for a return to the subject (conscious or unconscious) that produces signs—a return from sociolinguistics and narratology. “[S]igns are used to communicate not only a finished product, the message, but also the processes which make the ongoing production of that message possible . . .” (1980:2). This statement falls short of Jakobson’s work on the sender and receiver and offers little specific advice on how to gain access to the subject. Blanchard’s work is basically itself a return to a venerable critical method, stylistics, which traditionally deals with the psychological, subjective processes underlying literary structure. It is a relative more of hermeneutics than of semiotics.

5. Thomas A. and Jean Sebeok (1980) have offered us what must surely be the definitive critique of the logocentric attempt to make animals talk to us in their recent book, Speaking of Apes.

6. A superior study of the rebirth of Satanism in religion is William Bainbridge’s (1978) Satan’s Power.

7. Jonathan Culler’s (1975) lucid guide, Saussure, offers an excellent summary of the excited speculation about language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in continental Europe, especially as it paved the way for Saussure’s groundbreaking work.

8. Certainly the major philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein privilege language, as does the extreme linguistic bias of A. J. Ayer, for example. Even local, regional disciplines, such as psychoanalysis (Lacan), anthropology (Cassirer, Langer), and history (Foucault), exhibit an extraordinary degree of linguistic self-awareness. Now it is precisely this (painful) self-consciousness that prompts at this time a critical turn toward finding alternatives to linguistic primacy. Speech act and performative (Searle, Austin) theses in philosophy reattach language to its (latent) communicative function; one realizes the seductive, desiring aspect of language-as-discourse, i,e., as addressed by a subject to other subjects, personal or transpersonal, in the work of Foucault, Kristeva, Barthes, sociolinguistics, etc. In this respect we must note that it is semiotics that most often serves as a point of departure for breaking out of the prisonhouse of language as far as recent theorists are concerned: one could cite, for example, Milton Singer’s address to the 1980 American Anthropological Association, “Signs of the Self: An Exploration in Semiotic Anthropology;” Clifford Geertz’s Interpretation of Culture (1973); Paul de Man’s (1973) “Semiology and Rhetoric;” Geoffrey Broadbent’s (1977) semiotic for architecture and design; the essays in the 1976 Modern Language Notes symposium on semiotics; the new journal Poetics Today; the growing acceptance of Lacan’s semiotic psychoanalysis; the movement toward semiotics in ethology, expressed openly by Sebeok (1978) and Medawar and Medawar (1977); the Drama Review’s issue devoted to “Structuralist Theatre” (vol. 23, no. 3, September 1979). See also recent writings by Clifford Geertz, Erving Goffman, David Schneider, Victor Turner, Jacques Derrida, Christian Metz, etc.

In short, what seems to be happening is that systems of signification that rival language or compete with it for attention as meaning-bearing are, as Saussure predicted, being discovered and analyzed with semiotic methods. Sex, politics, manners, kin relations, clothing styles, etc., as systems of signs are beginning to serve us as much-needed “mirrors” for, or reflections upon, the nature of language itself.

9. Lionel Gossman (1976) gives a calm, detached assessment: “The startling scope of semiotics may in itself give pause and cause us to reflect on the assumptions of such a wide-ranging enterprise, on the significance of its ambition to be a science, and even on the reasons for its growing institutional acceptance. There is a hint of self-questioning that is already under way among semioticians in the preoccupation shown by some of the speakers at the symposium . . . with the theoretical foundations of semiotics.”

1. A GENERAL SEMIOTIC OF CULTURAL CHANGE

1. Any cultural production can serve the function of exemplarity, as a ‘condensation point’ (to use Freud’s term for metaphor) which then reopens culture to speculation. Modern instances are Freud’s dreamworks (1965:311ff; the emphasis is on the dream as artful production), Dean MacCannell’s monuments (1976a), Goffman’s selves (1959:252-55), which are staged. A follower of Emile Durkheim, the American structuralist Frank W. Young, writes of social movements as symbolic structures in “Reactive Subsystems” (1970).

2. Dean MacCannell’s “Making Space” (1978) makes extended use of these concepts.

3. See Lotman’s essay in Lucid (1977:99-100), where he distinguishes between l/he communication and l/l (external vs. internal speech). In this model, external speech is syntagmatic, the code is constant, and the message is a variable text, usually decreasing in information in transmission. Internal speech, on the other hand, is seen as iconic and associative, accompanied by a transformation of the text from one code into another. In this case it is the code that is variable, and the system is oriented toward receiving codes not messages.

4. Mary Douglas’s (1970:11) viewpoint is neo-Durkheimian. Her position is that “the social relations of men provide the prototype for the logical relations between things,” i.e., symbolic systems or patterns. This seems to us onesided, for it is indeed possible that symbolic systems can operate to shape the social relations of men and women.

5. An important essay for the current debate on the ‘subject’ is Walter Benn Michaels’s cogent essay (1977): he finds that Peirce specifically developed his semiotics in the light of the Cartesian subject, in a kind of replaying of the seventeenth-century empiricist/rationalist debate.

6. Jacques Derrida’s book (1967a) on Rousseau’s Essai sur l’origine des langues put the radical question to Rousseau and Saussurian semiotics—whether one could find an exit from the semiotic world. He ascribed to both these Swiss a nostalgia for a pre-semiotic or a-semiotic world. Whether this ascription is a correct reading of their attitudes or not, the question is entirely valid. Derrida’s work is of interest in its attempt to find in differentiation and writing exits from metaphorization (1972:261-69).

7. In the Essai ([1747] 1968:197-99), Rousseau describes how sign can devolve from a richly associative rhetorical matrix into a mere system of directives:

8. E. C. Hughes, chief architect of the Chicago School of Sociology’s later phase (1971:ix) writes, “Men constantly make and break norms, there is never a moment when norms are fixed and unchanging.” Similarly his student Erving Goffman notes (1959:12-13), “the initial definition of the situation projected by an individual tends to provide a plan for the co-operative activity that follows. . . . Any projected definition of the situation also has a distinctive moral character.” The importance of ‘definitional disruptions’ (13) in this view of human interaction is their revelation of interaction as a pure socio-cultural production, subject to change. In Goffman’s work these disruptions, like Freud’s psychopathologies (escaped feelings, pathos taken in the etymological sense), are not willed changes in the situation but are a part of the semiotic mechanism. See also David Schneider (1968:6-8). On this point, then, the Hughes/Goffman studies differ entirely from American ‘ethnomethodology’, wherein only an effort of will (Garfinkel 1972:29-31) can disrupt the defined situation and uncover its unconscious norms.

9. Rousseau (1968:45-47) writes that the first language must have been figurative and that “proper meaning” was found afterwards by an act of “transposition.” See also pp. 64-67 on “De l’écriture,” where writing accomplishes the fixing of values. Writing, the apparent ‘dead letter’, is however, a supplementary origin of semiosis: as Jacques Derrida has shown (1972:375), the essence of writing is to be readable, and Rousseau writes that language passes from written books into discourse; “En disant tout comme on l’écriroit on ne fais plus que lire en parlant” (p. 69). [“By saying everything as one would write it one no longer does anything but read by speaking.”]

