Prof: Well,
I'd like to welcome the prospective students.
I won't say the word
"Yalie" prematurely,
but of course I hope you all come.
I wish I had a chance to
provide a little context for what I'm going to say today,
but maybe you'll scramble into some sense of things as we go
along. This lecture concerns an essay
written to immediate widespread acclaim and controversy by two
young, at the time quite uninfluential
and untenured scholars trying to make their way in the world.
They certainly succeeded with
this essay, which was published in
Critical Inquiry, then certainly the leading
organ for the dissemination of innovative theoretical ideas,
and they were, generally speaking,
gratified by the results. Almost immediately the editors
of Critical Inquiry decided to publish,
together with "Against Theory,"
in book form a series of responses to "Against
Theory," all of them sort of polite,
carefully thought-through responses which made a very
interesting thin book, which is still available.
I think it's still in print and
well worth having if you take an interest in the controversies
that the article generated, and of course,
I'm hoping in the time remaining to get you to take an
interest in them. Knapp and Michaels were then,
still are, what's called
"neo-pragmatists," which is to say they are
influenced most immediately by an important book written in the
1970s by the philosopher Richard Rorty called Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature; but Rorty was writing in a
tradition that goes back through the important work of John Dewey
in the 1930s and '40s, and before then not only to the
great philosophical interventions of William James,
Henry James's brother, but also a theory of signs
by Charles Sanders Peirce, a theory which at the time
didn't generate too much recognition or controversy.
It was taken up by the
so-called Cambridge School of literary critics headed by
I.A. Richards. He and C.K. Ogden wrote some
reflections on Peirce's semiotics,
but today with pragmatism, neo-pragmatism--
a fairly important strain in academic theoretical and
literary thinking-- Peirce's semiotics is in a way
receiving more attention, in a way also challenging the
hegemony in the field of literary theory of Saussure's
semiotics. This sense of the sign as
something different from what Saussure said it was is going to
be the underlying theme of the second and central part of this
lecture. Nineteen eighty-two was
probably the high-water mark both of the fascination and the
frustration with literary theory in this country.
It was a hot-button
topic--we've gone into this before--
in ways that it is not really today,
so that our interest in literary theory is at least in
part historical, one might want to say.
In 1982, though,
where you stood on these matters just made all the
difference, and it was in that atmosphere
that Knapp and Michaels's "Against Theory"
was published. Now as I say,
they were neo-pragmatists, and what that means basically
is that one knows things, which is the same thing as to
say that one believes things, such that one acts in the world
unhesitatingly as an agent.
Everything that matters in
being human has to do with one's powers of agency,
but there are no actual foundations in what we can know
objectively for our beliefs and actions.
In other words,
it's a position which is called anti-foundational or
anti-foundationalist but not a position that,
as such a position might imply, somehow entails nihilism or a
kind of crippling radical skepticism.
On the contrary,
it's a position that insists that we just do what we do,
that we are always doing, thinking, believing,
and saying something; that we are always exerting an
influence as social beings in our surroundings,
and that the only thing that needn't concern us about our
powers of agency is that perhaps we don't really have a full,
adequate objective account of how and why it is that we do and
say and believe and influence things in the way that we do.
That position is essentially
the position taken up in Knapp and Michaels.
Now you saw it last time
already in the essay of Stanley Fish--
Stanley Fish, who takes it that we are
largely produced by the interpretive community to which
we belong. You'll recall his understanding
of this community as that which constitutes our values--
in other words, there's nothing intrinsic to
ourselves, nothing unique in our own modes
of perception, but rather only the ways in
which our educational circumstances bring us to
believe and understand things. This, too, is a neo-pragmatist
position. Now you notice that in the
third part of the Knapp and Michaels essay,
they engage in a kind of polite disagreement with Fish.
There is an underlying,
very broad agreement with him, but remember in the third part
of the essay they're talking about the synonymity,
the identity, of knowledge and belief,
and they point to a particular passage in one of Fish's
arguments where he kind of slips into the idea that,
on the one hand, you have knowledge and then,
on the other hand, you have, in relation to that,
belief. They say, "No, no, no, no.