10. Jean-Joseph Goux (1968:65) writes:

See also the literary critic Paul de Man (1973). De Man’s insights are consistent with those explored here, though he seems committed to a Benvenistian position, assigning primacy to language over other semiotic systems. This is a move, one suspects, based on the central organizing principles of ‘literary studies’, which assign ontological primacy to certain representative figures in order to distinguish themselves from the semiotic study of culture. Literature, the sign-system par excellence, could be defined as the attempt to create the illusion of mastery over semiotic production. See also Derrida (1972:267).

11. A striking example of the revolution of value scales around an axis that acquires the allure of being compelling and central is the figure of Manon in Prevost’s Manon Lescaut. Des Grieux blends fraternal (lateral) and paternal (hierarchical) versions of Heavenly Love in his descriptions of the amoral girl, and she seems to take on a supreme value (she is “L’Amour Même”) at the moment of and because of the displacement.

12. Kant (1952:50 and 57-64). Kant investigates the relative priority in a judgment of taste of “the feeling of pleasure and the estimating of the object.” In other words, the two value scales are the foundation of a second-order evaluative act, taste or ‘aesthetic judgment’.

2. PHALLACIOUS THEORIES OF THE SUBJECT: ON THE FREUDIAN MARXIST SYNTHESIS

1. Lacan’s secret seminar was attended by the Tel Quel group (Sollers, Kristeva, Barthes) and by Foucault, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and Althusser (see Wilden 1968:xiv and Turkle 1979:21-22). Lacan participated in the original introduction of Freudian theories into France and was a friend of Princess Marie Bonaparte and the surrealist André Breton. He trained analysts for years but had a falling out with Nacht in the early nineteen fifties when the attempt was made to legitimate psychoanalysis in France by making it a medical subspecialty. Lacan resigned from the Paris Analytic Society and helped found the French Analytic Society. Splitting from the original society caused the dissidents’ exclusion from the International Analytic Society. The International Society eventually made Lacan’s removal as a training analyst the sine qua non of reinstatement for the entire French Society. The French agreed to this stipulation, and Lacan, with much anguish, moved from the medical setting of Saint Anne’s Hospital to the Ecole Normale Supérieure. He founded the Ecole Freudienne in 1962. (See Turkle 1979:101-18 for a vivid narrative of these events.) The Discourse of Rome was an address to a group of French psychiatrists that occurred during the first phase of the political difficulties with the Paris and International Societies. It is a text that shows the force of feeling translated into text.

2. Laplanche (1976:136-37) also notes how Freud constantly transmutes his categories in an attempt to keep up with the psyche’s own revisionism: at times the Unconscious is the source of discontinuity, at other times, of continuity; sometimes it is metaphoric, sometimes metonymie: just so any form of reproduction implies the problems of sameness and difference. See also Jeffrey Mehlmann (1970:382) who reviews the duality-become-multiplicity of the ego, at times fort, at other times faible. In his introduction to his translation of the Laplanche book (original French edition 1970), Mehlmann (1976:ix-x) describes Freud as delineating the “processes whereby a bizarre form of culture or intersubjective exchange—‘unconscious sexuality’—is generated in humans entirely through a movement of deviation from (natural) instinctual processes.” It is the way of understanding this deviation that creates theoretical divisions between those psychoanalysts who see the process of repression of nature in ego formation as maturational or developmental and those who see it as recurring at different levels and at different moments of psychic life.

3. For some last-ditch efforts to save those lifeless forms, see Sennett (1976), Shils (1974), and Jameson (1978:338).

4. See Althusser, “Freud et Lacan” (1965:91), and Coward and Ellis (1977), who document a shift toward materialism and the primacy of the material signifier in the work of Roland Barthes.

5. In Language and Materialism (1977) Coward and Ellis present their effort to form, forge—at times, just to force—a synthesis of the three figures. Linking them has much heuristic value and is theoretically correct for our current cultural situation. Coward and Ellis rely heavily on Lacan’s connection of Saussure and Freud.

6. Judith Adler (1976) discusses the counterculture (American hippie and French ’68ers) in these terms. She also gives an interesting interpretation of how Herbert Marcuse, philosopher, became a figure— the prophet (419).

7. This process is clearly set forth in Benveniste (1966:3-13). In his exposition, language remains an empty form until it is linked to the subjective experiencing of it as an ‘event’, in the speech act—like the existential foreknowledge that structures but cannot capture experience. Conversely, subjective relation to the event appears to be autonomous and ‘free’, while it is thoroughly positioned by the (pre)form(ations) of language structure. Thus, for example, in Benveniste’s argument, the ‘l’ is a mere lexical, like any other, yet when it is used in a speech event it “means” one’s own subjective life; and it will “mean” the same to whoever uses it.

8. We must recommend Anthony Wilden’s System and Structure (1972:30-62), especially the chapter on Freud’s semiotic and on entropy (155-78) for the cybernetic versus thermodynamic (or even hydraulic) interpretation of Freud. It is an important book and ought to have had somewhat better luck in Anglo-America, inasmuch as it tries to link our philosophies to Continental ones. Much that Coward and Ellis have to say has in fact been done by Wilden. Many writers cite Wilden’s work, but few engage him or even acknowledge his actual contributions—or when they do it is in the mode of (unjustified) attack. Jameson (1978:352), for example, attributes ‘confusion between penis and phallus’ to Wilden when, indeed, the very pages he cites in Wilden’s work contain the same insight (see Wilden 1978:286).

9. Mehlmann (1976:viii-ix) writes a brief history of the secrecy and influence of Lacan; so does Wilden (1972:1-30). Turkle’s (1979) book sets the stage better than these do, but hers is not a conceptual account.

10. Lacan uses Benveniste’s “it,” as in “It is raining,” as an example of the subject of the unconscious (1970:188). Samuel Weber also resorts to the metaphor of a grammar, seeing the id as a “third person neuter . . . beyond volition and consciousness” (1977:25-26). It is this third person that is in a sense the hero of discourse, the ultimate addressee and the ultimate respondent. (Weber appears to be critical of Lacan on this point; we fail to see the differences.) Voloshinov/M. M. Bakhtin (1976) offers a social, rhetorical rather than grammatical model for the ‘it’.

11. Marjorie Grene (1973:185-202) examines Sartre’s “Marxism” in the Critique. From Lacan to Kristeva it is clear that the concern for matter and praxis in semioanalysis has been filtered through Sartre’s concerns, in particular that of the ironic unleashing of the negative object of human activity by activity: the “fall” of “individual praxis” into the collective “practico-inert.”

12. Few of those who try to relate Freud to materialism via Lacan and semiotics refer to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Coward and Ellis never cite him. Not only does he stress the kind of corporeality and existential viewpoint often found in Lacan, but he also prepared the way for his successor in French philosophy, Jacques Derrida, by means of his work on Husserl and signs.

13. See Eugenio Donato’s reading of the Unconscious as the experience of alienated subjectivity (1978:575-76)—like Benveniste’s reading (1971:65-67), this is close to Hegel.

14. Emma is the obverse of Balzac’s Vautrin, who not only sees a spirit in all social institutions but rises above them to equal or excel them in subjective power. Emma’s “dropping out” before making anything of her various situations reminds us of this aspect of Guattari/Deleuze, but Vautrin’s mobility and mastery remind us of their underlying interest in power. See Deleuze and Foucault (1977).

15. Benveniste’s interpretation (1971:66) is that symbols are substitutes for unnameable desires; they are motivated by desire, but this desire cannot be formulated as such. Donato (1978:575) interprets the Unconscious as the murderer of desire, its ruination. For Kristeva it is the Symbolic Order as the Unconscious in the broadest sense that demands the sacrifice of desire (1975b). These theses presuppose that desire knows itself originally but loses, radically and forever, the capacity for self-knowledge by entry into the “Symbolic Order,” or langue: only discourse (parole) can begin to retrieve desire. Other models for desire are available, for example Girard’s famous triangle, in which desire is originally mimetic, the desire of the other (See Girard 1965 and Lacoue-Labarthe 1978:12). What we have been trying to explore in this chapter is the possibility that it is the unmotivated sign (the arbitrary association between signifiers and signifieds) which is also the structure of desire and affect, at the same time that this desire is repressed.

16. Freud’s analyses are aimed at uncovering blockages or obstacles to the direct expression of desire or wish. These blockages are what he terms “monuments” to the original semiosis—the bestowing of a sexual or erotic meaning upon an object (1936:14-15). One treads upon the earth and links this treading to sexual transgression of the mother (Mother Earth); one sees one’s setting pen to paper as a sexual image (stylus, cutting into, etc.) These associations, free semiosis, the desire itself, are not pathological: it is the fear of the freedom that is. Thus the association made is consciously and conscientiously denied—but the path linking the signifiers to the signifieds has already been traced while consciously erased. The symptom is generated when these denied signs discharge their affect into substitutes: one begins to have a hysterical limp, one suddenly has “writer’s block.” As Freud wrote, one has a symptom in order not to have anxiety—the anxiety of free-wheeling semiosis, free-wheeling sexuality—for Freud anything can be eroticized. Thomas A. Sebeok (1976a) has designated Freud’s anxiety signal as equivalent to Peirce’s index. These monuments to past loves that have been denied appear as the totality of cultural productions, metaphors, social relations, etc.

17. Lyotard (1977:13-15) describes the free flows of desire and Kapital.

18. Rousseau speaks in the Social Contract of the entrance into culture as evidenced by the creation of “needs” for the mind: “The mind has its needs as does the body . . .”(1964:111).

19. Freud’s great critique of the notion that the aim of all life is survival in Beyond the Pleasure Principle clearly brings what had first seemed to be a purely psychic model to the understanding of biological development. Freud used development against a continuum model of evolution: entities, biological and psychical, develop not via a series of forward progressions whose beneficial by-product is the will to survive handed on to succeeding generations and mature psychic states. Development occurs, rather, as a series of halting movements, painfully contradicting the lower levels of existence toward which all life ironically tends (lower psychic tension; lower material organization).

20. Rousseau claims in the Confessions, III (1964:l:114-15) and the Dialogues, II (1964:l,807-8) that neither interpersonal nor personal events had any meaning for him in the present: he always had to understand social situations after the fact; and no sensation remained in his memory were it not associated with a “distinct feeling of pleasure or pain that accompanied it.” This “sentiment distinct” is an interpretation (conscious or no), which charges the groove made by an empirical experience with affect. Emotions are blockages (figures, interpretations, signs) independent of sense experience.

21. Even the “gap” has been masculinized: see the recent essay by Guy Hocquenghem on male homosexuality, in which the male anus is shown to have attractive power superior to that of the female anus (1977:150-51). Lacan sees the void or lack as the source of subjective desire, as in note 15 above: the other is the final cause of the subject, just as the phallus is only a signifier or the presence of another who is the object/source of desire (this is an ultra social model). The difficulty, as Derrida tries to show, lies not only in subjectifying the structure of desire and overorganizing semiosis into oppositional categories that quickly become structural hierarchies, but also in the fact that the choice of the phallus as the prime example of the signifier is no more neutral in Lacan’s theory than it has been in human society. Derrida has of course vaginalized phallic discourse wherever possible.

22. A striking example is the devotion of a recent issue of Yale French Studies (1978) to this kind of staging of Lacan for Americans. Two earlier issues of the same journal (1967 and 1974) had placed Lacan within the matrix of Freud’s French Revolution, though they had not brought out clearly any of the major theoretical conflicts that have arisen between Lacan and some of the students who attended his crucial seminars in the 1960s—Derrida and Foucault, for example. It would have been possible in the 1978 issue to bring into focus the theoretical and historical positioning of Lacan; instead, we have an apostolic Lacan, useful for our own moral and political end of saving literature by admitting sexuality into it. Not a sexuality of satisfaction, à la N. O. Brown, W. Reich, or H. Marcuse, but a sexuality that fits into our puritanical ethics. See for example Fredric Jameson’s essay, which develops his earlier understanding of Lacan (1972:172). In The Prison-House of Language (1972) Jameson read Lacan’s theory of béance and the introduction of the phallus as supplementary signifier of a lack. He then claims that Lacan teaches us that we must submit to lack of satisfaction if we are to keep desire alive: “Genuine desire . . . is a consent to incompleteness, to time and to the repetition of desire in time; whereas the disorders of desire result from an attempt to keep alive the delusion of and the fiction of an ultimate satisfaction. Lacan’s stoicism is the antithesis of the sexual optimism of a Wilhelm Reich. . . .” This elegiac moral, so easy for the descendants of Puritans to grasp, results from a grave misreading of both Lacan and Freud: it is not the separation from the mother, her loss, that creates the anxiety of béance: it is satisfaction itself, the very satisfaction that the mother provides that is the source of anxiety. For in satisfaction, desire loses its object, and it is the loss of its object (desire’s whole reason for being is to have an object) that is the source of anxiety and of semiosis (metonymization of the object; metaphorization of the aim; i.e., breast is substituted for milk; pleasure is substituted for the satiation of hunger). On anxiety, see Freud (1936:114ff); on anaclisis, Lacan (1966:691) and Laplanche (1976:13-24). The point here is that we are often too avid to see the moral and political implications of someone’s writing practice. We fail to read the theory correctly. Sherry Turkle’s excellent book (1979) on psychoanalysis in France (though it fails to cover all the theoretical disagreements) has to present itself in the mode of a political analysis, prepared in the current version of the acceptable role for the academic female: interviewer/reporter.

23. This ‘call’ is heard in the recent issue of Modern Language Notes (1978), in Fredric Jameson’s essay (1978), and in Coward and Ellis’s (1977) book. The ‘call’ may be more politically than conceptually motivated: after all, if the leading French Marxist (Althusser 1965:91) and the non-Marxist power analysts like Foucault demand an end to the subject as a humanist ideological construct, then we would “of course” have to oppose them. Kristeva’s handling of the death of the subject is, like Althusser’s, the analytic demystification of individual “identity” and is much less sweeping than Foucault’s historical pronouncements about the end of man. Brenkman (1978:445,n.43) gives a good summary of the current anti-ego, anti-imaginary trend.