You can't separate knowledge
and belief," and just on those grounds they
disagree with Fish. Fish writes one of the
responses in the book that's then subsequently published
concerning "Against Theory," but it's a
completely friendly controversy about a transitory and
superficial matter. As a matter of fact,
while I'm going to pay a lot of attention to the first two
arguments-- there are basically three
arguments in this essay-- I'm going to pay very little
attention to the third argument in which Fish is challenged
about the relationship between knowledge and belief,
in part at least because it's an argument that belongs to
philosophy. It is the cornerstone of
Rorty's argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of
Nature and perhaps not so immediately relevant to the
kinds of things that we think about in doing literary theory.
So to turn then to what they
actually do say in relation to this movement that I'm talking
about, you notice for example that in
tone, their work is very similar to
that of Stanley Fish. It's a kind of a downright,
no-nonsense, let's-get-on-with-it kind of
tone that, after reading Derrida and other
writers of that kind, you're perhaps not quite ready
for. In a way it's bracing.
It must be kind of a relief to
get this sort of no-nonsense attitude toward these issues
after all the tacking and veering that we're likely to
have experienced in earlier writers.
In a way, the tone comes with
the territory. You take these views and in a
way, the tone seems to follow from it, because what they're
saying in effect is, You just do what you do.
You think what you think.
As a literary interpreter,
you're bound to have some opinion about what you're
looking at, so just get on with it.
Express that opinion,
that's your job of work. On this view and in this tone,
the only way you can go wrong is to grope around for some
theoretical justification for what you're doing.
It's just fine that you're
doing it. Don't worry about it.
Get on with it,
but don't think, according to the argument of
Knapp and Michaels, that you can hope to find
anything like an underlying or broad theoretical justification
for what you're doing. Obviously, that rather
challenging and provocative notion is something that lends
itself readily to the sort of no-nonsense tone that I'm
talking about. So turning then to their
argument, they argue that people become
entangled with issues of theory, all of which in their view
should be avoided, when they do two--well,
three but, as I say, we're going to set
"knowledge and belief" aside--
when they make three fundamental mistakes.
The first is to suppose that
there is a difference between meaning and intention:
in other words, for example,
that to know a meaning you have to be able to invoke an
intention, on the one hand,
or in the absence of an intention,
we cannot possibly speak of a meaning,
on the other hand. That's their first argument:
people become embroiled in theory when they make one of
those two mistakes. We'll come back to that in a
minute. The second argument is their
insistence that there is no such thing as a difference between
language and speech: in other words,
the Saussurian idea that we have language somehow or another
virtually present in our heads as a lexicon and a set of rules
of grammar and syntax, that language or langue
produces speech, what I say from sentence to
sentence, or parole--this notion
is simply false because there is no difference between language
and speech. That's their second premise.
Now before I launch into those
arguments, let me say one more thing about their attitude
toward theory. Let me call your attention to
the very first paragraph, which in your copy center
packet is on page 079. This is the very first
paragraph of "Against Theory,"
where interestingly they exempt certain ways of thinking about
literature, certainly quasi-scientific ways
of thinking about literature, from their charge against
theory. They say:
The term ["theory"] is sometimes applied to
literary subjects with no direct bearing on the interpretation of
individual works, such as narratology,
stylistics, and prosody. Despite their generality,
however, these subjects seem to us essentially empirical,
and our arguments against theory will not apply to them.
Well, now this is a little
surprising because for one thing,
in this course, which is presumably devoted to
theory, we've talked about some of
these things-- especially about narratology:
stylistics-- which is the science of style
and how one can approach style syntactically,
statistically and in the variety of ways in which that's
done-- and poetics,
which is general ideas about what constitutes a poem,
or a text written in some other genre.