4. ETHNOSEMIOTICS: BEYOND STRUCTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

1. Western economic thought and its extension into the Third World operates as a kind of mirror image of anthropology, but it contains a similar lapsus. Alain de Janvry (1975a and 1975b) suggests that the application of the “Western Paradigm” to peripheral regions, which is believed to lead to their economic development, may have an opposite result:

2. For an example of ethnographic writing that is aware of itself as an extension of Western values, see Paul Rabinow’s sensitive autobiographical introduction to his Uncommonplaces (1975b). The same theme is treated analytically in a recent essay by Vincent Crapanzano (1977).

3. There are openings now that may lead to important changes in this situation: for example, the recent opening in the anthropology department at Berkeley of a faculty position in “theory” with no specific culture area designation. Also, in this regard, David Schneider’s (1968) trailblazing study of American culture should be seen as a noteworthy exception.

4. Another exception is Laura Nader’s (1964 and 1974) persistent criticism of anthropology for falling short of its promise to be a “mirror for man.”

5. This same interpretation was proffered by Michel Leiris in an exceptional paper, “L’ethnographe devant le colonialisme,” written in the early fifties but published much later. Leiris (1966:131) wrote:

6. This point has been made many times, often in less polite language, by historians, anthropologists, and other analysts who originally came from the Third World. See, for example, Howard Adams’s (1975) touching and angry account of the life of half-breeds on the Canadian prairie. See also Jack Forbes’s (forthcoming) well-documented critique of the policy changes affecting Indians under the Nixon administration. There is also Malinowski’s (1929) paper on the importance of anthropology for colonial administrators. The best analytical summary of this type of literature is found in Bastide’s (1974) Applied Anthropology.

7. For a more complete treatment of current macrostructural change affecting modern society, see D. MacCannell’s articles “Negative Solidarity” (1977a) and “Pseudo-Espionage” (1978).

8. This term was used suggestively but not developed in the same way we have developed it here in a recent article by Donna Jean Umiker (1974). Jacques Derrida has also used it as an adjective to describe Rousseau’s anthropology.

9. D. MacCannell has begun to develop this theme elsewhere. See his reports, 1976a, b, c, d, and 1977b and c.

10. We have borrowed the term “Fourth World” from Nelson Graburn (1976).

11. The best review of the recent development of semiotics in the field of anthropology that we have read is Milton Singer’s (1978) “For a Semiotic Anthropology.”

12. Here, and elsewhere, we are benefiting from a recent radical reinterpretation of Rousseau by philosophers and literary critics in Europe and America. See, for example, Juliet Flower MacCannell (1977a and b), Paul de Man (1976), and Jacques Derrida (1967a).

13. Rousseau’s use of methods of argumentation which he devised to maximize their unacceptability should not prejudice us against the correctness of his ideas.

14. Dumont’s fieldwork among the Panare is also reported in his (1976) ethnography Under the Rainbow.

15. Rabinow’s interpretation appears to us to be a macro-level variant of the double-bind theory of mental disorder first advanced by Gregory Bateson et al. (1956) and eventually elaborated at the level of face-to-face interaction by Erving Goffman (1971:355-90; 1974:7 and passim), R. D. Laing (1965), and others.

16. The last of Marx’s (1967:402) epigrammatic “Theses on Feuerbach,” the one that appears on his headstone in Highgate Cemetery, reads: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Rabinow’s reflections on his field experience (1975b) reveal the strain of attempting to do new ethnography within the rules of classical ethnography, which rigorously holds to pre-Marxist principles: interpretation and description are the only goals; the point is not to change the culture that is studied.

17. This research, which was based on several years of field observations in Eastern and Western Europe and North America, is reported in D. MacCannell 1973, 1976a, and 1977b.

18. Some of this research is reported in Valene L. Smith, ed. (1977). On the Eskimo see Smith’s own contribution to her volume: “Eskimo Tourism: Micro-Models and Marginal Men.” Specifically on Eskimo arts and tourism, see Graburn (1976). The Basque case is reported in Greenwood (1976). On the transformation of the Amish into a tourist attraction see Roy C. Buck (1977) and D. MacCannell and J. Hostetler (1974).

19. There are other examples of the new ethnography that would have served as well as the ones discussed here for purposes of illustration. Some of these are beginning to find their way into mainstream anthropological journals. In a recent issue of the American Anthropologist, for example, we can read in the biographical sketch of Lee Drummond (1977:842): “Several years of thinking about this subject have left me with a commitment to social anthropology conceived as the study of what people think about other people, and therefore about themselves.”

20. It is noteworthy that European students, especially those working within the semiotic frame, have been quick to use the United States as an ethnographic field area. See the recent issue of Tel Quel on the United States and Julia Kristeva’s (1977) study of the Chinese in Manhattan.

21. For a helpful recent discussion of the expansion of the structural linguistic paradigm to cover other cultural domains, see Winner and Winner (1976:128 and passim).

22. For a more thorough review of recent anthropological theory that arrives at the same conclusion, see Peter K. Manning (in press).

23. Lévi-Strauss owes future students a technical manual containing scoring protocols for the myths and step-by-step explanations of how they were set up for machine analysis. Such a manual could build upon and make operational his (1958:104-5) remarks in his 1955 American Folklore Society paper:

Reanalysis and continued development of the Mythologiques by others will be greatly impeded if we must reconstruct these procedures at the level of the division of the myths into their “constituent units.”

24. Paul Ricoeur (1970, 1971) has begun the important task of describing the theoretical and methodological (as opposed to the political) differences between semiotics and phenomenology as they apply to the “sciences of man.” Much of the difference, according to Ricoeur, can be traced to simple terminological confusion and to the fact that important questions remain unexplored by both groups. A good discussion of these issues and Ricoeur’s contribution to understanding them is found in Winner and Winner (1976).

25. D. MacCannell first presented this argument in a paper at the Eastern Meetings of the American Sociological Society in 1975.

26. Apparently, this structure operates even on a philosophical level. Husserl critioized non-Western thought for being incapable of arriving at critical self-understanding. In so doing, he ignored his own insight into Western thought; that it often hides from itself; that philosophical language as well as ordinary language can simultaneously obscure and reveal. Paul de Man (1967:52-53) comments:

27. In a remarkable series of recent papers and addresses, Thomas A. Sebeok (1977, in press) has advanced the more radical suggestion that we should examine the systems of communication between species as well as between cultures and individuals for clues about the ultimate structures of meaning.

28. Peter Manning (1976) has undertaken what we cannot do here, namely, a thorough review of Goffman’s published writings. Manning’s thoughtful and sympathetic article is unique, as far as we know, in its effort to link Goffman’s writings to the wider socio-historical context in which they appeared.

29. As a discipline, American sociology lacks the theoretical vocabulary to discuss Goffman’s works in these terms. For a recent “in house” analysis, see Gonos (1977) who suggests that Goffman has been miscast as a “symbolic interactionist” and should be labeled a “structuralist.” This argument is correct, as far as it goes, but from an ethnosemiotic standpoint both structuralism and symbolic interactionism would be seen as “first drafts” of a semiotic of social relations. The Gonos paper can be criticized for not attending to Goffman’s phenomenology.

30. For a recent demonstration of Goffman’s skill at interpreting interpretations, see his (1976) presentation, “Picture Frames.”

31. Much of the Third-World community research done by the Youngs and their students at Cornell is summarized in Young and Young 1973. The analysis of movements is reported in Young 1970 and elsewhere.

32. For a discussion of the technical aspects of using aerial photographic data for a semiotic of community structure, see Young and D. MacCannell 1967, especially p.345.

5. THE SECOND ETHNOMETHODOLOGY

1. Consider the complex, illustrative case of Erving Goffman who was typecast by sociology as an ethnomethodologist, but never accepted into the ranks of ethnomethodology, nor apparently desirous of such acceptance. Even though Goffman was trained at Chicago in the most prestigious sociology program of his day, and tenured by the Berkeley sociology department during its brief apogee, he abandoned the field completely at mid-career. After arriving at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, he used the anthropology department as his mailing address, did not participate in the training of graduate sociologists, and never again published in a sociology journal.

2. Although he is not self-identified as such, for reasons of overlapping theoretical antecedents and empirical domain (everyday life), we shall consider Peter Berger a classificatory cousin of the ethnomethodologists. Nicolas C. Mullins (1973) also groups Berger with the ethnomethodologists.

3. See Aflred Schutz’s essay on the “Problem of Rationality in the Social World” (1964:x,64-88).

4. Heap and Roth (1973) have written a helpful article that is explicitly critical of the naive adaptation of phenomenological concepts by discipline sociologists. They correctly point out, for example, that “intentionality” and other borrowed terms are often misused by sociologists as if their technical meaning corresponds to their folk-psychological meaning.

5. See, for example, Victor Turner’s proto-semiotic studies of ritual in primitive societies or Dean MacCannell’s forthcoming study of modern ritual.

6. It is worthwhile to mention here that in its struggle for life in the infertile soil of American sociology, much of the excellent work that has been accomplished has been forced to deny its own historical basis. Sudnow, for example, does a fairly straightforward re-test of several of Sartre’s ideas about the glance, but nowhere in his writing does he give any sign of awareness of his own substantial existential ancestors. This is only one of the ways in which the location of ethnomethodological studies within sociology effectively prevents them from becoming cumulative.

6. ON THE NATURE OF THE LITERARY SIGN

1. We refer of course to theorists such as Wolfgang Iser (1974), Paul de Man (1972 and 1979), and those interested in reception theory. In an earlier study of Rousseau (1974), Juliet MacCannell attempted to describe the narcissistic structure involved when the author moves from a public-audience orientation to discovering him or herself as the reader or receiver of the written message. Jacques Derrida’s essay in Marges (1972: especially 372-75) is an intricate but important scrutiny of the notion of reading as communication. Recently Umberto Eco (1979) has underscored the importance of a theory of reading in semiotics. His analysis is extremely idealized, positing Model Readers and authors as each purely “textual strategies.” Overall the separation of author-function and reader-function remains in Eco’s work. In this paper we tend to see author and reader not as textual strategies—a natural consequence of parole orientation—but rather as both implicated in the sign, which for us still remains the focus of the literary attention.

2. See in particular Paul de Man’s essay on “Semiology and Rhetoric” (1979:8-9) in Allegories of Reading. Décio Pignatari (1978) has taken the logocentric bias in Saussurian semiotics as the exaltation of the verbal and syntagmatic over the iconic, and he turns to Peircian definitions as the proper alternative to neo-Saussurian terminology for literary criticism.

As a brief aside, one could characterize several tendencies in critical theory as presuming literary analysis divided between a pictorial or iconic emphasis and a verbal or narrative emphasis. Wayne Booth’s (1961:3-20) early Rhetoric of Fiction sets forth this paradigm and attacks the image bias in literature (the showing over the telling) as a Romantic heritage. Pignatari’s essay mentioned above sees a similar division, while demanding attention to the pictorial or imaged elements. It is interesting to note that the title of one of the most influential treatises in American criticism—The Verbal Icon (1954) by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr.—is literally a collation of these two elements. Our essay here shows, we hope, that the verbal and iconic are not mutually exclusive but mutually determinant, especially in the work of Saussure. Thomas A. Sebeok (1976) provides an invaluable guide to the structure of iconicity both historically and in the work of Peirce. Paul de Man’s early essay (1960) on the intentional structure of the Romantic image is indispensable for those wishing to trace the genealogy of the Saussurian literary sign.

3. Here we refer the reader to our analysis of the splitting of the Saussurian sign into analyzable parts in “On the Discriminations of Signs,” chapter 7. In it we track the sign in Barthes, Jakobson, Benveniste, Deleuze, Kristeva, Lacan and Derrida as well as in Lévi-Strauss, relating all these writings of Saussure to the story of post-rationalism.

4. Anglo-American debates on modernism and referentiality, as in W. B. Michaels (1978) and Gerald Graff (1979), with political battle lines drawn between anti- and pro-mimeticists are uncalled for from a semiotic standpoint. Language as nomenclature does not exist as a problem in Saussure, nor for that matter in Peirce, whose liberties with terminology are infamous. The tendency to identify words as semiostructural units (as in the Todorov passage cited later) and then to concentrate on the question of reference rather than meaning (as in Todorov’s adoption of Frege’s tripartite division of the sign) is a pattern in structural literary criticism. In a sense, the potential explosion of meaning generated by the differential sign-machine is controlled by the structuralist poetics and should thus find a sympathetic audience in the proponents of “referentiality.”

5. This issue of stability is most seriously raised and also undermined in Saussure’s work on the “language-state,” the “synchronic,” which like any other “state” in human affairs is fictional. In the “language-state” one of the elementary forms of relationship is the “association,” which is, however, not “free-wheeling.” This type of relationship, which post-Saussurian semioticians have assumed to be the same as the paradigmatic (Culler 1976:48-49), has been neglected, particularly because of its overtones of idiosyncratic psychologizing, even though it is structural for Saussure. First Emile Benveniste (1971:4ff.), then Jameson (1972:22ff), and now Lentricchia (1980:112ff.) argue against the antihistorical bias in Saussure’s scheme, particularly when the “language-state” is taken as a set of categories that determine historical speech events. Both the charge of idiosyncrasy and the accusation that Saussure overstructuralizes seem to us irrelevant if one views his “language-state” as we have here. Saussure’s “association” is not merely an individual and local question of psychology; nor is the “synchronic” devoid of a temporal dimension, e.g., the temporality of culture, memory, the contemporary use of the past.

6. Lévi-Strauss’s chapter on the “Science of the Concrete” in The Savage Mind contains the absolutely indispensable discussion of the differences between the material signifier, imbedded in a finite context, and the concept—detachable, transportable, and flexible, the Cartesian “universal instrument.”