All of these,
for example, must remind us very much of the
Russian formalists. Narratology,
as we studied it, is largely derived from
structuralism, indeed also from certain ideas
of Freud, and all of this sounds
suspiciously like theory. What point are they making
about it? Well, simply,
the point that those ways of thinking about literature,
which they exempt from their diatribe against theory.
are the ways that they call
"empirical," ways of thinking about
literature that are based on observation--
and that, of course, would certainly,
it seems to me, apply to the Russian formalists
or at least to what the Russian formalists think they're doing--
ways that are empirical in the sense that they observe data,
they build up a kind of database, and they generalize
from what they have observed. They begin, in other words,
with the object in question and then draw conclusions from it.
So empirical approaches to
literature, the simple observation of data
from which one can generalize-- they exempt these from the
general charge against literary theory.
Turning then to the idea that
intention and meaning just must be the same thing,
and then subsequently the idea that language and speech just
must be the same thing: in the background I'd like you
to be thinking about some of the implications of this sentence
[points to board: "I can know the meaning of
a word, but can I know the intention of
a word?"] by Stanley Cavell which was
written in another one of the responses to this essay that was
published in the book, Against Theory.
I don't want to reflect on
it now, but it seems to me a strikingly
vivid way of posing a challenge to the Knapp and Michaels
position which in a variety of ways,
if only by implication, we'll be touching on.
So what do Knapp and Michaels
do in order to convince us?-- and I'm going to be going a
long way with them here, indeed almost all the way,
even though I'm going to be taking a sharp turning toward
the end of the road which, I hope, saves theory.
After all, it's scarcely
conscionable to stand here twenty-six times in front of you
for an hour each and then finally to confess at the end
that the thing we have been talking about should be banished
from our vocabulary. >
Needless to say,
it's incumbent on me to save our subject matter.
I will, but you're going to
have to wait a while because, as I say, I am going to be
going a long way down the road with Knapp and Michaels.
Knapp and Michaels say in
effect, Well, you know what?
The thing about the way in
which we approach any text, any utterance,
any instance of language floating before us,
is just to take for granted that it has an intention.
As theorists and critics,
we worry away at the question of how we can know intention,
and all of this is a dangerous mistake because the fact is,
in everyday practice any piece of language we encounter we just
assume to have an intention. All right.
So they give us an example in
which this assumption is tested and makes us realize what's at
stake in supposing that we know the meaning of something.
Ordinarily, we just
spontaneously say, "I know what that
means," or if we don't know what it
means, we say, "It must mean something
even though I don't know what it means."
That's our normal approach to a
piece of language. Then they say,
Suppose you're walking on the beach and you come across four
lines-- "lines"
is already a dangerous thing to say--
four scratches in the sand that look an awful lot like the first
stanza of Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal':
A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears.
She seem'd a thing that could
not feel The touch of earthly years.
There it is on the beach just
right in front of us; and we say, Oh,
well, somebody's come along, some Wordsworth lover has come
along here and scratched these lines in the sand,
so that the intention of the text is unquestioned.
Wordsworth wrote it.
Somebody now wants to remind us
of what a wonderful stanza it is, and there it is.
Of course, it's very difficult
to know what it means, but at least I can ascribe
meaning to it because, no doubt, it's an intended
thing. But then what happens?
A huge wave comes along and
leaves on the beach underneath the first stanza the other
stanza, and this of course is highly problematic.
There it is:
No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Now we are really puzzled.
Maybe, as Knapp and Michaels
say, the sea is a kind of a pantheistic being that likes to
write poetry--so the sea wrote it.
Maybe, they say later on,
there are little men in a submarine who look at their
handiwork and say, "Gee, that was great.
Let's try that again."
In other words,
we can infer all sorts of authors for the stanza,
but it's much more likely that instead of saying that the sea
writes poetry, or instead of saying there are
little sort of homunculi in submarines writing poetry--
instead of saying that, it's much more likely that
we'll say, "This is an amazing
coincidence, truly amazing,
but it's just a coincidence. What else could it be?"
Knapp and Michaels's point,
which was the same point that you might make about a parrot
saying, "My boss is a jerk,"
for example-- you know the parrot doesn't
mean that. The parrot is just making words.
Somebody else meant it,
maybe, but that's just words for the parrot,
okay? Or monkeys at typewriters
writing Shakespeare. We are told that given
eternity, this is a task that could be accomplished,
always supposing somebody were there to whisk away the sheets
whenever they wrote a word >
and finally put it back
together. All of these things are
possibilities, but we suddenly realize that
those texts, "My boss is a jerk"
and "A slumber did my spirit seal,"
written by chance by whatever it is--
and already there is a sort of an intentionality entailed in
the idea of writing "by"
something-- but just left by chance,
we suddenly realize, according to Knapp and
Michaels, that in that case those words are only like
language. They are not actually language
because nobody wrote them; nothing wrote them;
no entity or being from God on down wrote them.
They are just there by chance.
Therefore, even though they
look like language, we suddenly realize that it
would be foolish to suppose that they have meaning.
There is a poem that exactly
resembles this bunch of marks that we see in front of us,
and that poem has meaning, but this bunch of marks does
not have meaning. Now I think probably most of
us--and that's why I think in a way Knapp and Michaels could
have chosen a better example-- I think probably most of us
would resist the idea that we can't interpret the bunch of
marks. They're identical to language.
We feel free to interpret them.
After all, nobody knows what
the poem means anyway! It's been the subject of
critical controversy for decades.
That's one of the reasons Knapp
and Michaels choose it, and so okay,
there it is on the beach. I'll have my stab at it.
It must mean something,
so here goes. And so we resist that.
That's why I gave you this
other example, because it seems to me that in
a way, the other example is more compelling than that of Knapp
and Michaels. [Points to handout.]
Now you see these two ladies looking up at the tree.
The upper--what do you call
them? What do you call it when the
branches are sawed off and eventually there's a kind of a
scar formed? Student: A burl.
Prof: Burl?
The upper burl certainly looks
an awful lot like Jesus, >
and when this appeared in
Milford about fifteen years ago, not just these two ladies but
hundreds and hundreds of people visited the site.
Now they, of course,
believed that that was on the tree because God put it there.
Therefore, it had meaning.
We knew what it was.
It was a representation of the
face of Jesus, and the feeling that one could
know what it was, interpret it,
and take it to be an actual representation of something was
therefore unquestioned. As we would all agree,
you accept the premise: God wrote it or I should say
put it there. He's been known to do the same
thing with toasted cheese sandwiches and tacos,
and it happens, right?
You accept that premise and
you're all set. But suppose you say,
"No, no, no, no.
God didn't write that.
God didn't put that there.
It's just an accident."
Wouldn't you then say,
"Oh, therefore it has no meaning,
it's not a representation of anything,
it just looks like something"?
In other words,
in this case-- however you feel about "A
Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"--
in this case you would accept Knapp and Michaels's argument.
You would say,
"It really does depend on the inference of an intention.
If I infer no intention,
I ascribe no meaning. If I infer an intention,
I ascribe meaning." So Knapp and Michaels are
simply making the same argument about "A Slumber Did My
Spirit Seal," and I think it's a very strong
argument. Once you realize--or once,
I should say, you accept the idea--that
meaning just is intention and think about it etymologically--
when I say "I mean," that precisely means "I
intend," right?
It doesn't quite work that way
in all languages, but it certainly works that way
in English, and it's worth remembering
to mean is "to intend" --
it makes a lot of sense to say that a meaning just is an
intention and that it's perhaps against the grain of common
sense to factor them apart, to say, "Well,
I can see this sentence and I have a certain notion what it
might mean, but I still don't know what the
author intended to say," which is forbidden from the
standpoint of Knapp and Michaels.
Of course, you know what
the author intended to say. You've just ascribed meaning to
the sentence. Now mind you,
you may be wrong, but that isn't to say that your
being wrong hinges on knowing what the author intended.
In a certain sense,
Knapp and Michaels agree perfectly well with the New
Critics and with Foucault or whoever it might be and say,
"Well, you can never know what an author intended."
But that's not the point.
The meaning of the sentence in
itself entails intention. If it weren't a sentence spoken
intentionally by an agent, human or otherwise,
it wouldn't have meaning because it wouldn't be language.