7. Lucien Goldmann’s thesis on Kant presents the clearest discussion we know of this relationship. Goldmann still sees Kant as a “rationalist,” however, without noting the “post-rational” influence of Rousseau on Kant’s thought. See Goldmann 1971.

8. Jonathan Culler (1976:56-59) gives a concise and very useful sketch of the language theories of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century continental thinkers. See also Roman Jakobson 1975.

9. W. B. Michaels (1978) has recently attacked members of the “New Yale School” for their elision of ‘reference’, and he has pronounced them to be as formalist as the “Old Yale School” of Wimsatt, Warren, and Wellek. Michaels cites a recent text by Paul de Man (“The Purloined Ribbon,” 1977) as typical of the difficulty of formalism. Interestingly enough, the essay by de Man, also the target of an attack by Gail Wade (1978), is one of the few of his essays that deal with literature as a performative speech act, contextually conditioned or ‘situated’ by the implicit operations of desire. It is ironic that an essay of this type, rather than, say, the more ‘purely cognitive’ ones such as his work on the epistemology of metaphor (1978) should have excited charges of formalism.

10. We are indebted to Jacques Derrida’s essay on the trope, “La mythologie blanche,” in Marges (1972) and Paul de Man’s essay mentioned above on the history of tropes and the epistemology of metaphor (1978), each of which pinpoints in its own fashion the keys or turning points in transition between the hermeneutic and post-structural approaches to reading metaphors. The recent essay by Derrida in Enclitic (1978), written in response to Paul Ricoeur’s La métaphore vive (1975), is an example of the clash we are talking about. The disagreement is over the interpretation of a line from Heidegger linking the fate of metaphor with that of metaphysics. The recent book by Daniel Giovannangeli (1979) should be useful to those interested specifically in the transitions between phenomenology, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism in relation to literary aesthetics.

11. Lionel Gossman’s (1976) division of comparative literature from the study of national literatures on the basis of a synchronic versus a diachronic approach is particularly apt and politically correct. One must not, however, neglect the important dimension of what Saussure calls here “mnemonic history” in the comparative literature methodology. In fact, the implications for a methodology that would deal with ‘value’ and ‘significance’ in literature (differences) without dependence upon oppositional structures, such as a comparative literature methodology would be, are profound, and it is our hope to see them worked out over the next decade.

7. ON THE DISCRIMINATIONS OF SIGNS

1. Probably the best possible description of the spirit of Cartesian science is contained in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970:50-58).

2. Edward Wilson (1978:13) states the challenge succinctly:

3. Romanowski (1974) finds that Descartes’s use of the address (je/vous) in his scientific writing opened the breach for the sign (communicative) to enter the Cartesian attitude and undermine it: he moves from science to philosophic discourse. It is interesting to note that Descartes’ great twentieth-century malin génie, Michel Foucault, has opted for Discourse as his counter to rationalism. Anti-rationalism is the basis for his rhetorical (topological) discourse analyses. Foucault’s is, in a way, a truncated hermeneutics, the interpretation of the world made by langauge not only as instrument but agent, and without Understanding as the key component.

4. Kenneth Burke (1957:157-58) writes of the fundamental differences between James and Peirce,

5. The New York Review of Books (1967) helped reawaken and widen interest in Peirce; it seems as if academia had to lose some of its exclusive rights to sanctifying writers before Peirce could come most fully into his own. The story of Peirce’s mistreatment by the moral structure of the university still shocks us, evoking the passionate discourse of one of our most eminent scholars and leading semioticians: Thomas A. Sebeok (1976b:1430) remarked in his keynote address to the C. S. Peirce Symposium on Semiotics and the Arts at the Johns Hopkins University: “The harsh facts are that Peirce, who ‘remains the most original, versatile, and comprehensive philosophic mind this country has yet produced,’ was dismissed by your university after five years of sterling service and he never again succeeded in holding any academic post.”

6. See Juliet Flower MacCannell (1977) on the conceptual problems of pity and self-love in the eighteenth century.

7. In the mid-twentieth century there appeared some exquisite literary criticism based on phenomenology’s reassessment of the Cartesian cogito. The work of Georges Poulet is an example of literature’s benefiting from phenomenology: for the first time certain Romantic and pre-Romantic texts were adequately analyzed. Poulet’s former colleague at the University of Zürich, Paul de Man, also successfully employed phenomenological methods at the beginning of his literary career. The benefits have flowed in more than one direction: Heidegger’s existential analysis of Being claimed that “Being-a-sign-for” was a universal relationship of “showing” such that the “sign-structure itself provides an ontological clue for characterizing any entity whatsoever” (1967[1927]:108). Thenceforth the “world” has had the same “being” as the literary work—composed of signs; it became perfectly legitimate for literary critics to apply their analytic methods to culture outside of printed texts, as Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin have done.

8. Jacques Derrida devotes a long essay to his teacher in his 1967 book, L’Ecriture et la différence. Lévinas was most instrumental in bringing Husserl and Heidegger to a French audience, through his many important articles and books on German phenomenology and existentialism, including his and Pfeiffer’s French translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations. His 1930 work on Husserl’s theory of intuition (1973) was made available to Americans through the series on Continental philosophy published by Northwestern University Press. It is Lévinas’s theory of the trace that sets off Derrida’s own meditation, a meditation he collates with Freud’s notion of frayage (Bahnung) to make the transition to his post-structural psychoanalysis of philosophy.

9. Heidegger’s comments on ethnography are interesting because although he decides against empirical social investigation (it would “fail to recognize the real problem. . . . the genuine knowledge of essences” [1962:77]), his version of the ‘primitive’ is true to the Romantic equation of primitive with genuine (and in Heidegger’s case the pre-Socratic Greeks, perhaps?):^*

Heidegger’s anti-Semitism may well be an embarrassing consequence of an old Romantic (syntagmatic) opposition between naive and complex souls (naive, spontaneous, Greek/complex, interior, Judaeo-Christian).

10. Paul Ricoeur’s (1967) outstandingly clear exposition of Husserl’s transcendental self, together with Husserl’s own descriptions have formed the basis of our seeing culture as the “first epochē” in chapter 3. Of course, this is our own derivation; Ricoeur himself has characterized Lévi-Strauss’s work as “Kantism without a transcendental subject,” which implies that the transcendental subject is modeled on the superior Cartesian cogito, an inference that is often made (see Milton Singer, 1978:218). See Paul de Man’s essay (1971:10ff.) on the crisis in criticism in the late 1960s when the lack of central subjectivity was perceived as a crucial issue for literature. See also Donato 1974:160-62, where Donato sets up the question of the self (as subject or shifter) as a kind of either/or question for literature. This should be read in the light of his later (1978) decision for the subject discussed here in chapter 2. T. S. Eliot’s “stock exchange” metaphor for literary tastes is as appropriate as ever for the representatives of American literary scholarship.

11. Benveniste (1966) demonstrates that subjective time, oriented toward the present, depends absolutely on linguistic time, whose only mode is the present. Past and future are situated in relation to it.