In a certain sense this,
then, can carry us to our second argument because,
having established in their own minds satisfactorily that for
any text the meaning of the text must just be its
intention-- in other words,
to be understood as language at all,
to repeat myself once again, and to be understood as
language at all, an intention needs to be
inferred. The argument here is that we
ought to be able to recognize, supposing we succeed in
not inferring an intention,
that what we are looking at is actually not language;
it's just a simulacrum of language,
an effective copy of language like,
for example, the speech of a parrot or the
words produced by monkeys on typewriters and so on.
We should not from such
simulacra of words infer not only intention but meaning as
well. It is meaningless to speak of
marks that are not signs as language.
Bringing us to the notion of
"sign": for C.S. Peirce,
who actually discriminated among hundreds of different
kinds of signs, all signs are
active--that is to say, they have an agency,
they have a purpose, they have a function.
Peirce, in other words,
does not understand them in the way that Saussure does as being
differential. He understands that too,
but for him the central point about a sign is the agency of
the sign. Now the implication of this is
clear, and it's the implication that Knapp and Michaels draw on
in this argument. Their claim is that there is no
distinction to be made between language and speech.
Now let's just pause over their
argument. I would think the fact that as
we think about that-- especially since we have been
exposed to Saussure and, I hope, have come to accept the
idea that language is a virtual synchronic entity laid out in
space, and speech is an actual
diachronic performance derived from language laid out in time--
since we have absorbed that and since we just have this sort of
spontaneous belief, if we're students of literary
theory, that there is a distinction
between language and speech: what do we do when we come face
to face with this claim of Knapp and Michaels's?
Now I think that they make
their most effective case in a footnote.
This is the last footnote I'll
be calling your attention to this semester,
and it's, like all footnotes, perhaps the most telling thing
in the essay. It appears on page 084 in the
copy center packet, footnote number twelve.
I'm not going to read the whole
thing. I'm just going to read a single
sentence at the top their page twenty-one,
footnote twelve, in which they say,
"… [A]
dictionary is an index of frequent usages in particular
speech acts-- not a matrix of abstract,
pre-intentional possibilities."
Think about that.
Language, we suppose,
is, in addition to being a set of grammatical and syntactical
rules, also a set of definitions made available for speech acts.
That is the assumption that a
course in literary theory provides for us.
Knapp and Michaels are denying
that in this footnote. They are saying that dictionary
definitions are just a sum total,
as it were, of words in action, that any definition is of a
word which is already a speech act.
You go through all eighteen
definitions of a word. They're all of them embedded in
sentences, speech acts, and can be taken out of
sentences and still understood in their agency as performed.
Any word in a dictionary,
in other words, according to Knapp and
Michaels, is a word performed, and the record fossilized,
as it were, in the dictionary is a record
not of meaning per se but of performance,
of the way in which the word works in speech,
in history. A dictionary is nothing other
than a composite or a sum total of speech acts.
To distinguish,
therefore, between language as something which is pre-action
and speech as the implementation of language is a mistake.
Language, even in the sense
that it's always there before us, is nevertheless always
active. It is a record of those actions
that have taken place before our own actions as speakers.
There's no difference between
me acting through speech and language preexisting as
something which is not action. It's all continuous as an
ever-deepening, broadening, and
self-complicating record of action, or speech action.
Now this is a very interesting
idea and I think, again, it's an idea that one
might well go a long way with. I think it should be said in
defense of Saussure, by the way, that in a certain
way he anticipates this position.
Remember I told you that
although for purposes of learning,
to understand structuralism and its aftermath we only
distinguish between language and speech,
langue and parole,
but in Saussure there's actually a third category,
a sort of intermediate category, which he calls
langage. Langage is actually the sum total of all
known speech acts. If you could codify or quantify
everything that's ever been said or written, that would be
langage. You can see how it's different
from langue, which needn't necessarily ever
have been said at all. I'll be coming back to that in
a minute. Langage,
in other words, is "empirical,"
as Knapp and Michaels would say.
It is something that,
had we enough information, we could actually codify into a
vast database. It would be the sum of all
speech acts, and that actually,
what Saussure calls langage,
would be not unlike what Knapp and Michaels mean by
language. Saussure is aware that you can
think of the sum of speech acts in the way that Knapp and
Michaels do, but he still holds out for this
other category, this notion of langue as
the code from which speech acts are derived,
as a thing apart. Now I think,
as I say, this is a persuasive position,
because after all, as long as we suppose that
language exists for communication,
that it is interactive--as long as we accept,
as we have accepted from Bakhtin and others during the
course of the course-- the idea that language is
social, that all of its deployments are interactive,
derived from the speech acts of others,
appropriated for oneself as one's own set of speech acts,
and influential on yet other people as a speech act--
as long as we accept this, we say to ourselves,
"Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to think of language as
inseparable from speech, to think of language simply as
the sum of all agencies so that no meaningful distinction
between that sum of agencies and the individual agency of a
speech act needs to be made."
Notice though--and here,
by the way, is where I'm going to make my
turn and save theory, so sharpen your
pencils!--notice that I began that last riff by saying
"as long as we suppose language exists for
communication." Now we do suppose
language exists for communication.
What else could it exist for?
What do we do with language
except to communicate? You could say,
"Well, we write doodles. We make meaningless marks in
the sand." There are all kinds of things
that maybe we do with language, but let's face it:
we don't, right? If I do, in fact,
make marks in the sand amounting to "A Slumber Did
My Spirit Seal," it's because I love Wordsworth,
as by the way I do, and I wish to communicate that
love to the rest of the world. It's a speech act.
Come on, I'm not just making
marks. If I wanted to make marks,
I'd do something rather more mark-like [gesticulates].
Well, so
> in any case,
we certainly inhabit a life world in which it is almost
inconceivable for anyone to come along and tell us,
"Language is not for the purpose of communication."
In other words,
Knapp and Michaels seem to be completely right.
What else is it for?
That's what we use it for.
We have refined it to a
fare-thee-well as an efficient, flexible, sometimes even
eloquent medium of communication.
That's what language is for,
that's what it exists for. As I'm saying,
if we accept this idea-- which seems simply to carry the
day, because who could think
anything else?-- if we accept this idea,
then there's a very strong case for Knapp and Michaels being
right. Really there's no significant
or important difference between language and speech.
But now suppose we approach the
question from a--I don't say from an empirical point of view
> but from a speculative
anthropological point of view. Suppose we approach it with
some rather commonsense remarks. Now we say language is for
communication; the purpose of language is for
communication. We say that.
Especially if we think of the
whole history of mankind, does that mean that the purpose
of fire is for cooking? Or to bring it a little bit
closer to home, does it mean that the purpose
of the prehensile thumb is for grasping?
Does it mean that the purpose
of a cave, a hole in the rock, is for dwelling?
No.
In those cases,
adaptation is what makes fire a good thing to cook with,
the prehensile thumb a good thing to grasp with,
and a cave a good thing to take shelter in,
but they all in their various ways are just there.
Plainly, all of them have
other, well, not "purposes,"
because a purpose is, when you think about it,
only something that we can impose on something;
but they certainly are not there in any sense for us to do
the thing that it turns out we've decided it's a good idea
to do with it. Fire burns us but we can cook
with it, and so on. Now in the case of language,
we have to suppose as a matter of fact that language,
as it were, appeared among us in the same way that the
prehensile thumb did. Of course we "discovered
its use," but that's a funny way to put
it. It might be more circumspect to
say that we discovered it had a use for us which was to
communicate, and so once we were able to put
this-- whatever it was,
this weird capacity to make differential sounds--
once we put this weird capacity to make differential sounds to
work, henceforth for us and for our
purposes language was there to communicate.
Of course we made an enormous
success of it, or a tower of Babel of it,
whichever you prefer to think, but in any case we have it,
and it has developed among us as a means of a medium of
communication. But by whatever mutancy
language arose, supposing this to be the
case--and I'm not making an argument that has anything to do
with "intelligent design" one way or
another-- supposing that by whatever
mutancy language appeared, then, of course,
the next day there were an avalanche: then it might well be
the case that this species consisting of all of us sitting
in this room and I guess a few other people,
> that this species might be mute.
It might be communicating
perhaps with incredible eloquence, perhaps even with
literary genius, by means of signs or--who
knows? Or for that matter it might
have taken a detour in its development such that
communication was not anything one could identify as
specifically human. All sentient beings
communicate, but it's possible that this particular species
could have taken a turn in its development after which
communication was much as it is among mice or ants or whatever.
All of this is possible,
you see, when we think about language--a property that we
have and manipulate and communicate
with--anthropologically. It comes into being in such a
way that it is, I would think,
scarcely relevant to say that its purpose is for
communication. It comes into being simply as
an attribute, a property, something we happen
to have, something someone happens to
have for which a use is then discovered,
as for fire, for the prehensile thumb and
for the cave. The relationship between the
cave and the house, it seems to me,
is a particularly interesting way of thinking about the
relationship between language as a set of differentials and
language as speech. Notice something about the
signs of language--and here of course we also invoke Saussure.
Saussure lays every stress on
the idea that language is made up of differential and arbitrary
signs. In other words,
Saussure denies that there is such a thing in language as a
natural sign. The Russian formalists do this
as well. Both Saussure and the Russian
formalists warn us against believing that onomatopoetic
devices-- for example,
"peep, peep, peep"--devices like that,
are actually natural signs, that they are derived,
in other words, from the thing in the world
that they seem through their sound to represent.
Saussure reminds us that these
are accidents of etymological history which can also be
understood in adaptive terms. Onomatopoeia exists in language
because it's good for communication and it's fun to
communicate with, but it doesn't enter language
as a natural sign. It only passes through
moments--in the evolution of a given word--
it only passes through moments in which the relationship
between the sound and the thing represented seems to be natural.
This is a matter upon which
great stress is laid both in Saussure and in the Russian
formalists. When you read these passages in
which such stress is laid on it you may have thought:
well, that's overkill. Who cares about onomatopoeia?
Well, it anchors the entire
idea about language, which is precisely that it is
something other than speech. When we speak,
we not only endeavor to communicate;
we endeavor to refer. In other words,
we take language and we try to make it, as the philosophers
say, hook on to the natural world.
We take a set of signs,
a code which is not in itself natural,
which is arbitrary, and through the sheer force of
will, we make those signs as best we
can hook on to the natural, to the actual world.
In doing so,
we reinforce the idea that language is for
communication--whereas my argument is language isn't for
communication; speech is.
When we speak,
that is--entirely and exclusively and without any
other motive-- for communication,
except for one thing that the Russian formalists in particular
took note of. There are funny things going on
in our speech-- alliteration,
unnecessary or uneconomical forms of repetition--
weird things going on in our speech which don't seem to have
the purpose of communication. As a matter of fact,
they actually seem to impede communication.
When I really start messing
language up-- for example,
in Lewis Carroll's "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves /
did gyre and gimble in the wabe"--
I am impeding communication because I am laying stress on
elements of rhythm, pattern, and sound recurrence
which cannot be said to have any direct bearing on communication.
This, of course,
is what we've studied recurrently and,
I have to say, empirically
> because these are all empirical
facts about language, as the Russian formalists
insisted. What we have studied
recurrently is the way in which language rears its ugly head in
speech, the way in which,
in other words, language won't be repressed as
mere communication, the way in which speech entails
elements that keep bubbling up to the surface and asserting
themselves, which oddly enough really can't
be said to conduce to communication.
Those things,
those elements that bubble up to the surface,
are nothing other than evidence of the presence of language,
precisely in the way that in Freud the Freudian slip--
the fact that I can't get through a sentence without
making some kind of blunder, very often an embarrassing
blunder-- is understood as the bubbling
up into the conscious effort to speak of that which speech can't
control, of that which Freud calls
"the unconscious" and which,
by the way, we would have no idea of the existence of if it
weren't for the Freudian slip. In other words,
as Freud said in the first handout that I gave you at the
beginning of the semester, we infer the unconscious from
the behavior of consciousness because,
given the erratic nature of the behavior of consciousness,
it seems necessary to do so. By precisely the same token,
we can and, I think we should say,
we do infer language as something else from the
composite or sum total of speech acts.
We infer language from the
erratic behavior of speech because it seems there is no
other way to account for the erratic behavior of speech.
That sense of language,
which I'm going to be talking a lot more about on Thursday,
sort of bubbling up and from below in speech,
and proving its existence as something other than a composite
record of all speeches, is what suggests to us that
Knapp and Michaels are not quite right in saying there is really
no difference between language and speech;
that if there is a difference between language and speech,
as I am claiming, and if the difference between
language and speech is much as we have been taught to think of
it by Saussure and his successors down through
deconstruction-- if there is such a difference,
then guess what? We have literary theory back in
the fold, alive and well,
and we no longer have to say that it should be jettisoned
from our thinking about literature.
We have a real use for literary
theory. But that's exactly where Knapp
and Michaels, supposing they were here and
I'd convinced them--by the way, I know them both.
You can't convince them of
anything, but that's not unusual.
You probably can't convince me
of anything either--suppose we had them here and I had
succeeded in convincing them. They would say,
"Well, okay, but isn't it a pity?
Because you have proved better
than we did that literary theory has no purpose.
Why on earth should we worry
about all this bubbling up of stuff that has nothing to do
with communication? After all, we're here to
communicate, aren't we? We've begun by saying that our
life world consists precisely in the deployment of language for
communication, and here is this person saying
there is this stuff bubbling up, which makes communication
difficult. What use is that?"
Knapp and Michaels might say.
You see, they are pragmatists,
aren't they? They are pragmatists,
or they are concerned with practicality.
Their interest,
their reason for being interested in meaning and
interpretation, is a practical reason entirely
entailed in the understanding of communication and the
furtherance of communication; whereas theory,
which I have saved, I nevertheless seem to have
saved at a pretty considerable cost because I have suggested
that theory itself is completely impractical.
I have suggested it,
and we're going to get back to that next time.
That's what the Thursday
lecture is going to be about. In the meantime you say to
yourself, "Okay, fine.
We've got theory,
but we have also been shown that you can't really do
anything with it, and so it might just as well
suit us to suppose that Knapp and Michaels are right and to
proceed as though theory could be jettisoned."
One last quick point,
going back to the distinction between meaning and intention:
notice the two-pronged argument.
On the one hand,
there are people like E.D. Hirsch who believe that
you can invoke an author's intention in order to pin down a
meaning-- on the one hand,
you have people like that and, on the other hand,
you have people doing deconstruction who say that
because there is no inferable intention,
texts themselves have no meaning.
But that's not quite
right, because that's not really what
deconstruction says. Deconstruction doesn't say
texts have no meaning. Deconstruction doesn't even say
that you can't know what the meaning of a text is,
exactly. What deconstruction says is
that you can't rope off meaning in a text.
Texts have too much meaning.
Texts explode with meaning.
You can't corral the way in
which texts produce meaning. You can't corral it by
inferring an intention. You can't corral it by taking a
particular interpretive path. Meaning just explodes in texts.
That's not at all the same
thing as to say, according to the claim of Knapp
and Michaels, that in deconstructive thinking
texts have no meaning-- a very, very different
proposition altogether. I think it might suggest to you
that the relationship between intention and meaning isn't
really what's at stake in deconstruction.
A text is intended,
or you can say, "Well, it may be intended,
no doubt it's intended"-- all sorts of ways of putting
it, but is that really the point?
The text is the text on
my view, and the text, just as I say,
fairly bristles with meaning, that being precisely the point.
You can't rein it in.
That's not really the flip
side--as Knapp and Michaels would want to make you
think–that's not really the flip side of the idea of the
followers of Hirsch that in order to know a meaning,
you have to be able to infer an authorial intention.
There is no symmetry
there and, as I say, I'm not sure that
deconstruction, whatever its claims,
whatever its perfections and imperfections--
I am not sure that really deconstruction has the question
of intention in relation to meaning very much at heart one
way or another. Sorry to have kept you.
We'll see you Thursday.