12. Barthes and Lévi-Strauss concur that myths are good to think with, though Barthes decries them when they constitute the mythology of the bourgeoisie foisting off its representations on others as well as on itself. Lévi-Strauss does not moralize, and we are immensely indebted to him for characterizing mythic thought so explicitly and without the adulation of the primitive, a common form of condescension evident even in Heidegger. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss’s vision of the mythic totality provides us with a wonderful sense of the ‘totality’ of Western culture and establishes ‘savage thought’ as appropriate for culture studies.

13. Saussure distinguishes between two types of semiotic relations at the level of language: syntagmatic and associative. Semioticians have restricted themselves almost exclusively to the syntagmatic. (For discussion, see chapter 6, “On the Nature of the Literary Sign.”) The similiarities in associations are neither purely arbitrary nor rationally necessary. They are constellations, pluralities of like signifiers and signifieds. Barthes declares in his Système de la mode (1967a) that associations are impossible in fashion and sticks to syntagms. Paradigm classes are accumulations of syntagms, not associations. Perhaps the renewed interest in Freud’s ideas of condensation, displacement, and overdetermination will help us to understand Saussure’s association relation more completely.

14. Lévi-Strauss in the Scope of Anthropology (1967) uses the Oedipus and the Christian quest myths as his ‘sources’ for typological insight into Amerindian myths.

15. Nietzsche (1956:189): “Oblivion . . . is an active screening device.” For him forgetting is a necessary component of memory and of the present itself.

16. This blindness to the sign-character of scientific representation is evident today in a recent popular book by an eminent American ethologist, Edward Wilson’s On Human Nature (1978). The ineffable is also given many nods, in the form of “touchstone” quotations from indisputable “great” writers, throughout the book. Wilson reserves almost all his openly expressed antagonisms for post-rational thinkers, from Kant to Camus: recall that his most famous work, Sociobiology, opens with an attack on Camus’s statement that suicide is the central question of philosophy. This is natural in a scientist. Sociobiology does have its right and left wings, that is, its division between those who cannot see the representation-character or sign mechanism of the objects they study and those whose inquiries are compatible with semiotics, such as Tynbergen, Dawkins, and the Medawars (see Sebeok 1972).

The rapid invasion of culture studies by biologists ought to give rise to some reflection on the part of those in the humanities; it should at least compel them to ask whether the rationalist versus the post-rationalist positions on culture may not give them a good handle on where they themselves may be divided. Some philosophers, historians, and literary critics will hold to a rational stance, honoring reason in the face of irrationality, and will feel a kinship of purpose with science. But it should also be recalled that “rationality” has its applied behavioral science, as Max Weber taught us: bureaucracy, hierarchy, the decision against “irrational” bonds (e.g., family, love) for organizing our relationships. (Family or ‘genetic’ ties are considered by Edward Wilson to be one example of the ‘biological’ forces against which reason must fight.)

There are also adherents of the anti-rational or irrational positions—Michel Foucault is the great doer of battle with the Cartesian cogito. It may well be that he is still controlled by the rationalist position, even in the way he operates his antitheses. He refuses the signified and decides for Discourse analysis (rather than separating language and speech as Saussure did). But in essence that is what Descartes did, though he was blind to the significance of his own moves, when he moved from science to philosophy (and method). Baudrillard’s work consistently criticizes the hypostasis of the signifier and takes a tack opposing Foucault.

17. See Dean MacCannell on “Marx’s Semiotic” in The Tourist (1976a).

18. Singer (1978) and de Man (1973) characterize “semiology” as Saussurian-linguistic and “semiotic” as Peircian and broader (usually less verbal and more visual in orientation).

John Deely (1978:21) gives a lucid philosophical review of the difficulty of identifying signs with representations. He distinguishes between signs that represent objects and signs that serve “only to found relations to what they themselves are not, namely the objects of which we are directly aware.” It is clear that the next important issue for semiotics will be shaped around the problem of representation: are there objects of which we are “directly aware”? This coming debate (if it ever comes) will have to consider the possibility of even these foundational signs as “representation,” as in the recent works on mimesis by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1978) and the neo-Nietzschean interpretation of Freud’s unconscious in this way. (In this version “consciousness” is an original hypothesis: the hypothesis that consciousness represents an elsewhere, an ‘it’ heterogeneous to itself. See Lacoue-Labarthe 1977. Consciousness presents itself as a “representation.”) Also pertinent will be Derrida’s “White Mythology” (1974). The varieties of the Unconscious would be an excellent central organizing topic.

19. Derrida 1973: Part I, “Sign and Signs,” refers to the ambiguous construction Husserl noted in the sign, which is both expression (Ausdruck) and indication (Anzeichen). The latter are signs “that express nothing because they convey nothing” one could ever call meaning (Sinn) (17). Considering one of the etymologies of metaphor as that which conveys or transports meaning we have here the beginning of what will grow to be a non-metaphoric or differently metaphoric sign in Derrida and deconstruction, the open trope.

20. This literature is carefully reviewed by Jonathan Culler in his books on Structuralist Poetics (1975a) and on Saussure (1976). Derrida’s definitive review, “Linguistics and Phonoiogy,” in Grammatology (1976:27-73) cannot be ignored by scholars and critics.

Culler’s judicious book is a painstaking analysis of structuralism-for-literature. His conclusion that linguistics is to language as poetics is to literature seems to us an example of the kind of Lévi-Straussian mythic accommodation which would allow the disciplines to continue to function, especially without having to challenge the concept of literature as narrative. Culler’s The Pursuit of Signs (1981) appeared too late for us to comment on it.

21. S. Saumjan (Benveniste 1966:136-52) criticizes the work of Chomsky and the generative grammarians for remaining solely within the limits of the syntagm in their analysis of language. The paradigmatic axis is left out.

22. The important contribution to communication theory made by the great structural linguist Roman Jakobson in effect weds Peirce and Saussure. See Jakobson (1960:253) for a communication model that accommodates both. Wilden (1968:184) speaks of this in Freud. The entire section on the “Cogito and the ‘True’ Subject” (177-84) is worth reading. See also Daniel Laferriere’s attempt to calibrate Freud and Chomsky in his recent (1979) book.

23. A. J. Greimas (1970:13) relegates “meaning” to the question of levels:

Barthes claims that semiolinguistics has never gone beyond the level of the sentence and that Discourse lies beyond the analytic scope of grammar:

This might have been seen as a challenge to departments of rhetoric to study the semiotic mechanics of language; however, this is not the trend. (Seymour Chatman is a noteworthy and rather unusual exception.) One might also note that Barthes, like Lacan, sees the acquisition of speech as that which shapes human personality (in the form of the Oedipal situation), but he does not take this amiss (1974:271; also 1975:47): “Death of the Father would deprive literature of many of its pleasures. . . . Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus? . . . Oedipus was at least good for something: to make good novels.” Deleuze has an anti-Oedipal stance (1978). He opposes Oedipus as narrative, full of the signifier, fictional to the point of schizophrenia, the sign divided by itself.

There has also been a critique of semiolinguists for not doing the semiotic of language, by Christian Metz in his Essais Sémiotiques (1977).

24. See Michel Foucault (1977:81-82): according to Lacanian theory, the terrifying fact that the signifier signifies nothing generates psychosis. Michel Foucault, despite his disagreement with psychoanalysis, gives a good summary:

This “catastrophe of the signifier,” its failure to mean anything beyond itself or to signify anything more than a lack, is best illustrated in Lacanian theory by the phallus.

25. The signifiers precede the imposition of the symbolic order by the mirrorstage and the acquisition of language. The point is that language always conceals as it reveals—a very Heideggerian notion, or even Hegelian.

26. See their essays in Anti-Oedipe and articles by and about them in Sémiotext(e), especially their collaborative essay on the desiring machine, and the replay of Freud’s wolfman in “One or Several Wolves.”

27. Foucault’s theses on madness as Reason’s disowned alter ego (Descartes’s malin génie) are well known.

28. Here one might compare the vogue for the young Lukács’s aesthetic theories in the later 1960s (see Paul de Man 1971:36-50). Some saw the same kind of transversality there as a way of retaining the formal and phenomenological sign-character of the work of art without having it tied to empirical conditions of social communication. For an opposing Marxist viewpoint, see the very lucid exposition by V. N. Voloshinov (1977:96-108). Voloshinov opens the work of art to discourse analysis and attacks the notion of essence. See also Mukarovsky 1976:3-10.

29. For example, Jean Houdebine’s open letter to Derrida, which specifically questions his position on Marx (1973:57). See also the 1980 conference at Cérisy, especially the talk by Joel Rogozinski on Derrida and Marx.

30. Most analysts of the value and meaning of ‘money’ refer to its metaphoric status, as in Foucault’s The Order of Things (1970:168-82), in which Foucault speaks of money as a representation of a representation, whose legitmation derives from its reproduction of the image of the ruling authority (prince, president, etc). As the age of mechanical reproduction cedes to the age of electronic reproduction, however, questions such as these must be rethought. Clearly Derrida has found in another of Rousseau’s themes, counterfeiting, a clue at least to money’s ‘legitimation’—and the source of its value in the work of the laborer who produces it.

31. Althusser attended Lacan’s seminars on Freud.

32. The “New Philosophers” include André Glucksmann, Guy Lardreau, and Jean-Marie Benoist as well as Bernard Lévy, who actually studied with Derrida. This group has adopted a post-semiotic vocabulary for their anarchical withdrawal into individualism. Benoist, for example, expresses this tendency toward isolation and purity when he proclaims that Marx is dead, but he has been killed only to be “at last” purified of Lenin, Stalin:

Etc. The overt hostility to a Marx reduced to a single text in order to be cut apart is unfortunate; but it is also pernicious in its pretence to be a part of “the structural revolution”: for if there is anything that structuralism and post-structuralism has taught us, it is the lession of intertextuality, the critical role of the (hi)story of its readings as constitutive of the text.

Glucksmann’s book Les Maîtres penseurs (1977) is a decadent exercise: it denounces the right and the left in the name of their common resort to “the camps” to oppress the “plebe” (whose paradigm is—ironically, neo-romantically—the European peasant [291]). According to Glucksmann, the peasant has always been the butt of the modern bourgeoisie’s scorn. But let us make no mistake: this is not Sartre or Merleau-Ponty denouncing Stalinism in the name of a commitment to a Eurocommunism that attempts to correct the Soviet excesses (bureaucracy and terror), it is an appeal to an ideal type that perhaps never existed.

Lardreau (1973) also appeals to a purposely vague “people” to support his anarchism, whose method is that of removing differences and distinctions: Freud’s repression is the “same as” oppression; the social contract (which actually constitutes the sovereignty of the people in Rousseau—see J. MacCannell 1978) ought to be “suppressed” (142); the body itself abolished (229). It is clear these are not adherents of Derrida, no more than of Marx—nor of any other philosophy at all.

8. A COMMUNITY WITHOUT DEFINITE LIMITS

1. John Deely (178:18) extends semiotics even further back into antiquity, before the Greeks: “The terms of Poinsot’s theory enable us to grasp the origin of the human world in a semiotic act—the act of insight into the mind-dependent status of certain signs.” Boguslaw Lawendowski (1978:266) echoes Deely’s radical claim that the origin of semiotics is the same as the origin of culture.

2. Augustine’s and Rousseau’s contributions to the doctrine of signs have been discussed in the previous chapters. For a helpful comment on Dante’s contribution, see Thomas A. Sebeok (1975:233). Locke’s contribution to semiotics is well-known and was acknowledged by Peirce to be the single greatest influence on Peirce’s own work. John Deely (1978) has reintroduced a formerly obscure text, Poinsot’s Tractatus de Signis (first published in 1932), which anticipates many of Peirce’s ideas in much the same way that Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia anticipates Peirce. One of the best general treatments of the history of the idea of sign is Erich Auerbach’s (1959:11-78) classic essay “Figura.”

3. Here we are following Max Fisch’s (1978:31-70) sensitive handling of Peirce’s ideas and life.

4. For more detail on “Marx’s Semiotic,” see D. MacCannell 1976a:19ff.

5. See Milton Singer’s (1978:214) parallel contrast of Peirce’s semiotic versus Saussure’s semiology. See also J. Lotman in Lucid 1977.

6. This structure is made explicit in Neil Bruss’s (1977:131-47) Semiotica essay in which he combines Freud and Chomsky in a semiotic frame.

7. This version of the sign is also the one found in Edward Wilson’s sociobiology.

8. Making the same point for humans, Goffman (1967:7-10) has written: “[T]he person’s face clearly is something that is not lodged in or on his body, but rather something that is diffusely located in the flow of events. . . [I]t is only on loan to him from society. . . .”

And later in the same essay: “Universal human nature is not a very human thing” (45).

9. Peter Marler’s work (1978:115) has many nice empirical observations, for example, that monkeys sometimes use the same expression, with different inflections, to mean “man” and “snake.”

10. For an excellent critique of these assumptions, see Harley Shands’s (1978:175-201) report on his work with disabled arthritics and their different capacities to express themselves.

11. Peter Marler (1978:114) argues strongly against those who are “convinced of the inflexible automaticity of the animal as an unthinking machine.”

12. On this point, see also Juliet Flower MacCannell (1978:477):

13. We do not wish to carry the critique of the semiotics of unity to the point of destruction, for now that the forces opposing semiotics are operating from within, they can be put to good use as an effective impetus to clarify basic issues.

14. Lawendowski (1978) further suggests that the production and interpretation of signs has

In chapter 5 we have called Lawendowski’s type 3b “ethnosemiotics.” The best example of ethnosemiotics we have seen is Lee Drummond’s (1977) study of ethnic stereotyping among Carib Indians. See also Gary Stonum’s (1977:947) essay on noise as form of escape or Anthony Wilden’s treatment of similar issues (1972).

15. See also Peirce (1955:162ff) on the indefinite, limitless community. It is noteworthy both that Peirce appears to have been disturbed that his theory of consciousness did not involve a psychological subject necessarily and that Fisch singles out this concern for special attention. In a letter to Lady Welby reproduced by Fisch (1978:55) Peirce wrote: