Critical Theory Since 1965

Obiectiuity,ValueJudgment,and Theory Choice that, whatever their initial source, the criteria or values deployed in theory choice are fixed once and for all, unaffected by their participation in transitions from one theory to another. Roughly speakirg, but only very roughlS I take that to be the case. If the list of relevant values is kept short (I have mentioned five, not all independent) and if their specification is left vague, then such values as accuracy, scope, and fruitfulness are permanent attributes of science.But little knowledg. of history is required to suggest that both the application of thesevaluesand, more obviously,the relativeweights attached to them have varied markedly with time and also with the field of application. Furthermore, many of these variations in value have been associated with particular changes in scientific theory. Though the experience of scientists provides no philosophical justification for the values they deploy (such justification would solve the problem of induction), those values are in part learned from that experience, and they evolve with it. The whole subject needs more study (historians have usually taken scientific values, though not scientific methods, for granted), but a few remarks will illustrate the sort of variations I have in mind. Accuracy, as a value, has with time increasingly denoted quantitative or numerical agreement, sometimes at the expense of qualitative. Before early modern times, however, accuracy in that sensewas a criterion only for astronomy, the scienceof the celestial region. Elsewhereit was neither expected nor sought. During the seventeenthcentury, however, the criterion of numerical agreement was extended to mechanics,during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to chemistry and such other subjects as electricity and heat, and in this century to many parts of biology. Or think of utilitR an item of value not on my initial list. It too has figured significantly in scientific development, but far more strongly and steadily for chemists than for, say, mathematicians and physicists. Or consider scope. It is still an important scientific value, but important scientific advances have repeatedly been achievedat its expense,and the weight attributed to it at times of choice has diminished correspondingly. \7hat may seem particularly troublesome about changeslike these is, of course, that they ordinarily occur in the aftermath of a theory change. One of the objections to Lavoisier's new chemistry was the roadblocks with which it confronted the achievement of what had previously been one of chemistry's

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traditional goals: the explanation of qualities, such as color and texture, 4s well as of their changes. lil7ith the acceptance of Lavoisier's theory such explanations ceased for some time to be a value for chemists; the ability to explain qualitative variation was no long er a criterion relevant to the evaluation of chemical theory. Clearly, if such value changes had occurred as rapidly or been as complete as the theory changes to which they related, then theory choice would be value choice, and neither could provide justification for the other. But, historically, value change is ordinarily a belated and largely unconscious concomitant of theory choice, and the former's magnitude is regularly smaller than the latter's. For the functions I have here ascribedto values, such relative stability provides a sufficient basis. The existence of a feedback loop through which theory change affects the values which led to that change does not make the decision processcircular in any damaging sense. About a second respectin which my resort to tradition may be misleading, I must be far more tentative. It demands the skills of an ordinary language philosopher, which I do not possess.Still, no very acute ear for language is required to generate discomfort with the ways in which the terms "objectivity" and, more especiallS "subjectivity" have functioned in this paper. Let me briefly suggest the respectsin which I believelanguagehas gone astray. "subjective" is a term with severalestablisheduses: in one of these it is opposed to "obiective," in another to "judgmental." V/hen my critics describe the idiosyncratic features to which I appeal as subiective, they resort, erroneously I think, to the second of these senses.\7hen they complain that I deprive scienceof objectivity, they conflate that second senseof subjectivewith the first. A standard application of the term "subiective" is to matters of taste, and my critics appear to suppose that that is what I have made of theory choice. But they are missing a distinction standard since Kant when they do so. Like sensation reports, which are also subjective in the sensenow at issue, matters of taste are undiscussable. Suppose that, leaving a movie theater with a friend after seeing a western, I exclaim: "How I liked that terrible potboiler!" My friend, if he disliked the film, mzy tell me I have low tastes,a matter about which, in thesecircumstances, I would readily agree. But, short of saying that I lied, he cannot disagreewith my report that I liked the film or try to persuade me that what I said

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about my reaction was wrong. til(rhatis discussable in my remark is not my cha racterrzation of my internal state, my exemplification of taste, but rather my iudgment that the film was a potboiler. Should my friend disagreeon that point, we may argue most of the night, each comparing the film with good or great ones we have seen, each revealing, implicitly or explicitly, something about how he iudges cinematic merit, about his aesthetic.Though one of us may, before retiring, have persuaded the other, he need not have done so to demonstrate that our differenceis one of judgment, not taste. Evaluations or choicesof theory have, I think, exactly this characrer. Not that scientists never say merelS I like such and such a theory, or I do nor. After 19z6 Einstein said little more than that about his opposition to the quanrum theory. But scientists may always be asked to explain their choices,to exhibit the basesfor their judgments. Such judgments are eminently discussable,and the man who refuses to discuss his own cannot expect to be taken seriously. Though there arq very occasionally, leaders of scientific taste, their existencetends to prove the rule. Einstein was one of the f.rv, and his increasing isolation from the scientific community in later life shows how very limited a role taste alone can play in theory choice. Bohr, unlike Einstein, did discuss the basesfor his judgmenr, and he carried the day.rf my critics introduce the term "subjective" in a sense that opposesit to judgmenral-thus suggesringthat I make theory choice undiscussable, a maffer of fssfs-they have seriously mistaken my position. Turn now to the sensein which "subjectivity" is opposed to "objectivity," and note first that it raises issues quite separate from those just discussed. tU7hethermy taste is low or refined, my report that I liked the film is objective unless I have lied. To -y iudgment that the film was a potboiler, however, rhe objective-subjective distinction does nor apply at all, at least not obviously and directly. when my critics say I deprive theory choice of objectiviry, they must, therefore, have recourse to some very different senseof subjective, presumably the one in which bias and personal likes or dislikes function instead of, or in the face of, the actual facts. But that sense of subjective does nor fit the process I have been describing any better than the first. 's7here factors dependent on individual biography or personaliry must be introduced to make values applicable, no standards of factuality or acualitv

are being set aside. Conceivably my discussion of theory choice indicates some limitations of objectivity, but nor by isolating elemenrsproperly called subjective.Nor am I even quite content with the notion that what I have been displaying are limitations. objectivity ought to be analyzablein terms of criteria like accuracy and consistency.If these criteria do not supply all the guidance that we have customarily expectedof them, then it may be the meaning rather than the limits of objectiviry that my argument shows. Turn, in conclusion, to a third respect, or set of respects,in which this paper needs to be recasr. I have assumed throughout that the discussionssurrounding theory choice are unproblematic, that the facts appealed to in such discussionsare independent of theory, and that the discussions'outcome is appropriately called a choice. Elsewhere I have challenged all three of these assumptions, arguing that communication between proponents of different theories is inevitably partial, that what each takes to be facts depends in parr on the theory he espouses,and that an individual's transfer of allegiance from theory to theory is often better described as conversion than as choice. Though all these theses are problematic as well as controversial, my commirmenr to them is undiminished. I shall not now defend them, but must at least attempt to indicate how what I have said here can be adiusted to conform with these more central aspects of my view of scientific development. For that purpose I resort to an analogy I have developed in other places.Proponenrsof different theories are, I have claimed, like native speakersof different languages. communication between them goes on by translation, and it raisesall translation's familiar difficulties. That analogy is, of course, incomplete, for the vocabulary of the two theories may be identical, and most words function in the same ways in both. But some words in the basic as well as in the theorerical vocabularies of the two theories-words like "star" and "planetr" "mixture" and "compoundr" or "force" and "matte1"do function differently. Those differences are unexpected and will be discovered and localized, if at all, only by repeated experience of communication breakdown. r7ithout pursuing the matter further, I simply assert the existence of significant limits to what the proponents of different theories can communicate to one another. The same limits make it

Objectiuity, Value Judgment, and Theory Cboice difficult or, more likelS impossible for an individual to hold both theories in mind together and compare them point by point with each other and with nature. That sort of comparison is, however, the processon which the appropriatenessof any word like "choice" depends. Nevertheless,despite the incompletenessof their communication, proponents of different theories can exhibit to each other, not always easilS the concrete technical results achievable by those who practice within each theory. Little or no translation is required to apply at least some value criteria to those results. (Accuracy and fruitfulness are most immediately applicable, perhaps followed by scope. Consistency and simplicity are far more problematic.) However incomprehensible the new theory may be to the proponents of tradition, the exhibit of impressive concrete results will persuade at least a few of them that they must discover how such re-

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sults are achieved.For that purpose they must learn to translate, perhaps by treating already published papers as a Rosetta stone or, often more effective, by visiting the innovator, talking with him, watching him and his students at work. Those exposures may not result in the adopdon of the theory; some advocatesof the tradition may return home and attempt to adiust the old theory to produce equivalent results. But others, if the new theory is to survive, will find that at some point in the languagelearning process they have ceasedto translate and begun instead to speak the language like a native. No process quite like choice has occurred, but they are practicing the new theory nonetheless.Furthermore, the factors that have led them to risk the conversion they have undergone are iust the ones this paper has underscored in discussing a somewhat different process, one which, following the philosophical tradition, it has labelled theory choice.

HrydenV/hite b. r9z8

AYDENWurtB's essayincluded here provides another example of what Clifford Geerfe describesas "Blurred Genres"-6[4t is, the recognition

in one disciplineof a cognitiveneedfor or affinity with another discipline,in the absenceof any settledor establishedway of making the link. This is not readily describableunder the notion of "interdisciplinary" studies,much in favor with researchfoundationsduring the past two decades,sincethe actual nature of the need or affinity more often bespeaksa need to transform or re-form the discipline one professes,not simply marry it to another.The dilemma, as W'hitedescribesit, is a classicdoublebind: if one wishesto reviewone'sdiscipline,one way to do so is to considerits history; but when the discipline is historS either the practitioner is already committed to a particular way of doing it so as to be partially disqualifiedfor the job or else,if the reviewer is nor a historian (and hencenot biased),he is bound to be an incompetentjudgeof what matters. In this essay,as elsewhere,uflhite describesmetahistoryas a critical enterprise wherein the historian addressesreflectivequestionsabout the writing of history itself. As a metalanguagerequires a set of terms to characterizethe language itself, so metahistory as white conceivesit usesterms from literary criticism, particularly termspertaining to narrativeform or "emplotment" in writing history. Both in this essayand in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-centuryEurope (t97), white employsa theory of fictionsderived from Northrop Fryet Anatomy of Criticism Ggsil, together with a theory of figuresderivedfrom GiambattisraVico (CTSP,pp. 293-3or) asa metalanguage to designatethe typesof emplotmenta historian might choose. I7hite arguesthat all historical writing, as narrative, dependson a "nonnegatableitem," the form of the narrative itself, and, further, that the storiesof history are understandableby virtue of their relianceon fictive forms. From the materialsof the simplechronicle,as a seriesof events,a setof facts,the historian providesexplanationsonly by providing formal coherence:the story that is to say is neversimply there in the facts but must be created.Suchpresumablyelementary matters as what eventswill be consideredas "causes" and which as "effects" dependpreciselyon how the eventsare emplotted,just as the mode in which the resulting history will be understood (e.g.,as a comedy,tragedy,romance,or satire)depends,among other things, on the structure of the plot. 'Sfhite ln Metahistory documentsin detail how such formal determinations affected the writing of history in the nineteenth century and concludesthe presentessaywith his observationthat "history as a discipline is in bad shape today becauseit has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination." \fhile 394

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one could reversethe terms,to saythat literary criticism is in bad shapebecause it has lost sight of its origins in the historical imagination,the risk in either case is the assumptionthat someoneelse'shouseis in better order than one'sown. In this particular case,the issuemight be differently posed by noting that'W'hite's adoption of a formalist accountof narrative, energizingthough it may be, falls short of accountingfor different functions servedby narrative forms. The traditional question, posed repeatedlysince Aristotle, of the differencein function between"history" and "poetr5" might well be replacedby a differentsetof functional questions,pertaining, for example, to the function of narrative forms wherever they appear-a question by no meansresolvedin the rather messy mansionsof literarv criticism. 'White's major works include Metahistory: The Historical lmagination Nineteenth-CenturyEurope GgZl) and The Tropics of Discourse: Essays Cultural Criticism (tgz8).

THE HISTORICAL TE,XTASLITERARY ARTIFACT' One of the ways that a scholarly field takes stock of itself is by considering its history. Yet it is difficult to get an obf ective history of a schol arly discipline, because if the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or another of its THE HrsroRrcAl

TExr

AS LTTERARy ARTTFACT was

first

publishedin Clio 3, ro. I GgZd, reprinted in TheTropics of Discourse: Essaysin Cultural Criticism. Reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press, copyright 1978. l This essayis a revised version of a lecture given before the Comparative Literature Colloquium of Yale Universiry on z4 January 1974. In it I have tried to elaborate some of the themes that I originally discussed in an article, "The Structure of Historical Narrative," Clio r (1972)z j-zo.I have also drawn upon the materials of my book Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore, rgT j), especially the introduction, entitled "The Poeticsof History." The essayprofited from conversations with Michael Holquist and Geoffrey Hartman, both of Yale University and both experts in the theory of narrative. The quotations from Claude L6vi-Strauss are taken from his Sauage Mind (London, ry66) and "Overture to Le Cru et le cuit," rn Structuralism, ed. Jacques Ehrmann (New York, ry66). The remarks on the iconic nature of metaphor draw upon Paul Henle, Language, Thougbt, and Culture. (Ann Arbor, ry66). Jakobson's notions of the tropological nature

sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant eventsof the field's development. One might think that these difficulties would not arise in the field of history itself, but they do and not only for the reasonsmentioned above. In order to write the history of any given scholarly discipline or even of a science, one must be prepared to ask questions about it of a sort that do not have to be asked in the practice of rt. One must try to get behind or beneath the presuppositions which sustain a given rype of inquiry and ask the questions that can be begged in its practice in the interest of determining why this type of inquiry has been designedto solve the problems it characteristicallytries to solve. This is what metahistory seeksto do. It addressesitself to such questions as, \(/hat is the structure of a peculiarly historical consciousness? What is the epistemological status of historical explanations, as compared with other kinds of explanations that might be offered to account for the materials with which historians ordinarily deal ? What are the possible forms of historical representation and what -. tr "Linguisticsand Poetics,"in Styleand Lan"f "/. ed. Thomas A. Sebeok(New York and London, guage, ry6o).In addition to Northrop Frye'sAnatomy of Criticism (Princeton,r 957),seealsohis essayon philosophy of history,"New Directionsfrom Old," in Fablesof ldentity (New York, r96j). On story and plot in historical narrativein R. G. Collingwood'sthought,see,of course, The Idea of History (Oxford, r 9 j6).[Au.]

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are their bases? \7hat aurhority can historical accounts claim as contributions to a secured knowledge of reality in general and to the human sciences in particular? Now, many of thesequestions have been dealt with quite competently over the last quarter-century by philosophers concerned to define history's relarionships to other disciplines, especially the physical and social sciences,and by historians interested in assessingthe successof their discipline in mapping the past and determining the relationship of that past to the present. But there is one problem that neither philosophers nor historians have looked at very seriously and to which literary theorists have given only passing attention. This question has to do with the status of the historical narrative, considered purely as a verbal artifact purporting to be a model of structures and processeslong past and therefore not subject to either experimental or observational controls. This is not to say that historians and philosophers of history have failed to take notice of the essentiallyprovisional and contingent nature of historical representationsand of their susceptibility to infinite revision in the light of new evidence or more sophisticated concep tualization of problems. one of the marks of a good professional historian is the consistencywith which he reminds his readers of the purely provisional nature of his characterizations of events, agents, and agencies found in the always incomplete historical record. Nor is it to say that literary theorists have neuer studied the structure of historical narratives. But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much inuented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences. Now, it is obvious that this conflation of mythic and historical consciousnesswill offend some historians and disturb those literary theorists whose conception of literature presupposes a radical opposition of history to ficiion oi of factto fancy. A, Northrop Frye has remark€d,t "In a sensethe historical is the opposite of the mythical, and to tell the historian that what gives shape to his book is a myth would sound to him vaguely insulting." Yet 2See,"New Directionsfrom Old," in Fablesof ldentity. [Eds.]

Frye himself grants that "when a historian's scheme gets to a certain point of comprehensivenessit becomes mythical in shape,and so approachesthe poetic in its structure." He even speaks of different kinds of historical myths: Romantic myths "based on a quest or pilgrimage to a City of God or classless society" l Comic "myths of progress through evolution or revolution"; Tragic myths of "decline and fall, like the works of Gibbon and Spengler"; and Ironic "myths of recurrenceor casual catastrophe." But Frye appears to believe that these myths are operative only in such victims of what might be called the "poetic fallacy" as Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sartre-historians whose fascination with the "constructive" capaciry of human thought has deadenedtheir responsibiliry to the "found" data. "The historian works inductivelR" he says, "collecting his facts and trying to avoid any informing patterns except those he sees, or is honestly convinced he sees,in the facts themselves." He does not work "from" a "unifying formr" as the poet does, but "toward" it; and it therefore follows that the historian, like any writer of discursiveprose, is to be judged "by the truth of what he says, or by the adequacy of his verbal reproduction of his external model," whether that external model be the actions of past men or the historian's own thought about such actions. \7hat Frye says is true enough as a statement of the ideal that has inspired historical writing since the time of the Greeks, but that ideal presupposes an opposition berween myrh and history that is as problematical as it is venerable.It servesFrye's purposes very well, since it permits him to locate the specifically "fictive" in the space between the two concepts of the "mythic" and the "historical." As readers of Frye's Anatomy of Criticism will remember, Frye conceivesfictions to consist in part of sublimates of archetypal myth-structures. These structures have been displaced to the interior of verbal artifacts in such a way as to serve as their latent meanings. The fundamental meanings of all fictions, their thematic content, consist, in Frye's view, of the "pre-generic plot-structures" or mythoi derived from the corpora of Classical and JudaeoChristian religious literature. According to this theory, we understand why a particular story has "turned out" as it has when we have identified the archetypal myth, or pregeneric plot structure, of which the story is an exemplification. And we see

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact the "point" of a story when we have identified its theme (Frye's translation of dianoia), which makes of it a"parable or illustrative fable." "Every work of literatur€r" Frye insists, "has both a fictional and a thematic aspectr" but as we move from "fictional projection" toward the overt articulation of theme, the writing tends to take on the aspect of "direct address, or straight discursive writing and cease[s] to be literature." And in Frye's view, as we have seen,history (or at least "proper history" ) belongs to the category of "discursive writingr" so that when the fictional element-or mythic plot structure-is obuiously present in it, it ceasesto be history altogether and becomesa bastard genre, product of an unholy, though not unnatural, union between history and poetry. Yet, I would argue, histories gain part of their explanatory effect by their successin making stories out of mere chronicles; and stories in turn are made out of chronicles by an operation which I have elsewhere called "emplotment." And by emplotment I mean simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggestedis the casewith "fictions" in general. The late R. G. Collingwood insisted that the historian was above all a story teller and suggested that historical sensibility was manifested in the capacity to make a plausible story out of a congeries of "facts" which, in their unprocessedform, made no sense at all. In their efforts to make senseof the historical record, which is fragmentary and always incomplete, historians have to make use of what Collingwood' called "the constructive imagination," which told the historian-as it tells the competent detective-what "must have been the case" given the available evidence and the formal properties it displayed to the consciousnesscapable of putting the right question to it. This constructive imagination functions in much the same way that Kant supposed the a priori imaginarion functions when it tells us that even though we cannot perceive both sides of a tabletop simultaneouslS we can be certain it has two sides if it has one, because the very concept of one side entails at least one other. Collingwood suggestedthat historians come to their evidenceendowed with a senseof the possible forms that different kinds of reco gnizably human situa3SeeCollingwood,The ldea of History. [Eds.]

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tions cnn take. He called this sensethe nose for the "story" contained in the evidence or for the "true" story that was buried in or hidden behind rhe "apparent" story. And he concluded that historians provide plausible explanations for bodies of historical evidence when they succeed in discovering the story or complex of srories implicitly contained within them. 'S(rhat Collingwood failed to seewas that no given set of casually recorded historical evenrscan in itself constitute a story; the most it might offer to the historian are story elements. The events are mAde into a story by the suppressionor subordination of certain of them and the highlighting of others, by charactenzation, motific repetition, variation of tone and point of vieq alternative descriptive strategies, and the like-in short, all of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of a novel or a play. For example, no historical event is intrinsically tragic; it can only be conceived as such from a particular point of view or from within the context of a structured set of events of which it is an element enjoying a privileged place. For in history what is tragic from one perspective is comic from another, iust as in society what appearsto be tragic from the standpoint of one class may be, as Marx purported to show of the r 8th Brumaire of Louis Buonap artera only a farce from that of another class. Considered as potential elements of a story, historical events are value-neutral. Ifhether they find their place finally in a story that is tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic-to use Frye's categories-depends upon the historian's decision to configure them according to the imperatives of one plot structure or mythos rather than another. The same set of events can serve as components of a story that is tragic or comic, as the case may be, depending on the historian's choice of the plot structure that he considers most appropriate for ordering events of that kind so as to make them into a comprehensible story. This suggeststhat what the historian brings to his aseeKarl Marx, The EighteenthBrumaire of Louis Bonaparte(r 8Sz), in Surueys from Exile (New York, r97), the source of Marx's celebratedremark, "Hegel remarks somewherethat all the great eventsand charactersof world historyoccur,so to speak,twice.He forgot to add: the first time as tragedSthe secondas farcei' (p. t+6). (The generalscholarlyopinion is that it was Engels,not Hegel,who first madethe provocativeremark in a letter to Marx, December 3, r85 r.) [Eds.J

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consideration of the historical record is a notion of the types of configurations of events that can be recognized as stories by the audience for which he is writing. True, he can misfire. I do not suppose that anyone would accept the emplotment of the life of President Kennedy as comedy, but whether it ought to be emplotted romanticall5 tragically, or satirically is an open question. The important point is that most historical sequencescan be emplotted in a number of different ways, so as to provide different interpretations of those events and to endow them with different meanings. Thus, for example, what Michelets in his great history of the French Revolution construed as a drama of Romantic transcendence, his contemporary Tocquevillet emplotted as an ironic Tragedy. Neither can be said to have had more knowledg. of the "facts" contained in the record; they simply had different notions of the kind of story that best fitted the facts they knew. Nor should it be thought that they told different stories of the Revolution because they had discovered different kinds of facts, political on the one hand, social on the other. They sought out different kinds of facts because they had different kinds of stories to tell. But why did these alternative, not to say mutually exclusive,representationsof what was substantially the same set of events appear equally plausible to their respective audiences? Simply because the historians shared with their audiences certain preconceptions about how the Revolution might be emplotted, in responseto imperatives that were generally extra historical, ideological, aesthetic, or mythical. Collingwood once remarked that you could never explicate a tragedy to anyone who was not already acquainted with the kinds of situations that are regarded as "tragic" in our culture. Anyone who has taught or taken one of those omnibus courses usually entitled'Western Civilizatron or Introduction to 'Western the Classics of Literature will know what Collingwood had in mind. Unless you have some idea of the generic attributes of tragic, comic, romantic, or ironic situations, you will be unable to sJulesMichelet (tZ g8- r 8Z Frenchhistorianandwriter, 4, author of the massive,multivolume Histoire de France ( r 8 lt - 6 t ) . [ E d s . ] 6Alexisde Tocqueville(r8o5-59), Frenchhistorianand politician, best known for his Democracyin America (t815-4o). The work referredto is L'AncienRdgimeet la rduolution(r 8S6). [Eds.]

recognize them as such when you come upon them in a literary text. But historical situations do not have built into them intrinsic meanings in the way that literature texts do. Historical situations are not inherently tragic, comic, or romantic. They may all be inherently ironic, but they need not be emplotted that way. All the historian needs to do to transform a tragic into a comic situation is to shift his point of view or change the scope of his perceptions. Aryway, we only think of situations as tragic or comic becausetheseconceptsare part of our generally cultural and specificallyliterary heritage. How a given historical situation is to be configured depends on the historian's subtlety in matching up a specific plot structure with the set of historical events that he wishes to endow with a meaning of a particular kind. This is essentiallya literary, that is to say fiction-making, operation. And to call it that in no way detracts from the status of historical narratives as providing a kind of knowledge. For not only are the pregeneric plot structures by which setsof events can be constituted as stories of a particular kind limited in number, as Frye and other archetypal critics suggest; but the encodation of events in terms of such plot structures is one of the ways that a culture has of making senseof both personal and public pasts. We can make senseof sets of events in a number of different ways. One of the ways is to subsume the events under the causal laws which may have governed their concatenation in order to produce the particular configuration that the events appear to assumewhen consideredas "effects" of mechanical forces. This is the way of scientific explanation. Another way we make senseof a set of events which appears strange, enigmatic, or mysterious in its immediate manifestations is to encode the set in terms of culturally provided categories, such as metaphysical concepts, religious beliefs, or story forms. The effect of such encodations is to familiarize the unfamiliar; and in general this is the way of historiography, whose "data" are always immediately strange, not to say exotic, simply by virtue of their distance from us in time and their origin in a way of life different from our own. The historian shares with his audience general notions of the forms that significant human situations must take by virtue of his participation in the specific processesof sense-making which identify him as a member of one cultural endowment rather

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact than another. In the process of studying a given complex of events, he begins to perceive the Possible story form that such events may figure. In his narrative account of how this set of events took on the shape which he perceivesto inhere within it, he emplots his account as a story of a particular kind. The reader, in the process of following the historian's account of those events, gradually comes to realize that the story he is reading is of one kind rather than another: romance, tragedR comedR satire, epic, or what have you. And when he has perceived the class or type to which the story that he is reading belongs, he experiencesthe effect of having the events in the story explained to him. He has at this point not only successfully followed the story; he has grasped the point of it, understood rt, as well. The original strangeness,mysterS or exoticism of the events is dispelled, and they take on a familiar aspect, not in their details, but in their functions as elements of a familiar kind of configuration. They are rendered comprehensibleby being subsumed under the categories of the plot structure in which they are encoded as a story of a particular kind. They are familiarized, not only because the reader now has mo re information about the events, but also becausehe has been shown how the data conform to an icon of a comprehensible finished process, a plot structure with which he is familiar as a part of his cultural endowment. This is not unlike what happens, or is supposed to happen, in psychotherapy. The sets of events in the patient's past which are the presumed cause of his distress, manifested in the neurotic syndrome, have been defamiliarized, rendered strang€, mysterious, and threatening and have assumeda meaning that he can neither accept nor effectively reject. It is not that the patient does not know what those events were, does not know the facts; for if he did not in some senseknow the facts, he would be unable to reco gnrzethem and repress them whenever they arise in his consciousness.On the contrary, he knows them all too well. He knows them so well, in fact, that he lives with them constantly and in such a way as to make it impossible for him to see any other facts except through the coloration that the set of events in question gives to his perception of 'We the world. might say that, according to the theory of psychoanalysis,the patient has overemplotted these events, has charged them with a meaning so intense that, whether real or merely imagined,

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they continue to shape both his perceptions and his responsesto the world lon g after they should have become "past history." The therapist's problem, then, is not to hold up before the patient the "real facts" of the matter, the "truth" as against the "fantasy" that obsesseshim. Nor is it to give him a short course in psychoanalytical theory by which to enlighten him as to the true nature of his distress by cataloguing it as a manifestation of some "complex." This is what the analyst might do in relating the patient's case to a third parfy, and especially to another analyst. But psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the patient will resist both of these tactics in the same way that he resists the intrusion into consciousnessof the traumatized memory traces in the form that he obsessivelyremembers them. The problem is to get the patient to "reemplot" his whole life history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their significance for the economy of the whole set of events that make up his life. As thus envisaged, the therapeutic processis an exercisein the refamiliarization of events that have been defamiliarized, rendered alienated from the patient's life-history, by virtue of their overdetermination as causal forces. And we might say that the eventsare detraumatized by being removed from the plot structure in which they have a dominant place and inserted in another in which they have a subordinate or simply ordinary function as elementsof a life sharedwith all other men. Now, I am not interested in forcing the analogy between psychotherapy and historiography; I use the example merely to illustrate a point about the fictive component in historical narratives. Historians seek to refamil rarize us with events which have been forgotten through either accident, neglect, or repression. Moreover, the greatest historians have always dealt with those eventsin the histories of their cultures which are "traumatic" in nature and the meaning of which is either problematical or overdetermined in the significance that they still have for current life, events such as revolutions, civil wars, large-scale processes such as industrialization and urbanization, or institutions which have lost their original function in a society but continue to play an important role on the current social scene. [n looking at the ways in which such structures took shape or evolved, historians refamiharrze them, not only by providing more information about them, but also by showing how

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their developments conformed to one or another of the story fypes that we conventionally invoke to make senseof our own life-histories. Now, if any of this is plausible as a charact errzation of the explanatory effect of historical narrative, it tells us something important about the mimetic aspect of historical narratives. It is generally maintained-as Frye said-that a history is a verbal model of a set of events external to the mind of the historian. But it is wrong to rhink of a history as a model similar to a scale model of an airplane or ship, a map, or a photograph. For we can check the adequacy of this latter kind of model by going and looking at the original and, by the necessary rules of translation, seeing"pplying in what respect the model has actually succeededin reproducing aspects of the original. But historical structures and processesare not like these originals; we cannot go and look at them in order to seeif the historian has adequately reproduced them in his narrative. Nor should we want to, even if we could; for after all it was the very strangeness of the original as it appeared in the documents that inspired the historian's efforts to make a model of it in the first place. If the historian only did that for us, we should be in the same situation as the patient whose analyst merely told him, on the basis of interviews with his parents, siblings, and childhood friends, what the "true facts" of the patient's early life were. We would have no reason to think that anything at all had been explained to us. This is what leads me to think that historical narratives are not only models of past events and processes,but also metaphorical statementswhich suggesta relation of similitude between such events and processesand the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings. Viewed in a purely formal way, a historical narrative is not only a reproduction of the events reported in it, but also a complex of symbols which gives us directions for finding an icon of the structure of those events in our literary tradition. I am here, of course, invoking the distinctions between sign, symbol, and icon which C. S. Peircet developed in his philosophy of language. I think that thesedistinctions will help us to understand what is fictive in all putatively realistic representations of TSee Peirce.

[Eds.]

the world and what is realistic in all manifestly fictive ones. They help us, in short, to answer the question, \7hat are historical representations representations of? It seems to me that we must say of histories what Frye seems to think is true only of poetry or philosophies of historS namely that, considered as a system of signs, the historical narrative points in fwo directions simultaneously: toward the events described in the narrative and toward the story fype or mythos which the historian has chosen to serve as the icon of the structure of the events. The narrative itself is not the icon; what it does is describe events in the historical record in such a way as to inform the rea der what to take as an icon of the eventsso as to render them "familiar" to him. The historical narrative thus mediates between the events reported in it on the one side and pregeneric plot structures conventionally used in our culture to endow unfamiliar eventsand situations with meanings, on the other. The evasion of the implications of the fictive nature of historical narrative is in part a consequence of the utility of the concepr "hisrory" for the definition of other fypes of discourse. "History" can be set over against "science" by virtue of its want of conceptual rigor and failure to produce the kinds of universal laws that the sciences characteristically seekto produce. Similarly, "history" can be set over against "literature" by virtue of its interest in the "actual" rather than the "possible," which is supposedly the object of representation of "literary" works. Thus, within a long and distinguished critical tradition that has sought to determine what is "real" and what is "imagined" in the novel, history has served as a kind of archefpe of the "realisdc" pole of representation.I am thinking of Frye, Auerbach, Booth, Scholesand Kellogg,t and orhers. Nor is it unusual for literary theorists, when they are speaking about the "context" of a literary work, to suppose that this context-the "historical milisu"-has a concretenessand an accessibilitythat the work itself can never have, as if it were easierto perceive the reality of a past world put together from a thousand historical documents than it is to probe the depths of a single literary work that is 8SeeErich Auerbach,Mimesis:The Representation of Re'Western ality in Literature (r968h Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction ft96t); and Robert Scholesand RobertKellogg,The Nature of Narratiue(196r). [Eds.]

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact present to the critic studying it. But the presumed concretenessand accessibility of historical milieux, rhese contexts of the texts that literary scholars studR are themselvesproducts of the fictive capability of the historians who have studied those contexts. The historical documents are not less opaque than the texts studied by the literary critic. Nor is the world those documents figure more accessible.The one is no more "given" than the other. In fact, the opaquenessof the world figured in historical documents is, if anything, increased by the production of historical narratives. Each new historical work only adds to the number of possible rexts that have to be interpreted if a full and accurate picture of a given historical milieu is to be faithfully drawn. The relationship between the past to be analyzed and historical works produced by analysis of the documents is paradoxical; the more we know about the past, the more difficult it is to generalize about it. But if the increase in our knowledg. of the pasr makes it more difficult to generalize about it, it should make it easier for us to generalize about the forms in which that knowledg. is transmitted to us. Our knowledg. of the past may increase incrementallR but our understanding of it does not. Nor does our understanding of the past progress by the kind of revolutionary breakthroughs that we associate with the development of the physical sciences.Like literature, history progresses by the production of classics,the nature of which is such that they cannot be disconfirmed or negated, in the way that the principal conceptual schemata of the sciences are. And it is their nondisconfirmability that testifies to the essentially literary nature of historical classics. There is something in a historical masterpiecethat cannot be negated,and this nonnegatableelement is its form, the form which is its fiction. It is frequently forgotten or, when remembered, denied that no given set of events amestedby the historical record comprises a story manifestly finished and complete. This is as true as the events that comprise the life of an individual as it is of an institu'We tion, a nation, or a whole people. do not liue stories, even if we give our lives meaning by retrospectively casting them in the form of stories. And so too with nations or whole cultures. In an essay on the "mythical" nature of historiographS L6viStrauss remarks on the astonishment that a visitor from another planet would feel if confronted by the thousands of histories written about the French

40r

Revolution.e For in those works, the "authors do not always make use of the same incidents; when they do, the incidents are revealed in different lights. And yet these are variations which have to do with the same country, the same period, and the same events-events whose reality is scattered across every level of a multilayered structure." He goes on to suggestthat the criterion of validiry by which historical accounts might be assessedcannot depend on their elemenls"-that is to say-their putative factual content. On the contrary, he notes, "putsued in isolation, each element shows itself to be beyond grasp. But certain of them derive consistency from the fact that they can be integrated into a system whose terms are more or lesscredible when set against the overall coherenceof the series." But his "coherence of the series" cannot be the coherenceof the chronological series, that sequence of "facts" organized into the temporal order of their original occurrence. For the "chronicle" of events, out of which the historian fashions his story of "what really happened," abeady comes preencoded. There are "hot" and "cold" chronologies, chronologies in which more or fewer dates appear to demand inclusion in a full chronicle of what happened. Moreover, the dates themselvescome to us already grouped into classesof dates,classeswhich are constitutive of putative domains of the historical field, domains which appear as problems for the historian to solve if he is to give a full and culturally responsible account of the past. All this suggeststo L6vi-Straussthat, when it is a matter of working up a comprehensive account of the various domains of the historical record in the form of a story, the "alleged historical continuities" that the historian purports to find in the record are "secured only by dint of fraudulent outlines" imposed by the historian on the record. These"fraudulent outlines" are, in his view, a product of "abstraction" and a means of escapefrom the "threat of an infinite regress" that always lurks at the interior of 'We every complex set of historical "facts." can construct a comprehensible story of the past, L6viStraussinsists, only by r decision to "give up" one or more of the domains of facts offering themselves for inclusion in our accounts. Our explanations of historical structures and processes are thus detereSeeL6vi-Strauss, "overture to Le Cru et le cuit" in Structuralism,pp. 33-55. [Eds.]

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mined more by what we leave out of our representations than by what we put in. For it is in this brutal capacity to exclude certain facts in the interest of constituting others as components of comprehensible stories that the historian displays his ract as well as his understanding. The "overall coherence" of any given "series" of historical facts is the coherence of storS but this coherenceis achieved only by a tailoring of the "facts" to the requirements of the story form. And thus L6vi-Strauss concludes: "[n spite of worthy and indispensable efforts to bring another moment in history alive and to possessit, a clairvoyant history should admit that it never completely escapesfrom the nature of myth." It is this mediative function that permits us ro speak of a historical narrative as an extended metaphor. As a symbolic structure, the historical narrative does not reproduce the events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges our thought about the events with different emotional valences. The historical narrative does not image the things it indicates; it calls to mind images of the things it indicates, in the same 'When way that a metaphor does. a given concourse of events is emplotted as a "tragedR" this simply means that the historian has so describedthe evenrs as to remind us of that form of fiction which we associate with the concept "tragic." Properly understood, histories ought never to be read as unambiguous signs of the events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that "liken" the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar in our literary culture. Perhaps I should indicate briefly what is meant by the symbolic and iconic aspects of a metaphor. The hackneyed phrase "My love, a rose" is not, obviously, intended to be understood as suggesring that the loved one is actually a rose. It is not even meant to suggestthat the loved one has the specific attributes of a rose-that is to say, that the loved one is red, yellow, orange, or black, is a plant, has thorns, needs sunlight, should be sprayed regularly with insecticides, and so on. It is meant to be understood as indicating that the beloved sharesthe qualities which the rose has come to symbolize in the customary linguistic usagesof Western culture. That is to say, considered as a messxge, the metaphor gives directions for finding an entity that will evoke the images associated with loued ones and

rosesalike in our culture. The metaphor does not image the thing it seeks to charact erize, it giues directions for finding the set of images that are intended to be associatedwith that thing. It functions as a symbol, rather than as a sign: which is to say that it does not give us either a description or an icon of the thing it represents, but tells us what images to look for in our culturally encoded experience in order to determine how we should feel about the thing represented. So too for historical narratives. They succeedin endowing sets of past events with meanings, over and above whatever comprehensionthey provide by appeal to putative causal laws, by exploiting the metaphorical similarities between sets of real events and the conventional structures of our fictions. By the very constitution of a set of events in such a way as to make a comprehensiblestory out of them, the historian charges those events with the symbolic significance of a comprehensible plot structure. Historians may not like to think of their works as translations of fact into fictions; but this is one of the effects of their works. By suggesting alternative emplotments of agiven sequenceof historical events, historians provide historical evenrs with all of the possible meanings with which the literary art of their culture is capable of endowing them. The real dispute between the proper historian and the philosopher of history has to do with the latter's insistence that events can be emplotted in one and only one story form. History-writing thrives on the discovery of all the possible plot structures that might be invoked to endow sets of events with different meanings. And our understanding of the past increasesprecisely in the degree to which we succeed in determining how far that past conforms ro the strategies of sense-making that are contained in their purest forms in litera ry art. Conceiving historical narratives in this way may give us some insight into the crisis in historical thinking which has been under way since the beginning of our century. Let us imagine that the problem of the historian is to make senseof a hypothetical set of events by arranging them in a series that is at once chronologically and syntactically structured, in the way that any discourse from a sentenceall the way up to a novel is structured. We can see immediately that the imperatives of chronological arrangement of the events constituting the set must exist in tension with the imperatives of the syntac-

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact tical strategies alluded to, whether the latter are conceived as those of logic (the syllogism) or those of narrative (the plot structure). Thus, we have a set of events (t)

d, b, c,d, e,.. ..

., /r,

ordered chronologically but requiring description and characterization as elements of plot or argument by which to give them meaning. Now, the series can be emplotted in a number of different ways and thereby endowed with different meanings without violating the imperatives of the chronological arrangement at all. \We may briefly characterrze some of these emplotments in the following ways:

.,n

(z)

A,b,c,d,e,

b) (+) (s)

d r B , c ,d , e , . . . . . . . . . r n .,n d,b,C,d,e, .rn drbrcrDre,

And so on. The capital rzed letters indicate the privileged status given to certain events or sets of events in the seriesby which they are endowed with explan atory force, either as causes explaining the structure of the whole series or as symbols of the plot structure of the series considered as a story of a specific kind. \il(remight say that any history which endows any putatively original event (a) with the status of a decisive factor (A) in the structuration of the whole seriesof events following aftet it is "deterministic." The emplotments of the history of "society" by Rousseau in his Second Discourse, Marx in the Manifesto, and Freud in Totem and Taboo would fall into this category. So too, any history which endows the last event in the series(e), whether real or only speculatively proiected, with the force of full explanatory power (E) is of the type of all eschatological or apocalyptical histories. St. Augustine's City of God and the various versions of the Joachite notion of the advent of a millenium, Hegel's Philosophy of History, and, in general, all Idealist histories are of this sort. In between we would have the various forms of historiography which appeal to plot structures of a distinctively "fictional" sort (Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire) by which to endow the series with a perceivable form and a conceivable"meaning." If the series were simply recorded in the order in

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which the events originally occurred, under the assumption that the ordering of the events in their temporal sequenceitself provided a kind of explanation of why they occurred when and where they did, we would have the pure form of the chronicle. This would be a "naive" form of chronicle, however, inasmuch as the categories of time and space alone served as the informing interpretative principles. Over against the naive form of chronicle we could postulate as a logical possibility its "sentimental" counterpart, the ironic denial that historical series have any kind of larger significance or describe any imaginable plot structure or indeed can even be construed as a story with a discernible beginning, 'We could conceive such accounts middle, and end. of history as intending to serve as antidotes to their false or overemplotted counterparts (nos. z) j, 4, and 5 above) and could represent them as an ironic return to mere chronicle as constituting the only sense which any cognitively responsible his'We could char acterize such histotory could take. ries thus: (6)

"d,brc,d,e

....,n

with the quotation marks indicating the conscious interpretation of the events as having nothing other than seriality as their meaning. This schemais of course highly abstract and does not do justice to the possible mixtures of and varrations within the types that it is meant to distinguish. But it helps us, I think, to conceive how events might be emplotted in different ways without violating the imperatives of the chronological order of the events (however they are construed) so as to yield alternative, mutually exclusive, and yet, equally plausible interpretations of the set. I have tried to show in Metahistory how such mixtures and variations occur in the writings of the master historians of the nineteenth century; and I have suggestedin that book that classic historical accounts always represent attempts both to emplot the historical series adequately and implicitly to come to terms with other plausible emplotments. It is this dialectical tension between two or more possible emplotments that signals the element of critical self-consciousness present in any historian of recognizably classical stature. Histories, then, are not only about events but also about the possible sets of relationships that

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those events can be demonstrated to figure. These sets of relationships are not, however, immanent in the events themselves;they exist only in the mind of the historian reflecting on them. Here they are present as the modes of relationships conceptualized in the myth, fable, and folklore, scientific knowledg., religion, and literary arr, of the historian's own culture. But more importantlyrthey arerl suggest, immanent in the very language which the historian must use to describe events prior to a scientific analysis of them or a fictional emplotment of them. For if the historian's aim is to familiarize us with the unfamiliar, h. must use figurative, rather than technical, language. Technical languages are familia rizing only ro those who have been indoctrinated in their uses and only o/ those sets of events which the practitioners of a discipline have agreed to describe in a uniform terminology. History possessesno such generally accepted technical terminology and in fact no agreement on what kind of events make up its specific subject matter. The historian's characteristic instrument of encodation, communication, and exchangeis ordinary educated speech. This implies that the only instruments that he has for endowing his data with meaning, of rendering the strange familiar, and of rendering the mysterious past comprehensible,are the techniques of figuratiue language. All historical narratives presuppose figurative characterizations of the events they purport to represent and explain. And this means that historic al narratives, considered purely as verbal artifacts, can be characterized by the mode of figurative discourse in which they are cast. If this is the case,then it may well be that the kind of emplotment that the historian decides to use to give meaning to a set of historical events is dictated by the dominant figurative mode of the language he has used to describe the elements of his accounr prior to his composition of a narrative. Geoffrey Hartman once remarked in my hearing, at a conference on literary history, that he was not sure that he knew what historians of literature might want to do, but he did know that ro write a history meant to place an event within a context, by relating it as a part to some conceivable whole. He went on to suggest that as far as he knew, there were only two ways of relating parts to wholes, by metonymy and by synecdoche.Having been engagedfor some time in the study of the thought of Giambattista Vico, I was much taken with this thought, because it con-

formed to Vico's notion that the "logic" of all "poetic wisdom" was contained in the relationships which language itself provided in the four principal modes of figurative representation: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche,and irony. My own hunchand it is a hunch which I find confirmed in Hegel's reflections on the nature of nonscientific discourseis that in any field of study which, like historS has not yet become disciplinized to the point of constructing a formal terminological system for describing its objects, in the way that physics and chemistry have, it is the rypes of figurative discourse that dictate the fundamental forms of the data to be studied. This means that the shape of the relationships which will appear ro be inherent in the objects inhabiting the field will in realiry have been imposed on the field by the investigator in the very act of identifying and describing the obiects that he finds there. The implication is that historia ns constitute their subjectsas possible objects of narrative representation by the very language they use to describe them. And if this is the case,ir means that the different kinds of historical interpretations that we have of the same set of events, such as the French Revolution as interprered by Michelet, Tocqueville, Taine, and others, are little more than projections of the linguistic prorocols that thesehistorians used to pre-frgure that set of events prior to writing their narratives of it. It is only a hypothesis, but it seems possible that the conviction of the historian that he has "found" the form of his narrative in the events themselves,rather than imposed it upon them, in the way the poet does, is a result of a certain lack of linguistic self-consciousness which obscuresthe extent to which descriptions of events already constitute interpretations of their nature. As thus envisaged, the difference berween Michelet's and Tocqueville's accounts of the Revolution does not reside only in the fact that the former emplotted his story in the modaliry of a Romance and the latter his in the modaliry of tagedy; it residesas well in the tropological mode-metaphorical and metonymic, respectively-with each brought to his apprehension of the facts as they appeared in the documents. I do not have the space to try to demonstrate the plausibility of this hypothesis, which is the informing principle of my book Metahistory. But I hope that this essaymay serve to suggestan approach to the study of such discursive prose forms as histo-

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact riography, an approach that is as old as the study of rhetoric and as new as modern linguistics. Such a story would proceed along the lines laid out by Roman Jakobson in a paper entitled "Linguistics and Poeticsr"to in which he charact erized the difference between Romantic poetry and the various forms of nineteenth-centuryRealistic prose as residing in the essentially metaphorical nature of the former and the essentially metonymical nature of the latter. I think that this characterization of the difference between poetry and prose is too narro% because it presupposes that complex macrostructural narratives such as the novel are little more than proiections of the "selective" (i.e., phonemic) axis of all speechacts. PoetrS and especially Romantic poetry, is then characterizedby Jakobson as a projection of the "combinatory" (i.e., morphemic) axis of language. Such a binary theory pushes the analyst toward a dualistic opposition between poetry and prose which appears to rule out the possibility of a metonymical poetry and a metaphorical prose. But the fruitfulness of Jakobson's theory lies in its suggestion that the various forms of both poetry and prose, all of which have their counterparts in narrative in general and therefore in historiography too, can be char acterized in terms of the dominant trope which serves as the paradigm, provided by language itself, of all significant relationships conceived to exist in the world by anyone wishing to representthose relationships in language. Narrative, or the syntagmatic dispersion of events across a temporal series presented as a prose discourse, in such a way as to display their progressive elaboration as a comprehensibleform, would represent the "inward turn" that discoursetakes when it tries to show the reader the true form of things existing behind a merely apparent formlessness. Narrative style, in history as well as in the novel, would then be construed as the modality of the movement from a representation of some original state of affairs to some subsequent state. The primary meaning of a narrative would then consist of the destructuration of a set of events (real or imagined) originally encoded in one tropological mode and the progressiverestructuration of the set in another tropological mode. As thus envisaged, narrative would be a processof decodation and recodation in which an original perception is clarified by 'oSeeStyleand Language. [Eds.]

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being cast in a figurative mode different from that in which it has come encoded by convention, authorit5 or custom. And the explanatory force of the narrative would then depend on the contrast between the original encodation and the later one. For example, let us suppose that a set of experiencescomesto us as a grotesque,i.e., as unclassified and unclassifiable. Our problem is to identify the modaliry of the relationships that bind the discernible elements of the formless totality together in such a way as to make of it a whole of some sort. If we stressthe similarities among the elements,we are working in the mode of metaphor; if we stressthe differencesamong them, w€ are working in the mode of metonymy. Of course, in order to make senseof any set of experiences,we must obviously identify both the parts of a thing that appear to make it up and the nature of the shared aspectsof the parts that make them identifiable as a totality. This implies that all original charact errzations of anything must utilize both metaphor and metonymy in order to "fix" it as something about which we can meaningfully discourse. In the case of historiographR the attempts of commentators to make senseof the French Revolution are instructive. Burke decodesthe events of the Revolution which his contemporaries experienceas a grotesque by recoding it in the mode of irony; Michelet recodes these events in the mode of synecdoche; Tocqueville recodes them in the mode of metonymy. In each case, however, the movement from code to recode is narratively described, i.e., laid out on a time-line in such a way as to make the interpretation of the eventsthat made up the "Revolution" a kind of drama that we can recognizeas Satirical, Romantic, and Tragic, respectively. This drama can be followed by the reader of the narrative in such a way as to be experienced as a progressive revelation of what the true nature of the events consists of. The revelation is not experienced, however, as a restructuring of perception so much as an illumination of a field of occurrence.But actually what has happened is that a set of events originally encoded in one way is simply being decoded by being recoded in another. The events themselvesare not substantially changed from one account to another. That is to say, the data that are to be analyzed are not significantly different in the different accounts. rU7hatis different are the modalities of their relationships. These modalities, in turn,

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although they may appear to the reader to be based on different theories of the nature of society, politics, and historS ultimately have their origin in the figurative charact erizations of the whole set of events as representing wholes of fundamentally different sorts. It is for this reason that, when it is a matter of setting different interpretations of the same set of historical phenomena over againstone another in an attempt to decide which is the best or mosr convincing, we are often driven to confusion or ambiguiry. This is not ro say that we cannot distinguish between good and bad historiography, since we can always fall back on such criteria as responsibility to the rules of evidence,the relative fullness of narrative detail, logical consistencS and the like to determine this issue.But it is to say that the effort to distinguish between good and bad interpretations of a historical event such as the Revolution is not as easy as it might at first appear when it is a mafter of dealing with alternative interprerations produced by historians of relatively equal learning and conceptual sophistication. After all, a great historical classiccannot be disconfirmed or nullified either by the discovery of some new datum that might call a specific explanation of some element of the whole account into question or by the generation of new methods of analysis which permit us ro deal with questions that earlier historians might not have taken under consideration. And it is precisely because great historical classics, such as works by Gibbon, Michelet, Thucydides, Mommsen, Ranke, Burckhardt, Bancroftrtt and so on, cannot be definitely disconfirmed that we must look to the specifically literary aspects of their work as crucial, and not merely subsididty, elements in their historiographical technique. what all this points to is the necessiryof revising the distinction conventionally drawn berween poetic and prose discourse in discussion of such narrative forms as historiography and recogni zingthat the distinction, as old as Aristotle, between his1rEdwardGibbon GZ37- 94, Englishhistorian,authorof Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (tZZ6-gg); Michelet,seenote 5 above;Thucydides(ca. 46o-400 B.c.), Greek historian, author of The Peloponnesian 'War; TheodorMommsen(r8ry-rgoil, Germanhistorian, author of History of Rome (18S+-56); Hubert Howe Bancroft(r8 i'z-r9r8), Americanhistorian,author of a 39-volumehistoryof centralAmerica,Mexico, and the westernUnitedStates(t8Z+-9o). tEds.l

tory and poetry obscures as much as it illuminates about both. If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there is an element of poetry in every historical account of the world. And this because in our account of the historical world we are dependent, in ways perhaps that we are not in the natural sciences, on the techniques of figuratiue language both for our characterization of the objects of our narrative representations and for the strategies by which to constitute narrative accounts of the transformations of those objects in time. And this because history has no stipulatable subject matter uniquely its own; it is always written as part of a contest between contending poetic figurations of what the past might consist of. The older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the represenration of the actual, must give place to the recognition that we can only know the actual by conrrasting it with or likening it to the imaginable. As thus conceived, historical narratives are complex structures in which a world of experienceis imagined to exist under at least two modes, one of which is encodedas "real," the other of which is "revealed" to have been illusory in the course of the narrative. of course, it is a fiction of the historian that the various staresof affairs which he constitures as the beginning, the middle, and the end of a course of development are all "actual" or "real" and that he has merely recorded "what happened" in the transition from the inaugural to the terminal phase.But both the beginning state of affairs and the ending one are inevitably poetic constructions, and as such, dependent upon the modality of the figurative languageused to give them the aspectof coherence.This implies that all narrative is not simply a recording of "what happened" in the transition from one state of affairs to another, but a progressive redescription of sets of eventsin such a way as to dismantle a structure encoded in one verbal mode in the beginning so as to iustify ^ recoding of it in another mode at the end. This is what the "middle" of all narratives consist of. All of this is highly schematic, and I know that this insistenceon the fictive element in all historical narratives is certain to arouse the ire of historians who believe that they are doing something fundamentally different from the novelist, by virtue of the fact that they deal with "real," while the novelist

The Historical Text as Literary Artifact deals with "imaginedr" events.But neither the form nor the explanatory power of narrative derives from the different contents it is presumed to be able to accommodate. In point of fact, history-the real world as it evolves in time-is made senseof in the same way that the poet or novelist tries to make sense of it, i.e., by endowing what originally appears to be problematical and mysterious with the aspect of a recognizable, because it is a familiar, form. It does not matter whether the world is conceived to be real or only imagined; the manner of making senseof it is the same. So too, to say that we make sense of the real world by imposing upon it the formal coherency that we customarily associate with the products of writers of fiction in no way detracts from the status as knowledge which we ascribe to historiography. It would only detract from it if we were to believe that literature did not teach us anything about reality, but was a product of an imagination which was not of this world but of some other, inhuman one. In my view, we experiencethe "fictionalization" of history as an "explanation" for the same reason that we experience great fiction as an illumination of a world that we inhabit along with the author. In both we recognize the forms by which consciousness both constitutes and colonizes the world it seeks to inhabit comfortably. Finally, it may be observedthat if historians were to reco gnize the fictive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda. In fact, this recognition would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptionswhich they do not recognize as such but honor as the "correct" perception of "the way things really are." By drawing

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historiography nearer to its origins in literary sensibility, we should be able to identify the ideological, becauseit is the fictive, element in our own dis'We are always able to seethe fictive element course. in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree; we seldom perceive that element in our own prose. So, too, if we recognized the literary or fictive element in every historical account, we would be able to move the teaching of historiography onto a higher level of self-consciousnessthan it currently occupies. \fhat teacher has not lamented his inability to give instruction to apprentices in the writing of history? What graduate student of history has not despaired at trying to comprehend and imitate the model which his instructors appear to honor but the principles of which remain uncharted? If we recognize that there is a fictive element in all historical narrative, we would find in the theory of language and narrative itself the basis for a more subtle presentation of what historiography consists of than that which simply tells the student to go and "find out the facts" and write them up in such a way as to tell "what really happened." In my view, history as a discipline is in bad shape today becauseit has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In the interest of appearing scientific and objective, it has repressedand denied to itself its own greatest source of strength and renewal. By drawing historiography back once more to an intimate connection with its literary basis, we should not only be putting ourselves on guard against merely ideological distortions; we should be by way of arriving at that "theory" of history without which it cannot pass for a "discipline" at all.

YurhjLotrnan b. rgzz

B. A. lJspensky b . r 93 7

n

tru mid-r96os Yurii Lotman, together with his colleaguesat Tartu \tNcr \,f university in soviet Estonia, has been developing an elaborate theory of semiotics,focusingnot merelyon literature but, as the title of this essaysuggests,on a wide rangeof cultural phenomena.Lotman'swork is influencedmost immediately by structural linguistics (through the work of the prague circle, de saussureand Emile Benueniste),justas it belongsin a tradition of lit.r"ry speculationthat includes the Russianformalists and critics such as Bakhtin. Partly for this reason,the work of the Tartu Schoolhas beensomewhatcontroversial in the Sovietunion; Lorman in particular has been criticized for being too subjectiveand too schematicand, more generally,for adopting a positioi (structuralism)that is by naturesuspect,asit tendsto isolateaesthetiiconsiderations from concernsof praxis. Lotman's Lectureson StructuralPoetics(rg6+), followed by The structure of the Artistic Text (r97r), developedan imposing architectonicview of literature as a,semioticsystem.Lotman'spivotal conceptis that semioticsystemsoperate by the constructionof modelsand that narural languageis a primary moieling systemas it establishesfundamental, shareablecorrelations betweensubjecti and objectswhich are rhen accessiblefor the creation of other models.In this view, literature (or art, more generally)is a secondarymodelingsystemthat operatesin the sameway asnatural language,though with significantdifferencesLf purpose, focus, and immediate content. one might note that this distinction (while in no way directly related)bearssomesimilarity to Coleridge'sdistinction betweenthe primary and secondaryimagination,in BiographiaLiteraria (crsp, pp.46o-7r). The essayincluded here elaboratesthis idea in a more expansiveregisterby treating culture as a semioticprocess.The approach is not quite what ctifford Geertzrecommends,that is, treating culture as text, sinceit is at leastlogically prior to sucha recommendation.By treating "culture" as a limiting, diffeiential 408

Yurij LotmanandB. A. Uspensky concept,Lotman and Uspenskyprefigure the conceptualfield according to its ability to singleout a community of adherents-such that within a nation, for example,one might find many cultures,without assumingthat it was intellectually or methodologicallynecessaryto equatenation with culture. Thus, the culturesat issuein Lotman and Uspensky'saccountexist as they produce texts, and the texts producedfunction as the collective,nonhereditarymemory of the culture in question. The essayprovides illustrations of broad systemicdifferenceswhen, for example, a culture placesgreateremphasisupon the permissiblerules by which texts are produced,or upon the correctnessor permissibility of the texts themselves.This differencecan be seenrelativeto anotheraxis of distinction, whether the culture is concernedmore with contentor with expression.On this basis,the model would predict that culturesdirectedtoward expressionwill tend to think in termsof correcttexts, while culturesmore concernedwith contentwill tend to think in terms of rules.From an analyticalpoint of view, a matrix suchas this is especiallysuggestive,since it puts in focus a broad range of issuesthat might otherwiseneverbe correlated,such as the relativehonor accordedthe producer of texts or the regulator (or critic) of texts, and the kinds of taboosor strictures that particular communitiesmay imposeupon their members. While the essaydoesnot attempt to formulate its illustrative principles rigorously, it offers a provocativeillustration of a semiotic method by which the "inner workings" of culture, including literary works, can be explored in detail-and, not coincidentally,madeintelligible and communicableto a community of scholars. Lotman'sworks availablein Englishinclude The Structureof tbe ArtisticText, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon Ggzz), and Sernioticsof Cindma, trans. M. Suino ft52il. The Tartu School publishesa monograph series, Trudy po znakouymsisternam(Paperson Sign Systems),in which a variety of studiesby membersof the schoolhas beenpresented.

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Yunrl LorueN ANDB. A. UspnNsrcy

ONTHE SEMIOTIC MECHANISMOF CULTURE There are many ways of defining culture.' The difference in the semantic content of the concept culture in different historical epochs and among different scholarsof our time will not discourageus if we remember that the meanin g of the term is derivable from the type of culture: every historically given culture generatessome special model of culture peculiar to itself. Therefore, a comparative studl of the semantics of the term culture over the centuries provides worthwhile material for the construcion of typologies. At the same time, among the variety of definitions one can single out something common to them all that appears to answer to certain features we intuitively attribute to culture in any interpr etation of the word. ru7ewill consider iust two of them here. First, underlying all definitions is the notion that there are certain specific features of a culture. Though trivial, this assertion is nor without meaning: from it arises the assertion that culture is never a universal set, but always a subset organized in a specific manner. Culture never encompasseseuerything, but forms instead a marked-off sphere. Culture is understood only as a section, a closed-off area against the background of nonculture. The nature of this opposition may vary: nonculture may appear as not belonging to a particular religion, not having accessto some knowledge, or not sharing in ON THE SEMIOTIC MECHANISM OF CULTURE fiTSt APPCATd

in Trudy po znakouym sistemam V (Tartu, t97r). This translation by George Mihaychuk was first printed in New Literary History 9 GSZS)i zrr-jz. Reprinted by permission of the edito r of New Literary History and The Johns Hopkins University Press,copyright 1978. tsee A. Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn, "Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions," in Papers of tbe peabody Museum (Cambridge, Mass., rg1zh A. Kloskowska, Kultura masowa ('Warsaw, ry6+); R. Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Cambridge, Mass., r%4; Stein Rokkan, ed., comparatiue Research across cultures and Nations (Paris, 1968); M. Mauss, Sociologie et antbropologie (Paris, 1966) ; Claude L6vi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris, r9j8); and Yvan Simonis, "Claude L6viStrauss ou la 'Passion de l'incester"' in Introduction au structuralisme (Paris, r 968). [Au.]

some rype of life and behavior. Bur culture will always needsuch an opposition. Indeed,culture stands out as the marked member of this opposition. Second, the various ways of delimiting culture from nonculture essentially come down to one thing: against the background of nonculture, culture appears as a system of signs. In particular, whether we speak of such features of culture as "being man-made" (as opposed to "being natural" ), "being conventional" (as opposed to "being spontaneous" and "being nonconventionxl"), or as the ability to condense human experience (in opposition to the primordial quality of nature)-in each case, we are dealing with different aspects of the semiotic essenceof culture. It is significant that a change of culture (in particular, during epochs of social cataclysms)is usually accompanied by ^ sharp increase in the degree of semiotic behavior (which may be expressed by the changing of names and designations),and even the figh t against the old rituals may itself be ritualized. On the other hand, the introduction of new forms of behavior and the semiotic intensification of old forms can testify to a specific change in the type of culture. Thus, the activities of Peter the Great in Russia largely amount to a struggle with old rituals and symbols, which was expressedin the creation of new signs (for example, the absenceof the beard became as mandatory as its presencehad been earlier; wearing foreign styled clothes became as indispensable as the wearing of Russian clothes earlier, and so on); t but the Emperor Paul's activiry, on the other hand, was expressed in the semiotic intensification of existing forms, in particular, by in2Compare the specialEdicts of Peter on the forms of clothingmademandatory.Thus, in r7oo, it was ordered to wear clothesof a Hungarian pattern; in r7or, of a German pattern; in r7oz, on celebrationdays, French caftans.See Polnoe sobranie zakonou [The complete collectionof laws], sratutesr74r, 1898, and r 9gi, accordingto which, in r 7r4, any Petersburg merchantwho soldRussianclothesof a nondecreed patternwasordered to bewhippedandsentenced to hardlabor; and,in r7r5, it was decreedto sentence anyonedealingin nailsfor the shoeingof boots and shoesro hard labor (sratutes287+ and z9zil. Compare,on the other hand, the protests againstforeign clothing both during the pre-Petrineperiod and amongthe old-Believerswho were the carriers of pre-Petrineculture. The Old-Believers,evenup to our times, keep the eighteenth-century pamernof clothing and wearit for churchservices;their funeralclothingappearsevenmore archaic(seethe articleby N. P.Grinkova on clothing in Bukhtarminskiestaroobryadtsy[The Old-

On tbe Semiotic Mechanism of Culture creasingtheir symbolic character. (Compare the increaseat that time of genealogical symbolism, of the symbolism of parades, of ceremonial language and similar cases and, on the other hand, the fight against certain words which sounded like symbols of a different ideology. Compare also such symbolic acts as the admonition to the deceased,the challenging of princes to a duel, and so on.) A KEy question is the relationship of culture to natural language. In the preceding publications of Tartu University (the semiotic series),cultural phenomena were defined as secondary modeling systems, a term which indicated their derivational nature in relation to natural language. Many studies, following the Sapir-rUfhorf hypothesis, emphasized and examined the influence of language on various manifestations of human culture. Recently Benveniste has emphasizedthat only natural languages can fulfill a metalinguistic role and that, by virtue of this, they hold a distinct place in the system of human communication.3More questionable,however, is the author's proposal in the same article to consider only natural languagesas strictly semiotic systems, defining all other cultural models as semantic, that is, not possessingtheir own systematicsemiosis but borrowing it from the sphere of natural languages. Even though it is valuable to contrast primary and secondary modeling systems (without such a contrast it is impossible to single out the distinguishing characteristicsof each), it would be appropriate to stresshere that in their actual historical functioning, languages are inseparable from culture. No language (in the full senseof the word) can exist unless it is steepedin the context of culture; and no culture can exist which does not have, at its center, the structure of natural language. As a methodological abstraction, one may imagine language as an isolated phenomenon. However, in its actual functioning, language is molded into a more general system of culture and, together with it, constitutes a complex whole. The fundamental "task" of culture, as we will try to show, is in structurally organizing the world around man. Culture is B.ti.".*-f Bukhtarminskl[Leningrad,r %o]). It is not difficult to seethat the very nature of the relation to the signand the generallevelof the semioticaspectof culture prior to Peterand during his reign,in the givencase,remain one and the same.[Au.] 3Emile Benveniste, "S6miologiede la languer" Semiotica, r, No. r (t969).[Au.]

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the generator of structuredness, and in this way it createsa social sphere around man which, like the biosphere, makes life possible; that is, not organic life, but social life. But in order for it to fulfill that role, culture must have within itself a structural "diecasting mechanism." It is this function that is performed by natural language. It is natural language that gives the members of a social group their intuitive senseof structuredness that with its transformation of the "open" world of realia into a "closed" world of names, forces people to treat as structures those phenomena whose structuredness, at best, is not apparent.aIndeed, in many casesit turns out not to matter whether some meaning-forming principle is a structure, in a strict sense,or not. It is sufficient that the participants in an act of communication should regard it as a structure and use rt as such for it to begin to display structurelike qualities. One can well understand how important it is that a system of culture has, at its center, so powerful a source of structuredness as language. The presumption of structuredness, which has evolved as a result of language intercourse, exerts a powerful organizing force on the entire complex of the means of communication. Thus, the entire system for preserving and communicating human experience is constructed as a concentric system in the center of which are located the most obvious and logical structures, that is, the most structural ones. Nearer to the periphery are found formations whose structurednessis not evident or has not been proved, but which, being included in general signcommunicational situations, function as structures. Such quasi structures occupy a large place in human culture. Moreover, it is precisely the fact of their internal lack of orderedness,their incomplete organization, that ensures for human culture the greater inner capacity and the dynamism not known to more ordered systems. 'Sfr

culture as the nonbereditary memuNDERSTAND ory of tbe community, a memory expressingitself in a system of constraints and prescriptions. This formulation, if accepted, presupposes the following

aThus,for example,the structuredness of history constitutesthe initial axiom of our approach;otherwisethere is no possibility of accumulatinghistorical knowledge. However,this ideacannotbe provedor disprovedby evidence,as world history is incompleteand we are submergedin it. [Au.]

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Yunly LorueN AND B. A. Uspsr{sry

consequences.First of all, it follows that culture is, by definition, a social phenomenon. This fact does not exclude the possibility of an individual culture in the case where the individual seeshimself as a representatiueof the community or in casesof autocommunication, where one person fulfills, in time or space, the functions of various members of the community and in fact forms a group. However, the casesof individual cultures are, of necessity,historically secondary. On the other hand, depending on the limits placed by the researcher on his material, culture may be treated as common to all mankind, or as the culture of a particular area, or of a particular time, or of a particular social group. Furthermore, insofar as culture is memory or)in other words, a record in the memory of what the community has experienced,it is, of necessity,connectedto past historical experience.consequentlS at the moment of its appearance, culture cannot be recorded as such, for it is only perceived ex post facto. \fhen people speak of the creation of a new culture, they are inevitably looking ahead; that is, they have in mind that which (they presume) will become a memory from the point of view of the reconstructable future (of course, the correctness of such an assumption will only be shown by the future itself ). Thus, a program (of behavior) appears as the opposite of a system of culture. The program is directed into the future from a point of view of its author; but culture is turned towards the past from the point of view of the realization of such behavior (of the program). It then follows that the difference befween a program of behavior and a culture is a functional one: the same text can be one or the other, functioning variously in the general sysrem of historical life of a particular community. In general, the definition of culture as the memory of a community raises the question about the system of semiotic rules by which human life experience is changed into culture: these rules can, in their own turn, be treated as a progrAm. The very existence of culture implies the construction of a system, of some rules for translating direct experience into text. In order for any historical event to be placed in a specific category, it musr first of all be acknowledged as existirg; that is, it must be identified with a specific element in the language of the organization which is committing it to memory. Then it has to be evaluared according to all the hier-

archic ties of that language. This means that it will be recorded; that is, it will become an element of the text of mem ory, an element of culture. The implanting of a fact into the collective memorS then, is like a translation from one language into anotherin this case,into the "language of culture." Culture, as a mechanism for organizing and preserving information in the consciousnessof the communitg raisesthe specificproblem of longevity. It has two aspects: (r) the longeviry of the rexts of the collective memory and (z) the longevity of the code of the collective memory. In certain casesthese two aspects may not be directly related to one another. Thus, for example, superstitions can be seen as elementsof a text of an old culture whose code is lost; that is, as a case where the text outlives the code. For example: Superstition I a fragment Of ancient trurh. The temple fell; And posterity could never decipher The language of its ruins. [8.A. Bararynsky] Every culture crearesits own model of the length of its existence,of the continuity of its memory. This model corresponds to the concept a given culture has of the maximum span of time practic ally comprising its "eternity." Insofar as culture acknowledges itself as existing, only identifying itself with the constant norms of its memory, the continuity of memory and the continuity of existenceare usually identified. characteristicallS many cultures do not allow eventhe possibility of any kind of substantial change in the realization of the rules formulated by itin other words, the possibility of any kind of reappraisal of its values. Hence, culture very often is not geared to knowledge about the future, the future being envisaged as time come to a stop, as a stretched out "now"; indeed, this is directly connected to the orientation towards the past, which also ensures the necessarystabiliry, one of the conditions for the existence of culture. The longevity of rexts forms a hierarchy within the culture, one usually identified with the hierarchy of values. The texts consideredmost valuable are those of a maximum longevity from the point of view, and according to the standard, of the culture in question, or panchronic texts (although "shifted"

On the Semiotic Mechanism of Cubure cultural anomalies are also possible whereby the highest value is ascribed to the momentary). This may correspond to the hierarchy of materials upon which the texts are affixed and to the hierarchy of places and of the means of their preservation. The longevity of the code is determined by the permanenceof its basic structural principles and by its inner dynamism-its capacity for change while still preserving the memory of preceding statesand, consequentlS of the awarenessof its own coherence. Considering culture as the long-term memory of the communitS we can distinguish three ways in which it is filled. First, a quantitative increasein the amount of knowledge-filling the various nodes of the culture's hierarchic system with various texts. Second, a redistribution in the structure of the nodes resulting in a change in the very notion of "a fact to be remembered," and the hierarchic appraisal of what has been recorded in the mem ory; a continuous reorganization of the coding system which, while remaining itself in its own consciousness and conceiving itself to be continuous, tirelessly reforms separate codes, thus ensuring an increase in the value of the memory by creating "nonactual," yet potentially actualizable, reserves. Third, forgettittg. The conyersion of a chain of facts into a text is invariably accompanied by selection; that is, by fixing certain events which are translatable into elements of the text and forgetting others, marked as nonessential.In this senseevery text furthers not only the remembering process,but forgetting as well. Yet since the selection of memorizable facts is reali zed every time according to particular semiotic norms of the given culture, one should beware of identifying the events of life with any text, no matter how "truthful" or "artless" or firsthand the text may appear. The text is not realitR but the material for its reconstruction. Therefore, a semiotic analysis of a document should always precede a historical one. Having established the rules for the reconstructing of reality from the text, the researcherwill also be able to reckon from the document those elementswhich, from the point of view of its author, were not "facts" and thus were forgettable, but which might be evaluated quite differently by a historian, for whom, in the light of his own cultural code, they emerge as meaningful events. However, forgetting takes place in another way as well: culture continually excludes certain texts. The

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history of the destruction of texts, of the purging of texts from the reserves of the collective memory, proceeds alongside the history of the creation of new texts. Every new movement in art revokes the authority of the texts by which preceding epochs oriented themselves,by transferring them into the category of nontexts, texts of a different level, or by physically destroying them. Culture by its very essence is against forgetting. It overcomes forgettitg, turning it into one of the mechanismsof memory. In the light of the above, one can assume definite limits to the capacity of the collective memory, which determines this exclusion of some texts by others. But on the other hand, becauseof their semantic incompatibiliry, the nonexistence of some texts becomes a necessarycondition for the existence of others. Despite their apparent similarity, there is a profound difference between forgetting as an element of memory and forgetting as a means of its destruction. In the latter casethere takes place the disintegration of culture as a unified collective personality, a personality possessing continued self-consciousness and accumulated experience. It is worth recalling that one of the sharpest forms of social struggle in the sphere of culture is the obligatory demand to forget certain aspects of historical experience. Epochs of historical regression (the clearest example is the Nazi state culture in the twentieth century), in forcing upon the community highly mythologized schemesof historS end by demanding from society that it forget those texts which do not lend themselves to being so organized. \7hi1e social formations, during the period of ascent, produce flexible and dynamic models, providing the collective memory with broad possibilities, and aiding its expansion, then social decline, as a rule, is accompanied by an ossifying of the mechanism of the collective memory and by an increasing tendency to contract. THn sEMlorlc study of culture does not only consider culture functioning as a system of signs. It is important to emphasize that the very relation of culture to the sign and to signification comprises one of its basic typological features.s 5Comparethe remarks on the connectionbetweencultural evolutionand the changein relation to the sign in Michel Foucault,Les mots et leschoses,une arch6ologie du sauoir(Paris,1966).[Au.]

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Yunrl LorueN AND B. A. UspnNsry

First of all, it is relevant whether the relation befween expression and content is regarded as the only possible one or as an arbitrary (accidental, conventional) one. In the first case the question, what this or that thing is called, is crucial, and correspondinglS an incorrect designation may come to be identified with a differenl content (see below). Compare the searchesin the Middle Ages for the names of certain hypostaseswhich incidentally became fixed in the Masonic ritual; one should interpret taboos against the uttering of certain names in a similar manner. In the second casethe question of designation, and of expression in general, is not an important principle; one can say that expression here appears as an auxiliary and indeed more or less inciden tal factor with regard to content. Accordingly, it is possible to distinguish berween cultures directed mainly towards expression and those directed chiefly towards content. It is clear that the very fact of emphasis on expression, of strictly ritualized forms of behavior,6 is usually a consequenceeither of seeing a one-to-one correlation (rather than an arbitrary one) berweenthe level of expression and the level of content, their inseparability in principle (as is characteristic, in particular, for the ideology of the Middle Ages), or of seeing the influence of expression upon content. (We may note in this respectthat, in a sense,symbol and ritual can be regarded as opposite poles. tilThile a symbol usually presupposesan external, relatively arbitrary expression of some content, ritual is capable of forming content and influencing it.) To a culture directed towards expression that is founded on the notion of correct destgnationand, in particu5Thisfeaturebecomesreadilyapparentin the paradoxical situationwhereadherence to specificrestrictionsand requirementscomesinto conflict with the contentwhich, in fact, producedthem. "'Wekissthy shacklesasthoseof a saint,but we cannotbe helpfulto thee,"wrote the head of the RussianChurch, Metropolitan MakariS sending his blessingsto Maksim Grek, who was languishingin captivity (quotedby A. I. Ivanov, Literaturnoenasledie Maksima Greka [The literary heritageof Maksim the Greekl [Leningrad,ry6g], p.r7o). Eventhe holinessof Maksim Grek, admittedby MakariS and his respectfor him cannotbring him to easethe lot of the prisoner;the signsare not subordinateto him. (lt makessenseto assumethat the headof the RussianChurch,Makariy, had in mind not his helplessness in the face of someconditions broughtin from outside,but the inner impossibiliry of transgressing the decisionof the sobor [church].His disagreementwith the content of the decisiondid not lower, in his eyes,the authority of the decisionas such.) lAu.l

lar, correct naming, the entire world can appear as a sort of text consisting of various kinds of signs, where content is predetermined and it is only necessary to know the language; that is, to know the relation between the elements of expression and content. In other words, cognition of the world is equivalent to philological analysis.TBut in typologically different cultural models, oriented directly towards content, some degree of freedom is assumed both in the choice of content and in its relation to expression. Culture can be represented as an aggregate of texts; however, from the point of view of the researcher, it is more exact to consider culture as a mechanism creating an aggregateof texts and texts as the realization of culture. An essentialfeature for the rypology of culture is its self-appraisalin this regard. ufhile it is typical of some cultures to regard themselvesas an aggregateof normative texts (take the Domostro!,t for example), others model themselves as a system of rules that determine the creation of texts. (In other words, in the first case the rules are defined as the sum of precedents; in the 7Comparethe conceptfound in variouscultures, but most of all in the Middle Ages,of a book as a symbolof the world (or as a model of the world). SeeE. R. Curtius, "Das BuchalsSymbol,"in EuropaischeLiteratur und Iateiniscbes Mittelaber,znd ed. (Bern, 19S4);D. Chizhevsky, "Das Buch als Symbol des Kosmos," in Aus zwei 'Welten: Beitragezur Geschichtederslauisch-wetlicben literarischenBeziehungen('s-Gravenhage,1956); P.N. Berkov,"Kniga v poeziiSimeonaPolotskogo"[Thebook in the poetry of SimeonPolotsky],in Literatura i obshchestuennaya mysl' dreuney Rusi [The literature and socialthought of Old Rus'], Trudy otdeladrevnerusskoy literaturyInstitutarusskoyliteraturyAN SSSR[Papersof the departmentof Old RussianLiteratureof the Institute of Russian Literature AN SSSRI,XXIV (Leningrad, rg6gh Yu. M. Lotman and B. A. UspenskS"Inrroduzioner"in RicercheSemiotiche(Turin, r97il, pp. xivxv. Comparealsothe role of the alphabetin the conceptions of the architectonics of the universein F. Dornseiff, "Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie," Erocyeta, 7 (r9zz), 33 (seein particular,the remarkson the coincidenceof the sevenIonic vowelswith the sevenplanets). Characteristicallgin connectionwith the above,the Skoptsy sectarianscalled the Virgin Mary "the living book"l perhapsone can seeherethe generictie with the widespreadidentificationamongthe Orthodox retaining its Byzantineroots,of "'S7isdom,"that is, of Sophiawith the Virgin Mary (seeon the questionof this identification Uspensky,Iz istorii russkikhkanonicheskikhimen [From the historyof Russiancanonicalnames][Moscow,r g69], pp.48-+g).[Au.] 8Sixteenth-century Russianbook of religious,social,and domesticprecepts.[Tr.]

On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture second the precedent exists only where it is described by an appropriate rule.) Cultures directed primarily towards expression have this conception of themselvesas a correct text (or aggregate of texts) whereas cultures directed mainly towards content see themselves as a system of rules. Each fype of culture generatesits own particular ideal of Book and Manual, including the organization of those texts. Thus, with orientation towards rules, a manual has the appearance of a generative mechanism, while with orientation towards text, one gets the characteristic (questionanswer) format of a catechism, and the anthology (book of quotations or selected texts) comes into being. In contrasting text and rules, as applied to culture, it is also important to keep in mind that, in Somecases,the same elementsof a culture can Serve both functions, that is, both as text and as rules. Thus, for example, taboos which are a component of the general system of"a given culture can, on the one hand, be examined as elements (signs) of the text reflecting the moral experience of the community and, on the other hand, be regardedas an aggregate of magical rules prescribing specific behavior. The opposition we have formulated between a system of rules and an aggregateof texts can be illustrated by taking literature which is a subsystem of the whole culture. A clear example of a system explicitly oriented towards rules will be European Neo-Classicism.Although historically the theory of Neo-Classicism was created aSa generalizationfrom a particular artistic experience, the picture was somewhat different as seen from within the theory itself: the theoretical models were thought of as eternal and as preceding the actual act of creation. In art' only those texts considered "correctr" that is, corresponding to the rules, were recognizedas texts, i.e., having significance. It is especially interesti.g, in light of the above, to seewhat Boileau, for example, considers as poor works of art. The bad in art is whatever breaks the rules. But even the violation of the rules can be described, in Boileau's opinion, as following certain "incorrect" rules. Therefore, "bad" texts can be classified; any unsatisfactory work of art serves as an example of some typical violation. It is no accident that, for Boileau, the "incorrect" world of art consists of the same elements as the correct but that the difference lies in the system for combining them, prohibited in "good" art.

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Another characteristic of this type of culture is the fact that the creator of the rules stands higher in the hierarchy than the creator of the texts. Thus, for example, within the system of Neo-Classicism the critic commands markedly more respect than the writer. As a contrasting example, one can point to the culture of European Realism of the nineteenth century. The artistic texts that formed part of it were fulfilling their social function directly and did not need an obligatory translation into a metalanguage of theory. The theorist constructed his apparatus following after art.In practice, for example, in Russia after BelinskR criticism played a most active and independent role. But it is all the more evident that, in assessinghis own role, BelinskS for example, gave prioriry to Gogol, seeing himself as a mere interpreter. Although the rules are, in both cases,a necessary minimal condition for the creation of culture, the degree to which they enter into its self-appraisal will v^ry. This can be compared to the teaching of language as a system of grammatical rules or as a set of usages.t AcconDING to the distinction formulated above, culture can be opposed both to nonculture and to anticulture. tU7ithin the conditions of a culture chiefly oriented towards content and represented as a system of rules, the basic opposition is "otganized-nonorg antzed" (and this opposition can be realized in particular cases aS "cosmos-chaos," "ectropy-entropyr" "culture-natuf€r" and so on). But within the conditions of.a culture oriented primarily towards expression and represented as an aggregateof normative texts, the basic opposition will be "correct-incorrectr" i.e., wrong (precisely "incorrect" and not "noncorrect": thiS Opposition may approximate, even coincide with, the opposition "true-false" ). In the latter case,culture is opposed not to chaos (entropy) but to a system preceded by negativesign. GenerallR of course,when " within a culture directed towards a one-to-one coreIn connectionwith this opposition there are various modesof "teaching" culturewhich we will not consider in detailheresincethey are the subjectof anotherarticle (Lotman, "Problema obucheniyakulture kak ee !ipologicheskayakharakteristika"[The problem of teaching a iulture as its typological characteristics] , Trudy po znakouymsistemamlPaperson sign systems],V [Tartu, reTrl). [Au.]

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Yunly LoruaN AND B. A. UsprNsry

respondence between expression and content and primarily oriented towards expression, the world appears as a text, and the question, what is this or that called, becomes of principal importance. An incorrect designation can be identified with a different content (but not with none!), that is, with different information and not with a distortion in the information. Thus, for example, the Russianchurch Slavonic word aggel [angel], written in accordance with the Greek spelling of the corresponding word, was to be read as angel; but as it was actually spelled fangell, the word was understood in Medieval Russiato signify the devil.'oAnalogouslg when, as a result of Patriarch Nikon's reforms, the spelling of christ's name Isuswas changed to lisus, th. ,r.* form was taken to be the name of a different being: not Christ but the Antichrisr.l' SimilarlS the distortion of the word Bog [God] in the word spasibo [thank you] (from spasi Bog [save us God]l may, even now, be understood by the old-Believers as the name of a pagan god, so that the very word spasibo is understood as an appeal to the Antichrist (in its place the words spasi Gospodi [save us Lord] are usually used by the "priestless" old-Believers and spasi Kbristos [saveus Christ] by the old-Believers with priests).t' The point to note here is that every10SeeuspenskS Arkhaicheskaya sistematserkounoslauyanskogoproiznosheniya[Thearchaicsystemof church Slavonic_ pro_nunciation] (Moscow, 196g),pp. 5r- 5j, 78-82. [Au.] Iz istorii,p. 216. [Au.] llSq. Uspensky, t2There is a legendon this theme, apparently not recorded -the anywhere,where it is said that phrase spasi,Bal (going-backto the.pronunciationof ihe *otd spasibo yilh akany.e,i.e.,-change of unsrressed o into a [saveus 86l) was shoutedby the pagansin Kiev to thi pagan idol, floating down the Dni.pet, which had bee" oi.rthrown by St. vladimir. The,very tendencyto identify the pagangod with the Antichrisr(satan),th"t is, incorporating it into the-system of christian ideologr,is very characteristicf9r the rype of culture being ."*"rrri".d. See,for example,the identificationof the {^g n volosveles with the demon, who, in oth.r ."i.r] could be identifiedwith st. vlasiy (vyach. vs. Ivanov and v. N. Toporov, "K rekonstruktsii obrazavelesa-volosakak protivnikagromoverzhtsa"[Towardsa reconstructionof the image of veles-volosas an opponent of the thundererl, in Tezisy dokladou IV Letney shkoly po utoricbnym modeliruyushchim sistemam [Theses of papgr,sat the fourth summer school on secondary modelingsystems][Tartu, r97o], p. 4S); also .o-p"rl the remark further in this paper abo.tt atr analogous concept of Apollo. It is characteristicthat the .ighteenth-century old-Believers' authoriry Feodo-siy

thing opposed to culture (in this case a religious culture) also has to haue its own special t*prtition, but one that is false (incorrect). In other words, anticulture is constructed here isomorphically to culture, in its own image: it too is understood as a sign system having its own expression.one can say that anticulture is perceived as culture with a negative sign, as a mirror image of culture (where ihe ties are not broken bur are replaced by their opposites). In this kind of situation any other culture with different expressions and ties is seen, from the point of view of the given culture, as anticulture. This is the source of the natural tendency to interpret all "incorrect" cultures, those opposed to the given ( "correct" ) one, as a unified system.Thus, in "The song of Roland" lLa chanson de Rolandl, Marsiliun turns out to be a pagan, otr atheist, a Mohammedan, and a worshipper of Apollo all at rhe same time: Li reis Marsilie la tient, ki Deu nen aimet. Mahumet sert e Apollin recleimet: . . .13

v""ttr, ."lled the devil "wicked leader,unholylamb,,, explaining.with referenceto st. Hyppolitus: ',in everytling the deceiverwishesto resemblechrist, the son of God: christ th9 lion, the lion And-christ; there appeared Christ the lamb, there appearstoo the Antichrist as a - lamb" (see p. s. smirnov, "perepiska raskol'nich'ikhdeyateleynach. XVIII v.,i [The *rr._ spondenceof the leadersof the schismin thi beginning "chtenie 91. ,1t.. eighteenth centuryl, Khristianskoye No. r j9o9l, pp.+g-iS). [Christianreadings], Inasmuchas in a culture of the krnd e"iiiing in the Middle Agesthereis a givensum of correcttexls and a notion of the mirror-imagecorrespondence of the correct and the incorrect,the negativetexts may be constructedfrom the sacralones as a result of'applying systemsof antitheticalexchanges to them.A strifing exar,npleof this is the exchangein the Russianadmoni"tion of the correct designatronrab bozhiy [servantof God] for a "black" one, par bozhiy, wheri pa, is the resultoi a backward (mirrored)readingfchai] which is the actual pronunciationof the word rab (with the changeof a voicedconsonantinto a correspondingvoiceless6ne in the final position).SeeA. M. Aitakhova,"zaogovornoe iskusswona rekePinege"[Admonitionalart on"theriver Pineg],in Krest' yanskoeiskustuosssR fpeasantart of the USSRI,II (Leningrad,r9z8),50- 52,-6g.[Au.] .^ t3"La chanson de Roland," in Henti cto,r"rd and Robe.t Le_ggewie, eds., Anthologie de la litt1rature frangaise (New York, 196o),r, ro: "King Marsiliunholdsit, who does not love God; he servesMahomet and .oni.rr., Apollin." For a numberof textsthe identificationof Apollo with

On the Semiotic Mechanism of Cubure In the Muscovite "Tale of the Defeat of Mam ayr" Mamay is describedas follows: "Being a Hellene by his faith, a worshipper of idols , dn iconoclasr, and a wicked punisher of Christians."'o Examples of this kind would not be difficult to multiply. Also significant in this regard was the antipathy in pre-Petrine Russia to foreign languag€s, which were viewed as means for expressingalien cultures. Note particularly the special works against Latin and Latinate forms which were identified with Catholic thought and, more widelS with Catholic culture." Typi cally,when Patriarch Mak ariy of Antioch arrived in Moscow in the middle of the seventeenth century, he was especially warned of "talking in Turkish." "God forbid," as Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich put it, "that such a holy man should sully his lips and tongue with that impure language."tt In these words we hear the conviction, so typical for ,h. d.ttl .* be explained,besidesthe generalconsiderationsjust given,by the identificationof the pagangod with the referenceto Satanin Revelation9i rr as "Apollion." [Au.] 14M.N. Tikhomirov, V. F. Rzhiga, and L. A. Dmitriev, eds.,Pouestio Kulikouskoybitue fTalesof the battle of KulikovoFieldl(Moscow,rg1j),p.+j. [A".] lsSeeV. V. Vinogradov, Ocherki po istorii russkogoliteraturnogo yazyka XVil-XIX uu. [Essayson the history of the Russian literary languageof the seventeenthnineteenthcenturies](Moscow,1938),p.9; UspenskR "Vliyanre yzaykana religioznoesoznanie"[The influenceof languageon religiousconsciousness], in Trudy po znakouymsistemam.IV (Thrtu, t969), fi4-65. See also the texts edited by M. SmentsovskgBrat'ya Likhudy [The Likhud brothers] (St. Petersburg,figg) (appendices); N. F. Kanterev,"O greko-latinskikhshkolakh v Moskve XVII vekedo otkrytiya Slavyano-grekolatinskoy Akademii" [Ot the Greco-Latinschoolsin Moscow in the seventeenth centuryup to the openingof the Slavo-Greco-LatinAcademyl, in Godichny akt u Moskouskoy Dukhounoy Akademii l-go oktyabrya 1889goda [Yearlyact of the Moscow ReligiousAcademyof the first of Octoberr88g] (Moscow,1889).Even Patriarch Nikon in his polemic with the (Orthodox) MetropolitanPaisiyof Gazais ableto exclaimin answer to the latter's reply in Latin: "O cunning slave,from thine own lips I judgetheenot to be an Orthodox since you have addressedus basely in the Latin tongue" (N. Gibbenet, lsotoricheskoeissledouaniedela patriarkha Nikona [A historicalinvestigationconcerning the caseof PatriarchNikon], Pt. z [St.Petersburg, r 884], p.6r). [Au.] t5SeePavel AleppskS Puteshestuie Antiokhiyskogo patriarkha Makariya u Rossiyuu polouine XVII u. [The journeyto Russiaof PatriarchMakariy of Antioch in the middle of the seventeenth cenrury],tr. from Arabic by G. Murkos (Mosco%r898),pp. 20-zr. [Au.]

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that time, that it is impossible to use alien means of expression and yet stay within one's own ideology (in particular, one could not speak in such an "unOrthodox" language as Turkish, seen as the means of expression for Mohammedanism, or Latin, seen as the means of expression for Catholicism, and still remain pure in relation to Orthodoxy). Equally revealing, on the other hand, is the attempt to see all "Orthodox" languagesas one language. Thus, during that same period Russian scribescould speak of a single "Helleno-Slavic" language (a grammar of it was even published)tt and could describethe Slavic languagesaccording to the exact patterns of Greek grammar, seeking in it, indeed, an expressionof those grammatical categories which exist only in Greek. CorrespondinglS a culture chiefly directed towards content, one opposed to entropy (chaos), where the main opposition will be "organ izednonorg anizedr" always conceives itself as an active principle which must expand and seesnonculture as the sphere for its potential expansion. On the other hand, in a culture directed mainly towards expression, where the basic opposition is between "correct" and "incorrectr" there may be no attempt whatsoever to expand (on the contrary, the culture may strive to limit itself to its own boundaries, to separateitself from all that is opposed to it). Nonculture is here identified with anticulture and therefore, according to its very essence,cannot be a potential area for the expansion of culture. Examples of how an orientation towards expression and a high degree of ritualization bring with them the tendency to shut oneself off might be Medieval China or the idea "Mosco% the Third Rome." These casesare marked by an urge towards preservation rather than expansion of their system, esoterism, and a lack of missionary zeal. In one type of culture, knowledge spreads by its expansion into areasnot yet known to it, but in the opposite type of culture, the spread of knowledge is possible only as a triumph over falsehood. NaturallS the concept of science,in the modern senseof the word, is connected with culture of the first fype. In the secondtype of culture, scienceis not opposed so markedly to art, religion, and so on. It is interest17SeeA6e),gor4s Grammatika dobroglagoliuagoellinoyazykafAgrammarof well-spokenHellenoslouenskago Slavicl(L'vov,r 59r). [Au.]

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ing that the opposition of science and art, which is so typical of our time and which sometimes rises to antagonistic levels,only becamepossible within the conditions of the new, post-RenaissanceEuropean culture which had freed itself from the outlook of the Middle Ages and which stood to a great degree in opposition to that outlook (let us remember that the very concept "fine arts," as opposed to science, only appears in the eighteenth century)." This brings to mind the distinction between the Manichaeistic and Augustinian conceprs of the devil in Norbert wiener's brilliant interpretation." According to the Manichaeistic concept, the devil is an essencehaving evil intentions, that is, consciously and with purpose rurning his power against man; but according to the Augustinian concept, the devil is a blind force, atr entropy, which is only objectively directed against man because of man's weakness and ignorance. If one accepts a broad enough senseof the term deuil as that which is opposed to culture (once again in the broad senseof the word), then it is evident that the difference between the Manichaeistic and the Augustinian approach corresponds to the difference between the fwo types of cultures which we spoke of earlier. Tnn opposrrroN "organized-nonorga nized" can appear within the very mechanism of culture as well. As we have already stated,the hierarchic structure of culture is constructed as a combination of highly organized systems and of those allowing various degrees of disorganization to the point 18see in this regardthe observations on the influenceof Galileo'saestheticviews on his scholarshipin Erwin PanofskR "Galiley: nauka i iskusswo (esteticheskie vzglyadyi nauchnayamysl')" [Galileo:scienceand art (aestheticopinionsand scientificthought)1,in u istokou klassicheskoy nauki [Amongthe solrcei of classical (Moscow, 1968), pp. z6-28. Compare pansc-ience] ofsky,Galileoasa Critic of the Arts(Hague,i954), and the remarkson the meaningof artisticform foi CaHeo in accountingfor his scientificconclusionsin L. olyshki, Geschichteder neusprachlichenwissenschaftticheln Literntur,Vol. III of Galilei und seineZeit (Halle, r9z7), whereolyshki writes:"By meansof adaptingexpression to content,the latter acquiresan obligatoryand thus artistic form. Poetryand sciencearefor Galileothe spheres which give shapeto the world. The problem of cbntent and the problemof form coincidefor him." [Au.] teseeN. wiener, Kibernetikai obshchestuo[cybernetics and soci.tyl(Moscow,19j8), pp. 47-48.tAu.l

where, in order to reveal their structure, they must continually be contrasted with the former. If the nuclear structure of a culture mechanism is an ideal semiotic system with srrucural links realized at all levels (or more correctly, the nearest approximation of such an ideal possible in particular historic situations), then the formations around it are constructed so as to break the various links of such a structure and to require continual comparison with the nucleus of the culture. This kind of "incompleteness," the incomplete regulatednessof culture as a unified semiotic system, is not a shortcoming but a condition for its normal functioning. The point is that the very function of the culrural assimilation of the world implies assigningto the world a systematicquality. In some cases,as for example in the scientific cognition of the world, the point will be to reveal the system concealed in the object; in others-for example, in education, missionary work, or propagand it will be to impart ro an unorga nized object certain principles of organizarion. But in order to fulfill this role, culture, and especially its central coding mechanism, must possesscertain qualities. Among these, two are essentialfor our present purposes: First, it should have a high degree of modeling potential, that is, either the ability to describe as wide a range of obf ecrs as possible,which would include as many as yet unknown objects as possible, this being the oprimal requirement for cognitive models, or it should have the capability to declare those objects which it cannot be used to describeas nonexistent. Second,its systematicnature should be acknowledged by the community using it as an instrument for assigning system to what is amorphous. Therefore, the tendency of sign systems to become automatized represents an ever present inner foe of culture against which it continually struggles. The conflict berween the continual affempt to take the systematic to its limits and the continual opposition to the aut omatization produced thereby within the structure is organically present in every living culture. THIs BRTNGSus to a problem of primary importance: why is human culture a dynamic system? ,il(Ihyare the semiotic systemsthat form human culture, with the exception of certain obviously local

On tbe Semiotic Mechanism of Cuhure or secondary artificial languages, subject to an obligatory law of evolution? The fact that artificial languages exist convincingly bears witness to the possibiliry of the existence and successfulfunctioning, within specific limits, of nondeveloping systems. \7hy then can there exist a unified, nondeveloping language of road signals, while natural languagenecessarilyhas a history without which its (real, not theoretical) synchronic functioning is impossible?After all, the existenceof diachrony itself is not only not among the minimum conditions necessary for the appearance of semiotic systems but presents the researcherwith a theoretical riddle and a practical problem. The dynamism of the semiotic components of culture is evidently connected with the dynamism of the social life of human society. However, this connection is by itself fairly complicated because we can still ask: "But why must human society be dynamic?" Man is included in a more mobile world than all the rest of nature, and in a very basic way he regards the very notion of movement differently. All organic creatures strive to stabilize their surroundings, all their changeabiliry is a striving for selfpreservationwithout change in a world that is liable to change and contrary to their interests; for man the changeability of his surroundings is a normal condition of living; for him the norm is life within changing conditions, a change in the way of life.lt is no accident that from the point of view of nature man appears as a destroyer. But it is precisely cultttre, in the broad sense,that distinguishes human society from nonhuman societies. Thus it follows that dynamism is not an outer qualiry of culture imposed on it by the arbitrariness of external causes but is insep arable from it. It is another matter that the dynamism of culture is not always acknowledged by its members. As has already been stated, the striving to perpetuate every contemporary (synchronic) condition is rypical for many cultures, and the possibility of any substantial change of the rules in force may not be allowed for at all (along with a typical prohibition against their being understood as relative). This is understandable where we are concernednot with observersbut with participants, with those within the particular culture: one can only speak of the dynamism of culture from the perspective of an investigator (observer) and not from that of a participant.

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On the other hand, the processof gradual change of a culture may not be perceived as continuous' and so the various stages of the process can be taken for different cultures contrasting with one another. (lt is exactly in this fashion that language continually changes, but the continuity of this processis not perceived directly by the users of the language themselvessince linguistic changesdo not occur within a single generation but through the transmission of the language from one generation to the next. In this way, the users of the language tend to see language change as a discrete process; language for them is not an uninterrupted continuum but breaks down into separate strata, the differences between which then acquire stylistic meaning.)'o The question whether dynamism, the constant need for self-regeneration,is an inner qualiry of culture or merely the result of the disturbing influence of the material conditions of man's existence on the system of his ideals cannot be resolved simply. Doubtless both processesare relevant. On the one hand, changes in a culture system are connected with the accumulation of information by the human community and with the inclusion of scienceinto culture as a relatively autonomous system with its own initiatives. Scienceis enriched not only by positive knowledg. but also by developing modeling complexes. The pursuit of inner unification, which is one of the basic tendenciesof culture (as we will seebelow), causesa constant transfer of purely scientific models into the general field of ideas and attempts to ascribe to them the features of the culture as a whole. Therefore, cognition with its initiating tendency and dynamic character will naturally influence the form of the model of the culture. On the other hand, not everything within the dynamics of semiotic systemscan be explained in this manner. It would be difficult to interpret the dynamics of the phonological or grammatical side of '$Thereas the necessiry for language in this way. change in the lexical system can be explained by the need for a different concept of the world to be reflected in the language, phonological change is an 20See Uspensky,"semioticheskieproblemy stilya v linosveshchenii"[Semioticproblemsof style gvisticheskom in a linguisticinterpretation],in Trudypo znakouymsistemam,IV (Tartu,1969),+9g. [Au.]

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immanent law of the system itself. or, to take another revealing example, the system of fashion can be studied in connection with various external social processes:from the laws of industrial manufacture to social-aesthetic ideals. However, at the same time, fashion is clearly ^ synchronically closed system with the specific quality that it undergoes change. Fashion is different from a norm in that it regulates a system of directing it not towards permanence but towards change. In so doing, fashion always tries to become the norm, but theseconcepts are by their very nature in opposition, for hardly does fashion achievea relative stability approximating the condition of a norm than it quickly seeksto abandon it. The motives for the change in fashion, as a rule, remain incomprehensible to the community regulated by its rules. This nonmotivation of fashion forces one to assume that we are dealing here with pure change; and it is precisely the nonmotivation of change (compare Nekrasov's "fickle fashion" lizmenchiuaia modal ) that defines the specific social function of fashion. It was no accident that made the forgotten eighteenth-century wrirer N. Strakhov, the author of A correspondence of Fashion, containing Letters from sleeuelessModes, Meditations by Inanimate costumes, conuersations among speechless Bonnets, the sentiments of Furnishings, carriages, Notebooks, Buttons and Ancient shirt-Fronts, caftans, Housecoats, Jackets, etc.: A Moral and critical composition wberein Are Reuealedin Their True Light tbe Manners, woy of Life and Diuerse comical and Imposing scenes of a Fashionable Agt, choose Impermanence as his leading Fashion correspondent while among the "Rules of Fashion" in his book we read: "'we hereby decree that no color of cloth should remain in use for more than one year."2r lt is quite obvious that the change in the color of cloth is not dictated by any urge to approximate some general ideal of truth, goodness, beauty, or appropriateness. One color is exchanged for another simply becausethe one was old and the oth er new. \we are dealing here with a tendency at its purest, one which in a more disguised form appears widely in human culrure. Thus, for example, in Russia in the beginning of the eighteenth century a change took place in the entire system of the culrural life of the ruling social stratum, a change which allowed people of that 2rPerepiska Mody,. . . (Mosco% r1gr),p. z1S.[Au.]

epoch to call themselveswith a certainpride "ne\ry." Kantemir wrote of the positive hero of his epoch: \ilfise is he that lets not fall peter's decrees ut *};$rX. have become at once a people

In this, as in thousands of other cases,one could point out many interesting reasonsfor the transformations, dictated by some correlation with other structural orders. However, what is equally clear is that the need for nouelty, for systematic change, is an equally perceptible stimulus for change.'sfherein lie the roots of this need? The question could be posed more generally as: "'Sfhy does mankind, as distinct from all other creatures of the world, have a history? " one can assumehere that mankind lived through a lon g prehistoric period in which duration of time played no parr, for there was no development and only at a specificmoment did there occur that break which gave birth to a dynamic structure and initiated the history of mankind. At present the most likely answer to this question appears to be as follows : at a certain moment, the moment, in fact, from which we can begin to speak of culture, man linked his existenceto a continually expanding nonhereditary memory; he became a receiuer of information (during the'prehisroric period he was merely a carrier of constant and genetically given information). But this required the continual actualization of a coding system which had to be constantly present in the consciousnessof both the addresseeand the addresseras a deauto matrzedsystem. The latter made it possible for a particular mechanism to emerge which, on the one hand, would exhibit particular homeostatic functions to such a degree as to preserve the uni ty of the memory, to remain the same, and on the other, would continu ally renew itself, deautomatizing itself at every phase and thereby maxim izing its ability to absorb information. The necessity for continual self-renewal, to become different and yet remain the same, constitutes one of the chief working mechanisms of culture. The reciprocal tension between these tendencies iustifies the static and the dynamic model of culture, 22satiry i drugie stikhotuorcheskie sochineniyaknyazya Antiokha Kantemira [satires and other verse compositions of Prince Antiokh Kantemir] (st. petersburg, 1 7 6 z ) p, . j z . [ A " . ]

On the Semiotic Mecbanism of Culture the models being defined by the initial axioms of description. AroNcsIDE this opposition within the system of culture of the old and the new, the unchangeable and the mobile, there is yet another basic opposi.We tion, the antithesis of unity and multiplicity. have already noted that the heterogeneity of the inner organrzation is a law for the existence of culture. The presence of differently organized structures, and various degrees of organization, is an essentialcondition for the functioning of the mecha'We cannot name a single culture in nism of culture. history in which all levels and subsystemswere organized on a strictly uniform structural base and synchronized in their historical dynamism. As a result of this need for structural variety, every culture singles out special spheres, differently organized, which are valued very highly in an axiological sense although they are outside the generalsystemof organrzation. Such were the monastery in the medieval world, poetry within the concepts of Romanticism, the world of gypsies, the backstage in the culture of St. Petersburg during the nineteenth century, and many other examples of little islands of "different" organization in the general body of culture, whose aim was to increase the structural variety and to overcome the entropy of structural automatization. Such were the temporary visits by t member of any cultural group into a different social structureofficials entering an artistic environment, landowners coming into Moscow for the winter, townspeople going into the country for the summer, Russian nobles in Paris or Karlsbad. And this, as M. M. Bakhtin has showtr, was the function of the carnival in the highly normative life of the Middle Ages." And yet culture requires unity. In order to fulfill its social function, culture has to appear as a structure subject to unified constructive principles. This unity comes about in the following manner: at a specific stage in the development of culture, there comes a moment when it becomes conscious of itself, when it createsa model of itself. The model defines the unified, the artificially schematized image, 'S7hen that is raised to the level of a structural unity. imposed onto the reality of this or that culture, it 23SeeM. M. Bakhtin TuorchestuoFransuaRablei narod, naya kul'tura sredneuekou'ya i Renessnnsa [The works of FranEoisRabelaisand the folk cultureof the Middle (Moscow,1965).[Au.] Agesand the Renaissance]

42r

exerts a powerful regulating influence, preordaining the construction of culture, introducing order, and eliminating contradiction. The error of many literary histories is that the self-interpreting models of cultures such as "the concept of Classicism in the works of seventeenth/eighteenth-century theoreticians" or "the concept of Romanticism in the works of the Romantics," which form a special stratum in the system of a culture's evolution, are studied on the same level as the facts of particular writers' works; this is a logical error. The assertions "everything is different and cannot be described by single general schema" and " "everything is the same and we have to deal with never-endingvariations of an invariant model" continually reappear in various guisesin the history of culture, from Ecclesiastesand the dialecticians of antiquiry to our own d"y. And this is no accident; they describe various aspects of a single cultural mechanism, and in their reciprocal tension they are part of the essenceof culture. These appear to us to be the basic featuresof that complicated semiotic system which we define as culture. Its function is to serve as a memory; its basic feature is self-accumulation. At the dawn of European civilization Heraclitus wrot€: "Essential to the psyche is the self-generating logos."'o He grasped the basic characteristic of culture. Sour oF our observations may be generalized as follows: structure, in nonsemiotic systems (those outside the complex "society-communicationculture"), pr€supposessome constructive principle of interconnection between elements.It is precisely the realization of this principle that allows one to speak of the given phenomenon as structural. Therefore, once a phenomenon exists, it has no alternative within the limits of its qualitative definition. A phenomenon may have structure, that is, be itself, or not have structure and not be itself. There are no other possibilities. Hence the fact that structure in nonsemiotic systems can only bear a fixed quantity of information. The semiotic mechanism of culture created by mankind is constructed according to a different principle: opposed and reciprocally alternating 2aHeraclitus,fragmentscited accordingto Anticbnye filosofy, Suidetel'stuA, fragmenty,teksty [Philosophersof antiquity; certificates,fragments,texts], compiled by A. A. Avitis'yan(Kiev,19j5), p. 27.lAu.l

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structural principles are essential. Their relation to one anotber, the disposition of particular elements in the structural field which emerges here, creates that structural regulatednesswhich allows the system to preserveinformation. It is crucial here, however, that it is not actuall y any specific alternatives whose number is finite and constant for the given system that are given, bur the very principle of alternation itself, and that all the actual oppositions of the given structure are merely interpretations of this principle on a cerrain level. As a resuh, any pair of elements, of local regularities, of particular or general structures, or even of whole semiotic systems acquires the significanceof being alternatives and forms a strucural field which may be filled with information. Hence the system with its everincreasing information potential. This snowballing of culture does not exclude the fact that its separate components, sometimes very essential ones, appear stabilized. Thus, for example, the dynamics of natural languagesis much slower than the development of other semiotic systems so that compared with any one of them, languages appear as synchronically stabilized systems. Yet culture is able to "squ eezeout" information even from this by creating the structural pair "static-dynamic." The snowballing of culture gave mankind an advantage over all other living beingsthat exist in conditions where the volume of informarion is stable. However, this processhas a darker side as well: culture devours resourcesiust as greedily as industry and iust as readily destroys its environment. The pace of its development is by no means always dictated by man's real needs; there comes into play the inner logic of accelerating change in the working mechanisms of information. In many fields (scientific information, art, information for the masses) crises come about which may bring whole spheres won over by culture to the brink of expulsion from the system of the social memory. "The self-generatinglogos" has always been valued positively. Now it is evident that a mechanism has unavoidably come into being which, by irs

complexity and rate of growth, can smother that very logos. culture doubtlessly still has many reserves.But for them to be utilized, we need a much clearer notion of its inner workings than we have available at present. As already noted, language carries out a specific communicative function within which it may be studied as an isolated functioning system, but in the system of culture, language has another role: it provides the collective with a presumption of commLtnicability. Language structure is abstracted from the material of languages; it becomes independent and is transferred to an ever-increasingrange of phenomena which begin to behave in the system of human communication as language and thus become elements of culture. Any realiry drawn into the sphere of culture begins to function as a sign. But if it already has a sign character (for any quasi sign of this kind is, in a social sense, undoubtedly a reality), then it becomesa sign of a sign. The presumption of language, applied to amorphous material, changes it into language and a language system and generates metalingual phenomena. Thus the twentieth century has produced nor only metalanguages of science, but a metaliterature and metapainting (painting about painting) as well, and apparently is creating a metaculture, an all-encompassingmetalingual system of a secondary order. Just as scientific metalanguage is not concerned with solvi.g factual problems of a particular science, but has its own aims, so contemporary "metanovelsr" "metapaintingsr" and "metacinematography" stand logically on a different hierarchic level than the corresponding first-order phenomena and pursue different ends. Looked at together, they do indeed seemas strange as a logical problem in engineering. The possibility of self-reduplication of meralanguage formations on an unlimited number of levels, along with the introduction of ever-new obiects into the sphere of communication, forms culture's reservein information.

PaulRicoeur b. 19r3

Fr.l I nr renunn work of Paul Ricoeur,as representedparticularly by The SymI bolism of Euil, displaysa variety of intellectual relations but especially phenomenologicalhermeneuticsand its connection to modern theology. The later work on metaphor,while maintaining the sameconcerns,entersinto the more recentlanguageof poststructuralismin order to quarrel with someof its more radical assertions.This developmentcan be seenby comparing Ricoeur's earlier attention to the symbol and its religious associationswith emphasison the metaphorin two later books, The Rule of Metapbor and,InterpretationTheory.ln his book on Freud and interpretation,Ricoeurdevelopeda distinction betweentwo types of hermeneuticof the symbol: the hermeneuticof suspicion, where the symbol is regardedas "transparent," through which its determinate meaningis declaredto be recovered;and a true hermeneuticin which the symbol is regardedas "opaque," though with an inexhaustibledepth. However,Ricoeur alsotreatsthe symbolas a sort of miraculousincarnation,and in that senseit too is "bound" or "rooted." By contrast, the metaphor, which Ricoeur regardsas "the linguistic procedure-that bizarre form of predication-within which the symbolicpower is deposited,"may or may not itself be a symbol,which is privilegedin all of Ricoeur'swork. ln Tbe Rule of Metaphor,Ricoeur tracesthe history of the theory of metaphormost eruditely from Aristotle through the history of rhetoric and arguesthat the Aristotelian notion of metaphor as deviation Irom common usagebecamechangedin an unwarrantedway to deviation from proper or original usage.This changeled the way to an erroneousdistinction betweenfigurative and proper that Ricoeur seesas having dominated language theory to its detriment, eversince. Ricoeur'saim is to shift the idea of the metaphor from that of denomination, where it seemsto be a substitution, to predication, which meansthat a metaphor is not lodgedin a noun but in the tensionof the copula and that it requires a semanticsof the sentencefor its eventualinterpretation. Metaphort rootednessis in the concreteact of discourserepresentedby the copula. Predicationhas always a syntheticcharacterin the act and cannot be understoodon the principle of the mereinterplay of differencesamongsignifiers.Ricoeurwould restore the notion of referenceto languagetheory. The metaphoricalactivity, he holds, makespossiblethe creationof new meaningreleasedin interpretation.However, when a metaphor becomesrepeated,it losesits "authenticityr" and presumably new metaphoricalactsmust comein its wake. Thus Ricoeurembracesa distinction betweenliving and dead metaphor.Clearly his concernwith metaphor and his insistenceon a semanticsof the sentenceand a hermeneuticof the work is 423

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opposedto deconstruction,which he claims doesnot go beyond a semioticsof the word. The essayhere,which follows on the two books concernedwith metaphor, extendsRicoeur'stheory of it. Here he arguesfor a conceptof ,,indirect reference,"in which is involved a "suspensionand seeminglyan abolition of the ordinary referenceattachedto descriptivelanguage." Ricoeurt major work translatedinto EnglishincludesFattibteMan (196o, trans. 1966); Tbe symbolismof Euil (196o, trans. 1969);Freudand philosophy (t96t ff., trans. r97o); The Conflictof Interpretations(196o-69,trans. ry74); The.Rule of Metaphor G97s, trans. 1977); Interpretation Tbiory: Discourse and the surplus of Meaning Ggz6); Hermeneuticsand the Human sciences (r98r, trans.r98 r ); andTimeandNarratiue(1983,trans.r9g4).SeeDon Ihde, HermeneuticPhenomenology:The Philosopbyof paul Ricoeur; HazardAdams, Philosophyof the Literary Symbolic(pp. tZz-8g).

THEMETAPHORICAL PROCESS AS

COGNITION, IMAGINATION,AND FEELING This paper will focus on a specific problem in the somewhat boundless field of metaphor theory. Although this problem may sound merely psychological, insofar as it includes such terms as "image" and "feelingr" I would rather cha racterize it as a problem arising on the boundary between a semantic theory of metaphor and a psychological theory of imagination and feeling. By a semantic theory, I mean an inquiry into the cap acity of metaphor to provide untranslatable information and, accordinglS into metaphor's claim to yield some true insight about realiry. The question ro which I will address myself is whether such an inquiry may be completed without including as a necessarycomponent a psychological moment of the kind usually described as "image" or "feeling." THE METAPHORICAL PROCESS As cocNITIoN, IMAGINArIoN, AND FEELTNGfirst appeare din Critical Inquiry s (Au-

tqml ry78). It is reprintedby permissionof the University of ChicagoPressand PaulRicoeur,copyright r97g.

At first glance, it seemsthat it is only in theories in which metaphorical phraseshave no informative value and consequently no truth claim that the so-called images or feelings are advocated as substitutive explanatory factors. By substitutive explanation I mean the attempt to derive the alleged significanceof metaphorical phrases from their capacity to display streamsof images and to elicit feelings that we mistakenly hold for genuine information and for fresh insight into reality. My thesis is that it is not only for theories which deny metaphors any informative value and any truth claim that images and feelings have a constitutiue function. I want instead to show that the kind of theory of metaphor initiated by I. A. Richards in philosophy of Rhetoric, Max Black in Models and Metaphors, Beardsley, Berggren,t and others cannot achieve its own goal without including imagining and feeling, that is, without assigning a semantic function to what seems to be mere psychological features and without, therefore, concerning itself with some accompanying factors extrinsic to the informative kernel of metaphor. This contention seems to run against a well-established-at least since Frege'sfamous article "Sinn und Bedeutung" and Husserl's Logical Inuestigationsz -dichotomy, that between sinn or senseand vorstellung or representation, if we understand "sense" as the objective content of an expression and "representation" as its mental actuahzation, precisely in the form of I For Berggrenseen. zz. 2SeeFregeand Husserl.[Eds.] [Eds.]

The Metaphorical Processas Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling image and feeling. But the question is whether the functioning of metaphorical sense does not put to the test and even hold at bay this very dichotomy. The first articulate account of metaphor, that of Aristotle, already provides some hints concerning what I will call the semantic role of imagination (and by implication, feeling) in the establishmentof metaphorical sense. Aristotle says of the lexis in general-that is, of diction, elocution, and style, of which metaphor is one of the figures-that it makes discourse (/ogos) appear as such and such. He also says that the gift of making good metaphors relies on the capacity to contemplate similarities. Moreover, the vividness of such good metaphors consists in their ability to "set before the eyes" the sensethat they display.' What is suggestedhere is a kind of pictorial dimension, which can be called the picturing function of metaphorical meanittg. The tradition of rhetoric confirms that hint beyond any specific theory concerning the semantic status of metaphor. The very expression "figure of speech" implies that in metaphor, as in the other tropes or turns, discourse assumesthe nature of a body by displaying forms and traits which usually characterizethe human face, man's "figure"; it is as though the tropes gave to discourse a quasi-bodily externalization. By providing a kind of figurability to the message,the tropes make discourse appear. Roman Jakobson suggestsa similar interpretation when he char acterizesthe "poetic" function in his general model of communication as the valorization of the message for its own sake. In the same way, Tzvetan Todorov, the Bulgarian theoretician of neo-rhetorics, defines "figure" as the visibility of discourse. G6rard Genette, in Figures I, speaksof deviance as an "inner spaceof language." "Simple and common expressionsr" he says, "have no form, figures [of speech]have some." I am quite aware that these are only hints which point toward a problem rather than toward a statement. Furthermore, I am quite aware that they add to this difficulty the fact that they tend to speak metaphorically about metaphor and thus introduce a kind of circularity which obscuresthe issue.But is not the word "metaphor" itself a metaphor, the metaphor of a displacement and therefore of a transfer in a kind of space?rDfhat is at stake is precisely the necessityof these spatial metaphors about 3SeeCTSP,pp. 60-62. [Eds.]

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metaphor included in our talk about "figures" of speech. Such being the problem, in what direction are we to look for a correct assessmentof the semantic role of imagination and eventually of feeling? It seems that it is in the work of resemblance that a pictorial or iconic moment is implied, 3s Aristotle suggests when he says that to make good metaphors is to contemplate similarities or (according to some other translations) to have an insight into likeness. But in order to understand correctly the work of resemblancein metaphor and to introduce the pictorial or iconic moment at the right place, it is necessary briefly to recall the mutation undergone by the theory of metaphor at the level of semantics by contrast with the tradition of classical rhetoric. In this tradition, metaphor was correctly described in terms of deuinnce, but this deviance was mistakenly ascribed to denomination only. Instead of giving a thing its usual comm on nnme, one designatesit by means of a borrowed nam e, a "foreign" name in Aristotle's terminology. The rationale of this transfer of name was understood as the objective similarity between the things themselvesor the subjective similarity between the attitudes linked to the grasping of these things. As concerns the goal of this transfer, it was supposed either to fill up a lexical lacuna, and therefore to serve the principle of economy which rules the endeavor of giving appropriate names to new things, new ideas, or new experiences,or to decorate discourse, and therefore to serve the main purpose of rhetorical discourse, which is to persuade and to please. The problem of resemblancereceivesa new articulation in the semantic theory char acterized by Max Black as an interaction theory (as opposed to a substitutive theory). The bearer of the metaphorical meaning is no longer the word but the sentenceas a whole. The interaction process does not merely consist of the substitution of a word for a word, of a name for a name-which, strictly speaking, defines only metonymy-but in an interaction befween a logical subject and a predicate. If metaphor consists in some deviance-this feature is not denied but is described and explained in a new way-this deviance concerns the predicative structure itself. Metaphor, then, has to be described as a deviant 'We predication rather than a deviant denomination. come closer to what I called the work of resemblance if we ask hoz this deviant predication ob-

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tains. A French theoretician in the field of poetics, Jean Cohen, in Structure du langage podtique, speaks of this deviance in terms of a semantic impertinence, meaning by that the violation of the code of pertinence or relevance which rules the ascription of predicates in ordinary use.oThe metaphorical statement works as the reduction of this syntagmatic deviance by the establishmentof a new semantic pertinence. This new pertinence in turn is secured by the production of a lexical deviance, which is therefore a paradigmatic deviance, that is, precisely the kind of deviance describedby classical rhetoricians. Classical rhetoric, in that sense,was not wrong, but it only described the " effect of sense" at the level of the word while it overlooked the production of this semanric twist ar the level of sense.nThile it is rrue that the effect of senseis focused on the word, the production of senseis borne by the whole utterance. It is in that way that the theory of metaphor hinges on a semantics of the sentence. Such is the main presupposition of the following analysis.The first question is to understand how resemblanceworks in this production of meanirg. The next step will be to connect in the right way the pictorial or iconic moment to this work of resemblance. As concerns the first step, the work of resemblance as such, it seemsto me that we are still only halfway to a full understanding of the semanric innovation which characterizesmetaphorical phrases or sentencesif we underline only the aspect of deviance in metaphor, even if we distinguish the semantic impertinence which requires the lexical deviance from this lexical devianceitself, as described by Aristotle and all classical rhetoricians. The decisive feature is the semantic innovation, thanks to which a new pertinence, a new congruence, is established in such a way that the utterance "makes sense" as a whole. The maker of metaphors is this craftsman with verbal skill who, from an inconsistent utterance for a literal interpretation, draws a significant utterance for a new interpretation which deservesto be called metaphorical becauseit generates the metaphor not only as deviant but as acceptable. In other words, metaphorical meaning does not merely consist of a semantic clash but of the oJeanCohen,Structuredu langagepodtique(Paris,1966). [Au.]

new predicative meaning which emerges from the collapse of the literal meaning, that is, from the collapse of the meaning which obtains if we rely only on the common or usual lexical valuesof our words. The metaphor is not the enigma but the solution of the enigma. It is here, in the mutation characteristic of the semantic innovation, that similarity and accordingly imagination play a role. But which role? I think that this role cannot be but misunderstood as long as one has in mind the Humean theory of image as a faint impression, that is, as a perceptual residue. It is no better undersrood if one shifts ro rhe other tradition, according to which imagination can be reduced to the alternation between two modalities of association, either by contiguity or by similarity. UnfortunatelS this prejudice has been assumed by such important theoreticians asJakobson, for whom the metaphoric processis opposed to the metonymic processsin the same way as the substitution of one sign for another within a sphere of similarity is opposed to the concatenation between signs along a string of contiguiry. ril(rhatmusr be understood and underscored is a mode of functioning of similariry and accordingly of imagination which is immanent-that is, nonextrinsic-to the predicative processitself. In other words, the work of resemblance has to be appropriate and homogeneous to the deviance and the oddness and the freshnessof the semantic innovation itself. How is this possible? I think that the decisive problem that an interaction theory of metaphor has helped to delineatebut not to solve is the transition from literal incongruence to metaphorical congruence between fwo semantic fields. Here the metaphor of spaceis useful. It is as though a change of distance between meanings occurred within a logical space. The new pertinence or congruence proper to a meaningful metaphoric utterance proceeds from the kind of semantic proximiry which suddenly obtains berween rerms in spite of their distance. Things or ideas which were remote appear now as close. Resemblance ultimately is nothing else than this rapprochement which reveals a generic kinship between heterogeneous ideas. tU7hat Aristotle called the epiphora of the metaphor, that is, the transfer of meaning, is nothing else than this 5SeeCTSP,pp. r rr3-r6. [Eds.]

The Metaphorical Processas Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling move or shift in the logical distance, from the far to the near. The lacuna of some recent theories of metaphor, including Max Black's, concerns precisely the innovation proper to this shift.t It is the first task of an appropriate theory of imagination to plug this hole. But this theory of imagination must deliberately break with Hume and draw on Kant, specifically on Kant's concept of productive imagination as schematizing a synthetic operation.7 This will provide us with the first step in our attempt to adjust a psychology of imagination to a semantics of metaphor or, if you prefer, to complete a semantics of metaphor by having recourse to a psychology of imagination. There will be three steps in this attempt of adiustment and of completion. In the first step, imagination is understood as the "seeingr" still homogeneous to discourse itself, which effects the shift in logical distance, the rapprochement itself. The place and the role of productive imagination is there, in the insight, to which Aristotle alluded when he said that to make good metaphors is to contemplate likeness- tlteorein to omoion This insight into likeness is both a thinking and a seeing.It is a thinking to the extent that it effects a restructuration of semantic fields; it is transcategorical becauseit is categorical. This can be shown on the basis of the kind of metaphor in which the logical aspect of this restructuration is the most conspicuous, the metaphor which Aristotle called metaphor by analogy, that is, the proportional metaphor: A is to B what C is to D. The cup is to Dionysus what the shield is to Ares. Therefore we may say, by shifting terms, Dionysus' shield or Ares' cup. But this thinking is a seeing,to the extent that the insight consists of the instantaneous grasping of the combinatory possibilities offered by the proportionality and consequently the establish6Black'sexplanationof the metaphoricalprocessby the' "Systemof associatedcommonplaces"leavesunsolved the problem of innovation,as the following reservations and qualificationssuggest:"Metaphorsr" he says,"can be supported by specificallyconstructed systemsof implications as well as by acceptedcommonplaces" (Models and Metaphors [Ithaca, N.Y., 196z), p. $). And further: "Theseimplicationsusuallyconsistof commonplacesabout the subsidiarysubiect,but may,in suitad ablecases,consistof deviantimplicationsestablished hocby the writer" (p. 44).How are we to think of these implicationsthat are createdon the spot?[Au.] TSeeKant, Critique of PureReason.[Eds.]

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ment of the proportionality by the rapprochement between the fwo ratios. I suggest we call this productiue character of the insi ght predicatiue assimilation. But we miss entirely its semantic role if we interpret it in terms of the old association by resemblance. A kind of mechanical attraction between mental atoms is thereby substituted for an operation homogeneous to language and to its nuclear ac\ the predication act. The assimilation consists precisely in making similar, that is, semantically proxim atq the terms that the metaphorical utterance brings together. Some will probably obfect to my ascribing to the imagination this predicative assimilation. Without returning to my earlier critique of the prejudices concerning the imagination itself which may prevent the analysts from doing iustice to productive imagination, I want to underscore a trait of predicative assimilation which may support my contention that the rapprochement characteristic of the metaphorical process offers a typical kinship to Kant's schematism.I mean the paradoxical character of the predicative assimilation which has been compared by some authors to Ryle's concept of "category mistaker" which consists in presenting the facts pertaining to one category in the terms appropriate to another.t All new rapprochement runs against a previous categorizatron which resists, or rather which yields while resisting, as Nelson Goodman says.tThis is what the idea of.a semantic impertinence or incongruence preserves. In order that a metaphor obtains, one must continue to identify the previous incompatibility through the new compatibility. The predicative assimilation involves, in that way, a specific kind of tension which is not so much between a subiect and a predicate as between Semantic incongruence and congruence. The insight into likeness is the perception of the conflict between the previous incompatibility and the new compatibility. "Remoteness" is preserved within "proximity." To seethe like is to seethe same in spite of, and through, the different. This tension between samenessand difference char acterizes the logical structure of likeness. Imagination, accordinglR is this ability to produce new kinds by assimilation and to produce them not aboue the differsThe Conceptof Mind (New York, 1949),pp. r6ff- [Eds.] eLanguages 1976),p.6g.[Eds.] of Art (Indianapolis,

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ences,as in the concept, but in spite of and through the differences. Imagination is this stage in the production of genres where generic kinship has not reached the level of conceptual peace and rest but remains caught in the war berween distance and proximitS between remoteness and nearness. In that sense, we may speak with Gadamer', of the fundamental metaphoriciry of thought to the extent that the figure of speech that we call "metaphor" allows us a glance at the general procedure by which we produce concepts. This is becausein the metaphoric process the movement toward the genus is arrested by the resistanceof the difference and, as it were, intercepted by the figure of rhetoric. such is the first function of imagination in the processof semanticinnovation. Imagination has not yet been considered under its sensible, quasi-optic aspect but under its quasi-verbal aspect. However, the latter is the condition of the former. \7e first have to understand an image, according to Bachelard's remark in the Poetics of space, as "a being pertaining to language."tt Before being a fading perception, the image is an emerging meaning. such is, in fact, the tradition of Kant's productive imagination and schematism.tVhat we have above described is nothing else than the schematism of metaphorical attribution. The next step will be to incorporate into the se, mantics of metaphor the second aspecrof imagination, its pictorial dimension. It is this aspect which is at stake in the figuratiue character of metaphor. It is also this aspectwhich was intended by I. A. Richards' distinction between tenor and vehicle.t, This distinction is not entirely absorbed in the one Black makes between frame and focus. Frame and focus designate only the contextual setting-say, the sentence as a whole-and the term which is the bearer of the shift of meaning, whereas tenor and vehicle designate the conceptual import and its pictorial envelope. The first function of imagination was to give an account of the frame/focus interplay; its second function is to give an account of the difference of level between tenor and vehicle or, in other words, of the way in which a semantic innovation is not only schematized but pictured. Paul Henle borrows toSeeGadamer. [Eds.] ll Gaston Bachelard, The Poeticsof space,trans. Maria Jolas(New York, ry6+). [Au.] '2I.A. Richards, TIte Philosophyof Rhetoric(.'g16).[Eds.]

from charles sanders Peirce the distinction between sign and icon and speaks of the iconic aspect of metaphor.t' If there are two thoughts in one in a metaphor, there is one which is intended; the other is the concrete aspect under which the first one is presented. In Keats' verse "'when by my solitary hearth I sit / And hateful thoughts enwrap my soul in gloom," the metaphorical expression ,,enwrap" consistsin presenting sorrow as if it were capable of enveloping the soul in a cloak. Henle comments: "'we are led lby figurative discourse] ro think of something by a consideration of something like it, and this is what constitures the iconic mode of signifying." Someonemight obf e.t at this point that we are in danger of reintroducing an obsolete theory of the image, in the Humean sense of a weakened sensorial impression. This is therefore the place to recall a remark made by Kant that one of the functions of the schema is to provide images for a concept. In the same vein, Henle writes: "If there is an iconic element in metaphor it is equally clear that the icon is not presented, but merely described." And further: "'what is presented is a formula for 's7hat the construction of icons." we have therefore to show is that if this new extension of the role of imagination is not exactly included in the previous one, it makes sensefor a semantic theory only to 'V7hat the extent that it is conrrolled by it. is at issue is the development from schematization to iconic presentation. The enigma of iconic presentation is the way in which depiction occurs in predicative assimilation: something appears on which we read the new connection. The enigma remains unsolved as long as we treat the image as a mental picture, that is, as the replica of an absent thing. Then the image musr remain foreign to the process, extrinsic to predicative assimilation. 'we have to understand the process by which a certain production of images channels the schematization of predicative assimilation. By displ^yirg a flow of images, discourse initiates changes of logical distance, generatesrapprochement. Imagittg or imagining, thus, is the concrete milieu in which and through which we see similarities. l1o t3Paql Henle, "Metaphor," in Language,Thought, and Culture,ed. Henle(Ann Arbor, Mich., rgjg). tAu.1Sre Peirce.[Eds.]

The MetaphoricalProcessas Cognition,Imagination,and Feeling imagine, then, is not to have a mental picture of something but to display relations in a depicting mode. \Thether this depiction concerns unsaid and unheard similarities or refers to qualities, structures, localizations, situations, attitudes, or feelingS, each time the new intended connection is grasped as what the icon describesor depicts. It is in this way, I think, that one can do justice within a semantic theory of metaphor to the Wittgensteinian concept of "seeing as." tilTittgenstein himself did not extend this analysisbeyond the field of perception and beyond the process of interpretation made obvious by the case of ambiguous "Gestalten," as in the famous duck/rabbit drawing.'o Marcus B. Hester, in his The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor, has attempted to extend the concept of "seeing as" to the functioning of poetic images.tt Describing the experience of reading, he shows that the kind of images which are interesting for a theory of poetic language are not those that interrupt reading and distort or divert it. These imagesthese "wild" images, if I may say so-are properly extrinsic to the fabric of sense. They induce the reader, who has become a dreamer rather than a reader, to indulge himself in the delusive attempt, described by Sartre as fascination, to possessmagically the absent thing, bodR or person. The kind of images which still belong to the production of sense are rather what Hester calls "bound" images, that is, concrete representations aroused by the verbal element and controlled by it. Poetic language, says Hester, is this language which not only merges senseand sound, as many theoreticians have said, but senseand senses,meaning by that the flow of bound images displayed by the sense.We are not very far from what Bachelard called retentissement [reverberation]. In reading, Bachelard says,the verbal meaning generatesimages which, so to speak, rejuvenate and reenact the traces of sensorial experience. Yet it is not the process of reverberation which expands the schematization and, in Kant's words, provides a concept with an image. In fact, as the experienceof reading shows, this display of imagesranges from schematization without full-blown images to wild images which distract thought more than they instruct it. The kind of images which are raSeeWittgenstein. [Eds.] t5Marcus B. Hester, The Meaning of Poetic Metaphor (TheHague,ry62). [Au.]

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relevant for a semantics of the poetic image are those which belong to the intermediary range of the scale, which are, therefore, the bound images of Hester's theory. These images bring to concrete completion the metaphorical process. The meaning is then depicted under the features of ellipsis. Through this depiction, the meaning is not only schematrzedbut lets itself be read on the image in which it is inverted. Or, to put it another waR the metaphorical sense is generated in the thickness of the imagining scene displayed by the verbal structure of the poem. Such is, to my mind, the functioning of the intuitive grasp of a predicative connection. I do not deny that this second stageof our theory of imagination has brought us to the borderline between pure semantics and psychology or, more preciselR to the borderline between a semantics of productive imagination and a psychology of reproductive imagination. But the metaphorical meaning, as I said in the introduction, is precisely this kind of meaning which denies the wellestablished distinction between sense and representation, to evoke once more Frege's opposition between Sinn and Vorstellung. By blurring this distinction, the metaphorical meaning compels us to explore the borderline between the verbal and the nonverbal. The process of schematrzation and that of the bound images aroused and controlled by schematization obtain precisely on that borderline between a semanticsof metaphorical utterancesand a psychology of imagination. The third and final step in our attempt to complete a semantic theory of metaphor with a proper consideration of the role of imagination concerns what I shall call the "suspension" or, if you prefer, the moment of negativity brought by the image in the metaphorical process. ln order to understand this new contribution of the image to this process,w€ have to come back to the basic notion of meaning as applied to a metaphorical expression. By meaning we may understand-as we have in the preceding as well-the inner functioning of the proposition as a predicative operation, for example, in Black's vocabularS the "filter" or the "screen" effect of the subsidiary subject on the main subiect. Meanitg, then, is nothing else than what Frege called Sinn [sense],in contradistinction to Bedeutung [reference or denotation]. But to ask about what a metaphorical

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statement is, is something other and something more than to ask what it says. The question of reference in metaphor is a particular case of the more general question of the truth claim of poetic language. As Goodman says in Languages of Art, all symbolic systems are denotative in the sense that they "make" and "remake" reality. To raise the question of the referential value of poetic language is to try to show how symbolic systems reorganize "the world in terms of works and works in terms of the world." t6 At that point the theory of metaphor tends to merge with that of models to the extent that a metaphor may be seenas a model for changing our way of looking at things, of perceiving the world. The word "insight," very often applied to the cognitiue rmport of metaphor, conveys in a very appropriate manner this move from senseto reference which is no less obvious in poetic discourse than in so-called descriptive discourse. Here, too, we do not restrict ourselvesto talking about ideas nor, as Frege says of proper names, "are we satisfied with the sense alone." "'we presuppose besides a referencer" the "striving for truthr" which prompts "our intention in speaking or thinking" and "drives us always to advance from the senseof the refe tence.,,t, But the paradox of metaphorical referenceis that its functioning is as odd as that of the metaphorical sense. At first glance, poetic language refers to nothing but itself. In a classic essayentitled "'word and Language," which defines the poetic function of language in relation to the other functions implied in any communicative transaction, Jakobson bluntly opposes the poetic function of the message to its referential function. on the contrarR the referential function prevails in descriptive language, be it ordinary or scientific. Descriptive languag., h. says, is not about itself, not inwardly oriented, but outwardly directed. Here language, so to speak, effacesitself for the sake of what is said about reality. "The poetic function-which is more than mere poetry-lays the stress on the palpable side of the signs, underscoresthe messagefor its own sake and deepens the fundamental dichotomy berween signs 15NelsonGoodman,op. cit., p. z4r. [Au.] tt{: quoted lrom Frege's"Senseand Riference" in my The Rule of Metaphor: Mubidisciplinary studiesin the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto, r97g), pp. 217- r8. [Au.]SeeFrege.[Eds.]

and obiecs."'8 The poetic function and the referential function, accordingly, seem to be polar opposites. The latter directs language toward the nonlinguistic context, the former directs message toward itself. This analysis seems to strengthen some other classicalarguments among literary critics and more specifically in the srrucruralist camp according ro which not only poetry but literature in general implies a mutation in the use of language. This redirects language toward itself to the point that language may be said, in Roland Barthes, words, to "celebrate itself " rather than to celebratethe world. My contention is that these arguments are not false but give an incomplete picture of the whole process of reference in poetic discourse. Jakobson himself acknowledged that what happens in poerry is not the suppressionof the referential function but its profound alteration by the workings of the ambiguity of the messageitself. "The suprem acy of poetic function over referential functionr" he r"yr, "does not obliterate the referencebut makes it ambiguous. The double-sensed message finds correspondencein a split addresser,in a split addressee, and what is more, in a split reference,as is cogently exposed in the preambles rc fairy tales of various people, for instance, in the usual exhortation of the Majorca story tellers; Aixo era y no ert (it was and it was not) ." tt I suggestthat we take the expression "split reference" as our leading line in our discussionof the referential function of the metaphorical statement. This expression, as well as the wonderful "it was and it was notr" contains in nuce allthat can be said about metaphorical reference. Tlo summa rize, poetic language is no less about reality than any other use of language but refers ro it by the means of a complex strategy which implies, xs an essential component, a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference amachedto descriptive language.This suspension,however, is only the negative condition of a second-order reference, of an indirect referencebuilt on the ruins of the direct reference.This referenceis called second-order reference only with respect to the primacy of the refertsJakobson, Selected'Writings, z vols. (The Hague, 196z), z: 3 56. [A".] reAs found in my The Rule of Metaphor, p. zz4.[Au.]

The Metapborical Processas Cognition, lmagination, and Feeling ence of ordinary language. For, in another respect, it constitutes the primordial reference to the extent that it suggests,reveals, unconceals-or whatever you say-the deep structures of reality to which we are related as mortals who are born into this world and who dwell in it for a while. This is not the place to discuss the ontological implications of this contention nor to ascertain its similarities and dissimilarities with Husserl's concept of Lebensweh or with Heidegger's concept of In-der-Welt-Sein.toI want to emphasize, for the sake of our further discussion of the role of imagination in the completion of the meaning of metaphor, the mediating role of the suspension-or epoch6"-o[ ordinary descriptive reference in connection with the ontological claims of poetic discourse.This mediating role of the epochd in the functioning of the reference in metaphor is in complete agreement with the interpretation we have given to the functioning of sense.The senseof a novel metaphor, we said, is the emergence of a new semantic congruence or pertinence from the ruins of the literal senseshattered by semantic incompatibility or absurdity. In the same way as the self-abolition of literal sense is the negative condition for the emergence of the metaphorical sense,the suspensionof the reference proper to ordinary descriptive language is the negative condition for the emergenceof a more radical way of looking at things, whether it is akin or not to the unconcealing of that layer of reality which phenomenology calls preobjective and which, according to Heidegg€r, constitutes the horizon of all our modes of dwelling in the world. Once more, what interests me here is the parallelism between the suspension of literal sense and the suspension of ordinary descriptive reference. This parallelism goes very far. In the same way as the metaphorical sensenot only abolishes but preservesthe literal sense,the metaphorical reference maintains the ordinary vision in tension with the new one it suggests.As Berggren says in "The Use and Abuse of Metaphor": "The possibility or comprehension of metaphorical construing requires, therefore, a peculiar and rather sophisticated in'W. Bedell Stanford metatellectual ability which 20Lebenswelt:life-world; In-der-Welt-Seinz Being-in-theworld. [Eds.] 21Aterm employedby HusserL[Eds.]

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'stereoscopicvision' : the ability to phorically labels entertain two different points of view at the same time. That is to say, the perspective prior to and subsequentto the transformation of the metaphor's principal and subsidiary subiectsmust both be conjointly maintained."" But what Bedell Stanford called stereoscopicvision is nothing elsethan what Jakobson called split reference: ambiguiry in reference. My contention now is that one of the functions of imagination is to give a concrete dimension to the suspension or epochd proper to split reference. Imagination does not merely schematizethe predicative assimilation berween terms by its synthetic insight into similarities nor does it merely picture the sensethanks to the display of images aroused and controlled by the cognitive process. Rather, it contributes concretely to the epochd of ordinary referenceand to the proiection of new possibilities of redescribing the world. In a sense,all epochd is the work of the imagination. Imagination is epoch6. As Sartre emphasized, to imagine is to address oneself to what is not. More radicallS to imagine is to make oneself absent to the whole of things. Yet I do not want to elaborate further this thesis of the negativity proper to 'Sfhat I do want to underscore is the solithe image. darity between the epoch| and the capacity to project new possibilities. Image as absenceis the negative side of image as fiction. It is to this aspectof the image as fiction that is attached the power of symbolic systemsto "remake" reality, to return to Goodman's idiom. But this productive and proiective function of fiction can.only be acknowledged if one sharply distinguishes it from the reproductive role of the so-called mental image which merely provides us with a re-presentation of things already perceived. Fiction addressesitself to deeply rooted potentialities of reality to the extent that they are absent from the actualities with which we deal in everyday life under the mode of empirical control and manipulation. [n that sense, fiction presents under a concrete mode the split structure of the reference pertaining to the metaphorical statement. It both reflects and completes it. [t reflects it in the sensethat the mediating role of the epochd proper 22DouglasBerggren,"The Use and Abuseof Metaphor," Reuiewof Metaphysicsr 6 (Decemberry62) i 243.[Au.]

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to the image is homogeneous to the paradoxical structure of the cognitive process of reference. The "it was and it was not" of the Majorca storytellers rules both the split reference of the metaphorical statement and the contradictory structure of fiction. Yet, we may say as well that the structure of the fiction not only reflects but completes the logical structure of the split reference. The poet is this genius who generates split references by creating fictions. It is in fiction that the "absence" proper to the power of suspending what we call "realify" in ordinary language concretely coalescesand fuses with the positiue insight into the potentialities of our being in the world which our everyday transactions with manipulatable objects tend ro conceal. You may have noticed that until now I have said nothing concerning feelings in spite of the commitment implied in this paper's title to deal with the problem of the connection berweencognition, imagination, and feeling. I have no intention to elude this problem. Imagination and feeling have always been closely 'we linked in classicaltheories of metaphor. cannor forget that rhetoric has always been defined as a strategy of discourse aiming at persuading and pleasing. And we know the central role played by pleasurein the aestheticsof Kant. A theory of metaphor, therefore, is not complete if it does not give an account of the place and role of feeling in the metaphorical process. My contention is that feeling has a place not just in theories of metaphor which deny the cognitiue import of metaphor. These theories ascribe a substitutive role to image and feeling due to the metaphor's lack of informative value. In addirion, I claim that feeling as well as imagination are genuine components in the process described in an interaction theory of metaphor. They both achieue the semantic bearing of metaphor. I have already tried to show the way in which a psychology of imagination has to be integrated into a semantics of metaphor. I will now try to extend the same kind of description to feeling. A bad psychology of imagination in which imagination is conceived as a residue of perception prevents us from acknowledging the constructive role of imagination. In the sameway, a bad psychology of feeling is responsiblefor a similar misunderstanditrg.Indeed, our natural inclination is to speak of feeling in terms

appropriate to emotion, that is, to affections conceived as (r ) inwardly direced states of mind, and (z) mental experiencesclosely tied to bodily disturbances, as is the case in fear, anger, pleasure, and pain. In fact both traits come together. To the extent that in emotion we are, so to speak, under the spell of our bodS we are delivered to mental states with little intentionality, as though in emotion we "lived" our body in a more intense way. Genuine feelings are not emotions, as may be shown by feelings which are rightly called poetic feelings. Just like the corresponding images which they reverberate, they enjoy a specific kinship with language.They are properly displayed by the poem as a verbal texture. But how are they linked to its meaning? I suggestthat we construe the role of feeling according to the three similar moments which provided an ,articulation to my theory of imagination. Feelin$s,first, accomp any and complete imagination in its function of schematization of the new predicative congruence. This schematization, xs I said, is a kind of insight into the mixrure of "like" and "unlike" proper to similariry. Now we may say that this instantaneous grasping of the new congruence is "felt" as well as "seen." By saying that it is felt, we underscore the fact that we are included in the process as knowing subjects. If the process can be called, as I called it, predicative assimilation, it is true that we are assimilated,that is, made similar, to what is seenas similar. This self-assimilation is a part of the commitment proper to the "illocutionary" force of the metaphor as speech act. we feel like what we see like. If we are somewhat reluctant to acknowledge this contribution of feeling to the illocutionary act of metaphorical statements,it is becausewe keep applying to feeling our usual interpretation of emotion as both inner and bodily states. We then miss the specific structure of feeling. As Stephan Strasser shows in Das Gemut [The heart], a feeling is a second-order intentional structure.23It is a process of interiorizatron succeeding a movement of intentional transcendencedirected toward some obfective state of affairs. To feel, in the emotional senseof the word, is to mak e ours what has been put at a distance by thought in its objectifying phase. Feel23StephenStrass er, DasGemut(Freiber g, r956). [Au.]

The MetaphoricalProcessas Cognition,Imagination,and Feeling ings, therefore, have a very complex kind of intentionality. They are not merely inner states but interiorized thoughts. [t is as such that they accompany and complete the work of imagination as schematizing a synthetic operation: they make the schematized thought ours. Feeling, then, is a caseof SelbstAffektion, in the sense Kant used it in the second edition of Critique. This Selbst-Affektion, in turn, is a part of what we call poetic feeling. Its function is to abolish the distance between knower and known without canceling the cognitive structure of thought and the intentional distance which it implies. Feelingis not contrary to thought. It is thought made ours. This felt participation is a part of its complete meaning as poem. Feelings, furthermore, accom pany and complete imagination as picturing relationships. This aspect of feeling has been emphasizedby Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism under the designation of "mood." Each poem, he says, structures a mood which is this unique mood generated by this unique string of words. [n that sense,it is coextensiveto the verbal structure itself. The mood is nothing other than the way in which the poem affects us as an icon. Frye offers strong expression here: "The unity of apoem is the unity of a mood"; the poetic images "express or articulate this mood. This mood is the poem and nothing else behind it."'o In my own terms, I would say,in a tentative way, that the mood is the iconic as ftb.Perhaps we could arrive at the same assumption by starting from Goodman's concept of dense vs. discrete symbols. Dense symbols are felt as dense. That does not mean, once more, that feelings are radically opaque and ineffable. "Density" is a mode of articulation just as discretenessis. Or, to speak in Pascal'sterms, the "esprit de finesse" is no less thought than the "esprit g6ometrique." However, I leave these suggestions open to discussion. Finally, the most important function of feelings can be construed according to the third feature of imagination, that is, its contribution to the split reference of poetic discourse. The imagination contributes to it, as I said, owing to its own split structure. On the one hand, imagination entails the epoch6, the suspension, of the direct reference of 2aNorthrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays ( P r i n c e t o n r, g S Z ) . [ A u . ] S e eC T S P ,p . r r z 3 . [ E d s . ]

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thought to the objects of our ordinary discourse. On the other hand, imagination provides models for reading reality in a new way. This split structure is the structure of imagination as fiction. \fhat could be the counterpart and the complement of this split structure at the level of feelings? My contention is that feelings, too, display a split structure which completes the split structure pertaining to the cognitive component of metaphor. On the one hand, feelings-l mean poetic feelings-imply a kind of epochd of our bodily emotions. Feelings are negative, suspensiveexperiences in relation to the literal emotions of everyday life. tilfhen we read, w€ do not literally feel f.earor anger. Just as poetic language denies the first-order reference of descriptive discourse to ordinary objects of our concern, feelings deny the first-order feelings which tie us to thesefirst-order objects of reference. But this denial, too, is only the reverseside of a more deeply rooted operation of feeling which is to insert us within the world in a nonobjectifying manner. That feelings are not merely the denial of emotions but their metamorphosis has been explicitly assertedby Aristotle in his analysisof catharsis. But this analysis remains trivial as long as it is not interpreted in relation to the split reference of the cognitive and the imaginative function of poetic discourse. It is the tragic poem itself, as thought ( dianoia), which displays specific feelings which are the poetic transposition-I mean the transposition by means of poettc langudge-of fear and compassion, that is, of feelings of the first order, of emotions. The tragic phobos and the tragic eleos (terror and pity, as some translators say) are both the denial and the transfiguration of the literal feelings of fear and compassion. On the basis of this analysis of the split structure of poetic feeling, it is possible to do justice to a certain extent to a claim of Heidegger's analytic of the Dasein that feelings have ontological bearing, that they are ways of "being-therer" of "finding" ourselves within the world, to keep something of the semantic intent of the German Befindlicbkeit Becauseof feelings we are " attuned to" aspectsof reality which cannot be expressedin terms of the obiects referred to in ordinary langu age. Our entire analysis of the split referenceof both language and feeling is in agreement with this claim. But it must be underscored that this analysis of Befindlichkeit

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makes senseonly to the extenr that it is paired with that of split referenceboth in verbal and imaginative structures. If we miss this fundamental connection, we are tempted to construe this concept of Befindlicbkeit as a new kind of intuitionism-and the worst kind!-in the form of a new emotional realism. we miss, in Heidegger's Daseinanalyse itself, the close connections berween Befindlichkeit and Verstehen, between situation and project, befween anxiety and interpretation. The ontological bearing of feeling cannor be separated from the negative process applied to the first-order emotions, such as fear and sympathy, according to the Aristotelian paradigm of catharsis. r7ith this qualificadon in mind, we may assumethe Heideggerian thesis that it is mainly through feelings that we are attuned to reality. But this attunement is nothing else than the reverberation in terms of feelings of the split reference of both verbal and imaginative structure. To conclude, I would like to emphasizethe points which I submit to discussion: r. There are three main presuppositions on which the resr of my analysis relies: (a) metaphor is an act of predication rather than of denomination; (b) a theory of deviance is not enough to give an account of the emergenceof a new congruence at the predicative level; and (c) the notion of

metaphorical senseis not complete without a description of the split reference which is specific to poetic discourse. z. On this threefold basis, I have tried ro show that imagination and feeling are not extrinsic to the emergence of the metaphorical sense and of the split reference. They are not substitutive for a lack of informative content in metaphorical statements, but they complete their full cognitive intent. j. But the price to pay for the last point is a theory of imagination and of feeling which is still in infancy. The burden of my argument is that the notion of poetic image and of poetic feeling has to be consrrued in accordance with the cognitive component, understood itself as a tension between congruence and incongruence at the level of sense,between epochd and commitment at the level of reference. 4. My paper suggeststhat there is a structural analogy berween the cognitive, the imaginative, and the emotional components of the complete metaphorical act and that the metaphorical process draws its concretenessand its completenessfrom this structural analogy and this complementary functioning.

M. H. Abrams b. rgrz

rHE appearanceof his The Mirror and the Lamp,a study of critical \Y/tt" theoryof the romanticperiod,M. H. Abramsbecameknown as a luVY cid and thorough scholar of the thought of that age. His secondmajor book, Natural Supernaturalism,was an impressiveoverview of romantic literature. Throughout his careerAbrams has producedimportant essays,mainly on romantic poetry, but in his later work he hasenteredthe contemporarytheoretical wars with essaysthat are openly critical of developmentsoccurring around deconstructionand the questionof whetherdeterminatemeaningis possible.In a well-known essay "The DeconstructiveAngel" (Crhical Inquiry I bgZZD, Abramstook ashis targetin particular the later deconstructivewri tingsof ! . Hillis Miller, who respondedin the essayin this volume. This selectionof Abrams'sis a critique of the work of JacquesDerrida, Stanley Fish, and Harold Bloom. Critical of all three, he is nevertheless able to provide, in his characteristicway, a clear descriptionof the positions they hold. Abrams recognizestheir differences,but he seesone overarchingsimilarity among them, and he doesnot like it. That is their commonrejectionof presumptionsabout the meaningof literary texts, indeedof all texts, that havebeenfairly commonly held by traditional humanists-that aurhors had somethingro say which they conveyedin such a way within a tradition of linguistic conventionsas to make possiblethe assumptionthat their meaningcould be construedby a reader. Abrams doesnot imply that new readingscannorreasonablyarise.He holds that we read accordingto the linguistic strategyemployedby the author of the work, and clearly he believesthat in situationswhere a past text provides specialdifficulties this strategy is theoretically recoverableby the work of humanistic scholarship. Abrams'sprincipal works are The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and tbe critical Tradition (t9 y); Natural Supernaturalism:Tradition and ReuoIution in Romantic Literature (tgZr); and The CorrespondentBreeze(1984), a collectionof essayson romanticism.SeeWayneBooth, "M. H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralisr,"Critical Inquiry z (Spring1976).

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HOXTTODO THINGS \NTH TEXTS The Age of Criticism, which reached its zenith in the mid-decades of this century, has given way to the Age of Readirg, and whereas the American new critics and European formalists of the Ag. of Criticism discovered the work-as-such, current literary theorists have discovered the reader-as-such.This reader, as everyone knows who has kept even cursorily in touch with the latest Paris fashions, is not the man he used to be. He is a wraith of his old self, stripped of everything human, as part of a systematic dehumanizing of all aspects of the traditional view about how a work of literature comes into being, what it is, how it is read, and what it means. For purpose of comparison, let me sketch the salient and persistent features of the traditional, or humanistic paradigm of the writing and reading of literature. The writer is conceived, in Wordsworth's terms, as "a man speaking to men." Literature, in other words, is a transaction between a human author and his human reader. By his command of linguistic and literary possibilities, the author actualizes and records in words what he undertakes to signify of human beings and actions and about matters of human concern, addressing himself to those readers who are competent to understand what he has written. The reader sets himself to make out what the author has designed and signified, through putting into play a linguistic and literary expertise that he shares with the author. By approximating what the author undertook to signify the reader understands what the language of the work means. In our Age of Reading, the first casualry in this literary transaction has been the author. To the noninitiate, it is bemusing to observe the complacency with which authors of recent books and essays announce their own demise. "It is about timer" says Michel Foucault, "that criticism and philosophy acknowledged the disappearanceor the death of the author." t "As institutionr" according to Roland Barthes, "the author is dead: his civil

How ro Do THTNGS wrrH TExrs is reprintedfrom Partisan Reuiew(tgZil by permissionof the author. 1SeeFoucaulton the subiectof the author. [Eds.]

status,his biographical person, have disappeared."t The necrology extends to the human reader, and indeed to man himself, who is reduced to an illusion engendered by the play of language, or as Foucault puts it, to "a simple fold in our knowledg.," destined to "disappear as soon as that knowledge has found a new form."' In these new writings about reading, accordingl5 the author deliquesces into writing-as-such and the reader into reading-assuch, and what writing-as-such effectsand readingas-such engages is not a work of literature but a text, writing, 1criture.a In its turn the text forfeits its status as a purposeful utterance about human beings and human concerns,and even its individuality, becoming simply an episode in an allxs Edward encompassing textuality-dissolved, Said has remarked, into "the communal sea of linguicity."t ConsonantlS the relations between authors which had traditionally been known as "influence" are depersonalized into "intertextualiryr" a reverberation between ownerlesssequencesof signs. It might be expected that, evacuated of its humaniry, reading-as-suchwould become an interplay of bloodless abstractions. Quite to the contrary. We find in French structuralist criticism and its American analogues that reading is a perilous adventsls-not of a soul among masterpiecesrtbut of the unsouled reading-process as it engages with the text-as-such.Persistentlythis inhuman encounter is figured in a rhetoric of extremity, as tense with the awarenessof risk and crisis; anguished by doubts about its very possibiliry; meeting everywhere in the " Action du signifiant" T with violence, disruption, castration, mysterious disappearances,murder, self-destruction; or as overcome by vertigo as the ground falls away and leaves it suspended over an abyss of recessivemeanings in a referential void. ln this Gothic context of the horrors of reading it is a relief to come upon Roland Barthes's Tbe Plea2Barthes,The Pleasureof the Text (New York: Hill and 'Wang, r97S),p.27. On Barthessee CTSP,pp. r r9Ssg. [Eds.] 3SeeFoucault,The Order of Things(New York: Pantheon Books,r97r). [Eds.] aEcriture, a term employedfreely in structuralismand poststructuralism, especiallyin the work of Barthesand Derrida. [Eds.] sBeginnings:Intention and Method (New York: Basic B o o k s ,r 9 7 S ) p , p .2 7 9 - j 4 j . [ E d s . ] ;Abrams is quoting from Anatole France. See CTSP, p.6zr. '"Action[ E d s . ] of the signifier."[Eds.]

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sure of the Text, with its seeming promise to revive the notion, as old as Aristotle and Horace, that the distinctive aim of a literary work is to give pleasure to its readers.8But then we find in Barthes'saccount that the pleasure is not in the artful management of the human agents, interactions, and passions signified by the text, but in the engagement with the text-as-such, and that Barthes adapts the traditional concept to current connoisseursof textualiry by ^ running conceit sustainedby double entendres, in which textual pleasure is assimilated to sexual pleasure; the prime distinction is between the mere plaisir effected by a comfortably traditional rexr and the orgasmic rapture , iouissance, in the close encounter with a radical "modern" text which, by foiling the reader's expectations, "brings to a crisis his relations with language." It seemssafe to predict that the innocent reader, seduced by Barthes's erotics of the text, who engageswith a nouueau roman is in for a disappointment. My concern, however, is with the strategy and the rhetorical tactics of structuralist criticism only as a background for considering three current writers who put forward radical new ways of reading texts. One, JacquesDerrida, is a French philosopher with an increasing following among American critics of literature; by pressing to an extreme the tendencies of structuralism, Derrida proposes a mode of reading which undermines not only the grounds of structuralism itself, but the possibility of understanding language as a medium of decidable meanings.t The other two, Stanley Fish and Harold Bloom, are Americans who set their theories of reading in opposition to what they decry as the antihumanism of structuralist procedures.toAll three are erudite, formidable, and influential innovarors who found their strategies of reading on an insight into a neglected aspect of what enters into the interpretation of a text. These theorists differ, we shall see,in essential respects, but they share important features which are distinctive of current radicalism in interpretation. In each, the theory doesn't undertake simply to explain how we in fact read, but to propagate a new way of reading that subverts accepted interpretations and replaces them with unexpected alternatives. Each theory eventuates in a radical scepticism about our ability to achievea correct in-

terpretation, proposing instead that reading should free itself from illusory linguistic constraints in order to become liberated, creative, producing the meanings that it makes rather than discovers.And all three theories are suicidal; for as the theorist is aware, his views are self-reflexive,in that his subversive process destroys the possibility that a reader can interpret correctly either the expression of his theory or the textual interpretations ro which it is applied. It is worth nodng that such Newreading-by which I denote a principled procedure for replacing standard meanings by new meanings-is by no 'Western means recent, but had many precedents in hermeneutics. \7e find such a procedure, for example, in ancient Greek and Roman attempts to uncover the deep truths hidden within Homer's surface myths and fictions, and to moralize the immoral tales of Ovid; we find it also in the reinterpretations of the Old Testament by writers of the New Testament,as well as by Jewish Kabbalists; we find a similar procedure in medieval and later exegetes of the many-leveled allegorical meanings in the entire biblical canon. These old reinterpretive enterprises,however diverse,all manifest three procedural moments, or aspects:(r) The interpreter indicates that he understands the standard, or accepted meanings of a text or passage (called by biblical exegetes "the literal meaning" ). (z) He replaces, or at least supplements, these standard meanings by new meanings. (il He mediates between these two systems of signification by setting up a transformational calculus which servesto convert the old meanings into his new meanings. We can, I think, discern a parallel procedure in our current Newreaders. [n considering their proposals, I shall ask the following questions. SThat sorr of things does each Newreader undertake to do with texts? By what transformational devices does he manage to do these things ? And then there is the general question: What is there about the way language functions that enables a Newreader to accomplish the surprising things he does with texts ?

sAristotle,CTSP,p. S5;Horace,CTSP,pp.67-75. [Eds.] eSeeDerrida. [Eds.] roSeeFish and Blooz. [Eds.]

How is one to make entry into the theory of Jacques Derrida, the most elusive,equivocal, and studiously noncommittal of philosophical writers ? I shall try

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to break through with a crashing generalization: As a philosopher of language, Derrida is an absolutist without absolutes. Derrida proposes that both the Western use of language and philosophies of language are "logocentric" l that they are logocentric because essentially "phonocentric" (that is, giving priority and privilege to speechover writing); and that language is thereby permeated, explicitly and implicitlS by what, in a phrase from Heidegg€r, he calls "the metaphysicsof presence."By "presence"-s1 in alternative terms, a "transcendental signified" or "ultimate referenl"-fts designateswhat I call an absolute; that is, a foundation outside the play of language itself which is immediately and simply present to us as something ultimate, terminal, selfcertifying, and thus adequate to "center" the structure of the linguistic system and to guarantee the determinate meaning of an utterance within that system.The positing of some form of presence,it is suggested, is the expression of a desire-which is the motivating desire of metaphysics-to establish a conceptual replacement for the certainty about language and meaning provided by the myth in Genesis of language as originated and guaranteed by a divine, hence absolute, authoriry, or else by the theological view that language is certified by the omnipresence of the Logos. In a remarkable seriesof readings of diverse texts, philosophical and literarS Derrida subtly uncovers the presupposition that there is an absolute foundation for language, and displays the internal paradoxes and selfcontradictions that are attendant upon such a presupposition. The quest for presence, then, is doomed to unsuccess,whether that supposedabsolute is the presenceof his meaning to the consciousnessof the speaker at the instant of his utterance; or Platonic essencesthat underwrite the significations of verbal names; or a fixed and simple referent, "the thing itselfr" in the world "outside of language"l or Heidegger's "Being" as the ultimate ground of signification and understanding. But having, in the critical aspect of his reading of texts, dismantled the traditional absolutes, Derrida remains committed to absolutism; for he shares the presupposition of the views he deconstructs that to be determinately understandable,languagerequiresan absolute foundation, and that, since there is no such ground, there is no stop to the play of undecidable meanings: "The absence of a transcendental signified

extends the realm and the play of signification to infinity." tt In this aspect of his dealings with language, Derrida's writings present variations on a Nietzschean theme: Absolutes, though necessary, are dead, therefore free play is permitted. It should be remarked, however, that the philosophy of language offers an alternative to the supposition that language requires an absolute foundation in order to be determinately meaningful. This alternative sets out from the observation that in practice 'We language often works, that it gets its fob done. live a life in which we have assurancethat we are able to mean what we say and know what we mean, and in which our auditors or readers show us by their verbal and actional responseswhether or not they have understood us correctly. This alternative stance takes as its task not to explain away these workings of language, but to explain how it is that they happen, and in instancesof failure, to inquire what it is that has gone wrong. A prominent recent exemplar of this stance is the Philosophical Inuestigations of Ludwig l(rittgenstein." There are similarities between Wittgenstein's views of language and Derrida's, in the critical aspect of Derrida's reading of philosophical texts. Like Derrida, for example, Wittgenstein insists that it is not possible to use language to get outside "the limits of language"; he holds that the concept that language directly represents realiry is simply " a picture that holds us captive" l he rejects the account of the meaning of an utterance in terms of the objects or processesto which its words refer, or as equivalent to the conscious state of the speaker of the utterance; and, in his own way, he too deconstructs the traditional absolutes,or "essencesr"of \Testern metaphysics. He also rejects as futile the quest for an ultimate foundation for language. Philosophy, he says,"can in the end only describe" the "actual use of language," for it "cannot give it any foundation"l in giving reasons for the working of language, "the spade turns" before we reach an ultim ate reason. But \Tittgenstein's stance is that language is "a practice" that occurs as part of a shared "form of lifer" and that this practice works; as he puts it, "this game is played." His Inuestigations are designed to get us to reco gnizewhen language works, and when it doesn'g-661ryhen languageis like an engine idling, ll See Derrida. [Eds.] 12See W ittgenstein. [Eds.]

How to Do Things witb Texts not when it is doing ys1ft"-g6 get us to understand how the slippage occurred. Derrida of course acknowledges that language works, or as he puts it, that it "funcgisns"-that we constantly perform what we take to be successful speechacts and successfulinstancesof oral communication, and that a written text is lisible, "legible," that is, strikes us as having determinably specific meanings. But he accounts for this working as no more than "the effectsof ideality, of signification, of meaning and of refersngs"-effects which are engendered by the play of differenceswithin language itself; he then proceeds to "deconstruct" these effects by undertaking to show that, since they lack a ground in presence,their specificity of meaning is only a simulation. Derrida's procedure might be summa rrzed as follows. He agrees that language works, then asks, "But is it possible that it really works ?" He concludes that, lacking an ultimate ground, it is absolutely not possible that it works, hence that its working is only a seeming-that, in short, though texts may be legible, they are not intelligible, or determinately significant. Of each of the traditional terms and distinctions used to analyze the working of language-terms such as "communicationr" "contextr" "intentionr" "meaningr" and oppositions such as speech-writi.g, literal-metaphorical, nonfictional-fictional-Derrida requires not only that they be grounded in absolute presence,but also that they be certified by criteria of what he calls "ideal purity" and "ultimate rigor" if they are to be determinately used and understood. For example: in order to communicate "a determinate content, an identifiable meaningr" each of these words must signify a concept "that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable," and its contextual conditions of use must be "absolutely determinable" and "entirely certain"; while the utterance of a determinate speech act must be tied to "the pure singularify of the event." Of course such analytic words cannot meet these criteria of absolute fixity, puriry, and singularity, nor can any words, for it is an essentialcondition of a language that a finite set of words, manageablein accordance with a finite set of regularities, be capable of generating an unlimited variety of utterances adaptable to an unlimited diversity of circumstances, purposes, and applications. But Derrida's all-or-none principle admits of no alternative: failing to meet absolute criteria which language cannot satisfy

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without ceasingto do its work, all spoken and written utterances, though they may give the "effect" of determinate significance, are deconstructable into semantic indeterminacy. Derrida describes his "general strategy of deconstruction" as a mode of "double writing": it first "inverts" the hierarchy of the terms in standard philosophical oppositions such as speech-writing, signifier-signified,then it "displaces" what was the lower term in the hierarchy (or a derivative from that term) "outside the oppositions in which it was held." The latter move generates, in place of the standard terms used to analyze the workings of language, a set of new terms which, he says) are neither words nor concepts, neither signifiers nor signifieds. These invented pseudoterms, however, although "displaced" from their locus within the system of language, nonetheless are capable of producing "conceptual effects"l and these effects operate in two dimensions. On the one side, they account for the fact that texts are "leeible," yielding the effects of seemingly determinable meanings. On the other side, they serve as what I have called a set of transformers, which Derrida employs to "disseminate" these effects into their deconstructed alternatives. The chief transformer is diffdrancel3-$xussure's k.y term "difflrencer"to twice-born and re-spelled with an "a"-lyhich conflates "difference" and "deferment." In one aspect of its functioning, the "differences" among signs and among the conditions of their use explain how they generate their apparently specific significations; in its deconstructive aspect, it points to the fact that, since these significations can never come to rest in an absolute presence,their specification is deferred from substitute sign to substitute sign in a movement without end. Similarly with the other nonwords for nonentities with which Derrida replaces standard terms for dealing with language; in place of the spoken utterance or written text, the "general text" or "proto-writing"; in place of the word, "mark" or "grapheme"; in place of significance, "dissemination" or a large number of other "nicknames" that Derrida resourcefully coins, or else adapts to his equivocal purpose from common usage.All in their double function account for the legibility of a text at the same time that they "open" the apparent clo13SeeDerrida. [Eds.] taSeede Saussure. lEds.l

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sure of the text " en abyme," into the abyss of an endless regress of ever-promised, never-delivered meaning. Derrida emphasizesthat to deconstruct is not to destroy; that his task is to "dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures" operative in a text "not in order to reiect or discard them, but to reconstitute them in another way" I that he puts into question the "search for the signified not to annul it, but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind." He can in fact be designated 3s, on principle, a double-dealer in language, working ambidextrously with two semantic orders-the standard and the deconstructed. He writes essaysand books, and engagesin symposia and in debates, that put forward his deconsrructive strategy and exemplify it by deconstructing the texts of other writers. [n this deconstruction of logocentric languagehe assumesthe stancethat this language works, that he can adequately understand what other speakers and writers mean, and that competent auditors and readers will adequately understand him. In this double process of construing in order to deconstrue he perforce adopts words from the logocentric system; but he does so, he tells us, only "provisionallyr" or sous rature, "under erasure." At times he reminds us of this pervasiveprocedure by writing a k.y word but crossing ir our, leaving it "legible" yet "effaced"-xn ingenious doublespeak,adapted from Heidegg€r, that enables him to eat his words yet use them too. Derrida's double-dealingwith rexrsis all-inclusive, for he is aware that his deconstrucrive reading is self-reflexive;that, although "exorbitant" in intention, it cannot in fact escape the orbit of the linguistic system it deconstructs. "Operating necessarily from the insider" as he says,"the enterpriseof deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work." The invented nonwords which serve as his instruments of deconstruction not only are borrowed from language, but are immediately reappropriated into language in the process of their "iteration" (in Derrida's double senseof being"repeated" and therefore "other" than absolutely selfidentical). And the deconstructive reading these instruments effect, he says, is a "productionr" but "does not leave the text. . . . And what we call production is necessarilya text, the system of a writing and a reading which we know is ordered by its own

blind spot." Even as they are put to work on a text, accordingly, the deconstructive instruments deconstruct themselves, as well as the deconstructed translation of the original text which Derrida, xs deconstructor, has no option except to write down as still another deconstructible text. Derrida's critical lexicon, therefore, as Gayatri Spivak, his translator, has said, "is forever on the move." In the consciously vain endeavor to find a point outside the logocentric system on which to plant his deconstructive lever, he leaps from neologism to neologism, as each sinks beneath his feet en abyme. His deconstructiveenterprisethus is a bootstrap operation, a deliberate exercise in ultimate futility, in a genre of writing he has almost singlehandedly invented-the serious philosophy of the absurd. The most earnestand innovative passagesin Derrida are those which, on the surface, seem at best playful and at worst embarrassinglyarch-passages which deploy grotesque puns, distorted words, false etymologies, genital analogues, and sexual jokes; which insist in our attending to the shapes of printed letters, play endless tricks with Derrida's own name and with his written signature; or collocate wildly incongruous texts. In such passages-extended to the length of a nonbook in his Glas-Derrida is the Zen masrer of Wesrern philosophS undertaking to shock us out of our habitual linguistic categoriesin order to show what cannot be told without reappropriation into those categories: what it is to experience a text not as conveying significance, but as simply a chain of marks vibrating with the free and incessanrplay of diffdrance. Occasionalln however, Derrida ventures the attempt to tell what can't be told, that is, to make his deconstructiveconcepts,although "in intimate relationship to the machine whose deconstruction they permit," nonetheless"designate the crevicethrough which the yet unnameable glimmer beyond the closure can be glimpsed." This glimpse is of an apocalyptic new world which, he prophesies, will be effected by the total deconstruction of our logocentric language-world-"the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledg.r" hence cannot be described but only "proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity." To realize the inclusivenessof the new world thus

How to Do Things with Texts proclaimed, we need to keep in mind what Derrida calls "the axial proposition" in Of Grammatology, his basic theoretical work: Il n'y a pas d' bors-texte, "there is no outside-the-text." Like all Derrida's k.y assertions,this sentenceis multiple in significance. In one aspect, it says we can't get outside the written text we are reading-it is a closure in which both its seeming author and the people and objects to which the text seemsto refer are merely "effects" engendered by the internal action of diffdrance. ln another aspect, it says that there is nothing in the world which is not itself a text, sincewe never experience a "thing itself," but only as it is interpreted. In this inclusive rendering, then, all the world's a text, and men and women merely readers-except that the readers, according to Derrida, 4S "subjectsr" "egosr" "cogitosr" are themselves effects which are engenderedby an interpretation; so that in the processof undoing texts, we undo our textual selves.The apocalyptic glimpse, it would seem,is of a totally textual universe whose reading is a mode of intertextuality whereby a subiect-vortex engages with an object-abyss in infinite regressionsof deferred significations. At the end of his essay"Structure, Sign and Play," t' Derrida hazards his most sustainedendeavor in the vain attempt to put names to "the as yet unnameable which cannot announce itself except . . . under the formless form, mute, infant, and terrifying, of monstrosity." The annunciation is of "a world of signs without error, without truth, without origin, which is offered to an active interpretationr" in which one "plays without security" in a game of "absolute chance, surrendering oneself to genetic indeterminacn the seminal chancinessof the trace." Derrida suggeststhat we at least try to overcome our age-old nostalgia for security, with its hopeless dream of an absolute ground in "full presence,the reassuring foundation, the origin and end of the playl' and to assume instead toward this prophecy of deconstruction triumphant the nonchalance of the Ubermensch, "the Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the freeplay of the world." If one cannot share the joR one can at least acknowledge the vertigo effected by Derrida's vision, yet take some reassurancein the thought that, even in a sign-world of absolute indeterminacS it will prelsSeeDerrida. [Eds.]

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sumably still be possible to achieve the "effect" of telling a hawk from a handsaw, or the "effect," should the need arise, of identifying and warning a companion against an onrushing autobus.

RrnorNG BrnvEEN THEWonDs: SreNrEYFrsH Of the deconstructive "interpretation of interpretation" Derrida remarks that it "attempts to pass beyond man and humanism." Stanley Fish represents his theory of reading as a ringing defense against "the dehum anization of meaning" in the "formalism" of current linguistics and stylistics, as well as in structuralist criticism, which raises "the implied antihumanism of other formalist ideologies to a principle." Such theory "is distinguished by what it does away with, and what it does away with are human beings." Fish himself undertakes to explain meaning by reference to "the specifically human activity of reading," proposing as his humanistic "point of departure the interpretive activity (experience) by virtue of which meanings occur." His model for interpretation is that of a reader who confronts the marks on a page and generatesmeanings by his informed responsesto it. In the traditional humanistic view, it will be recalled, there is an author who records what he undertakes to signify, as well as a reader who undertakes to understand what the author has signified. In terms of this paradigm, Fish's rehum anization of reading is only a half-humanism, for it begins by diminishing, and ends by deleting, the part played by the author. In Fish's later writings, we shall see, the reader becomes the only begetter not only of the text's meanings, but also of the author as the intentional producer of a meaningful text.16 Fish differs from other systematic Newreaders in that, instead of setting up a matrix of transformers-a set of revisionary terms-he proposes a "method" or "strate gy" which is in fact a set of moves to be enacted by the reader in the process of construing a text. These moves are such as to yield meanings which are always surprisi.g, and often t5The later essaysof Is There a Text in This C/assl See Fish.[Eds.]

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antithetic to, what we have hitherto taken a text to mean. As the k.y to his method, he proposes that we replace our usual question while reading"'Sfhat does this sentence(or words, phrase, work) mean?"-by what he calls "the magic question," namely: "'What does this sentencedo?" The result of this magic question, if persistently applied by readers,is that it "transforms minds." In all Fish's expositions of his method, however, "the k.y word," ashe himself remarks,"is, of course, experience"; and what in fact works the transformative magic is his major premise, expressand implied, "Reading is an experience." On the comrnon assumption that the term "experience" can be predicated of any perception or process of which one is aware, this assertion seemsself-evident, and innocent enough; it can, however, lead to dubious consequenceswhen posed as the premise from which to draw philosophical conclusions. Take, for example, one of Fish's favorite sourcesof sentencesto 'Walter demonstrate his method of readirg, Pater's "Conclusion" to The RenaissAnce.tT In one virtuoso paragraph, Pater begins by casually positing that the perception of all "external obiects" is an "experience," then dissolvesthe experienceof each obf ect "into a group of impressions," translates this into "the impression of the individual in his isolation," and reduces it "to a single sharp impression" in a fleeting moment, bearing traces of "moments gone by"; to this, h. asserts,"what is real in our life fines itself down." From the premise that everything we perceive is our experience,Pater has taken us headlong down the metaphysical slope to his conclusion of a solipsism of the speciouspresent-that one can validly assert reality only for one's single senseimpression in a fugitive "Now!" The example should make us wary about the consequencesfor interpretation that Fish deduces from his premise that reading is an experience,and what he proposes as its immediate corollary-that "the meaning of an utterance . . . is the experience-all of it." One conclusion that Fish draws from this claim that meaning is all of a reader's experience (all the experience, as he qualifies it, of a "competent" or "informed" reader) is that, since the "response includes everything" and is a "total meaning experiencer" you can't make valid use of the traditional distinction between subject matter and style, "prorTSee Pater,CTSP,pp. 6+;--45. [Eds.]

cessand product (the how and the what)" in an utterance. Another and related conclusion is that you can't distinguish, within the totality of a declararive sentence,what is being asserted.He excerpts, for example, from Pater's"conclusion" to The Renaissance: "That clear perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours." In standard stylistic analysis,he says,this is "a simple declarative of the form X is Y." He then analyzesthe experience of reading the sentencein accordance with the question, "What does it do ?" and finds that "in fact it is not an assertion at all, although (the promise of ) an assertion is one of its components. It is an experience;it occurs; it does somethirg; . . [and] what it does is what it means." Turn Fish's method of reading back upon his own writing (I find nothing in the method to prevent our doing so) and we get the interesting result that his assertion about Pater'ssentence-"In fact it is not an assertionat all . . ."-i5 in fact not an assertion at all, but only an evolving experienceeffectuatedin a reader. I want to focus, however, on an important aspect of Fish's strategy for transforming accepted meanings. He supplementshis basic equation of meaning with the reader's total response by proposing a start-stop-extrapolate method in reading: The basis of the method is a consideration of the temporal flow of the reading experience. . . I. an utterance of any length, there : is a point at which the reader has taken in only the first word, and then the second, and then the third, and so on, and the report of what happens to the reader is always a report of what has happened to that point. (The report includes the reader's set toward future experiences,but not those experiences.)tt \7hat happens at each stopping point, then, is that the reader makes senseof the word or words he has so far read, in large part by surmising what will come next. These surmisesmay, in the text's sequel, turn out to have been right, but they will often turn out to have been wrong; if so, "the resulting mistakes are part of the experienceprovided by the author's language, and therefore part of its meaning." Thus "the notion of a mistake, at least as something 18/s There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard Universiry Press,r98o). [Eds.]

How to Do Things with Texts to be avoided, disappears." And the point at which "the reader hazards interpretive closure" is independent of the "formal units" (such as syntactical phrases or clauses)or "physical features" (such as punctuation or verse lines) in the text written by the author; the method in fact creates what the reader takes to be formal features of the text, "because my model demands (the word is not too strong) perceptual closures and therefore locations at which they occur." In reading the sentencefrom Pater's Renais' sance, for example, Fish hazards brief perceptual closuresafter each of the four opening words: "That clear perpetual outline . . ." It is apparent that by Fish's start-stop strategy, a large part of a text's meaning consists of the false surmises that the reader generates in the temporal gaps between the words; and this part, it turns out, constitutes many of Fish's new readings. To cite one instance: Fish presents a three-line passage from Milton's Lycidas which describes one consequence of Lycidas's death: The willows and the hazel copsesgreen Shall now no more be seen, Fanning their ioyous leavesto thy soft lays. Although, he tells us, it is " merely a coincidence" when a perceptual closure coincides with a formal unit or physical feature such as the end of a verse line, it happens in this instance that the reader's process of making sense"will involve the assumption (and therefore the creation) of a completed as'seen"' at the end of the secsertion after the word ond line; he will then hazard the interpretation that these trees, in sympathy with the death of Lycidas, "will wither and die (will no more be seen by anyone)." And though this interpretation will be undone "in the act of reading the next line," which reversesit by going on to say that they "will in fact be seen,but they will not be seenby Lycidas," the false surmise remains part of the text's meaning. I recall a new reading of the closing couplet of Lycida.s which William York Tindall of Columbia proposed to me many years ago. Tindall suggested the following perceptual closures (I cite the first edition of r 6n), At last he rose, and twitch'd. His mantle blew.

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to fresh Woods, and Pastures

Those who know Bill Tindall may suspect he was not wholly seriousin this proposal. Yet according to Fish's strategy, it is the way a first reader might hazard his perceptual closures.The thought that, even after subsequent correction, this misreading remains an element in the poem's meaning is to me disquieting. I have myself tried, by way of experiment, to read in accordance with Fish's method. By stern selfdiscipline, I managed to read word by word and to impose frequent perceptual closures, resisting the compulsion to peek ahead in order to see how the phrases and clauses would work out in the total sentence.And instead of suspendingiudgment as to meaning until the semantic Gestalt was complete, I solicited -y invention to anticipate possible meanings and actuated -y will to fix on a single one of these possibilities. The result was indeed an evolvitrg sequence of false surmises. I found, however, that the places where I chose to stop rarely coincided with the stopping-placesof Stanley Fish, and that my false surmisesrarely matched his, especially in the startling degree to which they diverged from what actually followed in the text. \7hat am I to conclude? A possible conjecture is that Fish himself has not always resistedthe impulse to peek ahead; that in fact many of his novel readings are not prospective, but retrospective; that in local instances they are the result of a predisposition to generate surprising meaningsbetween the words; and that in large-scaleinstances,when he presentsa new reading of a total literary work, they are the result of a predisposition to generate a system of surprising meanings of a coherent sort. In his earlier writings, despite some wavering as to what is implied by his use of the term "method," Fish representedhis analysesprimarily as a description of what competent readers in fact do; its aim was simply to make "available to analytic consciousnessthe strategiesreaders perform, independently of whether or not they are aw are of having performed them." In his recent theoretical writings, however, Fish asks us to take his method not as "deleThelinesread: "At last he rose,and naritch'dhis Mantle 'Woods, blue: / Tomorrow to fresh and Pasturesnew." [Eds.]

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scriptive" but "prescriptive"; its aim now is to persuade us to give up reading in our custom ary way and instead to "read in a new or different way." Fish's current views are anextreme form of methodological relativism, in which the initial choice of a 'oarbitr aryr" and the particular method of reading is elects creates the text and reader method that the meanings that he mistakenly thinks he finds. "Interpretive strategies" are procedures "not for reading iin the conventional sense)but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their in'faCtS'Of tentiOns." "Fgrmal Unitsr" and even "the gramm atr,, are "always a function of the inter'in' pretive will one brings to bear; they are not the text." It turns out, indeed, that there is nothing either inside or outside the text except what our elected strategy brings into being, for "everyone is continually executing interpretive strategies and in that act constituting texts, intentions' speakers,and authors." Starting with the premise that the meaning is all of a reader'sexperience of a text' we have plunged down the metaphysical slope to the concluiion that each reader's optional strategy, by determining his responsive experience' creates everything but the marks on the PaBe, including the author whose intentional verbal acts' we had mistakenly assumed, effectuate the text as meaningful discourse. From this position Fish draws the consequence that, since all reading strategiesare self-confirming, there is no "right reading" of any part of a text; there are onl y agreementsamong readers who belong to an "interpretive community" which h"pp.ttt to share the same strategy. And with his usual ,.rr-.tt, Fish acknowledges that the reading strategy he himself proposes is no less "arbitr^ry" in its and therefore no less a "fictioll" than alJtption ternative ways of readi.g; his iustification for urging it upon us is that it is "a superior fiction." It is su!.rior becauseit is "more coherent" in the relation of its practice to its principles, and because"it is also creative." Insistenceon a "right reading" and "the real text" are the fictions of formalism, and as fictions they have the disadvantage of being confining. My fiction is liberating. It relievesme of the obligation to be right (a standard that simply diops out) and demands only that I be interesting (a standard that can be met without

any referenceat all to an illusory obiectivity). Rather than restoring or recovering texts, I am in the business of making texts and of teaching others to make them by adding to their repertoire of strategies. In theseclaims Fish does his own critical practice lessthan iustice. Many of his close readings of literary texts effect in his readers a shock of recognition which is the sign that they are not merely interesting, but that they are right. In such readings, how.uir, he escapeshis own theory and reads as other competent readers do, only more expertly than -"try of us; his orientation to the actual processof reading servesin these instancesto sensitizehim to ,rtrrrr.., effected by the author's choice and order of words that we have hitherto missed. And even when, in conformity with his stated strategy, Fish creates meanings by reading befween the words, the new readings are often, as he claims, interestittg. They are interesting becausethey ate bravura critical performances by a learned, resourceful, and witty intelligence, and not least, becausethe new readings never entirely depart from implicit reliance on the old way of reading texts. I remain unpersuaded, therefore, that the hermeneutic circle is inescapably, as Fish represents it, a vicious circle-a closed interplay between a reader's arbitrary stra tegy and his interpretive findings. I persist in the assurance that a competent reader of Milton, for example, develops an expertise in reading his sentencesin adequateaccordance both with Milton" linguistic usage and with the strategy of reading that Milton himself deployed, and assumedthat his readerswould deploy. This exit repertise is not an arbitrary stratery-though refineand correction to open continuously mains ment-for it has a sufficient warrant in evidence that we tacitly accumulate in a lifetime of speaking, writing, and reading English, of reading English literature, of reading Milton's contemporaries, and of reading Milton himself. Those who share this assurance set themselvesto read Milton's text, not as pretext for a creative adventure in liberated interpretation, but in order to understand what it is that Miltott meant, and meant us to understand. For our prepossessionis that, no matter how interesting a Lritic's created rext of Milton may be, it will be less interesting than the text that Milton himself wrote for his fit readers though few'

How to Do Things with Texts

THBScrNr oF LnrneruRE: Hnnoro BrooM Harold Bloom's theory of reading and writing literature centers on the area that Derrida and the structuralists call "intertextuality." Bloom, however, employs the traditional term "influencer" and presentshis theory in opposition against "the antihumanistic plain dreariness of all those developments in European criticism that have yet to demonstrate that they can aid in reading any one poem by any poet whatsoever." "Poemsr" he affirms, "are written by men" l and against "the partisans of writing . . . like Derrida and Foucault who imply . . . that languageby itself writes the poem and thinks " he insist, tt only "the human writes, th. hr'r-in "t thinks." Unlike Stanley Fish, then, Bloom restores the human writer as well as reader to an effective role in the literary transaction. But if Fish's theory is a half-humanism, Bloom's is all-too-human, for it screens out from both the writing and reading of "strong" literature all motives except self-concern and all compunction about giving free rein to one's will to power: . . . the living labyrinth of literature is built upon the ruin of every impulse most generous in us. So apparently it is and must be-we are wrong to have founded a humanism directly upon literature itself, and the phrase "humane letters" is an oxymoron. . . . The strong imagination comesto its painful birth through savagery and misrepresentation.'o Like many recent critics, Bloom posits a great divide in literary history and locates it in the seventeenth century; his innovation is to account for this division as the change from the relative creative nonchalance of a Homer, Dante, or Shakespearein "the giant age before the flood" to the acute anxiety of influence suffered by all but a very few poers since the Enlightenment. A modern, and therefore "belatedr" poet awakens to his calling when irresistibly seizedupon by one or more poems of a precursor or father-poet, yet experiences that seizure as an intolerable incursion into his imaginative lifespace. The response of the bel ated writer is to de'o york: oxford University !h, Anxiety of Influence(New Press,r973), pp. 85- 86. [Eds.]

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fend himself against the parent-poem by distorting it drastically in the process of reading it; but he cannot escapethe precursor, for he inevitably embodies its distorted form into his own attempt at an absolutely original poem. Bloom's theory, as he points out, is a revision for literary criticism of what Freud sardonically called "the Family Romance." The relation of reader and poet to his parent-precursor, as in Freud's Oedipal relationship, is ambivalent, compounded of love and hate; but in Bloom's detailed descriptions of reading and writing, love enters only to weaken the result of the process,while the aspect of hate, jealousy, and fear is alone given a systematic and creative role to perform. This role is to deploy, with unconscious cunning, 2 set of defensivetactics, "the revisionary ratiosr" which are in fact aggressiveacts designed to "malform" the precursor in the attempt to disestablish its "priorify" over the latecomer, both in time and in creative strength. "Every act of reading is . . . defensive, and as defenseit makes of interpretation a necessarymisprision. . . . Reading is therefore misprision-or misreading." And since "every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem," he concludes that "the meaning of a poem can only be another poem." "There are no right readings"l the sole alternative is between "weak mis-readings and strong mis-readings." A weak misreading attemprs, although unavailingly, to get at what a text really means in itself; it is the product of an inhibiting timidiry, or ar best of an excess of "generosity" toward the parent-poet. A misreading is strong, hence creativeand valuable, in proportion to the boldness with which the reader's emorional compulsions are licensed to do violence to the text that he strives to overcome. It is sometimes argued against Bloom's theory that his claim, "all reading is misreadirg," is incoherent, on the ground that we cannot know that a text has been misread unless we know what it is to read it correctly. This argument overlooks an interesting feature of Bloom's theory, that is, its quasiKantian frame of reference.At times Bloom's idiom corresponds closely enough ro Kant's to qualify, in Bloom's terms, as a "deliberate misprision" of Kant's epistemology. Terms which recur on almost every page in which Bloom discussesmisreading are "necessityr" "necessaryr" "necessarilS" "must be." Such terms are to be taken seriously; they signify an a priori necessity. In Bloom's theorg that is, the

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compulsive revision ary ratios through which we experience a poem correspond, in Kant's philosophy' to the cognitive forms of space, time, and the categories that the mind inescapably imposes on all its experience of the world. Consequently Bloom's reader can only know the phenomenal poem constituted by his own revision ary categories;he cannot possibly get outside these categories to know the noumenal Ding dn sich, or what Bloom calls "the poem-in-itself" or the "poem-as-such." But Bloom's aim, he says,is not simply to propose "another new poeticsr" but to establishand convert us to "a newer and starker way of reading poems"' The product of this new way of reading is "an antithetical practical criticism, 3S opposed to all the primary criticisms now in vogue." Let us give up the failed enterprise of seeking to "understand" any single poem as an entity in itself. Let us pursue instead the quest of learning to read any poem as its poet's deliberate misinterpretation, as a poet, of a precursor poem or of poetry in general.tt Bloom therefore, like Derrida and Fish, proposes a way of reading a text that will displace the meanings that "prima ryr" or traditional readers have hitherto found in it. As applied in his reading, Bloom's revisionary ratios in effect function as an inventory of transformers for translating accepted meanings into new meanings; he conveniently presents a one-p age table of his transformers which he calls "The Map of Misprision." And such is the virtuosity of these devices that they cannot fail to effect Bloom's antithetic meanings; in his own repeated assertion,"It must be so." In this analysisI deliberately enact the role which Bloom, in a phrase from Blake, calls "the Idiot of his Questionerr" whose presence as an aspect own mind Bloom recognizesbut sternly represses. (In the present instance "the Idiot Questioner" can be translated as a stolid inquirer into the credentials of a critic's interpretive procedures.) Pursuing such an inquirR I note that Bloom, in his tetralogy of books on the theory and practice of antithetic criticism, sets up six revision ary ratios which he names "clinam€flr" "tesserart' "kenosisrt' and so on' He 21Ibid.,pp.6gff. [Eds.]

goes on to assimil ate each of these ratios to a variery of other reinterpretive devices-to a Freudian defense-mechanism; to a concept of the Hebrew Kabbalists; to one of the rhetorical tropes such as synecdoche,hyperbole, metaphor; and to a recurrent fype of poetic imagery. These amalgamated ffansformers are not only versatile enough to establish each of Bloom's new readings, but also antithetical enough to convert any possible counterevidence into a confirmation of his own reading. Take, for example, the Freudian mechanisms of defense-which Bloom calls "the clearest analogues I have found for the revision ary ratie5"-45 he applies them to interpret any poem as a distorted version of.a precursor-Poem. [f the belated poem patently echoesthe parent-poem, that counts as evidence for the new reading; although, Bloom asSerts,"only weak poems, or the weaker elementsin strong poems, immediately echo precursor poems' or directly allude to them." If the later poem doesn't contain such "verbal remindersr" that counts too, on the basis of the mechanism of repression-the belated poet's anxiety of influence has been strong enough to repress all reference to his predecessor. And if the belated poem differs radically from its proposed precursor, that counts even more decisiuely,or the basis of the mechanism of "reactionformation"-the poet's anxiety was so intense as to distort the precursor into its seemingopposite. This power of the negative to turn itself into a stronger positive manifests itself frequently in Bloom's applied criticism. For example, the opening verse paragraph of Tennyson's Titboruzs has traditionally t..tt read as expressing the aged but immortal protagonist's longing for death. Bloom, however, reads it antithetically as a revision' or affirmaswerve away from the naturalistic 'what is Keats. of tions of \T0rdsworth and of all is simply lines opening these in absent narure; what is present is the withered Tithonus. As Tennyson'S reaction-formation against his precursors' stance, these lines ^i, ^ rhetorical irony, denying what they desire, the divination of a poetic survival into strength." 22Poetry and Repression(New Haven: Yale University P r e s sr,9 7 6 ) ,P P . r6 4 - 6 S . [ E d s ' ]

How to Do Tbings with Texts Perhaps so; but it will be noted that the reactiontransformer charters the antithetic critic to speak without fear of contradiction, while stranding his Questioner in a no-win position. Bloom's theorS like that of other Newreaders, is self-referential, for he does not exempt his own interpretations from the assertion that all readings are misreadings. In his recent books on Yeats and Stevens,he often writes brilliant critiques that compel assent from a "prim ary" critic like myself. The extent of Bloom's own claim for these readings, however, is that they are strong misreadings, in that they do violence to the texts they address, by virtue of his surrender to his need for autonomy and to his anxieties of the influence exerted on him by his critical precursors. And in lieu of any possible criterion of rightness, such readings can be valuable only to the degree that they are " creative or interesting misreadings." By their strength, he says, such readings will provoke his critical successorsto react by their own defensive misreadings, and so take their place within the unending accumulation of misreadings of misreadings that constitute the history both of poetry and of criticism, at least since the Enlightenment. \7hile acknowledging that his theory "may ask to be iudged, as argumertr" Bloom also insists that "a theory of poetry must belong to poetry, must be poetry" and presentshis work as "one reader's critical vision" bodied forth in "a severepoem." Let me drop my role as Idiot Questioner of Bloom's evidential procedures to read him in this alternative way, as a prose-poet who expressesa founding vision of the Sceneof Literature. In the main, this has been traditionally conceived as a republic of equals 'Wordsworth's composed, in phrase, of "the mighty living and the mighty dead" whose poetry, as Shelley said, "is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." In Bloom's bleak re-vision, the Sceneof Literature becomes the arena of a savage war for LebensrAumtt waged by the living poet against the oppressive and everpresent dead-a parricidal war, in which each newcomer, in his need to be self-begotten and selfsufficient, undertakes with unconscious cunning to mutilate, murder, and devour his poetic father. The poet's prime compulsions are like those of the 23Lebensraum:living space. [Eds.]

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Freudian Id, which demands no less than everything at once and is incapable of recognizing any constraints on its satisfactions by moral compunction, logical incompatibility, or empirical impossibility. And the poetic self remains forever fixed at the Oedipal stage of development; for Bloom explicitly denies to the poet "as poet" the Freudian mechanism of sublimation, which allows for the substitution, in satisfying our primordial desires,of higher for lower goals and so makes possible the growth from the infantile stage of total self-concern to the mature recognition of reciprociry with other selves. The war of which each poem is a battleground is ultimately futile, not only because every poet is inescapably fathered by precursors but also because,according to Bloom, his will to priority over his precursors is, in deep psychic fact, a defense against acknowledging his own human mortality. The conflict, furthermore, is doomed to terminate in the death of poetry itself, for the population of strong poets will soon usurp so much of the available living-space that even the illusion of creative originality will no longer be possible. In Bloom's own idiom of rhetorical tropes, one can say of his critical poem about poetry that it is a sustained synecdoche which puts a part for the whole. By this device, and by his subsidiary device of strong hyperbole, Bloom compels us to face up to aspects of the motivation to write and misread poems-self-assertiveness, lust for power and precedence, malice, envy, revenge-which canonical critics have largely ignored. To those of us who yield ourselves to Bloom's dark and powerful eloquence, the Scene of Literature will never look the same again; such a result is probably the most that any writer compelled by an antithetical vision can hope 'What to achieve. But the part is not the whole. Bloom's point of vantage cannot take into account is the great diversity of motives for writing poetry, and in the products of that writing, the abundance of subject-matters, characters, genres, and styles, and the range of the passions expressed and represented, from brutality and terror and anguish, indeed, to gaiety, ioy, and sometimes sheer fun. In sum, what Bloom's tragic vision of the literary scene systematically omits is almost everything that has hitherto been recognized to constitute the realm of literature. On Bloom's critical premises,I am of course open

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to the retort that I have misread both his criticism and our heritage of literary texts. But knowing from experience Bloom's geniality to his own critical precursors, I am confident that he will attribute my misreading to an amiable weakness-to my fall acY, that is, of misplaced benevolence.

NnwnEADINGAND Oro Nonus I shall conclude by considering briefly my third question: What makes a text so vulnerable to the diverse things that Newreaders do with it? The chief reason is that our use and understanding of language is not a science but a practice. That is, what we call "knowing a language" is not a matter of knowing that or knowing why, but of knowing ho*, of having acquired a skill. We are born into a community of speakers and writers who have aIready acquired this skill, and we in turn acquire it by interplay with these others, in which we learn how to say what we mean and how to understand what others have said by ^ continuous process of self-correction and refinement, based on what are often very subtle indications of when and in what way we have gone wrong. The successful practice of language depends on our mastery of linguistic uniformities that we call conventions, or norms, or rules. Linguistic rules, however, differ radically from the rules of chess or of a card-game to which they are often compared. The rules which constitute these games are stipulated in an authoritative code to which we can refer in order to resolve disputes. The use and understanding of language, on the other hand, depends on tacit consensualregularities which are multiplex and fluid; except in very gross ways, these regularities are uncodified, and probably uncodifiable. In our practice, therefore, we must rely not on rules, but on linguistic tact-a tact which is the emergent result of all our previous experience with speaking, hearing, writing, and reading the language' Stanley Fish seems to me right in his claim that the linguistic meanings we find in a text are relative to the interpretive strategy we emplon and that agreement about meanings depends on membership in a community which shares an interpretive strategy. But if we set out not to create meanings, but to ,rttd.tttand what the sequenceof sentencesin a literary work mean, when we have no choice except to

read according to the linguistic strategy the author of the work employed, and expected us to employ. 'we are capable of doing so, because an immense Store of cumulative evidence provides assurance that the authors of literary texts belonged to the linguistic communify into which we were later born, and so shared our skill, and the consensual regularities on which that skill depends, with some divergencies-which we have a variety of clues for deare the result both of the slow tecting-which change of communal regularities in time and of the limited innovations which can be introduced by the individual author. \fhen a Newreader, on the basis of his contrived interpretive strategy, asserts that a passage means something radically different from what it has been taken to mean, or elsethat it means nothing in particular, we lack codified criteria to which we can appeal against the new interpretation; in the last analysis, we can only appeal to our linguistic tact, as supported by the agreement of readers who share that tact. But such an appeal has no probative weight for a reader who has opted out of playing the game of language according to its constitutive regularities; nor is the application of our own inherited practice verifiable by any proof outside its sustainedly coherent working. All we can do is to point out to the Newreader what he already knows-that he is playing a double game, introducing his own interpretive strategy when reading someone else's text, but tacitly relying on communal norms when undertaking to communicate the methods and results of his interpretations to his own readers. \U7ecan't claim that the Newreader's strategy doesn't work, for each of these ways of doing things to texts indubitably works. Allowed his own premises and conversion procedures' Derrida is able to deconstruct any text into a suspension of numberless undecidable significations, Fish can make it the occasion for a creative adventure in false surmises, and Bloom can read it as a perverse distortion of any chosen precursor-text. These substitute strategiesin fact have an advantage which is a principal cause of their appeal to students of literature. Our inherited strategy, although it has shown that it can persistently discover new meanings even in a classic text, must operate always under the constraint of communal regularities of usage.Each new strategy, on the other hand, is a discovery procedure

How to Do Things with Texts which guarantees new meanings. It thus provides freshness of sensation in reading old and familiar texts-at least until we learn to anticipate the limited kind of new meanings it is capable of generatirg; it also makes it easy for any critical follower to say new and exciting things about a lite rary work that has been again and again discussed.But we purchase this advantage at a cost, and ultimately the choice between a radical Newreading and the old way of reading is a matter of cultural cost-

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accounting. \7e gain a guaranteed novelty, of a kind that makes any text directly relevant to current in'$fhat we lose is accessto the terests and concerns. inexhaustible variety of literature as determinably meaningful texts by, for, and about human beings, as well as accessto the enlightening things that have been written about such texts by the humanists and critics who were our precursors, from Aristotle to Lionel Trilling.

J.HillisMiller b. rgzB

'Frf | *r" vo*x or J. Hillis Miller, somewhatlike the work of Roland Barthes(see CTSP,pp. tt96-99), frequentlyoccupiesa middlegroundbetweencritiI cal commentaryand theory proceedingby instanceand exampleto illuminate a current theoretical position. It is, then, a dual observationto say that Miller's work is exemplary.Sincethe publication of the first book, CharlesDickens: The World of HisNouels(rg j8), Miller hasdisplayeda preciseand penetratingsense of the text, both as a verbal structure inviting interpretation, and as a reflection of essentialsocial and psychologicalcircumstances.In subsequentwork, principally The Disappearaiceof God Gg6l) and Poetsof Reality_(t965),Miller adopted a genirally phenomenologicalstance,particularly influenced by the work of Genevacritics such as GeorgesPoulet (seeCTSP, pp' rzr3-zz)' His later work, as this essayillustrates, is written from the point of view of deconstruction,following lacques Derrida and others. Millert account of di.ottstt,tction as "neither nihilism nor metaphysicsbut simply interpretationas such" tendsto play down the more radical claimsmade for deconstructionas a philosophicalenterprisedevotedto liberatingwriting (or *criture) from a logocentricmetaphysics.For Miller, deconstructionappearsas an inescapableform of indeterminacy,exemplifiedin the peculiarity of suchrelations as htst and parasite,where there is alwayssomeuncertaintyasto which is which. Millert tti"t.gy in the essayhereis to respondto M. H. Abrams'ssomewhat polemical chargi that "deconstructionist" readingsare parasitical on obvious readingsby admitting the chargebut deconstructingits intent: there are no ..obvious;'readings,no "univocal" readings,sincethe relation betweenany two texts or actsof writit g, whether Poemsor interpretations,is itself neverobvious nor univocal. In disiussingNietzsche,as "one of the patrons" of presentday deconstruction, Miller suggeststhat contemporary discomfort with decorrstructionis only a local example of a fundamental relation betweenlogocentric metaphysici and nihilism, where the former as host elicits the latter as parasite-and viceversa. By settingthe issuein theseterms, Miller then proceedsto, developa reading e Triumpb of Life (with someadditional remarkson other poems) of Slreiley's-Tb as itself an e"a-ple of the weakly paradoxical relation betweenparasite-and host, nihilism and -etaphysics. The unremarkedirony (though it may havebeen anticipated)is that MilLr producesa rather "obvious" and "univocal" reading, -.r.ly by ihematizing his interpretation on the governing trope of the essaS host-parasite. tn ihis respect,Miller's essayexemplifiesat least three problems which have 450

J. HillisMiller surroundedthe appropriation of deconstructionby American critics. First, it is not at all clearthat the philosophicalpresuppositionsthat led Derrida to develop his version of deconstructionsurvive translation. By treating the problem as a structural relation berweenmetaphysicsand nihilism, for exampie,Miller appearsto presumethat at leastthe truth about this mattermay be known-whiih hasthe effectof convertingDerrida'snotion of "di ffltance" into a wholly parsable difference.The Americanwill to pragmatismis at leastsuggested by this presumption, but it is more evident in the secondproblem: the propensity of American practitioners of deconstructionto treat it as another "approach" to criticism, which remainsvery much the enterpriseof developingcommentariesabout individual texts and only incidentally a philosophicaldilemma. - The third problem is exemplifiedby the progressionof Miller's work, from formalism through phenomenologyto deconstruction,as yet another example of the host-parasiterelation elaboratedin Miller's essay.starting from ,tr"t.g1., having rheir roots not in Hegeland Saussurebut in coleridge t. R. Richaids, "rrl of each succeedingstageof critical practice effectsthe conve=rsion the parasite into the host, as the formalism of the New criticism hostsphenomenologyand structuralismasparasites,which in turn becomethe hostsfor deconstruction.To follow one aspecrof the metaphor Miller doesnot pick up, the geneticidentity of thesesymbioticcouplespersists.In the casehere,the fruiirated-searchof New critics for someadequateprinciple to differentiateliterary art from other forms of discourse(which cleanth Brookspresumedto find in ..paradox" or ..dramatic irony"-s.. crsP, pp.ro4r-48) persiststhrough its inheimliclr transformations, to appearin this instanceas intertextuality and indeterminacy,subjectto the "uneasyjoy of interpretation." Miller's major works include charles Dickens: The vorld of His Nouels of God (-'9e); poetsof Reality (rg,e); Thomas !1lSS); Tbe Disappearance Hardy: Desire and Distance (rgzoh and Fiction and Repetiiion (t9gz). see M. H. Abrams's"The DeconsrructiveAngel," Critical Iiquiry 3 ft977i), for Abrams'sresponseto an earlierversionof the following essay.se. Abrams,s "tro "How to Do Things with Texts" in this volume.

45r

4Sz

J. Hnrts MITLER

THE CRITICASHOST "Je meurs oit ie m'attacbe," Mr. Holt said with a polite grin. "The ivy saysso in the picture, and clings to the oak like a fond parasite as it is." "Parricide, sir!" cries Mrs. Tusher. Henry Esmond, Bk.I, ch. 3

I in CulAt one point in "Rationality and Imagination 'Wayne Booth's tural History" M. H. Abrams cites assertion that the "deconstructionist" reading of a given work "is plainly and simply parasitical" on t "the obvious or univocal reading." The latter is Abrams' phrase, the former Booth's. My citation of a citation is an example of a kind of chain which it will be part of my intention here to interrogate. \(Ihat happens when a critical essayextracts a "paso'cites" it? Is this different from a cita' sage" and tion, echo, or allusion within a poem? Is a citation an alien parasite within the body of the main text, or is the interpretive text the parasite which surrounds and stranglesthe citation which is its host? The host feeds the parasite and makes its life possible, but at the same time is killed by it, as criticism is often said to kill literature. Or can host and parasite live happily together, in the domicile of the same text, feeding each other or sharing the food? Abrams, in any case' goes on to add " a more radical reply." If "deconstructionist principles" are taken seriouslR he says, " any history which relies on written texts becomes an impossibility" (p. 48)' So be it. That's not much of an argument. A certain notion of history or of literary history' like a certain notion of determinable readitg, might indeed ASHOSTfirst appeared(in a shorterversion)in THECRITIC Critical Inquiry 3. This versionof the essayis from Deconstructionand Criticism, publishedby SeaburyPress, reprintedwith the permissionof Continuum Publishing Corporation,copyright 1979. 'Critical lnquiry,'ll, I (Spring1976)z457-t9' Tt first Booth,^"M' H' Abrams: phraseis quot-edfrom \il7aynei{istoriatt it Critic, Critic as Pluralist," Critical lnquiry, lI, j (Spring1976), 44r. The openingpagesoI !h.t presy ^ppr^t.d itt a preliminaryform rn Critical lnent essa quiry, rfu, i^ (Springry)il, 439- 4\ by permissionof th. Uttiversityof ChicagoPress.[A".]

be an impossibilitS and if so, it might be better to know that. That something in the realm of interpretation is a demonstrable impossibility does not, however, prevent it from being "doner" as the abundance of histories, literary histories, and readings demonstrates. On the other hand, I should agree that the impossibilicy of reading should not be taken too lightly. It has consequences,for life and death, since it is incorporated in the bodies of individual human beings and in the body politic of our cultural life and death together. word suggests the image of "Parasitical"-the "the obvious or univocal reading" as the mighty oak, rooted in the solid ground, endangered by the insidious twining around it of deconstructive ivy. That ivy is somehow feminine, secondatY,defective, or dependent. It is a clinging vine, able to live in no orher way but by drawing the life sap of its host, cutting off its light and air. I think of Hardy" The Iuy-Wife or of the end of Thackeray's Vanity Fair: "God bless you, honest \Tilliam!-Farewell, dear green agarn, tender little parasite, Amelia-Grow round the rugged old oak to which you cling!" Such sad love stories of a domestic affection which introduces the parasitical into the closed economy of the home no doubt describewell enough the way some people feel about the relation of a "deconstructive" interpretation to "the obvious or univocal reading." The parasite is destroying the host. The alien has invaded the house, perhaps to kill the father of the family in an act which does not look like parricide, but is. [s the "obvious" reading, though, so "obvious" or even so "univocal" ? May it not itself be the uncanny alien which is so close that it cannot be seenas strange, host in the senseof enemy rather than host in the senseof open-handed dispenser of hospitality? Is not the obvious reading perhaps equivocal rather than univocal, most equivocal in its intimate familiarity and in its abiliry to have got itself taken for granted as "obvious" and single-voiced? "Parasite" iS one of those words which calls up its apparent opposite. It has no meaning without- that counte part. There is no parasite without its host. At the t"*. time both word and counterword subdivide. Each reveals itself to be fissured already within itself, to be, like Unheimlich, unbeimlich-' \fords in "parar" like words in "anar" have this as 2(.Jnheimlich [Eds.] : uncanny,literally,un-home-1ike.

The Critic as Host an intrinsic property. "Parao' as a prefix in English (sometimes "p^r" ) indicates alongside, near or beside, beyond, incorrectlS resembling or similar to, subsidiary to, isomeric or polymeric to. In borrowed Greek compounds "para" indicates beside, to the side of, alongside, beyond, wrongfull5 harmfully, unfavorablS and among.'Words in "para" form one branch of the tangled labyrinth of words using some form of the Indo-European root per. This root is the "base of prepositions and preverbs with the basic meaning of 'forward,' 'through,' and a wide range of extended sensessuch as 'in front ofr' 'beforer' 'earlyr' 'firstr' 'chiefr' 'towardr' 'againstr' 'nearr' 'Atr' 'around."" If words in "para" are one branch of the labyrinth of words in "per," the branch is itself a miniature labyrinth. "Para" is a double antithetical prefix signifying at once proximiry and distance, similarity and difference, interiority and exterio riy, something inside a domestic economy and at the same time outside it, something simultaneously this side of a boundary line, threshold, or margin, and also beyond it, equivalent in status and also secondary or subsidiaty, submissive, as of guest to host, slave to master. A thing in "parar" moreover, is not only simultaneously on both sides of the boundary line between inside and out. It is also the boundary itself, the screen which is a permeable membrane connecting inside and outside. It confuses them with one another, allowing the outside in, making the inside out, dividing them and joining rhem. It also forms an ambiguous transition between one and the other. Though a given word in "par a" may seemto choose univocally one of thesepossibilities, the other meanings are always there as a shimmering in the word which makes it refuse to sray still in a sentence. The word is like a slightly alien guest within the syntactical closure where all the words are family friends together. \U7ordsin "para,, include: parachute, paradigm, parasol, the French parauent (windscreen), and parapluie (umbrella), paragon, paradox, parapet, parataxis, parapraxis, parabasis, paraphrase, paragraph, paraph , paralysis, paranoia, paraphernalia, parallel, parallax, parameter, parable, paresthesia,paramnesia, para3All definitionsand etymologies in this essa y are taken from The American Heritage Dictionary of'the English Language,\Tilliam Morris, ed. (Bosron:AmericanHeritage Publishingco., Inc. and Houghton Mifflin company,ry69).[Au.]

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morph, paramecium, Paraclete,paramedical, panlegal-and parasite. "Parasite" comes from the Greek parasitos, "beside the grain," para, beside (in this case)plus sitos, grain, food. "Sitolo gy" is the science of foods, nutrition, and diet. A parasite was originally something positiv e, a fellow guest, someone sharing the food with you, there with you beside the grain. Later on, "parasite" came to mean a professional dinner guest, someone expert at cadging invitations without ever giving dinners in return. From this developed the rwo main modern meanings in English, the biological and the social. A parasite is "Any organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host"; and "A person who habitually takes advantage of the generosiry of others without making any useful return." To call a kind of criticism "parasitical" is, in either case, strong language. A curious system of thought, or of language, or of social organization (in fact all thre e at once) is implicit in the word parasite. There is no parasite without a host. The host and the somewhat sinister or subversive parasite are fellow guests beside the food, sharing it. On the other hand, the host is himself the food, his substance consumed without recompense, as when one says, "He is eating me out of house and home." The host may then become host in another sense,not etymologically connected. The word "host" is of course the name for the consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist, from Middle English oste, from Latin hostia, sacrifice, victim. If the host is both eater and eaten, he also contains in himself the double antithetical relation of host and guest, guest in the bifold senseof friendly presence and alien invader. The words "host" and "guest" go back in fact to the same efymological root: ghos-ti, stranger, guest, host, properly "someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitaliry." The modern English word "host" in this alternative sense comes from the Middle English (b)oste, from Old French, host, guest, from Latin hospes (stem hospit-), guest, host, stranger. The "pes" or "pit" in the Latin words and in such modern English words as "hospital" and "hospitality" is from another root, pot, meaning "master." The compound or bifurcated root ghos-pot meant "master of guestsr" "one who symbolizes the relationship

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of reciprocal hospitality," as in the Slavic gospodi, Lord, sir, master. "GueStr" on the other hand, is from Middle English gest, from Old Norse gestr, from ghos-ti, the same root as for "host." A host is a guest, and a guest is a host. A host is a host. The relation of household master offering hospitality to a guest and the guest receiving it, of host and parasite in the original sense of "fellow guest," is inclosed within the word "host" itself. A host in the senseof a guest, moreover, is both a friendly visitor in the house and at the same time an alien presencewho turns the home into a hotel, a neutral territory. Perhapshe is the first emissary of a host of enemies (from Latin hostis [stranger' enemyl ), the first foot in the door, followed by a swarm of hostile strangers, to be met only by our own host, as the Christian deity is the Lord God of Hosts. The uncanny antithetical relation exists not only between pairs of words in this system, host and parasite, host and guest, but within each word in itself. It reforms itself in each polar opposite when that opposite is separatedout. This subverts or nullifies the apparently unequivocal relation of polarity which seemsthe conceptual schemeappropriate for thinking through the system.Each word in itself becomes divided by the strange logic of the "para," membrane which divides inside from outside and yet ioins them in a hymeneal bond, or which allows an osmotic mixing, making the stranger friend, the distant near, the Unheimlich heimlich, the homely homey, without, for all its closenessand similarity, ceasingto be strange, distant, and dissimilar. One of the most frightening versions of the parasite as invading host is the virus. In this case, the parasite is an alien who has not simply the abiliry to invade a domestic enclosure, consume the food of the family, and kitl the host, but the strange capacity, in doing all that, to turn the host into multitudinous proliferating replications of itself. The virus is at the uneasy border bet'weenlife and death. It challengesthat opposition, since, for example, it does not "eat," but only reproduces.It is as much a crystal or a component in a crystal as it is an organism. The genetic pattern of the virus is so coded that it can enter a host cell and violently reprogram all the genetic material in that cell, turning the cell into a little factory for manufacturing copies of itself, so destroying it. This is The luy-Wife with a vengeallce. Is this an allegory, and if so, of what? The use by

modern geneticists of an " analogy" (but what is the ontological status of this analogy?) between genetic reproduction and the social interchangescarried by language or other sign systemsmay fustify a transfer back in the other direction. Is "deconstructive criticism" like a virus which invades the host of an innocently metaphysical text, a text with an "obvious or univocal meaningr" carried by . single referential grammar? Does such criticism ferociously reprogram the Sramme of the host text to make it utter its own message,the "uncannyr" the "aporiar" "la drff6,ranc€r"or what have you? Some people have said so. Could it, on the other hand, be the other way around ? Could it be that metaphysics, the obvious or univocal meanitg, is the parasitical virus which has for millennia been passedfrom generation to generation in Western culture in its languages and in the privileged texts of those languages? Does metaphysics enter the languagelearning apparatus of each new baby born into that culture and shape the apparatus after its own patterns? The difference might be that this apparatus, unlike the host cell for a virus, does not have its own pre-existing inbuilt genetic code. Is that so certain, however? Is the systemof metaphysics "natural" to man, as it is natural for a cuckoo to sing "cuckoo" or for a bee to build its comb in hexagonal cells? If so, the parasitical virus would be a friendly presence carrying the same messagealready genetically Programmed within its host. The messagewould predispose all European babies or perhaps all earth babies to read Plato and become Platonists, so that anything else would require some unimaginable mutation of the species man. Is the prison house of language an exterior constraint or is it part of the blood, bones, nerves' and brain of the prisoner? Could that incessant murmuring voice that speaks always within me or constantly weavesthe web of language there, even in my dreams, b. an uncanny guest, a parasitical virus, and not a member of the family? How could one even ask that question, since it must be asked in words provided by the murmuring voice? Is it not that voice speaking here and now? Perhaps, aftet all, the analogy with viruses is "only an anal ogY," a "figure of speechr" and need not be taken seriously. \7hat does this have to do with poems and with the reading of poems? It is meant as an "example" of the deconstructive strategy of interpretation. The procedure is applied, in this case,not to the text of

The Critic as Host a poem but to the cited fragment of a critical essay containing within itself a citation from another essay,like a parasite within its host. The "example" is a fragment like those miniscule bits of some substance which are put into a tiny test tube and explored by certain techniques of analytical chemistry. To get so far or so much out of a little piece of language, context after context widening out from these few phrasesto include as their necessarymilieux all the family of Indo-European languag€S,and all the permutations of our social structures of household economy, gift-giving and gift-receivingthis is an argument for the value of recognizing the equivocal richness of apparendy obvious or univocal language, even of the language of criticism. Criticism is in this respect, if in no other, continuous with the language of literature. This equivocal richness, my discussion of "parasite" implies, r€sides in part in the fact that there is no conceptual expression without figure, and no intertwinin g of concept and figure without an implied narrative, in this case the story of the alien guest in the home. Deconstruction is an investigation of what is implied by this inherence in one another of figure, concept, and narrative. My example presents a model for the relation of critic to critic, for the incoherence within a single critic's language, for the asymmetrical relation of critical text to poem, for the incoherence within any single literary text, and for the skewed relation of a poem to its predecessors.To speak of the "deconstructive" reading of a poem as "parasitical" on the "obvious or univocal reading" is to enter willynilly into the strange logic of the parasite, to make the univocal equivocal in spite of oneself, according to the law that languageis not an instrument or tool in man's hands, a submissive means of thinking. Language rather thinks man and his "worldr" including poems, if he will allow it to do so. The systemof figurative thought (but what thought is not figurative?) inscribed within the word parasite and its associates,host and guest, invites us to recognize that the "obvious or univocal reading" of a poem is nor identical to the poem itself. Both readings, the "univocal" one and the "deconstructive" one, are fellow guests"beside the grain," host and guest,host and host, host and parasite, parasite and parasite. The relation is a triangle, not a polar opposition. There is always a third to whom the two are related, something before them or berween

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them, which they divide, consume, or exchange, across which they meet. The relation in question is always in fact a chain. It is a strange sort of chain without beginning or end, a chain in which no commanding element (origin, goal, or underlying principle) may be identified. In such a chain there is always something earlier or something later to which any link on which one focuses refers and which keeps the seriesopen. The relation between any two contiguous elements in this chain is a strange opposition which is of intimate kinship and at the same time of enmity. It cannot be encompassedby the ordinary logic of polar opposition. It is not open to dialectical synthesis. Each "single element," moreover, far from being unequivocally what it is, subdivides within itself to recapitulate the relation of parasiteand host of which, on the larger scale,it appears to be one or the other pole. On the one hand, the "obvious or univocal reading" always contains the "deconstructive reading" as a parasite encrypted within itself as part of itself. on the other hand, the "deconstructive" reading can by no means free itself from the metaphysical reading it means to contest. The poem in itself, then, is neither the host nor the parasite but the food they both need, host in another sense,the third element in this particular triangle. Both readings are at the same table together, bound by r strangerelation of reciprocal obligation, of gift or food-giving and gift or foodreceiving. The poem, in my figure, is that ambiguous gift, food, host in the sense of victim, sacrifice. It is broken, divided, passed around, consumed by the critics canny and uncanny who are in that odd relation to one another of host and parasite. Any poem, however, is parasitical in its turn on earlier poeffis, or it contains earlier poems within itself as enclosed parasites, in another version of the perpetual reversal of parasite and host. If the poem is food and poison for the critics, it must in its turn have eaten. It musthave beena cannibal consumerof earlierpoems. Take, for example, Shelley's The Triumph of Life. It is inhabited, as its critics have shown, by long " chain of parasitical presences-echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts. These are present within the domicile of the poem in that curious phantasmal way, affirmed, negated, sublimated, fwisted, straightened out, travestied, which Harold Bloom has begun to study and which it is one major task of literary interpretation today to investigate

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further and to define. The previous text is both the ground of the new one and something the new poem must annihilate by incorporating it, turning it into ghostly insubstantiality, so that the new poem may perform its possible-impossibletask of becoming its own ground. The new poem both needs the old texts and must destroy them. It is both parasitical on them, feeding ungraciously on their substance, and at the same time it is the sinister host which unmans them by inviting them into its home, as the Green Knight invites Gawain. Each previous link in the chain, in its turn, played the same role, as host and parasite, in relation to its predecessors. From the Old to the New Testaments, from Ezekiel to Revelation, to Dante, to Ariosto, to Spenser,to Milton, to Rousseau, to Wordsworth and Coleridge, the chain leads ultimately to The Triumph of Lift. That poem, in its turn, or Shelley'swork generallS is present within the work of Hardy or Yeatsor Stevensand forms part of a sequencein the major texts of Romantic "nihilism" including Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Blanchot. This perpetual reexpressionof the relation of host and parasite forms itself again today in current criticism. It is present, for example, in the relation between "univocal" and "deconstructionist" readings of The Triumph of Life, between the reading of Meyer Abrams and that of Harold Bloomroor bet'weenAbrams' reading of Shelley and the one I am proposing here, or within the work of each one of these critics taken separately. The inexorable law which makes the "alogical" relation of host and parasite re-form itself within each separate entity which had seemed, on the larger scale,to be one or the other, applies as much to critical essays as to the texts they treat. The Triumph of Life contains within itself, iostling irreconcilably with one another, both logocentric metaphysicsand nihilism. It is no accident that critics have disagreedabout it. The meaning of Tbe Triumph of Life can never be reduced to any "univocal" reading, neither the "obvious" one nor a single-minded deconstructionist one, if there could be such a thing, which there cannot. The poem' like all texts, is "unreadabler" if by "readable" one means a single, definitive interpretation. In fact, neither the "obvious" reading nor the "deconstrucaSeeM. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Reuolutionin RomanticLiterature(tgZr), and Harold Blooffi, Poetry and Repression:Reuisionismfrom (1976. [Eds.] Blaketo Steuens

tionist" reading is "univocal." Each contains, necessarilS its enemy within itself, is itself both host and parasite. The deconstructionist reading contains the obvious one and vice versa. Nihilism is an inalienable alien presencewithin Occidental metaphysics, both in poems and in the criticism of poems.

il Nihilism-that word has inevitably come up as a label for "deconstruction," secretly or overtly present as the name for what is feared from the new mode of criticism and from its ability to devalue all values, making traditional modes of interpretation "impossible." \7hat is nihilism? Here the analysis may be helped by a chain which goesfrom Friedrich Nietzsche to Ernst Jiingert to Martin Heidegger.' The first book of Nietzsche's The Will to Power, in the ordering by his sister of the Nachlass, is entitled "European Nihilism." The beginning of the first section of this book is as follows: "Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?" ("Der Nihilismus steht uor der Tiir: woher kommt u,ns dieser unheimlichste aller Giiste?")7 Heidegger's comment on this comes near the beginning of his essayon ErnstJtinge r's Uber die Linie. The title of Heidegger's essaywas later changed to Zur Seinsfrage,The Question of Being. Heidegger's essaytakes the form of a letter to Jtinger: It is called the "uncanniest" fder "unheim' lichste"/ becauseas the unconditional will to will, it wants homelessnessas such fdie Hei' matlosigkeit als solchel. Therefore, it does not help to show it the door because it has long since and invisibly been moving around in the house. The important thing is to get a glimpse of the guest and to see through it. You [ringer] write: "A good definition of nihilism would be comparable to making the cancer bacillus visible. It would not signify a 5Ernst Jringer(r 8gS- ), Germanwriter. [Eds.] 5SeeHeidegger.[Eds.] TwalterKaufmannand R. J. Hollingdale,trans.,The Will York: VintageBooks,ry68),p.7; Friedto Power(New'Werke in Drei Biinden,ed.Karl Schlechta, rich Nietzsche, III (Munich:Carl HanserVerlag,1966),88r.[Au.]

The Critic as Host cure but perhaps the presupposition of it, insofar as men contribute anything toward it." . . . Nihilism itself, as little as the cancer bacillus, is something diseased.In regard to the essenceof nihilism there is no prospect and no meaningful claim to a cure. . . . The essenceof nihilism is neither healable nor unhealable. It is the heal-less [das Heil-lose], but as such a unique relegation into health [eine einzigartige Verweisung ins Heile].t For these three writers, link after link in a chain, the confrontation of nihilism cannot be detached from the system of terms I have been exploring. To put this another way, the system of terms involves inevitably a confrontation with the uncanniest of guests, nihilism. Nihilism is somehow inherent in the relation of parasite and host. Inherent also is the imagery of sicknessand health. Health for the parasite, food and the right environment, may be illness, even mortal illness, for the host. on the other hand, there are innumerable cases,in the proliferation of life forms, where the presenceof a parasite is absolutely necessaryto the health of its host. Moreover, if nihilism is the "heal-less" as such, a wound which may not be closed, an attempt to pretend that this uncanniest of guests is not present in the house might be the worst of all illnesses, the nagging, surlS covert, unidentified kind, there as a general malaise which undermines all activities, depriving them of joy. The uncanniestguest is nihilisffi, "h6te fant6me," in Jacques Derrida's phrase, "h6te qui hante plut6t qu'il n'habite, guest et ghost d'une inquihtante 6tranget6."e Nihilism has already made itself at home with occidental metaphysics.Nihilism is the latent ghost encrypted within any expression of a logocentric system, for example in Shelley's Tbe Triumph of Lifr, or in any interpretation of such a text; for example in Meyer Abrams' reading of The Triumph of Life or in reversed form in Harold Bloom's reading. The two, logocentrism and nihilism, are related to one another in a way which is not antithesis and which may not be synthesizedin tJeln T. ru7ildeandtilTilliam Kluback,trans.,The euestion of leing [a bilingual rext] (New Haven, Cottn.icollege \ ^6cUniversityPress,19j8), pp.36-3g. [Au.] e h6te fant6me;phantomor ipeitral hori; hate . . . 6tranglt6: host which haunts more than a house,guestand ghostof a disquietingstrangeness. [Eds.]

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any dialectical Aufhebung." Each defines and is hospitable to the other, host to it as parasite. Yet each is the mortal enemy of the other, invisible to the other, as its phantom unconscious, that is, as something of which ir cannot by definition be aware. If nihilism is the parasitical stranger within the house of metaphysics, "nihilism," as the name for the devaluation or reduction to nothingness of all values, is not the name nihilism has "in itself." It is the name given to it by metaphysics, as the term "unconscious" is given by consciousnessto that part of itself which it cannot face directly. In attempting to expel that orher than itself contained within itself, logocentric metaphysics deconstirures itself, according to a regular law which can be demonstrated in the self-subversion of all the great texts 'western of metaphysics from Plato onward. Metaphysics contains its parasite within itself, as the "unhealable" which it tries, uirsuccessfullr to cure. It attempts to cover over the unhealable by annihilating the nothingness hidden within itself. Is there any way to break this l"*, to turn the system around? Would it be possible to approach metaphysics from the standpoint of "nihilism" ? could one make nihilism the host of which metaphysics is the alien guest, so giving new names to both? Nihilism would then not be nihilism but something else, something without a melodramatic aura, perhaps something so innocent-sounding as "rhetoricr" or "philology," or "the study of trop€sr" or even "the trivium." Metaphysics might then be redefined, from the point of view of this trivium, as an inevitable rhetorical or tropological effect. It would not be a cause but a phantom generated within the house of language by the play of language. "Deconstruction" is one current name for this reversal. The present -d^y procedure of "deconstruction " of whiih Nietzsche is one of the p;;;;, ;;';, however, new in our own d^y.It has been repeated regularly in one form or another in all the centuries since the Greek Sophists and rhetoricians, since in fact Plato himself, who in The Sopbisthas enclosed his own self-deconstruction within the canon of his own writing. If deconstruction could liberate us from the prisonhouse of language, it would seem that it should have long since done so, and yet it has not. There must be something wrong with the matoAuflgbung: to lift up, preserve, and cancelor annul, as usedby Hegel to describethe effectof dialecic. [Eds.]

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chinery of demolition, or some inexpertness in its operator, or perhaps the definition of it as liberating is incorrect. The frdhliche Wissenschaft" of Nietzsche, his attempt to move beyond metaphysics to an affirmative, life-enhancing, perforrnative act of language, is posited on a dismantling of metaphysics which shows it as leading to nihilism by an inevitable process whereby "the highest values devaluate themselves." The values are not devaluated by something subversiveoutside themselves.Nihilism is not a social or psychological or even world historical phenomenon. It is not a new or perhaps cyclically reappearing phenomenon in the history of "spirit" or of "Being." The highest values devalue themselves.Nihilism is a parasite always akeady at home within its host, Western metaphysics.This is stated as a "point of departure" (Ausgangspunkt) at the beginning of Zum Plan ( "Towards an Outline" ), at the opening of Book I of The WiU to Power, iust after the sentencedefining nihilism as "this uncanniest of all guests": . . . [t is an error to consider "social distress" or "psychological degeneration" or, worse, corruption as the cause oI nihilism. . . . Distress, whether of the soul, bodR or intellect, cannot of itself give birth to nihilism (i.e. the radical repudiation of value, meaning, and desirability)-Such distress always permits a variety of interpretations. Rather: it is in one particular interpretation, the Christianmoral one, that nihilism is rooted.tt \flould it be possible, then, to escape from the endlessgeneration out of itself by metaphysicsof nihilism, and the endlessresubmission of nihilism to the metaphysics which defines it and is the condition of its existence?Is "deconstruction" this new way, a new threefold way out of the labyrinth of human historS which is the history of error, into the sunlit forum of truth and claritS all ways made straight at last? Can semiotics, rhetoric, and tropology substitute for the old grammar' rhetoric, and logic? Would it be possible to be freed at last from the nightmare of an endless brother battle, Shem replacing Shaun, and Shaun Shem? I do not think so. "Deconstruction" is neither nitt gayscience.[Eds.] fr\hliche Wissenschaft: t2Kaufmann and Hollingdale,p. 7; Schlechta,III, 88r . [Au.]

hilism nor metaphysics but simply interpretation as such, the untangling of the inherence of metaphysics in nihilism and of nihilism in metaphysics by way of the close reading of texts. This procedure, however, can in no way escape,in its own discourse, from the language of the passagesit cites. This language is the expression of the inherence of nihilism 'We in metaphysics and of metaphysics in nihilism. have no other langu age.The language of criticism is subject to exactly the same limitations and blind alleys as the language of the works it reads. The most heroic effort to escapefrom the prisonhouse of language only builds the walls higher. The deconstructive procedure, however, by reversing the relation of ghost and host, by playing on the play within language, may go beyond the repetitive generation of nihilism by metaphysics and of metaphysicsby nihilism. It may reach something 'Wissenscbaft for which Nietzlike that frdhliche sche called. This would be interpretation as loyful wisdom, the greatestjoy in the midst of the greatest suffering, xr inhabitation of that gatety of language which is our seigneur. Deconstruction does not provide an escapefrom nihilism, nor from metaphysics,nor from their uncanny inherence in one another. There is no escape. It does, however, move back and forth within this inherence.It makes the inherenceoscillate in such a way that one enters a strange borderland, a frontier region which seemsto give the widest glimpse into the other land ( "beyond metaphysics"), though this land may not by any means be entered and does 'Western man. By this form of not in fact.exist for interpretation, however, the border zone itself may be made sensible, as quattrocento painting makes the Tuscan air visible in its invisibility. The zone may be appropriated in the torsion of the mind's expropriation, its experience of an inability to comprehend logically. This procedure is an attempt to reach clarity in a region where clarity is not possible. In the failure of that attempt, however, something moves, a limit is encountered.This encounter may be compared to the uncanny experience of reaching a frontier where there is no visible barrier, as when \ilTordsworth found he had crossedthe Alps without knowing he was doing so. It is as if the "prisonhouse of language" were like that universe finite but unbounded which some modern cosmologies posit. One may move everywhere freely within this enclosure without ever encountering a

The Critic as Host wall, and yet it is limited. It is a prison, a milieu without origin or edge. Such a place is therefore all frontie r zone without either peaceful homeland, in one direction, land of hosts and domesticity, nor, in the other direction, any alien land of hostile strangers, "beyond the line.'l The place we inhabit, wherever we are, is always this in-ber'weenzone, place of host and parasite,neither inside nor outside. It is a region of the Unheimlich, beyond any formalisffi, which reforms itself wherever we are, if we know where we are. This "place" is where we arqin whatever text, in the most inclusive senseof that word, we happen to be living. This may be made to appear, however, only by an extreme interpretation of that text, going as far as one can with the terms the work provides. To this form of interpretation, which is interpretation as such, one name given at the moment is "deconstruction."

ilI As an "example" of the word "parasite" functioning parasitically within the "body" of work by one author, I turn now to an analysis of the word in Shelley. The word "parasite" does not appear in The Triumph of Life. That poem, however, is structured throughout around the parasitical relationship. The Triumph of Life may be defined as an exploration of various forms of the parasitical relation. The poem is governed by the imagery of light and shadow, or of light differentiated within itself. The poem is a series of personifications and scenes each of which gives a figurative "shape" (Shelley'sword) to a light which remains the "same" in all its personifications. The figurative shape makes the light a shadow. Ary reading of the poem must thread its way through repeated configurations of light and shadow. It must also identify the relation of one scene to the next which replaces it as sunlight puts out the morning star, and the star again the sun. That star is Lucifer, Venus, Vesp€r, all at once. The polarity constantly reforming itself within a light which turns into shadow in the presenceof a novel light is the vehicle which carries, or is carried bp the structure of dream vision within dream vision and of person confronting or replacing precursor person. This structure is repeated throughout the poem. These repetitions make the poem a mise en abtme

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of reflections within reflections or a nest of Chinese boxes. This relation exists within the poem, for example, in the iuxtaposition of the poet's vision and the prior vision which is narrated by Rousseau within the poet's vision. Rousseau'svision comes later in the linear sequenceof the poem but earlier in "chronological" time. It puts early late, metalepticallS as late's explanatory predecessor.The relation in question also exists in the encapsulation in the poem of echoesand referencesto a long chain of previous texts in which the emblematic chariot or other figures of the poem have appeared: Ezekiel, Revelation, Virgil, Dante, Spenser,Milton, Rousseau, Wordsworth. Shelley's poem in its turn is echoed by Hardy, by Yeats,and by many others. This relation inside the poem between one part of it and another, or the relation of the poem to previous and later texts, is a version of the relation of parasite to host. It exemplifies the undecidable oscillation of that relation. It is impossible to decide which element is parasite, which host, which commands or enclosesthe other. It is impossible to decide whether the seriesshould be thought of as a sequence of elements each external to the next or according to some model of enclosure like that of the Chineseboxes. lfhen the latter model is applied it is impossible to decide which element of any pair is outside, which is inside. In short, the distinction between inside and outside cannot be held to across that strangemembrane, wall at once and copulating hymen, which stands berween host and parasite. Each element is both exterior to the adiacent one and at the same time enclosesand is enclosedby it. One of the most striking "episodes" of The Triumph of Life is the scene of self-destructive erotic love. This scenematchesa seriesof sceneselsewhere in Shelley'spoetry in which the word "parasite" is present. The sceneshows sexual attraction as one of the most deadly forms of the triumph of life. The triumph of life is in fact the triumph of language. For Shelley this takes the form of the subjection of each man or woman to illusory figures projected by his or her desire. Each of these figures is made of another substitutive shape of light which fades as it is grasped. It fades becauseit exists only as a transitory metaphor of light. It is a momentary lightbearer. Venus, star of evenirg, as the poem says, is only another disguise of Lucifer, fallen star of the morning. Vesper becomes Hesper by a change of initial consonant, masculine H for feminine V.

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S7henthe infatuated lovers of TheTriumph of Lile rush together, they annihilate one another, like particle and antiparticle, or, in the metaphors Shelley uses, like two thunderclouds colliding in a narrow valley, or like a great wave crashing on the shore. This annihilation, nevertheless, is not complete, since the violent collision leaves always a trace, a remnant, foam on the shore. This is Aphrodite's foam, seed or sperm which starts the cycle all over again in Shelley'sdrama of endlessrepetition. The darkest feature of the triumph of life, for Shelley,is that it may not even be ended by death. Life, for him, though it is a living death, may not die. It regenerates ltself interminably in ever-new figures of light: . . . in their dance round her who dims the Sun Maidens & youths fling their wild arms in air As their feet rwinkle; they recede,and now Bending within each other's atmosphere Kindle invisibly; and as they glow Like moths by light attracted & repelled, Oft to new bright destruction come & go. Till like two clouds into one vale impelled That shake the mountains when their lightnings mingle And die in rain,-the fiery band which held Their natures, snaps . . . ere the shock ceaseto tingle One falls and then another in the path nor is the desolation single, Senseless, Yet ere I can say where the chariot hath Past over them; nor other trace I find But as of foam after the Ocean's wrath Is spent upon the desert shore. [1. r 48-64]" This magnificent passageis the culmination of a series of passageswriting and rewriting the same materials in a chain of repetitions beginning with t3Tbe Triumpb of Life is cited from the text establishedby Donald H.-Reimanin Shelley's"The Triumph of Life": A Critical Study (Urbana,Ill.: The Universiryof Illinois Press,r96il. All other citationsfrom Shelleyare taken from Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, correctedby G. M. Matthews(London,Oxford, New York: Oxford UniversityPress,1973).[Au.]

Queen Mab.In the earlier versionsthe word "parasite" characteristically appears, like a discreet identifying mark woven into the texture of the verbal fabric. The word appears in Queen Mab and in the version of one episode of Queen Mab called The Daemon of the World.It appearsthen in Alastor, in Laon and Cythna, in The Reuolt of Islam, in Epipsychidion, and rn The SensitiuePlant, always with the same surrounding context of motifs and themes. These include narcissism and incest, the conflict of generations, struggles for political power, the motifs of the sun and the moon, the fountain, the brook, the caverned enclosure, ruined tower, or woodland dell, the dilapidation of man's constructions by nature, and the failure of the poetic quest. That part of Queen Mab which Shelley reworked under the title The Daemon of the World contains the earliest version of the complex of elements (including the chariot from Ezekiel) which receivesits final expression in The Triumph of Life. There Ianthe's "golden tressesshade / The bosom's stainless pride, / Twining like tendrils of the parasite / Around a marble column" (ll. 44- 47). In Alastor thedoomed poet, like Narcissussearching for his lost twin sister, seeksthe "veiled maid" (1. 15r) who has come to him in dreams. He seeks her in a woodland glen with a "well / Dark, gleaming and of most translucentwave" (ll. 4 57-58), but he finds only his own eyes reflected there. These eyes, however, are doubled by "two eyes, / Two starry eyes" (ll. + 89-90), which meet his eyeswhen his look rises. They are perhaps actual stars, perhaps the eyes of his evasive beloved. This play of eyesand looks had been prepared a few lines earlier in a description of "parasites, / Starred with ten which twine thousand blossoms" (ll. $9-4o), around the trees of the dense forest hiding this well. In Canto VI of Laon and Cythna, then again in the revised version, The Reuolt of Islam (which veils the theme of incestuous love), Cythna rescues Laon from defeat in battle and takes him for a wild ride on a Tartar's courser to a ruined palace on a mountain top. There they make love, in another scene involving eyes, looks, stars, and Narcissus' well: "her dark and deepening eyes' / \rhich, as fwin phantoms of one star that lies / O'er a dim well, move, though the Star reposes,/ Swam in our mure and liquid ecstasies"(ll. z6z4-28). This lovemaking takes place in a "natural couch of leaves" in a recessof the ruin. The recessis shaded in spring

The Critic as Host by "flowering parasites" which shed their "stars" on the dead leaveswhen the wandering wind blows (ll. z j78-84). rn Epipsychidion, the poer plans to take the lady Emily to an island with a ruined tower where, as he says, "'we shall become the same, we shall be one / Spirit within two frames" (ll. 573-7d. This ruin too is shaded by "p"rasite flowers" (1.5oz), just as, in The sensitiue Plant, the garden which the lady personifiescontains "parasite bowers" (1.+il which die when winter comes. A special version of the undecidable structure contained within the word "parasite" operates in all these passages.one could say either that the word contains the passagesin miniature within itself or that the passagesthemselves are a dramatization of the word. The passageslimit the word's meaning and expand it at the same time, tracing our one special design within the complex sysrem of thought and figuration contained within the word. These passagesmight be defined as an affempt to get a complicated group of themes to come out right. Their aim is magical or promethean. They attempt to describe an act of Narcissistic selfbegetting and self-possessionwhich is at the same time an incestuous lovemaking between brother and sister. This lovemaking short-circuits the differences of the sexes and the heterogeneify of families in an unlawful sexual coupling. At the same time this act is a breakdown of the barrier berween man and nature. It is also a political act putting an end to a tyranny which is imaged as the familial domination of a bad father over his children and over his progeny in all succeeding generations. It is, finallr an act of poetry which will destroy the barriers between sign and signified. Such poerry will produce an apocalypseof immediacy in which no more poetry will be needed becauseno more figures will be needed, oo metaphors, no substitutions or "standings for," no veils. Man will then stand in the presence of a universal present which will be all light. It will no longer require Luciferic shapes,p.rronr, figimages from nature to bear that light and in Tes, or the bearing hide it. All these projects fail at once. They fail in a way which The Triumph of Life makes clearest in showing that the conjunction of lovers, clouds, wave and shore, or words both destroys what it conjoins and always leaves a remainder. This genetic trace starts the cycle of lovemaking, artempts by the self ro pos-

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sess itself, self-destructive political tyrannR and poetry-writing all over again. Shelley'spoetry is the record of.a perpetually renewed failure. Ir is a failure ever to get the right formula and so end the separateincomplete self, end lovemaking, end politics, and end poetry, all at once, in a performative apocalypse in which words will become the fire they have ignited and so vanish as words, in a universal light. The words, however, always remain, there on the page, as the unconsumed traces of each unsuccessful aftempt to use words to end words. The attempt must therefore be repeated. The same scene, with the same elements in a slightly different arrangement, is written by Shelley over and over again from Queen Mab to The Triumph of Life, in a repetition ended only with his death. This repetition mimes the poet's failure ever to get it right and so end the necessity of trying once more with what remains. The word "parasiter" for Shelley, names the bridge, wall, or connecting membrane which at once makes this apocalyptic union possible, abolishing difference, and at the same time always remains as a barrier forbidding it. Like the thin line of Aphrodite's foam on the shore, this remnant starts the process all over again after the vanishing of the previous couple in their violent attempt to end the interminable chain. The parasite is, on the one hand, the barrier and marriage hymen between the horizontal elements which make some binary opposition. This opposition generatesforms and generates also a narrative of their interaction. At the same time the parasite is the barrier and connecting screen between elements on different planes vertically, Earth and Heaven, this world and a spiritual one above it. The world above is the white t"di"n.. of eternity. This world's opposing pairs, male, for example, against female, both figure forth and hide that white fire. Parasites for Shelley are always parasite flowers. They are vines which twine themselves around the trees of a forest to climb to light and air, or they grow on a ruined palace to cover its stone and make fragrant bowers there. parasitical flowering vines feed on air and on what they can take from their hosts. Those hosts they join with their srems. shelley's parasites flower abundantlg making a screen between sky and earth. This screen remains even in winter as a lattice of dried vines. A final ambiguity of Shelley's version of the sys-

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tem of parasite and host is the impossibility of deciding whether the sister-belovedin these poems is on the same plane as the desiring poet or a transcendent spirit infinitely above him. She is both at once. She is a sister to whom the protagonist might make love, incestuously. At the same time she is an unattainable muse or mother who governs all, as the spirit eyes Alastor pursues are those of no earthly sister, or as the poet's love for Emily in Epipsychidion is also an attempt, like that of Prometheus, to steal heavenly fire, or as the scene of erotic love rn The Triumph of Life is presided over by the devouring female goddess,riding in her triumph, Life, or as, in the first version of this pattern' the earthly Ianthe beloved by Henry is doubled by the female Daemon of the World who presidesover their relation and who is present at the end of the poem as the star repeating the heroine's eyes.These star-like eyes are a constant symbol in Shelleyof the unattainable transcendent power in its relation to the earthly signs of it, but at the same time they are no more than the beloved's eyes, and also, at the same time, the protagonist's own eyes reflected back to him.

IV The motif of a relation between the generations in which one generation is related parasitically to another, with the full ambiguity of that relation, lP' pears in Epipsychidion rn its most complete form. This version makes clearest the relation of this theme to the system of parasite and host, to the theme in Shelley of a repetition generated always by what is left over after an earlier cataclysmic selfdestruction, to the political theme which is always present in these passag€s,to the relation of man's works to nature, and to the dramatrzatron of the power of poetry which is always one of Shelley's themes. The ruined tower in the Sporades to which the poet will take his Emily in Epipsychidion is said, in one of the drafts of the preface, somewhat prosaicallS to be "a Saraceniccastlewhich accident has preserved in some repair." In the poem itself this tower is a strange structure which has grown naturallR almost like a flower or stone' saxifrage and saxiform. At the sametime it is almost Supernatural. It is a house for a god and a goddess,or at any rate

for a semi-divineOcean-Kingand his sister-spouse. The building bracketsthe human level.It is above and belowthat levelat once: But the chief marvel of the wilderness Is a lone dwelling, built by whom or how None of the rustic island-people know: 'Tis not a tower of strength, though with its height It overtops the woods; but, for delight, Some wise and tender Ocean-King, ere crime Had been invented, in the world's young prime, Reared it, a wonder of that simple time, An envy of the isles, a pleasure-house Made sacred to his sister and his spouse. It scarceseemsnow a wreck of human art, But, as it were Titanic; in the heart Of Earth having assumedits form, then grown Out of the mountains, from the living stone, Lifting itself in cavernslight and high: For all the antique and learned imagery Has been erased,and in the place of it The ivy and the wild-vine interknit The volumes of their many-twining stems; Parasite flowers illume with dewy gems The lampless halls, and when they fade, the sky Peepsthrough their winter-woof of tracery til7ith moonlight patches, or star atoms keen, Or fragments of the day's intense serene;\Torking mosaic on their Parian floors. [ll. + 81- So7] An "Ocean-Kirrg" is, possibln a human king of this ocean isle and at the same time, possibly, a King of the Ocean, an Olympian or a Titan. In any case, this dwelling was built "in the world's young prime." It was built near the time of origin, when the opposites were confounded or nearly confounded and *h.tr incest was not a crime, as it was not for those Egyptian pharaohs who always mated with their sisters, only fit spousesfor their earthly divinity. In the same way, in that young time, nature and culture were not opposed. The palace seems at once "Titanicr" the work of a superhuman strength, and at the same time human, since it is, after allr"a wreck

Tbe Critic as Host of human artr" though it scarcely seemsso. At the same time it is natural, as though it had grown from the rock, not been built by human art at all. Though the building was once adorned with elaborate carved inscriptions and images, those have been effaced by time. Its towers and facades now seem once more natural rock, grown out of the mountains, living stone. The natural, the supernatural, and the human were reconciled in a union whose symbol was brother-sister incest, the same mating with the same, so short-circuiting normal human love with its production of new genetic lines. The prohibition against incest, as L6vi-Straussto has argued, is both human and natural at once. It therefore breaks down the barrier between the fwo. This breaking was doubly broken by the ocean-King and his sisrer. Their copulation kept crime from being invented. It held nature, the supernatural, and the human together-mimicking and maintaining that vision of unity which can be seen from the palace.This seascape-landscape, two in one, makes the particulars of nature seem the ideal dream of a fulfilled sexuality between rwo great gods, Earth and Ocean: And, d^y and night, aloof, from the high towers And terraces, the Earth and Ocean seem To sleep in one another's arms, and dream Of waves, flowers, clouds, woods, rocks, and all that we Read in their smiles, and call reality. [ll. jo8-rz] To this place the poet plans to bring his EmilS promising a renewal of that ideal sexual union of the prime rime. This renewal will magically renew the time itself. It will take them back to a time prior to the invention of crime and reconcile once more' in a performative embrace, nature, supernature, and man. This performance, however, can never be performed. It remains at the end of Epipsychidiin a proleptic hope which is forbidden by the words which express it. It can never be performed because in fact this union never existed in the past. It is only loseeclaude Ldui-straerss. SeealsoL6vi-Strauss's Elementqry structuresof Kinsbip (Boston:Beaconpress, rg6g). lEds.l

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a projection backward from the present. It is a "seeming" created by reading the signs or remnants still present in the present. The ocean-King, wise and tender though he may have been, was human after all. The prohibition against incest precedesthe committing of incest. It precedes the division between natural and human while at the same time creating that division. The love-making of the ocean-King and his spousewas itself the act which "invented crime." Though it was a mating of the same with the same, it did not pur a stop to the difference of sexes, families, and generations, as the peopling of the earth, the presence of political and paternal ryrannS the existence of the poet with his unassuageddesire for Emily all demonstrate. Moreover, the building only seemed to be natural, divine, and human at once. Though its stone is natural enough, its shape was in fact a product of human art, as is demonstrated by the presenceon it once of "antique and learned imagery." This imagery was learned becauseit pointed back still further to a human tradition already immemorial. The "volumes" of the ivy and the wild vine, that screen of parasite flowers, the former making a hieroglyphic partern on the stone, the latter casting mosaic patterns in tracery on the marble floors, are substitutes for that effaced writing. The purely natural vines and parasites here paradoxicafuy become a kind of writing. They stand for the erased pattern of learned imagery carved in the stone by the ocean-King's builders. They stand also by implication for writing in general, the writing for example of the poem itself which the reader is at that moment retracitrg. Yet the pattern of parasite vines is no legible language. It remains "in place of" the erased human language. In this "in place of" all the imaginary unity of "the world's young prime" breaks down. It is dispersed back into irreconcilable comparrments separated by the dividing textured membrane which tries to bring them together. Male and female; divine, human, supernatural-all become separaterealms. They ^r, ,i^lms separated by language itself and by the dependence of language on figure, on the "in place of " of metaphor or allegorical substitution. Ary attempt to cross the barrier and unify what have frorn all time been separated by the language which brings 'them together (that antique and learned imagery which was already there even for the wise andlender oceanKing and his sister spouse),leads only ro an exacer-

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bation of the distance. It becomes a transgression which creates the barrier it attempts to efface or ignore. Incest cannot exist without kinship names and is "invented" as a crime not so much in sexual acts between brother and sister as in any imagery for them. This imagerR however, is always there, of immemorial antiquity. It joins nature and culture in what divides them, as the living stone is covered with carved images making it humanly significant, and as the parasite vines or rather the filigrees of their shadows are taken as signs. In the same way the poet's attempt to repeat with Emily the pleasure of the Ocean-King and his sister only repeats the crime of illicit sexual relations, always at least implicitly incest for Shelley."'S(/'ouldwe rwo had been twins of the same mother!" (1.+S) saysthe protagonist to his Emily. The speaker'slove only prolongs the divisions. His union with Emily remains always in the future, as is Henri's love in The Daemon of the'World, or as is the hero's love in Alastor, and as the union of Laon and Cythna is paid for when they are burned at the stake. The lovemaking of Laon and Cythna does not in any caseproduce the political liberation of Islam. In the same way, the poet's attempt in Epipsychidion to express in words this union becomes itself the barrier forbidding it. It forbids also the poet's Promethean attempt to scale heaven and seize its fire through language and through erotic love. The passage is one of Shelley's grandest symphonic climaxes, but what it expressesis the failure of poetry and the failure of love. It expressesthe destruction of the poet-lover in his attempt to escapehis boundaries, the chains at once of selfhood and of language.This failure is Shelley'sversion of the parasite structure. 'S7ho, however, is "Shelley" ? To what does this word refer if any work signed with this name has no identifiable borders, and no interior walls either? It has no edges becauseit has been invaded from all sidesas well as from within by other "nameS," other powers of writing-Rousseau, Dante, Ezekiel, and the whole host of others, phantom strangers who have crossed the thresholds of the poems, erasing their margins. Though the word "Shelley" may be printed on the cover of a book entitled Poetical Works, it must name something without identifiable bounds, since the book incorporates so much outside within its inside. The parasite structure obliterates the frontiers of the texts it enters. For

"Shelle5" then, the parasite is a communicating screen of figurative language which permanently divides what it would unify in a perpetual "in place of" forbidding union. This screen creates the shadow of that union as an effect of figur e, a phantasmal "once was" and "might yet ber" never "now" and "here": Our breath shall intermix, our bosoms bound, And our veins beat together; and our lips \ilith other eloquence than words, eclipse The soul that burns between them, and the wells \ftich boil under our being's inmost cells, The fountains of our deepestlife, shall be Confused in Passion'sgolden purity, As mountain-springs under the morning sun. We shall become the same, we shall be one Spirit within two frames, oh ! wherefore two? One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew, Till like two meteors of expanding flame, Those spheresinstinct with it become the same, Touch, mingle ) are transfigured; ever still Burnin g, yet ever inconsumable: In one another's substance finding food, Like flames too pure and light and unimbued To nourish their bright lives with baser PreY, \7hich point to Heaven and cannot pass away: One hope within two wills, one will beneath Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death, One Heaven, one Hell, one immortality' 'Woe is me! And one annihilation. The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fireI pant, I sink, I tremble, I exPire!

tll. s6s -erl No reader of these extraordinary lines can fail to feel that the poet here protests too much. Every repe-

The Critic as Host tition of the word "one" only adds another layer to the barrier forbidding oneness. The poet protests too much not only in the attempt in words to produce a union which these words themselves keep from happening, but even in the concluding ourcry of woe. Not only does the poet not achieve union through words with his Emily and so climb to I,ove's fiery heights. He does not even "expire" through the failure of these magic performatives. words do not make anything happen, nor does their failure to make anything happen eirher. Though the "Advertisemenr" to Epipsychidion tells the reader the poet died in Florence without ever reaching that isle, "one of wildest of the sporades," the reader knows that words did not kill him, for "l pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire !" is followed by the relatively calm post-climax dedicatory lines beginning: "weak verses, go, kneel at your Sovereign's feet" (1.j9r). The grand climactic passageitself is made of variations on the paradoxical parasite structure. The verbal signs for union necessarilyrebuild the barrier they would obliterate. The more the poet says they will be one the more he makes them two by reaffirming the ways they are separated. The lips that speak with an eloquence other than words are doors which are also a liminal barrier between person and person. Those lips may eclipsethe soul that burns between them, but they remain as a communicating medium which also is a barrier to union. The lips are the parasite structure once more. Moreover, the voice that speaks of an eloquence beyond words useseloquent words to speak of this transverbal speech.By naming such speechit keeps the soul flom being eclipsed. In the same way, thl image of the deep wells reaffirms the notion of cellulai enclosure, just as the clash of fire and water in the figure of the mountain-springs being "confused" under the morning sun tells the reader that only by evaporaring as entities can lovers become one.-Theimages of two frames with one spirit, the double meteois becoming one floating sphere, the pair each both eater and eaten ("in one another's substance finding food"), are the parasitical relation again. All play variations on "shelley's" version of the parasite structure, the notion of a unity which yet remains double but in the figurarive expression of that unity revealsthe impossibility of rwo becoming one across a parasitic wall and yet remaining two. This impossibility is mimed in the final mise en

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abtme. This is a cascadeof expressionsdescribing a twoness resting on the ground of a oneness which then subdivides once more to rest on a still deeper ground which ultimately reveals itself to be, if it exists at all, the abyss of "annihilation." The vertical wall berween cell and cell, lover and beloved, is doubled by a horizontal veil between levels of being. Each veil when removed only reveals another veil, ad infinitum, unless the veil exposes an emptiness. This would be the emptinessof that oneness which is implored into existence in the reiterarion of

ttoner tt ttoner tt ttoner t'

ttonett:

ttO ne

hope

w i thi n

rwo wills, one will beneath / Two overshadowing minds, one life, one death / One Heaven, one Hell, one immortalitR / And one annihilation. woe is me !" The language which tries ro efface itself as language to give way to an unmediated union beyond language is itself the barrier which always remains as the woe of an ineffaceable trace. words are always there as remnant, "chains of lead" which forbid the flight to fiery union they invoke. This does nor mean that love-making and poetrymaking are the "same thing" or subject to the same impassesdetermining their failure as performatives magically transforming the world. In a sensethey are antagonists, since lovemaking attempts to do wordlessly what poetry attempts to do with words. No one can doubt that Shelleybelievedsexual experience "occurs" or that he "describes" it in his poetry, for example in Laon and cythna and in the great passageon erotic love in The Triumph of Life. Lovemaking and poetrymaking are not, however, stark opposites in shelley either. Each is, so ro speak, the dra matization of the other or the figure of it. This is an elliptical relation in which whichever of the rwo the reader focuseson reveals itself to be the metaphorical substitution for the other. The other, however, when the reader moves to it, is not the "original" but a figure of what at first seemeda figure for it. Lovemaking, as The Triumph of Lift shows, is a way to "experiencer" as incarnate sufferitg, the self-destructive effects of signmaking, signprojectirg, and signinterpretation. The wordleisness of lovemaking is only another way of dwelling within signs after all, as is shown in The Triumph of Life by the affirmed identiry bemeen venus, evening star of love, and Lucifer, star of morning, "light-bearerr" personification of personification and of all the other tropes, all the forms of the ..in place of."

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Poetrymaking, on the other hand, is for Shelley always a figure of, as well as figured b5 the various religious, familial, and forms of life-political, erotic. It does not have priority as an origin but can exist only embodied in one or another of the forms of life it figures. There is, for ShelleS no "sign" without its material carrier, and so the play of substitutions in language can never be a purely ideal interchange. This interchange is always contaminated by its necesaryincarnation, the most dramatic form of which is the bodies of lovers. On the other hand, lovemaking is never a purely wordless communion or intercourse. It is in its turn contaminated by language. Lovemaking is a way of living, in the flesh' the aporias of figure. It is also a way of experiencing the way language functions to forbid the perfect union of lovers. Language always remains, after they have exhausted or even annihilated themselves in an attempt to get it right, as the genetic trace starting the cycle all over again.

V Five times, or seventimes if one counts The Daemon 'World and The Reuolt of Islam as separate of the texts, seven times, or even more than seven if one includes other passages with the same elements where the word "parasite" does not appear-more than seventimes, then, throughout his work, Shelley castshimself against the lips of the parasitical gate. Each time he falls back, having failed to make two into one without annihilating both. He falls back as himself the remainder, the power of langauge able to say "'Woe is me ! " and forced to try again to break the barrier only to fail once more, in repetitions which are terminated only by his death. The critic, in his turn, like those poets, Browning, HardS Yeats, or Stevenswho have been decisively "influenced" by Shelley, is a follower who repeats the pattern once agarnand once again fails to "get it right," just as Shelley repeats himself and repeats his precursors, and iust as the poet and Emily follow the Ocean-King and his sister spouseThe critic's version of the pattern proliferated in this chain of repetitions is as follows. The critic's attempt to untwist the elements in the texts he interprets only nvists them up again in another place and leavesalways a remnant of opacity, or an added opacity, as yet unraveled. The critic is caught in his

own version of the interminable repetitions which determine the poet's career. The critic experiences this as his failure to get his poet right in a final decisive formulation which will allow him to have done with that poet, once and for all. Though each poet is different, each contains his own form of undecidability. This might be defined by saying that the critic can never show decisively whether or not the work of the writer is "decidable," whether or not it is capable of being definitely interpreted. The critic cannot unscramble the tangle of lines of meaning, comb its threads out so they shine clearly side by side. He can only retrace the text, set its elements in motion once more, in that experience of the failure of determinable reading which is decisive here. The blank wall beyond which rational analysis cannot go arises from the copresencein any text in 'Western literature, inextricably internvined, as host and parasite, of some version of logocentric metaphysics and its subversivecounterpart. In Shelley's case these are, on the one hand, the "idealism" always present as one possible reading of his poeffiS, even of The Triumph of Life, and on the other hand, the putting in question of this in Shelley's "scepticism" by ^ recognition of the role of projections in human life. This is that law of shadowing which deconstructs idealism. It is most explicitly formulated in The Triumph of Life: Figures ever new Rise on the bubble [of the phenomenal and historical worldl, paint them how you may; 'We have but thrown, as those before us threw, Our shadows on it as it past away. lll.248-Stl The "deconstruction" of metaphysics by an appeal to the figurative nature of language always, however, contains its own impasse, whether this dismantling is performed within the writing of the author himself or in the following of that in repetitive retracing by the critic who comes after, as in my discussionhere. This impasseis itself double. On the one hand, the poet and his shadow, the critic, can "deconstruct" metaphysics only with some tool of analysiswhich is capable of becoming another form of metaphysics in its turn. To put this

The Critic as Host another way, the differentiation between metaphysics and scepticism reforms itself as a new form of doublenesswithin "scepticism." Scepticismis not a firm and unequivocal machine of deconstruction. It carries within itself another form of the parasite structure, mirror image with the valences reversed of that within metaphysics itself. The appeal to language from idealism is an admirable example of this. As is abundantly apparent in criticism at the present time, rhetorical analysis, "semioticsr" "structuralism r" "narratologyr" or the interpretation of tropes can freeze into a quasiscientific discipline promising exhaustive rational certainty in the identification of meaning in a text and in the identification of the way that meaning is produced. The appeal to etymologies can become another archeology. It can become another way to be beguiled by the apparent explanatory power of seeming "origins" and the accompanying explanatory power of the apparently causally determined chains which emerge from a starting point in some "Indo-European root." Insofar as this move in contempor ary criticism is motivated by an appeal to Freud's linguistic insights, such critics should perhaps remember Freud's demonstration, in The Psychopathology of Eueryday Life and in Jokes and the Unconscious, of the way wordplay in all its forms is superficial. tU7ordplayis the repression of something more dangerous. This somethirg, however, interweaves itself with that wordplay and forbids it to be merely verbal or merely play. Rhetorical analysis, the analysis of figure, and even an investigation of etymologies are necessaryto put in question a heavily idealist reading of ShelleR but these must be dismantled in their turn in an interminable movement of interrogation which is the life of criticism. Criticism is a human activiry which depends for its validity on never being at easewithin a fixed "method." It must constantly put iqs own grounds in question. The critical text and dhe lite rary text are each parasite and host for the other, each feeding on the other and feeding it, destroying and being destroyed by it. The dismantling of the linguistic assumptions necessaryto dismantle Shelley'sidealism must occur, however, not by ^ return to idealism, and not by the appeal to some "metalangu age" which will encompass both, but by movement through rhe" torical analysis, the analysis of tropes, and the appeal to etymologies, to something "beyond" lan-

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guage which can yet only be reached by recognition of the linguistic moment in its counter-momentum against idealism or against logocentric metaphysics. By "linguistic moment" I mean the moment in a work of literature when its own medium is put in question. This moment allows the critic to take what remains from the clashing of scepticism and idealism as a new starting place, for example by the recognition of a performative function of language which has entered into my discussion of Shelley. This agarn)in its reinstating of a new form of referentiality and in its formation of a new clashing, this time berween rhetoric as tropes and rhetoric as performative words, must be interrogated in its turn, in a ceaselessmovement of interpretation which Shelley himself has mimed in the sequenceof episodes rn The Triumph of Lift. This movement is not subject to dialectical synthesis, nor to any other closure. The undecidable, nevertheless,always has an impetus back into some covert form of dialectical movement, as in my terminology here of the "chain" and the "going beyond." This is constantly countered, however, by the experienceof movement in place. The momentary always tends to generate a narrative, even if it is the narrative of the impossibility of narrative, the impossibility of getting from here to there by means of language. The tension between dialectic and undecidability is another way in which this form of criticism remains open, in the ceaselessmovement of an "in place of" without resting place. The word "deconstruction" is in one way a good one to name this movement. The word, like other words in "der" "decrepituder" for example, or "denotation," describesa paradoxical action which is negative and positive at once. In this it is like all words with a double antithetical prefix, words in "anar" like "analysisr" or words in "parar" like "parasite." These words tend to come in pairs which are not opposites, positive against negative. They are related in a systematic differentiation which requires a different analysis or untying in each case,but which in each caseleads, in a different way each time, to the tying up of a double bind. This tying up is at the same time a loosening. It is a paralysis of thought in the face of what cannot be thought rationally: analysis,paralysis; solution, dissolution; composition, decomposition; construction, deconstruction; mantling, dismantling; canny, uncanny; competence, incompetencel apocalyptic,

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anacalyptic; constituting, deconstituting. Deconstructive criticism moves back and forth between the poles of these pairs, proving in its own activity, for example, that there is no deconstruction which is not at the same time constructive, affirmative. The word says this in iuxtaposing "de" and "con." At the same time, the word "deconstruction" has misleading overtones or implications. It suggests something a bit too external, a bit too masterful and muscular. It suggests the demolition of the helpless text with tools which are other than and stronger than what is demolished. The word "deconstruction" suggeststhat such criticism is an activity turning something unified back to detached fragments or parts. It suggeststhe image of a child taking apart his father's watch, reducing it back to useless parts, beyond any reconstitution. A deconstructionist is not a parasite but a parricide. He is a bad son demolishing beyond hope of repair the machine of Western metaphysics. In fact, insofar as "deconstruction" names the use of rhetorical, etymological, or figurative analysis to demystify the mystifications of literary and philosophical language,this form of criticism is not outside but within. It is of the same nature as what it works against. Far from reducing the text back to detached fragments, it inevitably constructs again in a different form what it deconstructs. It does again as it undoes. It recrossesin one place what it uncrossesin another. Rather than surveying the text with sovereign command from outside, it remains caught within the activity in the text it retraces. To the action of deconstruction with its implication of an irresistible power of the critic over the text must always be added, as a description of what happens in interpretation, the experience of the impossibility of exercising the power. The dismantler dismantles himself. Far from being a chain which moves deeper and deeper into the text, closer and closer to a definitive interpretation of it, the mode of criticism sometimes now called "deconstructionr" which is analytic criticism as such, encounters always, if it is carried far enough, some mode of oscillation. In this oscillation two genuine insights

into literature in general and into a given text in particular inhibit, subvert, and undercut one another. This inhibition makes it impossible for either insight to function as a firm resting place, the end point of analysis.My example here has been the copresencein the parasite structure in Shelleyof idealism and scepticism, of referentiality which only proleptically refers, in figure, therefore does not refer at all, and of performatives which do not perform. Analysis becomes paralysis, according to the strange necessity which makes these words, or the t'procedurer" "experience" or the they describe, turn into one another. Each crosses over into its apparent negation or opposite. If the word "deconstruction" names the procedure of criticism, and "oscillation" the impassereached through that procedure, "undecidability" names the experience of the ceaselessdissatisfied movement in the relation of the critic to the text. The ultimate justification for this mode of criticism, as of any conceivablemode, is that it works. It reveals hitherto unidentified meanings and ways of having meaning in major literary texts. The hypothesis of a possible heterogeneity in literary texts is more flexible, more open to a'given work, than the assumption that a good work of literature is necessarilygoing to be "organically unified." The latter presupposition is one of the major factors inhibiting recognition of the possibly self-subversive complexity of meanings in a given work. Moreover, "deconstruction" finds in the text it interprets the double antithetical patterns it identifies, for example the relation of parasite and host. It does not claim them as universal explanatory structures, neither for the text in question nor for literature in general. Deconstruction attempts to resist the totalizing and totalitarian tendencies of criticism. It attempts to resist its own tendenciesto come to rest in some senseof mastery over the work. It resiststhese in the name of an uneasy ioy of interpretation, b.yond nihilism, always in movement, a going beyond which remains in place, as the parasite is outside the door but also always already within, uncanniest of guests.

julia Kristeva b. r94r

n

nrn arrival in Parisfrom her nativeBulgariain r966,Julia Kristevahas \ntcr tJ played an increasingly important and interesting role in the ongoing critique of intellectual traditions that has dominated recent French thought. Kristeva'sinterestshaveexpandedto include virtually all of the traditional subjects of the human sciences,from her early participation in Lucien Goldmann's seminarand her work asa researchassistantat L6vi-Strauss's Laboratory of Social Anthropology to her positions as a member of the editorial board of Philippe Sollers'influentialjournal,Tel Quel, aprofessorat the Universityof ParisVII, and a practicing psychoanalyst.At the centerof thoseinterests,rangingfrom literary history and linguisticsto social theory and psychoanalysis, is the "speakingsubject" and "poetic language,"ideasthat Kristevadoesnot relinquishas casualties of the critique of significationbut emphasizesas essentialpostulatesof any theory of languageor society.More specifically,her work as representedin Desire in Languagedevelopswhat sheterms "semanalysis,"linking semioticsand psychoanalysis,to show how the speakingsubjectis shapedby the complex matrix of forcespresentin and deployedby signifying systemswithin a cuhure. Kristeva's"semanalysis"focuseson "signifying practicesr"particularly in poetry and art, that reflect the intertwined problemsof meaning,the subject,and the idea of structure.Partly under the influenceof the Russianformalists (see,for example,Bahktin and Boris Eichenbaum,CTSP,pp.8z9-46), Kristevasingles out poetic languagefor its distinctivecapacityto call attention to polysemy,ambiguiry and undecidability in natural language,making artistic signification thereforea rich arenafor exploration and discovery. While this view is in many respectsvery traditional, it hasradical implications for Kristeva'scomplex view of feminism,as presentedin the essayhere.Following Lacan, Kristeva arguesthat the Freudian castrationanxiety is, "in sum, the imaginary construction of a radical operation which constitutesthe symbolic field" separatinglanguagefrom a stateof nature. Any "signifying practice," in this view, givesa semiotic meaning to the social contract as a "symbolic contract," just as it complicatesall social transactionswith a senseof loss and desire. In this way, enteringinto the sociosymboliccontract makesmeaningpossible, as Kristeva puts it, only in reference"to the lack or to the desirewhich constitutesthe subjectduring his or her insertion into the order of language." By posing her argument in terms of time, Kristeva contrasts two temporal orders, drawing terms from Nietzsche,to distinguish in linear time the early phaseof modern feminismastied to the historical moment of the nation or state, and from a more recentphase (after the profound political disrurbancesof the +6g

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Juun Kntstnve

or deterritorializingof feministissues late r96os) in which the universalization belongsto monurnentaltime.But while "monumental"time for Nietzscheis virtually mythic,Kristevatreatsit as a political "future perfect,"just when the traditional meansfor political (and other) modes of significationare breaking down. Kristeva'sanalysisis particularlycautioussincethe symboliccontractat issuecan easilybe the site for violence.Beforethe "terror of power," Kristeva remindsus, we may be led to terrorismin the "desirefor power." is somewhatwary of For similar reasons,Kristevain this essay(aselsewhere) the term "theory," sinceany analytical discoursecan itself be taken up into the signifyingstructureit seeksto analyze-just aswomen, givenaccessto positions system,may be takenup into the defenseand jusof powerin a male-dominated tifiiation of the systemitself. To be thus incorporatedis in part to be neutralized or neutered;and the apparentlymoreradical alternative,to inauguratea countersociety, has ironically the same effect by requiring exclusion and, therefore, As Kristevaobserves,feminismmay then become"a kind of inscapegoating. vertedsexism,"insulatingitself againstcriticism. It is possiblethat in taking a critical stance,the essaymight be regardedas antifeminist(see,for example,lardine); but its crucial point is that for a "new generation"of women, theseissueswill be insistentlypresent.Kristeva'ssomber ipeculation (which she marks as "undoubtedly too Hegelian") is that modern feminismmay be "but a momentin the interminableprocessof comingto conabout the implacableviolence(separation,castration,etc.) which sciousness constitutesany symboliccontract." The hope held out, however,returns upon the signifying practicesof poetry, art, and religion.In Kristeva'sview,thesearepracticesthat rely on an essentially religiousneedfor speakingbeings"to provide themselveswith a representation (animal,female,male,parental,etc.)in placeof what constitutesthem assuch." Only a critical perspectivecan bear in mind that the processmay turn to "deadly violence"or to "a cultural innovation"and that the aestheticquestionis also a questionof morality and ethics.Kristeva'sspeculationin this context is more sanguine,lesssomber:a new generationmay find the meansto interiorizethe "founding separationof the sociosymboliccontract" and, in so doing, movenot only beyondsexismbut anthropomorphismin general. areavailablein English.Seeespecially A numberof Kristevatbooksand essays Desirein Language:A SemioticApproach to Literature and Art (r98o); Pouers of Horror: An Essayon Abiection(r98o, trans.r98z) ; andReuolutionin Poetic Language(r974,trans. r984). SeealsoLeonS. Roudiez's"Introduction" to De' sire in Language,and Alice Jardine,"Theories of the Feminine:Kristeva," Enclitic ft982).

Women'sTime

\TOMEN'STIME The nation-dream and reality of the nineteenth century-seems to have reachedboth its apogeeand its limits when the 1929 crash and the NationalSocialist apocalypsedemolished the pillars tha \ according to Marx, were its essence:economic homogeneity, historical tradition, and linguistic unity.' It 'war could indeed be demonstrated that \world II, though fought in the name of national values (in the above senseof the term), brought an end to the nation as a reality: It was turned into a mere illusion which, from that point forward, would be preserved only for ideological or strictly political purposes, its social and philosophical coherence having collapsed. To move quickly toward the specific problematic that will occupy us in this arricle, let us say that the chimera of economic homogeneity gave way to interdependence (when not submission to the economic superpowers), while historical tradition and linguistic unity were recast as a broader and deeper determinanr: what might be called a symbolic denominator, defined as the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography. The variants of this memory produce social terrirories which then redistribute the cutting up into political parties which is still in use but losing strength. At the same time, this memory or symbolic denominator, common to them all, reveals beyond economic glob alization and/or uniformrzation certain characteristics transcending the nation that sometimesembrace an entire continent. A new social ensemble superior to the nation has thus been constituted, within which the nation, far from losing its own traits, rediscovers and accentuates them in a strange tempor aliq, in a kind of "future perfectr" where the most deeply repressed past gives a distinctive characer to a logical and voMEN's rrME, orig_inallypublishedas "Le Temps des femmes" in l+l++: cahiers-derecherchedesscienlesdes texteset documents,no. 5 (\Tinter rg79), was translated !r AliceJardineandHarry Blake,for pu-bii."tionin signs: lournal .of women in culture and society z Gggr)."Reprinted ,bypermissionof the universiryof chicago br.rr. 'The following discussion emphasizeiEurop. ii a way which may seemsuperfluousto someAmer-icanreaders given the overallemphasison deterritorialization.It is, however,essentialto the movementof an article that is aboveall devotedto the necessityof paying attentionto - ' the placefrom which we speak.tTr.l

47r

sociological distribution of the mosr modern Tpe. For this memory or symbolic common denominator concernsthe responsethat human groupings, united in spaceand time, have given not to the problems of the production of material goods (i.e.,the domain of the economy and of the human relationships it implies, politics, etc.) but, rather, to those of reproduction, survival of the species,life and death, the bodS sex, and symbol. If it is true, for example, that Europe is representativeof such a sociocultural ensemble, it seemsto me that its existenceis basedmore on this "symbolic denominator," which its art, philosophy, and religions manifest, than on its economic profile, which is certainly interwoven with collective memory but whose traits change rather rapidly under pressurefrom its partners. It is clear that a social ensemblethus constituted possesses both a solidity rooted in a particular mode of reproduction and its representations through which the biological speciesis connected to its humanity, which is a tributary of time; as well as a certain fragility as a result of the fact that, through its universaliry, the symbolic common denominator is necessarily echoed in the corresponding symbolic denominator of another sociocultural ensemble. Thus, barely constituted as such, Europe finds itself being asked ro compare itself with, or even to recognize itself in, the cultural, artistic, philosophical, and religious constructions belonging to other supranational sociocultural ensembles.This seemsnatural when the entities involved were linked by history (e.9., Europe and North America, or Europe and Latin America), but the phenomenon also occurs when the universality of this denominator we have called symbolic iuxtaposesmodes of production and reproduction apparently opposed in both the past and the present (e.g., Europe and India, or Euiope and china). In short, with sociocultural ensembles of the European type, w€ are constantly faced with a double problematic: that of their identity constituted by historical sedimentation, and that of their /oss of identity which is produced by this connection of memories which escapefrom history only to encounter anthropology. In other words, we confront two temporal dimensions: the time of linear history, or cursiue time (as Nietzsche called it), and the time of another history, thus another dme, monumental time (again according to Nietzsche),which englobes thesesupranational, sociocultural ensembleswithin even larger entities.

4Tz

Jurm Knrsrnvn

I should like to draw attention to certain formations which seem to me to summarrze the dynamics of a sociocultural organism of this type. The question is one of sociocultural groups, that is, groups defined according to their place in production, but especiallyaccording to their role in the mode of reproduction and its representations, which, while bearing the specificsociocultural traits of the formation in question, are diagonal to it and connect it to other sociocultural formations. I am thinking in particular of sociocultural groups which are usually defined as agegroups (e.g.,"young people in Europ€"), as sexual divisions (e.g., "European women"), and so forth. \7hile it is obvious that "young people" or "women" in Europe have their own particularity, it is nonethelessjust as obvious that what definesthem as "young people" or as "women" placesthem in a diagonal relationship to their European "origin" and links them to simil ar categoriesin North America or in China, among others. That is, insofar as they also belong to "monumental historS" they will not be only European "young people" or "women" of Europe but will echo in a most specific way the universal traits of their structural place in reproduction and its representations. ConsequentlR the reader will find in the following pages, first, oo attempt to situate the problematic of women in Europe within an inquiry on time: that time which the feminist movement both inherits and modifies. Second, I will attempt to distinguish two phases or two generations of women which, while immediately universalist and cosmopolitan in their demands, can nonethelessbe differentiated by the fact that the first generation is more determined by the implications of a national problematic (in the sense suggestedabove), while the second, more determined by its place within the "symbolic denominatorr" is European and transEuropean. FinallR I will try, both through the problems approached and through the type of analysis I propose, to present what I consider a viable stance for a European-or at least a European womanwithin a domain which is henceforth worldwide in scope.

'STHtcH

TIprB?

"Father's time, mother's speciesr" as Joyce put it; and, indeed, when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generating

and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history. The modern sciencesof subjectivitS of its genealogy and accidents, confirm in their own way this intuition, which is perhaps itself the result of a sociohistorical conjuncture. Freud, listening to the dreams and fantasiesof his patients, thought that "hysteria was linked to place." t Subsequent studies on the acquisition of the symbolic function by children show that the permanenceand quality of maternal love condition the appearance of the first spatial references which induce the child's laugh and then induce the entire range of symbolic manifestations which lead eventually to sign and syntax.3Moreover, antipsychiatry and psychoanalysis as applied to the treatment of psychoses, before attributing the capacity for transference and communication to the patient, proceed to the arrangement of new places, gratifying substitutes that repair old deficienciesin the maternal space. I could go on giving examples. But they all converge on the problematic of space,which innumerable religions of matriarchal (re)appearanceattribute to "woman," and which Plato, recapitulating in his own system the atomists of antiquitS designatedby the aporia of the chora, matrix space, nourishitg, unnameable, anterior to the One, to God and, consequently,defying metaphysics.o As for time, femalet subiectiviry would seem to 2Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jttg, Correspondence (Paris:Gallimard,r975),r :87. [Au.] 3R. Spitz, La Premiire anndede la uie de I'enfant fFirst studyof normal and deviant yearof life: a psychoanalytic of objectrelations](Paris:PUF, 1958);D. development 'Winnicott, Jeu et rdalitd lPlayingand realityl (Paris:Gallimard, r975); Julia Kristeva,"Noms de lieu" in Polylogue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1977), translatedas "PlaceNames" in Julia Kristeva,Desirein Language:A SemioticApproach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez,trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine,and Leon Roudiez(New York: ColumbiaUniversiryPress,r98o) (hereaftercited as Desirein Language).[Au. and Tr.] aPlato,Timaeus "Indefinitelya place:it cannotbe de52: stroyed,but providesa groundfor all that can comeinto bY outsideof all sensation, being;itself6eingperceptible, meansof a sort of bastardreasoning;barely assuming credibiliry,it is preciselythat which makes us dream when we perceiveit, and affirm that all that existsmust be somewhere,in a determinedplace. . ." (my translation). [A".] 5As most readersof recentFrenchtheory in translation know, le fdminin doesnot havethe samepejorativeconnotationsit hascometo havein English.It is a term used to speakaboutwomenin general,but, asusedmostoften in this article,it probablycomesclosestto our "female"

'Women'sTime 473 provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations. on the one hand, there arc cycfes, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereoTping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable iouissance.t on the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence,there is the massive presenceof a monumental temporaliry, without cleavageor escape,which has so little to do with linear time (which passes)that the very word "temporality" hardly fits: All-encompassingand infinite like imaginary space,this temporality reminds one of Kronos in Hesiod's mythology, the incestuous son whose massivepresencecovered all of Gea in order to separate her from ouranos, the father., or one is reminded of the various myths of resurrection which, in all religious beliefs,perpetuate the vestigeof an anterior or concomitant maternal cult, right up to irs most recent elaboration, christianiry, in which the'body of the virgin Mother does not die but moves from one spatiality to another within the sametime via dormition (accordingto the Orthodox faith) or via assumption (the catholic faith).' The fact that these two rypes of temporality (cyclical and monumental) are traditionaily linked io female subjectiviry insofar as the latter is thought of as necessarilymaternal should not make us forget that this repetition and this eterniry are fourrd to be the fundamental, if not the sole, conceptions of time in numerous civilizations and experiences, as defined by Elaine Showalter in A Literature of Their own (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton university press, rgzil. I have therefore used either "women" or ..f.m"lel,' ^r(cf. also n. 9 in ,.Introduction to 9o-tdi"s to the context ''women's Time"'in signsz [tggr], Julia Kristeva's here-h.r.'r.f.r, after cited as "Introduction"). "subjeltivity" to the state of being "a thinking, speaking, acting, doing opposed toaobjec9t .*{iting agent" and never, e.g., "r -!i-uity" (seethe glossary in Desiie in Liiguage). trr.l 6I have retained iouissance-that word foi plJ"r"r. #r,i.l, defies translation-as it is rapidly becomir€ a .,believable neologism" in English (seet[. giorsary in Desire in Language). [Tr.] TThis particular mythology has imporrant implicationsequal. o1ly to those of the oedipal myth.Jfo, frrrrl't French thought. [Tr.] oSee Julia Kristeva , "Hlrfyique de l,amour,,, Tel euel, no. 7 4 ( 1 9 7 7 ) ,p p . 3 o - 4 9 . [ A u . ]

particularly mystical ones.' The fact that certain currents of modern feminism reco gnize themselves here does not render them fundamentally incompatible with "masculine" values. In return, female subjectivity as it gives itself up to intuition becomes a problem with respect to a certain conception of time: time as project, teleologR linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival-in other words, the time of history.'o It has alre ady been abundantly demonstrated that this kind of temporaliry is inherent in the logical and ontological values of any given civilization, that this rempor ality renders explicit a rupture, atr expectation, or an anguish which other temporalities work to conceal. It *iglrt also be added that this linear time is that of language considered as the enunciation of sentences (noun + verb; topic-commentl beginning-endirg), and that this time rests on its own stumbling blo&, which is also the stumbling block of that enunciation-dearh. A psychoanalyst would call this ..obsessionaltime," recognizing in the mastery of time the true strucrure of the slave. The hysteric (either male or female) who suffers from reminiscences would, rather, recognize his or her self in the anterior temporal modalities: cyclical or monumental. This antinomy, one perhaps embedded in psychic structures, becomes, nonetheless, within a given civilization, an antinomy among social gtoup, and ideologies in which the radical positions of cerrain feminists would rejoin the discourse of marginal groups of spiritual or mystical inspiration and, strangely enough, rejoin recent scientific preoccupations. Is it not true that the problematic of a time indissociablefrom space,of a space-timein infinite expansion, or rhythmed by accidentsor catastrophesr pr€occupies both space science and genetics? And, at another level, is it not true that th. contemporary media revolution, which is manifest in the storage and reproduction of information, implies an idea of time as frozen or exploding accordirg to the vagaries of demand, returning to its source but uncontrollable, utterly bypassirrgit, subiect and leaving only two preoccupationr to those yho approve of it: ril7ho is ro have power over the origin (the programming) and over the end (the use)? eseeH. c. Peuch, La Gnoseet la temps(paris:Gallimard, tgzz). [Au.] 10See"Introducdon." [Tr.]

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It is for two precise reasons, within the framework of this article, that I have allowed myself this rapid excursion into a problematic of unheard of complexity. The reader will undoubtedly have been struck by a fluctuation in the term of reference: mother, woman, hysteric. . . . I think that the apparent coherencewhich the term "woman" assumes in contemporary ideology, apart from its "mass" or "shock" effect for activist purposes' essentiallyhas the negative effect of effacing the differences among the diverse functions or structures which operate beneath this word. Indeed, the time has perhaps come to emphasize the multipliciry of female expressions and preoccupations so that from the intersection of these differences there might arise, more precisely, less commerciallS and more truthfullR the real fundamental difference between the two sexes: a difference that feminism has had the enormous merit of rendering painful, that is, productive of surprises and of symbolic life in a civilization which, outside the stock exchange and wars, is bored to death. It is obvious, moreover, that one cannot speak of Europe or of "women in Europe" without suggesting the time in which this sociocultural distribution is situated. If it is true that a female sensibility emerged a century ago, the chances are greatthat by introducing its own notion of time, this sensibility is not in agreementwith the idea of an "eternal Europe" and perhaps not even with that of a "modern Europe." Rather, through and with the European past and presenr, as through and with the ensembleof "Europer" which is the repository of memory, this sensibility seeks its own trans-European temporaliry. There are, in any case,three attitudes on the part of European feminist movements toward this conception of linear temporality, which is readily labeled masculine and which is at once both civrltzational and obsessional.

equal work; for taking power in social institutions on an equal footing considered feminine or maternal insofar as they are deemed incompatible with insertion in that history-all are part of the /ogic of identifi.cationtt with certain values: not with the ideological (these are combated, and rightly so, as reactionary) but, rather, with the logical and ontological values of a rationality dominant in the nation-state. Here it is unnecessaryto enumerate the benefits which this logic of identification and the ensuing struggle have achieved and continue to achieve for women (abortion, contraception, equal pay, professional recognition, etc.); these have already had or will soon have effectsevenmore important than those of the Industrial Revolution. Universalist in its approach, this current in feminism globalizes the problems of women of different milieux, ages,civilizations, or simply of varying psychic 'Woman." A structures, under the label "Universal consideration of generations of women can only be conceivedof in this global way as a succession,as a progression in the accomplishment of the initial program mapped out by its founders. In a second phase, linked, on the other hand, to the younger women who came to feminism after May ry68 and, on the other, to women who had an aesthetic or psychoanalytic experience, linear temporality has been almost totally refused, and as a consequence there has arisen an exacerbated distrust of the entire political dimension. If it is true that this more recent current of feminism refers to its predecessorsand that the struggle for sociocultural recognition of women is necessarilyits main concern, this current seemsto think of itself as belonging to another generation-qualitatively different from the first one-in its conception of its own identity and, consequently,of temporality as such. Essentiallyinterestedin the specificity of female psychology and its symbolic realizations, these women seek to give a language to the intrasubiective and corporeal experiences left mute by culture in the

Two GBNnRATIoNS In its beginnings, the women's movement, as the struggle of suffragists and of existential feminists, aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of proiect and history. In this sense, the movement' while immediately universalist,is also deeply rooted in the sociopolitical life of nations. The political demands of women; the struggles for equal pay for

trThe term "identification"belongsto a wide semanticfield rangingfrom everydaylanguageto philosophyand psyWhile Kristevais certainlyreferringin princhoanalysis. cipleto itt elaborationin Freudianand Lacanianpsychoanalysis,it canbe understoodhere,asa logic' in its most generalsense(seethe entry on "identification" in Jean taPlanche and J. B. Pontalis,Vocabulairede la psych[Paris:Pre_sses analyse[The languageof psychoanalYfis] r g6Z; rev.ed., r976])' [Tr'] de-France' Universitaires

'Women'sTime

past. Either as artists or writers, they have undertaken a veritable exploration of the dynamic of signs, an exploration which relatesthis tendency,at least at the level of its aspirations, to all major projects of aestheticand religious upheaval. Ascribing this experience to a new generation does not only mean that other, more subtle problems have been added to the demands for sociopolitical identification made in the beginnittg. It also means that, by demanding recognition of an irreducible identiy, without equal in the opposite sex and, as such, exploded, plural, fluid, in a certain way nonidentical, this feminism situates itself outside the linear time of identities which communicate through proiection and revindication. Such a feminism reioins, on the one hand, the archaic (mythical) memory and, on the other, the cyclical or monumental temporality of marginal movements. It is certainly not by chance that the European and trans-European problematic has been posited as such at the same time as this new phase of feminism. Finally, it is the mixture of the two attitudes-insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjectivelimitations imposed by this history's time on an experiment carried out in the name of the irreducible difference-that seems to have broken loose over the past few years in European feminist movements,particularly in France and in Italy. If we accept this meaning of the expression " a new generation of womenr" two kinds of questions 'V(hat sociopolitical processes might then be posed. or eventshave provoked this mutation? What are its problems: its contributions as well as dangers?

SocmLIsM AND FnruoIANIsM One could hypothesize that if this new generation of women shows itself to be more diffuse and perhaps less conscious in the United States and more massivein'Western Europe, this is becauseof a veritable split in social relations and mentalities, a split produced by socialism and Freudianism. I mean by socialism that egalitarian doctrine which is increasingly broadly disseminated and accepted as based on common sense, as well as that social practice adopted by governments and political parties in democratic regimes which are forced to extend the zone of egalitarianism to include the distribution of goods as well as accessto culture. By Freudianism I

47 5

mean that lever, inside this egalitarian and socializittg field, which once agarn poses the question of sexual difference and of the difference among subjects who themselvesare not reducible one to the other. 'Western socialism, shaken in its very beginnings by the egalitarian or differential demands of its women (e.g.,Flora Tristan), quickly got rid of those women who aspired to recognition of a specificity of the female role in society and culture, only retaining from them, in the egalitarian and universalistic spirit of Enlightenment Humanism, the idea of a necessaryidentification between the fwo sexes as the only and unique means for liberating the "second sex." I shall not develop here the fact that this "ideal" is far from being applied in practice by these socialist-inspiredmovements and parties and that it was in part from the revolt against this situation that the new generation of women in Western Europe was born after May ry68. Let us just say that in theory, and as put into practice in Eastern Europe, socialist ideology, based on a conception of the human being as determined by its place rn pro' duction and the relations of production, did not take into consideration this same human being according to its place in reproduction, on the one hand, or in the symbolic order, on the other. Consequently, the specific character of women could only appear as nonessential or even nonexistent to the totalizing and even totalitarian spirit of this ide'We begin to see that this same egalitarian ology.'2 and in fact censuring treatment has been imposed, from Enlightenment Humanism through socialism, on religious specificities and, in particular, on Jews.t' What has been achieved by this attitude remains nonethelessof capital importance for women, and I shall take as an example the change in the destiny of women in the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. It could be said, with only slight exaggeration, that the demands of the suffragists and existential 12See D. Desanti,"L'Autre Sexedesbolcheviks,"Tel Quel, no. 76 (tgZS);JuliaKristeva,Des Chinoises(Paris:Editions des femmes, r97S), translatedas On Chinese Women,trans.Anita Barrows(New York: UrizenPress, 1977).[Au. andTr.] 13SeeArthur Hertzberg, The French Enlightenmentand tbe Jews (New York: ColumbiaUniversityPress,1968); Les Juifs et la rduolution franqAise,ed. B. Blumenkranz and A. Seboul(Paris:EditionPrivat,1976).[Au.]

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feminists have, to a great extent, been met in these countries, since three of the main egalitarian demands of early feminism have been or are now being implemented despite vagaries and blunders: economic, political, and professional equality. The fourth, sexual equality, which implies permissiveness in sexual relations (including homosexual relations), abortion, and contraception, remains stricken by taboo in Marxian ethics as well as for reasons of state. It is, then, this fourth equality which is the problem and which therefore appears essentialin the struggle of a new generation. But simultaneously and as a consequence of these socialist accomplishments-which are in fact a total deception-the struggle is no longer concerned with the quest for equality but, rather, with difference and specificity. It is precisely at this point that the new generation encounters what might be called the symbolic question.'o Sexual difference-which is at once biologi cal, physiological, and relative to reproduction-is translated by and translates a difference in the relationship of subjects to the symbolic contract which is the social contract: a difference, then, in the relationship to power, language, and meaning. The sharpestand most subtle point of feminist subversion brought about by the new generation will henceforth be situated on the terrain of the inseparable conjunction of the sexual and the symbolic, in order to try to discover, first, the specificity of the female, and then, in the end, that of each individual woman. A certain saturation of socialist ideologS a certain exhaustion of its potential as a program for a new social contract (it is obvious that the effective realization of this program is far from being accomplished, and I am here treating only its system of thought) makes way for . . . Freudianism. I am, of course, aware that this term and this practice are somewhat shocking to the American intellectual consciousness(which rightly reacts to a muddled and normatrzingform of psychoanalysis)and, above all, to the feminist consciousness.To restrict my remarks to the latter: Is it not true that Freud has been seen only as a denigrator or even an exploiter 'aHere,"symbolic" is beingmore strictly usedin termsof that function definedby Kristevain opposition to the semiotic:"it involvesthe thetic phase,the identification of subjectand its distinction from objects,and the establishmentof a signsystem"(seethe glossaryin Desire in Language,and Alice Jardine,"Theoriesof the Feminine: Kristeva,"Enclitic,in press).[T..]

of women ? as an irritating phallocrat in a Vienna which was at once Puritan and decadent-a man who fantasized women as sub-men, castrated men?

CnsTRATEDAND/on SUnJECT TO LENCUAGE Before going beyond Freud to propose a more just or more modern vision of women, let us try, first, to understand his notion of castration. It is, first of all, a question of an anguish or fear of castration, or of correlative penis enuy; a question, therefore, of imaginary formations readily perceivable in the discourse of neurotics of both sexes,men and women. But, above all, a careful reading of Freud, going beyond his biologism and his mechanism, both characteristic of his time, brings out two things. First, as presupposition for the "primal scener" the castration fantasy and its correlative (penis envy) are hypotheses, a priori suppositions intrinsic to the theory itself, in the sensethat theseare not the ideological fantasiesof their inventor but, rather, logical necessitiesto be placed at the "origin" in order to explain what unceasingly functions in neurotic discourse. In other words, neurotic discourse, in man and woman, can only be understood in terms of its own logic when its fundamental causesare admitted as the fantasies of the primal sceneand castration, even if (as may be the case) nothing renders them present in realiry itself. Stated in still other terms, the reality of castration is no more real than the hypothesis of an explosion which, according to modern astrophysics, is at the origin of the universe: Nothing proves it, in a senseit is an article of faith, the only difference being that numerous phenomena of life in this "big-bang" universe are explicable only through this initial hypothesis.But one is infinitely more jolted when this kind of intellectual method concerns inanimate matter than when it is applied to our own subiectiviry and thus, perhaps, to the fundamental mechanism of our epistemophilic thought. Moreover, certain texts written by Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, but especially those of the second topic, in particular the Metapsychology) and their recent extensions (notably by Lacan)," tsSee,in general, Lacan, Ecrits(Paris:Editionsdu Jacques Seuil,ry66) and, in particular,JacquesLacan,Le SdminaireXX; Encore(Paris:Editionsdu Seuil,r97S). [Tt.]

Women'sTime imply that castration is, in sum, the imaginary construction of a radical operation which constitutes the symbolic field and all beings inscribed therein. This operation constitutes signs and syntax; that is, language, as a separation from a presumed state of nature, of pleasure fused with nature so that the introduction of an articulated network of differences, which refers to objects henceforth and only in this way separatedfrom a subject, may constitute meaning.This logical operation of separation(confirmed by all psycholinguisticand child psychology)which preconditions the binding of language which is already syntactical, is therefore the common destiny of the two sexes,men and women. That certain biofamilial conditions and relationships cause women (and notably hysterics) to deny this separation and the language which ensues from it, whereas men (notably obsessionals)magnify both and, terrified, attempt to master them-this is what Freud's discovery has to tell us on this issue. The analytic situation indeed shows that it is the penis which, becoming the major referenr in this operation of separation, gives full meaning to the lack or to the desire which consrirutes the subject during his or her insertion into the order of language. I should only like to indicate here rhat, in order for this operation constitutive of the symbolic and the social to appear in its full truth and for it to be understood by both sexes,it would be just to emphasize its extension to all that is privation of fulfillment and of totality; exclusion of a pleasing, natural, and sound state: in short, the break indispensableto the advent of the symbolic. It can now be seenhow women, starting with this theoretical appararus,might try ro understand their sexual and symbolic difference in the framework of social, cultural, and professional realization, in order to try, by seeingtheir position therein, either to fulfill their own experienceto a maximum orbut always starting from this point-ro go further and call into question the very apparatusitself.

LlvlNG THE SecruFrcE In any case,and for women in Europe todaS whether or not they are conscious of the various mutations (socialist and Freudian) which have produced or simply accompanied their coming into their own, the urgent question on our agenda might be formu'what lated as follows: can be our place in the sym-

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bolic contract? lf the social contract, far from being that of equal men, is based on an essentiallysacrificial relationship of separation and articulation of differences which in this way produces communicable meaning, what is our place in this order of sacrifice and/or of language?No longer wishing to be excluded or no longer content with the function which has always been demanded of us (to maintain, arrange, and perpetuate this sociosymbolic contract as mothers, wives, nurses, doctors, teachers. . .), how can we reveal our place, first as it is bequeathedto us by tradition, and then as we want to transform it? It is difficult to evaluate what in the relationship of women to the symbolic as it reveals itself now arises from a sociohistorical conjuncture (patriarchal ideology, whether Christian, humanist, socialist or so forth), and what arises from a struc'We ture. can speak only about a structure observed in a sociohistorical conrext, which is that of chris'Western tian, civili zatron and its lay ramifications. In this senseof psychosymbolic structure, women, "we" (is it necessary to recall the warnings we issuedat the beginning of this article concerning the totalizing use of this plural?) seem to feel that they are the casualties,that they have been left out of the sociosymbolic contract, of language as the fundamental social bond. They find no affect rhere, no more than they find the fluid and infinitesimal significations of their relationships with the nature of their own bodies, that of the child, another woman, or a man. This frustration, which to a certain extent belongs to men also, is being voiced today principally by women, to the point of becoming the essenceof the new feminist ideology. A therefore difficult, if not impossible, identificadon with the sacrificial logic of separation and synractical sequence at the foundation of language and the social code leads to the rejection of the symbolic-lived as the rejection of the parernal function and ultimately generating psychoses. But this limit, rarcly reached as such, produces two types of counterinvestment of what we have termed the sociosymbolic contract. on the one hand, there are artemprs to take hold of this contract, to possessit in order to enjoy it as such or to subvert it. How ?The answer remains difficult to formulate (since,preciselS any formulation is deemed frustratirg, mutilating, sacrificial) or else is in fact formulated using stereotypestaken from extremist and often deadly ideologies.on the other hand, atr-

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other attitude is more lucid from the beginning, more self-analytical which-without refusing or sidestepping this sociosymbolic order-consists in trying to explore the constitution and functioning of this contract, starting lessfrom the knowledge accumulated about it (anthropology, psychoanalysis,linguistics) than from the very personal affect experienced when facing it as subject and as a woman. This leads to the active researchrtt still rare, undoubtedly hesitant but always dissident, being carried out by women in the human sciences;particularly those attempts, in the wake of contemporary art, to break the code, to shatter language, to find a specific discourse closer to the body and emotions, to the unnameable repressedby the social contract. I am not speaking here of a "woman's language," whose (at least syntactical) existenceis highly problematical and whose apparent lexical specificity is perhaps more the product of a social marginality than of a sexual-symbolic difference.tt Nor am I speaking of the aestheticquality of productions by women, most of which-with a few exceptions (but has this not always been the casewith both sexes?)-are a reiteration of a more or lesseu16This work is periodicallypublishedin variousacademic women'sjournals,one of the most prestigiousbeing Signs:Journalof Womenin Cultureand Society,University of ChicagoPress.Also of notearethe specialissues: "Ecriture, f6minit€, flminismer" La Reuuedessciences et la bumaines(LilleIII), no. + (tgZZ);and"LesFemmes philosophie,"Le Doctrinal de sapience(EditionsSolin), no. 3 Ggzz). [Au.] 17See linguistic researchon "female language":Robin Place(NewYork:Harper Lakoff,Languageand'Women's 6c Row, 1974; Mary R. Key, MalelFemaleLanguage (Metuchen,N.J.:Scarecrow Press,r97j); A. M. Houdebine, "Les Femmeset la langue," Tel Quel, no. 74 ftgZZ), pp. 34 -95. The contrastbetweenthese"empiriof women's"speechacts" and much cal" investigations of the researchin Franceon the conceptualbasesfor a here.It is some"femalelanguage"must be emphasized what helpful,if ultimatelyinaccurate,to think of the former as an "external"studyof languageand the latteras an "internal" explorationof the processof signification. For further contrast,see,e.g.,"Part II: Contemporary FeministThought in France:TranslatingDifference"in The Future of Difference,ed. Hester Eisensteinand AliceJardine(Boston:G. K. Hall 6c Co., r98o);the "lntroductions" to New French Feminisms,ed. Elaine Marks and Isabellede Courtivron (Amherst:University Press,r98o); and for a very helpful of Massachusetts overviewof the problemof "differenceand language"in France,seeStephenHeath, "Difference"in Screen19, no. 3 (Autumn1978)rjt-rrz. [Tr.]

phoric or depressedromanticism and always an explosion of an ego lacking narcissisticgratification.18 tVhat I should like to retain, nonetheless,as a mark of collective aspiration, as an undoubtedly vague and unimplemented intention, but one which is intense and which has been deeply revealing these past few years,is this: The new generationof women is showing that its major social concern has become the sociosymbolic contract as a sacrificial contract. If anthropologists and psychologists, for at least a century, have not stopped insisting on this in their attention to "savagethought," wars, the discourseof dreams, or writers, women are today affirmingand we consequently face a mass phenomenonthat they are forced to experience this sacrificial contract against their will." Based on this, they are attempting a revolt which they seeas a resurrection but which society as a whole understandsas murder. This attempt can lead us to a not lessand sometimes more deadly violence. Or to a cultural innovation. Probably to both at once. But that is preciselywhere the stakes are, and they are of epochal significance.

Trrn TEnnoR oF PowERoR THEPownn OT TNRRORISM First in socialist countries (such as the USSR and China) and increasingly in Western democracies, under pressure from feminist movements, women are being promoted to leadership positions in government, industry, and culture. Inequalities, devalortzations,underestimations,evenpersecution of women at this level continue to hold sway in vain. The struggle against them is a struggle against archaisms. The cause has nonethelessbeen understood, the principle has been accepted.'o\fhat retsThisis one of the more explicit references to the mass marketingof "6crituref6minine"in Parisover the last ten years.[Tr.] leTheexpressi "against on d leur corpsddfendanttranslates their will," but herethe emphasisis on women'sbodies: literally,"againsttheir bodies."I haveretainedthe forof its obvious in English,partly because mer expression intertextualitywith SusanBrownmiller'sAgainst Our are r97S).'Women Will (New York: Simon& Schuster, of the violence increasinglydescribingtheir experience of the symboliccontractasa form of rape.[Tr.] 20Many womenin the 'Westwho areonceagainfindingall doors closedto them abovea certain level of employ-

Women'sTime mains is to break down the resistanceto change. In this sense,this struggle, while still one of the main concerns of the new generation, is not, strictly speaking, its problem. In relationship to power, tts problem might rather be summarrzed as follows: What happens when women come into Power and identify with it? What happens when' on the contrary, they refuse power and create a parallel society, a counterpower which then takes on aspectsrangittg from a club of ideas to a group of terrorist commandos?" The assumption by women of executive, industrial, and cultural power has not, up to the present time, radically changed the nature of this power. This can be clearly seen in the East, where women promoted to decision-making positions suddenly obtain the economic as well as the narcissistic advantages refused them for thousands of years and become the pillars of the existing governments' guardians of the status quo, the most zealous protectors of the established order.t' This identification by women with the very power structures previously considered as frustratitg, oppressive,or inaccessiblehas often been used in modern times by totalitarian regimes: the German National-Socialists and the Chilean junta are examples of this.t3 The fact that this is a paranoid rype of counterinvestment in an initially denied symbolic order can perhaps explain this troubling phenomenon; but an explanation does not prevent its massive proPagation around the globe, perhaps in less dramatic forms than the totalitarian ones mentioned above, but all moving toward leveling, stabilization, conformism, at the cost of crushing exceptions, experiments, chance occurrences. -.*, rup.tally in the currenteconomicchaos,may find this statement,evenqualified,troubling,to saythe least. It is accurate,however,in principle:whetherthat of infinite capitalistrecuperationor increasingsocialistexpansion-within both economies,our integrationfunctions as a kind of operatiueillusion. [Tr.] 2lThe very real existenceand autonomousactivitiesof both of theseversionsof women'sgroupsin Europemay seema lessurgent problem in the United Stateswhere feministgroupsareoften absorbedby the academyand/ or are forced to remain financiallydependenton paraagencies. academic/governmental [Tt.] 22See Des Chinoises.[Au.] 23SeeM. A. Macciocchi,Elementspour une Anctlyse du fascisme(Paris:roh8, r976h MichdleMattelart, "Le Coup d'6tatau fdminrn," Les Tempsmodernes(January re7s). [Au.]

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Some will regret that the rise of a libertarian movement such as feminism ends, in some of its aspects, in the consolidation of conformism; others will rejoice and profit from this fact. Electoral campaigns, the very life of political parties, continue to bet on this latter tendency. Experience proves that too quickly even the protest or innovative initiatives on the part of women inhaled by power systems (when they do not submit to them right off) are soon credited to the system'saccount; and that the long-awaited democr atization of institutions as a result of the entry of women most often comes down to fabricating a few "chiefs" among them. The difficulty presented by this logic of integrating the second sex into a value system experienced as foreign and therefore counterinvested is how to avoid the central tzationof power, how to detach women from it, and how then to proceed, through their critical, differential, and autonomous interventions, to render decision-making institutions more flexible. Then there are the more radical feminist currents which, refusing homologation to any role of identification with existing power no matter what the power may be, make of the second sex a countersociety. A "female society" is then constituted as a sort of alter ego of the official sociery, in which all real or fantasized possibilities for iouissance take refuge. Against the sociosymbolic contract, both sacrificial and frustrati.g, this countersociety is imagined as harmonious, without prohibitions, free and fulfilling. In our modern societies which have no hereafter or, at least, which are caught up in a transcendency either reduced to this side of the world (Protestantism) or crumbling (Catholicism and its current challenges),the countersoci.ty remains the only refuge for fulfillment since it is precisely an a-topia, a place outside the law, utopia's floodgate. As with any society, the countersociety is based on the expulsion of an excluded element, d scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself;'o a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism. Modern protest movements have often reiterated this logic, locating the guilry one2aTheprinciplesof a "sacrificialanthropology"are developedby Ren6Girard in La Violenceet le sacrdfViolence and the sacred](Paris:Grasset,r97z) and esp.in Des chosescachdesdepuis la fondation du monde (Paris: Grasset,1978).[Au.] SeeGirard. [Eds.]

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in order to fend off criticism-in the foreign, in capital alone, in the other religion, in the other sex. Does not feminism become a kind of inverted sexism when this logic is followed to its conclusion? The various forms of marginalism-according to sex, age, religion, or ideology-represent in the modern world this refuge for iouissance, a sort of laicized transcendence.But with women, and insofar as the number of those feeling concerned by this problem has increased,although in less spectacular forms than a few years ogo, the problem of the countersociety is becoming massive: It occupies no more and no less than "half of the sky." It has, therefore, become clear, because of the particular radicalization of the second generation, that these protest movements, including feminism, are not "initially libertarian" movements which only later, through internal deviations or external chance manipulations, fall back into the old ruts of the initially combated archetypes. Rather, the very logic of counterpower and of countersociefy necessarily generates,by its very structure, its essenceas a simulacrum of the combated society or of power. In this senseand from a viewpoint undoubtedly too Hegelian, modern feminism has only been but a moment in the interminable process of coming to consciousnessabout the implacable violence (separation, castration, etc.) which constitutes any symbolic contract. Thus the identification with power in order to consolidate it or the constitution of a fetishist counterpower-restorer of the crises of the self and provider of a iouissance which is always already " transgression-seem to be the two social forms which the face-off between the new generation of women and the social contract can take. That one also finds the problem of terrorism there is structurally related. Th; large number of women in terrorist groups (Palestinian commandos, the Baader-Meinhoff Gang, Red Brigades, etc.) has already been pointed out, either violently or prudently according to the source of information. The exploitation of women is still too great and the traditional prejudices against them too violent for one to be able to envision this phenomenon with sufficient distance. It can, however, be said from now on that this is the inevitable product of what we have called a denial of the sociosymbolic contract and its counterinvestment as the only means of self-defense in the

struggle to safeguard an identity. This paranoidtype mechanism is at the base of any political involvement. It may produce different civilizing attitudes in the sensethat these attitudes allow a more or less flexible reabsorption of violence and death. But when a subiect is too brutally excluded from this sociosymbolic stratum; when, for example, a woman feels her affective life as a woman or her condition as a social being too brutally ignored by existing discourseor power (from her family to social institutions); she ffioy, by counterinvesting the violence she has endured, make of herself a "possessed" agent of this violence in order to combat what was experienced as frustration-with arms which may seemdisproportional, but which are not so in comparison with the subjective or more precisely narcissistic suffering from which they originate. Necessarily opposed to the bourgeois democratic regimes in power, this terrorist violence offers as a program of liberation an order which is even more oppressive,more sacrificial than those it combats. Strangely enough, it is not against totalitarian regimes that these terrorist groups with women participants unleash themselvesbut, rather, against liberal systems,whose essenceis, of course exploitative but whose expanding democratic legality guaranteesrelative tolerance. Each time, the mobilizaton takes place in the name of a nation, of an oppressed group, of a human essenceimagined as good and sound; in the name, then, of a kind of fantasy of archaic fulfillment which an arbitrary, abstract, and thus even bad and ultimately discrimi'V7hile natory order has come to disrupt. that order is accused of being oppressive, is it not actually being reproached with being too weak, with not measuring up to this pure and good, but henceforth lost, substance?Anthropology has shown that the social order is sacrificial, but sacrifice orders violence, binds it, tames it. Refusal of the social order exposesone to the risk that the so-called good substance, once it is unchained, will explode, without curbs, without law or right, to become an absolute arbitrariness. Following the crisis of monotheism, the revolutions of the past two centuries, and more recently fascism and Stalinism, have tragically set in action this logic of the oppressedgoodwill which leads to massacres.Are women more apt than other social categories,notably the exploited classes,to invest in this implacable machine of terrorism ? No cate-

'Women'sTime 48r gorical response,either positive or negative,can currently be given to this question. It must be pointed out, however, that since the dawn of feminism, and certainly before, the political activity ofexceptional women, and thus in a certain sense of liberated women, has taken the form of murder, consp iracy, and crime. FinallB there is also the connivance of the young girl with her mother, her greater difficulty than the boy in detaching herself from the mother in order to accede to the order of signs as invested by the absenceand separation constitutive of the paternal function. A girl will never be able to reestablishthis contact with her mother-a contacr which the boy may possibly rediscover through his relationship with the opposite sex-except by becoming a mother herself, through a child, or through a homosexualiry which is in itself exrremely difficult and judged as suspect by society; and, what is more, why and in the name of what dubious symbolic benefit would she wanr ro make this detachment so as to conform to a symbolic system which remains foreign ro her? In sum, all of these considerations-her eternal debt to the woman-mothermake a woman more vulnerable within the symbolic order, more fragile when she suffers within it, more virulent when she protects herself from it. If the archetype of the belief in a good and pure substance, that of utopias, is the belief in the omnipotence of an archaic, full, total, englobing -oth., with no frustration, flo separation, with no breakproducing symbolism (with no casrration, in other words), then it becomes evident that we will never be able to defuse the violences mobilized through the counterinvestment necessary to carrying out this phantaSffi, unless one challengesprecisely this myth of the archaic morher. It is in this way rhat we can understand the warnings against the recent invasion of the women's movements by paranoiarrr as in Lacan's scandalous sentence "There is no such thing as woman." tt Indeed, she does not exist with a capital "'w," possessorof some mythical unity -a 2tcf. Micheline Enriquezr"Fantasmes paranoiaques: diff6rencesdes sexes,homosexualite,loi du pdrej;-riil,ques,no. r I ftg24. [Au.] 25 SeeJacques Lacan,"Dieu-et la jouissance de la femme,, in Encore(Paris:Editionsdu Seuil, rg7il, pp. 6r_7r, esp,.p. 68. This seminarhasremained pii"i"ry criticai " and polemical focus for multipre t.rr'd.rr.i., i,, th. Frenchwomen'smovement.For btirf discussionof the seminarin English,seeHeath (n." r 7 above). tTr.]

supremepower, on which is basedthe terror of power and terrorism as the desirefor power. But what an unbelievableforce for subversionin the modernworld! And, at the sametime,what playing with fire!

CnEnruRES AND CneerRESsES The desire to be a mother, considered alienating and even reactionary by the preceding generation ol feminists, has obviously not become a standard for the present generation. But we have seenin the past few years an increasing number of women who-not only consider their maternity compatible with their professional life or their feminist involvement (certain improvements in the quality of life are also ar the origin of this: an increasein the number of d^ycare centers and nursery schools, more active participation of men in child care and domestic 1ife, etc.) but also find it indispensableto their discoverS not of the plenitude, but of the complexiry of the female experience, with all that this complexiry comprises in ioy and pain. This tendency has its extreme: in the refusal of the paternal function by lesbian and single mothers can be seen one of the most violent forms taken by the rejection of the symbolic outlined above, as well as one of the mosr fervent divinizations of maternal power-all of which cannot help but trouble an entire legal and moral order without, however, proposing an alternative to it. Let us remember here that Hegel distinguished between female right (familial and religious) and male law (civil and political). If our societiesknow well the usesand abusesof male l"*, it must also be recognizedthat female right is designated, for the moment, by a blank. And if these practices of materniry, among others, were to be generalized, women themselves would be responsible for elaborating the appropriate legislation to check the violence to which, otherwise, both their children and men would be subject. But are they capable of doing so? This is one of the impoitant questions that the new generation of women encounters, especiallywhen the members of this new generation refuse to ask those questions, seized by the-samerage with which the dominant order originally victimized them. Faced with this situation, it seemsobvious-and feminist groups become more aware of this when

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they attempt to broaden their audience-that the refusal of maternity cannot be a mass policy and that the majority of women today seethe possibility for fulfillment, if not entirely at least to a large degree, in bringing a child into the world. What does this desire for motherhood correspond to ? This is one of the new questions for the new generation, a question the preceding generation has foreclosed. For want of an answer to this question, feminist ideology leaves the door open to the return of religion, whose discourse,tried and proved over thousands of years, provides the necessaryingredients for satisfying the anguish, the suffering, and the hopes of mothers. If Freud's affirmation-that the desire for a child is the desire for a penis and, in this sense,a substitute for phallic and symbolic dominion-can be only partially accepted,what modern women have to say about this experience should nonetheless be listened to attentively. Pregnancy seemsto be experiencedas the radical ordeal of the splitting of the subject:" redoubling up of the body, separation and coexistence of the self and of an other, of nature and consciousness,of physiology and speech.This fundamental challenge to identity is then accompanied by ^ fantasy of totality-narcissistic completeness-a sort of instituted, socialized, natural psychosis.The arrival of the child, on the other hand, leads the mother into the labyrinths of an experience that, without the child, she would only rarely encounter: love for an other. Not for herself, nor for an identical being, and still less for another person with whom "I" fuse (love or sexual passion). But the slow, difficult, and delightful apprenticeship in attentiveness, gentleness, forgetting oneself. The ability to succeed in this path without masochism and without annihilating one's affective, intellectual, and professional personality-such would seem to be the stakes to be won through guiltless maternity. It then becomes a creation in the strong senseof the term. For this moment, utopian? On the other hand, it is in the aspiration toward artistic and, in particular, literary creation that woman's desire for affirmation now manifests itself. Why literature ? 2TThe"split subject" (from Spaltungas both "splitting" as used in Freudian psychoanalysis, and ..cieavage;'), here refersdirectly to Kristeva's"subiect in process/in question/ontrial" as opposedto the unity "fjh. tranego(seen. r4 in "Introduction").[Tr'] scendental

Is it because,faced with social norms, literature reveals a certain knowledg. and sometimes the ffuth itself about an otherwise repressed, nocturnal, secret, and unconscious universe? Because it thus redoubles the social contract by exposing the unsaid, the uncanny? And becauseit makes a game' a space of fantasy and pleasure,out of the abstract and frustrating order of social signs, the words of everyday communication? Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Today many women imagine, "Flaubert, c'est moi." This identification with the potency of the imaginary is not only an identification, an imaginary potency (a fetish, a belief in the maternal penis maintained at all costs), as a far too normative view of the social and symbolic relationship would have it. This identification also bears witness to women's desire to lift the weight of what is sacrificial in the social contract from their shoulders, to nourish our societieswith a more flexible and free discourse,one able to name what has thus far never been an obiect of circulation in the community: the enigmas of the body, the dreams, secret joys, shames,hatreds of the second sex. It is understandable from this that women's writing has lately attracted the maximum attention of both "specialists" and the media.tt The pitfalls encountered along the way, however, are not to be minimi zed: For example, does one not read there a relentless belittling of male writers whose books, nevertheless,often serve as "models" for countless productions by women? Thanks to the feminist label, does one not sell numerous.works whose naive whining or market-place romanticism would otherwise have been reiected as anachro4istic?And does one not find the pen of many a female''writer being devoted to phantasmic attacks against Language and Sign as the ultimate supports of phallocratic power, in the name of a semi-aphonic corporality whose truth can only be found in that which is "gestural" or "tonal" ? And y€t, no matter how dubious the results of these recent productions by women, the symptom en are writing, and the air is heavy is there with expectation: \il7hatwill they write that is new? 28Again a referenceto 1criturefdminineas genericallylabe-ledin France over the past few years and not to women'swriting in general.[Tr.]

'Women's

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INr'.' soN TiTlfJff: #:ffiti"" These few elements of the manifestations by the new generation of women in Europe seem to me to demonstrate that, beyond the sociopolitical level where it is generally inscribed (or inscribes itself), the women's movement-in its present stage, less aggressive but more artful-is situated within the very framework of the religious crisis of our civilization. I call "religion" this phantasmic necessityon the part of speaking beings to provide themselveswith a representation (animal, female, male, parental, etc.) in place of what constitutes them as such, in other words, symbolization-the double articulation and syntactic sequenceof language, as well as its preconditions or substitutes (thoughts, affects, etc.). The elements of the current practice of feminism that we have just brought ro light seem precisely to constitute such a representation which makes up for the frustrations imposed on women by the anterior code (Christianiry or its lay humanist variant). The fact that this new ideology has affinities, often revindicated by its creators, with socalled matriarchal beliefs (in other words, those beliefs charact errzingmatrilinear societies)should nor overshadow its radical novelry. This ideology seems to me to be part of the broader anrisacrificial current which is animating our culture and which, in its protest against the constraints of the sociosymbolic contract, is no lessexposed to the risks of violence and terrorism. At this level of radicalism, it is the very principle of sociality which is challenged. Certain contemporary thinkers consider, as is well known, that modernity is charact erized as the first epoch in human history in which human beings attempt to live without religion. In its present form, is not feminism in the processof becoming one ? Or is it, on the contrary and as avant-gardefeminists hope, that having started with the ide a of difference, feminism will be able to break free of its be'Woman, lief in Her power, Her writing, so as to channel this demand for difference into each and every element of the female whole, and, finall5 to bring out the singularity of each woman, and beyond this, her multiplicities, her plural languag€S, beyond the horizon, beyond sight, beyond faith itself ?

A factor for ultimate mobilizaton ? Or a factor for analysis? Imaginary support in a technocratic era where all narcissism is frustrated? Or instruments fitted to thesetimes in which the cosmos, atoms, and cellsour true contemporaries-call for the constitution of a fluid and free subiectiviry? The question has been posed. Is to pose it already to answer it?

ANoTHERGnNsRATToN Is ANoTHERSpncn If the preceding can be said-the question whether all this is true belongs ro a differenr register-it is undoubtedly because it is now possible to gain some distance on these two preceding generations of women. This implies, of course, that a third generation is now forming, at least in Europe. I am not speaking of a new group of young women (though its importance should not be underestimated) or of another "mass feminist movement" taking the torch passed on from the second generarion. My usageof the word "generation" implies less a chronology than a signifying space, a both corporeal and desiring mental space.So it can be argued that as of now a third attitude is possible, thus a third generation, which does not exclude-quite to the contrary-the parallel existence of all three in the same historical time, or even that they be interwoven one with the other. In this third attitude, which I strongly advocatewhich I imagine?-the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be 'What understood as belonging to metaphysic.s. can "identityr" even "sexual identityr" mean in a new theoretical and scientific space where the very notion of identity is challenged?" I am nor simply suggesting a very hypothetical bisexuality which, even if it existed, would only, in fact, be the aspiration toward the totality of one of the sexes and thus an effacing of difference. tVhat I mean is, first of all, the demassification of the problematic of difference, which would implS in a first phase, an apparent dedramatization of the "fight to the death" between rival groups and thus between the sexes. And this 2eseeSeminaron Identity directedby Levi-strauss(paris: Grasset& Fasquelle, 1977).[Au.]

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not in the name of some reconciliation-feminism has at least had the merit of showing what is irreducible and even deadly in the social contract-but in order that the struggle, the implacable difference, the violence be conceived in the very place where it operateswith the maximum intransigence,in other words, in personal and sexual identity itself, so as to make it disintegrate in its very nucleus. It necessarilyfollows that this involves risks not only for what we understand today as "personal equilibrium" but also for social equilibrium itself, made up as it now is of the counterbalancing of ag' gressiveand murderous forces massedin social, national, religious, and political groups. But is it not the unsupportable situation of tension and explosive risk that the existing "equilibrium" presuppor.t which leads some of those who suffer from it io divest it of its economy, to detach themselves from it, and to seek another means of regulating difference? To restrict myself here to a personal level' as related to the question of women, I seearising, under the cover of a relative indifference toward the militance of the first and second generations' an attitude of retreat from sexism (male as well as female) and, graduallR from any kind of anthropomorphism. The fact that this might quickly become another form of spiritualism turning its back on social problems, or elsea form of repression'oready to support all status quos, should not hide the radicalness of the process. This process could be summarrzed as an interiorization of the founding separation of the sociosymbolic contrdct, as an introduction of its cutting edge into the very interior of every identity whether subjective,sexual, ideological' or so forth. This in such a way that the habitual and increasingly explicit attempt to fabricate a scapegoat victim as foundress of a society or a countersociety may be replaced by the analysis of the potentialities of uictimlexecutioner which characterize each identity, each subiect, each sex. rU7hatdiscourse, if not that of a religion, would be able to support this adventure which surfaces as a real pottibilitn after both the achievements and 30Repression(le refoulementor Verdrangung)asdistinguishedfrom the foreclosure(la foreclusionor Verwer' and Trns) evokedearlier in the article (seeLaPlanche Pontalis).[Tr.]

the impasses of the present ideological reworkings, in which feminism has participated? It seems to me that the role of what is usually called "aesthetic practices" must increasenot only to counterbalance the storage and uniformity of information by present-d^y mass media, data-bank systems, and, in particular, modern communications technologS but also to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond itself, to demystifS therefore, the commnnity of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalizes and equalizes. In order to bring out-along with the singularity of each person and, even more, along with the multiplicity of every person's possible identifications (with atoms, €.g., stretching from the family to the stars)-the rilatiuity of hislher symbolic as well as biological existence, according to the variation in his/her specific symbolic capacities.And in order to emphasize the responsibility which all will immediately face of putting this fluidiry into play against the threats of death which are unavoidable whenever an inside and an outside, a self and an other, one group and another) are constituted. At this level of interrorrzation with its social as well as individual stakes, what I have called "aesthetic practices" are undoubtedly nothing other than the modern reply to the eternal question of morality. At least, this is how we might understand an ethics which, conscious of the fact that its order is sacrificial, reservespart of the burden for each of its adherents, therefore declaring them guilty while immediately affording them the possibility for iouissance,for various productions, for a life made up of both challengesand differences. Spinoza's question can be taken up again here: Are women subiect to ethics? If not to that ethics defined by classicalphilosophy-in relationship to which the ups and downs of feminist generations seem dangerously precarious-are women not already participating in the rapid dismantling that our age is experiencing at various levels (from wars to drugs to artificial insemination) and which poses the demand for a new ethics? The answer to Spinoza's question can be affirmative only at the cost of .orrrid.ring feminism as but a momenl in the thought of that anthropomorphic identity which .,,rrr*tly blocks the horizon of the discursive and scientific adventure of our species.

SandraM.Gilberr b. ,936

FF

woRK,oFsandraGilbert and her frequentcoilaborator,SusanGubar, I "i I has had a profound impact on the study of women writers. Their book The Madwoman in the Attic: The woman v{riter and the Nineteenth-century IaiteraryImagination.ftgzg) provided a paradigmaticexamplefor tracing,,a distinctively female literury tradition," lurt ih.i. -or" ,...rrt Norton An_ ", a thology of Literatu,reby-women (rgss), makes wide u"ri.ty oi rexrs conveniently availablefor students.The essayhere (which, ir, uerrion expandedto reflectthe lalger argumenrof the book,'appearsas th. first" .h"ft., oI Tbe MadwomAn-in the Attic) prwides a powerfuf iilusrration of the deiree to which the idea of the author and-of literary authority has been nor oity -"re but oppressivelyand cripplingly so for women writers. I0hile one of the major concernsof recentAmerican feminist critics has been to document the portrayal of women in literature by -.n-"rrJ how women writers themselveshaveaccededto demoralizingor restrictivemodels_this es_ say by Gilbert takes a more direct and dramatic route, to show how the most intimaterepresentationofawriter's creativepowerh"s beensyst maticallytreated as phallic-and patriarchal. unlike continenial rheorists,ciiu"r, ,rr., rhe mera_ phors and imageselectedby the writers themselves-n"ai"g and no compelling reasonto refer to Freud, Lacan, or Foucault-tJ "" "eed articulate a persistent-and preemptivepattern, in which creativepower as an active force has beenclaimedexclusivelyasmale,leavingwomen ahvays p".ri* o, subservient form of creativity.By treating the problem as historicar" .ipiri.al, Gilbert gainsthe considerableadvantageofshowing that there ""a i, no.og;;fa priori basis for the exclusionof women-,suggestingthal attemptsto construct a theory may offer less.in the ryay of explanaii,otrthltr they offer in the form oi .orr.r-.rp excuse'sincein almost all cases,it hasbeena man holding the pen, "rrd in theoretical yriqng especially.It is, in this respect,striking ,o ,ror."p"rri."t"ay in French feminist theory (see,for example, cixous ^ni Krirtrrri irr.-."i."t to which theoreticalargumentsare derivative,and in writing about'women,s writing, relatively little useis madeof the writing itself. Bgth in this essayand in her subsequentcollaborarions with Gubar, Gilbert is ^ firmly committed to clearing spaceft. women writers to be heard, writing in their own terms' on the princifle that the most important starting point is the coherenceand continuity of.thi writing itself. To ,,r',, Jir,-.ri."""dvanced by Noam chomskS rherecan be no theoiiesclaiming."pt"n"iorf " untir one can ascertainthat theoriesare descriptiv.ly r,rom"a.quacy thii view, the work of women writers has not yet beeniescribed, "deq,rate. .u.tt *L.r.i, has beenread, 485

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Sernne M. Gllnrnr partly becausethe problem of writerly authority has not beenclearly seenas an idea that is historically saturatedwith patriarchal assumptions. In disclosing the pattern and the consequencesof that saturation, Gilbert effectsa significantclarification of a fundamentaldescriptiveproblem, helping to establishthat while the exclusionof women is part of an entire systemand no merecoincidence,neither is it inevitable.In documentingthe pattern both from the works of men who assumeit or have presumedto enforceit and from the view of women protesting it, Gilbert doesnot merely continue or publicize the protest but indiiates a number of the ways that women writers have exercised iheir creativepower "to createthemselvesas characters"and to bring a "secret self to the surface" of their lives. ITith SusanGubar, Gilbert is the author of The Madutomanin the Attic: The 'Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-CenturyLiterary Imagination ft97); and Slsfers: Gubar and Gilbert haveeditedtwo important anthologies,Shakespeare's onWornen Poets(r97) and Tbe Norton Anthology of Litera' FeministEssays ture by Women (rgSS). Gilbert is also the author of. Acts of Attention: Tbe (x972)and numerousvolumesof poetry,includingIz Poemiof D. H. L,awrence T theFour)th'Wor ld ft 979), he SummerKitchen (r g 83), andEmily's Br ead ft 98l.

LITERARY PATERNITY Alas! A woman that attemPts the Pen Such an intruder on the rights of men, Such a PresumPtuousCreature is esteem'd The fault can bY no verrue be redeem'd.

::ffiI'li:il'js

has which thisimage -Anais Nin'

Is a pen a metaphorical penis? Gerard Manley Hopkins seemsto have thought so. In a letter to his friend R.'W. Dixon in r88 6,he confided a crucial feature of his theory of poetry. The artist's "most essential quality," he declared,is "masterly execution, which is a kind of male gift, and especially marks off men from women, the begetting of one's thought on paper, on verse,or whatever the matter is." In addiiion, he noted that "on better consideration it strikes me that the mastery I speak of is not so much in the mind as a puberty in the tife of that quality. The male t quality is the creative gift. . . ." Male sexualitR in oth.t words, is not just analogically but actually the

counteJLffi#i:l; As to all that nonsenseHenry and Larry talked about, the necessity of "I am God" in order to create (I suppose they mean "I am God, I am not a woman"). . . . this "I am Godr" which makes creation an act of solitude and pride, this image of God alone making was first publishedin Cornell RePATERNITY LITERARv uiew (tglg). An extendedand revisedversionof the essay .o-ptit.t- itt. first chapter of The Maduoman in the , 1979).Reprinted Attii (New Haven:YaleUniversityPress by permissionof the author,copyright@ r97g'

1"The Introductionr" rn The Poemsof Anne Countessof. Winchilsea,ed.Myra Reynolds(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress,r9oil, pp. 4-5; The Diqry.of Anai's.!in' Vol. i*o, 1934-r93g, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann(New york: The Swailow Pt.ss and Harcourt Brace, ry67), p. 23j. [A".] ,Ttti Cirrrtpondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Richard Witson Dixon, ed. C. C. Abbott (London: Oxford UniversiryPress,r9i5), p. r33.[Au']

Literary Paternity essenceof literary power. The poet's pen is in some sense(even more than figuratively) a penis. Eccentric and obscure though he was, Hopkins was articulating a concept central to that Victorian culture of which he was in this case a representative male citizen. But of course the patriarchal notion that the writer "fathers" his text just as God fathered the world is and has been all-pervasive in 'Western literary civilization, so much so that, as Edward Said has showr, the metaphor is built into the very word, author, with which writer, deity, and pater familias are identified. Said's meditation on the word "authority" is worth quoting at length because it summarizes so much that is relevant here: Authority suggests to me a constellation of linked meanings: not onlS as the OED tells us, "a power to enforce obediencer" or "a derived or delegated pow€r," or " a power to influence action," or "a power to inspire beliefr" or " a person whose opinion is accepted" I not only those, but a connection as is, a person who well with author-that originates or gives existence to something, a begetter, beginner, father, or ancestor, a person also who sets forth written statements. There is still another cluster of meanin gs: author is tied to the past participle auctus of the verb augere; therefore attctor, according to Eric Partridge, is literally an increaser and thus a founder. Auctoritas is production, invention, cause,in addition to meaning a right of possession.Finally, it means continuance, or a causing to continue. Taken together these meanings are all grounded in the following notions: (r ) that of the power of an individual to initiate, institute, establish-in short, to begin; (z) that this power and its product are an increase over what had been there previously; (3) that the individual wielding this power controls its issue and what is derived therefore; (+) that authority maintains the continuity of its course.' In conclusion, Said, who is discussing "The Novel as Beginning Intentionr" remarks that "All four of 3Edward '$f. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, r97S), p. 8f . [Au.]

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these [ast] abstractions can be used to describethe way in which narrative fiction assertsitself psychologically and aesthetically through the technical efforts of the novelist." But they can also, of course, be used to describe both the author and the authority of any literary text, a point Hopkins's sexual/aesthetictheory seemsto have been designedto elaborate. Indeed, Said himself later observesthat a convention of most literary texts is "that the uniry or integrity of the text is maintained by ^ seriesof genealogicalconnections: author-text, beginnittgmiddle-end, text- meaning, reader- interpretation, and so on. Underneath all these is the imagery of succession,of paterniry, or hierarchy." o There is a sensein which the very notion of paternity is itself, as StephenDedalus puts it in Ulysses,a "legal fiction," s a story requiring imagination if not faith. A man cannot verify his fatherhood by either senseor reason, after all; that his child is his rs in a sense a tale he tells himself to explain the infant's existence. Obviously, the anxiety implicit in such storytelling urgently needsnot only the reassurances of male superiority that patriarchal misogyny implies, but also such compensatory fictions of the 'Word as those embodied in the genealogicalimagery Said describes.Thus it is possible to trace the history of this compensatory, sometimes frankly stated and sometimes submerged imagery that elaboratesupon what StephenDedalus calls the "mystical estate" of paternity 6 through the works of many literary theoreticians besides Hopkins and Said. 4lbid., p. 16z. For an analogous useof suchimageryof paternity, see Gayatri Spivak's"Translator'sPreface" to JacquesDerrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress,1976),p. xi: ". . . to use one of Derrida'sstructuralmetaphors,[a prefaceis] the son or seed. . . causedor engendered by the father (text or meanirg).. . ." [Au.] sJames Joyce,U/ysses(New York: The Modern Library, 1934),p. zoS.[Au.] 5lbid. The whole of this extraordinarilyrelevantpassage developsthis notion further: "Fatherhood,in the senseof consciousbegetting,is unknown to man," Stephennotes. "It is a mysticalestate,an apostolicsuccession, from only begetterto only begotten.On that mysteryand nor on the madonnawhich the cunningItalian intellectflung to the mob of Europethe church is founded and founded irremovablybecausefounded,like the world, macro-and microcosm,upon the void. Upon incertitude,upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjectiveand objectivegenitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternitymay be a legalfiction" (pp.zo+-oj). [Au.]

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Defining poetry as a mirror held up to nature, the mimetic aesthetic that begins with Aristotle and descendsthrough Sidney, Shakespeare,and Jonson, implies that the poet, like a lesserGod, has made or engenderedan alternative, mirror-universe in which he has as it were enclosedor trapped shadows of realiry. SimilarlS Coleridge's Romantic concept of the human "imagination or esemplasticpower" is of a virile, generative force which, echoing "the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM . . . dissolves,diffuses,dissipatesin order to recreate."' ln both aesthetics, the poet, like God the Father, is a paternalistic ruler of the fictive world he has created. Shelleycalled him a "legislator." Keatsnoted, speaking of writers, that "the ancients were Emperors of vast Provinces" though "each of the moderns" is t merely an "Elector of Hanover." In medieval philosophy, the network of connections among sexual, bterary, and theological metaphors is equally complex: God the Father both engenders the cosmos and, as Ernst Robert Curtius notes, writes the Book of Nature: both tropes describe a single act of creation.e In addition, the Heavenly Author's ultimate eschatological power is made manifest when, as the Liber Scriptu.s of the traditional Requiem mass indicates, He writes the Book of Judgment. More recentlS male artists like the Earl of Rochester in the seventeenthcentury and Auguste Renoir in the nineteenth, have frankly defined aestheticsbasedon male sexual delight. "I . . . never Rhym'd, but for my Pintle's fpenis's] sake," declaresRochester'switty Timon, and, as the painter Bridget Riley notes, Renoir "said that he painted his paintings with his prick."'o Clearly, both these artists believe,with Norman O. Brown, that "the penis is the head of the body"; and they would both (to some extent, anyway) agree with John lrwin's suggestion that the relationship "of the masculine self TColeridge,BiographiaLiteraria,Ch. XIII. [A".] 8ShelleS"A Defenseof PoetrS" Keats, Letter to John Feb.3, 18r8. [Au.] HamiltonReynolds, eSeeE. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Harper Torchbooks, U6i), pp. 3oS,3o6. For further commentaryon both Curtius' "The Symbolismof the Book" and the "Book of Nature" metaphoritself,seeDerrida,op. cit., pp. r5-r7. [Au.] l0"Timon, A Safyr," in Poemsby lohn Wilmot Earl of Rochester,ed.Vivian de SolaPinto (London:Routledge and KeganPaulLtd., rgSj), p.gg. [Au.] BridgetRileR "The Hermaphrodite," Art and Sexual Politics, ed. ThomasB. Hass and ElizabethC. Baker (London: Collier Books,t973), p. Sz. [Eds.]

with the feminine-masculine work is also an autoerotic act . . . a kind of creative onanism in which 'pure space' through the use of the phallic pen on the of the virgin page or the chisel on the virgin marble, the self is continually spent and wasted in an act of progressiveself-destruction."tt No doubt it is for all these reasons, moreover, that poets have traditionally used a vocabulary derived from the patriarchal Family Romance to describetheir relations with each other. As Harold Bloom has pointed out, "from the sons of Homer to the sons of Ben Jonson, poetic influence had been described as a filial relationship, [a relationship of] sonship. . . ." The fierce struggle at the heart of literary history, says Bloom, is a "baffle between strong equals, father and son as mighty opposites, Laius and Oedipus at the crossroads.. . ."t' Though many of these writers use the metaphor of literary paternity in different ways and for different purposes, all seem overwhelmingly to agreethat a literary text is not only speechquite literally embodied, but also power mysteriously made mani'Western culture, fest, made flesh. In patriarchal therefore, the text's author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aestheticpatriarch whose pen is an instrument of generativepower like his penis. More, his pen's power, like his penis'spower, is not iust the ability to generate life but the power to create a posterity to which he lays claim, os, in Said's paraphrase of Partridge, "an increaser and thus a founder." In this respect, the pen is truly mightier than its phallic counterpart, the sword, and in patriarchy more resonantly sexual. Not only does the writer respond to his muse's quasi-sexual excitation with an outpouring of the aesthetic energy Hopkins called "the fine delight that fathers thought" (in a poem of that title)-a delight poured seminally from pen to page-but as the author of an enduring text the writer engagesthe attention of the future in exactly the same way that a king (or father) "owns" the homage of the present. No sword-wielding general could rule so long or possessso vast a kingdom. ll Norman O. Brown, Loue'sBody (New York: Vintage Books, ry68), p. r34.; JohnT. Irwin, Doublingand ln' cest,Repetitionand Reuenge(Baltimore:JohnsHopkins Univ. Press,1977),p.r6i. Irwin also speaksof "the phallic generativepower of the creativeimagination" ( p .r s s ) . [ A u . ] ttAarold Bloom, The Anxiety of lnfluence (New York: Oxford UniversityPress,r97i), p. ,6. [Au.]

Literary Paternity Finally, the fact that such a notion of "ownership" or possessionis embedded in the metaphor of paternity leads to yet another implication of this complex metaphor. For if the author/father is owner of his text and of his reader'sattention, he is also, of course, owner/possessorof the subiects of his text, that is to say of those figures, scenesand eventsthose brain children-he has both incarnated in black and white and "bound" in cloth or leather. Thus, becausehe is an author, a "man of letters" is simultaneouslR like his divine counterpart, a father, a master or ruler, and an owner: the spiritual rypt of a patriarch, as we understand that term in \U7estern sociery. Where does such an implicitly or explicitly p"triarchal theo ry of literature leave literary women ? If the pen is a metaphorical penis, with what organ can females generate texts ? The question may seem frivolous, but, as my epigraph from Anais Nin indicates, both the patriarchal etiology that defines a solitary Father God as the only creator of all things, and the male metaphors of litera ry qeation that depend upon such an etiology have long "confused" literary women-readers and writers alike. For what if such a proudly masculine cosmic Author is the sole legitimate model for all earthly authors ? Or worse, what if the male generative power is not iust the only legitimate power but the only power there is ? That literary theoreticians from Aristotle to Hopkins seemed to believe this was so no doubt prevented many women from ever "attempting the pen"-go use Anne Finch's phrase-and caused enormous anxiety in generations of those women who were "presumptuous" enough to dare such an attempt. Jane Austen's Anne Elliot understates the case when she decorously observes,toward the end of Persuasion, that "men have had every advantage of us in telling their story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands." tt For, as Anne Finch's complaint suggests,the pen has been defined as not just accidentally but essentially a male "toolr" and, therefore, not only inappropriate but actually alien to women. Lacking Austen's demure ironR Finch's passionate protest goes almost as far toward the center of the metaphor of literary paternity as Hopkins's letter to Canon Dixon. Not only is "a woman that affempts the pen" an intrusive and "presumptuous Creal3JaneAusten,Persuasion,ChapterTwenty-Three. [A".]

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ture," she is absolutely unredeemable:no virtue can outweigh the "fault" of her presumption because shehasgrotesquelycrossedboundaries dictated by

Nature: They tell us, we mistake our sex and way; Good breeding,fassion, dancing, dressing, play Are the accomplishmentswe shou'd desire; To write, or read, or think, or to enquire 'Wou'd cloud our beauty, and exaust our time, And interrupt the conquestsof our prime; t$Thilstthe dull mann age, of a servile house Is held by some, our outmos t art and use.to Because they are by definition male activities, this passageimplies, writing, reading and thinking are not only alien but also inimical to "female" characteristics. One hundred years later, in a famous letter to Charlotte Bronte, Robert Southey rephrased the same notion: "Literature is not the businessof a woman's life, and it cannot be." tt It cannot be, the metaphor of literary paternity implies, becauseit is physiologically as well as sociologically impossible. If male sexuality is integrally associated with the assertive presence of literary power, female sexuality is connected with the absence of such power, with the idea-expressed by the nineteenth-century thinker Otto Weiningerthat "woman has no share in ontological reality." As we shall see, a further implication of the paternity/creqtivity metaphor is the notion (implicit both in Weininger and in Southey's letter) that women exist only to be acted on by men, both as literary and as sensual objects. Again one of Anne Finch's poems explores the assumptions submerged in so many literary theories. Addressing three male poets, she exclaims: H"ppy you three ! happy the Race of Men ! Born to inform or to correct the Pen To proffitts pleasures freedom and command tUThilstwe beside you but as Cyphers stand T'increase your Numbers and to swell th'account laAnneFinch,Poems,pp. 4-S. [Au.] 15Southey,letterto Charlotte Bronte,March fi37 . Quoted rU7inifred in Gerin, Cltarlotte Bronte: The Euolution of Genius (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1967), p. r ro. [Au.]

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Of your delights which from our charms amount And sadly are by this distinction taught That since the Fall (by our seducement wrought) Ours is the greater losse as ours the gre ater fault t' Since Eve's daughters have fallen so much lower than Adam's sons, this passagesays, all femalesare "Cyphe1s"-11ullities, vacancies-existing merely and punningly to increasemale "Numbers" (either poems or persons)by pleasuring either men's bodies or their minds, their penisesor their pens. In that case, however, devoid of what Richard Chase once called "the masculine 6ldn," and implicitly rejecting even the slavish consolations of her "femininity," a literary woman is doubly a "Cypherr" for she is really a "eunuchr" to use the striking figure Germaine Greer applied to all women in patriarchal society. Thus Anthony Burgessrecently declared that Jane Austen's novels fail becauseher writing "lacks a strong male thrust," and \(illiam Gass lamented that literary women "lack that blood congested genital drive which energizesevery great t7 style." But the assumptions that underlie their statements were articulated more than a century ago by the nineteenth-century editor-critic Rufus Griswold. Introducing an anthology entitled The Female Poets of AmericA, he outlined a theory of literary sex roles which expands, and clarifies, l6Finch,Poems,p. roo. Otto \Teininger,Sexand Character (London: Heinemann,t9o6), p. 286.This sentence is part of an extraordinarypassagein which Weininger assertsthat "women haveno existenceand no essence; they are not, they are nothing." This because"woman has no relationto the idea . . . sheis neithermoral nor anti-moral," whereas"all existenceis moral and logical existence."[Au.] 17RichardChasespeaksof "the masculine 6lan" throughout "The Bront€s,or Myth Domesticated,"in Formsof Modern Fiction, ed. William V. O'Connor (Minneapolis: Univ. of MinnesotaPress,1948),pp. roz-r3. For a discussionof the "female eunuch" seeGermaineGreer, The FemaleEunuch. Seealso Anthony Burgess,"The Book Is Not For Reading,"New York Times Book Re' uiew,4 Decemberr 966, pp. r , 74, and William Gass, Reviewof Norman Mail er'sGeniusand Lust, New York Times BookReuiew,z4 Octoberry76rP. z. In this connection, too, it is interesting(and depressing)to considerthat Virginia rUfoolfdefinedherselfas "a eunuch" (seeNoel Annan,"Virginia Woolf Fever,"Netu York Reuiew of Books,April zo, 1978,p. zz). [A".]

the grim implications of the metaphor of literary paternity. It is lesseasy to be assuredof the genuineness of literary ability in women than in men. The moral nature of women, in its finest and richest development, partakes of some of the qualities of genius; it assumes,at least, the similitude of that which in men is the characteristic or accompaniment of the highest 'We are in danger, grade of mental inspiration. therefore, of mistaking for the efflorescent energy of creative intelligence, that which is 'feelings unonly the exuberance of personal employed.' . . . The most exquisite susceptibility of the spirit, and the cap acity to mirror in dazzling variety the effects which circumstances or surrounding minds work upon it, may be accompanied by no power to originate, nor euen, in dny proper sense, to tt reproduce fital. mine]. Since Griswold has actually compiled a collection of poems by women, h. plainly does not believethat all women lack reproductive or generative literary power all the time. His gender-definitions implS however, that when such creative energy appears in a woman it may be anomalous, freakish, becauseas a "male" characteristic it is essentially"unfeminine." The converseof these explicit and implicit definitions of "femininiry" may also be true for those who develop literary theories basedupon the "mystical estate" of fatherhood: if a woman lacks generative literary power, then a man who losesor abuses such power becomes like a woman. SignificantlR when Hopkins wanted to explain to R.'S7. Dixon the aesthetic consequencesof a lack of male mastery, he declared that if "the life" is not "conveyed into the work and . . . displayed there . . . the product is one of those hens' eggs that are good to eat t' and look iust like live ones but never hatch." And his own sense define he tried to in life, when, late his of sterility, his thickening writer's block, he described himself both as an eunuch and as a woman, specifically a woman desertedby male power: "the widow of an insight lost," surviving in a diminished 18Rufus Griswold, Prefaceto The FemalePoetsof AmerCarey& Hart, 1849),p. 8. [Au.] ica (Philadelphia: leHopkins,Correspondence, p. r 33. [Au.]

Literary Paternity "winter world" that entirely lacks "the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation" of male generative power, whose "strong / Spur" is phallically "live and lancto ing like the blow pipe flame." And once againsome lines from one of Anne Finch's protests against male literary hegemony seemto support Hopkins's image of the powerless and sterile woman artist. Remarking in the conclusion of her "Introduction" to her Poems that women are "to be dull / Expected and dessigned" she does not repudiate such expectations, but on the contrary admonishesherself, with bitter ironR to be dull: Be caution'd then my Muse, and still retir'd; Nor be dispis'd, aiming to be admir'd; Conscious of wants, still with contracted wing, To some few friends, and to thy sorrows sing; For groves of Lawrell, thou wert never meant; Be dark enough thy shades,and be thou there content.2l Cut off from generative energy, in a dark and wintry world, Finch seems to be defining herself here not only as a "Cypher" but as "the widow of an insight lost." Finch's despairing (if ironic) acceptanceof male expectations and designs summarizes in a single episodethe coercivepower not only of cultural constraints but of the literary texts which incarnate them. For it is as much, if not more, from literature as from "life" that literate women learn they are "to be dull / Expected and dessigned." As Leo Bersani puts it, written "language doesn't merely describe identity but actually produces moral and perhaps even physical identity . . . vr/ehave to allow for a kind of dissolution or at least elasticity of being induced by an immersion in literature." " A century and a half earlier, Jane Austen had Anne Elliot's interlocutor, Captain Harville, make a related point in Persuasion. Arguing women's inconstancy over Anne's heated objections, he notes that "all histories are against you-all stories, prose, and verse. . . . I 20SeeHopkins, "The fine delight that fathersthought." lAu.l 2rFinch,Poems,p. S. [Au.] 22LeoBersani, A Future fo, Astyanax (Boston: Little Brown,1976),p. rg4. [Au.]

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could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side of the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and t3 proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness." To this Anne responds, as we have seen, that the pen has been in male hands. In the context of Harville's speech, her remark implies that women have not only been excluded from authorship but in addition they have been subject to (and subjects of) male author-iry. rU7ith Chaucer's astute til(rife of Bath, therefore, Anne might demand "'Who peynted the leoun, tel me who?" And, like the Wife's, her own answer to her own rhetorical question would emphasize our culture's historical confusion of literary authorship with patriarchal authority: By God, if wommen hadde writen stories, As clerkes han withinne hir oratories, They wolde han writen of men more wikednesse Than all the mark of Adam may redresse. In other words, what Bersani, Austen and Chaucer all imply is that precisely becausea writer "fathers" his text, his literary creations (as we saw earlier) are his possession,his property. Having defined them in language and thus generatedthem, he owns them, controls them, and enclosesthem on the printed page. Describing his earliest senseof vocation as a writer, Jean-PaulSartre recalled in Les Mots his childhood belief that "to write was to engrave new beings upon [the infinite Tables of the X(lord] or . . . to catch living things in the trap of phrases. . . ."'o Naive as such a notion may seem on the face of it, it is not "wholly an illusion, for it is his [Sartre's] truth," as one commentator observestt-and indeed it is every writer's "truth," a truth which has traditionally led male authors to assume patriarchal rights of ownership over the female "characters" they engrave upon "the infinite Tables of the Word." Male authors have also, of course, generatedmale characters over whom they would seem to have had 23PersuAsion, loc. cit. [Au.] 2aJean-Paul Sartre,The Words,trans.BernardFrechtman (New York: Braziller,Inc., 1964),p. rr4 (paperback edition). [Au.] 25Marjorie Grene, Sartre (New New Viewpoints, r 9 7 3 ) ,p . g [ A u . ]

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similar rights of ownership. But further implicit in the metaphor of literary paternity is the idea that each man, arriving at what Hopkins called the "puberty" of his creative gift, has the ability, even perhaps the obligation, to talk back to other men by generating alternative fictions of his own. Lacking the pen/penis which would enable them similarly to refute one fiction by another, women in patriarchal societies have historically been reduced to mere properties, to characters and images imprisoned in male texts becausegeneratedsolelS as Anne Elliot and Anne Finch observe, by male expectations and designs. Like the metaphor of literary paternity itself, this corollary notion that the chief creature man has generatedis woman has a long and complex history. From Eve, Minerva, Sophia and Galatea onward, after all, patriarchal mythology defines women as created b5 from, and for men, the children of male brains, ribs, and ingenuity. For Blake the eternal female was at her best an Emanation of the male creative principle. For Shelley she was an epi-psyche,a soul out of the poet's soul, whose inception paralleled on a spiritual plane the solider births of Eve and Minerva. Throughout the history of Western culture, moreover, male-engendered female figures as superficially disparate as Milton's Sin, Swift's Chloe, and Yeats' Crazy Jane have incarnated men's ambivalence not only toward female sexuality but toward their own (male) physicality. At the same time, male texts, continually elaborating the metaphor of literary paternity' have continually proclaimed that, in Honor6 de Balzac's ambiguous wOrdS,"woman'S virtue iSman'Sgreatestinvention." A characteristically condensed and oracular comment of Norman O. Brown's perfectly summarizes the assumptions on which all such texts are based: Poetr1 the creative ac\ the act of life, the archetypal sexual act. Sexuality is poetry. The lady is our creation' or Pygmalion's statue. The lady is the poem; [Petrarch's] Laura is, reallRpoetry.... No doubt this complex of metaphors and etiologies simply reflects not iust the fiercely patriarchal 'Western society but also the understructure of pinning of misogyny upon which that severe pairiarchy has stood. The roots of "authority" tell us, after all, that if woman is man's proPerty then- he must have authored her, iust as surely as they tell us

that if he authored her she must be his property. As a creation "penned" by man, moreoverr woman has been "penned up" or "penned in." As a sort of "sentence" man has spoken, she has herself been "sentenced": fated, jailed, for he has both "indited" her and "indicted" her. As a thought he has "framedr" she has been both "framed" (enclosed)in his texts, glyphs, graphics, and "framed up" (found guiltS found wantinB) in his cosmologies.For as Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Tbrough the Looking Glass, the "master" of words, utterances,phrases,literary 26 properties, "can manage the whole lot of them 1ss authority masculine of and etiology The etymology arqit seems,almost necessarilyidentical. However, for women who felt themselvesto be more than, in every sense, the properties of literary texts, the problem posed by such authority was neither metaphysical nor philological, but (as the pain expressed by Anne Finch and Anne Elliot indicates) psychological. Since both patriarchy and its text subordinate and imprison women, before women can even attempt that pen which is so rigorously kept from them, they must escapejust those male texts which, defining them as "Cyphers," deny them the autonomy to formulate alternatives to the authoriry that has imprisoned them and kept them from attempting the pen. The vicious circularity of this problem helps explain the curious passiviry with which Finch responded (or pretended to respond) to male expectations and designs, and it helps explain, too, the centuries-long silenceof so many women who must have had talents comparable to Finch's. A final paradox of the metaphor of literary paternity is the fact that, in the same way that an author both generatesand imprisons his fictive creatures,he silences them by depriving them of autonomy (that is, of the power of independent speech)even as he gives them life. He silencesthem and, as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian LJrn" suggests,he stills them, or-embedding them in the nrarble of his art-kills them. As Albert Gelpi neatly puts it, "the artist kills experience into art, for temporal experience can only escapedeath 'immortality' of artistic form. The by dying into the 'life' in art and the fluidity of 'life' in nature fixity of are incompatible." " The p€n, therefore, is not only 26LewisCarroll, Throughthe Looking Glass,ChapterVI, "Humpty Dumpty." [A".] 2TAlbert-Gelpi,"Emily Dickinsonand the Deerslayer,"in ed. SandraGilbert and SusanGuSisters, Sbakespeare's IndianauniversityPress,r97il. [A".] bar (Bloomington:

Literary Paternity mightier than the sword, it is also like the sword in its power-its need, even-to kill. And this last attribute of the pen once again seems to be associatively linked with its metaphorical maleness. Simone de Beauvoir has commented that the human male's "transcendence" of nature is symbolized by his ability to hunt and kill, just as the human female's identification with nature, her role as a symbol of immanence, is expressedby her central involvement in that life-giving but involun tary birth process which perpetuatesthe species.Thus, superiority-or authority-"has been accorded in humanity not to the sex that brings forth but ro that which kills." tt In D. H. Lawrence's words, "the Lords of Life are the Masters of Death"-and, therefore, patriarchal poetics implies, they are the masters of art.ze Commentators on female subordination from Freud and Horney to de Beauvoir, tWolfgang Lederer, and, most recently, Dorothy Dinnerstein, have of course explored other aspects of the relationship between the sexes that also lead men to 'V(/hat want figuratively to "kill" women. Horney called male "dread" of the female is a phenomenon to which Lederer has devoted a long and scholarly book.'o Elaborating on de Beauvoir's assertion that as mother of life "woman's first lie, her first treason [seems to be] that of life itself-life which, though clothed in the most attractive forms, is always infested by the ferments of age and death," Lederer remarks upon woman's own tendency to, in effect, kill herself into art in order "to appeal to man": From the Paleolithic on, we have evidencethat woman, through careful coiffure, through adornment and makeup, tried to stress the eternal type rather than the mo rtal self. Such makeup, in Africa or Japan, may reach the, to us, somewhat estranging degree of a lifeless mask-and yet that is precisely the purpose 2sSimone de Beauvoir,The SecondSer (New York: Alfred Knopf, rgSj), p. [Au.] 2eD.H. Lawrence,58. The Plumed Serpent,Chapter XXIil, "Huitzilopochtli'sNight." [Au.] 'Womea 30See rUfolfgang Lederer,M.D ., The Fearof (New York: HarcourtBraceJovanovich, Inc., .'968);alsoH. R. Hays, The DangerousSer (New York: G. P. putnam's Sons,1964) KatharineRogers,The TroublesomeHetpmate (Seattle:Universityof WashingtonPress,t966); and Dorothy Dinnersrein,The Mermaid and the Minotaur (New York: Harper 6c Row, 1976).[Au.]

of it: where nothing is lifelike, nothing speaks of death." For yet another reason, then, it is no wonder that women have historically hesitated to attempr the pen. Authored by a male God and by a godlike male, killed into a "perfect" image of herself, the woman writer's self-contemplation may be said to have begun with a searching glance into the mirror of the male-inscribed literary rexr. There she would see at first only those eternal lineaments fixed on her like a mask to conceal her dreadful and bloody link to nature. But looking long enough, looking hard enough, she would see-like Mary Elizabeth Colerid ge gazing at "the other side of the 6i11e1"an enraged and rebellious prisoner: herself. Coleridge's poem describing this vision is central to female (and feminist) poetics: I sat before my glass one d^y, And conjured ,tp a vision bare, Unlike the aspectsglad and gay, That erst were found reflected thereThe vision of a woman, wild With more than womanly despair. Her hair stood back on either side A face bereft of loveliness. It had no envy now to hide X7hat once no man on earth could guess. It formed the thorny aureole Of hard unsanctified distress. Her lips were open-not a sound Came through the parted lines of red. 'SThate'er it was, the hideous wound In silence and in secret bled. No sigh relieved her speechlesswoe, She had no voice to speak her dread. And in her lurid eyes there shone The dying flame of life's desire, Made mad becauseits hope was gone, And kindled at the leaping fire Of iealousy, and fierce revenge, And strength that could not change nor tire. Shade of a shadow in the glass, O set the crystal sur face free ! Pass-as the fairer visions pass3rLederer, op. cit.,p.42. [Au.]

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Nor ever more return, to be The ghost of a distracted hour, 'l That heard me whisPer' am she!"t \[hat this poem suggests is that, although the woman who is the prisoner of the mirror/text's images has "no voice to speak her dread," although "no sigh" interrupts "her speechlesswoer" she has an invincible senseof her own autonomy, her own interiority; she has a sense,to paraphrase Chaucer's tilfife of Bath, of the authority of her own experience." The power of metaphor, saysMary Elizabeth Coleridge'spoem, can only extend so far. Fina115no human creature can be completely silenced by ^ text or by an image. Just as stories notoriously have a habit of "getting away" from their authors, human beings since Eden have had a habit of defying author-iry, both divine and literary.'o Once more the debate in which Austen's Anne Elliot and her Captain Harville engage is relevant here, for it is surely no accident that the question these two characters are discussingis woman's "inconstancy"-her refusal, that is, to be fixed or "kil[ed" by an author/owner, her stubborn insistence on her own way. That male authors berate her for this refusal even while they themselvesgenerate female characters who perversely display "monstrous" autonomy is one of the ironies of literary art. From a female perspective, however, such "inconstancy" can only be encouraging, for-implying suggeststhat women themselveshave duplicity-it the power to create themselves as characters, even perhaps the power to reach toward the self trapped on the other side of the mirror/text and help her to climb out. 3zMaryElizabethColeridge,"The Other Sideof a Mirror,'; in Poemsby Mary E. Coleridge(London: Elkin Mathews,r9o8),pP.8-9. [Au.] 33See though linesr-3: "Experience, The Wife'sPrologue, 'Were in this world, wereright ynough noon auctoritee/ to me I To spekeof wo that is in mariage.. ." Seealso Arlyn Diamond & Lee Edwards,ed., The Authority of Press, Experience(Amherst:Universityof Massachusetts rg77), an anthologyof feministcriticism which draws its title from the ril0ife'sspeech.[Au.] 3aIn acknowledgement of a point similar to this, Saidfollows his definitionof "authority" with a definitionof an accompanying,integrally relatedconceptof "molestationr" by which he sayshe means"that no novelisthas everbeenunawarethat his authority, regardlessof how complete,or the authority of a narrator, is a sham" p. 8+). [Au.] (Said,Beginninss,

Passagesfrom the works of several other women writers suggest one significant way in which the female artist can bring this secretself to the surfaceof her own life: against the traditional generative authority of the pen/penis, the lite rary woman can set the conceptual energy of her own female sexualiry. Though our patriarchal culture has tended to sentimentalize and thus trivialize the matriarchal power that, in the view of the nineteenth-century German thinker J.J. Bachofen,once dominated most human societies, a surprising number of literary women seem to have consciously or unconsciously fantasized the rebirth of such power." From Christina Rossetti,who dreamed of a utopian "Mother Countryr" to Adrienne Rich, whose Of WomAn Born rs (among other things) a metaphorical attempt to map such a land, women writers have almost instinctively struggled to associate their own lifegiving sexual energy with their art, opposing both to the deadly force of the swordlike pen/penis.t' In Charlotte Bronte's The Professor, for instance, the young poet/seamstressFrancesHenri celebrates the return of love and liberty after a long interlude of grief and failure by reciting "Milton's invocation 'secret top of to that heavenly muse, who on the Oreb or Sinai' had taught the Hebrew shepherdhow in the womb of chaos, the conception of a world had originated and ripened." ThouBh, as Virginia \foolf once suggested,the author of Paradise Lost was the "first of the masculinists" in his misogynistic contempt for Eve, the "Mother of Mankind," Bronte drastically revises his imagerS deemphasizing the generative power of the patriarchal Author and stressingthe powerful womb of the matriarchal muse." More directlR in Shirley she has her eponymous heroine insist that Milton never "saw" Eve: "it was his cook that he saw." In fact, shedeclares,the first woman was never, like Milton's Eve, "half doll, half angel" and always potential fiend. Rather, she was a powerful Titan, a woman whose Promethean creative energy gave birth to tr' "J.J. Bachofen,Myth, Religion,and Mother Right, nitph Manheim (Princeton:BollingenSeries,ry62)' lAu.l ,, RosJeffi,"Mother CountrR" in Tlte Poemsof Christina G. Rossetti: Goblin Market and Other Poems(Boston: 'Woman Little Brown, r9o9),p. r16. AdrienneRich, Of (New Institutioa and Born: Motherhoodas Experience York:\f. lilf.Norton, 1976)-[Au.] 37SeeCharlotteBronte, TheProfessor(New York: Dutton, ry6e),p. r5i (Ch.XIX). [A".]

Literary Paternity "the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the strength which could bear a thousand years of bond age . . . the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which . o . could conceive and bring forth a Messiah." " Clearly such a female Author would have maternal powers equal to the paternal energies of any male Titan. Mary Shelley's fictionalised Author's Introduction to The Last Man is based on a similarly revisionary myth of female sexual energy, a covertly feminist Parable of the Cave which implicitly refutes Plato, Milton, and the metaphor of literary paternity. In r8r8, Shelleybegins,she and "a friend" visited what was said to be "the gloomy cavern of the Cumaean Sibyl." Entering a mysterious, almost inaccessible chamber, they found "piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substanceresembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn." At first, Shelleyconfesses,she and her male companion (Percy Shelley) were baffled by this discoverS but "At length, my friend exclaimed 'This is the Sibyl's cave; these are sibylline leaves!"' Her account continues as follows:

49 S

But the main substancerests on the divine intuitions which the Cum aeandamsel obtained from heaven."

On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark and other substanceswere traced with 'What written characters. appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressedin various languages:some unknown to my companion . . . some in modern 'We dialects. . . could make out little by the dim light, but they seemedto conrain prophecies, detailed relations of evenrs but lately passed;names . . . and often exclamations of exultation or woe . . . were traced on their thin scant pages. . . . Iil(/emade a hasty selection of such of the leaves,whose writing one at least of us could understand, and then . . bade adieu to the dim hypaethric cavern. . . . Sincethat period . . . I have been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. . . . I present the public with my latest discoveriesin the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to . . . model the work into a consistent form.

Every feature of this cave journey is significant, especially for the female critic (or writer) who seeks alternatives to the "masculinist" metaphor of literary paternity. It is obviously important, to begin with, that the cave is a female space, and-more important-a spaceinhabited not by fettered prisoners (as the famous cave in Plato's Republic was) but by a free female hierophant, the lost Sibyl, a prophetess who inscribed her "divine intuitions" on tender leaves and fragments of delicate bark. For Mary Shelley, therefore, it is intimately connected with both her own artistic authority and her own power of selfcreation. A male poet or instructor may guide her to this place-as Percy shelley does, in her fictional narrative-but, as she herself comes to realize, she and she alone can effectively reconstruct the scattered truth of the Sibyl's leaves.Literally rhe daughter of a dead and dishonored mother-the powerful feminist Mary Wollstonecraft-Mary Shelley portrays herselfin this parable as figuratively the daughter of the vanished Sybil, the primordial prophetess who mythically conceived all women arrists. That the Sibyl's leaves are now scattered, fragmented, barely comprehensible is thus the central problem Shelley faces in her own art. Earlier in her introduction, she notes that finding the cave was a preliminary problem. she and her companion were misled and misdirected by native guides, she tells us; left alone in one chamber while the guides went for new torches, they "lost" their way in the darkness;ascendingin the "wrong" direction, they accidentally stumbled upon the true cave. But the difficulty of this initial discovery merely foreshadows the difficulty of the crucial rask of reconstruction, as shelley shows. For just as the path ro the Sibyl's cave has been forgotten, the coherent truth of her leaveshas been shattered and scattered, the body of her art dismembered,and, like Anne Finch, she has become a sort of "cypherr" powerless and enigmatic. But while the way to the cave can be "remembered" by accident, the whole meaning of the Sibylline leavescan only be re-rememberedthrough

38charlotteBronte, shirley (New York and London: The Haworth Edition, rgoo), p. jz8. [Au.]

"V1ry Shelley,The Last Man (1826; reprinr, Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of NebraskaPress,r96il, pp. 1'-4. [Au.]

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painstaking labor: translation, transcription and stitcher1 re-vision and re-creation. The specifically sexual texture of these Sibylline documents, thesescatteredleavesand leavings, adds 'Working to their profound importance for women. on leaves,bark and "a white filmy substancer" the Sibyl literally wrote, and wrote upon, the Book of Nature. She had, in other words, a Goddess' power of maternal creativity, the sexual/artistic strength that is the female equivalent of the male potential for lite rary paternity. In her "dim hypaerthric cavs1n"-4 dim sea-cave that was nevertheless open to the sky-she received her "divine intuitions" through "an aperture" in the "arched dome-like roof" which "let in the light of heaven." On her "raised seat of stone, about the size of a Grecian couchr" she conceiued her art, inscribing it on leaves and bark from the green world outside. And so fierce are her verses,so truthful her "poetic rhapsodies," that even in deciphering them Shelley exclaims that she feels herself "taken . . . out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face from ffi€, to one glowing with imagination and power." For in recovering and reconstructing the Sibyl's scatteredartistic/sexual energS Shelleycomes to recognize that she is discovering and recreatittgown creative power. literally decipbering-her "sometimes I have thoughtr" she modestly confesses,"that, obscure and chaotic as they ar% [these translations from the Sibyl's leaves] owe their present form to ffi€, their decipherer. As if we should give to another artist, the painted fragments which form the mosaic copy of Raphael's Transfiguration in St. Peter's;he would put them together in a form, whose mode would be fashioned by his own peculiar mind and talent." oo The quest for creative energy enacted by Charlotte Bronte and Mary Shelley in the passagesI have quoted here has been of consuming importance (for obvious reasons) to many other women writers. Emily Dickinson, for instance, sought what Christina Rossetti called a "Mother Country" all her life, and she always envisioned such a country as a land of primordial power. Indeed, though Dickinson's famous "My Life had stood-a Loaded Gun" seems to define sexuallcreative energies in terms of a destructive, phallic mechanism, it is important to re40lbid. [Au.]

member that this almost theatrically reticent literary woman always associated apparently "male" guns with profound "fem ale" volcanoes and mountains.olThus her phallic description of poetic speech in "My Life had stood" is balanced by characteri" zation of the ("female") volcano as "The SolemnTorrid-SymbolI The lips that never lls-." And in one of her lesserknown poems of the r 8 6os she formulated a matriarchal creed of womanly creativity that must surely have given her the strength to sustain her own art through all the doubts and difficulties of her reclusivelife: Sweet Mountains-Ye tell Me no lieNever deny Me-Never flyThose same unvarying Eyes Turn on Me-when I fail-or feign, Or take the Royal names in vainTheir far-slow-Violet GazeMy Strong Madonnas-Cherish stillThe Wayward Nun-beneath the Hill'S(/hose service-is to YouHer latest'Worship-\7hen the Day Fades from the Firmament awayTo lift Her Brows on You -42 One of Dickinson's most perceptive admirers, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich, has more recently turned to the same imagery of matriarchal power in what is plainly a similar attempt to confute that metaphor of literary paternity which, as Anais Nin wrote, has "confused" so many women in our society. "Your mother dead and you unbornr" she writes in "The Mirror [n tilftich Two Are Seen As One," describing the situation of the female artist, "your two hands [grasp] your head," drawing it down against the blade of life your nerves the nerves of a midwife learning her trade o3 " On "My Life Had stood-a Loaded Gun," seeAlbert Gelpi,"Emily Dickinson'sDeerslayer,"in SandraGilbert Sisters:Women and SusanGubar, ed., Shakespeare's Poets,FeministCritics(Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press,1978).[Au.] azThePoemsof Emily Dickinson, ed.ThomasH. Johnson (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press,r 9 55), #722. [Eds.] a3Adrienne and New, rgio-1974 Rich, PoemsSelected \Uf.Norton, r974),P.r9S. [Au.] (New York: \UY.

AnneneKolodny b. rg4r

Koroolv's earlierwork as a literaryhistorianand critic (particu;\**"*" ,f \ larly in The Lay of tbe Land, t975, and The Land Before Heii, 1984) illustratesa number of crucial differencesin the developmentof recentfeminiit theory primarily in the United statesand France.As Kolodny notesin the first part of the essayhere, work by North American feminist critics and scholars sincethe early x97oshas beenpursuedon a large scale,with professionalthoroughness,documentinga tradition of neglect,misreading,and sexual stereotyping that would be,_quiteliterallr criminal if actedout in the marketplaceof the r98os. It is, as Kolodny says,a major accomplishment;but in the context of American literary study in the universities,where a gigantic professionalapparatusis in place(andinpower), the irony is that work by women,observingthe apparentprotocols of the profession,has little apparent impact on the prof.rsional apparatusitself. Part of the anger to which Kolodny alludesstemi from the fact that the receptionof the critical and scholarlywork itself has tendedto confirm a continuingpattern of neglect,misreading,and stereotyping,not just of women poetsand writers but now of critics aswell. In France,tiris would not be a crime, bat un scandale;yet in the context of the Modern LanguageAssociation, for example,with more than 3o,ooomembers,teachingin-perf,aps 4,ooo collegesand universities,it is hard to stagea scandalor .u.rrl in many cases,to seeit. More is at stakethan a differenceof scale,to be sure; but the professionalization-of litenry study in thd United Stateson an unprecedentedscaledoeshavea profound effecton how questionsof theory are reiognized and pursuedor even what issueswill be acknowledgedas consequential.The .har"ct.ristic profile of criticism by American feminists has generallybeen the historical studv of the representationof women in literature, which can be pursued without directly ,.literaturer" raising theoreticalquestionspertainingto ,,representati,on," or even "women." Thematizing thesequestionsin existing forms of critical discourse leadsdirectly to practical issues:what rexrswill belncluded on reading and ex_ amination lists, who will be allowed ro teachwhat to whom, who will-be hired, promoted, or fired, ostensiblyon the basisof the professionaiactivitiesof teaching and publishing? t$7hilethesequestionsofthe literary canon and professional ethicsare shaped by practical concerns(includingthe existenceof federalstatutesprohibiting iiscrimination basedon sex), it remains uncertain what theoretical implicaiions 1heymay have.As Alice lardine observes,much of the work of Frenctrfeminists has become"antifeminist" (in Jardine'sphrase)as it has becomemore strictlv 497

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ANnrrrr KorooNv theoretical,sincethe conceptof feminism,asinherited from the rational humanism of the Enlightenment,comesinto questionwhen rational humanismitself is questioned.This is not to suggestthat "theory" must, perforce, question rational humanism, though that has been the caseamong many contemporary thinkers. It is, rather, to acknowledgethe logical and conceptualproblem that ariseswhen it becomesimperativeto define and attempt to redressan injustice that appearsto be a structural and not an accidentalpart of a systemof thought. Among American feminists,the emergenceof gender studiesis, in part, a responseto this problem, to cast the issuesin terms of the effectsof culture on identity without reinforcing the categorical ground of biological distinction from which stereotypingalso derives, Kolodny's argument in "Dancing through the Minefield" takes a different approach, staying within the boundariesof literary study per se, to question conventional assumptionsabout literary history interpretation, and critical method.The threepropositionsKolodny advances,as it were,for navigatingthe "minefield" havebeenfamiliar topics of theoreticaldebatesincethe late r94os: the proposition that "literary history . . . is a fiction" was a central issuein disputesbetweenthe New Critics and literary historians,while the contentionthat as we learn to read "we engage. . . not texts but paradigms" is essentialto the argumentsof archetypalcritics following Northrop Frye (seeCTSP,pp. rrr847) as well as to more recentversionsof structuralism.Kolodny'sthird proposition, calling into questionthe universalityof aestheticjudgment and encouraging the reexaminationof critical methods,is the very meansby which theoretical questionsare articulatedas such.This is iust to say that the institutional structure of academicliterary study in North America is basedless on articulated notions of phispeculativeor theoreticalmodelsthan on late-nineteenth-century and theory now in criticism courses and that literary chronology and lology in institutions few major at a available only universities, were in most offered and scholarcriticism feminist American frustration of the part of ry65. Atleast ship stemsfrom the fact that much of it beganwith the assumptionthat feminist literary study presenteda primarily documentaryproblem of literary history. From this point of view,the accomplishmentof Americanfeministcriticssincethe late r96os, exemplifiedin Kolodny'swork, is lessin the developmentof a coherent theory of feminist criticism than in making the issuesof feminismand genderan essentialand inescapablepart of any contemporarytheoreticaldiscussion. Annette Kolodny's work includesThe Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experienceand History in American Li.feand Letters ftgZ S) and The Land beforeHer: Fantasyand Experienceof the AmericanFrontier,t6jo-r86o (rg8+). Seealso her "A Map for Rereading:Gender and the Interpretation of Literary Texts," NeutLiterary History rr (r98o).

Dancing through the Minefield

DANCINGTHROUGH THE MINEFIELD: SomeObseffationson the Theory,Practice,and Politicsof a FeministLiterary Criticism Had anyone had the prescience,in 1969, to pose the question of defining a "feminist" literary criticism, she might have been told, in the wake of Mary Ellman n's Thinking About Women,' that it involved exposing the sexual stereotyping of women in both our literature and our literary criticism and, as well, demonstrating the inadequacy of established critical schools and methods to deal fairly or sensitively with works written by women. In broad outline, such a prediction would have stood well the test of time, and, in fact, Ellmann's book continues to be widely read and to point us in useful directions. \What could not have been anticipated in 1969, however, was the catalyzing force of an ideology that, for many of us, helped to bridge the gap between the world as we found it and the world as we wanted it to be. For those of us who studied literature, a previously unspoken senseof exclusion from authorship, and a painfully personal distressat discovering whores, bitches, muses,and heroines dead in childbirth where we had once hoped to discover ourselves, could-for the first time-begin to be understood as more than "a set of disconnected, unrealized private emotions."' \With a renewed courage to make public our otherwise private discontents, what had once been "felt individually as personal insecurity" came at last to be "viewed collectively as structural inconsistency" 3 within the very disciplines we studied. Following unflinchingly the full implications of Ellmann's percipient obserDANCING TIONS

ON

THROUGH THE

THE

THEORY,

MINEFIELD: PRACTICE

AND

SOME

OBSERVA-

POLITTCS

OF

A

FEMrNrsr LTTERARvcRrrrcrsM was first published in Feminist Studies (r98o). Copyright 1979 by Annerte Kolodnn reprinted by permission of the author. The author made minor editorial changes for this edition. rMary Ellmann, Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace & \forld, 1968). [Au.] 2SeeClifford Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural Systemr" The Interpretation of Cuhures: Selected Essays (New York: B a s i cB o o k s , 1 9 7 3 ) ,p . z j z . [ A u . ] 3 l b i d . ,p . z o 4 . [ A u . ]

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vations, and emboldened by the liberating energy of feminist ideology-in all its various forms and guises-feminist criticism very quickly moved beyond merely expos[ing] sexism in one work of literature after anothe rr" o and promised instead that we might at last "begin to record new choices in a new literary history."t So powerful was that impulse that we experienced it, along with Adrienne Rich, as much more than "a chapter in cultural history": it becaffi€,rather, "an act of survival."'I7hat was at stake was not so much literature or criticism as such, but the historical, social, and ethical consequences of women's participation in, or exclusion from, either enterprise. The pace of inquiry in the rgTos was fast and furious-especially after Kate Millett's r97o analysis of the sexual politics of literature' added a note of urgency to what had earlier been Ellmann's sardonic anger-while the diversity of that inquiry easily outstripped all efforts to define feminist literary criticism as either a coherent system or a unified set of methodologies. Under its wide umbrella, everything was thrown into question: our established canons, our aesthetic criteria, our interpretative strategies,our reading habits, and most of all, ourselvesas critics and as teachers.To delineate its full scope would require nothing less than a book-a book that would be outdated even as it was being composed. For the sake of breviry, therefore, let me attempt only a summary outline. Perhaps the most obvious successof this new scholarship has been the return to circulation of previously lost or otherwise ignored works by women writers. Following fast upon the initial successof the Feminist Pressin reissuing gems such as Rebecca Harding Davis's t86r novella, Life in the Iron Mills, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's r89z short story "The Yellow \$7allpaper," published in aLillian S. Robinson,"Cultural Criticism and the Horror Vacui," CollegeEnglishll (Octobert97z); reprintedas "The Critical Thsk" in her Sex,Class,and Culture(Bloomington: IndianaUniversityPress,1978),p. 5r. [Au.] 5Elaine Showalter,A Literature of Tbeir Oun: British Women NouelistsFrom Brontii to Lessing (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversityPress,1977),p. 36.[A".] 6AdrienneRich, "'S7henWe DeadAwaken:'V(rriting asReVision," CollegeEnglishl+ (Octoberry72); reprintedin Adrienne Rich'sPoetry,ed. BarbaraCharlesworrhGelpi and Albert Gelpi (New York: W. \f. Norton, r975), p.eo. [Au.] 7KateMillett, SexualPolitics(GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubled"y, r97o). [Au.]

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r97z and r97 j respectively,tcommercial trade and reprint houses vied with one another in the reprinting of anthologies of lost texts and, in some cases,in the reprinting of whole series. For those of us in American literature especially, the phenomenon promised a radical reshaping of our concepts of literary history and, at the very least, a new chapter in understanding the development of women's literary traditions. So commercially successful were these reprintings, and so attuned were the reprint houses to the political attitudes of the audiences for which they were offered, that many of us found ourselves wooed to compose critical introductions, which would find in the pages of nineteenth-century domestic and sentimental fictions some signs of either muted rebellions or overt radicalism, in anticipation of the current wave of "New Feminism." [n rereading with our students these previously lost works, we inevitably raised perplexing questions as to the reasons for their disappearancefrom the canons of "major works," and we worried over the aesthetic and critical criteria by which they had been accorded diminished status. This increased availability of works by women writers led, of course, to an increased interest in what elements, if dfly, might constitute some sort of unity or connection among them. The possibility that women had developed either a unique or at least a related tradition of their own especially intrigued those of us who specialized in one national literature or another, or in historical periods. Nina .Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Nouels by and Baym's about Women in America, rSzo-r87ot demonstrated the Americanist's penchant for examining what were once the "best-sellers" of their da5 the ranks of the popular fiction writers, among which women took a dominant place throughout the nineteenth century, while the feminist studies of British literature emphasized instead the wealth of women writers who have been regarded as worthy of cansRebecca Harding Davis,Life in the lron Mills, originally publishedin theAtlantic Monthly, April 186r; reprinted with "A BiographicalInterpretation"by Tillie Olsen(Old 'Westbury, N.Y.: FeministPress,r97z). CharlottePerkins Gilman,"The Yellow\7allpaper,"originallypublishedin the New England Magazine,May r89z; reprinted with an Afterword by ElaineR. Hedges(Old'Westbury,N.Y.: FeministPress,r97j). [Au.] eNinaBaym,'Woman'sFiction:A Guideto Nouelsby and 'Women in America, rSzo-r87o (Ithaca,N.Y.: about Cornell UniversityPress,1978).[Au.]

onization. Not so much building upon one another's work as clarifying, successivelRthe parameters of the questions to be posed, Sydney Janet Kaplan, Ellen Moers, Patricia Meyer Spacks, and Elaine Showalter, among many others, concentrated their energies on delineating an internally consistent "body of work" by women that might stand as a female counter-tradition. For Kaplan, in r97 5, this entailed examining women writers' various attempts to portray feminine consciousnessand selfconsciousness,not as a psychological categorS but as a stylistic or rhetorical device.toThat same year, arguing essentially that literature publicizes the private, Spacks placed her consideration of a "female imagination" within social and historical frames, to conclude that "for readily discernible historical reasons women have characteristically concerned themselves with matters more or less peripheral to male concernsr" and she attributed to this fact an inevitable difference in the literary emphases and subject matters of female and male writers.tt The next year) Moers's Literary Women: The Great 'Writers focused on the pathways of literary influence that linked the English novel in the hands of women.tt And finally, in 1977, Showalter took ,tp the matter of a "female literary tradition in the English novel from the generation of the Brontds to the present d^y" by arguing that because women in general constitute a kind of "subculture within the framework of a larger society," the work of women writers, in particular, would thereby demonstrate a unity of "values, conventions, experiences,and behaviors impinging on each individual" as she found her sources of "self-expression relative to a domi13 nant [and, by implication, male] sociery.tr At the same time that women writers were being reconsidered and reread, male writers were simi10In her Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Nouel (Urbana: Universiry of Illinois Press, r975), P. 3, Sydney Janet Kaplan explains that she is using the term "feminine consciousness" "not simply as some general attitude of women toward their own femininity, and not as something synonymous with a particular sensibility among female writers. I am concerned with it as a literary device: a method of characterization of females in fiction." [Au.] ll Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Avon Books, rg7 S), p. 6. [Au.] l2Ellen Moers, Literary Women: Tbe Great'Writers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubled^y, 1976).[Au.] 13Showalter,A Literature of Their Own, p. rr. [Au.]

Dancing through the Minefield larly subjected to a new feminist scrutiny. The continuing result-ro put years of difficult analysis into a single sentence-has been nothing less than an acute attentiveness to the ways in which certain power relations, usually those in which males wield various forms of influence over females, are inscribed in the texts (both literary and critical) that we have inherited, not merely as subject matter, but as the unquestioned, often unacknowledg ed giuen of the culture. Even more important than the new interpretations of individual texrs are the probings into the consequences(for women) of the conventions that inform those texts. For example, in surveying selected nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury British novels which employ what she calls "the two-suitors conventionr" Jean E. Kennard sought to understand why and how the structural demands of the convention, even in the hands of women writers, inevitably work to imply "the inferiority and necessarysubordination of women." Her 1978 studS victims of conuention, points out that the symbolic nature of the marriage which conventionally concludes such novels "indicates the adjustment of the protagonist to society's values, a condition which is equated with her maturity." Kennard's concern, however, is with the fact that the structural demands of the form too often sacrifice precisely those "virtues of independenceand individualityr" or, in other words, the very "qualities we have been invited to admire in" the heroines.toKennard appropriately caurions us against drawing from her work any simplistically reductive thesis about the mimetic relations between art and life. yet her approach nonethelesssuggeststhat what is important about a fiction is not whether it ends in a death or a marriage, but what the symbolic demands of that particular conventional ending imply about the values and beliefsof the world that engendered it. Her work thus participates in a growing emphasis in feminist literary srudy on the fact of literarure as a social institution, embeddednot only within its literary traditions but also within the particu9*r lar physical and mental artifacts of the society from which it comes. Adumbrating Millett's r97o decision to anchor her "literary reflections" to apreceding analysis of the historical, social, and economic talean E. Kennard, victims of conuention (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, r97B), pp. r 64, rg, 14. [Au.]

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contexts of sexual politicsrts more recent workmost notably Lillian Robinsen'5-[egins with the premise that the process of artistic creation "consists not of ghostly happenings in the head but of a matching of the states and processes of symbolic models against the states and processesof the wider world." " The power relations inscribed in the form of conventions within our literary inheritance, these critics argue, reify the encodings of those same power relations in the culture at large. And the critical examination of rhetorical codes becomes, in their hands, the pursuit of ideological codes, because both embody either value systemsor the dialectic of competition between value systems. More often than not, these critics insist upon examining not only the mirroring of life in art but also the normative impact of art on life. Addressing herself to the popular art availableto working women, for example, Robinson is interested in understanding not only "the forms it uses" but, more important, ..the myths it creates, the influence it exerts." "The way art helps people to order, interpret, mythologize, or dispose of their own experience," she declares,may be "complex and often ambiguous, but it is not impossible to define." tt 'v7hether its focus be upon the marerial or the imaginative contexts of literary invention; single texts or entire canons; the relations bet'ween authors, genres, or historical circumstances; lost authors or well-known names, the variety and diversiry of all feminist literary criticism finally coheres in its stance of almost defensive rereading. \il7hat Adrienne Rich had earlier called "revision," that is, "the act of looking back, of seeingwith fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction," tt took on a more actively self-protective coloration in r 978, when Judith Fetterley called upon the woman reader to learn to "resist" the sexisidesigns a text might make upon her-asking her to identify against herself, so to speak, by manipulatittg her sympathies on behalf of male heroes but lsseeMillett, sexual Politics, pt. 3, "The Literary Reflection," pp. 23S-j6r. [Au.] t5Thephraseis Geertz's; see"Ideology as a cultural syst e m r "p . z r 4 . [ A u . ] lTLillian s. Robinson, "criticism-and self-criticism," college English 36 (January 1974), and "criticism: t$fho Needs It?" in The (Jsesof criticism, ed. A. p. Foulkes (Bern and Frankfurt: Lang, 1976); both reClass,and Culture,pb.62, So.JAu.1 _^printedin Sex, 'We 18 Rich, "'When DeadAwak€r," p. g". in".]

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against female shrew or bitch characters.teUnderpinning a great deal of this critical rereading has been the not-unexpected alliance berween feminist literary study and feminist studies in linguistics and language acquisition. Tillie Olsen's commonsense observation of the danger of "perpetuating-by continued usage-entrenched, centuries-old oppressive power realities, early-on incorporated into language," 20has been given substantiveanalysisin the writings of feminists who study "language as a symbolic system closely tied to a patriarchal social structure." Thken together, their work demonstrates "the importance of languagein establishing,reflecting, and maintaining an asymmetrical relationship between women and men." " To consider what this implies for the fate of women who essaythe craft of language is to ascertain, perhaps for the first time, the real dilemma of the poet who finds her most cherished private experience "hedged by taboos, mined with falsenamings." tt It also explains the dilemma of the male reader who, in opening the pagesof awoman's book, finds himself entering a strange and unfamiliar world of symbolic significance. For if, as Nelly Furman insists, neither language use nor language acquisition is "gender-neutr 7lr" but is, instead, "imbued with our sex-inflectedcultural values;"" and if, additionally, reading is a process of "sorting out the structures of signification"'o rn any text, then male readers who find themselvesoutside of and unfamiliar with the symbolic systems that constitute female experience in women's writings will necessarily dismiss those systems as undecipherable, meaningless, or trivial. And male proleJudithFetterley,The ResistingReader:A FeministApproach to AmericanFiction (Bloomington:IndianaUniversityPress,1978).[A".] 20TillieOlsen,Silences (New York: DelacortePress,1978), pp.zj9-4c..[Au.] tt Sie CherisKramer,Barrie Thorne, and Nancy Henlen on Languageand Communicationr"Re"Perspectives view EssaSSigns3 (Summert978): 646. [Au.] 22SeeAdrienneRich'sdiscussionof the difficulryin finding as a motherin Of authenticlanguagef.orher experience Woman Bori: Motherhood as Experienceand Institution (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976),p. r5. [Au.] 23Nelly Furman, "The Study of 'Womenand I ,anguage: Comment on Vol. i, no. 3r" Signs 4 (Fall ry78): r 84. [Au.] 2aAgain,ffiy phrasingcomesfrom Geertz,"Thick Description: Toward an InterpretiveTheory of Cultuter" Inter' pretationof Cubures,P. 9. [Au.]

fessorswill find no reason to include such works in the canons of "major authors." At the same time, women writers, coming into a tradition of literary language and conventional forms already appropriated, for centuries, to the purposes of male expression, will be forced virtually to "wrestle" with that language in an effort "to remake it as a language adequate to our conceptual processes."" To all of this, feminists concerned with the politics of language and style have been acutely attentive. "Language conceals an invincible adversaryr" observes French critic H6ldne Cixous, "because it's the lant5 guage of men and their gramm ar." But equally insistent, as in the work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, has been the understanding of the need for all readers,male and female alike, to learn to penetrate the otherwise unfamiliar universesof symbolic action that comprise women's writings, past and present." To HnvE attempted so many difficult questions and to have accomplished so much-even acknowledging the inevitable false starts, overlapPing, and so short a time, should certainly repetition-in have secured feminist literary criticism an honored berth on that ongoing intellectual iourney which we loosely term in academia "critical analysis." Instead of being welcomed onto the train, however' we have been forced to negotiate a minefield. The very energy and diversity of our enterprise have rendered us vulnerable to attack on the grounds that we lack both definition and coherence;while our particular attentivenessto the ways in which literature encodes and disseminatescultural value systemscalls down upon us imprecations echoing those heaped upon the Marxist critics of an earlier generation.If we are scholars dedicated to rediscovering a lost body of 2sJuliaPenelope StanleyandSusanSf. Robbins,"Toward a no. 6 (tgZZ),p.4. [Au.] FeministAesthetic,"Chrysalis, 26H6lbne Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," trans. Keith Cohenand PaulaCohen,Signsr (Summerry76)z 882.[Au.] 27lnThe Madwomanin the Attic: The WomanWriter and the Nineteentb-Century Literary lmagination (New Haven,Conn.: YaleUniversityPress,1979),SandraM. Gilbert and SusanGubar suggestthat women'swritings are in someSense"palimpsestic"in that their "surface (and designsconcealo. obscuredeeper,lessaccessible levelsof meaning"@.Zl). It is, lessiocially acceptable) in their view, an art designed"both to expressand to (p. 8r). [Au.] camouflage"

Dancing througb the Minefield writings by women, then our finds are questioned on aesthetic grounds. And if we are critics determined to practice revisionist readings, it is claimed that our focus is too narrow and our results are only distortions or) worse still, polemical misreadings. The very vehemence of the outcry, coupled with our total dismissal in some quartersrtt suggestsnot our deficiencies, however, but the potential magnitude of our challenge. For what we are asking be scrutintzed are nothing less than shared cultural assumptions so deeply rooted and so long ingrained that, for the most part, our critical colleagues have ceased to reco gnize them as such. In other words, what is really being bewailed in the claims thar we distort texts or threaten the disappearance of the great Western literary tradition itself 2' is not so much the disappearance of either text or tradition but, instead, the eclipse of that particular form of the text and that particular shape of the canon which previously reified male readers' sense of power and significance in the world. Analogously, by asking whether, as readers, w€ ought to be "really satisfiedby the marriage of Dorothea Brooke to Will Ladislaw? of Shirley Keeldar to Louis Moore?" or whether, as Kennard suggests,we must reckon with the ways in which "the qualities we have been invited to admire in theseheroines [have] been sacrificed to structural neatnessr"30is to raise 28Consider,for example,RobertBoyers'sreductiveand inaccurategeneralizatronthat "what distinguishesordinary books and articles about women from feminist writing is the feminist insistenceon asking the same questionsof every work and demandingideologically satisfactoryanswersto those questionsas a meansof evaluatingitr" in "A CaseAgainstFeministCriticism," PartisanReuiew$ (1976):6oz.It is partlyasa resultof suchmisconceptions that we havethe paucityof feminist critics who are granteda placein Englishdepartments that otherwisepride themselves on the variety of their critical orientations.[Au.] 2eAmbivalentthough he is about the literary continuiry that begins with Homer, Harold Bloom nonetheless somewhat ominously prophesies"that the first true break . . . will be broughtabout in generations to come, if the burgeoningreligion of LiberatedWoman spreads from its clustersof enthusiasts to dominatethe West,"in A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Universiry Press,r97S), p.3j. On p.36, he acknowledges that while something"as violent [as]a quarrelwould ensueif I expressedmy judgment" on Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer, "it would lead to somethingmore intense than quarrels if I expressed my judgmentupon . . . the 'literatureof 'Women's Liberation."' [Au.] 30Kennard, Victimsof Conuention,p. 14. [Au.]

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difficult and profoundly perplexing questions about the ethical implications of our otherwise unquestioned aestheticpleasures.It is, after all, an imposition of high order to ask the viewer ro attend ro Ophelia's sufferingsin a scenewhere, before, he had always so comfortably kept his eye fixed firmly on Hamlet. To understand all this, then, as the real nature of the challenge we have offered and, in consequence, 2s the motivation for the often overt hostility we have aroused, should help us learn to negotiate the minefield, if not with grace, then with at least a clearer comprehension of its underlying patterns. The ways in which objections to our work are usually posed, of course, serve to obscure their deeper motivations. But this fray, in part, b. due to our own reticence at taking full responsibility for the truly radic alizing premises thar lie at the theoretical core of all we have so far accomplished. It may be time, therefore, to redirect discussion,forcing our adversaries to deal with the substantive issuesand pushing ourselvesinto a clearer articulation of what, in fact, we are about. Up until now, I fear, we have dealt only piecemeal with the difficulties inherent in challenging the authority of established canons and then justifying the excellence of women's traditions, sometimes in accord with standards to which they have no intrinsic relation. At the very point at which we must perforce enter the discourse-that is, claiming excellence or importance for our "finds"-all discussion has already, we discover, long ago been closed. "If Kate Chopin were really worth reading," an Oxfordtrained colleague once assured ffie, "she'd have lasted-like Shakespeare"; and he then proceeded to vote against the English department's crediting a women's studies seminar I was offering in American women writers. The canon, for him, conferred excellence; Chopin's exclusion demonstrated only her lesserworth. As far as he was concerned, I could no more justify giving English-departmenr credit for the study of Chopin than I could dare publicly ro question Shakespeare's genius. Through hindsight, I have now come to view that discussion as not only having posed fruitless oppositions but also having entirely evaded the much more profound problem lurking just beneath the surface of our disagreement. That is, that the fact of cano nization puts any work beyond questions of establishing its merir and, instead, invites students to offer only increas-

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ingly more ingenious readings and interpretations, the purpose of which is to validate the greatnessalready imputed by canonizatron. Had I only understood it for what it was then, into this circular and self-servingset of assumptions I might have interjected some statement of my right to question why any text is revered and my need to know what it tells us about "how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, [and] how our language has trapped as well as liberated us."" The very fact of our critical training within the strictures imposed by an established canon of major works and authors, however, repeatedly deflects us from such questions. Instead, we find ourselves endlessly responding to the riposte that the overwhelmingly male presenceamong canonical authors was only an accident of history and never intentionally sexist, coupled with claims to the "obvious" aestheticmerit of those canonized texts. It is, as I san a fruitless exchange, serving more to obscure than to expose the territory beitrg protected and dragging uS, again and again, through the minefield. It is my contention that current hostilities might be transformed into a true dialogue with our critics if we at last made explicit what appear, to this observer, to constitute the three crucial propositions to which our special interests inevitably give rise. They arq moreover, propositions which, if handled with care and intelligence, could breathe new life into now moribund areas of our profession: (r) literary history (and with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction; (z) insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms; and finall5 (3) sincethe grounds upon which we assign aesthetic value to texts are never infallible, unchangeable, or universal, we must reexamine not only our aestheticsbut, as well, the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aesthetic responses.For the sake of brevitS I will not attempt to offer the full arguments for each but, rather, only sufficient elaboration to demonstrate what I see as their intrinsic relation to the potential scope of and present challenge implied by feminist literary study. r. Literary history (and uith that, tbe historicity of literature) is a fiction. To begin with , 3n established canon functions as a model by which to chart the continuities and discontinuities, as well as 31Rich,"'When'WeDeadAwak€or"p. 90. [Au']

the influences upon and the interconnections befween works, genres, and authors. That model we tend to forget, however, is of our own making. It will take a very different shape, and explain its inclusions and exclusions in very different ways, if the reigning critical ideology believes that new literary forms result from some kind of ongoing internal dialectic within preexisting styles and traditions or if, by contrast, the ideology declares that literary changeis dependentupon societal development and therefore determined by upheavalsin the social and economic organization of the culture at Latge." Indeed, whenever in the previous century of English and American literary scholarship one alternative replaced the other, we saw dramatic alterations in o'wisdom." canonical This suggests,then, that our senseof a "literary historR" and, by extension, our confidence in a "historical" canon, is rooted not so much in any definitive understanding of the past as it is in our need to call up and utilize the past on behalf of a better understanding of the present. Thus, to paraphrase David Couzens Hoy, it becomesnecessary"to point out that the understanding of. art and literature is such an essential aspect of the present's selfunderstanding that this self-understanding conditions what even gets taken" as constituting that artistic and literary past. To quote Hoy fully' "this continual reinterpretation of the past goes hand in hand with the continual reinterpretation by the present of itself." 33In our own time, uncertain as to which, if dfry, model truly accounts for our canonical choices or accurately explains literary historR and pressured further by the feminists' call for some justification of the criteria by which women's writings were largely excluded from both that canon and history, we suffer what Harold Bloom has called "a remarkable dimming" of "our mutual 3o senseof canonical standards." Into this apparent impasse,feminist literary theorists implicitly introduce the observation that our choices and evaluations of current literature have the effect either of solidifying or of reshaping our 32Thefirst is a propositioncurrently expressedby some structuralistsand formalist critics; the best statement of the secondprobablyappearsin GeorgLuk6cs,Writer and Critic (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, r97o), p. rrg. [Au.] ,rbavid CouzensHoy, "HermeneuticCircularity,Indeterminacy,and Incommensurabiliry,"Neu,tLiterary History ro (Fall 1978):166-67. lAu.l 3aBloom, p. 36.[Au.] MaP of Misreading,

Dancing through tbe Minefield senseof the past. The authoriry of any established canon, after all, is reified by our perception that current work seems to grow almost inevitably out of it (even in opposition or rebellion), and is called into question when what we read appears to have little or no relation to what we recogn ize as coming before. So, were the larger critical community to begin to attend seriously to the recent outpouring of fine literature by women, this would surely be accompanied by a concomitant researching of the past, by literary historians, in order to account for the present phenomenon. In that process, literary history would itself be altered: works by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century women to which we had not previously artended might be given new importance as "precursors" or as prior influences upon present-day authors; while selected male writers might also be granted new prominence as figures whom women today, or even yesterday, needed to reject. I am arguing, in other words, that the choices we make in the presenr inevitably alter our senseof the past that led to them. Related to this is the feminist challenge ro that patently mendacious critical fallacy that we read the "classics" in order to reconstruct the past "the way it really was," and that we read Shakespeare and Milton in order to apprehend the meanings that they intended. short of time machines or miraculous resurrections, there is simply no way to know, precisely or surely, what "really wasr" what Homer intended when he sang, or Milton when he dictated. critics more acure than I have already pointed up the impossibility of grounding a reading in the imputation of authorial intention becausethe further removed the author is from us, so too must be her or his systems of knowledg. and belief, points of view, and structures of vision (artistic and otherwise)." (I omit here the difficulty of finally ei"Jo.hn pewey offered preciselythis argument in rg34 when he insistedthat a work of art "ii recreated.u.ty time it is estheticallyexperienced. . . . It is absurdto ask what an artist 'really' meantby his product: he himself would find differentmeaningsin it a1differentdaysand hours and in differentstagesof his own development." Further,he explained,"It is simplyan impossibiiirythat any one today should experiencethe paithenon as the devout Athenian contemporarycitizen experiencedit, any more than the religiousstatuaryof the-rwelfthcentury can mean,estheticallSevento a good catholic tod^y just what it meantto the worshipirs of the old period." Art as Experieace(New York: capricorn Books, r 9 5 8 ) ,p p . r o 8 - g . [ A u . ]

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ther proving or disproving the impuration of intentionality because,inescapably, the only appropriate authority is unavailable: deceased.)\fhat we have really come to mean when we speak of competence in reading historical texrs, therefore, is the abiliry to recognize literary conventions which have survived through time-so as to remain operational in the mind of the reader-and, where these are lacking, the ability to translate (or perhaps transform?) the text's ciphers into more current and recognizable shapes.But we never really reconstruct the past in its own terms. \U[rhatwe gain when we read the "classicsr" then, is neither Homer's Greece nor George Eliot's England as they knew it but, rather, an approximation of an abeady fictively imputed past made available, through our interpretative strategies, for present concerns. Only by understanding this can we put to rest that recurrent delusion that the "continuing relevance" of the classics servesas "testimony to perennial features of human experience."" The only "perennial feature" to which our ability to read and reread texts written in previous centuries testifies to our inventiysnsss-in the sense that all of literary history is a fiction which we daily re-creare as we reread it. s7hat distinguishes feminists in this regard is their desire to alter and extend what we take as historically relevant from out of that vast storehouse of our literary inheritance and, further, feminists' recognition of the storehouse for what it really is: a resource for remodeling our literary history, past, present, and future. z. Insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms. To pursue the logical consequencesof the first proposition leads, however uncomfortably, to the conclusion that we appropriate meaning from a text according to what we need (or desire),or in other words, according to the critical assumptions or predispositions (conscious or not) that we bring to it. And we appropriate different meanings, or report different gleanings, at different times-even from the same text-according to our changedassumptions,circumstances,and requirements. This, in essence,constitutes the heart of the second proposition. For insofar as literature is itself a social institution, so, too, reading is a highly socialized-or learned-activity. rU7hatmakes it so 35charles Altieri, "The Hermeneutics of Literary Indeterminacy:A Dissentfrom the New orthodoxy," New LiteraryHistory ro (Fall 1978)i 9c..[Au.]

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exciting, of course, is that it can be constantly relearned and refined, So as to provide either an individual or an entire reading communify, over time, with infinite variations of the same text. lt can provide that, but, I must add, too often it does not. Frequently our reading habits become fixed, so that each successive reading experience functions, in effect, normativelS with one particular kind of novel stylizing our expectations of those to follow, the stylistic devicesof any favorite author (or group of authors) alerting us to the presenceor absenceof those devices in the works of others, and so on. "Once one has read his first poemr" Murray Krieger has observed, "he turns to his second and to the others that will follow thereafter with an increasing seriesof preconceptionsabout the sort of activity in which he is indulging. In matters of literary experience, as in other experiencesr" Krieger concludes, "one is a virgin but once." " For most readers,this is a fairly unconsciousprocess, and not unnaturallS what we are taught to read well and with pleasurewhen we are young predisposesus to certain specific kinds of adult reading tastes. For the professional literary critic, the processmay be no different, but it is at least more conscious. Graduate schools, at their best, are training grounds for competing interpretative paradigms or reading techniques: affective stylistics, structu ralism, and semiotic analysis, to name only a few of the more recent entries. The delight we learn to take in the mastery of these interpretative strategies is then often mistakenly construed as our delight in reading specific texts, especially in the caseof works that would otherwise be unavailable or even offensive to us. In my own graduate career, for example, with superb teachers to guide ffi€, I learned to take great pleasure in Paradise Lost, even though, os both a Jew and a feminist, I can subscribe neither to its theology nor to its hierarchy of sexual valuation. If, within its own terms (as I have been taught to understand them), the text manipulates my sensibilities and moves me to pleasure-as I will affirm it does-then, at least in part, that must be because, in spite of my real-world alienation from many of its basic tenets, I have been able to enter that text through interpretative strategieswhich allow me to 3TMurrayKrieger, Tlteory of Criticism: A Tradition and Its System(Baltimore:JohnsHopkins UniversiryPress, 19T6),p. 6 [Au.]

displace less comfortable observations with others to which I have been taught pleasurably to attend. Though some of my teachers may have called this process "learning to read the text prope rlyr" I have now come to see it as learning to effectively manipulate the critical strategieswhich they taught me so well. Knowitg, for example, the poem's debt to epic conventions, I am able to discover in it echoes and reworkings of both lines and situations from Virgil and Homer; placing it within the ongoing Christian debate between Good and Evil, I comprehend both the philosophic and the srylistic significance of Satan's ornate rhetoric as compared with God's majestic simplicity in Book III. But in each case,an interpretative mod el, akeady assumed,had guided my discovery of the evidence for it." \il7hen we consider the implications of these observationsfor the processesof canon formation and for the assignment of aesthetic value, we find ourselveslocked in a chicken-and-eggdilemffia, unable easily to distinguish as primary the importance of what we read as opposed to how we have learned to read it. For, simply put, we read well, and with pleasure, what we alre ady know how to read; and what we know how to read is to alarge extent dependent upon what we have already read (works from which we developed our expectations and learned our 'What we then choose interpretative strategies). to read-and, by extension, teach and thereby "canoniTs" -ssually follows upon our previous reading. Radical breaks are tiring, demanding, uncomfortable, and sometimes wholly beyond our comprehension. Though the argument is not usually couched in precisely these terms, a considerablesegmentof the most recent feminist rereadings of women writers allows the conclusion that, where those authors have dropped out of sight, it may be due not to any lack of merit in the work but, instead, to an incapacity of predominantly male readers to properly interpret and appreciate women's texts-due, in large part, to a lack of prior acquaintance. The fictions that women compose about the worlds they inhabit may owe a debt to prior, influential works by other women or, simply enough, to the daily ex38See StanleyE. Fish, "Normal Circumstances,Literal Language,Direct SpeechActs, the Ordinary,the-E_verydanlhe Obvious,\ghat Goeswithout Saying,and Other Special Cases," Critical Inquiry 4 (Summer ry78)z 627-28. [Au.]

Dancing through perience of the writer herself or, more usuallS to some combination of the two. The reader coming upon such fiction with knowledgr of neither its informing literary traditions nor its real-world contexts will find himself hard pressed, though he may recognize the words on the page, to competently decipher its intended meanings. And this is what makes the studies by Spacks, Moers, Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, and others so crucial. For,by attempting to delineate the connections and interrelations that make for a female literary tradition, they provide us invaluable aids for recognizing and understanding the unique literary traditions and sex-related contexts out of which women write. The (usually male) reader who, both by experience and by readirg, has never made acquaintance with those contexts-historicallS the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundrn and so on-will necessarilylack the capacity to fully interpret the dialogue or action embedded therein; for, as every good novelist knows, the meaning of any character's action or statement is inescapably a function of the specific situation in which it is embedded." Virginia Woolf therefore quite properly anticipated the male reader's disposition to write off what he could not understand, abandoning women's writings as offering "not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental becauseit differs from his own." In her r 9z9 essay "'Women and Fictionr" \(Ioolf grappled most obviously with the ways in which male writers and male subiect matter had already preempted the language of literature. Yet she was also tacitly commenting on the problem of (male) audience and conventional reading expectations when she speculated that the woman writer might well "find that she is perpetu ally wishing to alter the established make serious what apvalues [in literature]-to pears insignificant to a man, and trivial what is to 'competence' him important."oo "The necessaryfor understanding [a] literary message . . . depends upon a great number of codices," after all; as Cesare Segre has pointed out, to be competent, a reader must either share or at least be familiar with, "in addition to the code language . . . the codes 3elbid.,p. 6+1. [Au.] a0Virginia 'Woolf, "'W'omen and Fictionr" Granite and Rainbou: Essays(London: Hogarth Press,19S8),p. 8r.

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of custom, of society, and of conceptions of the world"ot (what \iloolf meant by "values"). Males ignorant of women's "values" or conceptions of the world will, necessarilS be poor readers of works that in any senserecapitulate their codes. The problem is further exacerbated when the language of the literary text is largely dependent upon figuration. For it can be argued, as Ted Cohen has showtr, that while "in gen eral, and with some obvious qualifications . . . all literal use of language is accessibleto all whose languageit is . . . figurative use can be inaccessibleto all but those who share information about one another's knowledge, beliefs, intentions, and attitudes." 42There was nothing fortuitous, for example, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's decision to situate the progressive mental breakdown and increasing incapacity of the protagonist of "The Yellow tU7allpaper"in an upstairs room that had once served as a nursery (with barred windows, no less).But a reader unacquainted with the ways in which women have traditionally inhabited a household might not take the initial description of the setting as semantically relevant, and the progressive infantilization of the adult protagonist would thereby lose some of its symbolic implications. Analogously, the contemporary poet who declares, along with Adrienne Rich, the need for "a whole new poetry beginning here" is acknowledging that the materials available for symbol ization and figuration from women's contexts will necessarlly differ from those that men have traditionally utilized. Vision begins to happen in such a life as if a woman quietly walked away from the argument and jargon in a room and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap bits of yarn, calico and ueluet scraps,

pultingthetenetso,fi rti together with no mere will to master!, only cAre for the many-liued, unending forms in which she finds herself.o' arCesareSegre,"Narrative Structuresand Literary History," Critical Inquiry 3 fDfinter r976): z7z-Zl. lfuu.l azTedCohen,"Metaphor andthe Cultivationof Intim acyr" Critical Inquiry (Fall 1978):9. [Au.] a3From Adrienne5Rich's "TranscendentalEtude," The Dream of a Common Language:Poemsrg74-rg77 (New York: '$(/.'$(/.Norton, rg78), pp. 76-ZZ.lAu.l

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then, is the fate of the woman writer reading community is composed competent whose only of members of her own sex? And what, then, the responseof the male critic who, on first looking into Virginia'Woolf or Doris Lessing,finds all of the interpretative strategiesat his command inadequate to a full and pleasurabledeciphering of their pages? HistoricallR the result has been the diminished status of women's products and their consequent absence from maior canons. Nowadays, however, by pointing out that the act of "interpreting languageis no more sexually neutral than languageuse or the language system itselfr" feminist students of language like Nelly Furman help us better understand the crucial linkage between our gender and our interpretative, or reading, strategies.Insisting reader [in] the upon "the contribution of the active attribution of significance to formal signifiers," ooFurman and others promise to shake us all-female and male alike-out of our canonized and conventional aesthetic assumptions. J. Since the grounds upon which we assign aestltetic ualue to texts dre neuer infallible, unchange' able, or uniuersal, we must reexamine not only our aesthetics but, as well, the inherent biases and assumptions informing the critical methods which (in part) shape our aestbetic responses. I am, on the one hand, arguing that men will be better readers, or appreciators, of women's books when they have read more of them (as women have always been taught to become astute readersof men's texts). On the other hand, it will be noted, the emphasisof my remarks shifts the act of critical iudgment from assigning aesthetic valuations to texts and directs it, instead, to ascertaining the adequacy of any interpretative paradig- to a full reading of both female and male writing. My third proposition-and, I admit, perhaps the most controversial-thus calls into question that recurrent tendency in criticism to establish norms for the evaluation of literary works when we might better serve the cause of literature by developing standards for evaluating the adequacy of our critical methods.otThis does not mean that I wish to discard aesthetic valuation. The aaFurman, p. r84. [Au.] "study of \(omen andLanguager" +s"A recurrenttendencyin criticismis the establishment of falsenorms for the evaluationof literary works," notes Robert Scholesrn Structuralismin Literature: An Introduction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, r974\, p. r3r. [Au.]

choice, as I see it, is not between retaining or discarding aesthetic values; rather, the choice is between having some awareness of what constitutes (at least in part) the basesof our aestheticresponses and going without such an awareness.For it is my view that insofar as aesthetic responsivenesscontinues to be an integral aspect of our human responsesystem-in part spontaneous,in part learned and educated-we will inevitably develop theories to help explain, formalize, or even initiate those responses. In challenging the adequacy of received critical opinion or the imputed excellence of established canons, feminist literary critics are essentiallyseeking to discover how aestheticvalue is assignedin the first place, where it resides (in the text or in the reader), and, most important, what validity may really be claimed by our aesthetic "judgments." 'What ends do those judgments serve, the feminist asks; and what conceptions of the world or ideological stances do they (even if unwittingly) help to perpetuate? In so doing, she points out' among other things, that any response labeled "aesthetic" may as easily designate some immediate experienced moment or event as it may designatea species of nostalgia, a yearning for the components of a simpler past when the world seemedknown or at least understandable. Thus the value accorded an opera or a Shakespeareplay may well reside in the viewer's immediate viewing pleasure, or it may reside in the play's nostalgic evocation of a once comprehensible and ordered world. At the same time, the feminist confronts, for example, the reader who simply cannot entertain the possibility that women's worlds are symbolically rich, the reader who, like the male characters in Susan Glaspell's r9r7 short story "A Jury of Her Peersr" has already assumed the innate "insignificance of kitchen things."ot Such a reader, she knows, will prove himself unable to assign significance to fictions that attend to "kitchen things" and will, instead, judge such fictions as trivial and as aesthetically wanting. For her to take useful issuewith such a reader, she must make clear that what appears to be a dispute about aesthetic merit is, in reality, a dispute about the contexts of o6For a full discussionof the Glaspell short story that takesthis probleminto account,pleaseseemy "A Map for Rereading:Genderand the Interpretationof Literary Texts," New Literary History rr (Springr98o)t 45r62. [Au.]

Dancing through the Minefield iudgment; and what is at issue, then, is the adequacy of the prior assumptions and reading habits brought to bear on the text. To put it bluntly: we have had enough pronouncements of aestheticvaluation for a time; it is now our task to evaluate the imputed norms and normative reading patterns that, in part, led to those pronouncements. By and large, I think I have made my point. Only to clarify it do I add this coda: when feminists turn their attention to the works of male authors which have traditionally been accorded high aesthetic value and, where warranted, follow olsen's advice that we assertour "right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrad€s,"ot such statements do not necessarily mean that we will end up with a diminished canon. To question the source of the aesthetic pleaures we have gained from reading Spenser,Shakespeare,Milton, and so on does not imply that we must deny those pleasures.It means only that aesthetic response is once more invested with epistemological, ethical, and moral concerns. It means, in other words, that readings of paradise Lost which analyze its complex hierarchal structures but fail ro nore the implications of gender within that hierarchy; or which insist upon the inherent (or even inspired) perfection of Milton'r figurative language but fail to note the consequences, for Eve, of her specifically gender-marked weakness, which, like the flowers she attends, requires "ptopping up"; ot which concentrateon the poem's thematic reworking of classical notions of martial and epic prowess into christian (moral) heroism but fail to note that Eve is srylistically edited out of that process-all such readings, however useful, will no longer be deemed wholly adequate. The pleasureswe had earlier learned to take in the poem will not be diminished therebR but they will become part of an altered reading attentiveness. THBsr three propositions I believe to be at the theoretical core of most current feminist literary criticism, whether acknowledged as such or not. If I am correct in this, then that criticism represents more than a profoundly skeptical stance toward all other preexisting and contemporaneous schools and methods, and more than an impassioned demand that the variety and variability of women's literary expression be taken into full account, rather aTOlsen, Silence.s, p. +S. [Au.]

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than written off as a caprice and exception, the irregularify in an otherwise regular design. It represents that locus in literary study where, in unceasing effort, female self-consciousnessturns in upon itself, attempting to grasp the deepestconditions of its own unique and multiplicitous realities, in the hope, eventuallS of altering the very forms through which the culture perceives,expresses,and knows itself. For, if what the larger women's movement looks for in the future is a transformation of the structures of primarily male power which now order our sociery, then the feminist literary critic demands that we understand the ways in which those structures have been-and continue to bereified by our literature and by our literary criticism. Thus, along with other "radical" critics and critical schools, though our focus remains the power of the word to both structure and mirror human experience,our overriding commitment is to a radical alteration-an improvement, we hope-in the nature of that experience. what distinguishes our work from those similarly oriented "social consciousness"critiques, it is said, is its lack of systematic coherence. Pitted against, for example, psychoanalytic or Marxist readings, which owe a decisive share of their persuasivenessto their apparent internal consistencyas a system, the aggregateof feminist literary criticism appears woefully deficienr in system and painfully lacking in program. It is, in fact, from all quarrers, the most telling defect alleged against us, the most explosive threat in the minefield. And my own earlier observation that, as of 1976, feminist literary criticism appeared "more like a set of interchangeable strategies than any coherent school or shared goal orientation" has been taken by some as an indictment, by others as a statement of impatience. Neither was intended. I felt then, as I do now, that this would "prove both its stren gth and its weaknesSr"ot in the sensethat the apparent disarray would leave us vulnerable to the kind of obiection I have just alluded ro; while the fact of our diversity would finally place us securely where, all along, we should have been: camped out, on the far side of the minefield, with the other pluralists and pluralisms. In our heart of hearts, of course, most critics are really structuralists (whether or not they accept the a8Annette Kolodry, "Literary criticism," Review Essay, Signsz (S7inter1976): 4zo.[A".]

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label) becausewhat we are seeking are patterns (or structures) that can order and explain the otherwise inchoatel thus, we invent, or believewe discover,relational patternings in the texts we read which promise transcendencefrom difficulry and perplexity to clarity and coherence.But, as I have tried to argue in thesepages,to the imputed "truth" or "ac' curacy" of these findings the feminist must oppose the painfully obvious truism that what is attended to in a literary work, and hence what is reported about it, is often determined not so much by the work itself as by the critical technique or aesthetic criteria through which it is filtered or, rather, read and decoded. All the feminist is asserting, then, is her own equivalent right to liberate new (and perhaps different) significancesfrom these same texts; and at the same time, her right to choosewhich features of a text she takes as relevant becauseshe is, after all, asking new and different questions of it. In the process, she claims neither definitiveness nor structural completenessfor her different readings and reading systems, but only their usefulnessin recognizing the particular achievementsof womanas-author and their applicability in conscientiously decodingwoman-as-sign. That these alternate foci of critical attentiveness will render alternate readings or interpretations of the same text-even among feminists-should be no cause for alarm. Such developments illustrate only the pluralist contention that "in approaching a text of any complexity . . . the reader must choose to emphasize certain aspects which seem to him crucial," and that "in fact, the variery of readings which we have for many works is a function of the selection of crucial aspects made by the variety of readers." Robert Scholes, from whom I have been quoting, goes so far as to assert that "there is 'right' reading for any complex literary no single work," and, following the Russian formalist school, he observesthat "we do not speak of readings that are simply true or false, but of readings that are more or lessrich, strategiesthat are more or lessappropria te." oe Because those who share the term "feminist" nonethelesspractice a diversity of critical strategies,leading, in some cases,to quite different readings, we must acknowledge among ourselves that sister critics, "having chosen to tell a aeScholes, in Literature,pp. r 44-45. These Structuralism comments appear within his explication of Tzvetan Todorov'stheoryof reading.[Au.]

different story, may in their interpretation identify different aspects of the meanings conveyed by the samepassage."to Adopting a "pluralist" label does not mean, however, that we ceaseto disagree; it means only that we entertain the possibility that different readings, even of the same text, may be differently useful, even illuminating, within different contexts of inquiry. It means, in effect, that we enter a dialectical process of examining, testing, even trying out the contexts-be they prior critical assumptions or explicitly stated ideological stances (ot some combination of the two)-that led to the disp aratereadings. Not all will be equally acceptableto every one of us, of course, and even those prior assumptions or ideologies that are acceptablemay call for further refinement or clarification. But at the very least, because we will have grappled with the assumptions that led to it, we will be better able to articulate why we find a particular reading or interpretation adequate or inadequate.This kind of dialectical process,moreover, not only makes us more fully aware of what criticism is, and how it functions; it also givesus accessto its future possibilities,making us conscious,as R. P. Blackmur put it, "of what 6(of what can be done next, or done we have doner" again;" " or, I would add, of what can be done differently. To put it still another way: iust becausewe will no longer tolerate the specifically sexist omissions and oversights of earlier critical schools and methods does not mean that, in their stead, w€ must establish our own "party line." In my view, our purpose is not and should not be the formulation of any single reading method or potentially Procrustean set of critical procedures nor, even less,the generation of prescriptive catego50I borrow this concisephrasingof pluralisticmodesry from M. H. Abrams's "The DeconstructiveAngel," of the g 1977):4zT.lndications Criticallnquiry 3 (Sprin pluralismthat was to mark feministinquiry wereto be collectedby SusanKopfound in the diversiryof essays anher earlyand groundbreaking pelmancornillon for .Women in Fiction:FeministPerspecthologS Imagesof tiues(BowlingGreen,Ohio: BowlingGreenUniversity PopularPress,rgTz). [Au.] 51R.P.Blackmur,"A Burdenfor Critics,"HudsonReuiew r (Summerrg48\, ryr. Blackmur,of course,was referof ring to the way in which criticismmakesus conscious I am how art functions;I usehis wordingherebecause must alsobe focused arguingthat that sameawareness he avers,"is On the critical act itself."Consciousnessr" the way we feelthe critic'sburden." [Au.]

Dancing through the Minefield ries for some dreamed-of-nonsexistliterary canon.tt Instead, as I seeit, our task is to initiate nothing less than a playful pluralism, responsiveto the possibilities of multiple critical schools and methods, but captive of none, recognizing that the many tools needed for our analysis will necessarilybe largely inherited and only partly of our own making. Only by employing a pluraliry of methods will we prorecr ourselves from the temptation of so oversimplifying any text-and especially those particularly offensive to us-that we render ourselves unresponsive to what Scholes has called "its various systems of meaning and their interaction." " Ary text we deem worthy of our critical attention is usu ally, after all, a locus of many and varied kinds of (personal, thematic, stylistic, structural, rhetorical) relationships. So, whether we tend to treat a text as a mimesi.s,in which words are taken to be re-creating or representing viable worlds; or whether we prefer to treat a text as a kind of equation of communication, in which decipherablemessagesare passedfrom writers to readers; and whether we locate meaning as inherent in the text, in the act of reading, or in some collaboration between reader and text-whatever our predilection, let us not generate from it a straightjacket that limits the scope of possible analysis. Rather, let us generatean ongoing dialogue of competing potential possibilities-among feminists and, as well, between feminists and nonfeminist critics. The difficul ty of what I describe does not escape me. The very idea of pluralism seemsto threaten a kind of chaos for the future of literary inquiry while, at the same time, it seemsto deny the hope of establishing some basic conceptual model which can organrze all data-the hope which always begins any analytical exercise. My effort here, however, has been to demonstrate the essential delusions that inform such obiections: if literary inquiry has historically escapedchaos by establishing canons, then it has only substituted one mode of arbiftary action for another-and in this case, at the expense of half the population. And if feminists openly acknowledge ourselves as pluralists, then we do not give up the search for patterns of opposition 52I have earlier elaboratedmy objection prescriptive to c_ategories for literature in "The Feminist as Literary Critic," Critical Response,Critical Inquiry z (Summer 1976):827-28. [Au.] s3Scholes, Structuralismin Literature, pp. r j r - 5z. [Au.]

5r r

and connection-probably the basis of thinking irself; what we give up is simply the arrogance of claiming that our work is either exhaustive or definitive. (It is, after all, the identical arrogance we are asking our nonfeminist colleagues to abandon.) If this kind of pluralism appears to threaten both the present coherence of and the inherited aesthetic criteria for a canon of "greatsr" then, as I have earlier argued, it is precisely that threat which alone can free us from the prejudices, the strictures, and the blind spots of the past. In feminist hands, I would add, it is less a threat than a promise. 'v7hat unites and repeatedly invigorares feminist literary criticism, then, is neither dogma nor method but an acute and impassioned attentiueness to the ways in which primarily male structures of power are inscribed (or encoded) within our literary inheritance; the consequences of that encoding for women-as characters, as readers, and as writers; and, with that, a shared analytic concern for the implications of that encoding nor only for a better understanding of the past but also for an improved reordering of the present and future. If that concern identifies feminist literary criticism as one of the many academic arms of the larger women's movement, then that attentiveness,within the halls of academe, poses no less a challenge for change, generating as it does the three propositions explored here. The critical pluralism that inevitably follows upon those three propositions, however, bears little resemblance to what Robinson has called "the greatest bourgeois theme of all, the myth of pluralism, with its consequent rejection of ideological commitment as 'too simple' to embrace the (necessarily complex) truth ." s4Only ideological commitment could have gotten us to enter the minefield, putting in jeopardy our careersand our livelihood. Only the power of ideology to rransform our conceptual worlds, and the inspiration of that ideology to liberate long-suppressedenergies and emotions, can account for our willingness to take on critical tasks that, in an earlier decade, would have been "abandoned in despair or apathy." tt The factof dif5aLillians. Robinson,"Dwelling in Decencies: Radical criticism and the FeministPerspective," collegeEnglish 32 (May rgTr); reprintedin Sex, Class,and Culture, p. rr. [Au.] s5"Ideology bridgesthe emotional gapbetween things as they are and as one would havethem be, thus ensuring the performanceof rolesthat might otherwisebe aban-

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ferences among us proves only that, despite our shared commitments, we have nonetheless refused to shy away from complexity, preferring to disagree openly rather than to give up either intellectual honesty or hard-won insights. Finally, I would argue, pluralism informs feminist literary inquiry not simply as a description of what already exists but, more importantln as the only critical stance consistent with the current status of the larger women's movement. Segmentedand variously focused, the different women's organizations neither espouseany single system of analysisnor, as a result, expressany wholly shared, consistently articulated ideology. The ensuing loss in effective organization and political clout is a serious one, but it has not been paralyzing; in spite of our differences, we have united to act in areas of clear mutual concern. The trade-off, as I seeit, has made possible an ongoing and educative dialectic of analysis and proffered solutions, protecting us thereby from the inviting traps of reductionism and dogma. And so long as this dialogue remains active, both our politics and criticism will be free of dogma-but never, I hope, of feminist ideology, in all its variery. For, "whatever else ideologies may be-projections of unacknowledged fears, disguises for ulterior motives, phatic expressionsof group solidarrty" (and the women's movement, to date, has certainly been all of these, and more)-whatever ideologies express, they arq as Geertz astutely observes,"most distinctivelS maps of problematic social reality and matrices for the creation of collective conscience." And despite the fact that "ideological advocates . . . tend as much to obscure as to clarify the true nature of the problems involv€dr" as Geertz notes, "they at least call attention to their existenceand, by polarizingissues, make continued neglect more difficult. Without Marxist attack, there would have been no labor reform; without Black Nationalists, no delib'Without SenecaFalls, I would add, erate speed."" no enfranchisement of women, and without "consciousnessraisingr" no feminist literary criticism nor, even less,women's studies. doned in despair or apathy," Geertz comments in "Ideology as a Cultural System," p. zoS. [Au.] 55lbid., pp. zzo, Lo5. [Au.]

IdeologS however, only truly manifests its power by ordering the sutm of our actions.sTIf feminist criticism calls anything into question, it must be that dog-eared myth of intellectual neutrality. For what I take to be the underlying spirit or messageof any consciously ideologically premised criticismthat is, that ideas are important becausethey determine the ways we live, or want to live, in the vitiated by confining those ideas to the world-is studS the classroom, or the pages of our books. To write chapters decrying the sexual stereoryping of women in our literature, while closing our eyes to the sexual harassment of our women students and colleagues; to display Katherine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell in our courses on "The Image of 'Woman in Film," while the Independent Career managing not to notice the paucity of female woman administrators on our own campus; to study the women who helped make universal enfranchisement a politi cal reality, while keeping silent about our activist colleagueswho are denied promotion or tenurel to include segments on "'Women in the Labor Movement" in our American studies or women's studies courses,while remaining willfully ignorant of the department secretary frred for her efforts to organize a clerical workers' union; to glory in the delusions of "merit," "privileger" and "status" which accompany campus life in order to insulate ourselvesfrom the millions of women who labor in poverty-aLl this is not merely hypocritical; it destroys both the spirit and the meaning of what we are about. It puts us, however unwittingly, in the service of those who laid the minefield in the first place. In my view, it is a fine thing for many of us, individuallS to have traversed the minefield; but that h"ppy circumstance will only prove of lasting importance if, together, we expose it for what it is (the male fear of sharing power and significance with women) and deactivate its components, so that others, after us, may literally dance through the minefield. 57I here follow Frederic Jameson'sview in The PrisonHouseof Language:A Critical Account of Structuralism and RussianFormalism(Princeton,N.J.: PrincetonUniversityPiess,1974),p.ro7: "Ideologywould seemto be that grillwork of form, convention,and belief which ordersour actions."[Au.]

CliffordGeertz b. r9z6

HE INCLUSIONof "Blurred Genret" by Clifford Geertz, an anthropologist and professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study at

Princeton,is itself an exampleof the phenomenonthe essaydescribes.The work of Geertz and other anthropologists (such as Marcel Mauss, claude L6uistrauss,victor Turner, Edmund Leach,and others)has beenof compellinginterestto critics uneasywith the theoreticalconstraintsof aestheticformalism or the perceivedsterility of traditional "approaches" to literature. The irony that the essayalsodescribesis that anthropologists(suchas,for example,Geertz,Turner, Leach,and others)havebeenprey to similar dissatisfactionswith methodsand theories in the social sciences,leading to an interest in the interpretive, textbaseddisciplinesof literary study and criticism. Thus there is a mutuality of interest-and perhapspuzzlement,if not alarm-in the convergenceof the social and literary disciplines. Geeftzis of specialinterest for severalreasons,not the least of which is his remarkablegift for lively,interestingprose.It seemsnatural enoughthat with his writedy senseof the text, he should find it congenialto treat cultural phenomena as texts. As he saysin defenseof the generalstrategy,treating such things as a cockfight as a text insteadof a rite or a pastimebrings out an important feature: "its useof emotion for cognitive ends" (The Interpretation of Cuhures UgZZl, p.++il. r07hilethis remark highlights a fearureof critical practice (and literary texts) that can easily be taken for granted, it also indicatesone of the reasons why anthropologicalmethodsmay be appealingto critics. At leastfrom the outside,anthropologyappearsas a comprehensive,totalizing discipline,in intent if not in practice, free to examine the range of human behavior and institutions from the cockfight to the college of cardinals, and to do so in the manner that strivesto eliminateprejudice (or prejudicial ideology) by the intimate acquaintance of fieldwork. In this respect,the work of the anthropologist appearsro servecognitiveendsthat are frequentlyblockedwhen the text is alreadygiven as such, inasmuchas the anthropologistin the field must first constitute affairs of culture as texts in which the emotive and cognitive are joined. As Geertznotes elsewhere(Times Literary Supplement,June7, r98 j), this very presumptionis, within the professionalranks, a worrisome point indeed-on the grounds that fieldwork ("me anthropologist,you native," as Geertzdeftly puts it) may be neither rigorous nor even decent. lhile there may be other cautions (such as the reservationsexpressedby FredricJamesonin "The Ideologyof the Text,', Salmagundi3r-3L [rgZS]),the "blurring of genres"Geertzdescribesin this essayrepresentsan important cir513

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Crrrrono Grrnrz cumstancefor contemporary theory in the humanities and social sciences. Geertz'saccountof the;'refiguration'i of socialthought usesthe mild rhetoric of where one might saythe samethings in the mood worry and ironic "-ur.-.nt, in the latter case,one might be tempted to take is that, of crisis.The difference premature steps to resolution before the true least at or desperatemeasures, was clear. shapeof the situation When Geertz suggestsin this essaSfor example,that "a challengeis being mounted to someoithe cetttral assumptionsof mainstreamsocial science"by advocatesof interpretivetext-analogicalmethods,the "sea change"he predicts if presenttrendscontinuehas no predictableshape-partly becausesomeof the central assumptionsof mainstreaminterpretivedisciplinesare being called into questionpreciselybecausethey haveignoredissuesof socialstructureand social .h"rg.. Indeed,as Geertzsays,"It will take the wariest of wary reasonings,on all sidesof the divide' to get it clearer." Geertz'smaior works include Tbe lnterpretation of Cultures(1973); Kinship in Bali (with Hildred Geertz)(tgZil; and Local Knowledge:SelectedEssaysin lnterpretiueAnthropology (rS8I ).

GENRES: BLI.JRRED THEREFIGURATION OF SOCIALTHOUGHT I Certain truths about the social sciencestoday seem self-evident. One is that in recent years there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in social science, 2s in intellectual life generallS and such blurring of kinds is continuing apace. Another is that many social scientists have turned away from a laws-and-instancesideal of explanation toward a cases-and-interpretationsone, looking less for the sort of thing that connects planets and pendulums and more for the sort that connects chrysanthemums and swords. Yet another truth is that analogies drawn from the humanities are coming to play the kind of role in sociological understanding that BLURRED GENRES: THE REFIGURATION OF SOCIAL THoucHr first appeared in The American Scholar 49 (Spring r98o), @ r98o by the United Chapters of Phi.Beta Kappa-.Reprinted by permission of The American Scholar and Clifford Geertz.

analogies drawn from the crafts and technology have long played in physical understanding. I not only think these things are true, I think they are true together; and the culture shift that makes them so is the subject of this essay:the refiguration of social thought. This genre blurring is more than iust a matter of Harry Houdini or Richard Nixon turning up as characters in novels or of midwestern murder sprees described as though a gothic romancer had imagined them. It is philosophical inquiries looking like literary criticism (think of Stanley Cavell' on Beckett or Thoreau, Sartre on Flaubert), scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceAux (Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley), baroque fantasies presented as deadpan empirical observations (Borges, Barthelme), histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony (Fogel and Engerman, Le Roi Ladurie), documentaries that read like true confessions (Mailer), parables posing as ethnographies (Castenada), theoretical treatises set out as ffavelogues (Ldvi-Strauss),' ideological arguments cast as historiographical inquiries (Edward Said),' epistemological studies constructed like political tracts (Paul Feyerabend), methodological poleml SeeCauell. [Eds.] 2SeeLdui-Strarzss. [Eds.] 3SeeSaid. [Eds.]

Blurred Genres:The Refigurationof SocialThought 'Watson). ics got up as personal memoirs (James Nabokov's Pale Fire, that impossible object made of poetry and fiction, footnotes and images from the clinic, seems very much of the time; one waits only for quantum theory in verse or biography in algebra. Of course, to a certain extent this sort of thing has always gone on-Lucretius, Mandeville, and Erasmus Darwin o alI rnade their theories rhyme. But the present jumblin g of varieties of discourse has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors (Iflhat is Foucault'historian, philosopher, political theorist? What philosopher, socioloThomas Kuhnt-historian, gist of knowledge?) or to classify works (rU7hatis George Steiner's After Babel-linguistics, criticism, culture history? What \Tilliam Gass's On Being Blue-treatise, causerie,apologetic?).And thus it is more than a matter of odd sports and occasional curiosities, or of the admitted fact that the innovative is, by definition, hard to categorize.It is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeingis not just another redrawing of the cultural map-the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes-but an alteration of the principles of mapping. Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. 'We need not accept hermetic views of 1criture as so many signs signing signs, or give ourselves so wholly to the pleasure of the text that its meaning disappearsinto our responses,to seethat there has come into our view of what we read and what we write a distinctly democratical temper. The properties connecting texts with one another, that put them, ontologically anyway, on the same level, are coming to seem as important in characterizing them as those dividing them; and rather than face an array of natural kinds, fixed types divided by sharp qualitative differences,we more and more see ourselvessurrounded by ^ vast, almost continuous aTitusLucretiusCarus(ca. gg-5 j B.c.),Romanphilosopher, wrote On the Nature of Thingsin verse;Bernard Mandeville(167o-173j), Englishauthorandphysician, authorof The Fableof the Bees(tZt41 ErasmusDarwin (tll r-r8oz), Englishphysicianand writer,expounded the botanicalsystemof Linnaeusin a long poem,The BotanicalGarden(rZ8g-9r). [Eds.] 5SeeFoucault [Eds.] 5SeeKuhn. [Eds.]

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field of variously intended and diversely constructed works we can order only practic ally, relationallR and as our purposes prompt us. It is not that we no longer have convintions of interpretation; we have enough jerry-builtmore than ever, built-often to accommodate a situation at once fluid, plural, uncentered, and ineradicably untidy. So far as the social sciences are concerned, all this means that their oft-lamented lack of character no longer sets them apart. It is even more difficult than it always has been to regard them as underdeveloped natural sciences,awaiting only time and aid from more advanced quarters to harden them, or as ignorant and pretentious usurpers of the mission of the humanities, promising certainties where none can be, or as comprising a clearly distinctive enterprise, a third culture between Snow's canonical two. But that is all to the good: freed from having to become taxonomically upstanding, becausenobody else is, individuals thinking of themselvesas social (or behavioral or human or cultural) scientistshave become free to shape their work in terms of its necessitiesrather than received ideas as to what they ought or ought not to be doing. S(rhat Clyde Kluckhohn once said about anthropology-that it's an intellectual poaching license-not only seemsmore true now than when he said it, but true of a lot more than anthropology. Born omniforffi, the social sciencesprosper as the condition I have been describing becomesgeneral. It has thus dawned on social scientiststhat they did not need to be mimic physicists or closet humanists or to invent some new realm of being to serve as the obiect of their investigations. Instead they could proceed with their vocation, trying to discover order in collective life, and decide how what they were doing was connected to related enterpriseswhen they managed to get some of it done; and many of them have taken an essentially hermeneutis-e1, if that word frightens, conjuring up images of biblical zealots, literary humbugs, and Teutonic professors, an "interplslivs"-approach to their task. Given the new genre dispersion, many have taken other approaches: structuralism, neopositivism, neo-Marxism, micro-micro descriptivism, macro-macro system building, and that curious combination of common sense and common nonsense,sociobiology. But the move toward conceiving the social life as organized in terms of symbols (signs, representations, signifiants; Darstell-

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ungen. . . the terminology varies), whose meaning (sense, import, signifi.cation, Bedeutung . . .) we must grasp if we are to understand that organrzation and formulate its principles, has grown by now to formidable proportions. The woods are full of eagerinterpreters. Interpretive explanation-and it is a form of explanation, not just exalted glossography-trains its attention on what institutions, actions, images, utterances, events, customs, all the usual objects of social-scientific interest, mean to those whose institutions, actions, customs, and so on they are. As a result, it issues not in laws like Boyle's, or forces like Volta's, or mechanisms like Darwin's, but in constructions like Burckhardt's,'Weber's,or Freud's: systematic unpackings of the conceptual world in which condottiere, Calvinists, or paranoids live. The manner of these constructions itself varies: 'Weber models, Freud diagBurckhardt portrays, noses.But they all represent attempts to formulate how this people or that, this period or that, this person or that, makes senseto itself and, understanding that, what we understand about social order, historical change,or psychic functioning in general. Inquiry is directed toward casesor setsof cases,and toward the particular features that mark them off; but its aims are as far-reaching as those of mechanics or physiology: to distinguish the materials of human experience. \fith such aims and such a manner of pursuing them come as well some novelties in analytical rhetoric, the tropes and imageries of explanation. As theorR scientific or otherwise, moves mainly by analogy, a "seeing-as" comprehensionof the lessintelligible by the more (the earth is a magnet, the heart is a pump, light is a wave, the brain is a computer, and space is a balloon), when its course shifts, the conceits in which it expressesitself shift with it. In the earlier stagesof the natural sciences, before the analogiesbecameso heavily intramuraland in those (cybernetics,neurology) in which they still have not-it has been the world of the crafts and, later, of industry that has for the most part provided the well-understood realities (well-understood because, certum quod factum, 4S Vico said, man had made them) ' with which the ill-understood ones (ill-understood becausehe had not) could be brought into the circle of the known. Scienceowes TSeeCTSP,pp.z94-3or. [Eds.]

more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science; without the dyer's art there would be no chemistry; metallurgy is mining theorized. In the social sciences,or at least in those that have abandoned a reductionist conception of what they are about, the analogiesare coming more and more from the contrivances of cultural performance than theater, from those of physical manipulation-from painting, grammar, literature, law, play. What the lever did for physics, the chessmove promises to do for sociology. Promises are not always kept, of course, and when they are, they often turn out to have been threats; but the casting of social theory in terms more familiar to gamestersand aestheticiansthan to plumbers and engineersis clearly well under way. The recourse to the humanities for explanatory analogies in the social sciencesis at once evidence of the destabilization of genres and of the rise of "the interpretive turn," and their most visible outcome is a revised sfyle of discoursein social studies. The instruments of reasoning are changing and society is less and lessrepresentedas an elaborate machine or a quasi-organism than as a serious game,a sidewalk drama, or a behavioral text.

il All this fiddling around with the proprieties of composition, inquiry, and explanation represents, of course, a radical alteration in the sociological imagination, propelling it in directions both difficult and unfamiliar. And like all such changes in fashions of the mind, it is about as likely to lead to obscurity and illusion as it is to precision and truth. If the result is not to be elaborate chatter or the higher nonsense,a critical consciousnesswill have to be developed; and as so much more of the imagery, method, theorS and style is to be drawn from the humanities than previously, it will mostly have to come from humanists and their apologists rather than from natural scientists and theirs. That humanists, after years of regarding social scientistsas technologists, or interlopers, are ill equipped to do this is something of an understatement. Social scientists, having just freed themselves, and then only partially, from dreams of social physics-covering laws, unified science,operationalism, and all that -are hardly any better equipped. For

Blurred Genres:The Refigurationof SocialThought them, the general muddling of vocational identities could not have come at a better time. If they are going to develop systems of analysis in which such conceptions as following a rule, constructing a representation, expressing an attitude, or forming an intention are going to play central roles-rather than such conceptions as isolating a cause, determining a variable, measuring a force, or defining a are going to need all the help they function-they can get from people who are more at home among such notions than they are. It is not interdisciplinary brotherhood that is needed, nor even less highbrow eclecticism. It is recognition on all sides that the lines grouping scholars together into intellectual communities, or (what is the same thing) sorting them out into different ones, are these days running at some highly eccentric angles. The point at which the reflections of humanists on the practices of social scientistsseemsmost urgent is with respect to the deployment in social analysisof models drawn from humanist domainsthat "wary reasoning from analogS" as Locke called it, that "leads us often into the discovery of truths and useful productions, which would otherwise lie concealed." (Locke was talking about rubbing two sticks together to produce fire and the atomic-friction theory of heat, though business partnership and the social contract would have served him as well.) Keeping the reasoning wary, thus useful, thus true, is, as we say, the name of the game. The game analogy is both increasingly popular in contemporary social theory and increasingly in need of critical examination. The impetus for seeing one or another sort of social behavior as one or another sort of game has come from a number of sources (not excluding, perhaps, the prominence of spectator sports in mass society). But the most important are \Tittgenstein's conception of forms of life as language games, Huizinga's ludic view of culture, and the new strategies of von Neumann's and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behauior. From \il(rittgensteinhas come the notion of intentional action as "following a rule"; from Huizin ga, of play as the paradigm form of collective life; from von Neumann and Morgenstern, of social behavior as a reciprocative maneuvering toward distributive payoffs. Taken together they conduce to a nervous and nervous-making sfyle of interpretation in the social sciencesthat mixes a strong sense

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of the formal orderliness of things with an equally strong sense of the radical arbitrariness of that order: chessboard inevitability that could as well have worked out otherwise. The writings of Erving Goffman-perhaps the most celebrated American sociologist right now, and certainly the most ingenious-rest, for example, almost entirely on the game analogy. (Goffman also employs the language of the stage quite extensivelR but as his view of the theater is that it is an oddly mannered kind of interaction game-Ping-Pong in masks-his work is not, at base, really dramaturgical.) Goffman applies game imagery to just about everything he can lay his hands on, which, as he is no respecter of property rights, is a very great deal. The to-and-fro of lies, meta-lies, unbelievable truths, threats, tortures, bribes, and blackmail that comprisesthe world of espionageis construed as an "expression game" ; a carnival of deceptions rather like life in general, because,in a phrase that could have come from Conrad or Le Carrlr "agents [are] a little like us all and all of us [are] a little like agents." Etiquette, diplom dcy, crime, finance, advertising, law, seduction, and the everyday "realm of bantering decorum" are seen as "information games" -1v1avy structures of players, teams, moves, positions, signals, information states,gambles, and outcomes, in which only the "game-worthy" those willing and able "to dissemble about anything"-prosper. \Ufhat goes on in a psychiatric hospital, or any hospital or prison or even a boarding school in Goffman's work is a "ritual game of having a selfr" where the staff holds most of the face cards and all of the trumps. A t€te-i-t€te, a jury deliberation, "a task jointly pursued by persons physically close to one anotherr" a couple dancing, lovemaking, or boxing-indeed all face-to-face encounters-are games in which, "as every psychotic and comic ought to know, any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeveof immediate reality." Social conflict, deviance, entrepreneurship, sex roles, religious rites, status ranking, and the simple need for human acceptanceget the same treatment. Life is just a bowl of strategies. Or, perhaps better, as Damon Runyon once remarked, it is three-to-two against. For the image of society that emerges from Goffman's work, and from that of the swarm of scholars who in one way or another follow or depend on him, is of an un-

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broken stream of gambits, ploys, artifices, bluffs, disguises,conspiracies,and outright impostures as individuals and coalitions of individuals strugglesometimes cleverlS more often comically-to play enigmatical games whose structure is clear but whose point is not. Goffman's is a radically unromantic vision of things, acrid and bleakly knowing, and one which sits rather poorly with traditional humanistic pieties. But it is no less powerful for that. Nor, with its uncomplaining play-it-as-it-lays ethic, is it all that inhumane. However that may be, not all gamelike conceptions of social life are quite so grim, and some are 'What connects them all is the positively frolicsome. view that human beings are less driven by forces than submissiveto rules, that the rules are such as to suggeststrategies,the strategiesare such as to inspire actions, and the actions are such as to be selfrewarding-pour le sporf. As literal games-baseball or poker or Parcheesi-create little universesof meaning, in which some things can be done and some cannot (you can't castle in dominoes), so too do the analogical ones of worship, government, or sexual courtship (you can't mutiny in a bank). Seeingsociety as a collection of gamesmeans seeing it as a grand pluraliry of acceptedconventions and appropriate procedures-tight, airless worlds of move and countermove, life en rigle. "I wonderr" Prince Metternich is supposedto have said when an aide whispered into his ear at a royal ball that the czar of all the Russianswas dead, "I wonder what his motive could have been." The game analogy is not a view of things that is likely to commend itself to humanists, who like to think of people not as obeying the rules and angling for advantage but as acting freely and realizing their finer capacities. But that it seemsto explain a great deal about a great many aspects of modern life, and in many ways to catch its tone, is hardly deniable. ("If you can't stand the Machiavellianismr" as a recent New Yorker cartoon said, "g.t out of the cabal.") Thus if it is to be countered it cannot be by mere disdain, refusing to look through the telescope,or by passionedrestatementsof hallowed truths, quoting scripture against the sun. It is necessary to get down to the details of the matter, to examine the studies and to critique the interpretaGoffman's of crime as character tions-whether gambling, Harold Garfinkel's of sex change as identity plaS Gregory Bateson'sof schizophrenia as rule

confusion, or my own of the complicated goings-on in a mideastern bazaar as an information contest. As social theory turns from propulsive metaphors (the languageof pistons) toward ludic ones (the language of pastimes),the humanities are connected to its arguments not in the fashion of skeptical bystanders but, as the source of its imagery, chargeable accomplices.

m The drama analogy for social life has of course been around in a casual sort of way-all the world's a stageand we but poor playerswho strut and so onfor avery long time. And terms from the stage,most notably "role," have been staplesof sociological discourse since at least the rgjos. til7hat is relatively new-new, not unprecedented-are two things. First, the full weight of the analogy is coming to be applied extensively and systematically, rather than being deployed piecemeal fashion-a few allusions here, a few tropes there. And second, it is coming to be applied less in the depreci atory "mere show," masks and mummery mode that has tended to charactenze its general use, and more in a constructional, genuinely dramaturgical one-making, not fakirg, as the anthropologist Victor Turner has put ir. The two developments are linked, of course. A constructionalist view of what theater is-that is, poiesis-implies that a dramatistic perspective in the social sciences needs to involve more than pointing out that we all have our entrances and exits, we all play parts, miss cues,and love pretense. lt may or may not be a Barnum and Bailey world and we may or may not be walking shadows, but to take the drama analogy seriously is to probe behind such familiar ironies to the expressivedevicesthat make collective life seemanything at all. The trouble with analogies-it is also their glory-is that they connect what they compare in both directions. Having trifled with theater'sidiom, some social scientists find themselvesdrawn into the rather tangled coils of its aesthetic. Such a more thoroughgoing exploitation of the drama analogy in social theory-as an analogy, not an incidental metaphor-has grown out of sources in the humanities not altogether commensurable. On the one hand, there has been the so-calledritual

Blurred Genres:The Refigurationof SocialThought theory of drama associated with such diverse figures as Jane Harrison, Francis Fergusson, T. S. Eliot,t and Antonin Artaud. On the other, there is the symbolic action-"dramatismr" as he calls itof the American literary theorist and philosopher Kenneth Burke,t whose influence is, in the United States anyway, at once enormous and-because almost no one actually uses his baroque vocabulary, with its reductions, ratios, and so on-elusive. The trouble is, these approachespull in rather opposite directions: the ritual theory toward the affinities of theater and religion-drama as communion, the temple as stage; the symbolic action theory toward those of theater and rhetoric-drama as persuasion, the platform as stage.And this leavesthe basis of the analogy-just what in the theatron is like what in the agora-hard to focus. That liturgy and ideology are histrionic is obvious enough, 3s it is that etiquette and advertising are. But fust what that means is a good deal less so. Probably the foremost proponent of the ritual theory approach in the social sciences right now is Victor Turner. A British formed, American reformed anthropologist, Turner, in a remarkable series of works trained on the ceremonial life of a Central African tribe, has developed a conception of "social drama" as a regenerative process that, rather like Goffman's of "social gaming" as strategic interaction, has drawn to it such a large number of able researchersas to produce a distinct and powerful interpretive school. 'oon For Turner, social dramas occur all levels of social organization from state to family." They arise out of conflict situations-a village falls into factions, a husband beats a wife, a region rises against the state-and proceed to their denouements through publicly performed conventionalized behavior. As the conflict swells to crisis and the excited fluidity of heightened emotion, where people feel at once more enclosed in a common mood and loosened from their social moorings, ritualized forms of authority-litigation, feud, sacrifice, prayer-are invoked to contain it and render it orderly. If they succeed,the breach is healed and the status euo, or something resembling it, is restored; if they do not, it is acceptedas incapable of remedy and things fall apart into various sorts of 8SeeCTSP,pp. 784-90. [Eds.] eSeeCTSP,pp. 942- 47. [Eds.]

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unhappy endings: migrations, divorces, or murders in the cathedral. S7ith differing degreesof strictness and detail, Turner and his followers have applied this schema to tribal passage rites, curing ceremonies, and judicial processes;to Mexican insurrections, Icelandic sagas,and Thomas Becket'sdifficulties with Henry II; to picaresquenarrative, millenarian movements,Caribbean carnivals, and Indian peyote hunts; and to the political upheaval of the sixties. A form for all seasons. This hospitablenessin the face of casesis at once the major strength of the ritual theory version of the drama analogy and its most prominent weakness.It can expose some of the profoundest features of social process, but at the expense of making vividly disparate matters look drably homogeneous. Rooted as it is in the repetitive performance dimensions of social action-the reenactment and thus the reexperiencing of known form-the ritual theory not only brings out the temporal and collective dimensions of such action and its inherently public nature with particular sharpness; it brings out also its power to transmute not just opinions, but, as the British critic Charles Morgan has said with respect to drama proper, the people who hold them. "The great impact [of the theater]r" Morgan writes, "is neither a persuasionof the intellect nor a beguiling of the senses.. . . It is the enveloping movement of the whole drama on the soul of man. 'We surrender and are changed." Or at least we are when the magic works. \What Morgan, in another fine phrase, calls "the suspenseof form . . . the incompletenessof a known completion," is the source of the power of this "enveloping movementr" a power, as the ritual theorists have shown, that is hardly lessforceful (and hardly lesslikely to be seen as otherworldly) when the movement appears in a female initiation rite, a peasant revolution, a national epic, or a star chamber. Yet these formally similar processeshave different content. They say, as we might put it, rather different thitrgs, and thus have rather different implications for social life. And though ritual theorists are hardly incogntzant of that fact, they are) precisely because they are so concerned with the general movement of things, ill-equipped to deal with it. The great dramatic rhythffis, the commanding forms of theater, areperceivedin social processesof all sorts, shapes, and significances (though ritual theorists in fact do much better with the cyclical, restorative pe-

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riodicities of comedy than the linear, consuming progressions of tragedy, whose ends tend to be seen as misfires rather than fulfillments). Yet the individuating details, the sort of thing that makes A Winter's Tale different from Measure for Measure, Macbetb from Hamlet, are left to encyclopedic empiricism: massivedocumentation of a single proposition- plus ga change, plus c'est le m)me changement. If dramas are, to adapt a phrase of Susanne Langer's, poems in the mode of action' something is being missed: what exactly, socially, the poems say. This unpacking of performed meaning is what the symbolic action approaches are designed to accomplish. Here there is no single name to cite, just a growin g catalogue of particular studies, some dependent on Kenneth Burke, some on Ernst Cassirer,toNorthrop Fryertt Michel Foucault, or Emile Durkheim, concerned to say what some bit of acted saying-a coronation, a Sermon' a riot, an execution-says. If ritual theorists, their eye on experience, tend to be hedgehogs,symbolic action theorists, their eye on expression, tend to be foxes. Given the dialectical nature of things, we all need our opponents, and both sorts of approach are essential. \ilhat we are most in want of right now is some way of synthesizing them. In my own aboutto-be-published analysis of the traditional Indic polity in Bali as a "theater state"-cited here not because it is exempl dty, but becauseit is mine-I have tried to addressthis problem. In this analysisI am concerned, on the one hand (the Burkean one), to show how everything from kin group organization, trade, customary law, and water control, to mythology, architecture, iconographS and cremation combines to a dram atized statement of a distinct form of political theory, a particular conception of what status, power, authority, and Sovernment are and should be: nam ely,a replication of the world of the gods that is at the same time a template for that of men. The state enacts an image of order that-a model for its beholders, in and of itselforders society. On the other hand (the Turner one), as the populace at large does not merely view the state'sexpressionsas so many gaping spectators but is caught up bodily in them, and especially in the great, mass ceremonies-political operas of Burgundian dimensions-which form their heart, the loSeeCTSP,pp.994-ror3. [Eds.] llSeeCTSP,pp. r rr8-47 andFrye.[Eds.]

sort of "we surrender and are changed" power of drama to shape experience is the strong force that holds the polity together. Reiterated form, staged and acted by its own audience,makes (to a degree, for no theater ever wholly works) theory fact. But my point is that some of those fit to iudge work of this kind ought to be humanists who reputedly know something about what theater and mimesis and rhetoric arq and not iust with respect to my work but to that of the whole steadily broadening stream of social analyses in which the drama analogy is, in one form or another, governitg. At a time when social scientists are chattering about actors, scenes,plots, performances, and personae, and humanists are mumbling about motives, authority, persuasion, exchange,and hierarchy, the line between the fwo, however comforting to the puritan on the one side and the cavalier on the other, seems uncertain indeed.

w The text analogy now taken up by social scientists is, in some ways, the broadest of the recent refigurations of social theory, the most venturesome, and the least well developed.Even more than "game" or "dramar" "text" is a dangerously unfocused term, and its application to social action, to people's behavior toward other people, involves a thoroughgoing conceptual wrench, a particularly outlandish bit of "seeing-as." Describing human conduct in the analogy of player and counterplayer, or of actor and audience, seems,whatever the pitfalls, rather more natural than describing it in that of writer and reader. Prima facie, the suggestion that the activities of spies,lovers, witch doctors, kings, or mental patients are moves or performances is surely a good deal more plausible than the notion that they are sentences. But prima facie is a dubious guide when it comes to analogizing; were it not, we should still be thinking of the heart as a furnace and the lungs as bellows. The text analogy has some unapParent advantages still insufficiently exploited, and the surface dissimilarity of the here-w e-are-and-there-we-areof social interaction to the solid composure of lines on a page is what gives it-or can when the disaccordance is rightly aligned-its interpretive force. The k.y to the transition from text to text ana-

Blurred Genres:The Refigurationof SocialThought logue, from writing as discourse to action as discourse, is, as Paul Ricoeur tt has pointed out, the concept of "inscription": the fixation of meaning. 'When we speak, our utterances fly by as events like any other behavior; unlesswhat we say is inscribed in writing (or some other establishedrecording process),it is as evanescentas what we do. If it is so inscribed, it of course passes, like Dorian Gray's youth, anyway; but at least its meaning- the said, not the saying-to a degree and for a while remains. This too is not different for action in general: its meaning can persist in a way its actuality cannot. The great virtue of the extension of the notion of text beyond things written on paper or carved into stone is that it trains attention on precisely this phenomenon: on how the inscription of action is brought about, what its vehicles are and how they work, and on what the fixation of meaning from the flow of events-history from what happened, thought from thinking, culture from behavior-implies for sociological interpretation. To seesocial institutions, social custoffis,social changesas in some sense"readable" is to alter our whole senseof what such interpretation is toward modes of thought rather more familiar to the translator, the exegete, or the iconographer than to the test giver, the factor analyst, or the pollster. All this comes out with exemplary vividness in the work of Alton Becker, a comparative linguist, on shadow puppetry, or the wayang as it is Javanese 'Wayang-ing (there is no other suitable verb) called. is, Becker says, a mode of text buildin g, d way of putting symbols together to construct an expression. To construe it, to understand not just what it means but how it does so, one needs,he says,a new philology. Philolog5 the text-centered study of language, as contrasted to linguistics, which is speech centered, has of course traditionally been concerned with making ancient or foreign or esoteric documents accessibleto those for whom they are ancient or foreign or esoteric. Terms are glossed,notes appended, commentaries written, and, where necessary,transcriptions made and translations effected-all roward the end of producing an annotated edition as readable as the philologist can make it. Meaning is fixed at a meta-level; essentiallywhat a philologist, 12See Ricoeur.[Eds.]

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a kind of secondary author, does is re-inscribe: interpret a text with a text. Left at this, matters are straightforward enough, however difficult they may turn out to be in practice. But when philological concern goes beyond routinized craft procedures (authentication, reconstruction, annotation) to address itself to conceptual questions concerning the nature of texts as such-that is, to questions about their principles of construction-simplicity flees. The result, Becker notes, has been the shattering of philology, itself by now a near obsolescentterm, into disjunct and rivalrous specialties,and most particularly the growth of a division berweenthose who study individual texts (historians, editors, critics-who like to call themselveshumanists), and those who study the activity of creating texts in general (linguists, psychologists, ethnographers-who like to call themselvesscientists). The study of inscriptions is severed from the study of inscribing, the study of fixed meaning is severed from the study of the social processesthat fix it. The result is a double narrowness.Not only is the extension of text analysis to non-written materials blocked, but so is the application of sociological analysis to written ones. The repair of this split and the integration of the study of how texts are built, how the said is rescued from its saying, into the study of social phenomena-Apache jokes, English meals, African cult sermons, American high schools, Indian caste, or Balinese widow burning, to mention some recent attempts aside from Becker's-is what the "new philolo gy," or whatever else it eventually comes to be called, is all about. "In a multicultured world," Becker writes, "a world of multiple epistemologies, there is need for a new philologist-a specialist in contextual relations-in all areas of knowledge in which text-building . . . is a central activity: literature, history, l"*, music, politics, psychology, trade, even war and peace." Becker seesfour main orders of semiotic connection in a social text for his new philologist to investigate: the relation of its parts to one another; the relation of it to others culturally or historically associated with it; the relation of it to those who in some senseconstruct it; and the relation of it to realities conceived as lying outside of ir. Certainly there are others-its relation to its materia, for one; and, more certainly yet, even these raise profound methodological issues so far only hesitantly

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addressed."Coherencer" "inter-textualityr" "intenate what Becker's tionr" and "referenss"-which four relations more or less come down to-all become most elusive notions when one leaves the paragraph or page for the act or institution. Indeed, as Nelson Goodman has shown, they are not all that well-defined for the paragraph or PaBe,to say nothing of the picture, the melody, the statue, or the dance. Insofar as the theory of meaning implied by this multiple contextualization of cultural phenomena (some sort of symbolic constructivism) exists at all, it does so as a catalogue of wavering intimations and half-joined ideas. How far this sort of analysis can go beyond such specifically expressive matters as puppetry' and what adiustments it will have to make in doing so, is, of course, quite unclear. As "life is a game" proponents tend to gravitate toward face-to-f aceinteraction, courtship and cocktail parties, as the most fertile ground for their sort of analysis,and "life is a stage" proponents are attracted toward collective intensities,carnivals and insurrections, for the same reason, so "life is a text" proponents incline toward the examination of imaginative forms: jokes, proverbs, popular arts. There is nothing either surprising or reprehensiblein this; one naturally tries one's analogiesout where they seem most likely to work. But their long-run fates surely rest on their capacity to move beyond their easier initial successesto harder and lesspredictable ones-of the game idea to make senseof worship, the drama idea to explicate humor, or the text idea to clarify war. Most of thesetriumphs, if they are to occur at all, arq in the text case even more than the others, still to come. For the moment, all the apologist can do is what I have done here: offer up some instances of application, some symptoms of trouble, and some pleas for help.

V So much, anyw ay, for examples. Not only do these particular three analogies obviously spill over into one another as individual writers tack back and forth between ludic, dramatistic, and textualist idioms, but there are other humanistic analogies on the social science scene at least as prominent as they: speech act analyses following Austin and

Searle;" discourse models as different as those of Habermas's "communicative competence" and Foucault's "archaeology of knowledg."; representationalist approaches taking their lead from the cognitive aestheticsof Cassirer, Langer, Gombrich, or Goodman; and of course L6vi-Strauss'shigher cryptology. Nor are they as yet internally settled and homogeneous: the divisions berween the play-minded and the strategy-minded to which I alluded in connection with the game approach, and between the ritualists and the rhetoricians in connection with the drama approach, are more than matched in the text approach by the collisions between the againstinterpretation mandarins of deconstructionism and the symbolic-domination tribunes of neo-Marxism. Matters are neither stable nor consensual,and they are not likely soon to become so. The interesting question is not how all this muddle is going to come magnificently together, but what does all this ferment mean. One thing it means is that, however raggedly, a challenge is being mounted to some of the central assumptionsof mainstream social science.The strict separation of theory and data,the "brute fact" ideal the effort to create a formal vocabulary of analysis purged of all subiective reference, the "ideal language" idea; and the claim to moral neutrality and the Olympian view, the "God's truth" idea-none of these can prosper when explanation comes to be regarded as a matter of connecting action to its senserather than behavior to its determinants. The refiguration of social theory represents,or will if it continues, a seachangein our notion not so much of what knowledg. is, but of what it is we want to know. Social events do have causesand social institutions effects;but it f ust may be that the road to discovering what we assertin assertingthis lies lessthrough postulating forces and measuring them than through noting expressionsand inspecting them. The turn taken by an important segment of social scientists, from physical process analogies to symbolic form ones, has introduced a fundamental debate into the social sciencecommuniry concerning not just its methods but its aims. It is a debate that grows daily in intensiry. The golden age (or perhaps it was only the brass) of the social scienceswhen, whatever the differences in theoretical positions 13SeeAustin andSearle.[Eds.]

Blurred Genres:The Refigurationof SocialThought and empirical claims, the basic goal of the enterprise was universally agreed upon-to find out the dynamics of collective life and alter them in desired directions-has clearly passed.There are too many social scientists at work today for whom the anatomization of thought is wanted, not the manipulation of behavior. But it is not only for the social sciencesthat this alteration in how we think about how we think has disequilibrating implications. The rising interest of sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, political scientists, and even now and then a rogue economist in the analysis of symbol systemsposes-implicitly anyway, explicitly sometimes-the question of the relationship of such systems to what goes on in the world; and it does so in a way both rather different from what humanists are used to and rather lessevadable-with homilies about spiritual values

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and the examined life-than many of them, so it seems,would at all like. If the social technologist notion of what a social scientist is is brought into question by all this concern with sense and signification, even more so is the cultural watchdog notion of what a humanist is. The specialist without spirit dispensing policy nostrums goes, but the lectern sage dispensing approved judgments does as well. The relation befween thought and action in social life can no more be conceived of in terms of wisdom than it can in terms of expertise. How it is to be conceived, how the games, dramas, or texts which we do not just invent or witness but live, have the consequence they do remains very far from clear. It will take the wariest of wary reasonings, on all sides of all divides, to get it clearer.

StanleyFish b. t938

'r lr.r Hrs introduction to the book in which the essayincluded here is the title I piece,Fish reviewsthe development,over the courseof more than a decade, of the theory he sets forth. This developmenthe treats as a shift in questions asked.The questionthat first occupiedhim involved whether the readeror the text was the sourceof meaning.His program at that time was to attack the theory of the "afrective fallacy" asofferedby Monroe Beardsleyand W. K. Iflimsatt (seeCTSP,pp. rozz-3r) and the accompanyingtheory of the self-sufficiencyof the text. In his early work, including books on Milton and seventeenth-century poetry Fish locatedmeaningin the structureof the reader'sprogressthrough the text, emphasizingthe activity of reading itself, eventhough he continuedto regard the text as a stableentity that controlled what the readercould experience. At this stage,for Fish,the whole progressof readingembodiesmeaning;nothing is discarded.This view proposedto locate the readerin the Chomskianidea of linguistic competence(seeCbomsky),though this did not successfullyaccount for divergencesof interpretation among the competent.The commonality of readingexperiencewas anchoredin the text, and Fish found himself,by his own account, back with those very sameNew Critics from whom his emphasison readingwas designedto separatehim. Gradually Fish cameto concludethat "linguistic and textual facts,rather than beingthe objectsof interpretation,are its products"; but first he had to rid himself of the assumptionthat without the text as object containing thesefacts, the only alternativewas a solipsisticsubjectivity.Ultimately he found the ground for his theory in the notion of an "interpretive community" which declareswhat is or is not literature at any time, all texts whatever having the potentiality for beingincluded.In Fish'snext phasethe object is constitutedas literary; the subiect is both a determinerof its world and "informed by conventionalnotions." But soon the idea of both text and reader had to be further qualified because neither had an independentstatus. S7hatremain are texts that emergeas the consequenceof the interpretive man-mademodels that have called them into being. Interpretive strategiesthus precedeand make texts rather than arising from them. Suchstrategiesarisefrom the interpretivecommunity,and all interpreters belong to one or another of these.It follows, if this is inevitable, that subjectivityis an illusion and neednot concernus and that criticism'sbusinessis to "establish by political and persuasivemeans. . . the set of interpretive assumptionsfrom the vantageof which the evidence(and the facts and the inten5L4

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tions and everythingelse)will hereafterbe specifiable."In the end, Fish'stheory leadsto the study of socialand institutional power,the power to imposemeaning. Fish's books arc Surprisedby Sin GgZt), Self-ConsumingArtifacts (tgZz), and Is Tberea Text in This Class?(r98o), a collection of essayswrirten over the previousdecade.

IS THEREA TEXT IN THISCLASS? On the first d^y of the new semestera colleague at Johns Hopkins Universiry was approached by r student who, as it turned out, had just taken a course from me. She put to him what I think you would agree is a perfectly straightforward question: "ls there a text in this class?" Responding with a confidenceso perfect that he was unaware of it (although in telling the story, he refers to this moment as "walking into the trap"), my colleague said, "Yes; it's the Norton Anthology of Liternture," whereupon the trap (set not by the student but by the infinite capacity of language for being appropriated) was sprung: "No, oor" she said, "l mean in this classdo we believein poems and things, or is it just us?" Now it is possible (and for many tempting) to read this anecdote as an illustration of the dangers that follow upon listening to people like me who preach the instability of the text and the unavailability of determinate meanings; but in what follows I will try to read it as an illustration of how baselessthe fear of these dangers finally is. Of the chargeslevied against what Meyer Abrams has recently called the New Readers (Derrida, Bloom, Fish) the most persistent is that these apostles of indeterminacy and undecidabiliry ignore, even as they rely upon, the "norms and possibilities" embedded in language, the "linguistic meanings" words undeniably have, and thereby invite us to abandon "our ordinary realm of experience in speaking,hearitg, reading and understanding" for a rs rHEREA TEXTrN THrs cLASs?is the title essayfrom the book published by Harvard University Press.It is reprinted here by permissionof the publishers,copyright r98o by the Presidentand Fellows of Harvard College.

world in which "no text can mean anything in particular" and where "we can never say just what anyone means by anything he writes." t The charge is that literal or normative meanings are overriden by the actions of willful interpreters. Suppose we examine this indictment in the context of the present example. Wh at, exactly, is the normative or literal or linguistic meaning of "Is there a text in this class?" Within the framework of contemporary critical debate (as it is reflected in the pages, say, of Critical Inquiry) there would seem to be only two ways of answering this question: either there is a literal meaning of the utterance and we should be able to say what it is, or there are as many meanings as there are readers and no one of them is literal. But the answer suggested by my little story is that the utterance has two literal meanings: within the circumstancesassumedby my colleague (l don't mean that he took the step of assuming them, but that he was already stepping within them) the utterance is obviously a question about whether or not there is a required textbook in this particular course; but within the circumstances to which he was alerted by his student's corrective response,the utterance is just as obviously a question about the instructor's position (within the range of positions available in contemporary literary theory) on the status of the text. Notice that we do not have here a caseof indeterminacy or undecidability but of a determinacy and decidability that do not always have the same shape and that can, and in this instance do, change. My colleague was not hesitating bet'ween two (or more) possible meanings of the ufterance; rather, he immediately apprehendedwhat seemedto be an inescapablemeanirg, given his prestructured understanding of the situation, and then he immediately 1M. H. Abrams, "The DeconstructiveAngel," Critical Inquiry, j, no. j (Spring1977), 4jr, 4j4. [Au.] See Abrams;Derrida; Bloom. [Eds.]

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apprehended another inescapable meaning when that understanding was altered. Neither meaning was imposed (a favorite word in the anti-new-reader polemics) on a more normal one by t private, idiosyncratic interpretive act; both interpretations were a function of precisely the public and constituting norms (of language and understanding) invoked by Abrams. It is just that these norms are not embedded in the language (where they may be read out by anyone with sufficiently clear, that is, unbiased, eyes)but inhere in an institutional structure within which one hears utterances as already organized with reference to certain assumed purposes and goals. Becauseboth my colleague and his student are situated in that institution, their interpretive activities are not free, but what constrains them are the understood practices and assumptionsof the institution and not the rules and fixed meanings of a language system. Another way to put this would be to say that neither reading of the question-which we might for convenience'ssake label as "ls there a text in this class?", and "Is there a text in this class?"2-would be immediately available to any native speaker of the language."ls there a text in this class?", is interpretable or readable only by someone who already knows what is included under the general rubric "first d"y of class" (what concerns animate students, what bureaucratic matters must be attended to before instruction begins) and who therefore hears the utterance under the aegis of that knowledg., which is not applied after the fact but is responsible for the shape the fact immediately has. To someone whose consciousnessis not already informed by that knowledg., "Is there a text in this class?", would be iust as unavailableas "Is there a text in this class?", would be to someonewho was not already aware of the disputed issuesin contemporary literary theory. I am not saying that for some readers or hearers the question would be wholly unintelligible (indeed, in the course of this essayI will be arguing that unintelligibiliry, in the strict or pure sense,is an impossibiliry), but that there are readers and hearers for whom the intelligibiliry of the question would have neither of the shapes it had, in a temporal succession,for my colleague. It is possible, for example, to imagine someone who would hear or intend the question as an inquiry about the location of an obiect, that is, "I think I left my text

in this class;have you seenit?"'We would then have an "Is there a text in this class?", and the possibility, feared by the defendersof the normative and determinate, of an endlesssuccessionof numbers, that is, of a world in which every utterance has an infinite plurality of meanings.But that is not what the example, however it might be extended, suggestsat all. In any of the situations I have imagined (and in any that I might be able to imagine) the meaning of the utterance would be severely constrained, not after it was heard but in the ways in which it could, in the first place, be heard. An infinite plurality of meanings would be a fear only if sentencesexisted in a state in which they were not alre ady embedded in, and had come into view as a function of, some situation or other. That state, if it could be located, would be the normative one, and it would be disturbing indeed if the norm were free-floating and indeterminate. But there is no such state; sentences emerge only in situations, and within those situations, the normative meaning of an utterance will always be obvious or at least accessible,although within another situation that same utterance, no longer the same,will have another normative meaning that will be no less obvious and accessible.(My colleague's experience is precisely an illustration.) This does not mean that there is no way to discriminate between the meanings an utterance will have in different situations, but that the discrimination will already have been made by virtue of our being in a situation (we are never not in one) and that in another situation the discrimination will also have already been made, but differently. In other words, while at any one point it is always possible to order and rank "Is there a text in this class?", and "Is there a text in this class?", (becausethey will always have already been ranked), it will never be possible to give them an immutable once-and-forall rankirg, a ranking that is independent of their appearance or nonappearance in situations (because it is only in situations that they do or do not appear). Nevertheless, there is a distinction to be made between the two that allows us to say that, in a limited sense,one is more normal than the other: for while each is perfectly normal in the context in which their literalness is immediately obvious (the successivecontexts occupied by my colleague), 3S things stand now, one of those contexts is surely

Is There a Text in This Class? more available, and therefore more likely to be the perspective within which the utterance is heard, than the other. Indeed, we seem to have here an instance of what I would call "institutional nesting": if "Is there a text in this class?", is hearableonly by those who know what is included under the rubric "first d^y of class," and if "Is there a text in this class?", is hearableonly by those whose categories of understanding include the concerns of contemporary literary theorS then it is obvious that in a random population presentedwith the utterance, more people would "hear" "Is there a text in this class?", than "Is there a text in this class?",) and, moreover, that while "Is there a text in this class?", could be immediately hearable by someone for whom "Is there a text in this class?", would have to be laboriously explained, it is difficult to imagine someone capableof hearing "Is there a text in this class?" , who was not already capable of hearing "ls there a text in this class.", (One is hearable by anyone in the profession and by most students and by many workers in the book trade, and the other only by those in the profession who would not think it peculiar to find, as I did recently, a critic referring to a phrase "made popular by Lacan.")' To admit as much is not to weaken my argument by reinstating the category of the normal, becausethe category as it appears in that argument is not transcendental but institutional; and while no institution is so universally in force and so perdurable that the meanings it enableswill be normal for ever, some institutions or forms of life are so widely lived in that for a great many people the meanings they enable seem "naturally" available and it takes a special effort to seethat they are the products of circumstances. The point is an important one, because it accounts for the successwith which an Abrams or an E. D. Hirsch can appeal to a shared understanding of ordinary language and argue from that understanding to the availability of a core of determinate 'When meanings. Hirsch offers "The air is crisp" as an example of a "verbal meanittg" that is accessible to all speakers of the language, and distinguishes what is sharable and determinate about it from the associations that fray, in certain circumstances, accompany it (for exampl€, "I should have eaten less at supper." "Crisp air reminds me of my childhood 2SeeLacan. [Eds.]

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in Vermort"),' he is counting on his readers to agree so completely with his sense of what that shared and normative verbal meaning is that he does not bother even to specify it; and although I have not taken a survey, I would venture to guess that his optimism, with respect to this particular example, is well founded. That is, mostrif not all, of his readersimmediately understand the utterance as a rough meteorological description predicting a certain quality of the local atmosphere. But the "happiness" of the example, far from making Hirsch's point (which is always, as he has recently reaffirmed, to maintain "the stable determinacy of meaning")o makes mine. The obviousness of the utterance's meaning is not a function of the values its words have in a linguistic system that is independent of context; rather, it is becausethe words are heard as already embedded in a context that they have a meaning that Hirsch can then cite as obvious. One can see this by embedding the words in another context and observing how quickly another "obvious" meaning emerges.Suppose,for example, we came upon "The air is crisp" (which you are even now hearing as Hirsch assumesyou hear it) in the middle of a discussionof music ("'S7henthe piece is played correctly the air is crisp"); it would immediately be heard as a comment on the performance by an instrument or instruments of a musical air. Moreover, it woul d only be heard that way, and to hear it in Hirsch's way would require an effort on the order of a strain. It could be objected that in Hirsch's text "The air is crisp", has no contextual setting at all; it is merely presented, and therefore any agreementas to its meaning must be becauseof the utterance's acontextual properties. But there ls a contextual setting and the sign of its presence is precisely the absenceof any reference to it. That is, it is impossible even to think of a sentenceindependently of a context, and when we are asked to consider a sentence for which no context has been specified,we will automatically hear it in the context in which it has been most often encountered. Thus Hirsch invokes a context by not invoking it; by not surrounding the utterance with circum3E.D. Hirsch, Validityin Interpretation(New Haven:Yale UniversityPress,t967), pp. 2r 8-2r9. [Au.] SeeCTSP, pp. r 176-94. [Eds.] 4E.D. Hirsch, The Aims of Interpretation(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress,r976), p. r. [Au.]

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stances, h. directs us to imagine it in the circumstancesin which it is most likely to have been produced; and to so imagine it is already to have given it a shape that seemsat the moment to be the only one possible. \il7hat conclusions can be drawn from these two examples? First of all, neither my colleaguenor the reader of Hirsch's sentence is constrained by the meanings words have in a normative linguistic system; and yet neither is free to confer on an utterance any meaning he likes. Indeed, "confer" is exactly the wrong word becauseit implies a two stage procedure in which a reader or hearer first scrutinizes an utterance and then gives it a meaning. The argument of the preceding pages can be reduced to the assertion that there is no such first stage, that one hears an utterance within, and not as preliminary to determining, a knowledge of its purposes and concerns, and that to so hear it is already to have assigned it a shape and given it a meaning. In other words, the problem of how meaning is determined is only a problem if there is a point at which its determination has not yet been made, and I am saying that there is no such point. I am not saying that one is never in the position of having to self-consciously figure out what an utterance means. Indeed, my colleagueis in iust such a position when he is informed by his student that he has not heard her question as she intended it ("No, No, I mean in this class do we believe in poems and things, or is it iust us?") and therefore must now figure it out. But the "it" in this (or any other) caseis not a collection of words waiting to be assigneda meaning but an utterance whose already assignedmeaning has been found to be inappropriate.While my colleague has to begin all over agarn) he does not have to begin from square one; and in'deed he never was at square one, since from the very first his hearing of the student's question was informed by his assumption of what its concerns could possibly be. (That is why he is not "free" even if he is unconstrained by determinate meanings.) It is that assumption rather than his performance within it that is challenged by the student's correction. She tells him that he has mistaken her meanirg, but this is not to say that he has made a mistake in combining her words and syntax into a meaningful unit; it is rather that the meaningful unit he immediately discerns is a function of a mistaken identification (made before she speaks)of her inten-

tion. He was prepared as she stood before him to hear the kind of thing students ordinarily say on the first d^y of class,and therefore that is precisely what he heard. He has not misread the text (his is not an error in calculation) but mis preread the text, and if he is to correct himself he must make another (pre)determination of the structure of interests from which her question issues.This, of course, is exactly what he does and the question of how he does it is a crucial one, which can best be answered by first considering the ways in which he didn't do it. He didn't do it by attending to the literal meaning of her response.That is, this is not a case in which someone who has been misunderstood clarifies her meaning by making more explicit, by varying or adding to her words in such a way as to render their senseinescapable.\Tithin the circumstancesof utterance as he has assumedthem her words are perfectly clear, and what she is doing is asking him to imagine other circumstances in which the same words will be equally, but differentlR clear. Nor is it that the words she does add ("No, No, I mean . . .") direct him to those circumstances by picking them out from an inventory of all possible ones. For this to be the case there would have to be an inherent relationship between the words she speaks and a particular set of circumstances (this would be a higher level literalism) such that any competent speakerof the language hearing those words would immediately be referred to that set. But I have told the story to several competent speakers of the language who simply didn't get it, and one friend-a professor of philosophy-reported to me that in the interval between his hearing the story and my explaining it to him (and iust how I was able to do that is another crucial question) he found himself asking "'What kind of joke is this and have I missed it?" For a time at least he remained able only to hear "Is there a text in this class" as my colleague first heard it; the student's additional words, far from leading him to another hearing, only made him aware of his distance from it. In contrast, there are those who not only get the story but get it before I tell it; that is, they know in advance what is was coming as soon as I say that a colleagueof mine'S7ho recently asked, "Is there a text in this class?" are these people and what is it that makes their comprehension of the story so immediate and easy? \[e11,one could say,without being the least bit facetious, that they are the people who come to hear me

Is There a Text in This Class? speak because they are the people who already know my position on certain matters (or know that I will haue a position).That is, they hear, "Is there a text in this class?" even as it appears at the beginning of the anecdote (or for thar marrer as a title of an essay) in the light of their knowledg. of what I am likely to do with it. They hear it coming from ffi€, in circumstances which have committed me to declaring myself on a range of issues that are sharply delimited. My colleague was finally able to hear it in just that way, as coming from ffie, not because I was there in his classrooffi, nor becausethe words of the student's question pointed to me in a way that would have been obvious to any hearer, but because he was able to think of me in an office three doors down from his telling students that there are no determinate meanings and that the stability of the text is an illusion. Indeed, as he reports it, the moment of recognition and comprehension consisted of his saying to himself, "Ah, there's one of Fish's victims!" He did not say this becauseher words identified her as such but becausehis ability to seeher as such informed his perception of her words. The answer to the question "How did he get from her words to the circumstances within which she intended him to hear them?" is that he must already be thinking within those circumstancesin order to be able to hear her words as referring to them. The question, then, must be rejected,becauseit assumes that the construing of senseleads to the identification of the context of utterance rather than the other way around. This does not mean that the context comes first and that once it has been identified the construing of sense can begin. This would be only to reverse the order of precedence, whereas precedenceis beside the point becausethe two actions it would order (the identification of context and the making of sense)occur simultaneously.One does not say "Here I am in a situation; now I can begin to determine what these words mean." To be in a situation is to seethe words, these or any other, as already meaningful. For my colleague to realize that he may be confronting one of my victims is at the same time to hear what she says as a question about his theoretical beliefs. But to dispose of one "how" question is only to raise another: if her words do not lead him to rhe context of her utterance, how does he get there ? \(Ihy did he think of me telling students that there

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were no determinate meanings and not think of someone or something else? First of all, he might well have. That is, he might well have guessedthat she was coming from another direction (inquiring, let us say, as to whether the focus of this classwas to be the poems and essaysor our responsesto them, a question in the same line of country as hers but quite distinct from it) or he might have simply been stymied, like my philosopher friend, confined, in the absence of an explanation, to his first determination of her concerns and unable to make any senseof her words other than the sensehe originally made. How, then, did he do it? In part, he did it becausehe could do it; he was able to get ro this context becauseit was already part of his repertoire for organizing the world and its events. The category "one of Fish's victims" was one he alre ady had and didn't have to work for. Of course, it didnot always have him, in that his world was not always being organized by it, and it certainly did not have him at the beginning of the conversation; but it was available to him, and he to it, and all he had to do was to recall it or be recalled to it for the meanings it subtended to emerge.(Had it not been available to him, the career of his comprehension would have been different and we will come to a consideration of that difference shortly.) This, however, only pushes our inquiry back further. How or why was he recalled to it? The answer to this question must be probabilistic and it begins with the recognition that when something changes, not everything changes. Although my colleague's understanding of his circumstances is transformed in the course of this conversation, the circumstances are still understood to be academic ones, and within that continuing (if modified) understanding, the directions his thought might take are already severelylimited. He still presumes,as he did' at first, that the student's question has something to do with university businessin general, and with English literature in particular, and ir is the organizing rubrics associated with these areas of experience that are likely to occur to him. One of those rubrics is "what-goes-on-in-other-classes"and one of those other classesis mine. And so, by a route that is neither entirely unmarked nor wholly determined, he comes to me and to the notion "one of Fish's victims" and to a new construing of what his student has been saying. Of course that route would have been much more

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circuitous if the category "one of Fish's victims" was not already available to him as a device for producing intelligibiliry. Had that device not been part of his repertoire, had he been incapable of being recalled to it because he never knew it in the first place, how would he have proceeded?The answer is that he could not have proceeded at all, which does not mean that one is trapped forever in the categories of understanding at one's disposal (or the categories at whose disposal one is), but that the introduction of new categories or the expansion of old ones to include new (and therefore newly seen)data must always come from the outside or from what is perceived,for a time, to be the outside. In the event that he was unable to identify the structure of her concerns becauseit had never been his (or he its), it would have been her obligation to explain it to him. And here we run up against another instance of the problem we have been considering all along. She could not explain it to him by varying or adding to her words, by being more explicit, because her words will only be intelligible if he already has the knowledg. they are supposed to convey, the knowledge of the assumptions and interests from which they issue. It is clear, then, that she would have to make a new start, although she would not have to start from scratch (indeed, starting from scratch is never a possibility); but she would have to back up to some point at which there was a shared agreement as to what was reasonableto say so that a new and wider basis for agreementcould be fashioned. In this particular case,for example, she might begin with the fact that her interlocutor akeady knows what a text is; that is, he has a way of thinking about it that is responsible for his hearing of her first question as one about bureaucratic classroom procedures. (You will remember that "he" in these sentences is no longer my colleague but someone who does not have his special knowledg..) It is that way of thinking that she must labor to extend or challenge, first, perhaps, by pointing out that there are those who think about the text in other ways' and then by trying to find a category of his own understanding which might serve as an analogue to the understanding he does not yet share. He might, for example, be familiar with those psychologists who argue for the constitutive power of perception, or with Gombrich's theory of the beholder's share, or with that philosophical tradition in which the stability of objects has always been a matter of dis-

pute. The example must remain hypothetical and skeletal, because it can only be fleshed out after a determination of the particular beliefs and assumptions that would make the explanation necessaryin the first place; for whatever they were, they would dictate the strategy by which she would work to supplant or change them. It is when such a strategy has been successfulthat the import of her words will become clear, not becauseshe has reformulated or refined them but becausethey will now be read or heard within the same system of intelligibility from which they issue. In short, this hypothetical interlocutor will in time be brought to the same point of comprehension my colleague enioys when he is able to say to himself, "Ah, there'sone of Fish'svictims," although presumably he will say something very different to himself if he says anything at all. The difference, however, should not obscure the basic similarities between the two experiences, one reported, the other imagined. In both cases the words that are uttered are immediately heard within a set of assumptions about the direction from which they could possibly be coming, and in both caseswhat is required is that the hearing occur within another set of assumptions in relation to which the same words ("Is there a text in this class?")will no longer be the same. It is just that while my colleagueis able to meet that requirement by calling to mind a context of utterance that is already ^ part of his repertoire, the repertoire of his hypothetical stand-in must be expanded to include that context so that should he some day be in an analogous situation, he would be able to call it to mind. The distinction, then, is between already having an ability and having to acquire it, but it is not finally an essentialdistinction, becausethe routes by which that ability could be exercised on the one hand, and learned on the other, are so similar. They are similar first of all becausethey are similarly not determined by words. Just as the student's words will not direct my colleague to a context he already has, so will they fail to direct someone not furnished with that context to its discovery. And yet in neither case does the absenceof such a mechanical determination mean that the route one travels is randomly found. The change from one structure of understanding to another is not a rupture but a modification of the interests and concerns that are already in place; and becausethey are already in

Is There a Text in This Class? place, they constrain the direction of their own modification. That is, in both casesthe hearer is already in a situation informed by tacitly known purposes and goals, and in both caseshe ends up in another situation whose purposes and goals stand in some elaborated relation (of contrast, opposition, expansion, extension) to those they supplant. (The one relation in which they could not stand is no relation at all.) It is just that in one casethe network of elaboration (from the text as an obviously physical object to the question of whether or not the text is a physical object) has already been articulated (although not all of its articulations are in focus ar one time; selection is always occurring), while in the other the articulation of the network is the business of the teacher (here the student) who begins, necessarilSwith what is already given. The final similarity between the rwo casesis that in neither is successassured.It was no more inevitable that my colleaguetumble to the conrext of his student's utterance than it would be inevitable that she could introduce that context to someone previously unaware of it; and, indeed, had my colleague remained puzzled (had he simply not thought of me), it would have been necessaryfor the student to bring him along in a way that was finally indistinguishable from the way she would bring someone to a new knowledg., that is, by beginning with the shape of his present understanding. I have lingered so long over the unpacking of this anecdote that its relationship to the problem of authority in the classroom and in literary criticism may seem obscure. Let me recall you to it by recalling the contention of Abrams and others that authority depends upon the existence of a determinate core of meaning becausein the absenceof such a core there is no normative or public way of construing wh at anyone says or writes, with the result that interpretation becomes a matter of individual and private construings none of which is subiect to challenge or correction. In liter ary crrticism this means that no interpretation can be said to be better or worse than any other, and in the classroom this means that we have no answer to the student who saysmy interpretation is as valid as yours. It is only if there is a shared basis of agreementar once guiding interpretation and providing a mechanism for deciding befween interpretarions that a total debilitating relativism can be avoided. But the point of my analysis has been to show

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that while "Is there a text in this class?" does nor have a determinate meaning, a meaning that survives the sea change of situations, in any situation we might imagine the meaning of the utterance is either perfectly clear or capable,in the course of time, of being clarified. \(hat is ir that makes this possible, if it is not the "possibilities and norms" already encoded in language?How does communication ever occur if not by referenceto a public and stable norm ? The answer, implicit in everything I have already said, is that communication occurs within situations and that to be in a situation is already to be in possessionof (or to be possessedby) a structure of assumptions,of practices understood to be relevant in relation to purposes and goals that are alre ady in place; and it is within the assumption of these purposes and goals that any umerance is immediately heard. I stress immediately becauseit seemsto me that the problem of communication, as someonelike Abrams posesit, is a problem only becausehe assumesa distancebetween one's receiving of an utterance and the determination of its meaning-a kind of dead space when one has only the words and then facesthe task of construing them. If there were such a space, a moment before interpretation began, then it would be necessaryto have recourse to some mechanical and algorithmic procedure by means of which meanings could be calculated and in relation to which one could recognize mistakes. What I have been arguing is that meanings come already calculated, not becauseof norms embedded in the language but becauselanguage is always perceived, from the very first, within a structure of norms. That structure, however, is not abstract and independent but social; and therefore it is not a single structure with a privileged relationship to the processof communication as it occurs in any situation but a structure that changeswhen one situation, with its assumed background of practices,purposes,and goals, has given way to another. In other words, the shared basis of agreement sought by Abrams and others is never not already found, although it is not always the same one. Many will find in this last sentence,and in the argument to which it is a conclusion, nothing more than a sophisticated version of the relativism they fear. It will do no good, they say, to speak of norms and standards that are context specific, becausethis is merely to authorize an infinite plurality of norms and standards, and we are still left without any way

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of adjudicating between them and between the competing systems of value of which they are functions. In short, to have many standardsis to have no standards at all. On one level this counterargument is unassailable, but on another level it is finally beside the point. It is unassailableas a general and theoretical conclusion: the positing of context- or institutionspecific norms surely rules out the possibility of a norm whose validity would be recognizedby everyone, no matter what his situation. But it is beside the point for any particular individual' for since .u.ryorre is situated somewhere, there is no one for whom the absence of an asituational norm would be of any practical consequence,in the sensethat his performance or his confidence in his ability to perform would be impaired. So that while it is generally true that to have many standards is to have none at all, it is not true for anyone in particular (for there is no one in a position to speak "generally"), and therefore it is a truth of which one can say "it doesn't matter." In other words, while relativism is a position one can entertain, it is not a position one can occupy. No one can be a relativist, because no one can achieve the distance from his own beliefs and assumptions which would result in their being no more authoritative for him than the beliefs and assumptions held by others' or, for that matter, the beliefs and assumptions he himself used to hold. The fear that in a world of indifferently authorized norms and values the individual is without a basis for action is groundless because no one is indifferent to the norms and values that enable his consciousness.tt is in the name of personally held (in fact they are doing the holding) norms and values that the individual acts and argues, and he does so \ilfhen with the full confidence that attends belief. his beliefs chang€, the norms and values to which he once gave unthinking assentwill have been demoted to the status of opinions and become the obiects of an analytical and critical attention; but that attention will itself be enabled by a new set of norms and valuesthat arq for the time being, as unexamined and undoubted as those they displace. The point is that there is never a moment when one believesnothing, when consciousnessis innocent of any and all categoriesof thought, and whatever categories of thought are operative at a given moment will serve as an undoubted ground. Here, I suspect, a defender of determinate mean-

ing would cry "solipsist" and argue that a confidence that had its source in the individual's categories of thought would have no public value. That is, unconnected to any shared and stable system of meanings, it would not enable one to transact the verbal business of everyday life; a shared intelligibility would be impossible in a world where everyone was trapped in the circle of his own assumptions and opinions. The reply to this is that an individual's assumptions and opinions are not "his own" in any sensethat would give body to the fear of solipsism. That is, he is not their origin (in fact it might be more accurate to say that they are his); rather, it is their prior availability which delimits in advance the paths that his consciousnesscan possi'W'hen my colleague is in the act of conbly take. struing his student's question ("Is there a text in this class?"), none of the interpretive strategies at his disposal are uniquely his, in the sense that he thought them up; they follow from his preunderstanding of the interests and goals that could possibly animate the speech of someone functioning within the institution of academic America, interestsand goals that are the particular proPerty of no one in particular but which link everyonefor whom their assumption is so habitual as to be unthinking. They certainly link my colleague and his student, who are able to communicate and even to reason about one another's intentions, not, however, because their interpretive efforts are constrained by the shape of an independent language but because their shared understanding of what could possibly be at stake in a classroom situation results in language appearing to them in the same shape (or successionsof shapes). That shared understanding is the basis of the confidence with which they speak and reason, but its categoriesare their own only in the sense that as actors within an institution they automatically fall heir to the institution's way of making sense,its systems of intelligibility. That is why it is so hard for someone whose very being is defined by his position within an institution (and if not this one, then some other) to explain to someone outside it a practice or a meaning that seemsto him to require no explanation, becausehe regards it as natural. Such a person, when pressed,is likely to say,"but that's just the way it's done" Or "but isn't it obvious" and so testify that the practice or meaning in question is community property, 3s, in a sense,he is too. 'We see then that (r ) communication does occur'

Is There a Text in This Class? despite the absenceof an independent and contextfree system of meanings, that (z) those who participate in this communication do so confidently rather than provisionally (they are nor relativists), and that (l) while their confidence has its source in a set of beliefs, those beliefs are not individual-specific or idiosyncratic but communal and conventional (they are not solipsists). Of course, solipsism and relativism are what Abrams and Hirsch fear and what lead them to argue for the necessityof determinate meaning. But if, rather than acting on their own, interpreters act as extensionsof an institutional communiry, solipsism and relativism are removed as fears because they

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are not possible modes of being. That is to say, the condition required for someone to be a solipsist or relativist, the condition of being independent of institutional assumptions and free to originate one's own purposes and goals, could never be realized, and therefore there is no point in trying to guard against it. Abrams, Hirsch, and company spend a great deal of time in a search for the ways to limit and constrain interpretation, but if the example of my colleague and his student can be generalized (and obviously I think it can be), what they are searching for is never not already found. In short, my messageto them is finally not challenging, but consoling-not to worry.

MumryKri.ger b. r923

Knlrcen's recentwork (for his earlierseeCTSR pp' rzz3-49) l\ fu**t has been an effort to mediatebetweenthe earlier New Criticism, of M which he was a student and shrewd analyst, and contemporary poststructuralism. It has alwaysbeenhis tendenry to seekto enlargehis own theoretical thosemost recentinsightsworth maintaining'If positionin order to "rr.o-p"rs ih. N.* Criticism implied a theory of the "presence"of the signifiedin the signifier, evenof the refeient, in its treatmentof the poem as an aestheticallyclosed Krieger's held for "absence"and radicalopenness. object,the poststructuralists combining paradox is (asin fact the earlierone had implied) a ,r.* The poem,for him, manages closureand openness. presenceand absence, both".g.r-.nt the momentary illusion of self-identity "in the teeth of the principle of difference."This illusion doesnot obliteratedifferencebut rather recognizesdifference within itself. The New Critics had mademuch of irony and paradox (seeBrooks, cTsp, pp. ro4r-48), and Kriegerretainsirony in the form of the paradox of Krieger'sirony is that of the consciousfiction purposelyrent preserr.eTabrence. Ly its own awarenessof tentativepresenceand threateningabsence.In a more recentessaythan the one below, Krieger builds a defenseof the symbol against the attack of Paul de Man. Taking his title from Keatst "Ode to a Nightingale," Krieger treats the poem as a "waking dream": "As a dream, the symbol creates for .rs a surrogatereality, claiming the completenessof an irreducible domain within its eccentricterms; although it also stimulatesa wakefulnessthat undercuts its metaphoricextravagancesand threatensto reducesymbol to allegory." Thus the poem containsthe vision of its own paradox and is "self-demystifying," remainingwithin the symbolist aestheticwhile at the sametime fully aware of the void.hhis awarenessKrieger has always appreciatedas far back ashis The is transformedinto TragicVisionwith its existentialistroots. Now the awareness Ktieger givesto qualities that The thought. the ierms of linguistically oriented to a tradiholding forms, verbal to other the poem he dois not wish to accord an apolwriting thus and tional distinction betweenpoetry and other discourse ogy for the existenceof "poetics." krieger's larer works include The ClassicVision GgZt); Theory of Criticism Leuel: Tbe Fall of GgZ6); PoeticPresenceand Illusion (rgZil; and Arts on the and written the (with L. S. Dembo_) ittl'niiit Obiect (r98r). He has also edited lts Abernatiues and Structuralism introduction to Directions for Critici.sm: to Alternative Symbolic The Dream; Gszil.The essayquotedabove,"A Waking Bloomfield tq' y'17' Symbol, and in Allegory, Myth, iti.goty," "pp."t.d Murray Kriegei and Contemporary Critical Tbeory, ed. Bruce (r9g'r).- SeeHenricksen,a collection of essaysabout Krieger'swork' 534

An Apology for Poetics

AN APOLOGYFOR

POETICS First I should like to place my theory between the New Criticism and certain elements of postStructuralism by revealing those assumptions it seemsto share with each of thesepositions, which I seeas radically opposed to one another. Despite the fact that my early work was largely fashioned by New-Critical predispositions and despite a lingering sympathy with some of their central literary objectives, I have in at least rwo ways sought to differentiate my thinking from the New Critics'. Perhaps these modifications were performed in part to immunize this theoretical tradition from the assaults of those who would seein it undeniable tendencies toward mystification, but I like to think that my own transformations of the New Criticism borrowed from-if they did not anticipate-assumptions about language which post-Structuralism has now made commonplace among us. The New-Critical aesthetic rested totally on a prior commitment to formal closure as the primary characteristic of the successfulliterary obiect. Its dedication to organicism, or to the peculiar sort of "contextualism" which I have described in many places elsewhere,gave to the poem the objective of self-sufficiencyor of microcosmic perfection which, New Critics would claim, was the ultimate reahzation of the formalistic tradition from Aristotle to Kant to Coleridge and the organicists who followed. All borrowings from the world of actions, values, and language-as well as the borrowings from earlier poems-were to be radically transformed by the poet working in, as well as through, his medium into a world of its own finality sealed from his personal interests as from ours. Indeed, those venerable terms, "disinterestednessr" "detachmert," and "impersonalitS" all could be invoked as assurancesof the work's capaciry to come to terms with itself. And y€t, in its casuistic perfection, the world of the poem was to guide our vision by making itself normative of it. Consequendy, alAN Apol-ocy FoR poETrcsis reprinted from American Criticism in the PoststructuralistAgt, ed. Ira Konigsberg copyright r98r by the Universityof Michigan Press.By permission.

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though the existential was to be re-formed into aesthetic terms, through the work there was to be an existential projection after all. It has now been a number of years and a number of writings of my own since I have come to reject an exclusive commitment to aesthetic closure of the New-Critical kind. The New-Critical position derived much of its strength from the claim that organicism is all or none and not a matter of degree; consequently, the poem could not be considered part open and part closed, so that an anti-NewCritical adjustment could not be achievedsimply by moving from the emphasison closure to the emphasis on openness.lnstead, through the introduction of notions like self-reference,illusion, and metaphorical duplicity, I argued for aparadoxical simultaneity of utter closure and utter openness. The argument proceeded in the following way: those moments during which the fictional world betrays a self-consciousnessabout itself as fiction remind us of the illusionary nature of that "reality" which seeksto encloseus. By ^ kind of negative reference,this reminder implicitly points to the world which the poem explicitly excludes in order to affirm its own closure. The world may be reduced to the stagein front of us, but so long as we are aware that it is only the stage in front of us, there is a world outside threatening to break in. Thus the work of art, as its own metaphorical substitution for the world of experience beyond, is a metaphor that at once affirms its own integrity and yet, by negativeimplication, deniesitself, secretlyacknowledging that it is but an artful evasion of the world. This claim to duplicity permitted me to allow the work to celebrate its own ways and the ways of its language unencumbered,without denying the ways of the world and itslanguage.The work's very retreat from referentiality acted paradoxically to poinr it, through negative reference, to the world it so selFconsciously excluded. The second essential assumption of the New Criticism was its preestablishedcommitment to the poem as fixed object-a commitment which has effectively been attacked by much post-New Criticism as mere fetishism. The arguments against such reification as an act of uncritical spatializing of the language process have been often enough rehearsed 'We and are well known. are by now well aware of the extent to which the New Critics neglected the relation of art to the social process as well as to the psychological processesof human creation and re-

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sponse as these are defined by the flow of language as a governing force in human experiencing. I would hope that my own theorizing has reflected these concerns. I have increasingly tried to dwell upon the poem as an "intentional object" onlS an illusion of a single entity created through the complicity of the reader who, sharing the author's habit of seeking closure, allows the workeven as he does his share in creating it-to lead him toward the act of sealing it off within the aesthetic or fictional frame that his perceptual training leads him to impose. The metaphorical habits he has learned-from childhood, from religion, from previous traffic with the arts-lead him to seek an apocalypS€, an end to history, in the work as he seeksin it to bring chronological time to a stop. Such has been the human use of myth-the quest for the myths we need-in the western aesthetic since Aristotle formulated the distinction befween history and poetry as they relate to time and to beginnings, middles, and ends. In thus emphasizing the poem as a will-o'-the-witp, I have meant to reintroduce the temporal element, the element of processand of human experience,into our understanding of the lite rary work as it is created by the poet and created complicitously by us. BecauseI want to see the work as functioning within the metaphorical apocalypse we allow it to create for us even while it remains the unexceptional piece of language (running back into the past and forward into the future) which it would be were it not for us as aesthetically conscious readers, I am necessarily tempted to look for evidenceof a self-consciousduplicity in the work as we come upon it and as we, in effect, ask it to do these things. But I do not suggestthat through these workings the aesthetic becomes a game of now you see it, now you don't. Rather I see the work as touching and unlocking in us the anthropological quest for that which marks and defines every moment of a culture's vision as well as of its inner skepticism that undoes its visionary reality with a "real" reality which is no less illusion ary. The making and unmaking of our metaphors, our mythic equations, in experience as in art only reveal the primacy of the operation of the aesthetic in us all-and perhaps explain the extent to which our drive for art is accompanied by ^ cognitive itch which even the experience of art itself never quite eases,so that the need to experience more art happily remains.

These differences from the New Criticism allow ffi€, I hope, to escape the difficulties arising out of its epistemological naivet6, leaving me less uncomfortable as I contemplate currently more fashionable theories about language with which I share large areas of agreement. Since the ascendancy of Structuralism more than a decade a1o, critics in this country have had to come to terms with the Saussureannotion of verbal signs as arbitraty and as based upon the principle of differentiation. Thus what used to seem to be the simple matter of representation in language-the presenceof a fixed signified in the signifier-is converted into a problematic. In the view of Structuralism, signifiers operate in a dynamic field of differentiation and have only arbitrary relations with their presumed signifieds.t A culture's confidence in the identity and inevitability of its verbal meanings, rather than its confronting their differentiation and arbitrariness, only testifies to that culture's self-mystifications as it falls prey to the metaphysical habit of logocentrism.2 The wistful imposition of identity is accompanied by the ontological claim of presence,now to be undone by a shrewder philosophy of language that reminds us of the field of absenceupon which the systemof differencesplays. Hence we have the reiection of metaphor for metonymy, and with the reiection of metaphor the removal of the ground on which the New Criticism rested. After all, how can one retain the central requirement of unity in metaphor-the overcoming of verbal differences by the fusion that overwhelms all boundaries that set words apaft from one another-if the very basis on which words function subiects them indiscriminately to the Structuralist's "all-purpose differentiating machine" of which Ren6 Girard' has contemptuously spoken? Though I may be persuaded about language as the marshalling of arbitrary and differentiated signifiers, I would hold out for the possibility that a single verbal Structure can convert its elements so that we read them under the aegis of metaphorical identiry with its claim to presence.It is this holdout claim to what the poem can persuadeus its language is doing which ties me still to the NewCritical tradition despite my concessionsto StrucI Seede Saussure. [Eds.] 2A term madepopular by JacquesDerrida. [Eds.] 3SeeGirard. [Eds.]

An Apology for Poetics turalist theory. I seek to maintain this power for creating poetic identity in language despite language's normal incapacities, so that I do not see Structuralism or post-structuralism as precluding a poetics such as the tradition since Kant and coleridge has been seeking to construct. I grant that the conception of metaphor, with its illusion of presence, may well be a secular conversion of the religious myth of transubstantiation, so that we may wish to reduce it at once to nostalgic mystificadon. And we may then see such mystification operating in all our spatiali zing of verbal relations which would bring linguistic remporality to a stop in its attempt to redeem time. By confessing the illusionary nature of this metaphorical operation we help perform on ourselves, I am suggesting a sophisticated view of language that knows of its metonymic condition and yet generatesan internal play among its elements which appears to create a metaphorical identiry that exists in the teeth of the principle of difference. It is an identity that knows the world of differencq a metaphor that has known metonymy, a spatial vision which sustainsitself only through the acknowledgment that all may be finally nothing but time. If it functions as what I have elsewherecalled a "miracler" it can do so becauseit proclaims itself as miracle only while acknowledging that it cannor occur. ClearlR what is at stake is whether there can be any claim for distinctions within the realm of signifiers, whether we can break off segments of language called poems as if they have something special in them. One of the ironies of Structuralism, it has often been pointed out, is the undifferenriating way in which it assertsits principle of difference (it was just this problem which prompted the Derridean critique of L6vi-Strauss).oEventually any poetics, but especiallyone like mine, must createits own ground by seeking discontinuities within textualitn at least for the momen tary purpose of our aesthetic experience at the hands of a poem. This recurrent need, in our historS to establish a poetics perhaps accounts for the persistence with which theorists resort to a deviationist principle for distinguishing poems from other texts. And what for them sets poems apart must somehow be related to the power aDerrida's critiques of Ldui-Straussappear in "Structure, Sign, and Play" (this volume) and Of Grammatology.[Eds.]

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of converting differences into identities, the arbitrary into the inevitable-in short, verbal absence into verbal presence. But theselast years there have been assaultsfrom several directions on the theoretical deviationism which for many decadeshad been a basic assumption for the dominant aesthetic. some of these newer directions overlap one another significantlS and this is about what we should expect since most of them are related, one way or another, to that version of Structuralism which-in an anti-hierarchical spirit-rejects the literary work as an elite object and, consequently, rejects any collection of such works as a duly constituted canon. First, the application of "information theory" is used by some as a monolithic model of interpretation which reduces all varieties of discourse to itself, searching out the cues for encoding (by the author) and decoding (by the reader) of the message which, as programmed discourse, the text presumably exists to communicate. Second, the analysis of the process of signification leads others to apply their conclusions about the emptinessof signifiers-the absenceof all signifieds from them-to words in poems as in non-poems. They judge the deviationist's claim to find a privileged fullness in poetic language to be a delusion and a fetish, a mystification. In poerry as in philosophy, they would deconstruct the metaphysical assumption that ontologizes verbal meanings. Third, there are those who seeall varieties of language as playing a similar role in culture's histor5 its way of meaning and of conceiving its realiry. One can use what Foucault calls discursiveformations to uncover the several archeological stages in our development.s And there are no exceptions among those discoursescontributing to, or reflecting, those formations. Fourth, theorists may seek to deny the apparent meanings intended by all texts, reducing them ro rationalizations of the author's "will to power." These critics are not satisfied with stopping the deconstructive processonce assumedstable meanings have been changed into a textual play among signifiers; they rather pursue that process beyond all texts-until textual pretensions are traced to the political or psychological motive that puts them forward as its verbal disguise. For these critics, sFoucault,The Archeologyof Knowledge. tEds.l

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whether they derive from Marx or Nietzsche or Freud, there is no innocent text, no disinterestedness in its production or its reception: instead, though the text offers itself and its fiction as all there is, the author means to use it to manipulate the actual world, to imperialize the world his way. And poems, agarn, are no excePtion. Fifth, there are those who analyze all texts as originating in tropes or in narrative structures. Such analysis bestows liter ary categoriesupon nonliterary as upon literary texts, so that all texts are treated as similarly figured and similarly fictional. Consequently, there is no normal discourse from which poetic language could deviate, no neutral sequence of eventson which we have not already imposed narrative and tropological shape.In effect, all language is deviation and there is no norm. Thus there is no neutral reference,so that we all speak in fictions, whatever truths we deludedly think we 'We have gone beyond Molidre's Monsieur mouth. Jourdain who was surprised (and impressed) to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life; for in this view we have indeed, like all our fellows, been speaking-and writing-creative literature: poetry, fictions which we had been taking for sober 'Vfhere all are poems, there need be no referentialiry. special gift of poem-making. Sixth, finally (and this also overlaps some of the others) theorists can consider all speaking and writing-or even, more broadly, all human activity-as indifferent parts of what I have earlier referred to as the seamlessfabric of textuality, of course without distinctions within it: the world of words as text or even the world itself as text (the iournal Semiotexte or the new, more radical journal , Social Text). 'We cannot, in this view, escape from experience, worldly and verbal or worldly as verbal, as a single capaciousroom composed of wall-to-wall discourse (to borrow Edward Said'sphrase): the world as text, all of it just one hermeneutic challenge. Here is the farthest move away from any notion of the poem as a potentially discrete entity. In all of thesecases,the distinction-making power which would create a poetry and a poetics has been cut off. And, in light of the convergence of the several lines of recent theory upon these Structuralist or near-Structuralist notions, there would seem to be good reason to be persuaded by what they have taught us about the deceptive nature of signfunctioning and about the unified character of our apparently varied discourses at given moments in

our culture. But I propose that we still worry about whether we wish to include literary discoursewithin this monolithic construct. Ot, on the other hand, do we rather wish to see literary discourse as achieving a self-privileging exemption from that construct by manipulating all its generic linguistic elements until they are forced to subvert their own natures and do precisely what a Structuralist view of languagewould preclude them from doing: from functioning as signifiers that create and fill themselveswith their own signifieds as they go, thereby setting this text apart from textuality-at-large as its own unique, self-made system?\ilithout some such notion, are we capable of accounting for all that our greatest works perform for us ? Do we not, further, have to reco gnrzethe peculiarly fictional, and even is to say selfself-consciously fictional-which referential-character of our most highly valued literature, even if we wish to grant to non-literature a fictionality and reflexiviry which less sophisticated readings of would-be "referential" discourse did not used to grant? And are not literary fictions, with their peculiar self-reference,sufficient to separate the work which they charact erize from the rest of discourse? By urging the reflexiviry of all discourseupon us, Structuralists and post-Structuralists have perhaps not leveledliterature into common 1criture so much as they have raised all 4criture into literature. If these critics argue against the exclusivenessof poetry (that is, fictions, "imaginative literature") and rather seek to include a wide range of works by essayists, historians, philosophers, and even social scientists, they do so by treating these works as texts to which techniquesof analysisappropriate to literary criticism may be applied. Even more, their techniques of deconstructing their non-lit erary texts, stripping them of their pretensionsand reducing them to their naked fictionality, are to a great extent echoes of what poems have always been doing to themselvesand teaching their critics to do to them. It is for this reason I suggestthat, instead of the concept of literature being deconstructed into 1criture, dcriture has been constructed into literature. As a consequence,everything has become a "textr" and texts-as well as the very notion of textuality-have become as ubiquitous as writing itself, with each text now to be accorded the privileged mode of interpretation which used to be reserved for discourse with the apparent internal self-iustifi cation of poetry.

An Apology for Poetics I think, for example, of the work of Hayden rilThitet on history writing, in which he sers forth a number of models of narrative structure based on the severaltropes (or master figures), modes of discourse which he treats as reflecting the modes of human consciousness. obviousln his reduction of every historian's truth claim to be the illusions of the poet's fictions, his obliteration of the realm of neutral fact and of discursive reference, will not please many historians who take their truthclaiming function seriously. Indeed, ir may well seem to condescendto non-poetic humanistic texts for us to cut them off from any truth claim by restricting them ro the realm of fiction and to the metaphorical swerve of private consciousness. 'Sfhatever the deconstructive mood may suggest, the historian may well want us to believehis version of history over the versions of others, or the philosopher to make us accepthis claims about the nature of language or of realitS so that either may well resent our turning him into a poet malgrd lui.Theliterary humanist should understand that it may nor be taken exclusively as flattery if he brings historians, philosophers, and other humanists under the literary tent, especially since they are so intent on their more direct obiectives. Sfords like "fiction" and "illusion" should teach us that there is a negative side (from the cognitive point of view) as well as a positive side (from the aestheticpoint of view) to being a maker of literary fictions, and others may not be as comfortable with the designation as we literary people are. The sober scholar in the nonliterary disciplines, who does his careful work and makes his claims to its justness,may well feel that his discipline and its distinctive ambition are being trivialized by being treated as a fiction shaped by his tropological bent. And such affitudes, that would protect the distinction berween-say-history and poetry, have had the history of literary criticism on their side since Aristotle initiated the distinction berween hisrory and poetry in Chaprer Nine of the Poetics. Indeed, even earlier, Plato had inherited and severely contributed to the war between the philosophers and the poets in many places in his work, beginning mosr notably, perhaps, in Book Two of the Republic.' Such questions as those, for example, about the boundary between hisrory or biography on the one 'See White. [Eds.] TSeeCTSP,pp.rg-;-3. [Eds.]

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side and the novel on the other, and about the applicability of narratological analysisto each of them probably remain serious questions, despite efforts to collapse all discourse into undifferentiated textualiry and all textuality into trope and ficdon. Surely, even after we have granted that some fictional obfuscation, with its rhetorical swerving, takes place outside the realm of literary fictions, w€ may allow some remnant of the free play of fictional reflexivity to be left to the literary intent, and may allow it to be replaced by more precise and clearly aimed objectives ir, say, historical studies. Our temptation to tell the historian what he is doing ought to subside,at least a little, before his own perhaps less subtle senseof what he is about. And the finally free-floating inventiveness of self-conscious make-believein the literary text should also in the end be acknowledged as a thing apart, despite our best efforts to seein what ways these differing kinds of texts, produced in responseto such varying purposes, may reflect on one another. Aesthetic foregrounding may well go on outside poems, but we do condescend to our writers in all the disciplines when we ignore, or deprecate,the severalresponses which the body of their works appearsto be soliciting from their different readers. So I suggest we respond critically to the enterprise, currently so common among us, that would undermine the poem's differentness from other discourse. \7hat this enterprisehas been seekingto accomplish is a deconstruction of the metaphysical assumptions behind the traditional aestheticand its resulting claim about the poem's ontology: the claim that the poem is a totalized structure, a selfrealized teleological closure, a microcosm whose mutually dependent elements are cooperatively present in the fulfillment of their cenrripetal potentialities. Instead, the deconstructive move reduces the poem to a play of centrifugal forces such as characterizes general non-poetic discourse. Gaps appear everywhere-absences and emptiness-and we are to acknowledge thesegaps for what they are) resisting our constructive tendency, imposed on us by centuriesof self-deceivinghabits of literary interpretation with their ontological assumptions, of trying at all costs to fill those gaps. For what we have taken to be the self-fulfilling and self-sealing poem is, like all discourse,mere vacancS acknowledging an absenceof substance,fleeing all presence as it leads us down the lines moving ourward to the intertextual forces which become the code, but

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which permit no integrity, no free-standing sovereignty, to any would-be body operating within them. In this sense,the poem, as a construction of elements manipulated by art into a presence (according to the traditional older aesthetic), has been deconstructed into absences that can be made to point only to the code of writing itself. But what of the need for closure, otr aesthetic need felt by the human imagination, and the imagination's searchfor it in the objects of its experience? Should we not value, and set aside for separate treatment, those specially constructed obiects that seem addressedto that aesthetic need? A criticism that preserves its own referential obligation to its literary object can treat poems as dislocations of language that enable language to create itself as a medium that can close off what Structuralists have shown to be normally open. The persistent impulse both on the poet's part to close the form he creates and on our part to close the form we perceive accounts for the internal purposiveness that, for Immanuel Kant, cha racterizes the aesthetic mode. Presumably it is this need to make or to find closure which leads us to the myth-making and, with it, the privileging of objects that recent deconstructionists would undermine. The imagination's need to find closure may largely account for the role of the story-like that of the picture frame or the proscenium arch-in the history of culture. The inherent nature of narrative Structure surely reveals a responsivenessto what Frank Kermode has called our "sense of an ending." t The satisfying ending is one that fulfills internally aroused expectations, that realizes the purposes immanent in the Story. From Aristotle's concept of denouement or falling action to the formal finality called for by Kant, and in the formalistic tradition that is indebted to both, we find the imposition of a mythic ending, a structural apocalypse, which cuts off the fiction from history. It acts, in effect, as an intrusion of the spatial imagination on the radical temporality of pure sequence' shaping time into the separatenessof fiction. Linear sequenceis susPended,transformed into circularity. g,tt there is something in literature that also keeps it open to the world, to language at large, and to the reader. As we contemplate the verbal obiect through our culturally imposed habits of perceiving 8SeeKermode.[Eds.]

what is presented to uS as aesthetic,we must deal with the nno-sided nature of its words, now that they have been, in spite of their normal tendencies, shapedinto a poetic medium: they try to work their wat into a self-sufficient presence, and yet they remain transient and empty signifiers.This is the paradoxical nature of language as aesthetic medium, and both sides must be exploited. Language is able to create itself into a self-fustified fiction, but, becauseit is also no more than language-iust words after all-it is able to display a self-consciousness about its illusionary character. Language seemsin our best poetry to be both full of itself and emPry, both totally here as itself and pointing elsewhere, away from itself. It permits its reader at once to cherish its creation as a closed obiect, one that comes to terms with itself, and to reco gnrzeits necessarily incomplete nature in its dependence on us lanas its readers,ofl literary history, on the general 'We can world. of the way guage sysrem, and on the and world the from apart uniquely as r.. itt words the world of language, while we see them also as blending into those worldsNot that I am claiming these special characteristics to be in literary works so much as they are products of our aesthetic habits of perceptionwhen dealing with such works-which seek to find them there. And part of our aesthetichabit of dealing with fictions is its self-consciousnessabout the occasion that sponsors it. In other words, the literary work persuadesus of itself as a special obiect even aS we retain an awareness of the rather extraordinary activify we are performing in contributing to our own persuasion. It is not fetishism when we recognize the tentative conditions that encourage the closure we celebrate, and when we accept the openness that surrounds the moment of our commitment to the closed object. It is under these provisional conditions that we have learned to commit ourselves to the aesthetic responseand to proiect upon the poem our grounds for it. Thus these conditions also qualify and complicate our senseof presence-of signifiers that have filled themselves with the signifieds they have created within themselves-within the play of words before us. And, despite arguments of both Structuralists and post-Structuralists, the illusion of presence emerges for us from the written as well as the spoken words before us. But it is always a presence rponto red pour I'occAsion and co-existing with our

An Apolog awareness of the lurking absencesthat haunt both writing and speech (1criture and parole). As has been suggestedin post-Structuralist semiotics, the speaking voice may make us too ready to conceive the presence of the speaker, so that we concede too little ro the anonymity of speech as it enters the nenvork of all that is spoken or can be spoken; in consequence,so the argumenr runs, we would concede more if we were confronted by the silence of the apparently anonymous written page. But, on the other hand, a counter-argument might claim, speech may seem to be the more firmly tied to absence-the continuing fadings -away linked to temporal sequence-as the sounds dissipate in the air as they are spoken; further, the orphaned page, composed of visible (and invisible) traces left by an absent speaker, may neverthelesspersuade us of a spatial simultaneity among its words as it takes its place within the physically co-present book. Let me turn the matter around again by adding that even speech,considered as a sequenceof sounds, suggests a sensuouspresencein its auditory phenomena that belie our sense of them as fleeting transparencies. As the poet dwells upon those characteristics, heard and seen,which turn words into sensory things, the signifiers can take on the weightiness of substance. In these ways, with the knowing cooperation of the reader-hearer, the word on the page or on the tongue can be made the occasion for our assigning a tentative spatial presence to it. But in remembering it also as being no more than word-the trace on the page, the buzz in the ear-we do not deny its temporality within the flow of our experience, worldly and linguistic: its elusive unpresence despite our attempts to seize upon and fix it. As I contemplate the possibility of conceiving speech as more likely to sponsor the feeling of absence than writing is, as well as the possibility of conceiving them the opposit e wayr l am aware that it has been my interest to dwell upon the poet's attempt to persuade us to break through to presence, whichever of the nno is the case. I am aware, further, that in my career I have been concerned more with the presence of texts as discontinuous entities than with the speaking presence in texts of the authorial consciousnesswhich is their point of origin. This fact only reveals my inheritance from the New Criticism and ifs obsession with isolated rexts as well as my inheritance from the Anglo-American tradition dating from Bacon, which seeks to re-

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spond to empirical phenomena, rather than the French inheritance from Descartes, whose concern with the cogito and the resulting concern with consciousnesscan never long be shaken. It may be that the New Criticism has, after all, even shaped my differences from it just as, perhaps, critics of consciousnesslike Georges Poulet' have helped shape the thinking of the post-Structuralists who have excluded consciousnessas a controlling origin for the text. There is yet another emendation I would make to the post-Structuralist's critique as it affects my claim-an unmystified claim-to poetic presence.I would argue that there is a major difference-not noted in post-Structuralist theory-berween the generic difficulty with presence in our logocentrism and the special difficulty with presence in the language of poetry. It is not noted because one must distinguish poetic from other discourse (by means of a deviationist aesthetic) before being able to see the different sort of presence constructed by the poem. I have pointed out the usual assumptions about transparent representation-a signified fixed into presence within its signifier-assumptions which, according to post-Structuralists, we see our language as making, thanks to its implicit metaphysical assumptions. It is this presencewhich is to fall victim to the post-structuralist's deconstructive enterprise. As a proponent of a deviationist theory of poetry, I could join in this enterprise while holding out for a special presence which a poem can build into itself by subverting and reworking the materials left it by those discourses which posrStructuralists have deconstructed in order to reveal the absenceswithin them. The metonymic character of the usual sequenceof signifiers, with their differentiations, can be transformed by the poet (so I would claim), who manipulates his verbal elements so that they may function as metaphorical identities, creating a presentation of signifieds through the generating powers of the signifiers with which those signifieds are perceived as being one. This poetic presenration feeds itself into a fullness out of the gaps of the fail ed represenrationsin non-poetic discourse. If Derrida calls affention to our need to correct the naive feeling of presencein all texts constructed in the logocentric tradition of the Wesr, de Man complains of the poet's arrogant effort to eSeeCTSRpp. r zrz-zz. [Eds.]

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achievethe monistic presenceof symbolism instead of accepting the allegory which is the appropriate way of language.toEach of thesedeniessimple presence by seeingall language as functioning in a similar waR but though neither would grant to poetry any privilege within the general realm of discourse' de Man's critique does attack verbal presence on rather different grounds, within the province of the self-privileging poet or the overreaching theorist who takes up the fight for privilege on behalf of the poet. And these are the grounds on which my own argument for poetic presence, without challenging Derrida's, can stand as an alternative to de Man's. But the dream of unity, of formal repetiti.onsthat are seen as the temporal equivalent of fuxtapositions, that convert the temporal into the spatial through the miracle of simultaneity-this dream persists,reinforced by every aestheticillusion which 'We cultiwe help create and to which we succumb. vate the mode of identiry, the realm of metaphor, within an aesthetic frame that acknowledges its character as momen tary construct and thereby its frailty as illusion. But it allows us a glimpse of our own capacity for vision before the bifurcations of language have struck. The dream of unity may be entertained tentatively and is hardly to be granted cognitive power, except for the secret life-withoutlanguage or life-before-languagewhich it suggests' the very life which the language of difference precludes. [n poetry we grasp at the momentary possibility that this can be a life-in-language. Let me suggest that, in our anxiety to resist the mystification of ourselves, we may concede too much to temporality when we grant it a "realtty" which we deny to its rival category, space. Space, presumablR is an invention of the reifying act of mind in flight from confrontation with the world of fact which is the world of time. So the mystifications of the spatial imagination are, in the work of Paul de Man, deconstructed by our introduction of temporal facts. But we must wonder whether this deconstructive act is not a privileging of time that sets it outside the realm of mind and language while giving it ultimate control over both in spite of all our inventions. Is time any less a human category than space, to be given a secure ontological space which its own very meaning contradicts ? Yet the spatial, as that which redeemstime, must be taken loSeede Man [Eds.]

as a delusion when considered from the temporal perspective,though-let us grant-this perspective may be no less fictional than the spatial. So the poem as language may well have a dual character, being seen at once as canonized text and as just more textuality, as words at once shaped into a palpable form of art and playing an undistinguished role in the nerwork of discourse.This duality should not be broken up into separate choices: either a metaphorical delusion-the spatial simultaneiry of the open flow of time which is to set the I AM-or the delusion straight. Instead, it is to be seen as two illusion ary ways in which poetic texts seem at the Sametime to force uS to seethem as functioning. It is this self-consciousduplicity within both response and poem which leads me-despite whatever other changes my theory has undergone-to persist in seeing poetry still as a form of discourse whose functioning separatedit from the rest. In the original "Apology for Poetry," Sir Philip Sidney" sought to maintain the place of poetry though it was being threatened by an austere philosophy that shut it off from the truth and would allow it no other proper function. This attack would exclude poetry from the rest of discourse' while our current theoretical movements would too readily absorb it into the rest of discourse.Aty theory devoted to poetry must today argue for a separate definition of the poem, thereby iustifying its own right, within the realm of language theory, to function as a maker of claims for its subiect. Thus my apology is not for poeff5 but for poetics, the theoretical discourse whose existence, resting on the assumption that there is a poetry, is threatened with every denial of poetry's separate place. In this wdyrhaving begun my career by commenting on the lz "New Apologists for Poetry,tt I now find myself an apologist-I hope not altogether an older apologist-for poetics. I can make my apologS I am now convinced, only by making the tentative, selfundercutting moves that separate me from those older new apologists and may seem at moments to align me with those who refuse to grant a separate definition to poetry or poetics. But my hold-out separatist tendencies invariably win out, so that, with whatever phenomenological concessions,I remain an apologist after all. CTSP,pp. r 54-77. [Eds.] "See 12Thetitle of Krieger'sfirst book (rgs6). [Eds.]

ChadesAltieri b. rg42

'r fN Act and Quality, from which the selectionhere is raken, Charles Altieri I developsa complex and sophisticatedtheory of literature, most strongly influencedby ordinary languagephilosophyand speechact theory.He beginswith 'lfittgenstein's view that all affairs of languagepresentus with "forms of life," learnedin action and that what expressions"mean" is alwaysconditionedby the meansof expressionor the method of projection actually employed.Altieri arguesthat writers and readersexhibit particular forms of competence,discernible in "procedures" that writers employ and readersmust acknowledgeas the very condition for recognizingthat expressionsare, in fact, significant and that the potential relation betweenwriting and reading communities dependsupon a "grammar" comprisedof specific but flexible procedures.From this point of view, the condition of understandinga text or utteranceis a knowledgeof the relevantgrammar by which orderedrelationsare established. More specifically,Altieri arguesthat literature, viewed as a kind of acion, characteristicallyinvolves an exemplary (and exemplifying) performancethat makesa specificpossibility of action, character,or evaluationpublicly available. By thus making Wittgenstein'smetaphorliteral, Iiteratureis seenas a method of projecting "forms of life," with a distinctivegrammar and setsof proceduresby which valued qualities are exemplified.Altieri similarly adapts the distinction betweenlinguistic competenceand performance(seeChomsky)for specificliterary use.Just as sentencesrecognizedas belongingto a languagemay be evaluated accordingto degreesof grammaticality,they may also be evaluatedaccording to degreesof acceptability;and in a similar way,we distinguishberweentexts and readingsof texts both in their capacity to exemplify value and as performancesthat may be more or lessperspicuous,felicitous, or interesting. While Altieri's position requirescomplexcritical analyses,it hasthe advantage of avoiding metaphysicalargumentswhich presumeeither that literature must havea definable"essence"or that, becauseliterature is fictive, it is thereforeontologically empty (and semanticallyindeterminare).Sincea literary work is an institutional fact that comesinto beingin a complex but still definite set of relations, its mode of "being" is neither parasitic on an imitated model nor reduced to a singleprocessof substitution under the notion of signification. In the selectionhere,Altieri offersa critique of three characteristicargumenrs that maintain or imply that literature is inherently indeterminate.In each instance,his argumentsoffer shrewd appraisalsof why the argumentsthemselves turn out to be indeterminateor self-defeating,while advancinghis own casefor a performativeand proceduraltheory of literature. The three casesof psychological arguments(primarily "reader response"criticism), textualist arguments(pri543

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CHenns Ar,tIrnr marily deconstruction),and historical argumentsbasedon changingmodels of "literariness" all havesimilar problemsthat stem from inadequateconceptions of the relations that literary experiencepresupposesand makes possible.The first instance-the assumptionthat the "meaning" of a text is constitutedby a reader-Altieri shows to be, first, trivially true inasmuch as texts only have meaningfor someonebut, second,following only from mistakingthe experience of readingfor the meaningof the experience.I7ittgensteinshowsthat in the case of pain (or any immediateexperience),to postulate"private language"is a non sequitur, since any language,as expressible,is by that fact public, just as the ability to relate the terms of the languageto the experienceis the condition of expressibility.Thus, the meaningof anything that can be expressedis not determined "subjectively,"and, as Altieri notes, "The relevantopposition is not between the personallysubjectiveand the objective,but betweenthe personaland the impersonal,both of which admit public determinations."Similarly,textualist createthe illusion of indeterminacyby applying particular analytical "tgu-ittm analysisof significationas purely diff9rprocedures(most notablS a Saussurean intial and arbitrary) without respectfor situations and contexts in which the determinationof meaningactually arises.In the final case,where indeterminacy seemsto stem from historical changes,Altieri arguesthat the main problem is that the critic doesnot sumcientlyacknowledgethe complex structureof action in the text but assumesthat ambiguity is indeterminary,on the tacit view that determinatemeaningmust be expressedas thematiccoherence. lUfhatis perhapsmost characteristicof Altieri's argumentin Act and Quality is his insistenlethit one neednot (and probably should not) abandontoo quickly collectionsof critical practices,most notably the ideasof the New Critics about the dramatic particularity of literary texts, when they can be recoveredas valuable analytical procedures,even (or especially)when they are dissociatedfrom prematuretheoietical and ideologicalclaims.It is on similar groundsthat he argo.r ott behalf of traditional humanismand its "classic" texts as offering paradigmatic examples,thereby creating"classes"of texts in which valued qualities in human experienceremain available. Altieri's work includes Enlarging tbe Ternple:New Directions in American Poetryduring the r96o's (tgZil; Act and Quality: ATheory of Literary Mean' ing and Humanistic Undersunding (r98r); and Selfand Sensibilityin ContemporaryAmericanPoetryGgS+).

Literary Proceduresand the Questionof Indeterminacy

LITERARY PROCEDURES AND THE QUESTIONOF INDETERMINACY L. TSREE INpnTERMTNAcYTHEoRTEs

I SHen Cnrrrcrzg If there is any doctrine that constitutes a shared ideology in recent literary studies, it must be the belief that substantial aspects of literary meaning are indeterminate. Where twenty years ago virtually every good graduate student could spin out intricate arguments demonstrating how verbal and image patterns articulated paradoxical themes in a literary text, his counterpart now learns to show how texts respond to perennial problems of language and authority by declaring their own indeterminacy or at least by rewarding a wide variery of different reading approaches. My general discussionof semantic issueshas obviously been directed against this position. Still, the risk of repetition is worth facing in order to take on the theoretical versions of indeterminacy that have shaped this climate.' I consider it an important test of my perspective that it can disclose and combat serious flaws in these arguments, and I find confronting them a useful contrastive strategy for exhibiting the values in a procedural approach, LITERARYPROCEDURES AND THE QUESTIONOF INDETERMINAcy is reprinted from Act and Quality: A Tbeory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding, by permission of the University of Massachusetts Press, copyright r9gr. lE. D. Hirsch is a cautionary example here. His Aims of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. r 7 - 49, offers a convincing caseagainst the most general indetermin acy arguments, by showing that if all discourse is indeterminate, there is no possible truth in saying so, because that statement too would be indeterminate. Hirsch has had little effect,however, parrially because he does not take on the specific formulations of those theories which have some bite for literary issues and which can take subtle Nietzschean forms, stressing the critic's will to power. [Au.]

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especially in the description it establishesof literariness as a specific way of focussing the performance of concrete actions for empathic and qualitative reflection. Our efforts to establish a procedural definition of literariness give us a senseof what an alternative to indeterminacy might look like. Indeterminacy theorists rarely describe in a rigorous way what they oppose. At most, one garners a loose sensethat their antagonists are either badly stated versions of organicism or reductions of meaning to thematic patterns. Let this discussion, then, be at least a challenge for them to test their weapons. But let me also clarify the target. In defending a concept of determinacS I shall not argue that there is a single correct reading for every literary text, even if one takes literary in the restricted sensedeveloped above. Determinacy is, as we shall see,a matter of degree and a function of possible communal agreement about assessmentprocedures. It is a matter of degree because for the oty, at least, w€ must concentrate on probabilistic grounds and on discussionsof the general shape of authorial purposes. There will always be indeterminate aspects of texts, like the meaning of Milton's "two-handed engine." But we can consider a text reasonably determinate if we can show that clear public constraints apply to the kinds of evidence that will make a difference for a community, and if there are grounds for agreeing on the level of specific details and on the hierarchy of relationships that establish authorial and dramatic purpose. A general case for determinacy, moreover, must show that in most caseswe either have a basic senseof informing purpose or we know the kind of evidence (which may not be easy to get or to prove) which would resolve competing interpretations. Determinacy is neither certainry nor propositional adequacy to facts. But there remain fwo theoretical ways of testing for it. Both are matters of judgment. A viable argumenr for explaining determinacy must describe a basic model of interpr etation which postulates a more abstract or general form of syntheric operations than those which foster the conflicts used to justify indeterminacy theories. This shall be the role I ask the concept of performance to play, and this is why I need to contrast this concept to typical discussionsof indeterminacy. There is, moreover, strong warrant for relying on a notion like performance because, as we have seen,

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some semantic operation must be available which frees us from the tautological equation-only textuality, therefore no purpose and no determinacy. The second test involves negative judgments. One can claim a sufficient general model of determinacy with respect to literary texts if one describesa series of fundamental operations which competent readers take as basic to defeating an accepted reading. For, in knowing what counts against a reading, a community reveals implicit criteria it might not be able to articulate fully. ril7ith these matters to contend with, I shall have to ignore arguments for indeterminacy based on considerations of historical change and cultural relativity. The basic theoretical issuesinvolved have already been discussedwith respectto meaning and significance and to questions of the limitations of cultural foreunderstanding. Moreover, a grammatical perspectiveon meaning easily handles specific matters of changes in genre conventions or in the meaning of words, becauseit insists that awarenessof the historical dimensions of a text is a necessary feature of literary education. One is simply not a competent reader who does not know what "uegetable love" meant in the seventeenth century, or who is ignorant of the srylistic conflict between tU(illiams and Eliot.' Those theories I shall consider gain a good deal of their power from confusing and contradictory aspects of the New Criticism. The New Critics greatly expanded our sense of the semantic complexity of a text, but they did not develop adequate ways of showing how this information might be coherently processed.' As practical interpreters, they stressed rhetorical and formal features of literary discourse, while as spokesmen for the humanities, 2On the determinatequality of historicalfeaturesof style, seeNelsonGoodman,"The Statusof Style," Critical lnquiry r (rg7il: zgg-8rr. on the limits of pluralistverrionr of indeterminacywith respectto historicalissues, :'The DeconstructiveAngel: The see Meyer Abrams, Limits of Pluralism," Critical Inquiry 3 GgZZ)i 4l-538. [Au.] 'Faul-deMan makesexactlythis argumentasjustification for indeterminacyclaimsin the secondchapterof Blind' nessand Insight (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, r97r), abbreiiated BI. For a v9_rygood descriptionof how iorrt.*porary criticism still repeatsthe themesof which it claimsto reject'seeGerald New Criticai theoiy 'Sfas New Criticismr" SAlmagundi,no' 27 Graff, "'What G g z + ) i7 L - 9 1 . [ A u . ]

they insisted on literature as a special form of intense, complex, concrete experience. The claims to form seemedto give determinate status to a romantic, and ultimately unintelligible, senseof immediate experience, while the claims about experience seemed to circumvent the problems of circularity that attend formal, autotelic criteria for interpreta'We are now witnessing the inevitable breaktion. down of this unstable synthesis, with each pole claiming its own interpretive methods which necessarily lead to indeterminacy. Each of the models of indeterminacy I shall deal with derives a good deal of its authoriry from this condition. Psychological versions of indeterminacy, for example, emphasize the difficulty of attributing objective status to the complex experiential impact of literary language. Textualist versionsof literary meaning, on the other hand, depend on notions of rhetorical form and the constitutive properties of language, which overdetermine appropriate interpretive contexts and render meanings logically, rather than empirically, unstable. The final model of indeterminacy takes as its focus the way texts themselvesrespond to dilemmas of correlating formal and experiential aspects o'writof meaning, and, thus, present themselvesas erly," or subiect to a variety of incompatible thematic structures. Each theory in turn tests and clarifies a basic element in my argument- the status of the reading subiect, the conditions for contextualizing evidence in order to attribute formal intentions, and the relative priority of action to theme as grounds for establishing meanings.

Z.Tttp PnoBLEMwITH Psvctrot-oclcAt, VnnstoNs oF INpnTERMINAcY There are two distinctive types of psychological indeterminacy theory with a surprising degree of congruence.There are self-consciouslyempirical develop-.ttts of I. A. Richards' responsetheories, which insist that meanings for objects which are imaginatively experienced must be in large part created by the individual reader. The position is clear in the work of Norman Holland and'Walter Slatoff and, I think, logically required by Stanley Fish's arguments about affective stylistics, although he denies

Literary Proceduresand the Questionof Indeterminacy it.o What these critics root in empirical psychology, Paul de Man's earlier writings derive from a phenomenological description of the manner in which an intentional consciousnessconstitutes meanings from physical signs.Here are Holland and Fish generalizing about literary meaning: Meaning-whether we are talking simply of putting black marks together to form words or the much more complex processof putting words together to form themes-does not inhere in the words-on-the- page but, like beaut5 in the eye of the beholder. (r'rn, 98) The stylisticians proceed as if there were observable facts that could first be described and then interpreted. til(hat I am suggesting is that an interpreting entity, endowed with purposes and concerns, is, by virtue of its very operation, determining what counts as the facts to be observed;and moreover, that since this determining is not a neutral marking out of a valueless ateu but the extension of an already existing field of interests, it rs an interpretation.5 aI have used as my basictext for psychologicalindeterminacytheoriesNorman Holland, Poemsin Persons:An Introduction to the Psychoanalysisof Literature (New PIP,and Paulde Man, York: Norton, r97), abbreviated BI. Also basicto this positionis \(IalterSlatoff,Witb Respect to Readers: Dimensions of Literary Response (Ithaca:CornellUniversityPress,r97o).For further readingsin Holland andlaterrefinements of hisposition,seeJ ReadersReading (New Haven: Yale University Press, U7 S); "Unity Identity Text Self," PMLA 90 (tgZS), 8t3-zz; and "The New Paradigm:Subjectiveor Transitive?"New Literary History 7 ft976): j3S-46. Holland repeatedlydeniesthat his view is a subjectivismand prefersthe word transactiue, but he certainlyclaimstexts are indeterminateand locatesthe sourceof the indeterminacyin what he callsa reader'sidentity theme,a posi-tion I find hard finally to distinguishfrom subjectiuir-. lAu.l sStanleyFish,"'What Is Stylisticsand ,07hyAre They Saying SuchTerribleThingsAbout It," in SeymourChatman, ed.,Approachesto Poetics(New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press,rg73), pp. 148-49. Fish'sother basicstatement of indeterminacyprinciplesis "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics," New Literary History z (tgZo): rzj-62. Fish,like Holland,refusesthe kind of labelsI applyhere,but if readerscreatewbat countas the facts,we are pretty closeto psychologicalsubjectivism, howevertransactional.I quote herefrom his responseto Ralph Rader'sdevastatingcritique of his work, both in

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These generalizations depend on three assumptions: (r) that signs are truly obiective only as physical data-"A poem taken purely obfectively is nothing but specksof carbon on dried wood pulp" (r,rn, z);' (z) that the less scientific and referential an utterance is the more its emotive properties can only be reconstituted in individual experience-(( a being with a character experiences reality only to the extent he can give it life within that character" (ntn, 16r); and (l) that criticism is not objectively but rhetorically expressesindividual deasssessable sires,and consequentlyis most authentic when seen as self-analysis-6'{ reader uses the fine, subtle lis'new' critics have taught these last decadesto tening listen to himself and to others with the same attention to detail and nuance that formerly was reserved for literature as a separateentity" (pIP, ry$. 'V7hat Holland takes as empirical, de Man derives from Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx: all representations or interpretations are essentiallysymptomatic epiphenomena of underlying primary structures of desire. Both Holland and de Man, then, place the individual at the center of meaning, but only de Man is sufficiently ironic to reco gnrzethat the determining force played by desire threatens our fictions of identity as well as our dreams of objectiviry about literary works. De Man's "radical relativist" position on indeterminacy takes its departure from a phenomenological distinction between natural and human meanings that echoes Slatoff on scientific versus imaginative utterances and both Holland and Fish on the necessaryimaginative recreation of mere obiective marks on a page. Natural signs always have clear and repeatable meanings, because they hide nothing and follow established laws, while human utterances are always intentional, al"Fact, Theory and Literary Explanation," Critical Inquiry t GgZ|: z6z-72, and in his response to Fish's response, "Explaining Our Literary Understandingr" Critical Inquiry t (tgZ4: 96o ff. Rader's work makes it unnecessaryto consider Fish here, but I should point out that Rader's basic attack on Fish, for ignoring the conventional procedures by which we construct units of meaning, parallels my general concerns. [Au.] See FisD. lEds.l 6This view of meaning as constructions from signs and therefore subfective is one of the fundamental themes shared by psychological and phenomenological approaches. See, for example, Fish, "Affective Srylistics," p. r4o, and Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Readi.9," New Literary History t (r96fi t Sl-68. [Au.]

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ways both uttered from a point of view not entirely evident in the signs and dependent on the intenrions of the interpreter, and therefore always problematic (nt, ro).t Intentionality, for him, is not, he says, simply a procedure that transfers content from a mind to a text and then to a reader, as it is for E. D. Hirsch. Rather, intentionality signs a verbal obiect with the presence of a desire that can never be determinately recovered (nt, zj), for intentionality means that the signs emanate from a point of view, or what Sartre called a surpassingof the obiect, that can only be recovered from other points of view. Claims about the uniry of a text, for example, reside "not in the poetic text as suchr" for then intention would have the status of a natural sign; rather, they must be proposed "in the act of interpreting this text" (u, z9). Neither author nor critic has a privileged position on the text, for each has a different spatio-temporal perspective on it and is caught up in one of the two kinds of infinite regresscontained in the hermeneutical circle. First, hypotheses about the whole text must continually be modified and displaced by further experience of particulars, and, second, the self who interprets is continually being modified by his changing grasp of both his and the author's intentions (w, z9-iz). I find these psychological theories of literary meaning extremely useful for elaborating the different ways in which the act of reading is conceived by a procedural approach that emphasizes competence. Questions of procedural competence arise here on the most fundamental epistemological level, and involve us in questions of what subiectiuity and obiectiuity can mean. For it does not make sense to distinguish sharply between marks on a page as objective content and meanings which are then added by subjects-at least, when the pro7DeMan stresses the subiectiveconstructionof meanings he is led to that positionby his early in largepart because work attacking Romantic dreams of a languagethat could parallelnatural structures.Seeespecially"The Intentionaliryof the RomanticImage," in Harold Bloom, (New York: Nored., Romanticismand Consciousness ton, rg1o). De Man's later writings have shifted the forms of indeterminacyfrom intentionto the metaphoric quality of literary texts, that is, from phenomenological psychologyto semantics.This is clearestin "Semiology i"'d Rheioric," Diacritics i (Fall, $7il2 z7-31, and SecondDiscourser" "Theory of Metaphor in Rousseau's in David Thorburn, ed., Romanticism:Vistas,lnstances, Continuities (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), hereafterabbreviatedTMR. [Au.]

cedure being discussed is the activity of readitrg. There need be no quarrel that from certain perspectives the fundamental objectivity of a sign residesin its physical properties. These perspectives,however, are usually specialrzed ones, remote from the kind of obiectivity signs have in ordinary experience. Take a picture of a lion in a newspaper. How sensible is it to claim that obiectively all we seeare certain arrangements of dots and lines which we then subjectively interpret? Wh at if the dots and lines are not substances at all, then do we obiectively see only atoms and electrical forces? Obiectiuity, then, may be less an ontological term than one referring to what is fundamental and publicly shared in different modes of inqui.y.t The kind of objectivity a scientist requires is different from that needed in ordinary behavior, but that does not make ordinary behavior more subjective; it simply makes it less precise, and therefore not an adequate standard for certain purposes. It is not the ordinary purpose of reading to be clear about the physical properties of words on a page. This is why simple reflection tells us that when we read, w€ do not ordinarily construe words from letters and empty spaces,nor meanings from words, but take the letters as direct signs of meaningful utterances (assumitg, of course, that problematic casesdo not arise). It is more difficult not to take letters as objects not transferring meaning than it is simply to read them, and there is obviously quite a gap befween our ordinary sense of reading and the kind of behavior we notice when we feel we are subjectively construing such signs (perhaps as reminding us of pictures or hieroglyphs). Our usual meanings of subiectiue and obiectiue do not apply to such primary processes as reading ordinary sentences. The implications of this initial point become crucial when we recognize how a similar notion of obiectivity leads Holland and Slatoff to base their analysis on an empiricism that ignores distinctions between natural and institutional facts. They assume that one can establish a theory of meaning by simply observing what readers do in readittg. In a rough way, this observation procedure is adequate 8The clearestphilosophicalattackon the idea that words are obiectivesignswhich we then interpret it J: L. Austin's Senseand Sensibilia(New York: Oxford, 196z), asprocedurally pp. g4- r4z. For the notion of objectivity_ bi situationallydetermined,seechapterelevenof Austin's How to Do Things\|rith Words. [Au.] SeeArzsriz.[Eds.]

Literary Proceduresand the Questionof Indeterminacy for a physical science working within established paradigms. However, as soon as the phenomena in question involve education and the corollary possibilities of behavior being judged as inadequate, one must observe not only what people do, but the ways in which what they do is judged or defined by the relevant procedures. It follows from our earlier discussion of institutional facts that a scientist from another world could not explain the game of chess by simply observing how people play; he would need to know the traditions and purposes of the game and understand the possible and the good ways of playing it. It seemscertain that this scientist could not learn what a promise is by observing a representative sample of promises. He might learn something about promising behavior, but it would be ludicrous to define a promise as a pledge which people seem to keep about seventy percent of the time. I have made enough abstract claims about competence and procedures. Holland's methods enable us to put the case in concrete terms, for his questions and analyses obviously ignore the relevant issues needed in a description of reading and in understanding the grounds on which we fudge the adequacy of such a description. There is, first of all, something very odd in asking one's subjects in an experiment intended to measure the reading of complex texts, "Well, how did you respond?" and "How does the thing make you feel?" (ptp, 7or 9r). Not only are these questions heavily theory-laden, they ignore the kinds of considerations that distinguish meanings from simple associative responses. Again, imagine defining chess, or promises, or the enterprise Holland himself is engaged in by correlating answers to questions like these. The complexities clarified by what Holland does not consider are most obvious in his analysisof one particular respondent, Saul, whose answers derive not from affective states but from his acceptanceof aesthetic norms that sound very much like Ezra Pound (nln, 9o-95). Saul's responses,in short, are not immediate, but are mediated by a set of values he has derived from the institutions of literary discourse. Yet while these mediated responsesare too complex for Holland's empiricism, they would be judged by most competent readers as naive reliance on a limited moment in the history of taste. \ilfe come around again to the complex issue of the nature and the levels of convention. If direct observa-

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tions of reading activity could tell us the status of literary texts, there would be little point to locating Saul's ideology. But not only can we reco gnizeit, we can seeboth why he says what he does and what he overlooks. In other words, we confrorit the facts that there is a history of taste and that there i re recursive procedures based on more general conventions which enable us to criticize and to comprehend historical changes. This does not mean that there is a metaphysical essenceof reading, for we probably never completely escapeour culture. But it does suggest, once again, how flexible that culture is in allowing us to develop a self-conscious critical awarenessof our limitations. De Man is no empiricist. Nonetheless, his Sartrean view of intentionality allies him with Holland on a central thesis of psychological indeterminacy theories-ari equation of the intensely personal with the subjective play of desires. De Man recognizes the irony of speaking about self at all in this context, since the self is probably a cultural construct, certainly not an empirical entity one can directly experience. Yet the same cultural assumption remains. As Holland puts it, "A being with a character experiences reality only to the extent he can give it life within that character" (ptp, 16r). The force of this claim derives from taking a tautology for a significant truth. Of course, for me to experienceff, I must have the experience, but it does not follow that I make the meaning. I must personally attribute a meaning, but it is not I who determine what the meaning is. For if each agent determined what meanings to give words and situations, meaning would be entirely private. Holland and de Man confuse having a feeling (which is the act of a subject) with knowing what a feeling is.' There are difficult issuesof empirical psychology here, but they do not affect the semantic point made by the private language argument: to be able to speak about a feeling at all involves publicly determinate knowledge of how to relate linguistic coneI take this distinctionfrom Stuart Hampshire,Thought and Action (London: Chatto and tUfindus,r9S9), pp. rzr-zz. Hampshire'sbook and Anthony Kenny,Action, Emotion and Will (New York: HumanitiesPress,tg6l) providefull explanationsof how the philosophicalattack o1rthe positivist'sreferential/emotivedichotomy givesus nonsubjectiveways of talking about emotional experiences.For anotheranalogueof Hampshire'sdistinction, considerthe intuitive differencesbetweendescribinga literarywork and describingone'sresponseto it. [Au.]

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ventions to overt situational details we learn to recognize in grammatical terms.to After all, we often redescribe emotions as we do intentions, a procedure only intelligible if we identify emotions from public contexts. Similar insights led Husserl to insist that intentionality is not a feature of personal relations to situations, but of a consciousnessto a noematic object. In other words, Husserl flirted with idealism to preserve a distinction between the determinate relationships an active consciousness has to its objects and the necessarilynegative or "unreal" featuresof subjectiveintentions later to be stressedby Sartre. However, it is important to insist that denying the subjective base of our knowledg. of emotions does not entail denying that emotions are deeply experienced by persons.The relevant opposition is not berween the personally subjective and the objecrive, but berween the personal and the impersonal, both of which admit public determinations. Personalis a term that measuresinvolvement, not degreesof hermeneutic objectivity. Again, the relevant structures for the theorist are not onrological subjectivity and objectivitS but the different procedures evoked by different kinds of situations. Moreover, when we are dealing with institutional facts, we must reco gnize that structures of competencemake our experience in large part rule-governedl actors assume internalized roles and do not merely express subjective biases.(The subiectivemay createparticular ways of playing the roles, but these, too, if knowable at all, are publicly determinable.) The roles, nonetheless, can be performed with great personal intensity. One might argue, in fact, that the attack on subjectivity r0I cannotresistpointingout an obvious caseof the dangerginherentin denyingthe link betweenthe personal andestablished procedures. It turnsout that in '"TheSignificanceof Frank O'Hara," Iowa Reuiew4 GgZlj, ro2-o l, I publisheda readingof "The Day LadyDied" which almostexactlyparallelsthe one Holland givesthe poeT to show how his identiry themepsychologically conditionshis reading(PIR rro-34). We can, in fact, easilyseparatein the readingHolland the professional critic from Holland the psychologicalsubject.But the more interestingfact is the difficultya psychologicaltheory would haveexplainingboth why our readingsof the poem are so similar and why, nonetheless, our literary theoriesare so different.The similarityis easyto handle if one assumeswe both know how to read poetry,and that the theoristusing a poem as Holland doeshas no professionalobligation to read the specificcriticism (thatwould spoil what he is trying to demonsrrate in the reading).[Au.]

in Eliot's, and especiallyin Yeats',poetic derives from a sensethat personalintensiryincreases in direct ratio to the subjectivebaggageone can iettison when he performsthe conventionsof reading.

3. TrxruAlrst, SruANTrc MooELS OF INOPTERMINACY De Man's recent work brings us to the second type of indeterminacy theory based on descriptions of the semantically overdetermined quality of linguistic acts. His vision of the failure of the New Critics to control the complexities they revealed leads to complex meditations on rhe instability of any context an interpreter might pose as an image of controlling form or purpose. For signification, especially in metaphoric discourse,complicatespurpose by invoking endlesspossible paradigmatic sets and affective contexts. These multiplicities are doubled again by the contexts, metaphoric chains, and performative forces inscribed in the interpreter's discourse.To put de Man in the larger textualist frame needed to elaborate the general structure of this model: formalism bred the dream of complex informing structures, which we now must recognize, instead, 2s aspects of what Derrida calls structurality, the cap acity to disseminare continual possibilities of structure that never resolve into a determinate context.tt The simplest, and in some ways the most rigorous, case for reversing New critical doctrine into visions of textualist srrucrurality is presented by Arthur Moore's critique of organic form.tt Form, he argues,can serveto delimit meaning only if we establishour norion of form independently of a given text. If I mean by form a sonnet or a comedy, then I have a fixed concept to apply to a text, a concept whose meaning does not depend on 1rSeeDerrida's"structure,Sign,PlaR" in RichardMackseyand EugenioDonaro,eds.,TheStructuralistControuersy(Baltimore:JohnsHopkinsUniversiryPress,r97o), pp.z47-64. [Au.] Reprintedin thisvolume.[Eds.] 12ContestableConceptsin Literary Theory(Baton Rouge: LouisianaStateUniversityPress , r973),pp. r 55- z3z.lt should be noted that Rader,in the essaycited above, makesessentiallythe sameargumentagainstformalism, but in the serviceof a sophisticated model for verifying interpretiveproceduresthroughthe useof factsindependentof formalanalysis.The quoreat the endof the paragraphcomesfrom p. r74. [Au.]

Literary Procedures and the Question of Indeterminacy what I take the text to mean. But as soon as we try a more organic notion of form, as a concept that establishes what is semantically relevant in a text, we enter a vicious hermeneutical circle that no phenomenological magic can make benign. Organic form is establishedby our senseof relevant particulars, and we have no facts independent of those we construct in our interpretation with which to con'We trol our hypotheses of semantical relevance. combine advocate and irrry, or, as Moore puts it, form becomes"no lessand no more than the means by which" a critic "literally recreatesthe work of art from the potentialities of language." If I am to representthe logic of rextualist indererminacy adequatelRhowever, I cannot avoid returnittg once more to Derrida. It is, after all, only appropriate that a position ironically mirroring positivist criteria for securenames should repeat in semantic terms the dichotomy between reference and emotive, or, in this case,associative,discourse that inspired Richards' position.t' Here I shall presume my earlier discussion of unstable names and concentrate on Derrida's argument that the iterability of writing makes context indeterminate and renders intentions unrecoverable: A written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is with the collectivity of presencesorganizing the moment of its inscription. . . . By virtue of its essential iterabiliry, ^ written syntagma can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibiliry of functioning, if not all possibility of "communicating" precisely. One can perhaps come to reco gnrze other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onro other chains. No context can entirely encloseit.to In order for a context ro be exhaustiuely determinable, in the senserequired by Austin, conscious intention would at the very least t'S... JacquesDerrida, "'$7hiteMythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,"New Literary History6-ft974): 5-74, esp. p.45, and "DiffErance,"in this volume. positivismin Derridahasnot goneun[Eds.]The ironic 'Warner noticed.See Berthoff,"The rU7"y \7e Think Now: Protocols for Deprivationr" Neu Literary History 7 ( r g z 6 ) t 9 9 - 6 1 3 .[ A u . ] t*J19l,r9s5Derrida, "signature, Event, and Context,,' _ 9lvpl, one (Baltimore:The JohnsHopkins universiry Press,1977),p. r8z, hereafterabbreviatedSEC.tEds.]

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have to be totally present and immediately transparent to itself and to others, since it is a determining center of context. (sEc, rgL;italics mine) Derrida's claims threaten the center of my arguments, since one can deny his radical opposition between certainty and scepticism only by arguing for probabiliry conditions based on procedureswhich in turn require that contexts and intentions be sufficiently determinate to indi cate appropriate procedures. tU7ithout determinable intentions and contexts, there is no way to affirm a distinction between the ascriptive level of textuality and the purposes that characterizepragmatic usesof langu"g.. Becausewe are dealing with a specificconceptual issuehere, I will assumethat one can take Derrida's statements as philosophical claims. Then I will try to show that Derrida poses the issuesin ways that have very little relationship to the features of experience where problems of determinate meaning arise. Thus, when we do test his claims against common practices they are neither perspicuous nor accurate. Notice, first, the phrases I have underlined in the quotation above. These reinforcing adverbs insist on absolute criteria, which in effect put questions of meaning in a purely logical universe. Here Derrida (out of context) is his own best commentator: " . . . I become suspicious. This is especially so when an adverb, apparently redund ant, is used to reinforce the declaration. Like a warning light, it signals an uneasinessthat demands to be followed up." t, I am not sure that Derrida is masking uneasiness,but there is certainly causefor suspicion of his adverbial claims. These claims insure the truth of his version of indeterminacS but they also effectively banish his claims from any practical or testable discourse about meaning. It is tautologically true that all discourse has some degree of indeterminacy-to prevent this, each statement would have to catalogue all the facts, desires,and laws that might impinge upon it. But questions of indeterminate meaningr xs they relate to the description of actual language behavior, must concern themselveswith degreesof indeterminacS and, consequentlp with purposes and rsJacques Derrida, "Limited, fnc.," Glyph Two (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Universiry Press, rg77), p.r74, hereafterabbreviatedLI. tEds.l I note in SEC sevenseparatesentences relyingon thesereinforcingadverbs:pp. r74, 18r, r 82, t81,rt86, t92, rg+. tAu.l

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contexts that create specific needs for intelligibility. Statements do not fail because they are not absolutely determinate, but because they are not sufficiently determinate for specific tasks. Derrida's understanding of intention and context suffers from a similar idealization for the purpose of sceptical reversals. If intentions could ever be "totally present" and "immediately transparent," they would have to have the ontological status of the single objects Derrida and Russell demand as anchors for descriptive names. But who has ever seen a totally present intention? Again, Derrida asks us to suppose that meanings and contexts depend on the most problematic of properties, and, thus, he iustifies a tautological scepticism. Yet his view of intention is neither plausible nor intelligible (nor accurate to Austin's).tt A meaningful attack on intention would have to address the arguments of those, like Anscombe, who show how intention is not a psychological event, but a properry we attribute to certain kinds of behavior. From this perspective, Derrida has the relationship between intention and context reversed. As John Searle points out in his powerful critique of what can be abstracted as philosophical claims in Derrida, conventions and contexts enable someone to form intentions to himself and to have them recogni zed. The intention to write a poem is less a locatable psychic event than a series of choices in a context to which reasons may be attributed. Derrida cannot recognize the correlation between intention and context, becausehe has a similarly abstract view of context. For Derrida, contexts are essentially arbitra ry frames for a discourse, independent of the speaker's purposes. Thus, he argues as if an utterance can evoke or be placed in an infinite variety of contexts, with no qualifying conditions. He claims, correctly, that an ordinarily 16JohnSearle'sattemptto refute Derrida, "Reiteratingthe Differences,"Glyph One, pp. r98 -zrr, is especially useful on the subiectof intention and the problematic notions of writing and absencethat support Derrida's claims.There is room, however,also to note the literary mythologyinforming, or at leastleavingtraces,in Derrida's speechacts about intention. The absolute deposeintentionsas pure psychicmomandsfor presence ments of virginal innocence,in which the self might observeitself directly.But then writing comeslike Satan to violate the bower with the rude strokesof convention SEC,pp. 19r-9L.[Au.] and iterability.Seeespecially

senselessexpression, like "the green is eitherr" is not absolutely determinate as senseless,because it could make sense in some contexts, say as an example of.agrammaticaliry: "The possibility of disengagement and citation al graft" exists for every sign (snc, r8 j). But possibility is not a normal consid'We do not determine eration in interpretation. meanings by treating sentencesand contexts as independent of one another; nor are contexts necessarily carried along to other contexts simply because a statement is iterable. Contexts are part of the ways sentencescome to mean in the first place. \U7econsider "the green is either" to be senselessnot in some absolute metaphysical world, but in terms of the ordinary contexts in which we imagine sentences occurring. The fact that the sentence can make sense in some contexts is a sign that we always read its sensethrough assumptions about appropriate contexts. Indeed, it is a strong argument against Derrida that he can so easily posit the contexts needed for giving senseto the utterance, and that he clearly recognizes how changes in context involve specific changes in what counts as determinate discourse. That different contexts are always possible simply makes no difference to the argument that in given situations we can be reasonably sure of what the relevant contexts are for establishing a sufficient degree of determinacy. Let me try to link questions of intention, appropriate context, and iterability by developing a simple concrete example. SupposeI write a letter saying, "I will come next week." As a set of linguistic terms this statement is infinitely repeatable and "next week" not a specific temporal reference. Yet a reasonable person would only use this abbreviated statement if he thought the particular context of the letter sufficient for his purposes. He could always specify the date if he felt it necessary.More important, in order to gain an understanding of this letter adequate to act upon its message,there are many contexts and aspectsof intention we do not need to know. \U7edo not need to know other cases where the speaker has used the utterance, nor the contexts which made him the kind of person who might make this journey, nor the complex motives he might have in going. There are situations where these might be relevant, but usually not if we wish to understand the basic meanittg. The statement is not indeterminate, even though its motives, causes,

Literary Proceduresand the Questionof Indeterminacy and possible consequencesmight be and probably are. Imagine how long one could function in a human com.mynity, which is founded on probabilities, not certainties, if each time he received this message he didn't bother to pick the person up, because, after all, he doesn't seeit as exhaustiuely determinable and is not sure of all the person's motives. Imagine how we could decide that the context is not sufby assuming that another probable ficient-only context is the relevant one. It is true that, if we found this letter ten years later, it would be indeterminate as a speech act, though not as a semantic unit. This would be so not because the context is indeterminate, but becausethere is no relevant context at all. That is, the very conditions of uncertainty clarify the simple probability on which sense depends. \ilfhat we adduce about context pertains also to Derridean arguments about the displacing power of metaphor. Derrida claims, for example, that philosophical discourse is inherently unstable, because many of its central terms, like idea, theory, and propre sens, are inherently metaphorical and multiply contexts. But this assumes that metaphoricity is a properry of words, rather than of uses.It ignores the possibility that contexts or conventions can give appropriate fixed sensesto these terms, so that their metaphoric qualities are either placed or ignored. The examples I mentioned are by now dead metaphors: philosophers disagreenot becausethe terms are inherently unstable but because they desire to employ them in different kinds of argumentative contexts, like behaviorist or mentalist ones. The terms are defined differently not becauseof their inherent properties, but because of their generality, which makes their specific meanings depend on an argumentative structure. Moreover, when we consider live metaphors, there need be no indeterminacy. Metaphors cannot easily be elements in referring propositions, but we can understand them as features of a specific expressivespeechact. When metaphors displace or compli cate reference, they usually do so for an expressiveor hermeneutic purpose, and that purpose can normally be inferred from the situation. Metaphors are expressionsof an action taking place through the utterance, and if we understand the situation we normally see why the metaphor is used. (In cases where the metaphor cannot be paraphrased, we understand its purpose

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as creating a certain kind of effect and we assess how effective it is-and here expressivesuccess'not truth, is the relevant dimension of understandi n9.t' Let me demonsffate the determinacy of metaphor by exercising a bit of counterperversity on Paul de Man's brilliant reading of metaphor in Rousseau (rrvrn). Rousseau, he argues, claimed that speech originates from one man seeing another and describing him as a giant. Later, the man might recognrze his similarity with the other and shift to a generic abstraction like man. But, de Man goes on, the expression mnn is actually less accurately referential than the metaphor, becauseit covers over all sorts of potential differences benveen the men. The metaph or gianf, on the other hand, tells us nothing about the realm of objective facts, but, then, it does not pretend to and does not catch us up in bad faith as does the putative description mdn. The metaphor gives an honest expression of a mental state of a given man in a given situation, an expression which does not tempt us to false generalizations, because it is so clear as a particular action.

4. INpnTERMTNACYBasno oN CHINGING loBns oF "LITERARINEss" I hope I have made it clear that there are no general reasons why contexts are not sufficiently determinate to allow public agreement on the basic nature of speech acts. One need not so much refute Derrida for this purpose as point out how his claims are largely tautological and self-enclosed. His arguments about meaning are ultimately empty, because they simply do not address the differences between linguistic possibilities and actual linguistic choices. He shows that language as language is indeterminate, becauseit admits of possible choices, but he does not show that once choices are made there are t7For supportof my view of metaphor,seeDonald Stewart, "Metaphor, Truth, and Definition," Journal of AestheticsandArt Criticismjz (r97il: zo5- r 8; TedCohen, "Notes on Metaphor," lournal of Aestheticsand Art Criticismj4 (1976\ L49- 59; and L. JonathanCohen, "The Role of Inductive Reasoningin the Interpretation of Metaphor," in Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman, eds., Semanticsof Natural Language (Boston: David Reidel,r97z), pp.7Lz-40. [Au.]

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not probabilistic grounds for deciding what the immediately relevant choices and contexts are. However, while one can dismiss Derrida's relevance for general semantics,the caseis not so clear for specifically literary issues.Here we must show that literary texts provide sufficient probabilistic contexts for determining meanings in both the worlds they represent and in the authorial act. Indeterminacy theories specifically devoted to liter ary matters are likely to prove more perplexing than those basedon generalpsychological and semantic arguments. One must locate principles for synthesizing into a single hierarchy of relationships extremely dense semantic units organized by internal, self-referential contexts. Nonetheless,I have argued that there are procedural considerationsthat enable us to reconstruct these contexts by natural tzing the text as concrete performance for reflectivepurpose. The pressureof a third group of indeterminacy theories should allow me to clarify the provenance of this claim and to prepare for the next chapter's discussion of an intensional text grammar. Becausethis third group of theories is concerned primarily with practical questions, it does not manifest the clear conceptual organization of the other groups. Thematic claims for indeterminacy may derive from a wide variety of contexts, for example, from a senseof modernity developed out of the conjunction of Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx (as in Edward Said'sBeginnings and in Roland Barthes' more historical pronouncements), from Paul de Man's insistencethat self-consciouswriters use indeterminacy to mark the gap between the life of consciousness and the demands of the empirical world, or from Frank Kermode's claims for the inherent plenitude of classic texts that allows them to be reinterpreted according to the demands of different cultures.tt 1sSaid givesa very nice formulation of the five expectations that characterizethe classicalmodelsof meaning which modernviewsof intertextualityreject.SeeBeginnings,p. 16z. Paul de Man's essayon Derrida in Blindnessand Insightprovidesa good exampleof a critic trying to subsumeDerrida'slogical treatmentof meaning into a historicaland purposiveview of the author'sthematic awarenessof the problems.De Man, in short, makes indeterminacya possibleauthorial perspective, and,thus,impliesthat we canunderstandit asthe action of the implied author. For Kermode,I will concentrate on one essay,"Hawthorne'sModernrryr" PartisanReuiew 4r (rg74), 4z.8-4r, wherehis theoryis lessquali-

I have chosen as a representativeexample of these theories a recent essayby Frank Kermode on Hawthorne. The essaycombines aspectsof all the forms of thematic indeterminacy I have just mentioned, and it succinctly exemplifies the way Derridean concerns are domesticated, historicized, and psychologized in some of our best recent practical criticism. Kermode's theme is that Hawthorne is essentially a modern writer, because he recognizes that the very process of representing life in a fiction undermines the possibility of the writer's authoritatively interpreting his materials. Hawthorne employs the conventional typological structures which give an illusion of a writer's authority, but he carefully deconstructs any single thematic coherence within the rypology-thus, he suggeststhat the experience presented can only be given coherence by an individual reader in effect creating his own text. The following comment, on The House of Seuen Gables, suggestshow Hawthorne's metacommentary self-consciouslyreinforces his awareness of the new hermeneutic world opened up by about authoriry and historical ff;::nescepticism The text of the novel imitates him in this; its maps, inherited Gothic materials-lost courses lsicl-its magic, its confusion of the "traditionary" and the historical, its allegories cunningly too clear or too obscur e-are all evasions of narrative authoriry, and imply that each man must make his own reading. The types inscribed on it are shifting, urstable, varying in force, to be fulfilled only by the determinations of the reader; in strong contrast, then, to the old Puritan types. So the text belongs to its moment and implicitly declares that the modern classic is not, like the book of God or the old book of nature, or the old accommodated classic, of which the senses,though perhaps hidden, are fully determined, there in full before the interpreter. In the making of it the reader must take his share. (urvr,$6) It is crucial to this senseof modernity that Hawthorne is not simply a complex writer; rather, he is fi.d,h"" * his recentbook The Classic(New York: Vikrng, r97j). I will abbreviatethis essayas HM. [Au.] See Said and Kermode.[Eds.]

Literary Procedures and tbe Question of Indeterminacy a consciously indeterminate one, refusing to give his materials any secure interpretations and forcing readers to make "the book according to the order and disorder of our own imagination" (Htut,$9).It seems that authors, 3s well as critics, are trapped between an impossible dream of objective interpretations of experience,on the one hand, and, on the oth er)a hopelesslysolipsisticprocessof generat' ing fictions which can at best be honest about their own incapacity to understand how other minds make senseof the world. Kermode's claims are based on a very interestitg, and (for my purpose) useful, confusion. He fails to distinguish between an indeterminate text and a quite determinate textual act, which explores tensions that arise from attempting to interpret complex events by simple thematic categoriesor an insufficient typological grammar. Kermode does not ask whether difficulties of determining the text derive from his model of coherenceor from the action presented, and he ignores the fact that it is consistent to offer a coherentr determinate account of a literary text as exploring or postulating an essential indeterminacy in its dramatic situation. \What remains determinable is the nature and quality of the acts by which the author develops his claims and suggeststheir significance-this, at least, is what we bry when we stress competence as the capacity to natural rze a text in terms of a performance we reflect upon for its representative qualities. In fact, if we look at what Kermode actually does in this essay,we will find strong confirmation for my hypothesis about competence. For, despite his explicit position, he, in effect, demonstrates how to construct a text as a performance. \il7hilehe takes a share in making the text (an expression that reminds us of Holland's tautology about character), he does not, therefore, arbitrarily impose his own categories. Instead, he offers a very persuasive description of Hawthorne's authorial action that constitutes a comprehensive reading of the textual details. Kermode recognizesthe limits of simple moral interpretations of Hawthorne's actions, and shows, instead, how the strands of Hawthorne's fiction make sense as a dramatization of the difficulty of making moral judgments in a social context torn between religious and secular schemesof interpretation. The real power of Kermode's reading is not to releaseus into subjectivereadings,but to show how subiective moral allegories only capture us in the

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hermeneutic trap Hawthorne is depicting. Kermode claims that the reader as interpreter must make his own arrangement of the text's shifting play of signifiers, but, by forgoing moral interpretation for description of Hawthorne's action, he manages to achieve a position where a kind of objectivity is possible, and where the inadequacy of other readings is clearly established.He does this by showing how Hawthorne's problems with typology themselvestypify a recurrent human problem. Kermode, too, typifies a recurrent problem that leads to and informs much of the current interest in indeterminacy. A variety of cultural and academic forces-the enervation of the New Criticism, the desire for relevance, a distrust of formal and aesthetic issuesas not sufficiently absorbing for critical work-has led to equating determinate meaning with the possibiliry of coherent thematic interpretations of a text's details. This emphasis,in turn, fosters discoveriesthat literary texts are indeterminate. Thematic expectations lead interpreters to concentrate on whether an abstract conceptual model will fit the complexity of event and verbal texture in a work. The results are predictable, especiallyin a literary culture so aware of the tensions which I have discussed between representation and its other. Moreover, thematic analyses encourage indeterminacy theories, becausein their straight form they make it difficult to claim distinctive cognitive properties in literary experience. What depth literary themesprovide one can find better stated elsewhere, so it is tempting to root the value of literary experience in other properties-especially in literature's capacity to make themes ironic and to dramatize their inadequacy to concrete situations. (This move ironically repeatsNew Critical versions of paradox from different epistemological perspectives.)Then there are more subtle pressuresat work. Good critics want to stress the complex and intense energies involved in reading a text-both out of respect for the text and out of the desire to perform their own talents. However, if one equates meaning with theme, there is little room now (after decadesof interpretation) for the full play of a reader's energies, unless he concentrateson showing how the details contradict any easy generalizatrons and invite end'We less reinterpretation. find this evident in Kermode's reading of the perennial modernism of the classicas permanently vital, becausealways capable of being reinterpreted. This emphasis on rein-

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terpretation preserves the energy of classic texts by denying two of their central features-the necessary pastness of the classic, which makes its continuing relevance a testimony to perennial features of human experience, and the relationship benveen the qualitative depth of classic treatments of actions and their continuing power. It may well be that the term classic is significant because the works to which we apply it have the power of generating classes;that is, they become prototypes of basic recurrent modes for imaginatively organizing experience. What matters, then, is less the opennessin semantic texture that allows reinterpretation than the depth with which actions are rendered and engage our energies.A text like the Aeneid can be read in much the same way Kermode reads Hawthorneless becauseit is open to thematic reinterpretation, than because its action typifies perennial problems inherent in interpreting historical change. The implied author must come to terms with the contradictions bet'weenthe Augustan ideal of the Pax Romana and the danger that the means needed to achieve that ideal threaten to undermine it by repeating the violence endemic to the cultures it wants to supplant; Aeneashimself must continually grapple with reading signs that invoke two contradictory symbolic codes (or texts, in Derrida's formulation), one basedon the Trojan values on which he had formed himself, the other requiring faith in a destined new order. Those very features which lead thematic criticism toward indeterminacy become essentially determinate properties in readings that emphasize dramatistic performative qualities. By contrasting a performance model to Kermode's theses,we can begin to see both what that model can account for and the implications it has for practical criticism. The basic terms for that contrast derive from Kant's attempt to distinguish the status of ideas or themes in art from their status in other modes of discourse: "By an aesthetical idea I understand that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e., any concept, being capable of being adequate to it." t' One cannot be sure exactly how much forreCritique of Judgment,trans.J.H. Bernard(New York: posiHafner, ry68), sec.49, p. r 57. For \U7ittgenstein's tion, seeLecturesand Conuersationson Aesthetics,Psychology and ReligiousBelief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berke-

malism lies beyond Kant's claim, but it is possibleto insist, as Wittgenstein does, that this different status of concepts stems from the fact that, in ordinary experiences, art works are not so much analyzed and interpreted as described and treated as performances. Performances, in turn, cannot be reduced either to verbal constructs or to their informing ideas. These alternatives both serve as means rather than ends, becausethey make it possible for an interpreter to reconstruct dimensions of an action in a situation. The reader needs interpretive strategies, but these are provisional ways into appreciation of the performance. They are neither substitutes for the concrete enactment nor its goal. Interpretive concepts function more as themes do in music than as explanations do in science or ethics. These concepts become what \Thitehead called "lures for feelittg"; they are means for bringing large matters to bear in intensifying aspects of a specific irreducible event or situation. One cannot rule out subiective contexts as possible lures for feelitg, but for criticism, and ultimately for the reader who internalizes public standards, there remains the procedural test of convincing others that a particular way of conceiving the performance in the text articulates the fullest possibilities inherent in the words, situations, and formal patterns. The criteria for describing a performance, in short, are essentiallythose by which Kermode persuadesus to include Hawthorne's metafictional concerns in our reading of his novels. A text, then, may be conceptually indeterminate because, as Kant says, it admits the interplay of many concepts. But this does not mean we choose among these concepts; rather, we try to establish the action in such a way that we can seehow each might affect the nature and quality of what remains a single Purposive performance. Themes, then, contribute to the meaning of a literary text, but do not constitute the meaning. In one sense,this is obvious, becausewe treat texts as particulars, important as specific organizations of details rather than as primarily instances of generalizations. These texts depend on principles of organization and evaluation which are of a different t.yr u"t"*ttty of California Press , r97z), z8-4o, and John Casen The Languageof Criticism (London: Methuen, 1966).The New Critics often tried to definea denotativereferentfor aestheticideas,and, thus, produced claims about truth to nondiscursiveexperiences.[Au.]

Literary Proceduresand the Questionof Indeterminacy order of being, and are capable of organizing and using themes. In concrete cases, even with texts whose main purpose is to articulate or defend an idea, this means that as long as we view the text in literary terms-that is, as a significant, selflargest category of exorganizing particular-our planation will be act, not theme. Thus, even with texts based on single organizing ideas, our concern is less with the determinate nature of the org anizing ideas than with the purposes the ideas serve. We attend to the qualities of thought by which the ideas are articulated or applied to the abstract and con'We crete dimensions of the situation. often find that the nature of the theme-say the idea of justice in Paradise Lost or of nature in the Prelude-sxnnef be abstracted from the text. Justice in Paradise Lost means the relationships drawn by the text among the various situations in which the concept is used. This, indeed, is why literary texts, as performed correlations among aspects of an idea, so readily transcend the ideological limitations of their historical genesis. When we insist on the qualitative aspectsof even heavily thematic textsr we seethat there need not be much difference between classic or readerly texts and self-conscious modernist treatments of indeterminacy. Most literary texts matter because of the properties they hold in tension. These may be dramatic instances,where an author performs a capacity to make fixed ideas resonate in situations-as, say, in Donne's "Holy Sonnets" or in a novel like Middlemarch-or they may be situations where ideas themselvesconflict and will not be reconciled with one another or with events. In both cases,the texts have determinate and vital existence to the extent that they focus our sympathies and our reflective beings on intense relationships bet'ween a human agent and a situation. Thematic criticism can deepen our awarenessof that situation, so long as it does not propose too simple a conceptual substitute for it. Then, among other things, it encourages claims about indeterminacy as soon as other features are recognized. These claims are, virtually by definition, reductions of both the dramatic and the conceptual tensions which charact erize the power of most texts to move us deeply while rewarding the mind's ability to understand what it is moved by.

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MoDEL CeN 5. How A PnnToRMANCE Creuu ro RrsoLVE THnsn PnoBLEMS: THp AurHoRrTY oF AcnoNs Much of my last argument may have seemedonly a rehash of New Critical doctrines. It was that-determinedly and determinately-but with what I take to be the crucial difference that now this doctrine can be put on a concrete basis. Texts have properties of particularity, dramatic tension, and depth becausewe construe them as specific performances in situations which unfold in time for our sympathy and reflection. Moreover, we now have an imperative for returning to New Critical generalizations about the text as dramatic work, because we can see where the alternative emphasis on thematic content has led. \[ith an essentially Burkean restatement of New Critical views, w€ can clearly handle what becomes problematic in Kermode's essay. Now we have another way of understanding how a reader's energiesmight be absorbed. Reading is only partially thematic interpretation. Equally significant are processesof making qualitative distinctions, assessingacts, and trying to deepen one's grasp of the agents' relationships to their specific and conceptual situations. If theme is central, energies are all connected with decoding operations. But these operations, as we have seen,have nowhere to go but into refined ironies, because the theory provides no other focus for sympathetic and reflective engagement. S7ith action as our center, even the simplest themes can provide place and play for the most intense energies. A stress on performance can also establish terms for locating and resolving the more general problems that lead to an easy reliance on notions of indeterminacy. Kermode's observations about Hawthorne, for example, can be shown to derive from a basic determinable feature of literary texrs which modern writers tend to emphasize. A literary text typically blends two levels of action-a dramatic course of events, and a process of interpretation and judgment carried on by an implicit author, whom Geoffrey Hartman calls "the voice in the shuttle." Modern writers take advantage of this situation by calling attention to complex aspectsof voice which can be set in conflict with the mimetic level. Madame Bouary here is the quintessential modern text, for it

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nicely plays off the authorial voice against Emma's dramatic plight. r$fhile she tragically pursues her banal desires, the authorial voice coldly distances itself from that tragic world by using elabo rate artifice, grotesque plot manipulations, and obvious control over the dramatic, fictive subjects it creates in order to insist on its freedom from the ironic realm of desire. Madame Bouary is not open or pluralistic, but it demands of a reader who is to appreciate it fully that she remain open to the complex interrelationships between the two levels of action. The tensions Flaubert articulates, Kafka brings to one radical extreme, an extreme where indeterminacy is an important concept. For with Kafka, the authorial desire for an adequate stance from which to evaluate,or at least to handle, his dramatic materials becomes the basic action of the novel. There are always more allegorical possibilities arising on the expressivelevel than can be satisfactorily and coherently applied to the events of the story. But even here the point of Kafka's fables is not to elicit a variefy of readings, but to dram atize consequences deriving from the difficulty of determining meanings for events. Finally-once we can distinguish acts of performing problems involving indeterminacy from indeterminate texts-we can give an adequate description of what is at stake in the fashionable topic of a writer's authority. Kermode is typical of contemporary critics in assuming that authority depends on a writer's ability to make a determinate and accurate interpretation of his materials. It seemsmore probable, however, that a writer's au-

thority resides less in his generalizations than in the qualities of human concern his text displays. \il7hat givesHawthorne, Flaubert, and Tolstoy authoriryand what denies it to Beaumont and Fletcher or Scribe or Vachel Lindsay-is the fact that the members of the former group make a world serious people can imaginatively inhabit, concern themselveswith, and take delight in. Lite rary authority derives from making problems believable,not from solving them.'' Indeed, had Hawthorne taken literally the only remarks Kermode seemsto think are not indeterminate, had he really believed that "the reader may choose among these theories" (Htut, 4jB), his rendering of the hermeneutic problems which perplex modern man would be far less compelling and his authority that much diminished. On matters like these it is not simply Kermode's authority, but that of literary traditions in general, which is ultimately at stake. So long as we insist that readers can choose freely among alternatives, we simplify and trivialize both hermeneutic activities and the objects that authorize our concern with that activity. 20There is a simpletestfor the superiorityof a qualitative modelof authority,asopposedto and question-oriented a thematicone. ln Beginnings,Saiddoesbrilliant readings of the tensionberweena writer trying to authorize his text as an interpretationof experienceand the pressureor molestationof that authoriry by the intractable facts of the world or pulls of connotativelanguage.Yet his imageof authority cannothandlethe basic f act that we can distinguishdifferent degreesof respectfor a writer's authority preciselyin the honesty and depth with which he presentsthe ironic forcesthat molesthis desiredprojectionof thematicmeaning.[Au.]

AliceA. Iatdine b. 19jr

LrcE A. JnnDrNEworks at the juncture of Anglo-American and French feminist thought. The essayhere became parts of the first two chapters of her

Gynesis:Configtrations of Woman and Modernity (rg85), in which she expands the concernsof the essayinto lengthy considerationsof questionsof the subject,representation,and fictions. Shethen proceedsto discussthe thought of Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze,all threeof whom havebeen JacquesLacan,Jacques involved in developinga languagethat has helped to shape French feminist thought. Following that, shestudiesa number of modern literary works in connection with this thought. Jardinetakesparticular note at the outsetof the important differencesbetween Anglo-American and French feminism. Anglo-American feminist criticism has beenconcernedwith the sexof the author, with "narrative destiniesr"the image of woman projectedin texts, and genderstereotyping,genderbeingthe term employed to describethe pressureof culture on sexualidentity, while sexuality refers to biological identity only. French feminism has followed poststructuralist thought in its proclamation of the disappearanceof the author (seeespecially Foucauh)and the teleologicalnarrative(asin the Frenchnouuelroman).Characters havebecomemerelynamefunctions; the imagehas beenunsettled,and sexual identity itself has beendeconstructed.Indeed,as we shall see,there is question whether Frenchfeminismhas not gonebeyond feminismentirely and is not actually antifeminist.Clearly the sceneof Frenchfeminism (if that is what it any longer can be said to be) is a sceneof languagestudy.American feminist studies of languagehave tended to examine language"externallyr" that is to say, empirically. In Francethe effort has been to explore signification "internally" by way of examinationof suchquestionsasthe subject,the real, identiry and meaning. In addition to having a sexualidentity, the author as a speakingsubjectis in question.Representationitself becomesa fantasyof lU0estern thought. Trutlt and humanismare rejected,though thereremainsbelief in a world ftomwhich Truth has disappeared. Jardinesuggestsfor the future, rather than a turn toward silenceor religion in the face of all this, a "continual attention-historical, ideological, and affective-to the placefrom which we speak."Shehasconcludedthat we cannotpursuethe questionof sexualdifferenceutithin the legacyof representationand its "comfortable conception of the speakingsubject." In this she definitely sides with Frenchfeminism,but sheis also awareof a certain practical woddlinessin the Anglo-Americanfeminist movement,though sheis unableto acceptthe tacit assumptionsabout languageand the subject which she thinks are made by American feminist critics and languagescholars. 559

55o

Auce A. Jnnown Jardine'sterm "gynesis" is the "putting into discourseof .woman'.', This is a processwhich she declaresis beyond the subject, representation,and man's "truth." It is, the more we seeit in operation in her writing, modernity or what Derrida called 4criture and diff4rance,itself. Indeed, "woman," being itself a word, is subjectto the play of differencethat detachesit from representation(in this view) and entersit into the chain of signification."Woman" is, as a result, a metaphor of writing and of reading in the poststructuralistsense,the process that disrupts Westernsymbolic structuresand logics. It is in the sensethat this line of thought dispenseswith the author and representationthat Jardine's "gynesis" is possibly beyond feminism, at least feminism as it is inherited from the humanist and rationalist tradition. In addition to "Gynesis," Alice A. Jardinehas edited (with Hester Eisenstein) The Future of Difference (r98o), a collection of feminist studies.She is also cotranslatorof Julia Kristeva'sDesirein Langtage (r98o) and "'Women'sTime" (in this volume).

G\T{ESIS In a discussion of the problems involved when "observing others," Paul de Man mentions in passing that, when addressing two cultures, "the distressing question as to who should be exploiting whom is bound to arise." 1 In Paris, after almost three years of working closely with feminists and others, I am no longer sure either whom I am "observingr" or who my "others" are. Given that in-between state, I would like to begin with the title of the MLA Special Session for which this paper was originally written: "New Directions in Feminist Critical Theories in t France and the Francophone World." of my reflecyou here some with I will be sharing tions on theories developed in France (l should say in Paris) over the past two decades. That much is clear. But the words "new directionsr" "feministr" and "critical" pose a problem for me. First, it is unclear that there are any "new directions" in French feminist thought right now-for feminists cyNESIsfirst appearedin Diacritics rz (rg8z). It is reprinted here by permissionof JohnsHopkins University Pressand Alice A. Jardine. I Blindnessand lnsight (New York: Oxford University Press,r97r), p. ro. The context for this remark is provided by ClaudeL6vi-Strauss. [Au.] 'My thanks to Marguerite LeCl6ziofor inviting me to presentthis paperat the r98r MLA.[Au.]

in France at least. After the outburst of theoretical enthusiasm and energy during the late r96o's and early r97o's, the French Mouuement de libdration des femmes (MLF) experienced a seriesof splits, rivalries, and disappointments which have led them to stop, Bo back, think, read, and write again. In fact, the term "MLF" now legally belongs to only one group in France-.6psychoanalysis and Politics." And this group, according to its own literature and public stance, is most definitely opposed to feminism-as are many of the other women theorists, writing in France today, whose names are beginning to circulate in the United States.Who, then, do we mean by "feminist" ? That word, too, poses a serious problem. Not that we would want to end up by demanding a definition of what feminism is and, therefore, of what one must do, saR and be, if one is to acquire that epithet; dictionary meanings are suffocating, to say the least. But if we were to take "feminism" for a moment as referring only to those in France who qualify themselves as feminists in their life and work, our task would be greatly simplified. For example, if I were to talk about feminist theorists in France, I would want to insist on what might be called the "invisible feminists," those younger women as yet not "famous" who are working quietly behind the scenes,in study groups and special seminars, trying to sort out and pick up the pieces left in the wake of the both theoretical and practical disputes of the last few years. Or I might invoke the feminists who are attempting to map out

Gynesis some very new and long awaited directions under Mitterand's government; or the ones who have left France to work at the Universit6 des Femmes in Belgium, or in the United States. But, increasinglR when in the United States one refers to "feminist theories in France" or to "French feminismsr" it is not those women one has in mind. Perhaps this is becausethey are not, or are not primarilR working in feminist critical or literary theory, whereas theory is currendy ^ locus of interest for American feminism. Feminist (literary) criticism, as such, does not really exist as a genre in France. To my knowledge, only three books published in France over the past few years could be categorized as feminist literary criticism: Anne-Marie Dardigna's Les chAtuaux d'6ros, Claudine Herrmann's Les uoleuses de langue, and Marcelle Marini's Les territoires du fdminin at)ec Marguerite DurAs.' Other women theorists whose work has had or is beginning to have a major impact on theories of readi.g, and who at one level or another are writing about women, at the very least do not qualify themselveseither privately or in their writing as feminists and, at the most, identify themselvesand their work as hostile to, or "beyondr" feminism as a concept. H6lbne Cixous, Sarah Kofman, Julia Kristeva, Eug6nie Lemoine-Luccioni, for instance, belong to this group and their names are heard in the United States.o I would even go so far as to say that the major new directions in French theory over the past two decades-whether articulated by men or womenposit themselves as profoundl1 that is to say conceptually and in praxis, anti-feminist. That does not mean that they should be rejected or ignored by feminists. On the contrary. But it does mean that those American feminists, including myself, whose reading habits have been deeply changed by contemporary French thought must remain attentive to what arq ultimatelS some very complex problems of translation-in the most literal senseof the word as well as in its broader and more difficult sense,2s the inter-cultural exchange 3Claudine Herrmann, Les Voleusesde langue (Paris:des Femmes,r976h Anne-Marie Dardigna, Les Chhteaux d'6ros(Paris:Maspero,r98o); and MarcelleMarini, Les Territoiresdu fdminin auecMargueriteDura.s(Paris:Editions de Minuit, 1977).[Au.] t Luce lrigaray is a specialcase,one we will not be able to discussin this essay,but will reservefor attention at a later date. [Au.]

56r

of ideas:the specificproblemsinherentto the portation and exportationof thought.t 'What

follows may be seen as a gesture towards thinking through some of those problems. First I will attempt to clarify what I mean by the "antifeminism" of contemporary French thought and, in so doing, explicate my own title. Then I will complicate things further by outlining briefly what I see as the three major topographies of that French thought-as explored by the male theorists there. \Ufhy insist on "the men" instead of "the women" ? Becauseall of the women theorists in France whose names I have mentioned arq to one degree or another, in the best French tradition and not unproblematicallS direct disciples of those men. That is not meant as a criticism, but, at the same time, those women cannot be read as if they were working in isolation-especially in France where the tradition of the "school of thought" or the "literary salon" is still strong. I should also mention that the questions and problems I am raising are grounded in a hypothesis that the "new directions" in contemporary French thought arq in their "inspiration" and "conclusionsr" an attempt to delimit and think through what is now loosely called "moderniry" or, more problematically in the United States, "post-modernism." My feeling is that any "detour" of feminism through contemporary French thought is a voyage into that as yet still vague territory of modernity completely avoided, in my opinion, by Anglo-American feminist thought. The generic term "contemporary French theory" designates for me the first group of writers after the Frankfurt School to try to come to terms with the (threatened?) collapse of the dialectic and its representations which ls modernity. Ultimately, the question I would want to put into circulation here would be this: are feminism and modernity oxymoronic in their terms and sDuring the discussionfollowing my presentationof this paper at the MLA, there was a lot of energyexpended over the words "feminist" and "anti-feminist." It was almost as if the problems of translation addressed here could be resolvedif everyonein the room could just come to an agreementabout what feminism isor is not. The problems with that (primarily AngloAmerican) approach to interpretation are, of course, made abundantlyclear by many of the Frenchtheorists mentionedhere.S7hatis important, they might sa5 is not to decidewho is or isn't a feminist,but, rather,to examine how and why feminism-as both word and concept-may itselfbe problematic.[Au.]

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terminology? If so, how and why? If not, what new ruse of reason has made them appear -at least in France-to be so? Not long dgo, Annette Kolodry wrote that "As yet, no one has formulated any exacting defini'feminist tion of the term criticism'." t Like Elaine Showalter, she distinguishesbetween those women who write about "men's books" and thosewho write about "women's books." (Kolodny also mentions a third category-(cly1y criticism written by r woman, no matter what the subiectr"-[st she doesnot pursue it, implying its inadmissibility to any feminist.) Feminist criticism, within those parameters, is as multiple and heterogeneousas the "methodologies" available for use. She adds: "[These investigations] have allowed us to better define the portrayal of and attitudes toward female characters in a variety of authors and, where appropriate, helped us to expose the ways in which sexual bias and/or stereotyped formulations of women's roles in society become codified in literary texts" lp. TS]. This short statement by Kolodny summarizes well, I think, feminist criticism in its most fundamental gesture: an analysis (and critique) of fictional representations of women (characters)in men's and women's writing. If the author is male, one finds that the female destiny (at least in the novel) rarely deviates from one or two seemingly irreversible, dualistic teleologies: monster and/or angel, she is condemned to death (or sexual mutilation or disappearance)andl or to h"ppy-ever-after marriage. Her plot is not her own and the feminist critic is at her best when drawitrg the painful analogies between those written plots and their mimetic counterparts in "real life." IncreasinglS women feminist readers reach the point where they can no longer read "the men." That is, they begin to find the repetition unb earable. This is true of both kinds of male fictions"fiction" and "criticism." This limit, when reached, is particularly relevant in the caseof criticism, however, when one realizes that the maiority of male critics (in all of their incarnations) seemnot to have read (or taken seriously)what feminist criticism has produced. They continue either to ignore gender or elseto incorporate it into an untransformed reading 5"SomeNotes on Defininga 'FeministCriticism'," Critical lnquiry,YoI.z, No. r (Autumrl1975),p.ZS. [Au.]

system, with an ironic wink of the €y€, a guilty humanistic benevolence, or a bold stroke of "male feminism." This is perhaps one of the reasonswhy the focus on women writers (and critics) has given such fresh energy to feminist criticism: focusing on women writers, feminist critics can leave this repetition behind, feel that they are charting an unknown territory which, at the same time, is strangely familiar. This mixture of unfamiliarity and intimate, identificatory reading seems,indeed, to be the key to a new creative feminist style. This change in focus has, at the very least and undoubtedly, produced someof the most important feminist criticism to date. Let this stand, then, as a brief outline of primarily Anglo-American feminist concerns: the sex of the author, narrative destinies, images of women, and gender stereotypes, are the touchstones of feminist literary criticism as it has developed,most particularly, in the United States. \fhen one turns to France, however, one learns that this bedrock of feminist inquiry has been dislodged: there, in step with what are seen as the most important fictional texts of modernitS the "author" (and his or her intentionalities) has disappeared; the "narrative" has no teleoloBy; "ch aracters" are little more than proper name functions; the "im age" as icon must be rendered unreco gnrzable; and the framework of sexual identitR recognized as intrinsic to all of those structures, is to be dismantled. We will be looking here at this new kind of inquiry where it intersectswith what I am calling the fundamental feminist gesture. Of these intersections, there are three that seem to me particularly relevant. The first concerns the word, "authorr" and more generallS the problem of the speaking subiect. Lacanian psychoanalysis, Nietzschean and neoHeideggerian philosophies in France, have shaken this concept apart. As Michel Foucault reminds us, "None of this is recent: criticism and philosophy took note of the disappearance-or death-of the author some time ago. But the consequencesof their discovery of it have not been sufficiently examined, nor has its impact been accurately mea66I" and the "we" have been sured." 7 First, the 7"'WhatIs an Author?" (in this volume).[Eds.]

Gynesis utterly confused: the "[" is several,psychoanalysis has shown; and, further, one of the major ruses of 'Western metaphysics' violence has been the appropriation of a "we" by an imperialistic if imaginary "I" (whole individual with an interior and exterior, intrinsic to etc.) The notion of the "$slf"-s6 Anglo-American thought-becomes absurd. It is not something called the "Self" which speaks, but language, the unconscious, the textuality of the text. If nothing else, there is only a."splendid anonymity" or a plural and neuter "they." Contemporary fiction enacts this anonymity within a lottery of constantly shifting pronouns. The assurance of an author's sex within this whirlpool of de-centering is problematized beyond recognition. The "policing of sexual identity" is henceforth seen as being complicitous with the appropriations of representation; gender (masculine, feminine) is separate from identiry (female, male). The question of whether a "man" or "woman" wrote a text (a game feminists know well at the level of literary history) becomes nonsensical. A man becomes a woman ldeuient femme) when he writes, or, if not, he does not "write" (in the radical senseof 1criture) what he writes, or, at least, does not know what he's writing. . . No-one writes. "And behind all of these questions we hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: ''V7har difference does it make who is speaking?"" The feminist's initial incredulity faced with this complex "beyonding" of sexual identity is largely based on common sense (after all, someone wrote it? I). But is it not that very sense ("common to allr" i.e. humanism) that the feminist is amempting to undermine? On the other hand, when you problem atize 'Western "Man" (as being at the foundations of notions of the Self) to the extenr that French thought has, you're bound to find "'Woman"-ns matter who's speaking-and that most definitely concerns feminist criticism.e The second major intersection of importance here is the status and stakes of representations, where the tools of representation (and of feminist criticism)-narrative, characters-are recognized as existing only at the level of the fantasies which have entrapped us. To endlessly analyze those fan8Ibid. [Eds.] eSeeCixous. [Eds.]

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tasies is to ask for repetition. It is the process which moves beyond/behind/through those fantasies-the t'-which enunciation and disposition of phantasies must be examined. That "process" is attached to no self, no stable psychological entity, no content. And, here again, "theory" is presented as in step with a certain kind of contemporary "fiction." The third intersection, and the most problematic for me person ally, is the radical French requestioning of the status of fiction and, intrinsicallS of the status of truth. One of the oldest metaphysical problems, this is the newest and most fundamental 'S7hat problem for modernity. does the radical requestioning of the status of truth and/or fictions in theory (and fiction) in France imply for feminist criticism? The feminist critic is concerned about the relationship between "fiction" and "reality" (truth)-with how the two interact, mime each other, and reinforce cultural patterns. These "new direction5"-[eyond the "Selfr" the Dialectics of Representation," and beyond (Man's) "Truth"-ftaye not emergedin a void. Over the past century, those master (European) narratives-history, religion-which have determined our senseof 'West legitimacy in the have undergone a series of crisesin legitimation. Legitimacy is part of that judicial domain which, historic ally, has determined the right to govern, the successionof kings, the link between the father and son, the necessarypaternal fiction, the ability to decide who is the father-in patriarchal culture. The crises experienced by the 'Western major narratives have not, therefore, been gender-neutral.They are crises in the narratives invented by men. To go back and try to analyze those narratives and their crisesmeans going back ro the Greek philosophies in which they are grounded and, most particularlS to the originary relationships posited between the technd and physis,time and space,and all the dualistic couples which determine our ways of thinkirg. And rethinking those dualistic couples means, among other things, putting their "obligatory connotations" into discursivecirculation, making those connotations explicit in order, one hopes, to put them into question. For example, the techni 10Here I maintain the distinction in English berween "fantasies"(conscious) and "phantasies"(unconscious). lAu.l

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and time have always connoted the male; physis and space the female. To think new relationships benveen the techni and physis, time and space, within an atmosphere of crisis, requires a backing away from all that has defined their relationships in the history of Western philosophy, a requestioning of the maior topics of that philosophyr Man, the Subiect, Truth, History, Meaning. At the forefront of this rethinking is a rejection bylwithin those narratives of what seem to have been the strongest pillars of their history: Anthropomorphism, Humanism, and Truth. And again, it is in France where, in my opinion, this rethinking has taken its strongest conceptual leaps, as "philosophyr" "historR" and "literature" attempt to account for the crisis-innarrative which is modernity. In France, such rethinking has involved, above all, a reincorporation and reconceptualization of that which has been the master narratives' own "non-knowledg€," what has eluded them, what has engulfed them. This other than themselvesis almost always a "space" of some kind, over which the narrative has lost control, a space coded as feminine. To designate that process, I have suggested a new name, what I hope to be a believable neologism: gynesis-the putting into discourse of "woman" as that process beyond the Cartesian Subject, the Dialectics of Representation, or Man's Truth. The object produced by this process is neith er a person nor a thing, but a horizon, that towards which the process is tending: a gynem*. This gynema rs a reading effect, a woman-in-effect, never stable, without identity. Its appearance in a wriften text is perhaps noticed only by the woman (feminist) reader-either at the point where it becomesinsistently "feminine" or where women (as defined metaphysically, historically) seem magically to reappear within the discourse. The feminist reader's eye comes to a halt at this tear in the fabric, producing a state of uncertainty and sometimes of distrust-especially when the faltering narrative in which it is embedded has been articulated by a man from within a nonetheless still existent discipline. \U7henit appears in women theorists' discourse, it would seemto be less troubling. The still existent slippages in signification among feminine/woman/women and what we are calling gynesis and gynelna are dismissed as "unimportant" becauseit is a woman speaking. \fhat I mean by the "anti-feminism" of contemporary French thought may now seem clearer. For

feminism, as a concept, as inherited from the humanist and rationalist eighteenth century, is traditionally about a group of human beings in history whose identity is defined by that history's representation of sexual decidabiliry. And every term of that definition has been put into quesrion by contemporary French thought. In the writings of those French theorists participating in gynesis, "wom an" may become intrinsic to entire conceptual systems, without being "about" women-much less "about" feminism. First, this is the case, literally, insofar as contemporary thought in France is based almost entirely on men's writing and, most importantly, on fiction written by men. For example, a survey of such disparate writers as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze-or H6lBne Cixous, Luce kigaray, Julia Kristeva-yields remarkably few referencesto women writers. (To women, yesi one even finds Anpassing remarks on women theorists-Lou dreas Salom6, Marie Bonaparte, Melanie Kleinbut to women writers, no.) Lacan has much advice for women analysts, but only focuses once on a woman writer (Marguerite Duras)-as having understood his theory ! " Derrida, to my knowledg., never explicitly mentions a woman writer.t2 Deleuze and Guattari refer to Virginia Woolf as having incorporated the process of what they call le deue"not to the same exnir femme in her writing-but tent" t' as Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, or Henry Miller. The leading figure of "Psychoanalysis and Politics" and its women's bookstore Des Femmes, Cixous is perhaps the foremost theoretician in France on the specificity of "feminine writing" (which does not mean written by t woman). Yet it is not women llJacquesLacanr "Hommage i Marguerite Durasr" in MargueriteDuras (Paris:Albatros, 1979).[Au.] 12ExcludingMarie Bonaparte-essentialto Derrida'scritique of Lacanin Le Facteurde la udrit6-I can find only threeobliqueexceptionsto this observation.Oblique in that a particular wornan is never named in any of the three references:a footnote to "Violence et m6taphysique" in L'Ecriture et Ia diffdrance(Paris:Seuil, ry61) to an articleby BarbaraJohnsonin p.-zz8;his references "Envoisr" LA Cartepostale(Paris:Flammarion,r98o), pp. r 6z-t64; and his dialoguewith BarbaraJohnsoni propos of her paper on Mary Shelley'sFrankensteinin Les Fins de I'homme (Paris:Galil6e,r98r), pp.7588. [Au.] 13Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues (Paris: Flammarion,U77), PP.55-60- [Au-]

Gynesis writers who are the focus of her work. Her focus is on the male poets (Genet, Holderlin, Kafka, Kleist, Shakespeare)and on the male theoreticians (Derrida, Heidegg€r, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Nietzsche). Becausein the past women have always written "as menr" Cixous hardly ever alludes to women writers; one recent exception has been her reading and public praise of Clarisse Lispector, whose narrative is more "traditional" than one might have expected.to lrrgaray and Kristev a are uniquely concerned with analyzing the male tradition: from Freud to the philosophers to the avant-garde. The kind of empirical text-picking I have iust indulged in is perhaps ultimately not very useful. But this textual lack of reference should at least be pointed out given our "intersections." For the second reason that gynesis is not necessarily "about" women is more abstract: women can (have) exist(ed) only as opposed to men within traditional categories of thought. Indeed, women (especiallyfeminists) who continue to think within those categories ar% henceforth, seen as beingmefl.... Let me now again briefly enumerate these three intersections, this time emphasizing the "sources" of gynesls, so that we may begin to seemore closely why this accusation is made. Then I will discussone male theorist who has had a profound influence on both feminist and anti-feminist thinking in France: Jacques Lacan. I will be emphasizing his work, in such a brief way, less as written by the man named Lacan than as read by ^ new generation of men and women theorists in France.

THr SpnaxrNcSunlncr: THn PosnrvrTrEsoF AurNATroNls The "Other"

has been the major preoccupation

French thought

S6S

States, at least until very recently, that term has most often evoked Sartrean phenomenology and the inevitability of inter-subiective warfare. But while Americans were busy reading Sartre, French intellectuals were re-reading Heidegger and Nietzsche, becoming obsessedwith Mallarffi6, and the texts of such writers as Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and re-questioning Hegel's master/ slave dialectic as elaborated in Koieve's reading.t' These rereadings and the theoretical outburst of what is loosely called "structuralist theory" interlocked unevenlS but progressed together steadily towards a radical redefinition of "alterity" which directly refuted that of Sartre. The phenomenological "Self" and "Other" came to be seen as belonging with all of those Cartesian models of rational and scientific knowledg. where "certainty" is located in the Ego-as "predator of the Other." And it is this Ego, no matter what its sex or ideological position, that came to be seenas responsiblefor our modern technological nightm are.It is also this Ego that the fictions of modernity (Artaud, Joyce, Mallarmr6,Beckett) have been seen as attempting to explode. The result of this recognition has been an acceleratingexploration of Man's Non-Coincidence\7ith-Himself through new theories of alterity. And parallel to this retreat of the All-Too-HumanSubject (both male and female), there has been a regenderization of the space where alterity is to be reexplored in language. The space "outside of" the conscioussubiect has always connoted the feminine any movein the history of Western thought-and ment into alterity is a movement into that female space; any attempt to give a place to that alterity within discourse involves a mise en discours de Ia (I" ((he" can no or femme,t' If an autonomous longer exist then only an anonymous "she" will be seento-as Heidegger might say-ex-sist.

of

for the last fift1 years. In the United

toSee H6ldne Cixous, "L'Approche de Clarisse Lispector" in Podtique, No. 40 (r97il. The reader might also want to refer to her brief interview with Michel Foucault on Marguerite Durasl "A propos de Marguerite Duras" in Cahiers Renaud Barrault, No. Sg. [Au.] rsI am aware of the scandalous nature of using these "old and "alienation"-gs qualify a words"-"positivities" general philosophical movement intent on abolishing positivism and phenomenological theories of alienation

(Entaiisserung in Hegel). I am not sure whether the fact that these fwo words seem best to quali ty a " certain teleology" of contemporary French thought is due to an extreme case of pal1onymie (cf. Derrida, Marges, La Dissdmination, and Positions) or whether the fact of such a general emphasis could seem obvious only to the feminist reader. [Au.] 15Alexandre Koidve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (New York: Basic Books, ry6g). [Eds.] tt"prt into the discourseof woman." [Eds.]

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THNKING

THE UNNBPRESENTABLn,: THp

DrsprncEMENT

or

DTFFERENCE

Representation is the condition that confirms the possibility of an imitation (mimesis) based on the dichotomy of presence and absence, the dichotomies of dialectical thinking (negativity). Representation, mimesis, and the dialectic are inseparable; they designate together a way of thinking as old as the \West,a way of thinking which French thought, through German philosophS has been attempting to re-think since the turn of the century. Between r93o-r 960, the dialectic (and its modes of representation), as elaborated by the neo-Hegelians and redefined by the phenomenologists, was the major focus of French intellectuals and representeda major hope for reconstructing the world. An understanding of negativiry-either as representedby the "idealist" or as redefined by the "Marxis1"-1ryould bring about the possibility of building a general science of contradiction. But there soon surfaced in France a movement towards redefining the functions of mediation elaborated by traditional Hegelians and Marxists, as well as a quickening sense of urgency about looking again at the relationship between those two systems of thought. That movement, which came into its full maturity after 1968, still pursues its quest for a conceptualiry which would be non-dialectical, non-representational, and non-mimetic. The destruction of the dialectic in France is, for our purposes here, where the processof gyneslsbecomes the clearest.For to de-structure or attempt to subvert the dialectic is to put the function of mediation into question. Lacan was the first to displace, slightly, the mediator in patriarchal culture-the father-from "reality" to the "symbolic," as well as the first to reconceptualize and re-emphasize new spaces "exceedittg" the dialectic, twisting the dialectic into a knot. The philosophers-a fter-Lacan, especiallyDerrida, Deleuze, and Lyotard,tt were to displace mediation even further. The Aufhebltng," recogn ized as mediating between Culture and Nature, Difference and ldentity, is also seen as that which fundamentally definesMale and Female l8Jean-FranEois Lyotard, author of The PostmodernCondition and other works. [Eds.] leUsuallytranslatedinto Frenchas reliue andinto English as "sublation."[Eds.]

through hierarchization. Those philosophers will, therefore, in their radical displacement of mediation, set about a total reconceptualization of difference (beyond contradiction), self-consciously throwing both sexesinto a metonymic confusion of gender. And, as with the demise of the Cartesian Ego, that which is "beyond the Fatherrrt2'-everflowing the dialectics of representation, unrepresentable-will be genderedas feminine.

THs DnnnrsEoF ExpnnIENCE: FICTIoN AS STRANGERTHAN TNUTH? Disarmed of the cogito and the dialectic, lost in a maze of delegitimized narratives, any question of "Truth" in/for modernity can only be a tentative one. It will therefore only concern us here to the extent that a certain definition of truth, based in an experience of reality, is intrinsic to feminism as a hermeneutic. That is, the notion that women's truth-in-experience-and-reality is and has always been different from men's and has consequently been devalued and always already delegitimized in patriarchal culture. And that if men are experiencing that delegitimation todaR it can only be a positive step towards demystifying the politics of male sexuality. . . . The maior battle, in the wake of Freud, Nietzsche, and Heidegg€r, has been to unravel the illusion that there exists a universal truth which can be proven by any so-called universal experience and/or logic. Truth, therefore, can equal neither "experience" nor "reality" as those words have been traditionally understood; and therefore any discourse basing itself in either one is, in truth, an age-old fiction. Henceforth, the theorists oflin modernity will begin a search for the potential spacesof a "truth" which would be neither true nor false; for a "truth" which would be in-urai-semblable. For uraisemblance is the code word of our metaphysical heritage." "Truth" can thus only be thought through 20Areferenceto Lacan'sphrase"law of the father." [Eds.] 2rFrom a psychoanalyticalperspective,Jean-MichelRibetteshas maintainedthat it is also particularlymale, rather than hytbelongingas it doesto an obsessional terical economy.Cf.: "Le Phalsus(Vrai/semblant/vraisemblancedu texte obsessional"rn La Folle udrit6, ed. Julia Kristeva(Paris:Seuil, 1979),pp- r 16-r7o- [Au-]

Gynesis that which subverts it. The true must be thought strangely, outside of the metaphysical categories of opposition-or benneenthem. This approach involves, first and foremost, a relinquishing of mastery-indeed, a valorization of non-mastery. Secondly, the trlte, to be isolated in those processesanterior to, or in some cases, beyond the Truth as produced by the Techni, is that which can never be seen,which never presents itself as such but rather captures, points, withdraws, hides itself in its veils: and that true is "womx11"the "non-truth" or "partial truth" of Truth. Or, for others, "woman" is preciselythat elementwhich disturbs even that presupposition (Truth as castrated). \Thatever the strange intricacies of thesenew wanderings through the demise of Truth-In-Experience, "woman" is that element most discursiuely present. Julia Kristeva has called this new element a urdel"-a kind of "she-truth." This "she-truth" has been put into discourse in new ways in France-hence the gynesiswhose potential spacesI have had to outline so schematically here. The demise of the Subject, of the Dialectic, and of Truth has left thinkers-in-modernity with a uoid which they are vaguely aware must be spoken differentlS and strangely. As "woman." Or gynem0 . . .

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AnaoNc Cartesian orphans, Lacan is one of the best known explorers of the spatial contours of gynesis. In his Seminar XX, entitled Encore.," he elaborates, elaborately, how and why "woman" is that which escapes any form of universal logic, how and why "woman is not All." That is, he shows ho*, as opposed to Universal Man (the Self of Humanist thought), "woman" may be seen as the anti'Woman is not All; she is universal par excellence. excluded by the nature of words and things. There is something chez elle which "escapes" discourse. But Lacan does not stop there. For if woman is not All, she neverthelesshas accessto what he calls a "supplementary jouissangs"-beyond Man, beyond the Phallus. This "extra jouissance" is a substance,different from but not unrelated to "the quite expansive substance,complement of the other" described as "modern space": a "pure space, just as

one sayspure spirit" lp. ;-5]. Most importantly, this substanceiouissante is of the order of the infinite; it cannot be understood consciouslR dialectically, or in terms of Man's Truth-for it is what we have always called"God. . ." "Feminine iouissance" will, therefore, be posited as the ultimate limit to any discourse articulated by Man. It is, however, only the first of a seriesof such limits, which, through metonymy, will all be gendered as feminine. For example, the limit of any discourse for Lacan is also the "true." Truth (capital T) canlcould only exist as long as there is/was a belief in Universal'Woman. The "truer" like woman, is not All. And this "truer" inter-dit, located as it is between words, between-the-lines,provides an accessto what is perhaps the most important discursive limit for Lacan: the Real. The Real must be treated carefully. For not to treat it carefully is to misiudge the force of Lacan's twisting of the dialectic and to return to a nineteenth century Freud through the back door. In Lacanian literature, the Real has no ontological foundation. It "is" neither Reality, nor HistorS nor a Text. The Real designates that which is categorically unrepresentable,non-human, at the limits of the known; it is emptiness, the scream, the "zero-point" of death, the proximity of feminine jouissance. Further, the Real-like "feminine iouissance" 6611ss"-is imprduisible. Unseen and and like the unforeseeable,it surges out of the unconscious, as terrifying as any God no matter what name the latter carries. Is the unconscious,then, going to be gendered as being as feminine as the other limits of the symbolic 'Woman which it seemsto hold in store for us? Yes. as Other is "in relationship to what can be said of the unconscious, radically the Other, [ . . . ] that which has to do with this Other" [p. 75]. But if Man's unconscious is "womanr" what about women's unconscious? Here we arrive inevitably at a question addressed to Lacan by a feminist, Luce lrigaray's "scandalous question": is woman the unconscious, or does she have one?to Lacan will reply: "Both"-but only with regard to the male subject. Irig aray will not be satisfied with

22La Folle udrit6,p. rr. [Au.] 23Paris:Editions de Seuil r97 to , 5. [Au.] Pagereferences this work appearin bracketsin the text. [Eds.]

24Cf . Luce kigaray, Speculumde l'autre femme (Paris: Editionsde Minurt, rg74), and Ce Sexequi n'en estpas un (Parrs:Editionsde Minuit, rg77). [Au.]

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Aucn A. Jenonvn

that answer. But other women analysts will begin with this supposition in their attempt to define the "female subje gg"-at the coordinates of writing by men and feminine iouissnnce. It is no accident that those analysts will confront that question through "literature." For is the modern question put to the literary text not the same as that asked about woman? Is literature our unconscious or does it have one? Lacan will again answer: "both." It has one to the extent that it does not know what it is saying. It is our unconscious to the extent that it is the space of literariry itself: lalangue, as the "cloud of language [which] makes 'Writing is that letter [up] writing" fLacan, p. ro9]. which escapesdiscourse as its "effectr" iust as lalangue is that which "is at the service of completely other things than communication" [p. t 26). Like the unconscious, the written text is a sauoir faire with lalangue lp.rz7l. This successionof feminine spacesis enough to make the woman reader dizzy.Is writing then going to be gendered as being as feminine as "feminine jouissancer" the "truer" the "Realr" and the "unconscious"? Here Lacan stops. Beyond the realm of intersubjectivity, for Lacan, there can be no understanding. Lacan will call a halt to his feminine metonymy faced with literature itself-except to the extent that lalangue is necessarilymaternal and that the "letter" always has what he calls a "feminizing effect."" In spite of Lacan's irritating paternalism, we must not forget that he consistently shied away from going beyond his own early warning that "the images and symbol s chez la femme can never be separated from the images and symbol s de la femme."t'lf "woman" in his thought designates that which subverts the Subject, Representation, and Truth, it is because"she" does so in the history 'Western of thought. To assert that is perhaps to uncritically continue it. In any case, psychoanalysis alone can go no further than that recognition without rephenomenologizing its original conception. The next link in the feminine chain will be left to Lacan's Others. One of those is Eug6nie Lemoine-Lucci oni." She begins with Lacan's barring of universal woman (the 25Cf."Litturaterre" in Littdrature,No. 3, r97r. [Au.] 26Lacan, Ecrits(Paris:Seuil,ry66), p.728. [Au.] 27Cf. Eug6nie Lemoine-Luccioni, Partage des femmes (Paris:Seuil,1976), and Le R2uedu cosmonaute(Paris, Seuil,r98o). [Au.]

'Woman is divided, parwoman): woman is not All. titioned; that is her specificity. Further, that this division-in-herselfmarks woman's specificity means that alienation is fundamental to her being-in-theworld (rather than merely fundamental to culture). For Lemoine-Luccioni-and this is the core of her argument-it is only this intrinsic partitioning in/of woman that is capable of explaining what we have known about women from the beginning of time. Hers is an extreme Lacanian caseof "The man will always . . . the woman will always" as Stephen Heath points out. " This division-in-herselfexplains woman's narcissism fPartage des femmes, p. j5]; why she can't create, "even as a painter" [p. r 6 S]; why it is men who are the philosophers and poets "'We've known that since Dante" [p. to]. It, in fact, explains everything-from woman's lack of talent for mathematics [p. 8o] to her perennial modesry: "It is not in the nature of woman to expose herself" [p. zo]. In her second book, Le rAue du cosmonattte, Lemoine-Luccioni goes even further. There, she insists on how women in fact incarnate Lacan's 'Women exist within his "feminine woman-spaces. iouissance";" they attain the Real "more surely" than men [p.6t]. It is, above all, women who engender lalangue upon which the symbolic order is founded and upon which it will always depend. Vithin this context, it comes as no surprise that feminism is denounced by Lemoine-Luccioni as a danger to the social contract itself. For if "woman" were to disappear, "so too would the symptom of man, as Lacan says.And with no more symptom, no more language, and therefore no more man either" [p. ro]. The only hope, therefore, is for women to revindi cate, not their right to a discourse or to a look of their own, but rather to their difference-asnot-all. ril(Ihatthen would be women's place in the world? If women incarnate "woman" as the problem of identity, the discontinuity of the social contract, the symptom of Man, then "*hy not count on them to assume the irreducible difference that resists unification, since woman is there, and the sexual difference is there as well, and since woman alone can be the figure of division?" [p. r 8z].Saving the world would seem to be up to \Momen . . . 28"Difference" in Screen,Yol.r9, No. 3 (Autumnr978). [Au.] 2eLe RAuedu cosmonaute, p. 49. [Au.]

Gynesis Another woman analyst, Michble MontrelaS while sharing the curious logical mixture of pessimism and optimism apparent in Lemoine-Luccioni, is less dogmatically Lacanian.'o Her analysis, while remaining strictly loyal to the Lacanian doxa, does not fall into the same anthropological commonplaces as does that of Lemoine-Luccioni. This is in part because she is not primarily writing about women, but about something called "femininiry." But it is also becauseshe is closer to the literary text that Lemoine-Luccioni. Montrelay would seem to want to rend er Lacan's "woman" incarnate in a different way. Her "woman" is not partitioned, divided, in the world, but rather the locus of a "primary imaginary" dedicated to "feminine jouissance." And women are not necessarily closer to this primary imaginary than men. In fact, "'Women'sbooks [only] 'feminine' speak of this imaginary which menpoets, among others-possess" [p. r 5 5]. According to Montrela5 it is the male poets, not women, who have provided us with an accessto that imagin ary__ through writing. Here is where Montrelay completesLacan's feminine metonymy more thoroughly than LemoineLuccioni: "feminine jouissance can be understood as writing t . ] this iouissance and the literary text (which is also written like an orgasm produced within discourse) are the effect of the same murder of the signifier [ . . . ] Is it not for this reason that, with Bataille, JarrS Jabds,writing portrays itself as the iouissanceof a woman?" [pp. 8o-8r]. The list of male writers continues throughout 'Women, Montrelay's book. writing, "do not leave this feminine substanceon the pzge"-as men do. In any case,it would seemencouraging that woman writers are gradually becoming "less feminist." For, ultimatelR Montrelay shares the same apocalyptic sentiment as Lemoine-Luccioni. Somehow humanity must avoid the inevitable trauma of doin g aw^y with "woman" as man's symptom-if we are to avoid bringing the social order, the order of language, crashing down. Here we have reacheda point where, if spacepermitted, we would want to r. trace the trajectory of Lacan's "woman spaces" as unfolded by other male French theorists, even by thosd most overtly opposed to Lacanian analysis; and z. follow how other women theorists, whatever their posture towards 3oMichdleMontrelay, L'Ombre et le nom (Paris:Minuit, re77).[Au.]

S6g

analysis, have, in varying degreesand from different political stances, insistently posited that women somehow incarnate those spaces.For example, if we were to return for a moment to the notion of writing-as-feminine, we would most certainly want to treat, at length, the work of the foremost theoretician of hcriture in France: Jacques Derrida." For there, Lacan's "feminine iouissance" (as not all, in excess, invisible, half-said), as "supplementr" will be found to be intrinsic to a new, non-human, denatural rzedbody: not that of woman, but of the text as 4criture. For Derrida and his disciples, the questions of how women might accede to subjecthood, write surviving texts, or acquire a signature of their own are the wrong questions-eminently phallogocentric questions. Rather, woman must be releasedfrom her metaphysical bondage and it is writing, 2s the locus of the "feminine questionr" that can and does subvert the history of that metaphysics. The attributes of writing are the attributes of "woman"-1[at which disturbs the Subfect, the Dialectic, and Truth is feminine in its essence. 'We would also want to look at the ways in which women theorists of 4criture, like those of Lacan's "feminine jouissance," have not hesitated to incarnate Derrida's "feminine operation" by/in women, if in very different ways. H6ldne Cixous names Derrida's "writing-as-feminine-locus-and-operation" : l'1criture fdminine.t'And she goeson to posit that if "feminine writing" does not require the signature of a woman, women, toda1 nonetheless, do have a privileged accessto it. For Sarah Kofmarr " women already incarnate Derrida's "feminine operation" (as undecidability, oscillation), otr operation that will eventually put an end to all metaphysical oppositions, including that of men/women, and move towards a generalized feminine iouissnnce. 3tFor Derrida'smost extensivepresentationof writing as "feminine operationr" see his Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche(Paris:Flammarion,1978).It hasbeentranslated into Englishas Spursin the quatrilingualedition (Venice:Corboe Fiore,r976). [Au.] Also by the University of ChicagoPressin a French/English version. 32Cixous' most extensivedevelopmentsof 1criture[Eds.] fdminine as a concepthavebeenin her seminarsin Paris.But glimpsesof the concept'sdebt to Derridat work may be found, most particularly,in her "Le Sexeou la t€te", Les Cahiersdu GRIF 13 (October1976).[Au.] " Cf., in particular,SarahKofman's"Qa Cloche" rn Les Finsde I'homme,op. cit., pp. 89-tr6. [Au.]

S7o

Aucn A. JanorNn

For these women, feminism is hopelessly anachronistic, grounded in a (male) metaphysical logic which modernity has already begun to overthrow. I rtevn tried to outline here some of the reasonswhy we might not want to qualify the "new directions" in contemporary French thought as feminist and, most especially,as feminist only when and because they are being developed by women. At the same time, I feel that French thought can be an extremely important interlocutor for what we call feminist literary criticism in the United States.For if, as I have only been able to suggest here, modernity representsa new kind of discursiviry on/about/as woman (and women), a valonzation andlor speaking of "woman"l and if we, as American feminists, ate going to take modernity and its theorists seriously; then feminist criticism has some new and complex questions to addressitself to. Are gynesis and feminism in contradiction, or do

they overlap and participate with each orher in some way? In what ways might rhe text of gynesis be reintroducing certain very familiar representations of women "in spite of themselves"? That is, to what extent is that process designated as feminine absolutely dependent on those representations? Might it be that to posit that process-beyond the Subject,the Dialectics of Represenrarion,and Man's Truth-as a processincarnated by women is to fall back into the very anthropomorphic (or gynomorphic?) images that the thinkers of modernity are trying to disintegrate? Most importantly, if modernity and feminism are not to become mutually exclusive-and, at the same time, if feminism is not to compromise the quality of its attention to female stereotyping of whatever kind-what will be our srraregy for asking those questions, and others? New directions indeed . . .

Lillians.Robinson b . r 94 r

T lIrrnN S. RonrNsott'swork is revolutionary,Marxist, and feminist.Shewas I-Jan activist studentin the late sixtiesand early seventies,and in one of the essaysin her collection, Ser, Class,and Culture, shealludesto beingarrestedfor protest activitiesin that period. The activist backgroundremainsin her conception of criticism and of the cultural role of literatureand the arts. Sheis critical of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno for what she regardsas an aestheticist and formalist (thereforebourgeois)rejection of popular art; shetirelesslyadvocatesa criticismthat will "servethe forcesof change."lnher ry76 essay"Criticism: Who NeedsIt?" she arguesthat such a criticism "assumesthat to be a radical does not consist in holding certain opinions, but in learning to make theseviews the basisof concreteaction." It follows that Robinson'ssurvey and critique of various forms of feminist criticism expressdissatisfactionwith feminist attempts merely to enlarge the "canon" in order to include women writers. Nor doesshewish to stop with the developmentof alternativereadingsof literary tradition that reinterpretwomen or point out sexistideologyin canonizedworks. Rather,shewould call in question, presumablyby way of a Marxist critique, the notion of canonicity itself, implying that the categoriesof valuethemselvesare outmodedand false,that the standardsof literary valueare themselvesthe problem that leadsto exclusionnot only of works by women but also of works of minority or oppressedpeoples. What is important is that the experienceof suchpeoplehavea voicein literature. One of the ways this can come about is to call in questionthe division between fine and popular art (thus her dissatisfactionwith Horkheimer and Adorno, who should know better). Sheprojects a study of televisionthat will attempt to "put togetherthe piecesof what televisiontells about everydaylife." It may be addedherethat the problem of canonicity has not beenthe concern only of feminists.Indeed,as a literary concernit is an aspectof that powerful socialthrust of our times in which many groupsseekmodesof self-identification and expression. Lillian S. Robinsont essaysthrough rg77 arecollectedin Sex, Class,and Culture (1978). Sheis author with four othersof FeministScltolarsbip:Kindling in the Grouesof Academe(-S8S).

57r

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TREASONOURTEXT: FEMINIST CHALLENGE,S

TOTHELITERARY CANON

sion, sometimes generahzed as "sensibility," to the category of taste. Sweeping modifications in the canon are said to occur becauseof changes in collective sensibility, but individual admissions and elevationSfrom "minor" tO "major" StatUStend tO be achieved by successfulcritical promotion, which is to say, demonstration that a particular author does meet generally accepted criteria of excellence. The results, moreov er) arenowhere codified: they are neither set down in a single place, nor are they absolutely uniform. In the visual arts and in music, the cold realities of patron a1e, purchase, presentation in private and public collections' or performance on concert programs create the conditions for a work's canonical status or lack of it. No equivalent set of institutional arrangements exists for literature, however. The fact of publication and even the feat of remaining in print for generations, which are at least analogous to the ways in which pictures and music are displayed, are not the same sort of indicators; they represent less of an investment and hence lessgeneral acceptanceof their canonicity. In the circumstances, it may seem somewhat of an exaggeration to speak of "the" literary canon, almost paranoid to call it an institution, downright hysterical to characterrzethat institution as restrictive. The whole businessis so much more inform al, after all, than any of these terms implies, the concomitant processesso much more gentlemanly. Surely, it is more like a gentlemen'sagreement than a repressiveinstrument-isn't it? But a gentleman is inescapably-that is, by definition-a member of a privileged class and of the male sex. From this perspective,it is probably quite accurate to think of the canon as an entirely gentlemanly arcifact, considering how few works by nonmembers of that class and sex make it into the inform aI agglomeration of course syllabi, anthologies, and widely commented-upon "standard authors" that constitutes the canon as it is generally understood. For, beyond their availability on bookshelves,it is through the teaching and study-one might even say the habitual teaching and study-of certain works that they become institutionalized as canonical literature. Within that broad canon, moreover, those admitted but read only in advanced courses,commented upon only by more or lessnarrow specialists,are subjected to the further tyranny of "majot" versus"minor." For more than a decade now, feminist scholars

;:,r,::; iz;;;!:"',nn';:;,Y::",,f tr easonto the

i:;:;",,f:,:;,:7,'o" Jaun Mnncus

THp LOFTY SEAT OF CANONIZED BARDS

(Pollok, fi27) As with many other restrictive institutions, we are hardly aware of it until we come into conflict with it; the elements of the lite rary canon are simply absorbed by the apprentice scholar and critic in the normal course of graduate education, without any' one's ever seemingto inculcate or defend them. Appeal, were any necessary, would be to the other meaning of "canonr" that is, to established standards of judgment and of taste. Not that either definition is presented as rigid and immutable-far from it, for lectures in literary history are full of wry referencesto a benighted though hardly distant past when, say,the metaphysical poets were insufficiently appreciated or Vachel Lindsay was the most modern poet recognrzed in American literature. '$Thence the acknowledgment of a subjectivedimenTO THE LITEROURTEXT:FEMINISTCHALLENGES TREASON ARy cANoN is reprinted by permission of Tulsa Studies in W omen's Literature, copyright r 9 8 3. lJane Marcus, "Gunpowder Treason and Plot," talk delivered at the School of Criticism and Theory, Northwestern Universiry, colloquium "The Challenge of Feminist Criticismr" Novemb er r98 r. Seeking authority for the sort of creature a literary canon might be, I turned, like many another, to the Oxford English Dictionary.The tags that head up the several sections of this essay are a by-product of that effort rather than of any more exact and laborious scholarship. [Au.]

TreasonOur Text: FeministChallengesto tbe Literary Canon have been protesting the apparently systematic neglect of women's experience in the lite rary canon' neglect that takes the form of distorting and misreading the few recogn ized female writers and excluding the others. Moreover, the argument runs, the predominantly male authors in the canon show us the female character and relations between the sexesin a way that both reflects and contributes to sexist ideology-an aspect of these classic works about which the critical tradition remained silent for generations.The feminist challeng€,although intrinsically (and, to my mind, refreshingly)polemical, has not been simply ^ reiterated attack, but a seriesof suggestedalternativesto the male-dominated membership and attitudes of the acceptedcanon. In this essay, I propose to examine these feminist alternatives, assesstheir impact on the standard canon, and propose some directions for further work. Although my emphasis in each section is on the substance of the challenge,the underlying polemic is, I believe,abundantly clear.

THn PRESENCEOF CANONIZED FOREFATHERS (Burke, r79o) Start with the Great Books, the traditional desert'Westisland ones, the foundation of coursesin the ern humanistic tradition. No women authors, of course, at all, but within the works thus canonized, certain monumental female images: Helen, Penelope, and Clytemnestra, Beatrice and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets, B6r6nice, Cun6gonde, and Margarete. The list of interesting female characters is enlargedif we shift to the Surveyof English Literature and its classic texts; here, moreover, there is the possible inclusion of a female author or even several, at least as the course's implicit "historical background" ticks through and past the Industrial Revolution. It is a possibiliry that is not always honored in the observance. "Beowulf to Virginia Woolf" is a pleasant enough joke, but though lots of surveys begin with the Anglo-Saxon epic, not all that many conclude with Mrs. Dalloway. Even in the nineteenth century, the pace and the necessityof mass omissions may mean leaving out Austen, one of the Brontds, or Eliot. The analogous overview of American liter ary masterpieces,despite the relative brevity and modernity of the period considered, is

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likely to yield a similarly all-male pantheon; Emily not necessarilyDickinson may be admitted-but and no one else even comes close.'Here again, the canon contributes to the body of in-

male-authored

formation, stereotype, inference, and surmise about the female sex that is generally in the culture. Once this state of affairs has been exposed, there are two possible approaches for feminist criticism. It can emphasize alternative readings of the tradition, readings that reinterpret motivations,

women's character,

and actions and that identify and chal-

lenge sexist ideology. Or it can concentrate on gaining admission to the canon for literature by women writers. Both sorts of work

are being pursued, al-

though, to the extent that feminist criticism has defined itself as a subfield of literary studies-as tinguished

from

an approach

tended to concentrate on writing

or method-it

dishas

by women.

In fact, however, the current wave of feminist theory began as criticism of certain key texts, both literary and paralit erary) in the dominant

culture.

2In a survey of 5o introductory courses in American literature offered ^t zS U.S. colleges and universities, Emily Dickinson's name appeared more often than that of any other woman writer: zo times. This frequency puts her in a farly respectable twelfth place. Among the 6r most frequently taught authors, only 7 others are women; '$Tharton Edith and Kate Chopin are each mentioned g times, Sarah Orne Jewett and Anne Bradstreet 6 each, Flannery O'Connor 4 times, Willa Cather and Mary l7ilkins Freeman each 3 times. The same list includes 5 black authors, all of them male. Responsesfrom other institutions received too late for compilation only confirmed these findings. SeePaul Lauter, "A Small Survey of Introductory Courses in American Literaturer" Women's Studies Quarterly 9 (\tinter r98r): rz.In another studR 99 professors of English responded to a survey asking which works of American literature published since rg4r they thought should be considered classics and which books should be taught to college students. The work mentioned by the most respondents (59 citations) was Ralph Ellison's Inuisible Man. No other work by black " appears among the top zo that constitute the published list of results. Number t9, The Complete Storiesof Flannery O'Connor, is the only work on this list by a woman. (Chronicle of Higher Education, September 29, 1982.) For British literature, the feminist claim is not that Austen, the Bront€s, Eliot, and Woolf are habitually omitted, but rather that they are by no means always included in courses that, like the survey I taught at Columbia some years xgo, had room for a single nineteenth-century novel. I know, however, of no systematic study of course offerings in this area more recent than Elaine Showalter's "'Women in the Literary Curriculum," College English 3 z ( M a y r 9 7 r ) ' 8 S5 - 6 2 . [ A u . ]

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Kate Millett, Eva Figes, Elizabeth JanewaS Germaine Greer, and Carolyn Heilbrun all use the techniques of essentiallyliterary analysis on the social forms and forces surrounding those texts.3 The texts themselvesmay be regarded as "canonical" in the sensethat all have had significant impac on the culture as a whole, although the target being addressedis not literature or its canon. In criticism that is more strictly literary in its scope, much attention has been concentrated on male writers in the American tradition. Books like Annette Kolodny's The Lay of the Land and Judith Fetterley's The ResistingReader have no sysrematic, comprehensiveequivalent in rhe criticism of British or European literature.oBoth of these studies identify masculine values and imagery in a wide range of writings, as well as the alienation that is their consequence for women, men, and society as a whole. In a similar vein, Mary Ellmann's Thinking 'Women About examines ramifications of the tradition of "phallic criticism" as applied to writers of both sexes.'These books have in common with one another and with overarching theoretical manifestos like Sexual Politics a senseof having been betrayed by culture that was supposedto be elevat" ing, liberating, and one's own. By contrast, feminist work devoted to that part 'Western of the tradition which is neither American nor contemporary is likelier to be more evenhanded. "Feminist critics," declare Lenz, Greene, and Neely in introducing their collection of essays 3KateMillett, SexualPolitics(GardenCity, N.Y.: Doubled^y, r97o); Eva Figes,PatriarchalAttitudes (New York: Stein 6c Day, r97o); ElizabethJaneway,Man's World, Woman'sPlace:A Studyin SocialMythology (New York: Villiam Morrow, r97r); GermaineGreer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, U7t); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Toward a Recognitionof Androgyny (New York: Harper 6c Row, 1974). The phenomenonthese studiesrepresentis discussed at greaterlengthin a study of which I am a co-author;seeEllenCarol DuBois,Gail ParadiseKellS ElizabethLapovskyKennedy,Carolyn'W. Korsmeyer,and Lillian S. Robinson,FeministScholarship: Kindling in tbe Grouesof Academe(Urbanai Universityof IllinoisPress,r985). [Au.] aAnnetteKolodny,Tbe Lay of the Land: Metaphoras Experience and History in American Lift and Letters (ChapelHill: Universityof North CarolinaPress,t9Z S); Judith Fetterlen The ResistingReader:A FeministApproach to AmericanFiction (Bloomington:IndianaUniversityPress,1978).[Au.] 5Mary Ellmann Thinkingabout Vomez (New York: Har, court,Brace& World, t968). [Au.]

on Shakespeare,"rec ognize that the greatest artists do not necessarily duplicate in their art the orthodoxies of their culture; they may exploit them to create character or intensify conflict, they may struggle with, criticize, or transcend them.5 From this perspective,Milton may come in for some censure, Shakespeareand Chaucer for both praise and blame, but the clear intention of a feminist approach to these classic authors is to enrich our understanding of what is going on in the texts, as well as how-for better, for worse, or for boththey have shaped our own literary and social ideas.' At its angriest, none of this reinterpretation offers a fundamental challenge to the canon as canon; although it posits new values, ir never suggeststhat, in the light of those values, we ought to reconsider whether the great monuments are really so great, after all.

SucH

IS ALL THE woRLDE

CONFIRMED

HATHE

AND AGREED UPON, THAT

IT IS AUTHENTIQUE

AND CANONICAL

(T. rilfilson, r j j3) In an evolutionary model of feminist studies in literature, work on male authors is often characterrzed as "earlyr" implicitly primitive, whereas scholarship on female authors is the later development, enabling us to see women-the

writers themselves

and the women they write about-as

active agents

rather than passive images or victims. This implicit charact erization of studies addressed to male writers is as inaccurate as the notion evolution.

of an inexorable

In fact, as the very definition

of feminist

6Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol 'Womnn's Thomas Neely, eds. The Part: Feminist Criti(Urbana: cism of Shakespeare Universiry of Illinois Press, r98o), p. 4. In this vein, see also Juliet Dusinberre, 'Woman (London: MacShakespeareand the Nature of 'Wooing, 'Wedding, millan, U7 S); Irene G. Dash, and 'Women Power: in Shakespeare'sPlays (New York: Columbia University Press,r98r). [Au.] TSandraM. Gilbert, "Patriarchal Poetics and the'Woman Reader: Reflections on Milton's BogeR" PMLA gl (May 1978): 368-82. The articles on Chaucer and Shakespeare in The Authority of Experience: Essaysin Feminist Criticism, ed. Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1977), reflect the complementary tendency. [Au.]

Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon criticism has come increasinglyto mean scholarship and criticism devoted to women writers, work on the male tradition has continued. By this point, there has been a study of the female characters or the views on the woman question of every majorperhaps every known-author in Anglo-American, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, German, and Scandinavianliterature.t Nonetheless, it is an undeniable fact that most feminist criticism focuses on women writers, So that the feminist efforts to hum anrzethe canon have usually meant bringing a woman's point of view to bear by incorporating works by women into the established canon. The least threatening way to do so is to follow the accustomed pattern of making the case for individual writers one by one. The case here consists in showing that an alre ady recognized woman author has been denied her rightful place, presumably becauseof the generaldevaluation of female efforts and subjects. More often than not, such work involves showing that a woman alre ady securelyestablishedin the canon belongs in the first rather than the second rank. The biographical and critical efforts of R. W. B. Lewis and Cynthia Griffin Wolff, for example, have attempted to enhance Edith'S7harton's reputation in this way.t Obviously, no challenge is presented to the particular notions of literary quality, timelessness,universalitn and other qualities that constitute the rationale for canonicity. The underlying argument, rather, is that consistency,fideliry to those values, requires recognition of at least the few best and best-known women writers. Equally obviously, this approach does not call the notion of the canon itself into question.

'Wn ACKNovLEDGE

rT CANoNLIKE,

BUT NOT CNNONICALL

(BishopBarlo*, 16or) Many

feminist critics reject the method of case-by-

case demonstration.

The wholesale consignment of

8As I learned when surveying fifteen years' worth of Dlssertation Abstracts and MLA programs, much of this work has taken the form of theses or conference papers rather than books and journal articles. [Au.] eSeeR. r$(/.B. Lewis, Edith .Wharton: A Biograpby (New York: Harper & Row, rgTS); Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A

ST s

women's concerns and productions to a grim area bounded by triviality and obscurity cannot be compensated for by tokenism. True equiry can be attained, they argue, only by opening up the canon to a much larger number of female voices. This is an endeavor that eventually brings basic aesthetic questions to the fore. InitiallS however, the demand for wider representation of female authors is substantiated by an extraordinary effort of intellectual reappropriation. The emergenceof feminist literary study has been charact erized, at the base, by scholarship devoted to the discovery, republication, and reappraisal of "lost" or undervalued writers and their work. From Rebecca Harding Davis and Kate Chopin through Zora Neale Hurston and Mina Loy to Meridel 'West, reputations have been Lesueur and Rebecca reborn or remade and a female counter-canon has come into being, out of components that were largely unavailable even a dozen years ago.to In addition to constituting a feminist alternative to the male-dominated tradition, theseauthors also Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Whartoz (New York: Oxford University Press,1977); see also Marlene Springer, Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1976). [Au.] t0See, for instance, Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the 'lfestbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, r97z), lron Mills (Old with a biographical and critical Afterword by Tillie Olsen; Kate Chopin, Tbe Complete Works, ed. Per Seyersted (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 'Walker, "In Search of Zora Neale Press, tg6g); Alice Hurston r" Ms., March r97 S, pp. 74-7 S; Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, rg78): Zora Neale Hurston, I Loue Myself When I Am Laughing and Also When I Am Looking Mean and Impressiue (Old l7estbury: Feminist Press, rg79), with introductory material by Alice l0falker and Mary Helen'Washington; Carolyn G. Burke, "Becoming Mina Loy," Women's Studies 7 GgZili r j6- So; Meridel LeSueur, Ripening (Old \festbury: Teminist Press,r 9 8 r ) ; 'We on LeSueur, see also Mary McAnally, ed., Sing Our Struggle: A Tribute to Us All (Tulsa, Okla.: Cardinal Press, ry82); The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca 'West, rgrr-r9r7, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus (New York: Viking Press, r98z). The examples cited are all from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Valuable work has also been done on women writers before the Industrial Revolution. SeeJoan Goulianos, ed., By a'Woman Writt: Literature from Six Centuries by and About Women (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, r97j); Mary R. Mahl and Helene Koon, eds., The Female Spectator: English Women Writers before rSoo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). [A".]

576

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have a claim to representationin "the" canon. From this perspective, the work of recovery itself makes one sort of prima facie case,giving the lie to the assumption, where it has existed, that aside from a few names that are household words-differentially appreciated, but certainly well known-there simply has not been much serious literature by women. Before any aesthetic arguments have been advanced either for or against the admission of such works to the general canon, the new literary scholarship on women has demonstrated that the pool of potential applicants is far larger than anyone has hitherto suspected.

WOuLD

AUGUSTINE,

IF HE HELD ALL

THE BOOKS TO HAVE AN EQUAL RIGHT TO CANONICITY

. . . HAVE PREFERRED

SOME TO OTHERS?

(\ilf. Fitzgerald,trans. Vhitaker, fi+g) But the aesthetic issues cannot be forestalled for 'We need to understand whether the claim very long. is being made that many of the newly recoveredor validated texts by women meet existing criteria or, on the other hand, that those criteria themselvesintrinsically exclude or tend to exclude women and hence should be modified or replaced. If this polarity is not, in fact, applicable to the process, what are the grounds for presenting a large number of new female candidatesfor (as it were) canonization? The problem is epitomized in Nina Baym's introduction to her study of American women's fiction between r 8 zo and r87o: Reexamination of this fiction may well show it to lack the esthetic, intellectual and moral complexity and artistry that we demand of great literature. I confess frankly that, aIthough I have found much to interest me in these books, I have not unearthed a forgotten Jane Austen or George Eliot or hit upon the one novel that I would propose to set alongside The Scarlet Letter. Yet I cannot avoid the belief that "purely" literary criteria, 2S they have been employed to identify the best American works, have inevitably had a bias in favor of things male-in favor of, say, a

whaling ship, rather than a sewing circle as a 'While symbol of the human community. . . . not claiming any literary greatnessfor any of the novels . . . in this studS I would like at least to begin to correct such a bias by taking their content seriously. And it is time, perhaps-though this task lies outside my scope here-to reexamine the grounds upon which certain hallowed American classicshave been called great.tt Now, if students of literature may be allowed to confess to one Great Unreadable among the Great Books, my own b\te noire has always been the white whale; I have always felt I was missing something in Moby Dick that is clearly there for many readers and that is there for me when I read, say, Aeschylus or Austen. So I find Baym's strictures congenial, at first reading. Yet the contradicto ry nature of the position is also evident on the face of it. Am I or am I not being invited to construct a (feminist) aestheticrationale for my impatiencewith Moby Dickl Do Baym and the current of thought she represents accept "esthetic, intellectual and moral complexity and artistry" as the grounds of greatness,or are they challenging those values as well? As Myra Jehlen points out most lucidly, this attractive position will not bear close analysis: " fBaym] is having it both ways, admitting the artistic limitations of the women's fiction . . . and at the same time denying the validity of the rulers that measure these limitations, disdaining any ambition to reorder the lite rary canon and, on second thought, challenging the canon after all, or rather challenging not the canon itself but the grounds for its selection.t2Jehlenunderstatesthe case,however, in calling the duality a paradox, which is, after all, an intentionally created and essentially rhetorical phenomenon. \flhat is involved here is more like the agony of feminist criticism, for it is the champions of women's literature who are torn between defending the qualiry of their discoveriesand radically redefining literary quality itself. Those who are concerned with the canon as a 1lNina Baym, Women'sFiction: A Guide to NouelsBy and About Womenin America,rSzo-7o (lthaca:Cornell UniversityPress,1978),pp. r 4- r 5. [Au.] tzMyra Jehlen,"Archimedesand the Paradoxof Feminist Criticism,"Signs6 (Summerr98r): 592. [Au.]

Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon pragmatic instrument rather than a powerful abstraction-the compilers of more equitable anthologies or course syllabi, for example-have opted for an uneasy compromise. The literature by women that they seek-as well as that by members of excluded racial and ethnic groups and by working people in general-conforms as closely as possible to the traditional canons of taste and iudgment. Not that it reads like such literature as far as content and viewpoint are concerned,but the same words about artistic intent and achievementmay be applied without absurdity. At the same time, the rationale for a new syllabus or anthology relies on a very different criterion: that of truth to the culture being represented, the whole culture and nor the creation of an almost entirely male white elite. Again, no one seemsto be proposing-aloud-the elimination of Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter, just squeezingthem over somewhat to make room for another literary realitS which, joined with the existing canon, will come closer to telling rhe (poetic) truth. The effect is pluralist, at best, and the epistemological assumptions underlying the search for a more fully representativeliterature are strictly empiricist: by including the perspective of women (who are, after all, half-the-population), we will know more about the culture as it actually was. No one suggeststhat there might be something in this literature itself that challengesthe values and even the validity of the previously all-male tradition. There is no reason why the canon need speak with one voice or as one man on the fundamental questions of human experience.Indeed, even as an elite white male voice, it can hardly be said to do so. Yet a commentator like Baym has only to say "it is time, perhaps . . . to reexamine the grounds," while not proceeding to do so, for feminists to be accused of wishing to throw out the entire received culture. The argument could be more usefully joined, perhaps, if there were a current within feminist criticism that went beyond insistence on representation to consideration of precisely how inclusion of women's writing alters our view of the tradition. Or even one that suggestedsome radical surgery on the list of male authors usually represented. After all, when we turn from the construction of pantheons, which have no prescribed number of places, to the construction of course syllabi, then something does have to be eliminated each time

577

something else is added, and here ideologies, aesthetic and extra-aesthetic,do necessarilycome into play. Is the canon and hence the syllabus basedon it to be regarded as the compendium of excellenceor as the record of cultural history ? For there comes a point when the proponent of making the canon recognize the achievement of both sexeshas to pur up or shut up; either a given woman writer is good enough to replace some male writer on the prescribed reading list or she is not. If she is not, then either she should replace him anyway, in the name of telling the truth about the culrure, or she should not, in the (unexamined) name of excellence.This is the debate that will have to be engaged and that has so far been broached only in the most "inclusionary" of terms. It is ironic that in American literature, where attacks on the male tradition have been most bitter and the reclamation of women writers so spectacular,the appeal has still been only to pluralism, generositS and guilt. It is populism without the politics of populism.

To cANoNrzE YouR ovNE \TRITERS (Polimanterq r jgj) Although I referred earlier to a feminist countercanon, it is only in certain rather restricted contexts that literature by women has in fact been explicitly placed "counter" to the dominant canon. Generally speaking, feminist scholars have been more concerned with establishing the existence,power, and significance of a specially female tradition. Such a possibiliry is adumbrated in the title of Patricia Meyer Spacks's The Female Imagination; however, this book's overview of selected themes and stages in the female life-cycle as treated by some women writers neither broaches nor (obviously) suggests an answer to the question whether there is a female imagination and what characterizesit.t' Somewhat earlier, in her antholo gy of British and American women poets, Louise Bernikow had made a more positive assertion of a continuiry and connection subsisting among them.to She leaves it to 13Patricia Meyer Spacks,The FemaleImagination (New York:AlfredA. Knopf, ,975). taTbe World Split Open: Four[Au.] Centuries of Women Poets In England and America, r j j 2-r9j o, ed. and intro. Louise Bernikow (New York: Vintage Books, re74.[A".]

578

LtnnN

S. RouNSoN

the poeffis, however, to forge their own links, and, in a collection that boldly and incisively crosses boundaries between published and unpublished writing, literary and anonymous authorship, "high" art, folk art, and music, it is not easy for the reader to identify what the editor believesit is that makes women's poetry specifically "u,)oFnen's." Ellen Moers centers her argument for a (transhistorical) female tradition upon the concept of "heroinism," a quality shared by women writers over time with the female charactersthey created.ts Moers also points out another kind of continuitS documenting the way that women writers have read, commented otr, and been influenced by the writings of other women who were their predecessors or contemporaries. There is also an unacknowledged continuiry between the writer and her female reader. Elaine Showalter conceives the female tradition, embodied particularly in the domestic and sensationalfiction of the nineteenth centurS as being carried out through a kind of subversive conspiracy between author and audience.t' Showalter is at her best in discussing this minor "women's fiction." Indeed, without ever making a case for popular genres as serious literature, she basesher arguments about a tradition more solidly on them than on acknowledged major figures like Virginia Woolf. By contrast, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar focus almost exclusively on key literary figures, bringing women writers and their subjects together through the theme of perceived fethe act of literary creation male aberration-in itself, as well as in the behavior of the created pertt sons or personae. Moers's vision of a continuity based on "heroinism" finds an echo in later feminist criticism that posits a discrete, perhaps even autonomous "women's culture." The idea of such a culture has been developed by social historians studying the "homosocial" world of nineteenth-century t5EllenMoers,Literary'Women:The GreatWriters(GardenCity,N.Y.: Doubled^y,1976).[Au.] r6ElaineShowalter,A Literature of Their Own: British 'Women Nouelistsfrom Brontii to Lessing(Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversiryPress,r977). [Au.] lTSandra Gubar,TheMadwomanin M. GilbertandSusan 'Writer and the Nineteenth' the Attic: The Woman CenturyLiterary lmagination(New Haven,Conn.: Yale UniversityPress , r97g). [A".]

women.tt It is a view that underlies, for example, Nina Auerbach's study of relationships among women in selectednovels, where strong, supportive ties among mothers, daughters, sisters,and female friends not only constitute the real history in which certain women are conceived as living but function as a normative element as well.t' That is, fiction in which positive relations subsistto nourish the heroine comes off much better, from Auerbach's point of view, than fiction in which such relations do not exist. In contrast, Judith Lowder Newton seesthe heroines of women's fiction as active, rather than passive,preciselybecausethey do live in a man's world, not an autonomous female one.to Defining their power as "ability" rather than "control," she perceives"both a preoccupation with power and subtle power strategies" being exercisedby the women in novels by Fanny Burneg Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontd, and George Eliot. Understood in this wlY, the female tradition, whether or not it in fact reflects and fosters a "culture" of its own, provides an alternative complex of possibilities for women, to be set besidethe pits and pedestalsoffered by all too much of the Great Tradition.

CENONIZE

SUCH A MULTIFARIOUS

GnNEALoGIEoF CorvrrrlENTS (Nashe,rS%) like Smith-Rosenberg and Cott are care' ful to specify that their general rzatrons extend only to white middle- and upper-class women of the

Historians

18Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "The Female World of Love 'Women in Nineteenthand Ritual: Relations Between Century America ," Signsr (Fall r97 5) t r - 3o; Nancy FCott, Tbe Bonds of Womanhood: "'Womnn's Sphere" in New England, r78o-r83o (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977). [Au.] leNina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An ldea in Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, r97il. See also Janet M. Todd, Women's Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, r98o); Louise Bernikow, Among Women (New York: Crown, r98o). [A".] 20Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subuersion: Social Strategies in British Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press,r98r). [Au.]

TreasonOur Text: FeministChallengesto the Literary Canon nineteenth century. Although literary scholars are equally scrupulous about the national and temporal boundaries of their subject, they tend to use the gender term comprehensively. In this way, conclusions about "women's fiction" or "female consciousness" have been drawn or jumped to from considering a body of work whose authors are all white and comparatively privileged. Of the critical studies I have mentioned, only Bernikow's anthology, The World Split Open, brings labor songs, black women's blues lyrics, and anonymous ballads into conjunction with poems that were written for publication by professonal writers, both black and white. The other books, which build an extensive case for a female tradition that Bernikow only suggests,delineate their subject in such a way as to exclude not only black and working-class aurhors but any notion that race and class might be relevant categories in the definition and apprehension of "women's literature." Similarly, even for discussions of writers who were known to be lesbians, this aspect of the female tradition often remains unacknowledged; worse yet, some of the books that develop the idea of a female tradition are openly homophobic, employing the word "lesbian" only peioratively.tt Black and lesbianscholars,however,have directed much less energy to polemics against the feminist "mainstream" than to concrete,positive work on the literature itself. Recovery and reinterpretation of,a wealth of unknown or undervalued texts has suggested the existence of both a black women's tradition and a lesbian tradition. In a clear parallel with the relationship between women's literature in general and the male-dominated tradition, both are by definition part of women's literature, but they are also distinct from and independent of it. There are important differences, however, between these two traditions and the critical effort surrounding them. Black feminist criticism has the zt On the failings of feminist criticism with respectto black and lesbianwriters, seeBarbaraSmith, "Toward a Black Feminist Criticismr" Conditions: Two, r, L (Oct. r977h Mary HelenWashington,"New Livesand New Letters: Black Women l7riters at the End of the Seventies,"CollegeEnglisb43 fanuary ry8r); Bonnie Zimmetman, "'What Has Never Been:An Overviewof Feminist Lesbian Criticismr" Feminist Studies7, , ( r 9 8r ) .

S7g

task of demonstrating that, in the face of all the obstacles a racist and sexist society has been able to erect, there is a continuity of black women who have written and written well. tt is a matter of gaining recognition for the quality of the writing itself and respect for its principal subject, the lives and consciousness of black women. Black women's literature is also an element of black literature as a whole, where the recognized voices have usually been male. A triple imperative is therefore at work: establishing a discrete and significant black female tradition, then situating it within black literature and (along with the rest of that literature) within the common American literary heritage.'2 So far, unfortunatelS each step toward integration has met with continuing exclusion. A black women's tradition has been recovered and revaluated chiefly through the efforts of black feminist scholars. Only some of that work has been accepted as part of either a racially mixed women's literature or a two-sex black literature. As for the gatekeepers of American literature in general, how many of them are willing to swing open the portals even for Zora Neale Hurston or Paule Marshall? How many have heard of them? The issue of "inclusion," moreover, brings up questions that echo those raised by opening the male-dominated canon to women. How do generalizations about women's literature "as a whole" change when the work of black women is not merely added to but fully incorporated into that tradition? How does our senseof black literary history change? And what implications do these changes have for reconsideration of the American canon? 22See, e.g.,Smith,"Toward a Black FeministCriticism". Batbar:a'Christia n, Black'WomenNouelists:The Deuel'opmentof a Tradition,rSgz-rg75 (Westport,Conn.: GreenwoodPress,r98o); ErleneStetson,ed.,Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women, 1764-198o (Bloomington:IndianaUniversityPress,r98r) and its 'Women forthcomingsequel;Gloria Hull, "Black Poets 'S(Iheatley from to Walker," in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. RoseannP. Bell et al. (GardenCity, N.Y.: Anchor Books, ry79); Mary Helen \(/ashington,"Introducdon: In Pursuit of Our Own HistorS" Midnight Birds: Storiesof Contemporary Black Women Writers (GardenCiry, N.Y.: Anchor Books,r98o); the essays and'Women's bibliographres rn But Some of Us Are Braue: Black Studies, ed. Gloria Hull, PatriciaBellScort,and BarbaraSmith(Old 'Westbury: FeministPress,r98z). [Au.]

58o

LtnnN

S. RosINsoN

'Whereas

many white literary scholars continue to behave as if there were no maior black woman writers, most are prepared to admit that certain well-known white writers were lesbians for all or part of their lives. The problem is getting beyond a position that sayseither "so thAf's what was wrong with her!" or, alternatively, "it doesn't matter who talking about literature." she slept with-we're has addressedtheocriticism feminist Much lesbian retical questions about which hterature is actually part of the lesbian tradition, all writing by lesbians, for example, or all writing by women about women's relations with one another. Questions of class and race enter here as we[], both in their own guise and in the by now familiar form of "aesthetic standards." \ililho speaks for the lesbian community: the highly educated experimentalist with an unearned income or the naturalistic working-class autobiographer? Or are both the snme kind of foremother, reflecting the community's range of cultural identities and resistancel "

A cnEApER \x/AYoF CaNoN-MAKING IN A coRNER (Baxter, filg) It is not only members of included social groups' however, who have challenged the fundamentally elite nature of the existing canon. "Elite" is a literary as well as a social category. It is possible to argue for taking all texts seriously as texts without arguments based on social oppression or cultural exclusion, and popular genres have therefore been studied as part of the female literary tradition. Feminists are not in agreement as to whether domestic and sentimental fiction, the female Gothic, the women's sensational novel functioned as instruments of expression, repression,or subversion, but they have successfully revived interest in the question as a legitimate cultural issue.toIt is no longer 23SeeZimmerman,"What Has Never Been"; Adrienne Rich, "JaneEyre:Trials of a MotherlessGirl," Lies, Se' crets, and Silence:SelectedProse, 1966-1978 (New York: \f. l$Y.Norton, 1979);Lillian Faderm^n,Surpdssing the Loueof Men: RomanticFriendshipand LoueBeto the Present(New tieen Womenfrom the Renaissance in LesYork: \ililliam Morrow, r98r); the literaryessays \WestburS bian Studies,ed. Margaret Cruikshank(Old N.Y.: FeministPress,ry82). [Au.] 2aSomeexampleson different sidesof the questionare:

automatically assumed that literature addressedto the mass female audienceis necessarilybad because it is sentimental, or for that matter, sentimental becauseit is addressedto that audience.Feminist criticism has examined without embarrassment an entire literature that was previously dismissed solely because it was popular with women and affirmed standards and values associated with femininity. And proponents of the "continuous tradition" and "women's culture" positions have insisted that this material be placed beside women's "high" art as part of the articulated and organic female tradition. This point of view remains controversial within the orbit of women's studies, but the real problems start when it comesinto contact with the universeof canon formation. Permission may have been given the contemporary critic to approach a wide range of texts, transcending and even ignoring the traditional canon. But in a context where the ground contested, moreover-conof struggle-highly advancement to somewhat Wharton's cerns Edith more major status, fundamental assumptions have mob changed very little. Can Hawthorne's "d-d of scribbling women" really be invading the realms so long sanctified by Hawthorne himself and his brother geniuses?Is this what feminist criticism or even feminist cultural history means? Is it-to apply some outmoded and deceptively simple categories-a good development or a bad one? If these questionshave not beenraised,it is becausewomen's literature and the female tradition tend to be evoked as an autonomous cultural experience,not impinging on the rest of literary history.

'STrsooME

UNDER A RAGGED coATE

IS

SELDOME CANONICALL

(Crosse,fiq) \Thether dealing with popular genres or high art, commentary on the female tradition usually has Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, Alfred A. Knop f, ry7 6); Elaine Showalt et, A Literature of Their Own and her article "Dinah Mulock Craik and the Tactics of Sentiment: A Case Study in Victorian Female Authorship," Feminist Studies L (May r97il r S- z3;Katherine Ellis, "Paradise Lost: The Limin the Nineteenth-Century Novel," its of Do-.rticity Feminist Studiesz (May r97S): : 5-6S. [Au.]

TreasonOur Text: FeministChallengesto the Literary Canon been based on work that was published at some time and was produced by professional writers. But feminist scholarship has also pushed back the boundaries of literature in other directions, considering a wide range of forms and styles in which women's writing-especially that of women who did not perceivethemselvesas writers-appears. In this way, women's letters, diaries, iournals, autobiographies, oral histories, and private poetry have come under critical scrutiny as evidence of women's consciousnessand expression. Generally speaking, feminist criticism has been quite open to such material, recognizing that the very conditions that gavemany women the impetus to write made it impossible for their culture to define them as writers. This acceptancehas expanded our senseof possible forms and voices, but it has challenged our received senseof appropriate style. tWhat it amounts to is that if a woman writing in isolation and with no public audiencein view nonetheless had "good"-that is, canonical-models, we are impressed with the strength of her text when she applies what she has assimilated about writing to her own experiencesas a woman. If, however, her literary models were chosen from the same popular literature that some critics are now beginning to recognize as part of the female tradition, rhen she has not got hold of an expressiveinstrument that empowers her. At the Modern Language Association meeting in 1976, I included in my paper the entire two-page autobiography of a participant in the Summer '\il(orkers Schools for'Women held at Bryn Mawr in the first decadesof the century. It is a circumstantial narrative in which events from the melancholy to the melodramatic are accumulated in a serviceable, somewhat hackneyed style. The anonymous "Seamer on Men's Underwear" had a unique sense of herself both as an individual and as a member of the working class.But was she a writer? Part of the audience was as moved as I was by the narrative, but the maiority was outraged at the piece'sfailure to meet the criteria-particularly, the "complexity" criteria-of good art. \U7henI developed my remarks for publication, I wrote about the problems of dealing with an author who is trying too hard ro write elegantl1 and attempted to make the case that clich6s or sentimentality need not be signals of meretricious prose and that ultimately it is honest writing for which criti-

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cism should be lookitrg.tt Nowadays, I would also address the question of the female tradition, the role of popular fiction within it, and the influence of that fiction on its audience. It seemsto me that, if we accept the work of the professional "scribbling womanr" we have also to accept its literary consequences, not drawing the lines at the place where that literature may have been the force that enabled an otherwise inarticulate segment of the population to grasp a means of expressionand communication. Once again, the arena is the female tradition itself. If we are thinking in terms of canon formation, it is the alternative canon. Until the aesthetic arguments can be fully worked out in the feminisr context, it will be impossible to argue, in the general marketplace of literary ideas, that the novels of Henry James ought to give place-a little place, even-to the diaries of his sisterAlice. At this point, I suspect most of our male colleagueswould consider such a request, even in the name of Alice James, much less the Seamer on Men's Underwear, little more than a form of "reverse discriminagisn"-x concept to which some of them are already overly attached. It is up to feminist scholars, when we determine that this is indeed the right course to pursue, to demonstrate that such an inclusion would constitute a genuin ely affirmative action for all of us. The development of feminist literary criticism and scholarship has already proceeded through a number of identifiable stages.Its pace is more reminiscent of the survey course than of the slow processesof canon formation and revision, and it has been more successfulin defining and sticking to its own intellectual turf, the female counter-canon, than in gaining general canonical recognition for Edith Ifharton, Fanny Fern, or the female diarists 'Westward of the Expansion. In one sense,the more coherent our sense of the female tradition is, the stronger will be our eventual case.Yet the longer we wait, the more comfortable the women's literature ghetto-separate, apparently autonomous, and far from equal-may begin to feel. At the same time, I believe the challenge cannor come only by means of the patent value of the work of women. We must pursue the questions certain of 25Lillian S. Robinson, "WorkingAVomenAVriring," Sex, Class, and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1978), p. z;z. [Au.]

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us have raised and retreated from as to the eternal verity of the received standards of greatnessor even goodness. And, while not abandoning our newfound female tradition, we have to return to confrontation with "the" canon, examining it as a

source of ideas, themes, motifs, and myths about the two sexes.The point in so doing is not to label and hence dismiss even the most sexist literary classics, but to enable all of us to apprehend them, finally, in all their human dimensions.

HazardAdams b. 19z6 A

his first book, Blake and Yeats:The Contrary Vision (rgS5), Hazard \ncn Adams'sapproachto the role and work of criticism has beenremarkably \,, consistent:to apprehendand understandimaginativework from its own point of view For just that reason,his critical position is difficult to characterize.As he assertsof criticism itself in the selectionhere,Adams'sposition is ironic, in maintaining a tension betweencompeting alternatives.He developsBlake'sdistinction between"neg4tionsr"whereone term of an opposition deniesor negatesthe other, and a"contrary," where there is no presumptionthat opposingterms are in mortal conflict and one must be the victorAs with Northrop Frye,Adams'swork on Blakehasinformed his critical speculations, with the important differencethat Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism, with perhaps less irony than the casemay have required, took Blake's Los at his yys16l-"1 must createa Systemor be Enslav'd by Another Man's." As Blake understood,the risk of this imperativeis the creationof a "mill with complicated wheelsr"which may be "revolutionaryr" chieflyin the senseof starting "the same dull round over again." Adams has not produced a system,at least not as one might find it in Blake'spropheticbooks,Yeats'sAVision, or Frye'sAnatomy;but as theseselectionsftom Philosophyof the Literary Symbolicshow,he proceeds systematicallyto representthe needand the difficulty of apprehendinganything "from its own point of view." In the schemeoutlined here, modes of discourseand knowledge are representedalong a continuum of cultural creation, taking the poetic as the normative, not the abnormal case.As Adams explains in the first selectionhere, from the "Introduction" to Philosophyof tbe Literary Symbolic,the root idea of the poetic (asdevelopedboth by Vico and by Blake)is an inclusiveand creative gesture,constitutinga world by giving it imaginativeform-and therebymaking oneselfa "circumferencer"containinga world, asopposedto a "centerr" viewing that world (includingone'sown body and actions)as externaland opposedto a self or subject. In this view, poetry and mathematicsare the limits of the continuum, just as "myth" and "antimyth," as contraries,converge,for example, when mathematiciansproceedfrom the claimsthat mathematicsrepresentsreality to the claim that reality is mathematical-or when poets,like Blake or Yeats, ('systems." create Adamsrefersto diverseforms of creationalong the continuum as "fictionsr" not as a term of opposition to "truth" but as an acknowledgment that forms of knowledge and expressionare constituted by human acrs, nor givenor passively"discovered." Criticism Adams placesin the middle, along with the writing of historS with myth and poetry on the one side and religion and scienceon the other. So situated, the critic and historian are involved in the creation of fictions, selfconsciously contingent and mediatorS having the status neither of myth nor of

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Heznno Aoeus doctrine, but with the implicit task of indicating how (and with what effect) myth becomesdoctrine or vice versa. This is partly why Adams conceivesof Stevens's well-known lines about "the finer criticism as ironic, recallingltrflallace knowledge of belief," that "what it believesin is not true." From the middle ground Adams reservesfor criticism, one would also add, "but neither is it false." It is partly for this reasonthat Adams engagesrecentwork in the history and philosophyof science,in the secondexcerptherefrom the last chapterof Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic. Especiallyin the work of Gerald Holton and ThomasKuhn, Adams finds analogousconcernsas when, for example,Gerald Holton (in Thematic Ori.ginsof Scientific Thought) distinguishesbetweenscienceas a nascentactivity of imaginationand conception(St) and scienceas an institution of collectiveagreements(Sr), or in Kuhn's notion of the scientific "paradigm" as a disciplinary matrix. In both cases,the problem of the historian of sciencebecomesa problemof criticism(in a Kantian sense),as historicalevi dencefails with sublime regularity to confirm the view that the progressof science is a steady though incremental march to absolute truth. The critical dilemma closelyresembleswhat confronts the literary analyst and historian: by what model can one explain the creation of opposing models without turning the opposition into a negation-or, alternativeln simply dissolvingthe opposition? In the caseof natural science,a metaphysicallyor ontologically grounded notion of truth providesa ready justification for a historiographyof "progress," just as it providesan implicit teleology:one conductssuchinquiriesprecisely becausethey lead to Truth. When historical evidenceshows a radically more complexpicture, the statusof oppositionsusedto generatepivotal terms comes into question. One might argue (with Northrop Frye, for example) that literature never progresses,since it is a structure of potentialities that can be representedas a synchronic or mythic structure; but then it appearsthat the activity of constructing a critical model for that structure has either becomea part of what it describesor becomesnot a descriptionof a systemof potentialitiesbut a set of limiting conditions in its own right. In the first case,"criticism" and "poetry" become,as it were, indifferent; in the secondcase,"criticism" ceasesto servea reflectiverole to becomea sourceof doctrine itself. In this case,the postulate that literature is mythic servesto maintain the differencebetweenliterature and sciencebut only vexesthe statusof criticism. Can it make claimsthat are "true," and, if not, are its claims mythic or merely dogmatic?Sinceit is obvious that both literature and criticism change,just as scienceand philosophy of science change,are the changesthemselvesindifferent? The particular inrerestof this problem is that any dialecticalstrategy(whether Hegelian or Blakean) that dependson oppositions to generatethe functional terms for discourseis liable to assumea condition of stability in the oppositions When it turns out that the opposition is either oversimplifiedor subthemselves. ject to dynamic alteration,the confidencein a set of distinctionsmade as if they were logically a priori is underminedby historical change. As Adamsconstructshis model primarily after Blake and Vico, for example,it is notable that he interprets the model by deploying one axis of opposition

HazardAdam.s against another. On one axis are three thematic oppositions, difference/indifference,subject/object,and symbol/allegory;the other axis opposesthe notion of the "contrary" to the notion of the "negationr" suchthat any of the thematic oppositions could be treated as either contraries or negations.The strategyis indeedpowerful, but it stopsshort of acceptingthe historical interpretationthat was vital for both Blake and Vico. WhereasVico used his notion of "poetic logic" and "imaginative universals"to explain the developmentof Roman law, Blake usedhis notion of the "ancient poets" as "reprobate" in the serviceof an apocalypticvision of resurrectionfrom a fall. The similarity betweenVico and Blake in this instancereflectsnot so much a common view of history as teleological but rather the more stubborn expectationthat differences,and specifically historical differences,will count for something. If one adopts a position of radical historicism (as Kuhn sometimesseemsto do), then it may appear a matter of indifference,for example,which physical theory one endorses-which is preciselywhy Kuhn's work has beencontroversial in any domain wherepractitionersare convincedthat it makes^ greatdifferencewhich theory one chooses-and why, not coincidentallSKuhn qualifiesthe historicism of his notion of paradigmswith speculationson problems of value (seeKuhn). SimilarlS Gerald Holton's appealto "themata" as orderingelements in the history of scienceprovidesan indirect meansfor explaining fundamental choicesin theory or investigativestrategythat are not transparentlyderivedfrom evidencebut haveto do with recognizing"evidence" as such. In all threecases,Kuhn, Holton, and Adams,the tension,in Adams'sterms,is betweenoppositionsasnegationsor as contraries;and the choiceis madeall the more problematicbecauseof the historical fact of a common metaphysicalheritage that presumesthat knowledge must be a disclosureof being. on this account, Vico and Blake are on the sameground, as it were,with Bacon,Newton, and Locke, Blake'sunholy trinity of scientists,in assumingthat history will disclosebeingastruth. Instead,history disclosesbeing as active,indeed,restless,in the propagationof choices. For Blake,this dilemmatook shapein the difficulty of finishingan apocalyptic epic,where the very form of teleologicalnarrariveunderminedthe poetic insight that oppositions need not be negations.Blaket solution was to invent a new form, in lerusalem, where painting, verse, and critical commentary are integrated.For Adams'sargument,the main difficulty is that a third term is required to preventthematic oppositionsfrom being, by metaphysicaldefault, negations that generatestatic hierarchies.In the concluding sectionof philosophy of the Literary symbolic (not includedhere),Adams arguesfor a conceptof "identity" as the contrary to "difference/indifference"and "subject/object" and a concept of the "secular symbolic" as the contrary of "symbol/allegory."This view prlvides,in a u{ay,a critical contrary for poetic creation,not requiring a new form of critical discourse,or evena new "approachr" but rather an aciof historical recuperationin which the study of the history of criticism consrructsthe appropriate context for choice-and enough evidenceto see that choicesare profoundly consequential. Adams'swork includesBlakeandYeats:The contrary vision (rsss); wilriam Blake:A Readingof the ShorterPoemsGg6il; The Contextsof poary (rS6i;

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The lnterestsof Criticism (rg6g); Lady Gregory GgZil; Philosophyof the Literary Sytnbolic ft98); Joyce Cary's Trilogies: Pursuit of the Particular Real (rp8l). Adamsis also the editor of Critical Theory SincePlato (tg7r), the author of two novels, The Horses of Instruction (t968) and The Truth About Dragons (r97o), and an ironic account of academiclife and politics, The AcadernicTribes ft976).

FROM

OF THE PHILOSOPHY LITERARYSYMBOLIC Introduction I. SOUB BTNTEAN AND

VrcuEAN Vlnrvs In the chapter that is devoted wholly to Blake's views, I shall make a distinction between "myth" and "antimyth" that will carry over to the book's conclusion. Pleasemake no assumptions yet about what thesewords mean, for the meanings rise out of the later discussionsof Blake. I now offer four fundamental Blakean notions, and overlap them with three fundamental notions found in the writings of Vico. Though Blake, to my knowledg., had never heard of Vico, h. might as well have. r. Blake wrote in The Marriage of Heauen and Hell: The ancient Poets animated all sensible obiects with Gods or Geniuses,calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous sensescould perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deiry.

Reprintedhere are selectionsfrom chapterone, "Introductionr"and chaptertwelve,"Conclusionsr"in pHtrosopHy oF THE LITERARYSYMBoLIC, by permission of the author and the publisher, University Pressesof Florida, copyright @ 1983.

Till a systemwas formed, which some took advantage of, and enslavedthe vulgar by attempting to reahze or abstract the mental deities from their objects: Thus began priesthood. Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.t This is a complicated passage,which I shall examine again later. Here I want to note Blake's idea that the poetic capacity, which he identifies with primordial naming, is the source of language and culture. This means that the true model of language is trope and not the abstract ideal form of symbolic logic. This is not a unique view. It had been enunciated by Vico; it was picked up by Herder;' and it became a popular notion in romanticism. But with respectto the culture at large it has always been, I think, what Blake would call a "reprobate" view. Blake drew his notion of the "reprob ate" from the biblical image of the visionary crying in the wilderness; it is an ironic reversalof the Calvinist meanittg. For Blake, greater and greater forms of linguistic abstraction arise from poetic sources and in turn generate need for interpreters, or what Blake calls "priesthoodr" which would include those we now call critics. He goes on to remark that in this historical process something is lost: And at length they [the priests] pronounced that the gods had ordained such things. Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast. [p. tSl] l The Complete Writings of Wiltiam Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes(London: Nonesuch;New York: Random H o u s e ,1 9 S 7 ) , p . r i 3( p l a t er r ) . [ A u . ] 2Giambattista Vico ft668- 17 44),Italianphilosopherand historian (see CTSP, pp.294-3or); Johann Gottfried von Herder (tZ ++- r 8o3), German philosopherand critic, an important influenceon the developmentof German Romanticism.[Eds.]

Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic Blake implies that his "primitive and original ways" are designed to restore a golden age before the fall into separation of words from their contained obiects, of man from his gods. z. Blake also wrote in the Marriage a sentence that I have chosen as the epigraph for this book: . . . one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring: to the Devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole. [p. t 5 j] Here the "prolific," with which Blake connects the naming power of the "ancient poetsr" is made a constant social force, from which emanatescultural food, so to speak. The food is deuoured by an abstracting, interpreting, using, hungering society. It is easyenough for the devourers to become deluded into thinking that the prolific are merely their captives. The history of the arts in the nineteenth century suggeststhat many prolifics came to feel that this was their fate. But Blake says it is never really so, which is at worst a defiant remark, or at best a truth. 3. Blake offers in his longer poems a notion involving his own special use of the terms "center" and "circumference."o If you are at a center or are a center, everything is outside you in the form of na'S7hen you study yourself analytically ture or matter. you put yourself outside yourself in this material field. If you are at a circumferenceyour experiences are inside you and a part of yourself. You contain the world in the form your imagination, including your power of language,givesit. You become an ancient poet. On the other hand, at a center you are a priest or alien interpreter of an outer world. 4. Finally, Blake made in Milton and Jerusalem an important distinction between "contraries" and "negations," which is the basis for his un-Hegelian dialectic.' A negation is a situation in which, in an opposition like soul/body or good/evil, one side is privileged over the other, that is, one side negates the reality or authoriry of the other, atrempring ro 3Letterto Butts, January ro, r8oz, CompleteWritiflgs, p.8rz. [Au.] aBlake'simageryis full of instances of expansionsand contractions,circumferences and centers.See,for example, Jerusalem,plate7r, ibid., p. 7o9. [Au.] sForexample, plate ro, ibid., p. 6z.9.[Au.] Jerusalem,

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suppressit. This is, in Blake, definitely ^ historical notion. Blake's example in the Marriage, where the term "contrary" is first introduced, is the opposition soul/body: In the history of religion the soul has negatedthe body, connecting it with evil. This is a process that developed from original visionary acts toward priesthood, which bureaucratizes the interpretation of the act into law. In the Christian "church," a term indicating an era for Blake, the law is that of "chastity" or sexual repression. The process turns soul/body into good/evil. A "contrary" would be an opposition in which the distinction itself (or the reasoning that createsit) is on one side, and on the other is the denial of the distinction in favor of the identiry of the two things in the term "energyr" with neither side negated. "Idendty" is a tricky word applied to Blake. More will be said about it. Here let me state that "identity" is not indifference, but instead the contrary of the distinction difference/indifference.' This is the first of three negations, the contraries of which I shall seek.The second, subject/object,concerned Blake himself pretty directly, though he did not employ the terms. The third is symbol/allegory and is deeply involved with the first two. To con6Ren6Girard, Violenceand theSacred,trans.PatrickGregory (Baltimore:JohnsHopkins UniversityPress,1972), p.r59 lLa Violenceet le sacrd(Paris:BernardGrasset, r97z)) arguesthat inside a cultural systemonly differencesare perceived.Outside, all the antagonistsseem alike. Further, "wherever differencesare lacking, violencethreatens"(p. 57).I seeka stancebeyondGirard's inside/outside, beyondhis difference/indifference, which can be the contrary to that negation.Girard also remarks, "The rite selectsa form of violenceas 'goodr' as necessary to the unity of the communiry"(p.rr5). This differentiatingform of violenceis perhapspreferableto the undifferentiatingform that Girard seesthe culrure terrifiedof and managingin this way.But clearlyboth are Blakean"negationSr"correspondingto the oppositionof OrcAJrizenin Blake'spoetry.A contraryis needed,which would imply the possibilityof a higher form of culrure, not a return to a primitive state.Blake offershis figure Los asa contraryform. I offerthe as-yet-undeveloped notion of "idenriry." lfhere identity is lacking, alienation reigns. Angus Fletcherremarkswith pertinence:"Moral fablesassert,symbolicallRthat someobjectsaresacredand some are sinful, and the true believershould avoid the one and embracethe other. . . . But when we seekthe true meaningof 'sacred'[that is, the 'contrary' meaning] in religioususage,we meet a paradox,for it turns out that 'sacred'meansboth good and evil": Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (lthaca: Cornell University Press,1964),p. zz1. [Au.] SeeGirard. [Eds.]

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sider this and romantic and postromantic efforts to find a contrary to the negation to which Goethe and others gave the name is my historical theme. I have not, however, tried to write a history as such, either of the distinction between symbol and allegory or of the symbolic. In his book, Allegory, Angus Fletcher wisely declined to write a history of his subiect. It would have been impossible, because as he treats his subject he discovers that there is really no end to it.7 I am in the same situation and have therefore chosen moments of exemplary importance to my theoretical theme, which is centered on the pursuit of contraries to the three negations I have mentioned above. I come now to the three overlapping notions in Vico. He has been much written about in recent years by both theoreticians of history and semioticians, and his views have been digestedand clearly presentedalong with those of J. G. Herder by Isaiah Berlin.t The first two notions involve two distinctions Vico makes. The first distinction is between "poetic logic" and conceptual logic, and the second is between "imaginative universals" and abstract universals. Both. "poetic logic" and "imaginative universals" he connects with primitive people. r. "Poetic Logic": The keys to Vico's new science of man are his claims that in the childhood of the world men were by necessity"sublime poets" and that the first scienceto be mastered before more can be known about man is that of mythology.t The first 7lbid.,p. r. [Au.] 8lsaiahBerlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studiesin the History of ldeas (London: Hogarth, 1976), particularly pp. 4z-55. The standardltalian commentaryis that of FaustoNicolini, Commentostorico all secondascienza nouut, z vols.(Rome:rg49-io). [A".] eThe New Scienceof GiambattistaVico, rev. trans. of the 3d ed., 1774, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (lthaca: Cornell University Press, ry68), pp. 7r, j j lLa scienzanouua,ed.FaustoNicolini, z vols.(Bari:Gius.Laterza6cFigli, r9z8), t 287,421.For this, a study of the Hebraicbiblical tradition will not do becauseof the miraculousincursionof the deity into the historyof the Hebrews,which makesthem a specialcase. (Thus Vico avoidsreligiousdisputation.)They received their law direct from God and neverwent through the long historicalprocessthat the gentiletribes-dispersed desiendantsof Noah-experienced. The gentiles,thereby fore, had to discoverand makelaws for themselves " long processof developmentwhich everywherebeganin not because arose myths religion.The similaritiesamong of i commonhistoricaland geographicalorigin but becauseof a commonhumannature.[Au.]

wisdom of the gentile world was what Vico calls "poetic wisdom" operating by "poetic logic"-"a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of the first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust senseand vigorous imagination" [p. r fi (r : r 45-46)). The fundamental difference here between Vico and others who held similar views'0 is that Vico does not consistently denigrate as hopeless becausethey are irrational the qualities he mentions above; in some moods he even celebratesthem. Nor does he try to rationalize examples of "poetic logic" by claiming that myths hide rational statementsby allegory. The term "poetic" in Vico refers to a mode of thought that does not work toward abstract concepts,but in Blake's terms toward the expansion of centers."Poetic logic" gave rise first to history, not poetry (in the sense of imitation and feigning, at least); and the first history was created by poets, for "all gentile histories have their beginningsin fables" lp. Jt4 (z: zr)1. Mythologies are really "civil histories of the first peoples, who were everywhere naturally poets" [p. to5 (r: r3o)]. This view of Vico's differs from most allegorical euhemerism in that it does not claim myths to be early impressions of historical fact corrupted into fable over time, but events formulated originally in the mode of "poetic logic." In him there is no notion of an original enlightened condition of Deistic reasonablenessbefore a Fall into debasedreligion. Jove by the "poetic logic" of metaphor is the sky and the first of the gods. One does not stand for the other. This all follows from the nature of primitive thought, which for Vico is never far divorced from primitive language' which is animistic, incapable of abstraction, and fundamentally tropological. Indeed, language is the form of thought. Ideas and words are a twin birth.tt Vico goes so far as to say, anticipating modern strucr0See,for example,Antoine Court de Gebelin, Monde primitif analysd et compard auec le monde moderne (Paris, :'771,).Gebelinis under the domineeringinfluenceof Cartesianismwith its supremeconfidencein the mathematicalstructure of realiry. A good rationalist, he makesno distinctionberweenallegoryand symbolism. [Au.] ll Berlin, iiro and Herder, points out that Josephde Maistre'sremark "la pens6eet la parolesont un magnifique synonyme" [thought and languagear-ea -magnificent synonym]one hundredyearslater probably comes from Vico (p.+z).[A".]

Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic turalist thought, that minds are formed by the nature of language, not vice versa.tt Fundamental to Vico's notion of the origins of language in the concrete and poetic are three of the four major tropes: metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. (Irony appears somewhat later.) These tropes, which are treated by classical thought simply as devices of rhetoric spread upon a fabric of conceptual logic, Vico treats as the fundamental "corollaries" of "poetic logicr" the "necessarymodes of expression" [p. t3t (r : r 6Z)], thereby implicitly joining thought to language. He expresseshis important reversal of the classical view of tropes as follows: By means of these three divinities [ove, Cybele, and Neptune] . . . they [primitive men] explained everything appertaining to the sky, the earth, and the sea. And similarly by means of the other divinities they signified the other kinds of things appertaining to each, denoting all flowers, for instance, by Flora, and all fruits by Pomona. We nowadays reverse this practice in respect of spiritual things, such as the faculties of the human mind, the passions, the virtues, vices, sciences,and arts; for the most part the ideas we form of them are so many feminine personifications, to which we refer all the causes, properties and effects that severally appertain to them. For when we wish to give utterance to our understanding of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like painters, form human images of them. But these theological poets, unable to make use of the understanding, did the opposite and more sublime thing: they attributed sensesand passions, as we saw not long since, to bodies, and to bodies as vast as sky, sea, and earth. Later, as thesevast imaginations shrank and the power of abstraction gre% the personifications were reduced to diminutive signs [p. r zB (r : r 6z)1. There appears here the idea of a primordial "sy-pathetic naturer" as well as that of shrinkage to a Blakean center. Modern man's mind is "so detached l2SeeBerlin, ibid., who quotes from De nostre temporis studiorum ratione (r7o8). [Au.]

S8g

from the senses,even in the vulgar, by abstractions corresponding to all the abstract terms our language abounds in" that we cannot form any image of such a nature, at least not without an immense effort [p. r r8 (r : r48)]. The tropes are "corollaries" of a "poetic logic" identical to that exercised by Blake's "ancient poets." z. "Imaginative Universals": According to Vico, the earliestpeople did not possess"intelligible class concepts of thingS," but they nevertheless had to move in thought and expression from particulars to some sort of universals, "to which, as to certain models or ideal portraits" they could "reduce all the particular specieswhich resembledthem" lp. 74 (r : 9 r )]. A Vichean "imaginative univers alr" the special product of "poetic logicr" remains animate in its universaliry by retaining all the qualities of any particular referred to it. "It is an eternal property of the fables always to enlarge the ideas of particulars" [p. 3 rz (z: r8)] and, I might add, to insist on the "identify" with the particular of that enlargement. 'We are not surprised, therefore, to find that metaphor is the "most necessaryand frequent" corollary of "poetic logic" by which the first poets "attributed to bodies the being of animate substances, with capacities measured by their own, namely senseand passion, and in this way made fables of them" fp. tz9 (r: r6+)). Vico notes how many inanimate things are verbally formed by metaphors from the human bodS its parts, senses,or passions, and concludesthat "as rational metaphysicsteaches that man becomesall things by understanding them (bomo intelligendo fit omnia), this imaginative metaphysics[poetic logic] shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them (homo non intelligendo fit omnia); and perhaps the latter proposition is truer than the former, for when man understands he extends his mind and takes in things; but when he does not understand he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them" [p. t3o (r : 16S)]. Like metaphor, each metonymy and synecdoche creates a fable in miniature. Vico classesthe gods and some traditional heroes as "imaginative universals"Hercules, Homer, Aesop, Horatio, and Orlando, for example. Homer, the heroic character of Grecian men "insofar as they told their histories in songr" is an "imaginative univers al." All the inconsistenciesthat surround Homer as a singular indi-

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vidual during a particular period are made consistent by this view, which Vico develops to some length, anticipating Blake's remark in the annotations to Reynolds's Discourses, "Every class is individual." 3. The third Vichean notion is that of "fictions": If myth and poetry developed in the way Vico describes, so originally did iurisprudence. The most ancient laws of the gentiles arose out of single instances and were only later given general application. They were not conceived before the acts occurred that made them necessary.Vico introduces the idea of "fictions" into his account of Roman la*, which he calls as a whole a "serious poem." By this he means a historical development out of the practice of "poetic logic." His treatment of law as fictions in which "what had happened was taken as not having happened, and what had not happened as having happened" anticipates Hans Vaihinger's" theory of "as if" (which I shall discussin chapter 7) by rwo centuries, even down to the type of illustration used, and it emphasizesnot the untruth of a frc' tion but the notion of a fiction as a making, implicit in the Blakean idea of the "prolific" activity of the "ancient poets." There is in Vico, however, a latent positivism, with which a theory of symbolic cannot go along. He seems to regard "poetic logic" as principally and perhaps only a necessaryprecursor to philosophy. He writes that in fables, as in embryos or matrices,we have discovered the outlines of all esoteric wisdom. And it may be said that in the fables the nations have in a rough way and in the language of the human senses described the beginnings of this world of sciences,which the specialized studies of scholars have since clarified for us by reasoning and generalizations. lp. 297 (r, j8o)l For Vico, the early poets were the "sense" and the philosophers the "intellect" of human wisdom. The latter, working upon the crude and confused accomplishments of the former, made humanity " c o m p l e t e " l p . t 6 Z ( r : z r 3 ) ] . I t w o u l d s e e mt h a t each metaphor or "fable in brief" provides the ma13Hans Vaihinger (r 851- r9iil, lEds.l

German philosopher.

terials for abstract thought, but once abstract thought assimilatesmetaphor, the metaphor's formative power is lost and there is decayinto a "false" figure of speech,useful for illustrative purposes perhaps, but dangerouswhen extended beyond its now diminished realm. At the same time, Vico remarks that it was the very "deficiency of human reasoning power" that gave rise to the great sublime poetry of the heroic age and that "the philosophies which came afterward, the arts of poetry and of criticism, have produced none equal or better, and have even prevented its production [p. r zo (r : r 5 r )]. This sounds nostalgic, like Blake's story of the "ancient poets" and the subsequent "priesthood." As an antidote to that nostalgia Vico offers not a theory of the persistenceof "poetic logic" in art but only the recorso, the theory of the growth, maturitS and decline of a civrhzation, whose apotheosis seems to occur as the "abstract" mind gains complete ascendancy over the "poetic." The growth of the "ab' stract" marks the decadenceof the "poeticr" but the supreme dominance of the abstract marks also the decadenceof the culture. Vico offers a theory based on a keen appreciation of the facts of flux, and this enables him to search back into origins, to find the dynamic character of myth and language. But his sensitivity to change leads him to an inner conflict. On the one hand, he demonstrates sympathy for "poetic logic" as a mode of thought. It seems to provide a Blakean contrary to that excessof abstraction which leads man away from his own life in the world. On the other hand, he seemsto regard "poetic logic" as a stage in human development to be passedthrough. His third great age-the Ag. of Man-liberates man from myth. Vico offers to a philosophy of the literary symbolic a view of language that makes "poetic logic" more fundamental than abstract conceptualization and thereby tends, as Croce said of him, to "suppress the dualism between poetry and language" that has long dogged our civilization.lo Further, his attempt to distinguish "imaginative universals" from abstract ones shows him grounding the poetic in a processthat is clearly not the mode of romantic allegory as I shall soon describe it. But Vico does not take the crucial step to a laBenedetto Croce,The Philosophyof GiambattistaVico, trans. R. G. Collingwood(New York: Russelland Russell,r g6+),p. 5o. [Au.]

PhilosoPhy of the Literary Symbolic view of language as fully creative and symbolic. He cannot free himself entirelyl from certain assumptions about human progress\hat make him at times seem to denigrate the poetic dlmost as much as did the Cartesianism he sought to revise. This failure allows us to read him as a supreme historical ironist, with civili zation buffeted between the poles of poetry and abstract thought in an endless cyclical 'S7hat he needs is a Blakean notion of movement. "prolific" contrariety to oppose to the cycliciry which negatesnow "poetic logicr" now "conceptual logic." The contrary must also oppose the idea of straight-line progress from "poetic logic" to a culture of the pure concept.

FROM

PHILOSOPHYOF THE,

LITERARYSYMBOLIC Conclusions In an effort to clari fy ^ role for criticism among the liberal arts and sciences,I now return to the distinction betwen myth and antimyth and the Blakean principles with which this book began. On the basisof theseprinciples I shall affempt to distinguish a philosophy of the literary symbolic from a variety of structuralist, phenomenological, and poststructuralist positions. The conclusionsreachedI identify with the tradition of the symbolic as I have constructed it in a selection of its many transformations-from the romantic distinction berween symbolism and allegory through to a true contrary opposing "miraculous" symbol/allegory to "secular" symbolic.

r. Dnmcrrc oF Frcrrvr CurruRALFonus A similarity among differences berween structuralist and phenomenological positions is the refusal of both to mak e any sort of fundamental distinctionor sometimes even practical distinction-between

59r

kinds of language, as was made bn say, tilTheelwright t' or some theorists of the American New Criticism. Yet on the nature of this one undifferentiated form of language,phenomenologistsand structuralists generallydisagree.The rejection of such distinctions is also made by certain critics who belong to neither group. For exampl€, E.D. Hirsch, Jr.: No literary theorist from Coleridge to the present has succeededin formulating a viable distinction berween the nature of ordinary written speechand the nature of literary written speech.. . . I believe the distinction can never be successfully formulated, and the futility of attempting the distinction will come to be generally recognrzed.t' Not himself a structuralist, and in certain ways harshly critical of them, Hirsch is neverthelesswith the structuralists on this point, for his model of discourse is that of symbolic logic. He treats all writing in its terms and thus tends toward a romantically allegoric concept of all verbal structures. Phenomenologists tend to approach the matter from a quite different direction, reasserting variations of the "miraculous" concept of the symbol. My design is, of course, to argue for the concept of the poem as "secular" symbolic form, identifying language fundamentally with poetry, but recognizing a progression of antimythical emanations from it. In this, I seem to be like the phenomenologists, but my conception of language as creative,as I shall try to show, differs from their concept of all language as hermeneutic. At the same time, I am not prepared to claim any absolute fissure between poetic language and any such language as may be set up in opposition to it. In this, I seem to be like Hirsch, the symbolic logicians, and the structuralists. However, my model of language is not the mathematical one, nor is my normative description of it a term such as "logical discourse." As we have seen,Frye has speculatedabout the relation of poetry to mathematics,and Yeatsbefore him mused on mathematic form as myth. I propose a linguistic continuum that runs from a mythic pole outward 15Philip Wheelwright;seeCTSP,pp. rro3 -r2.. [Eds.] 158.D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation(Chicago: Universityof ChicagoPress,1976),pp. 9o-9r. [Au.]

Sgz

Hazeno Aneius

Mathematics

Ordinary

Mvthico-Poetic J

.

Figure rz,r through the fictive zones that some philosophers have tried to call "ordinary" language (if it exists) and Wheelwright's "steno language" to mathematical symbolism, which marks the outer limit of symbolic creativity (fig. rz.r). Blake's identification of centers with circumferences applies here. The mythic center is actually a container of all the possibilities implicit in the totality, becoming a circumference,as my diagram (fig. rz.r) attempts to show, the circle turning inside out in the way that Frye's "center" of literary merges with circumferential anagogy in any particular work. There can finally be no lines measuring off these zones, so my diagram is misleading; but unlike Hirsch, I do not believe that becausewe cannot logically formulate or "measure" where one mode ceasesand another begins, we should not make fictive distinctions helpful to our understanding. The principle is a contrary to one requiring a choice between indifference and difference. It states that any verbal structure has identity.It will take this chapter to indicate iust what I mean by the term. It should be clear that this notion of identity does not offer the mythic as a necessarily historical oriBin, as does Vico and as Blake seemsto do (though, I think, does not have to do). But it does deny as fundamental the assumptions about language upon which behavioral social sciencehas based its methodologies. With its quantitative methods, behav-

ioral social sciencemakes mathematics the origin, building abstract behavioral models outward from it. In such a system there is declared to be no containing circumference, all language pointing outward, though one can say, at a higher level, that quantitative social scienceends up trying to contain human behavior in a mathematic form. Structuralism, which claims to be a "hum an" science,or the basis of such a science,is in the end not much different in this matter. If we are to make the effort as critics to acknowledge (since adoption is finally impossible) the point of view of the poem, we can hardly declaretropes to be deviations from some norm, since they have as much right as anything else to be declared the norm. Metaphor is hardly a transgressiveactivitS as in some of the headier structuralist flights, unless we are perversely to identify transgression with normality. The idea of discourse that eliminates all tropes from a norm is really an ideal of pure mathematic abstraction. \When the mathematical ideal negatesthe poetic the result is mofold: (r) All languageis regarded as "outward" pointing; it is either transparently mimetic or arbitrarily significatory (allegorical) of a "primary" mathematrzeduniverse,that is, it goesto a center and stays there; (z) tropes are regarded as merely devices to lend vividness to discourse or to entertain, or figures to be allegorically interpreted, and poetry becomes decorated outward-pointing language. The idea of such purification toward the bare bones of logic is derived from a positivistic assumption about how the mind works that from the poetic point of view turns things inside out: Rather than computers being regarded as copies of mind, it is implied that the mind is a copy of a computer. Under these conditions "ordinary language" becomes simply a term for how language deviates from a mathematical norm. The argument that there is no ordinary language has been cleverly made by Stanley Fish, who attacks the distinction between ordinary and literary language by declaring the nonexistence of both." Ordinary language seemsto me a misleading fiction uselessto criticism as long as it is employed to declare poetry as in some way deviant from it. Fish argues that the distTStanleyFish, "How Ordinary Is Ordinary Language?" New Literary History5, rio. r (Autumn r973), 4r-54. lAu.l

Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic tinction has forced criticism to claim that poetry is either more than language ("messageplus"), which leads to a concept of decorative form, or less than language ("messageminus"), which eliminates content and eventuates in theories of "pure poetry." The plus and minus characterizations are simplistic, but in any caseFish's analysisdoes not focus on the issue that is fundamental in this book. That issue is whether we can give to language an expansive, creative character or only an imitative andl or significatory one, whether it is only a dead center, and not a center that is always becoming a circumference. With that said, I want to locate the arts, history, and criticism as cultural forms of symbolic in their appropriate dialectical positions on a continuum. My dialectic, like Yeats's, does not provide for Hegelian synthesis,but for the constantly renewed conflict of Heraclitus; the notion of identity requires conflict as well as continuum when it is rationally formulated. The dialectic is that of myth and antimyth. Table rz.r organizesthis opposition. The side of myth is the side of a paradox harbored by the word "identity." Identity is a harbor of individualiry and relationship. One has an identit5 and one can be identical with somethitrg.A tribe of primitive people can claim that they are crocodiles but do not make the error of jumping in the river that flows by their huts and cavorting with those creatureswith which they have establishedidentity. The side of antimyth eschews paradox (as it eschews the identity present in a trope) and abstracts toward general law. In both cases,I shall claim (beTable rz.r. Dialecticof fictivecultural forms

Mode:

Myth Sympathy

Antimyth Analysis

Direction:

Particulariry

Generalor universal law

Movement:

To a circumference

To a center

End:

Individual

Abstract Unity

Paradox:

The particular encompasses the whole

None

Antiparadox:

None

The particular is inside the aggregate whole

Contrary:

Identity

Difference/ Indifference

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cause I deliberately seek to acknowledge myth's point of view) that what we have are fictions, not untruths, but creations. I say this, even as (indeed, because) I recognize that from antimyth's point of view the antimythic creation is not creation but a correspondencewith an external reality. In the end, however, we shall have to say that this too is a fiction-a making. Let us now imagine these contraries as two extremes or limits. At the antimythical pole we have a vision of the world as external to us, the world of nature and her mathematical laws as object to our subiect. Our own bodies are outside us, objectified like the world and treatable wholly in terms of behavioristic assumptions. We define ourselves as natural or at least social objects. This is, of course, a myth itself, though what I have chosen, to avoid equivocation, to call a fiction. Antimyth acceptsthe fiction that the thing to be demythologized is external, in the senseof being an object to a subject. Part of the fiction is that the particular is deter mined by and in the world. Extended into religion it is the fiction of man in relation to a sky god, an alien god, or a moral la*, external to, usually above, him. As a limit, antimyth represents the fiction of complete division into primary externality and secondary internality and the consequent privileging of the external. The explicit invention of the division in the history of science, which is usually pushed back to Galileo, is denied by the historian of scienceGerald Holton to have been a "wanton act of dehumanrzation." Rather, he claims it to have been a "strategic decision to reach a worthy human goal, that of understanding nature (including, ultimately, man's nature) in a new way." tt This is certainly true, but as a pole or limit, it is precisely a dehu manization in that it externalizes man from himself by making man (or at least as much of man as can be gotten hold of in that form) a nature. \7e might call the notion of antimyth a "categoryr" to use Kantian language, but it would be better ro say that it is a pure form (indeed, the pure form) of scientific thought. It is not the form of the process of scientific thought. It is only a normative concept and as such readily illustrates how normarive concepts taken as absolutes can spread over the whole 18GeraldHolton, ThematicOrigins of ScientificThought: Keplerto Einstein(Cambridge,Mass.:Harvard UniversityPress,r97j), p. 44o.[Au.]

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Hnzeno Aoeus

range of a subject and corrupt our understanding of it. The process of science is an emergence from myth into antimythical form. Antimyth as a concept contains only "normal science" in Thomas Kuhn's senseor "public science" (Sr) ir Holton's.tt Both Kuhn and Holton attempt to expand our notions of the process of science by their ideas of paradigms and themata respectively.Holton treats themata as preconceptions in scientific activity that are not verifiable or falsifiable. He treats them as a third (really a primordial) dimension of science in addition to the dimension of the empirical and phenomenal and the dimension of the heuristicanalytic. These latter fwo alone compose what he 'Sfhat is lacking there is calls "public science" or Sr. part of the process: ". . . the dimension of fundamental presuppositions, notions, terms, methodological judgments, and decisions . . . which are themselves neither directly evolved from, nor resolvable into, obiective observation on the one hand, or logical, mathem atical, and other formal analytical ratiocination on the other hand .') 20I take it that themat a are those fictive acts out of which scientific theories emergein the processwe think of o'Public science" cannot explain as doing science. the role of these themata. There is a relation berween a public science and the time in which it is practiced that evadesscientific explanation. Holton remarks of contemporary science'sworld: ". . . it is now a profoundly egalitarian rather than hierarchical universe,so much so that a whole theory of relativity (Milne's) has been built around the so-called cosmological principle, the principle that any observer anywhere in the universe interprets data in exactly the same way as any other observer elsewhere." tt This appears to be an example of the emergence of scientific theory from myth, though not, perhaps, without a doubling back through antimyth to the culture in general. In any case,we can treat it as an emergenceinto antimyth, because it appears that before a thema can function scientifically in a "public" or "normal" senseit must be shaped into antimythical form. Holton seemsto treat the primary/secondary or subject/object division as a thema, like, say, the leThomasKuhn The Structureof ScientfficReuolutions, , zd ed. (Chicago:Universiryof Chicago Press,r97o), pp. r o-42; Holton, ThematicOrigins,PP.r9ff.[Au.] 20Holton,ThematicOrigins,p. SZ.[Au.] 21Ibid., p. r03. [Au.]

thema of fundamental probabilism in physical nature or the notion of the thing-in-itself as a mathematical structure (Heisenberg). His notion of themata as "preconceptions that appear to be unavoidable for scientific though ttt 22 would cover the division into primary and secondary qualities. But subiect/obiect is in one sense deeper than a thema and in another sensesubsequentto them ata. It is deeper in that it is the structure of the pure form to which all themata must accommodate themselves.It is subsequent in that thematic processesof thought that produce science(Sr) go on, or at least can begin, independent of it. Like what Michael Polanyi calls "tacit knowing," the "nature" of such a processis unspecifiable.t' Kuhn's notion of paradigms stands in relation to antimyth in the same way that themata do, though in Holton's view themata come more from the individual than from the community. Kuhn's notion of paradigms has been modified considerably since The Structure of Scientific Reuolutions appeared in 1962. Originally it was very broad, but Margaret Masterman's analysis, in which she showed that Kuhn used the term in at least twenty-one different senses, which she then divided into three basic groups, led Kuhn to redefine down to two fundamental senses.'oOriginally Kuhn offered paradigms of three types: metaphysical (sometimes "quasimetaphysical," as in Kuhn's description of Descartes' corpuscular theorn which told many scientists "what many of their researchproblems should be"), sociological, and artificial. Masterman's argument was that though most commentators treated Kuhn's paradigms as metaphysical, their fundamental sensewas not that at all; they representedsetsof scientific habits prior to theory in their development, sociologically describable and above all con22Ibid., p.zj. [A".] 23See Polanyi,PersonalKnowledge(tgS8) (Chicago:Universiryof ChicagoPress,196z),and Polanyiand Harry Prosch,Meaning(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, r s 7s ) . [ A u . ] 2aMargaretMasterman,"The Nature of a Paradigm,"in Criticismand the Growth of Knowledge$97o), ed.Imri Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (Cambridge:Cambridge UniversityPress,r97z), pp. 59 -89. Kuhn's response' "Reflectionson My Criticsr" occupiespp. z3r-78[Au.] Seealso,Kuhn, "secondThoughtson Paradigms" in The EssentialTension:SelectedStudiesin Scientific Traditionsand Change(Chicago:Universityof Chicago Press,1977),pp. z9j-irq. [Eds.]

Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic crete and observable. The fundamental form was what she called the " artif act or construct" paradigm that could be a piece of apparatus or anything bringing about puzzle-solving or normal science." Kuhn conspired in this retreat from metaphysicsin his postscript of 1969." It is clear, however, that Kuhn's theory must admit paradigms of the metaphysical sort becausemany of his examples are of that sort. But it is probably true that when they are admitted they are admitted 4s construct paradigms. This is becauseKuhn himself has a perfectly natural antimythical bias, as his interest in science might lead us to assumein the first place, though his theory raises all kinds of problems for purely antimythic al beliefs.Kuhn's abandonment of metaphysics, following Masterman's cue, makes his social science that much harder, a condition which has beendevoutln if on occasionmistakenl5 wished for. (In fact, Kuhn eventually drops the term "paradigm" and substitutes for it the term "disciplinary matrixr" which he describesas an "entire constellation of beliefs, values, techniques,and so on shared by members of a given community.") " For Kuhn, there is always a concrete situation in which a paradigm comes into play. Scientists don't learn concepts, laws, and theories "in the abstract and by themselves." They encounter these tools "in a historically and pedagogically prior unit that displays them with and through their applications." 2t This meansthat paradigms are relatively silent in the way that the Aristotelian notion of matter can become silent becauseof its "omnipresence and qualitative neutrality" in Aristotelian physics." But I doubt that becauseit is omnipresent it can quite be dispensed with. It is, still, paradigmatic. Antimyth is more than paradigmatic, for it is never overthrowable without denying science itself. Except, of course, that we are speaking at this point of public science. It is interesting to see how the notion of necessaryexternality appears even as Holton, for example, speaksof . . . the process of removing the discourse from the personal level . . . to a second level, 2sMasterman, "The Natureof a Paradigm,"p.65. [Au.] 25Kuhn,The Structureof ScientificReuolutions,pp. r 74zro. [Au.] 27Ibid., pp. r 8z, tZS. [Au.] 28Ibid., p. 46. [Au.] ttKuhn, "Reflections on My Critics,"p.269. [Au.]

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that of public science,where the discourse is more unambiguously understandable, being predominantly about phenomena and analytical schemes.. . . This is a process which every scientist unquestionably accepts,a process that may be termed externalization or proiection.'o It is what I call emergencetoward antimyth. 'What Kuhn calls "normal science" involves acceptance of paradigms and the making of community that this implies. Acceptance of a paradigm limits as well as liberates, since it tends to selectthe problems that will be regarded as scientific at any given time. But we can see,as Holton points out, it is in the nature of science,when limited to only two rather than his three dimensions, that certain questions cannot be asked. They are not scientific questions.This is true at a broader and deeper level than Holton indicates-at the metaphysical level that Kuhn abandons, the level nearing antimyth, which defines the limit of scientific projections. The antimyth of externality is in the end something that the philosophy of sciencemust recognize as the structure of scientific fictions. Once it is assumed that paradigms are fictive, the temptation is to reinvoke antimythical principle and consider each successiveparadigm nearer to an objective (external) truth. That is, the antimyth is invoked at a higher level than the current paradigm. Kuhn, as a philosopher of science,tries to step out of paradigms, and perhaps even out of the antimyth (though his retreat from metaphysics is a contrary act), and it is this move that causes him to differ with Karl Popper. Kuhn claims: "'We may . . . have to relinquish the notion, explicit or implicit, that changesof paradigm carry scientistsand those who learn from them closer and closer to the truth."3t From the point of view of the philosopher of science, Kuhn seesthe notion of a teleology in science itself as a vacuous concept. His view has outraged many scientists and philosophers-to the degree that they accept the absolute dominance of an anrimythical world-view and reject so-called "metaphysical" issues.More precisely, Kuhn refusesto 3oHolton,ThematicOrigins,p. ror. [Au.] 3rKuhn, The Structureof ScientificReuolutionstp. r/o; Karl Popper,The Logic of ScientificDiscouery(London: Hutchinson,rgj S). [Au.]

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compare theories as representations of nature, as statementsabout "what is really out there." Granting that neither theory of a historical pair is true, [many thinkers] neverthelessseek a sensein which the latter is a better approximation to the truth. I believe nothing of that sort can be found." For Kuhn, to posit an ontological limit, as Popper does, is to imply a neutral observation language, which he says has never been achieved (and, in my view, can never be achieved),or implies knowledge of the limit alreadS which makes the whole search unnecessary.Kuhn goes so far as to consider abandoning the cherished notions that sensory experience is fixed and neutral and that theories are simply man-made interpretations of given data. The same notion is expressedby Holton in his reiection of ". . . the idea of aperfect entiry . . . easily recogn izable in scientific thought, from the beginning to this d.y, as the conception-a haunting and apparently irresistible one despite all evidence to the contrary-of the final, single, perfect object of knowledg. to which the current state of scientific knowledg. is widely thought to lead us." " Holton goes on to speak of it as inexpressible in ordinary language, but the truth must be that it is inexpressible in any language or symbolic form. Yet a positing of such an external limit is so pervasive in sciencethat one must entertain the notion of its necessity as a fiction to the whole enterprise. This means not that the scientist doing Holton's S '-the unspecifiable imaginative process-need belieue it, but that normal science adopts it as part of the structure of antimyth. One can argue appropriately that the historian or philosopher of sciencecannot adopt it, at least not fully. The historian and philosopher perform in the realm of the ironic, and indeed must maintain a certain distance from science. Kuhn's quarrel with Popper seems definable in terms of Kuhn's ironic withdrawal. Of course, it ought to be clear enough that for a scientist to adopt the antimythical as a belief beyond the activity of S, itself is error. The structures which ope rate under the aegis of antimyth can be materials for myth and can themselves have fiction-making power. They can create 32Kuhn,"Reflections on My Critics,"p.t65. [Au.] 33Holton, ThematicOrigins,p. ro4. [Au.]

words and images which help to shape the culture, but always from or within an antimythical base. Thus the power is properly called antimythopoeic, but no lesstherefore fictive. As such it skews things in a certain way. Albert Einstein remarked that experience remains the sole criterion of the utiliry of a mathematical construct, but he also observed that a creativeprinciple residesin mathematics.In criticizing Mach he wanted to go beyond "phenomenological physics" to achieve a theory, as Holton remarks, "whose basis may be further from direct experience, but which in return has more unity in the foundation ." 34The desire to connect to experience ffiay, indeed, be the scientist's desire to return to a pre-antimythic condition, the place of myth, the origin of making or poesisin the broadest sense, 'We seethis in Einwhere things are "simple" again. stein's attitude toward his own theories, and his connecting them with classicpurity. We seealso returns to a sort of image-making. Holton notes a tendency among physicists to evoke visual images of what one would see if it were seeable,which it is not once it becomes assimilated to the form of antimyth. Michael Polanyi has sought to look beneath what our models of knowing are and invents the idea of tacit knowing. This idea speaksof something deeper than antimyth-something, as Polanyi says, "unspecifiable."" This is radically "personal" knowledge not grounded in explicit operations of logic. 'We can never get antimythically fo such knowledg. because when we try to establish rules of tacit knowing we discover that beneath them is always another tacit form and thus an infinite regress.This is perhaps what Yeats offers at the end of A Vision, where his ironic language reaches the end of its tether: The particulars are the work of the thirteenth sphere or cycle, which is in every man and called by every man his freedom. Doubtless, for it can do all things and knows all things, it knows what it will do with its own freedom but it has kept the secret.36 3aGeraldHolton, The ScientificImagination(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversityPress,1978),p.r4S. [Au.] 35Polanyr,Meaning,p.lg. [Au.] 35W.B. Yeats,A Vision (New York: Macmillan, r9i8), p. r8r. [Au.]

Philosophyof the Literary Symbolic This is a necessarilyironic description of the ground of antimythical fiction-making. Polanyi goes on to an account of metaphor as an integrative act of tacit knowing or personal knowledge that creates a meaning unspecifiable by recourse to subsidiaries,becauseit itself is the meanirg of the subsidiaries. Meaning here is always located ahead rather than behind the fictive act and thus can never be allegorically recovered.There are some interesting connections here to the Kantian notion of "internal purposiveness" in art and aesthetic experience. If we consider Kuhn's retreat from antimyth and note that it involves refusal to posit an ontological limit, we may come to conclude that Kant's aesthetictheory unintentionally encompasseshis critique of pure reason, just as Schiller seemsto have tried to make it encompasshis ethical theory. Kuhn's retreat is, in these terms, a disestablishment of external purposivenessin science and turns sciencein the direction of art. At the mythical pole we have the contrary to the duality of subject/object. The world is part of us, but we are also extended into the world. John Butler Yeatswrote that the poet is involved in a "continual progress in identifying himself with everything that lives, and that does not live, not merely men and women or animals and birds but even trees and plants and rocks and stones."" The fundamental quality of mythical thought, as I use the term here, is the drive toward identiry, the contrary of difference/indifference.The condition of pure myth would be the successful taking of everything into one's own imagination and the identification of all the elements once inside with the whole, yet the maintenance of the individual identity of everything so that it is let be, to use a phrase of Heidegger. The condition of pure antimyth would be the externalization and objectification of everything except at a central unmoving point, an isolated, purely subjective and totally passive consciousness,alien to everything else.But then there is the ruln-the drift back to myth, the yearning for some form of total unification. Of course, if we ffy to transcend the opposition I have posed and gain a more spaciousview, the antimyth reveals itself as a fiction: The antimyth, the subject surrounded by an alien object, is itself a hu37Further Letters of John Butler Yeats, ed. Lennox Robinson (Dundrum: The Cuala Press, rgzo), p. zz. [Au.]

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man creation-something inside and emanating from the human imagination. In this light, a shift in my own metaphor is necessary;for my continuum appears to be a sort of fountain whose source is myth and whose jet reaches toward complete analytic or externalizing power but which returns cyclically to its source for replenishment.If this is correct, we can declare that the intellectual life feeds on myth, as Blake's "devourer" feeds on his "prolific," and that the proper org anrzatronof the liberal arts and sciencesis vertical, the fine arts and literature at the foundation, the pure sciencesat the top, with the various humanistic disciplines and social sciencesin between. Except, of course, that there is always a flow back, with antimyth at the top returnirg, often as potentiality for myth. But full absorption into myth would be impossible to cultural man, as is phase r 5 of Yeats'swheel. Yeatscalls it a "supernatural incarnation" and thus introduces a "miraculous" though unachievable space. I prefer to call it a fictive limit we never reach. The limit we can reach at this end of the continuum is art. Myth is a term indicating a limit being approached by all symbolic activity that would claim to make, not merely copy or signify. Approaching the limit, language assertsits freedom from antimythical strictures about language. It brings the qualities of myth into action as a contrary to antimythical power. Pure indifference, in the Yeatsiansenseof phase r 5, impossiblein his system, would be unable to grant antimyth its place; and if antimyth is not granted its place, all of the potential vicious social possibilities of myth would be unleashed, and the world would become unlivable, as it threatened to be under Nazism. By the same token, pure antimyth is reduction to an unlivable center of alienation. Recently, Northrop Frye, continuing his expansion of the terms "myth" and "mythology" beyond the confinesof "literature" to designatelarger social verbal structures, has remarked: A mythological universe is a vision of reality in terms of human concerns and hopes and anxieties; it is not a primitive form of science. UnfortunatelS human nature being what it is, man first acquires a mythological universe and then pretends as long as he can that it is also the actual universe. All mythological universesare by definition centered on man,

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Hezenp Aoenas

therefore the actual universe was also assumed to be centeredon man." This passagetouches on many of the issues with which I have been concerned. The appearance of science,the creator of Frye's "actual universer" did not destroy or render unnecessarya "mythological universe." Frye makes a very interestingpoint about this where he suggeststhat at one time technology seemedto promise a marriage with myth that would produce one dominant structure: . . . but poets have dragged their feet in its celebration. Blake, D. H. Lawrence, Morris, Yeats, Pound, are only a few of those who have shown marked hostility to technology and have refused to believe that its peaceful and destructive aspectscan be separated.The poets see nothing imaginative in a domination of nature which expressesno love for it, in an activify founded on will, which always overreacts,in a way of life marked by con" stant increasein speed,which means also an increase in introversion and the breaking down of genuine personal relationships." Frye goes on to suggestthat for these reasons science fiction began as celebration ("hardware fantasy") of technology but has quickly become "software philosophical romance." oo It must always be so. Scienceis always a movement out of myth and inevitably tends to the contrary end of a continuum. It can never successfully force on society complete victory of what is therefore antimyth without perpetrating its own form of disaster. Frye's remarks point to how a myth that has closed itself and has become a doctrine, demanding subservience,can be the vehicle of terror. Under such conditions, the contrary is not admitted, as for so long the Copernican theory was rejected becauseit was not compatible with a mancentered myth that had closed itself into doctrine. Curiously, theo, x man-centered myth that closesitself decentersman. Frye points to the opposite terror above, where the antimyth negatesthe human center and alienatesnature. 38NorthropFrye, The SecularScripture:A Study of the Structureof Romance(Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,r976), p. r4. [Au.] 3elbid., p. r8o. [Au.] 40Ibid. [Au.]

Figure rz.z illustrates an attempt to build a dialectical continuum on which can be placed rwo of the forms that constitute what we call the humanistic disciplines, for the myth/antimyth contrary does not divide up all human activiry. Indeed, I have already collapsed it into a more fundamental metaphor of the fountain. The fountain generates a cyclical movement by virtue of a constant return of antimyth to myth. Still the notion of a continuum between contraries is useful for a while longer. There is a ground all along the continuuffi, to say nothing of a middle ground. All the so-called academic disciplines are somewhereon the continuuffi, usually described in the more general forms of the fine arts, the humanities, the social sciences,and natural sciences.To read recent philosophy and history of scienceis to recognizethat the ground of scientific activity in its largest sense is unspecifiable and is not a hypothetical-empirical model with an ontological limit, which is the appearance of Holton's Sr. To reco gnize this offers perhaps some solaceto the so-calledsocial scientist,who seemsin practice torn between the model of S, and various forms of supposedly subjective expression. Talcott Parsons'sbrief outline of the history of the social sciences describes ideological struggles among competing views of the disciplines. It was not until Weber, he concludes,that a social sciencebalancing contending forces was evolved. Parsons makes a claim for the social sciencesas an autonomous disciplinary category, emerging from the contending forces of empiricist-utilitarian monism and idealistic dualism. He defends the tripartite academic division of humanities, social sciences,and natural sciences: [the social sciences]are not natural sciences in the sense of excluding the categories of subjective meaning, that is, they must consider knowing subjects as obiects. Nor are they humanistic-cultural in the sensethat the individualiry of particular meanings must take complete precedenceover analytical generalities and such categoriesas causality.ot This is almost a fair statement. But one could say a good deal more, since clearly the statement implies alTalcottParsons,"Unity and Diversityin the Modern IntellectualDisciplines:The Role of the SocialSciences," 196S),61. [Au.] Daedalus94,no. r (\UTinter

PhilosoPhyof the Literary Symbolic

599

Frg. rz.z. The Cyclical Fiction of Cultural Forms Mythic Pole

e Toward Myth

THE rRoNrC

Anti-Mythic

Pole

Religion

Mathematics and Science

past as presence/ past as past

upper/lower

object/subject

interpretation

ideality of recollection

ethical meaning

numerical determinism

artlscience

determinism/ freedom

God/man

Nature/man

THARMAS (covering cherub)

URIZEN (Satan)

Language and Myths

Art

unity of feeling

radical creation

creation I description

synthesis

particular

sympathyof relationship (identity)

freedom

URTHONA

(Los)

(indifference/differenceis + opposedby identity.)

Toward41tr1!4f!-

Criticism

History

LUVAH (Orc)

Return of anti-myth to myth, of <mathematicsto aft, of religion to myth, of differentiationto poetry in the fictive act.

that social science always externalizes the knowing subject. Accepting the notion of internal/external or subject/object, the statement is grounded in antimyth. Becauseof the externalization of the knowing subject into an object, the ideal form of social science here is behavioral. (I use this term not in opposition to "instinct" psychology, as it is sometimes used, but to cover both modes as deterministic.) The behavioral form can be thought of as a displacement of the ideal mathematical form of antimyth. Periodically in the social sciences,and most recently with the advent of highly sophisticated computers, there is an ebullient attempt to adopt pure mathematical form in the discipline. But then there is a tendency to pull back. Holton remarks: . . . disciplines such as psychology (and certainly history) are so constructed that they are wrong to imitate the habit in the modern physical sciences to depress or project the discussion forcibly to the xly plane [Sr]. Iil7hen the thematic component is as strong and as explicitly needed as it is in these fields, the criteria of acceptability should be able to remain explicitly in three-dimensionalproposition space.o' a2Holton,ThematicOrigins,p. 55. [Au.]

(indifference and difference are opposed,and indifference is negated.)

Social science's relation to mathematics is ironic and not entirely different from natural science'sflirtation with an ontological limit. On the other hand, to move toward the mythical passing some point of balance turns a social scienceinto something of recognizably other dimensions. Too often the disciplines of history and literary criticism, placed in the area of the "ironic" on figure rz.z) are battlefields in which opposing sides make efforts to drag the discipline toward the extreme either of myth or of antimyth. If pulled in either direction, these disciplines lose their reason for being. The purely empirical or antimythical historian tends to make no distinction between the writing of history (history as a symbolic discipline) and the flow of events.One simply copies or signifies the other. I have actually known historians who have been unable to distinguish the two or to recognize that there is some sort of problem implicit in this naively empiricist notion. This breed ought to be on the decline, given the recent invasion of historical study by analystsof language; but the solution to the problem of the place of history is not to flee to the opposite and identify it as an art, which is only to loosen it from qualities of empiricism that all historical writing must have. The important thing to recogn ize at this point is that an empirical act. is a constitutive act. Both

Hezeno Apeus criticism and history must constitute something as an "object" of study, even as they know that they are "constituting" it, that is, creating a fiction according to certain antimythical categories. At the sume time, they must reach out toward mythic identification with that object as if it were not yet constituted. In a few versions of recent reader-oriented criticism this has been acknowledged, though more often such criticism refuses to constitute the object (even as a fictive object). Blake said that the inexplicit can "rouse the faculties to act," and Keats insisted on art's bringing about a "momentous depth of speculation." Both of these observations insist on an "object" of some sort that is doing thesethings, but they also require a constitutive act of the reader or viewer before the work can be said to have any value. Neither statement is as sophisticated as we would want it to be today, but with some extension either could be used to show that a text is there as potentiality, but that we must always constitute it as there with a certain independence from us, even as we must insist on our involvement with it. It is both land, as are all activities in relation to whatever they constitute. Recently some critics have seemed to want to become more important than the potentialities from which they constitute their readings; for a while, the style was to claim to be transparent interpreters of superior texts. This is part of the politics of critical theorR which appears to be cyclical: either there is a flight from objectification of meaning, even as it seemsto be established; or there is a flight from subjectiviry, even as it is practiced. Blake describesthis sort of cyclicity (on a considerablygrander scalethan I have here) in the struggle of Orc and Urizen, which goes nowhere; and he has to bring in his character Los as a contrary. It is this cyclical situation that I believe Stanley Fish is attempting to avoid in the last chapters of /s There a Text in This Class? There he makes no claim (or almost no claim) that the ways of criticism will change as a result of his arguments, only that one ought to know what kind of game one is playing (and perhaps square one's language with It is this cythe facts of it: a task that is not easy).o3 cliciry that I am trying to provide a contrary to. I am claiming that both criticism and history are o3StanleyFish,Is Tberea Text in This Class?(Cambridge, Mass.,and London: Harvard UniversiryPress,r98r), pp.toj-7r. [Au.]

creative cultural forms. Their constitutive acts are "ironic" because(from the point of view of a commentary on them) they must maintain both mythical and antimythical stancesat the same time. Not to go too far in the direction of either pole as an authority produces the virtue we call scholarly restraint. The growth of literary theory and historiography as separatesubjectshas recently been accelerated by a greater appreciation of the problems of expressionin the two fields that this ironic situation generates. In figure rz.r both historical writing and literary criticism would have to be placed somewhere between center and circumference-between where language claims to create and where it claims to "copy" or to describe analytically. I should like to return to the implications of that chart for criticism and for poetry: At the mythico-poetic pole tropes are not tropes in the classicalsense,but integrative, creative acts. In the classical rhetorical view there must always be a gap berween word and concept; there is always conceivably a better word for the concept. But, if we regard language in action as generating concepts, from a source of unspecifiable subsidiaries,the concept is not an othernessbut an emanation (but not a lost Blakean one), and the word does not "signify" an externality in the ordinary antimythical senseof the term. According to this view, languagegeneratesout of itself antimyth, and antimyth then demands the verbal fiction of the nonverbal concept or pure idea, or in sciencethe ontological limit. But this fiction, apart from language, has no external substance; it is always createdsymbolically. The most radical form of phenomenology would tell us we must get back to things and free ourselves of the tyrannical abstractnessof all words and ideas. This, too, would presume the existenceof a norm of language distant from the mythic pole. It setsup an idea of signifier and signified and concludesthat no poem can connect itself to a signified in the senseof a referent. Therefore, the argument goes' we must abandon languageor work through it to the object. This position finds language a prison house from which there is a radical escapethrough the negation of language. On the contrary, we must affirm that the imagination and language have a hand in constructing things for culture. From the point of view of the poetic, which is language-centered, therefore

Pbilosopbyof the Literary Symbolic imagination-centered, therefore man-centered, a world prior to human culture, which is always proceeding from myth, lacks full reality or is mere potentiality. It is always only subsidiary and unspecifiable because not here yet. The world of culture is something we are always proceeding to make rather than referring back or outward toward. From the point of view of antimyth, of course, the world is an objective out there; it is what Frye has called the "actual universe" to be described by science: But as we think about it, or in any form of our thinking about it, that too is a creation of antimyth. It quickly becomes an abstract idea as fictive as Locke's "primary" qualities were to Blake. \X/hat I have been seeking is a theory of secular creativity in languagethat givesprioritS but not the power that Blake called negation, to the fictive. In this attempt I have chosen to adopt the term "symbolic." Benedetto Croce was quite right to ask what a symbol, used in this sense,symbolizes. I employ symbol rzation to indicate an act of linguistic creativity. For the symbolic, in my usage, there is no symbol rzed, only the realm of the potential to be worked up into the symbolic. In Croce's terms, this would involve not the identiry of intuition and expression, but the unspecifiability of intuition outside of expression. Being is not prior to but in the field of language. As such, it is, of course, cultural being and moral being. It does not say there is no world there, but it also does claim that the world there is not the world of the "object." It is a potentiality for the human imagination to work upon, and it throws moral responsibility radically on man. This is why that wise author Joyce Cary said he feared what man would do with imagination and freedom, though he celebratedthem in all his books. Man, then, is not only a devourer of language but is also a constant creator of forms in languagein the manner of Blake's "ancient poetsr" whom Blake declares to have confronted a potentialiry and set about making (by naming) the world of culture. Each of us, however, grows up in a language that, like Blake's eternal London, is constantly decaying even as it is being built. True, as continental criticism likes to tell us, we cannot recapture an original undifferentiated innocence. Nor is it important whether it ever existed or not. We have instead the endless task of retrieving language from its own tendency toward ruin or exhaustion. If creation does not go on as decay takes place, the world of

6or

human culture becomesHell. Hell is the diminishment of culture, the result of adoption of the antimyth of human passivity as dogma and the negation of linguistic imagination. But it can also be the result of the negation of antimyth and a seeking for solace in the primitive. This view directs us radically toward the future, not toward the nothingness and individual death that is the fundamental reality of the existentialists, but toward the continuing act of linguistic creation, toward a passing along of the cultural role. It suggests that the poet's materials are always for him a potentiality to be worked up into form. Every poet begins the day as did Blake's ancients.Each such beginning restoresthe literal root meaning of "poet." However, as I have suggested,the maker of fictions is not merely the poet as conventionally conceived but everyone who symbolizes, including those opposite makers who seem to be taking apart or "copying" but actually are constructing antimyth. It becomes clear, from this point of view, for example, that historS which seems directed toward copying an oufward past, is also the act of creating that past, a symbolic past, which is the only past we have. We are always thus on the threshold of history in an entirely different sensefrom the common one. 'We are always making it. Yet, belonging to the "ironic," historians ate also hypostatizing a past and "copying" it. The difference berween signffiant and signifi| is itself a fictive creation of language as it operates at a distance from the mythic pole, beyond that unlocatable point where what Vico called "poetic logic" has turned into antimyth. To look back to the poem from a vantage beyond the turning point is to submit it to a mode of thought that is the poem's negation, where the poem is merely its analyzed structure or is only a romantic allegory. But these are all charact erizations finally not of the poem but of the limitations of this point of view toward the poem. This allegoric vantage is in the area of antimyth, where language has extended itself to invenr the dislocations that we, when we stand there, thrust back upon poems. But one must beware of simply located points of difference on the continuum. That is to be thrust back into an awkward distinction between ordinary and literarS steno and depth language, and overspatializes and quantifies the unmeasurable continuum between center and circumference. The

6oz

Hazeno Aoeus

whole continuum is creative. As we pass further and further outward (reallS of course, inward, creating more and more externality as we go), what we create is the fiction or antimyth of externaliryuntil we reach mathematics, where something very strange happens-for mathematics proceeds to assert its power to contain, claims that the world is mathematical rather than that mathematics represents the world. Our continuum, by turning inside out, defies measurement, which belongs to antimyth. Heisenberg'snotion of the thing-in-itself as a mathematical structure can be read as the assertion of a fictive containment of antimyth. I have said that the place of criticism on this continuum of languageis ironic. Becauseit must project itself farther out on the radius (or farther inwardtherefore pointing outward) than any so-called literary text it treats, it must employ the categories of analysis and reduction, even as it must at some point reiect those categories.This is why Frye was compelled in his Anatomy to begin by claiming criticism to be a science,but in the end to make his work an anatomy, thus fictively containing his science or antimyth.aoFrom this odd perch, irony is one of the things criticism projects back into poetry when critical language cannot hold the poem together in any other way. Certain critics, marveling sweetly over their own condition, imagine that criticism may well be more interesting than poetry todty. It should be no surprise that this self-regarding activity should valorize allegory. But this takes us back to a conclusion alre ady reached that criticism is finallR like all symbolic forms, at least partly a making of its own. From its ironic area, it produces an antimyth of bifurcations even while it protects the poem's myth. The danger to criticism is to lose the only area where it is distinctly something other than either myth or antimyth, though always in irresolution and always having to be done again. aaFrye's naming of his book as he did calls for some thought. The anatomyas a literary genremight well be regardedas an evokerof irony in my senseof the term. I claim irony to be the product of the relationof or differencebetweenthe poemand the commentary.Frye'swork is "literary" but at the sametime it standsouf'wardfrom the poetic center (though not so far ou.fwardas to be "science" after all) becauseit hypostatizesan object, "literaturer"and is a commentaryon that object.Yeats's A Visionhassimilar qualities,but I placeit closerto the poetic centerbecauseit doesn'treallyhavean object.It ends up commentingon itself. Of course,when I say centerabove,I reallymeancircumference. [Au.]

This theory of "secular" creativiry, then, though it refuses to draw a line measuring off poetry from other forms of discourse, and though it argues for the creativity of all language, does not quarrel with our needs as critics to create the dialectical contrariety of myth and antimyth-for the whole system is a creation of criticism-where a continuum is what we apparently have created. The fiction includes the antimyth of difference/indifferenceand of nature as mathematical law. Blake called antimyth the "starry floor" beneath which, through God's mercy, man could not fall any further than he already had.ot I do not believe in a fall, but I do believe in a limit. Criticism, under the ironic condition I have outlined, would seem to be a struggle of radical creation with descriptive analysis,.in which neither can be allowed full sway. History would seem to be the product of the historian's mediation between the past regarded as a presence (that is, constructed) and the past regarded as a past (reconstructed or 'We "copied"). see in both criticism and history an oscillation, at times, between these two poles. A movement to either extreme tends to vitiate the critic's or the historian's ironic strength. At the creative extreme we find par excellence Walter Pater's treatment of the Mona Lisa, which'W. B. Yeatsquite appropriately turned into verse for his Oxford Book of Modern Verse.o'At the other extreme are a variety of reductive processes, the emphasis on critical "methodologies" and "approaches" and empirical modes. The diagram of cultural forms (fig. tz.z) converts itself into a circle by virtue of what I call the return of antimyth to myth. This illustrates the point I have made about the creativity of antimyth even as its creation denies creativity. This is a paradox after all, so figure rz.z must be amended to show that, as a creative force, antimyth in the end (in returning to myth) finally regains possessionof its own paradox. The return of antimyth to myth, in this sense, is also the return of mathematics, the language of science,to art, where Frye placed it as a containing form. It is also a return of religion to myth. It may seemodd that I have placed religion on the antimythical side, and I admit that it often does not asln Blake's"Introduction to Songsof Experience,"Com.Writings, plete p. zro. [Au.] o6Oxford Book of Modern Verse,ed. rU(r. B. Yeats(New York: Oxford UniversiryPress,1936),P. r. [Au.]

Philosophy of the Literary Symbolic want to stay there. There is little question that religion has its sources in and returns to myth; in the process of emanation it develops two antimythical characteristics. First, it acknowledges a threshold, in \ilTheelwright'ssense-a form of otherness,which it then modifies in some versions with the notion of incarnation or "miraculous" symbol, which in turn implies a Fall. Second,it works toward development of the moral la*, an external model of human action that is given'supernaturalsanction. But though it assertsthese differencesand posits an ideal realm of indifference, it also returns to myth via its own antimythical form: It tries to create through that form a vision of potential identity-the coexistence of freedom of individual moral choice with the law and the identicality of each individuality with all others. At the level with which we are now concerned,we can find a paradoxical creativity here-a creativity which involves a deliberate discipline of annihilation of the isolated selfhood and the flowing in of the fullness of a vision that is revelation in absence.In the end, such acts are chosen acts from the point of view of the artist. This is, in parr, what I think Blake meant when from the point of view of the artist he wrote:

6o3

Prayer is the Study of Art. Praise is the Practise of Art. Fasting &c., all relate to Art. The outward Ceremony is Antichrist. The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination, that is, God himself The Divine Bodyo' On the other hand, from the point of view of the theologian, art ought to be a form of prayer. I have somewhat frivolously connectedvarious of the cultural forms with Blake's Zoas and (in parentheses)their "time forms." A fanciful essaycould be written on these relationships. I am unable, however, to find a Zoa or other form to represent criticism. Perhaps this is because there ought to be something a little disembodied about the critical act. In Blake's poem it would have to be a ghostly fifth creature never quite anywhere-mediating, educating, and celebrating-somewhat fussy, perhaps, and regarded as rather a noxious vapor by the author. aTBlake, "The Laocoon," Complete'Writings, p. 776. [Au.]

EdwardS(/. Said b.r93i

'r lN Irs development,Edward'W.Said'swork has becomemore and more conI cernedwith the relation of criticism to political questions,which are in his casealwayslarge questionsand alwaysmoral questions.His views are deliberatelymeantto be impossibleto classify-for reasonshavingto do with his sense of the social role of criticism itself. "Texts are worldlyr" he says,and criticism must treat of their worldliness.Saidattacksa form of professionalismin criticism that removestexts from the world, and he looks very critically on the domestication of poststructuralistthought that tendsto isolatetexts in "textuality" or some systemhermeticallysealedfrom human politics. It is as if, for Said,deconstruction, once professionalized,has forgotten that languageitself is "worldly." He insists that criticism must study the realities of power and authority in which texts cometo be and exist. This requiresof the critic a certaindistanceand yet at as a "knowledge the sametime involvement.The distancemay be characterized an analytical of history,a recognitionof the importanceof socialcircumstance, capacityfor makingdistinctions."It appearsthat Saidhas displacedKant'saesthetic judgment (seeCTSP, pp.377-9il back into the world from which it seemedto have been divorced. But Said wants not merely aestheticdisinterest or disinterestin the sensein which Matthew Arnold advocatedit (seeCTSP, pp. 583-9 j). He would certainlyfault the notion of aestheticjudgmentasbeing without a center or beginning in the world. As he says,his book Beginnings: lntention and Method "argued the practical and theoretical necessityof a rea' sonedpoint of departurefor any intellectual and creativejob of work." But he knows also that suchpositions are dangerous,becausethey inevitably shut out something.Arnold's "disinterest" was clearly affiliated with a narrow culture and thus had severelimitations. So, for the critic, Said posits a position of perpetual marginality.The critic hastwo choices:complicity with the ruling culture and willingnessto excludeeverythingnot "natural" to it, includingits dominant political practices;and the attempt to study what Said calls the differencebetween "instinctual filiation" (nature)and "social affiliation" (culture) in the actual world. This distinctionitselfraisescrucialquestionsof which Saidis aware: Is "filiation" primordial, or is it but the receivedmode of "affiliation"? Wasthere a beginningwe can possibly call natural filiation or is that in any casealways alreadylost in the past?Either way,the proper role of the critic is both insideand outsideof "affiliation": "Always situated,it is skeptical,secular,reflectivelyopen to its own failings." It can neverbe value-free,which is to sayit cannot be without an ethical"beginning." 6o4

SecularCriticism Said'sbooks areloseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiograpby ft966); Beginnings: Intention and Method (ISZS); Orientalism GSZS); The Question of PalestineftgZil; Coueringlslam (r98r); and The World, tlte Text, and the Critic (t9$).

SECI.JLARCRITICISM Literary criticism is practiced today in four maior forms. One is the practical criticism to be found in book reviewing and literary journalism. Second is academic literary historn which is a descendant of such nineteenth-century specialties as classical scholarship,philologS and cultural history. Third is literary appreciation and interpretation, principally academic but, unlike the other two, not confined to professionals and regularly appearing authors. Appreciation is what is taught and performed by teachersof literature in the university and its beneficiaries in a literal sense are all those millions of people who have learned in a classroom how to read a poem, how to enjoy the complexity of a metaphysical conceit, how to think of literature and figurative language as having characteristics that are unique and not reducible to a simple moral or political message.And the fourth form is literary theory, a relatively new subject. It appeared as an eyecatching topic for academicand popular discussion in the United States later than it did in Europe: 'Walter people like Benjamin and the young Georg Lukacs,t for instance, did their theoretical work in the early years of this century, and they wrote in a known, if not universally uncontested, idiom. American literary theory, despite the pioneering 'War studies of Kenneth Burke' well before \forld Two, came of age only in the r97os, and that becauseof an observably deliberate attention to prior European models (structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction). . . . Now the prevailing situation of criticism is such sECULAR cRrTrcrsMis reprinted by permissionof the publishersfrom The World, the Text, and the Critic by Edward rUf.Said,Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press,copyrightr gb by EdwardW. Said. 'SeeBeniamin and Lukdcs. [Eds.] 2KennethBurke(b. t 8gZ)(seeCTSP,pp. 942-47). tEds.l

that the four forms represent in each instance specialization (although literary theory is a bit eccentric) and a very precisedivision of intellectual labor. Moreover, it is supposedthat literature and the humanities exist generally within the culture ("our" culture, as it is sometimes known), that the culture is ennobled and validated by them, and yet that in the version of culture inculcated by professionalhumanists and literary critics, the approved practice of high culture is marginal to the serious political concerns of society. This has given rise to a cult of professional expertise whose effect in general is pernicious. For the intellectual class,expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society. This is the trahison des clercs of which Julien Benda spoke in the 19zos.' Expertise in foreign affairs, for example, has usually meant legitimizatron of the conduct of foreign policy and, what is more to the point, a sustained investment in revalidating the role of experts in foreign affairs.oThe same sort of thing is true of literary critics and professional humanists, except that their expertiseis based upon noninterference in what Vico' grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as 'We well be called "the world." tell our students and our general constituency that we defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselvesto be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the historical and social world in which all these things take place. The degreeto which the cultural realm and its expertise are institutionally divorced from their real 3JulienBenda 9867-1956), Frenchauthor of The Treason of the Intellectuals(tgzZ).[Eds.] aThereis a good graphicaccountof the problemin Noam Chomsky,Languageand Responsibility(New York: Pantheon,1977),p. 6; SeealsoEdwardril7.Said,CoueringIslam (NewYork: Pantheon,r98r), pp. r47-6a. sGiovanniBattistaVico (1668-1744),TheNew[Au.] Science.' seeCTSP,pp. '293-3or. [Eds.]

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connections with power was wonderfully illustrated for me by an exchange with an old college friend who worked in the Department of Defensefor a period during the Vietnam war. The bombings were in full course then, and I was naively trying to understand the kind of person who could order daily B- 5 r strikes over a distant Asian country in the name of the American interest in defending freedom and stopping communism. "You knowr" my friend said, "the Secretary is a complex human being: he doesn't fit the picture you may have formed of the cold-blooded imperialist murderer. The last time I was in his office I noticed Durrell's Alexandria Quartel on his desk." He paused meaningfullS as if to let Durrell's presenceon that desk work its awful power alone. The further implication of my friend's story was that no one who read and presumably appreciated a novel could be the coldblooded butcher one might suppose him to have been.t Many years later this whole implausible anecdote (I do not remember my responseto the complex coniunction of Durrell with the ordering of bombing in the sixties) strikes me as typical of what actually obtains: humanists and intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim becausethe cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and becausecultural types are not supposedto interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them. Vhat the anecdote illustrates is the approved separation of high-level bureaucrat from the reader of novels of questionable worth and definite status. During the late r96os, however, literary theory presented itself with new claims. The intellectual origins of literary theory in Europe were, I think it is accurate to say, insurrectionary. The traditional university, the hegemony of determinism and positivism, the reification of ideological bourgeois "humanismr" the rigid barriers between academic specialties: it was powerful responsesto all these that linked together such influential progenitors of today's literary theorist as Saussure,Lukacs, Bataille, L6vi-Strauss,Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx.t Theory 5Theexampleof the Nazi who readRilke and then wrote underout genocidalorders to his concentration-camphngJhad not yet becomewell known. Perhapsthen the Duirell-Secretary of Defenseanecdotemight not have seemedso usefulto my enthusiasticfriend. [Au.] TGeorgesBataille (t8gZ-t962), French writer; see de

proposed itself as a synthesis overriding the petty fiefdoms within the world of intellectual production, and it was manifestly to be hoped as a result that all the domains of human activiry could be seen,and lived, as a uniry. And yet something happened,perhaps inevitably. From being a bold interventionary movement across lines of specialization, American literary theory of the late seventies had retreated into the labyrinth of "textualitR" dragging along with it the most recent apostles of European revolutionary textuality-Derrida and Foucaultt-whose trans-Atlantic canonization and domestication they themselves seemedsadly enough to be encouraging.It is not too much to say that American or even European literary theory now explicitly accepts the principle of noninterference, and that its peculiar mode of appropriating its subject matter (to use Althusser's' formula) is not to appropriate anything that is worldl5 circumstantial, or socially contaminated. o'Textuahty" is the somewhat mystical and disinfected subject matter of literary theory. Textuality has therefore becomethe exact antithesis and displacement of what might be called history. Textuality is considered to take place, y€s, but by the same token it does not take place anywhere or anytime in particular. It is produced, but by no one and at no time. It can be read and interpreted, although reading and interpreting are routinely understood to occur in the form of misreading and misinterpreting. The list of examples could be extended indefinitelR but the point would remain the same. As it is practiced in the American academy today, literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical sensesthat made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work. Even if we accept (as in the main I do) the arguments put forward by Hayden \7hite-that there is no way to get past texts in order to apprehend "real" history directlyto-it is still possible to say

Saussure, Lukdcs, Ldui'strauss; Freud (see CTSP' p p . 7 4 8 - Sj ) ; N i e t z s c h e( s e eC T S P ,p p . 6 l S - + r ) ; M a r x (seeCTSP, pp. 6ir-3a). [Eds.] sSeeDerrida and Foucault. [Eds.] eSeeAlthusser. [Eds.] 10SeeHayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagi' nation in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Pres\ 1973), and his Tropics of Dis-

Secular Criticism that such a claim need not also eliminate interest in the events and the circumstances entailed by and expressedin the texts themselves.Those events and circumstances are textual too (nearly all of Conrad's tales and novels present us with a situation-s ay a group of friends sitting on a ship's deck listening to a story-giving rise to the narrative that forms the text), and much that goes on in texts alludes to them, affiliates itself directly to them. My position is that texts are worldlS to some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are neverthelessa part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted. Literary theory, whether of the Left or of the Right, has turned its back on thesethings. This can be considered, I think, the triumph of the ethic of professionalism.But it is no accident that the emergence of so narrowly defined a philosophy of pure textualiry and critical noninterference has coincided with the ascendancyof Reaganism, or for that matter with a new cold war, increasedmili tarism and defensespending, and a massiveturn to the right on matters touching the economy, social services, and organized labor.t' In having given up the world entirely for the aporias and unthinkable paradoxes of a text,l2 contemporary criticism has retreated from its constituencS the citizens of modern society, who have been left to the hands of "free" market forces, multinational corporations, the manipulations of consumer appetites. A precious jargon has grown up, and its formidable complexities obscure the social realities that, strange though it may seem,encour agea scholarship of "modes of excellence" very far from daily life in the age of declining American power. Criticism can no longer cooperate in or pretend to ignore this enterprise. It is not practicing criticism either to validate the status quo or to join up with a priestly casteof acolytesand dogmatic metaphysicians. Each essay in this book " affirms the connection between texts and the existential actucoLtrse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). [Au.] SeeWhife. [Eds.] tt See my article "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community," Critical Inquiry (Fall t98z), for an analysis of the liaison between the cult of textuality and the ascendancyof Reaganism. [Au.] 12See de Man [Eds.] 13Thisessay is the introduction to thirteen essays.[Eds.]

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alities of human life, politics, societies,and events. The realities of power and authority-as well as the resistances offered by men, women, and social movements to institutions, authorities, and orthodoxies-are the realities that make texts possible, that deliver them to their readers,that solicit the attention of critics. I propose that these realities are what should be taken account of by criticism and the critical consciousness. It should be evident by now that this sort of criticism can only be practiced outside and beyond the consensusruling the art today in the four accepted forms I mentioned earlier. Yet if this is the function of criticism at the present time, to be between the dominant culture and the totalizing forms of critical systems,then there is some comfort in recalling that this has also been the destiny of critical consciousness in the recent past. No READERof Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, one of the most admired and influential books of literary criticism ever written, has failed to be impressed by the circumstances of the book's actual writing. These are referred to almost casually by Auerbach in the last lines of his epilogue, which stands as a very brief methodological explanation for what is after all a monumental work of literary intelligence. ln remarking that for so ambitious a study as "the rep'Western resentation of reality in Literature" he could not deal with everything that had been written in and about'Western literature. Auerbach then adds: I may also mention that the book was written during the war and at Istanbul, where the libraries are not equipped for European studies. International communications were impeded; I had to dispense with almost all periodicals, with almost all the more recent investigations, and in some cases with reliable critical editions of my texts. Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something that modern research has disproved or modified. . . . On the other hand, it is quite possible that the book owes its existenceto just this lack of a rich and specialrzedlibrary. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so

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many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing. to The drama of this little bit of modesty is considerable, in part becauseAuerbach's quiet tone conceals much of the pain of his exile. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Europe, and he was also a European scholar in the old tradition of German Romance scholarship. Yet now in Istanbul he was hopelessly out of touch with the literary, cultural, and political bases of that formidable tradition. In writing Mimesis, he implies to us in a later work, he was not merely practicing his profession despite adversiry: he was performing an act of cultural, even civiliza'Silhat he tional, survival of the highest importance. had risked was not only the possibility of appearing in his writing to be superficial, out of date, wrong, and ridiculously ambitious (who in his right mind would take on as a project so vast a subject as \ilfestern literature in its entirety?). He had also risked, on the other hand, the possibility of not writing and thus falling victim to the concrete dangers of exile: the loss of texts, traditions, continuities that make up the very web of a culture. And in so losing the authentic presenceof the culture, as symbolized materially by libraries, research institutes, other books and scholars, the exiled European would become an exorbitantly disoriented outcast from sense,nation, and milieu. That Auerbach should choose to mention Istanbul as the place of his exile adds yet another dose of drama to the actual fact of Mimesis. To any European trained principally, as Auerbach was, in medieval and renaissance Roman literatures, Istanbul does not simply connote a place outside Europe. Istanbul representsthe terrible Turk, as well as Islam, the scourge of Christendom, the great Oriental apostasyincarnate. Throughout the classicalperiod of European culture Turkey was the Orient, Islam its most redoubtable and aggressive representative.ts This was not all, though. The Orient and Islam also stood for the ultimate alienation from and opposition to Europe, the European tradition of laErich Auerbach,Mimesis:The Representation of Reality 'Western Liternture,trans. Willard Trask (tgS3; rpt. in Princeton:PrincetonUniversityPress,t968), p.557. [Au.] lsSeethe evidencein SamuelC. Chew, The Crescentand the Rose:Islam and England During the Renaissance (New York: Oxford UniversityPress,rgiZ). [Au.]

Christian Latinity, as well as to the putative authority of ecclesia, humanistic learning, and cultural community. For centuries Turkey and Islam hung over Europe like a gigantic composite monster, seeming to threaten Europe with destruction. To have been an exile in Istanbul at that time of fascism in Europe was a deeply resonating and intense form of exile from Europe. Yet Auerbach explicitly makes the point that it was precisely his distance from home-in all senses of that word-that made possiblethe superb undertaking of Mimesis. How did exile become converted from a challenge or a risk, or even from an active impingement on his European selfhood, into a positive mission, whose successwould be a cultural act of great importance ? The answer to this question is to be found in Auerbach's autumnal essay, "Philologie der \7eltliteratur." The major part of the essayelaborateson the notion first explicitly announced in Mimesis, but already recognizable in Auerbach's early interest in Vico, that philological work deals with humanity at large and transcendsnational boundaries. As he says, "our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation." His essaymakes clear, however, that his earthly home is European culture. But then, as if remembering the period of his extraEuropean exile in the Orient, he adds: "The most priceless and indispensable part of a philologist's heritage is still his own nation's culture and heritage. Only when he is first separated from this heritage, however, and then transcendsit does it bet'In order to stressthe salutary come truly effective." value of separationfrom home, Auerbach citesa passagefrom Hugo of St. Victor's Didascalicon: It is, therefo re, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be able to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land [the Latin text is more explicit here- perfectus uero cui mundus totus exilium estl. 15Auerbach,"Philologyand Webliterntur,"trans.M. and Reuiew,13 (Winter1969),P-17. E.\f. Said,Centennial [Au.]

Secular Criticism This is all that Auerbach quotes from Hugo; the rest of the passagecontinues along the same lines. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimesthe mind takes leaveof the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesidesand panelled halls." Auerbach associatesHugo's exilic credo with the notions of paupertas and terra aliena,tt even though in his essay'sfinal words he maintains that the ascetic code of willed homelessnessis " a good way also for one who wishes to earn a proper love for the world." At this point, then, Auerbach's epilogue to Mimesis suddenly becomesclear: "it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to iust this lack of a rich and specialized library." In other words, the book owed its existence to the very fact of Oriental, non-Occidental exile and homelessness.And if this is so, then Mimesls itself is not, as it has so frequently been taken to be, only a massive reaffirmation of the Western cultural tradition, but also a work built upon a critic ally important alienation from it, a work whose conditions and circumstances of existence are not immediately derived from the culture it describeswith such extraordinary insight and brilliance but built rarher on an agonizing distance from it. Auerbach says as much when he tells us in an earlier section of Mimesis that, had he tried to do a thorough scholarly job in the traditional fashion, h. could never have written the book: the culture itself, with its authoritative and authorizing agencies,would have prevented so audacious a one-man task. Hence the executive value of exile, which Auerbach was able to turn into effective use. Let us look again at the norion of place, the notion by which during a period of displacemenr someone like Auerbach in Istanbul could feel himself to be out of place, exiled, alienated. The readiest account of place might define it as the nation, l7Hugo of St. Victor, Didascalicon,trans. JeromeThylor (New York: ColumbiaUniversityPress,t96r), p. ror. lAu.l t8paupertas:poverry;terraaliena:alienland. tEds.]

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and certainly in the exaggerated boundary drawn between Europe and the Orient-a boundary with a long and often unfortunate tradition in European thought'e-the idea of the nation, of a nationalcultural community as a sovereign entity and place set against other places, has its fullest reahzation. But this idea of place does not cover the nuances, principally of reassurance,fitness, belonging, association, and community, entailed in the phrase at home or in place.In this book I shall use the word culture to suggestan environment, process,and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances)and their works are embedded, as well as overseenat the top by a superstructureand at the base by whole seriesof methodological attitudes. " It is in culture that we can seek out the range of meanings and ideas conveyed by the phrases beIonging to or in a place, being at home in a place. The idea of culture of course is a vast one. As a systematic body of social and political as well as historical significance, "culture" is similarly vast; one index of it is the Kroeber-Kluckhohn thesaurus on meanings of the word "culture" in social science.'oI shall avoid the details of theseproliferating meanings, however, and go straight to what I think can best serve my purposes here. In the first place, culture is used to designatenot merely something to which one belongs but something that one possessesand, along with that proprietary process,culture also designatesa boundary by which the concepts of what is extrinsic or intrinsic to the culture come into forceful play. These things are not controversial: most people employing culture would assent to them, as Auerbach does in the epilogue when he speaksof being in Istanbul, away from his habitual cultural environmenr, within its research materials and familiar environment. But, in the second place, there is a more interesting dimension to this idea of culture as possessing possession.And that is the power of culture by virtue of its elevatedor superior position to authorize, to dominate, to legitimate, demote, interdict, and validate: in short, the power of culture to be an agent of, and perhaps the main agency for, powerful differentiation within its domain and beyond it roo. leSeemy Orientalism(New York: Pantheon,1978), esp. chap.r. [Au.] 20A.L. Kroeberand ClydeKluckhohn, CuhLtre:A Critical Reuiewof Conceptsand Definitions (r9Sz; rprr. New York: VintageBooks,r96il. [Au.]

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It is this idea that is evident in French Orientalism, for example, as distinguished from English Orientalism, and this in turn plays a major role in the work of Ernest Renan, Louis Massignon, and Raymond Schwab, maior scholars whose work is assessedin the last part of this book." '!7hen Auerbach speaks of not being able to write such a book as Mimesis had he remained in Europe, he refers precisely to that grid of research techniques and ethics by which the prevailing culture imposes on the individual scholar its canons of how literary scholarship is to be conducted. Yet even this sort of imposition is a minor aspect of culture's power to dominate and authorize work. Ifhat is more important in culture is that it is a system of values saturating downward almost everything within its purview; y€t, paradoxically, culture dominates from above without at the same time being available to everything and everyone it dominates. In fact, in our age of media-produced attitudes, the ideological insistenceof a culture drawing attention to itself as superior has given way to a culture whose canons and standards are invisible to the degreethat they are"naturalr" "objectiver" and "real." Historically one supposesthat culture has always involved hierarchies; it has separatedthe elite from the popular, the best from the lessthan best, and so forth. It has also made certain styles and modes of thought prevail over others. But its tendency has always been to move downward from the height of power and privilege in order to diffuse, disseminate, and expand itself in the widest possible range. In its beneficent form this is the culture of which Matthew Arnold speaks in Cubure and Anarchy as sdmulating in its adherents a powerful zeal: The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledgt, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledg. of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstr act, professional, exclusivel to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, Yet still remaining the best knowledg. and thought of the time [Arnold's definition of culture of 2lErnest Renan (1827-9;-), French historian; LouisMassignon (r 88 3- 1962), French orientalist; Raymond SChwab(r884 -r956), French man of letters. lEds.l

course] and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light." The question raised by Arnold's passion for culture here is the relationship between culture and society. He argues that society is the actual, material base over which culture tries, through the great men of culture, to extend its sway. The optimum relationship between culture and society then is correspondence, the former covering the latter. \U(rhatis too often overlooked by Arnold's readers is that he views this ambition of culture to reign over society as essentially combative: "the best that is known and thought" must contend with competing ideologies, philosophies, dogmas, notions, and values, and it is Arnold's insight that what is at stake in society is not merely the cultivation of individuals, or the development of a class of finely tuned sensibilities, or the renaissanceof interest in the classics,but rather the assertively achieved and won hegemony of an identifiable set of ideas, which Arnold honorifically calls culture, over all other ideas in society. Yet it is still pertinent to ask Arnold where this struggle for hegemony takes place. If we say "in society" we will approach the answer, I think, but we will still have to specify where in society. In other words, Arnold's attention is to society defined grossly 4s, let us say, a nation-England, France, Germany-but more interestingly he seemsalso to be viewing society as a processand perhaps also an entity capable of being guided, controlled, even 'What Arnold always understood is that taken over. to be able to set a force or a system of ideas called "culture" over society is to have understood that the stakes played for are an identification of sociery with culture, and consequently the acquisition of a very formidable power. It is no accident that in his conclusion to Culture and Anarchy Arnold resolutely identifies a triumphant culture with the State, insofar as culture is man's best self and the State its realization in material reality. Thus the power of culture is potentially nothing less than the power of the State: Arnold is unambiguous on this point. He tells first of his unqualified opposition to such things as strikes and demonstrations, no matter how noble the cause,and then goes on to prove that such " anarchy" as strikes and demonstrations chal22MatthewArnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. J. Dover \ilfilson ft869; rPt. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press,t969), p. 70. [Au.]

SecularCriticism lenge the authority of the Srare,which is what morally, politically, and aesthetically they ^rei Becausea State in which law is authoritative and sovereign, a firm and settled course of public order, is requisite if man is to bring to maturity anything precious and lasting now, or to found anything precious and lasting for the future. Thus in our eyes, the very framework and exterior order of the State, whoever may administer the State,is sacred; and culture is the most resolute enemy of anarchR because of the great hopes and designs for the State which culture teachesus to nourish.t' The interdependencein Arnold's mind benveen culture, the sustained suzerainry of culture over society (anything precious and lasting), and the framework and quasi-theological exterior order of the State is perfectly clear. And it signifies a coincidence of power, which Arnold's entire rhetoric and thought constantly elaborates. To be for and in culture is to be in and for a State in a compellingly loyal way. \7ith this assimilation of culture to the authoriry and exterior framework of the State go as well such things as assurance,confidence,the majority sense, the entire matrix of meanings we associate with "homer" belonging and community. Outside this range of meanings-for it is the outside that partially definesthe inside in this case-stand anarchy, the culturally disfranchised, those elements opposed to culture and State: the homeless,in short. It is not my intention here to discussin detail the profoundly important implications of Arnold's concluding remarks on culture. But it is worth insisting on at least a few of those implications in a broader setting than Arnold's. Even as an ideal for Arnold, culture must be seenas much for what it is not and for what it triumphs over when it is consecratedby the Stateas for what it positively is. This means that culture is a system of discriminations and evaluations-perhaps mainly aesthetic,as Lionel Trilling has said, but no less forceful and tyrannical for that2a-fs1 a particular class in the State able to identify with it; and it also means that culrure is a system of exclusions legislated from above but en2 3 l b i d p. ,. z o 4 . [ A u . ] 2aLionelTrilling, BeyondCulture:Essayson Learning and Literature(New York:Viking Press,1965),p. rZS. [Au.]

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acted throughout its polity, by which such things as anarchR disorder, irrationalitS inferiority, bad raste, and immor ality are identified, then deposited outside the culture and kept there by the power of the State and its institutions. For if it is true that culture is, on the one hand, a positive doctrine of the best that is thought and known, it is also on the other a differentially negative doctrine of all that is not best. If with Michel Foucault we have learned ro see culture as an institutionalized process by which what is considered appropriate to it is kept appropriate, we have also seen Foucault demonstrating how certain alterities, certain Others, have been kept silent, outside or-in the case of his study of penal discipline and sexual repression-domesticated for use inside the culture. Even if we wish to contest Foucault's findings about the exclusions by classical European culture of what it constituted as insane or irrational, and even if we are not convinced that the culture's paradoxical encouragement and repression of sexuality has been as generalized as he believes, we cannot fail to be convinced that the dialectic of selffortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over society and the State is based on a constantly practiced differentiation of self from what it believesto be not itself. And this differentiation is frequently performed by seming the valorized culture over the Other. This is by no means a metaphysical point, as two nineteenthcentury English examples will demonstrate quickly. Both are related to the point I made earlier about Auerbach, that culture often has to do with an aggressivesenseof nation, home, community, and belonging. First there is Macaulay's famous Minute of rSjj on Indian education: I have no knowledg. of either Sanskrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanskrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves.I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority

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EownnD'W. Setp 'Western literature is indeed fully adof the mitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education . . . It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanscrit languageis lessvaluable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at prep aratory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the rwo nations is nearly the same."

This is no mere expression of an opinion. Neither can it be dismissed, as in his Grammatology Derrida has dismissed L6vi-Strauss, as a textual instance of ethnocentrism. For it is that and more. Macaulay's was an ethnocentric opinion with ascertainable results. He was speaking from a position of power where he could translate his opinions into the decision to make an entire subcontinent of natives submit to studying in a language not their own. This in fact is what happened.In turn this validated the culture to itself by providing a precedent, and a case) by which superiority and power are lodged both in a rhetoric of belongi.g, or being " at homer" so to speak, and in a rhetoric of administration: the two become interchangeable. A second instance also concerns India. rU7ithadmirable perspicacity Eric Stokes has studied the importance of utilitarian philosophy to British rule in India. \fhat is striking in Stokes's The English Utilitarians and India is how a relatively small body of thinkers-among them Bentham, of course, and able to argue and implement a both Mills-were philosophic doctrine for India's governance,a doctrine in some respectsbearing an unmistakable resemblance to Arnold's and Macaulay's views of European culture as superior to all others. John Stuart Mill among the India House Utilitarians has today a higher cultural status, so much so that his views on liberty and representative government have for generations passed as the advanced liberal culture statement on these matters. Yet of Mill, Stokes has this to say: "In his essay On Liberty John Stuart Mill had carefully stated that its doctrines were only meant to apply to those countries which were sufficiently advanced in civihzation to be capable of setQuotedin PhilipD. Curtin, ed.,lmperialism(New York: " 'Walker and Company,r97r), p. r8z. [Au.]

tling their affairs by rational discussion. He was faithful to his father in holding to the belief that India could still be governed only despotically. But although he himself refused to apply the teachings of Liberty or Representatiue Gouernment to Indi a, a few Radical Liberals and a growing body of educated Indians made no such limitations."" A quick glance at the last chapter of RepresentatiueGouernTnsnf-fs say nothing of the passagein the third volume of Dlss ertations and Discussions where he speaks of the absence of rights for barbariansmakes absolutely clear Mill's view that what he has to say about the matter cannot really apply to India, mainly because in his culture's judgment India's civilization has not attained the requisite degree of development. The entire history of nineteenth-century European thought is filled with such discriminations as these, made bet'weenwhat is fitting for us and what is fitting for them, the former designated as inside, in place, common, belonging, in a word aboue, the latter, who are designatedas outside, excluded, aberrant, inferior, in a word below. From these distinctions, which were given their hegemony by the culture, tro one could be free, not even Marx-as a reading of his articles on India and the Orient will immediately reveal." The large cultural-national designation of European culture as the privileged norm carried with it a formidable battery of other distinctions between ours and theirs, between proper and improper, European and non-European' higher and lower: they are to be found everywhere in such subjects and quasi-subjects as linguistics' history, race theory, philosophy, anthropology, and even biology. But my main reason for mentioning them here is to suggesthow in the transmission and persistenceof a culture there is a continual process of reinforcement, by which the hegemonic culture will add to itself the prerogatives given it by its sense of national identity, its power as an implement, allS or branch of the state, its rightness, its exterior forms and assertionsof itself: and most important, by its vindicated power as a victor over everything not itself. 26EricStokes,The EnglishUtilitariansand lndia (Oxford: Press,19Sil,p. :98.[Au.] Clarendon 27SeeOrientalism, pp. r Si-t56; also the important study by BryanTurner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London:Allen and Unwin, r 978).[Au.]

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There is no reason to doubt that all cultures operate in this way or to doubt that on the whole they tend to be successful in enforcing their hegemony. They do this in different ways, obviouslS and I think it is true that some tend to be more efficient than others, particularly when it comes to certain kinds of police activities. But this is a topic for comparative anthropologists and not one about which broad generalizations should be risked here. I am interested, however, in noting that if culture exerts the kinds of pressureI have mentioned, and if it creates the environment and the community that allows people to feel they belong, then it must be true that resistance to the culture has always been present. Often that resistancetakes the form of outright hostility for religious, social, or political reasons (one aspect of this is well described by Eric Hobsbawm in Primitiue Rebels).Often it has come from individuals or groups declared out of bounds or inferior by the culture (here of course the range is vast, from the ritual scapegoat to the lonely prophet, from the social pariah to the visionary artist, from the working class to the alienated intellectual). But there is some very compelling truth to Julien Benda's contention that in one way or the other it has often been the intellectual, the clerc, who has stood for values, ideas, and activities that transcend and deliberately interfere with the collective weight imposed by the nation-state and the national culture. Certainly what Benda says about intellectuals (who, in ways specific to the intellectual vocation itself, are responsible for defiance) resonates harmoniously with the personality of Socrates as it emergesin Plato's Dialogues, or with Voltaire's opposition to the Church, or more recently with Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual allied with an emergent class against ruling-class hegemony.tt Even Arnold speaks of "aliens" in Cuhure and Anarch!, "persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit," which he connects directly with ideal culture and not, it would appear, with that culture he was later to identify with the State. Benda is surely wrong, on the other hand, to ascribe so much social power to the solitary intellectual whose authority, according to Benda, comes from his individual voice and from

his opposition to organized collective passions. Yet if we allow that it has been the historical fate of such collective sentiments as "my country right or wrong" and "we are whites and therefore belong to a higher race than blacks" and "European or Islamic or Hindu culture is superior to all others" to coarsen and brutalize the individual, then it is probably true that an isolated individual consciousness,going against the surrounding environment as well as allied to contesting classes,movements, and values, is an isolated voice out of place but very much of that place, standing consciously against the prevailing orthodoxy and very much for a professedly universal or humane set of values, which has provided significant local resistanceto the hegemony of one culture. It is also the case, both Benda and Gramsci agree, that intellectuals are eminently useful in making hegemony work. For Benda this of course is the trahison des clercs in its essence;their unseemly participation in the perfection of political passions is what he thinks is dispiritingly the very essence of their contemporary mass sellout. For Gramsci's more complex mind, individual intellectuals like Croce t' were to be studied (perhaps even envied) for making their ideas seem as if they were expressions of a collective will. All this, then, shows us the individual consciousness placed at a sensitivenodal point, and it is this consciousnessat that critical point which this book attempts to explore in the form of what I call criticism. On the one hand, the individual mind registers and is very much aware of the collective whole, context, or situation in which it finds itself. On the other hand, precisely becauseof this awarenessa worldly self-situating, a sensitive response to the dominant culture-that the individual consciousness is not naturally and easily a mere child of the culture, but a historical and social actor in it. And because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belongi.g, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism. A knowledge of histo ry, a recognition of the importance of social circumstance, an analytical capacity for making distinctions: these trouble the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home, at home among one's people, supported by known powers

28Antonio Gramsci(r 89r - 19 j7), ltalian Marxist philosopher.[Eds.J

2eBenedetto Croce 9866-1952), Italian philosopher(see CTSP,pp.726- jS). [Eds.]

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and acceptablevalues,protected against the outside world. But to repeat: the critical consciousnessis a part of its actual social world and of the literal body that the consciousnessinhabits, not by any means an escape from either one or the other. Although as I charact erized him, Auerbach was away from Europe, his work is steeped in the reality of Europe, iust as the specific circumstances of his exile enabled a concrete critical recovery of Europe. lil7e have in Auerbach an instance both of filiation with his natal culture and, because of exile, affiliation with it through critical consciousnessand scholarly 'We must look more closely now at the cowork. operation between filiation and affiliation that is located at the heart of critical consciousness. RnrenoNsHlps of filiation and affiliation are plentiful in modern cultural history. One very strong three-part pattern, for example, originates in alarge group of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury writers, in which the failure of the generative impulse-the failure of the capacity to produce or generate children-is portrayed in such a way as to stand for a general condition afflicting society and culture together, to say nothing of individual men and women. Ulyssesand The Waste Land are fwo especially well-known instances,but there is a similar evidence to be found rn Deatb in Venice or The Way of Alt Flesh, lude the Obscure, A la ,tcherche du temps perdu, Mallarm6's and Hopkins' poetry, much of \7ilde's writitg, and Nosfromo.lf we add to this list the immensely authoritative weight of Freud's psychoanalytic theory, a significant and influential aspect of which posits the potentially murderous outcome of bearing children, we will have the unmistakable impression that few things are as problematic and as universally fraught as what we might have supposed to be the mere natural continuity between one generation and the next. Even in a great work that belongs intellectually and politically to another universe of disHistory and Class Conscious' course-Lukacs' ness-there is much the samethesis being advanced about the difficulties and ultimately the impossibility of natural filiation: for, Lukacs says,reification is the alienation of men from what they have produced, and it is the starkly uncompromising severity of his vision that he means by this all the products of human labor, children included, which

are so completely separatedfrom each other, atomrzed, and hence frozen into the category of ontological objects as to make even natural relationships virtually impossible.'o Childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence, all of them suggesting the difficulties of filiation.3l But no lessimportant in my opinion is the second part of the pattern, which is immediately consequentupon the first, the pressure to produce new and different ways of conceiving human relationships. For if biological reproduction is either too difficult or too unpleasant, is there some other way by which men and women can create social bonds between each other that would substitute for those ties that connect members of the same family acrossgenerations? A typical answer is provided by T. S. Eliot during the period right after the appearance of The Waste Land. His model now is Lancelot Andrewes, a man whose prose and devotional style seem to Eliot to have transcended the personal manner of even so fervent and effectivea Christian preacher as Donne. In the shift from Donne to Andrewes," which I believe underlies the shift in Eliot's sensibility from the world-view of Prufrock, Gerontion, and The Waste Land to the conversion poetry of Ash Wednesday and the Ariel Poems, we have Eliot saying something like the following: the aridiry, wastefulness, and sterility of modern life make filiation an unreasonable alternative at least, atr unattainable one at most. One cannot think about continuity in biological terms, a proposition that may have had urgent corroboration in the recent failure of Eliot's first marriage but to which Eliot's mind gave a far wider application." The only other alternatives seemedto be provided by institutions, associations, and communities whose social existencewas not in fact guaranteed by biology, but by affiliation. Thus according to Eliot Lancelot Andrewes conveys in his writing the enfolding presence of the English 30See Lukdcs.[Eds.] 3tSeemy Beginnings:Intention and Method (New York: B a s i cB o o k s ,r 9 7 S ) p, p . 8 r - 8 8 a n dp a s s i m[.A u . ] 32JohnDonne GSZz-r6jr), English poet and divine; LancelotAndrewes(r 55j -1626), Englishdivine.[Eds.] 33This informationis usefullyprovidedby Lyndall Gordon, Eliot'sEarly Years(Oxford andNew York: Oxford UniversityPress,1977).[Au.]

Secular Criticism church, "something representative of the finest spirit of England of the time [and] . . . a masterpiece of ecclesiasticalstatesmanship."With Hooker, then, Andrewes invoked an authoriry beyond simple Protestantism. Both men were on terms of equality with their Continental antagonists and [were able] to elevate their Church above the position of a local heretical sect. They were fathers of a national Church and they were Europeans.Compare a sermon of Andrewes with a sermon by another earlier master, Latimer. It is not merely that Andrewes knew Greek, or that Latimer was addressing a far less cultivated public, or that the sermons of Andrewes are peppered with allusion and quotation. It is rather that Latimer, the preacher of Henry VIII and Edward VI, is merely a Protestant; but the voice of Andrewes is the voice of a man who has a formed visible Church behind him, who speaks with the old authority and the new culture.'o Eliot's reference to Hooker and Andrewes is fig,trative, but it is meant with a quite literal force, just as that second "mere[y" (Latimer is merely Protes" tant) is an assertion by Eliot of "the old authority and the new culture." If the English church is not in a direct line of filiation stemming from the Roman church, it is neverthelesssomething more than a mere local heresS more than a mere protesting orphan. Why? BecauseAndrewes and others like him to whose antecedent authority Eliot has now subscribed were able to harness the old paternal authority to an insurgent Protestant and national culture, thereby creating a new institution based not on direct genealogicaldescentbut on what we may call, barbarously, horizontal affiliation. According to Eliot, Andrewes' language does nor simply express the anguished distance from an originating but now unrecoverable father that a protesting orphan might feel; on the contrary, it converts that language into the expressionof an emerging affiliative corporation-the English church-which commands the respectand the attention of its adherents. In Eliot's poetry much the same change occurs. The speakers of Prufrock and Gerontion as well 34T.S. Eliot, SelectedEssays Ggtz, rpt. London: Faber a n dF a b e rr, g Sj ) , p p .3 4 j - 4 4 . [ A u . ]

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'Waste as the characters of The Land directly express the plight of orphanhood and alienation, whereas the personae of Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets speak the common language of other communicants within the English church. For Eliot the church stands in for the lost family mourned throughout his earlier poetry. And of course the shift is publicly completed in After Strange Gods whose almost belligerent announcement of a credo of royalism, classicism,and catholicism form a set of affiliations achieved by Eliot outside the filial (republican, romantic, protestant) pattern given him by the facts of his American (and outlandish) birth. The turn from filiation to affiliation is to be found elsewherein the culture and embodies what Georg Simmel calls the modern cultural process by which life "incessantly generatesforms for itself," forms that, once they appear, "demand a validity which transcendsthe moment, anci is emancipated from the pulse of life. For this reason, life is always in a latent opposition to the form." tt One thinks of Yeats going from the blandishments of "rhe honey of generation" to the Presenceswho are "self-born mockers of man's enterpriser" which he set down in A Vision according to a spacious affiliative order he invented for himself and his work. Or, as Ian'Watt has said about Conrad's contemporaries, writers like Lawrence, Joyce, and Pound, who present us with "the breaking of ties with family, home, class, country, and traditional beliefs as necessarystages in the achievement of spiritual and intellectual freedom": these writers "then invite us to share the larger transcendental [affiliative] or private systems of order and value which they have adopted and invented." " In his best work Conrad shows us the futility of such private systems of order and value (saythe utopian world createdby Charles and Amelia Gould in Nos/ro mo), but no less than his contemporaries he too took on in his own life (as did Eliot and Henry James) the adopted identity of an emigr6-turned-English-gentleman.On the other side of the spectrum we find Lukacs suggesting that only class consciousness,itself an insurrectionary form of an attempt at affiliation, could possibly break through the anrinomies and atomizations of '5Georg Simmel, The Conflict of Modern Culture and Other Essays,trans. and ed. K. Peter Etzkorn (New York: Teachers CollegePress,r968), p. r z. [Au.] '5Ian 'Watt,Conradin the NineteenthCentury (Berkeley: Universityof CaliforniaPress,rg7g),p. 1'z.[Au.]

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reified existence in the modern capitalist worldorder. tU7hat I am describing is the transition from a failed idea or possibility of filiation to a kind of compensatory order that, whether it is a parql, an institution, a culture, a set of beliefs, or even a world-vision, provides men and women with a new form of relationship, which I have been calling affiliation but which is also a new system. Now whether we look at this new affiliative mode of relationship as it is to be found among conservative writers like Eliot or among progressive writers like Lukacs and, in his own special way, Freud, we will find the deliberately explicit goal of using that new order to reinstate vestiges of the kind of authority associated in the past with filiative order. This, finall5 is the third part of the pattern. Freud'spsychoanalytic guild and Lukacs' notion of the vanguard party are no less providers of what we might call a restored authority. The new hierarchy or, if it is less a hierarchy than a community, the new communify is greater than the individual adherent or member, just as the father is greater by virtue of seniority than the sons and daughters; the ideas, the values, and the systematic totalizing world-view validated by the new affiliative order are all bearers of authority too, with the result that something resembling a cultural system is established.Thus if a filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of obedien ce, fear, love, respect, authority-involving new affiliative relaand instinctual conflict-the tionship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms-such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and the hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and of "life," whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society. It is worth saying incidentally that what an estimable group of literary artists have adumbrated in the passage from filiation to affiliation parallels similar observations made by sociologists and records corresponding developments in the structure of knowledge. Tonnies' notion of the shift from Gemeinschoft to Gesellschaftt' can easily be reconciled with the idea of filiation replaced by affiliation. Similarly, I believe, the increased dependence of the modern scholar uPon the small, specialized 37FerdinandTonnies(r 8S5- I gt6), German sociologist. Gemeinschaft: community ; Gesellschaft' society.[Eds.]

guild of people in his or her field (as indeed the very idea of a field itself ), and the notion within fields that the originating human subject is of less importance than transhuman rules and theories, accompany the transformation of naturally filiative into systematically affiliative relationships. The loss of the subject, as it has commonly been referred to, is in various ways the loss as well of the procreative, generational urge autho r rzing fi li ative relationship s. The three-part pattern I have been describittgand with it the processesof filiation and affiliation as they have been depicted-can be considered an instance of the passage from nature to culture, as well as an instance of how affiliation can easily become a system of thought no less orthodox and 'What I want abruptly dominant than culture itself. to talk about at this juncture are the effects of this pattern as they have affected the study of literature today, at a considerable remove from the early years of our century. The structure of literary knowledg. derived from the academy is heavily imprinted with the three-part pattern I have illustrated here. This imprinting has occurred in ways that are impressive so far as critical thought (according to my notion of what it ought to be) is concerned. Let me pass directly now to concrete examples. Ever since Eliot, and after him Richards and Leavis," there has been an almost unanimously held view that it is the duty of humanistic scholars in our culture to devote themselvesto the study of the great monuments of literature. \ilhy? So that they may be passed on to younger students, who in turn become members, by affiliation and formation, of the company of educated individuals. Thus we find the university experience more or less officially consecrating the pact between a canon of works, a band of initiate instructors, a group of younger affiliates; in a socially validated manner all this reproduces the filiative discipline supposedly transcended by the educational process. This has almost always been the case historically within what might be lWestern, called the cloistral world of the traditional and certainly of the Eastern, university. But we are now, I think, in a period of world history when for the first time the compensatory affiliative relationships interpreted during the academic course of study in the Western university actually exclude more than they include. I mean quite simply that, 38I. A. Richards (see CTSP, pp. 8+l- 59); F. R. Leavis (r 8gj - r 978),Englishcritic. [Eds.]

SecularCriticism for the first time in modern historR the whole imposing edifice of humanistic knowledg. resting on the classics of European letters, and with it the scholarly discipline inculcated formally into students in Western universities through the forms familiar to us all, representsonly a fraction of the real human relationships and interactions now taking place in the world. Certainly Auerbach was among the last great representativesof those who believed that European culture could be viewed coherently and importantly as unquestionably central to human history. There are abundant reasonsfor Auerbach's view being no longer tenable, not the least of which is the diminishing acquiescenceand deference accorded to what has been called the Natopolitan world long dominating peripheral regions like Africa, Asia, and Latin America. New cultures, new societies,and emerging visions of social, political, and aesthetic order now lay claim to the humanist's attention, with an insistence that cannot long be denied. But for perfectly understandable reasons they are denied. When our students are taught such things as "the humanities" they are almost always taught that these classic texts embody, express, represent what is best in our, that is, the onlS tradition. Moreover they are taught that such fields as the humanities and such subfieldsas "literature" exist in a relatively neutral political element, that they are to be appreciated and venerated, that they define the limits of what is acceptable, appropriate, and legitimate so far as culture is concerned. In other words, the affiliative order so presented surreptitiously duplicates the closed and tightly knit family structure that securesgenerational hierarchical relationships to one another. Affiliation then becomes in effect a literal form of re-presentation, by which what is ours is good, and therefore deservesincorporation and inclusion in our programs of humanistic studn and what is not ours in this ultimately provincial senseis simply left out. And out of this representation comes the systems from Northrop Frye's" to Foucault's, which claim the power to show how things work, once and for all, totally and predictively. It should go without saying that this new affiliative structure and its systems of thought more or less directly reproduce the skeleton of family authority supposedly left behind when the family was left behind. The curricular structures holding Euro3eSee Fryeand CTSP,pp. rrr7-47. [Eds.]

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pean literature departments make that perfectly obvious: the great texts, as well as the great teachers and the great theories, have an authority that compels respectful attention not so much by virtue of their content but becausethey are either old or they have power, they have been handed on in time or seem to have no time, and they have traditionally been revered, 2s priests, scientists, or efficient bureaucrats have taught. It may seem odd, but it is true, that in such matters as culture and scholarship I am often in reasonable sympathy with conservative attitudes, and what I might object to in what I have been describing does not have much to do with the activity of conserving the past, or with reading great literature, or with doing serious and perhaps even utterly conservative scholarship as such. I have no great problem with those things. \il7hat I am criticizing is two particular assumptions. There is first the almost unconsciously held ideological assumption that the Eurocentric model for the humanities actually represents a natural and proper subject matter for the humanistic scholar. Its authority comes not only from the orthodox canon of literary monuments handed down through the generations, but also from the way this continuity reproduces the filial continuity of the chain of biological procrearion. lUfhat we then have is a substitution of one sort of order for another, in the process of which everything that is nonhumanistic and nonlite rary and non-European is deposited outside the structure. If we consider for a minute that most of the world todry is non-European, that transactions within what the UNESCO/McBride Report calls the world information order are therefore not literarS and that the social sciencesand the media (to name only two modes of cultural production in ascendancy today over the classically defined humanities) dominate the diffusion of knowledge in ways that are scarcely imaginable to the traditional humanistic scholar, then we will have some idea of how ostrichlike and retrograde assertions about Eurocentric humanities really are. The process of representation, by which filiation is reproduced in the affiliative structure and made to stand for what belongs to us (as we in turn belong to the family of our languages and traditions), reinforces the known at the expense of the knowable. Second is the assumption that the principal relationships in the study of literature-those I have identified as based on representation-ought to

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obliterate the traces of other relationships within literary structures that are based principally upon acquisition and appropriation. This is the great lesson of Raymond \Tilliams' The Country and the City. His extraordinarily illuminating discussion there of the seventeenth-century English countryhouse poems does not concentrate on what those poems represent, but on what they are as the result of contested social and political relationships. Descriptions of the rural mansion, for example, do not at bottom entail only what is to be admired by way of harmony, repose, and beauty; they should also entail for the modern reader what in fact has been excluded from the poems, the labor that created the mansions, the social processesof which they are the culmination, the dispossessionsand theft they actually signified. Although he does not come out and say it, Williams' book is a remarkable attempt at adislodgement of the very ethos of system, which has reified relationships and stripped them of their 'What he tries to put in its place is the social density. great dialectic of acquisition and representation, by which even realism-as it is manifest in Jane Austen'snovels-has gained its durable status as the result of contests involving money and power. \filliams teaches us to read in a different way and to remember that for every poem or novel in the canon there is a social fact being requisitioned for the page, a human life engaged, a class suppressedor elevated-none of which can be accounted for in the framework rigidly maintained by the processes of representation and affiliation doing above-ground work for the conservation of filiation. And for every critical system grinding on there are events,heterogeneousand unorthodox social configurations, human beings and texts disputing the possibility of a sovereign methodology of system. Everything I have said is an extrapolation from the verbal echo we hear between the words "filiation" and "affiltation." In a certain sense,what I have been trying to show is that, as it has developed through the art and critical theories produced in complex ways by modernism, filiation givesbirth to affiliation. Affiliation becomes a form of representing the filiative processesto be found in nature, although affiliation takes validated nonbiological social and cultural forms. Two alternatives propose themselvesfor the contemporary critic. One is organic complicity with the pattern I have described. The critic enables,indeed transacts, the transfer of

legitimacy from filiation to affiliation; literally a midwife, the critic encouragesreverencefor the humanities and for the dominant culture served by those humanities. This keeps relationships within the narrow circle of what is natural, appropriate, and valid for "us," and thereafter excludesthe nonliterarR the non-Europ ean)and above all the political dimension in which all literature, all texts, can be found. It also gives rise to a critical system or theory whose temptation for the critic is that it resolvesall the problems that culture gives rise to. As John Fekete has said, this "expresses the modern disaffection for reality, but progressively incorporates and assimilatesit within the categoriesof prevailing social (and cultural) rationaliry. This endows it with a double appeal, and the expanding scope of the theory, corresponding to the expanding mode of the production and reproduction of social life, gives it authority as a major ideology."oo The second alternative is for the critic to recognrze the difference between instinctual filiation and social affiliation, and to show how affiliation sometimes reproduces filiation, sometimes makes its own forms. ImmediatelR then, most of the political and social world becomesavailable for critical and secular scrutiny, as in Mimesis Auerbach does not simply admire the Europe he has lost through exile but seesit anew as a composite social and historical enterprise, made and remade unceasingly by men and women in society. This secular critical consciousnesscan also examine those forms of writing affiliated with literature but excluded from consideration with literature as a result of the ideological capture of the literary text within the humanistic curriculum as it now stands. My analysis of recent literary theory in this book focuseson these themes in detail, especially on the way critical systemseven of the most sophisticatedkind-can succumb to the inherently representative and reproductive relationship between a dominant culture and the domains it rules. Wser does it mean to have a critical consciousness if, as I have been trying to suggest,the intellectual's situation is a worldly one and Yet, by virtue of that worldliness itself, the intellectual's social identity a0JohnFekete,The Critical Twilight: Explorationsin the ldeotogyof Anglo-AmericanLiterary Theoryfrom Eliot to MiLuhan (London: Routledgeand Kegan Paul, r g 7 7 ) ,p p . r 9 3 - g + . [ A u . ]

Secular Criticism should involve something more than strengthening those aspectsof the culture that require mere affirmation and orthodox compliancy from its members? The whole of this book is an attempt to answer this question. My position, again, is that the contemporary critical consciousness stands between the temptations representedby rwo formidable and related powers engaging critical attention. One is the culture to which critics are bound filiatively (by birth, nationality, profession); the other is a method or system acquired affiliatively (by social and political conviction, economic and historical circumstances, voluntary effort and willed deliberation). Both of these powers exert pressuresthat have been building toward the contemporary situation for long periods of time: my interest in eighteenthcentury figures like Vico and Swift, for example, is premised on their knowledg. that their era also made claims on them culturally and systematicallS and it was their whole enterprise therefore to resist these pressures in everything they did, albeit of course, that they were worldly writers and materially bound to their time. As it is now practiced and as I treat it, criticism is an academic thing, located for the most part fat away from the questionsthat trouble the reader of a daily newspaper. Up to a certain point this is as it should be. But we have reached the stage at which specialization and professionalization, allied with cultural dogma, barely sublimated ethnocentrism and nationalism, as well as a surprisingly insistent quasi-religious quietism, have transported the professional and academic critic of literature-the most focused and intensely trained interpreter of texts produced by the culture-into another world altogether. In that relatively untroubled and secluded world there seemsto be no contact with the world of events and societies, which modern history, intellectuals, and critics have in fact built. Instead, contemporary criticism is an institution for publicly affirming the values of our, that is, European, dominant elite culture, and for privately setting loose the unrestrained interpretation of a universe defined in advance as the endless misreading of a misinterpretation. The result has been the regulated, not to say calculated, irrelevanceof criticism, except as an adornment to what the powers of modern industrial society transact: the hegemony of militarism and a new cold war, the depoliticization of the citizenrR the overall compliance of the intel-

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lectual class to which critics belong. The situation I attempt to cha racterize in modern criticism (not excluding "Left" criticism) has occurred in parallel with the ascendancyof Reaganism. The role of the Left, neither repressednor organized, has been important for its complaisance. I do not wish to be misunderstood as saying that the flight into method and system on the part of critics who wish to avoid the ideology of humanism is altogether a bad thing. Far from it. Yet the dangers of method and system are worth noting. Insofar as they become sovereign and as their practitioners lose touch with the resistance and the heterogeneity of civil society, they risk becoming wall-to-wall discourses, blithely predetermining what they discuss,heedlesslyconverting everything into evidence for the effi cacy of the method ) carelessly ignoring the circumstances out of which all theory, system, and method ultimately derive. Criticism in short is always situated; it is skeptical, secular, reflectively open to its own failings. This is by no means to say that it is value-free.Quite the contrary, for the inevitable trajectory of critical consciousnessis to arrive at Some acute Senseof what political, social, and human values are entailed in the reading, production, and transmission of every text. To stand between culture and system is therefore to stand close to-closeness itself having a particular value for me-a concrete reality about which political, moral, and social iudgments have to be made and, if not only made, then exposed and demystified. If, as we have recently been told by Stanley Fish, every act of interpretation is made possible and given force by an interpretive community, then we must go a great deal further in showing what situation, what historical and social configuration, what political interests are concretely entailed by the very existence of interpretive communities.ot This is an especially important task when these communities have evolved camoufl"ging fargons. I hope it will not seem a self-serving thing to say that all of what I mean by criticism and critical consciousnessis directly reflected not only in the subjects of theseessaysbut in the essayform itself. For if I am to be taken seriously as saying that secular otFor an extendedanalysisof the role of interpretivecommunities,seeStanleyFish,Is Therea Text in This Class? (Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress,r98o). [Au.] See Fish.[Eds.]

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criticism deals with local and worldly situarions, and that it is constitutively opposed to the production of massive, hermetic systeffis,then it must follow that the essay-a comparatively short, investigative, radically skeptical form-is the principal way in which to write criticism. Certain themes, naturally enough, recur in the essaysthat make up this book. Given a relatively wide selection of ropics, the book's unity, however, is also a unity of attitude and of concern. til7ith rwo exceptions, all of the essayscollected here were written during the period immediately following the completion of my book Beginnings: Intention and Metbod, which argued the practical and theoretical necessityof a reasoned point of departure for any intellectual and creative fob of work, given that we exist in secular history, in the "always-already" begun realm of continuously human effort. Thus each essay presupposes that book. Yet it is more important to point out that (again with two exceptions) all of these essayswere written as I was working on three books dealing with the history of relations between Easr and'West: Orientalism (tgZ8), The Question of Palestine GgZg), and Couering Islam (rg8r), books whose historical and social setting is political and cultural in the most urgent way. On matters having to do with the relationship between scholarship and politics, between a specific situation and the interpretation and the production of a text, between textuality itself and social reality, the connection of some essays here to those three books will be evident enough. The essayscollected here are arcangedin three interlinked ways. First I look at the worldly and secular world in which texts take place and in which certain writers (Swift, Hopkins, Conrad, Fanon) are exemplary for their attention to the detail of everyday existence defined as situation, event, and the org anrzation of power. For the critic, the challenge of this secular world is that it is not reducible to an explanatory or originating theorR much less to a collection of cultural generalities.There are instead a small number of perhaps unexpected characteristicsof worldliness that play a role in making sense of textual experience, among them filiation and affiliation, the body and the sensesof sight and hearing, repetition, and the sheer heterogeneity of detail. Next I turn to the peculiar problems of contemporary critical theory as it either confronts or

ignores issuesraised for the study of texts (and textualiry) by the secular world. Finally, I treat the problem of what happens when the culture attempts to understand, dominate, or recapture another, lesspowerful one. A word is in order about the special role played by Swift in this book. There are two essayson him, both of them stressing the resistanceshe offers to the modern critical theorist (resistance being a matter of central relevance to my argument in this book). The reasons for this are not only that Swift cannot easily be assimilated to current ideas about "writersr" "the textr" or "the heroic authorr" but that his work is at once occasional,powerful, andfrom the point of view of systematic textual practice-incoherent. To read Swift seriously is to try to apprehend a seriesof eventsin all their messyforce, not to admire and then calmly to decode a string of high monuments. In addition, his own social role was that of the critic involved with, but never possessing,power: alert, forceful, undogmatic, ironic, unafraid of orthodoxies and dogmas, respectful of settled uncoercive communitS anarchic in his sense of the range of alternatives to the status quo. Yet he was tragically compromised by his time and his worldly circumstances, a fact alluded to by E. P. Thompson and Perry Anderson id their dispute over his real (progressiveor reactionary) political commitments. For me he representsthe critical consciousnessin a raw form, a large-scalemodel of the dilemmas facing the contemporary critical consciousnessthat has tended to be too cloistered and too attracted to easy systematizing. He stands so far outside the world of contemporary critical discourse as to serve as one of its best critics, methodologically unarmed though he may have been. In its energy and unparalleled verbal wit, its restlessness, its agitational and unacademic designson its political and social context, Swift's writing suppliesmodern criticism with what it has sorely needed since Arnold covered critical writing with the mantle of cultural authority and reactionary political quietism. It is an undoubted exaggeration to say, on the other hand, that these essaysmake absolutely clear what my critical position-only implied by Orientalism and my other recent books-really is. To some this may seem like a failin g of rigor, honesry, or energy. To others it may imply some radical uncertainty on my part as to what I do stand for, espe-

Secular Criticism cially given the fact that I have been accused by colleagues of intemperate and even unseemly polemicism. To still others-and this concerns me more-it may seem that I am an undeclared Marxist, afraid of losing respectabiliry and concerned by the contradictions entailed by the label "Marxist." rilTithout wishing to answer all the questions raised by these matters, I would like my views to be as clear as possible. On the question of government and foreign policy that particularly involve ffie, nothing more should be added here than what is said in the last four essaysin this book. But on the important matter of a critical position, its relationship to Marxism, liberaliSffi, even anarchism, it needs to be said that criticism modified in advance by labels like "Marxism" or "liberalism" is, in my view, an oxymoron. The history of thought, to say nothing of political movements, is extravagantly illustrative of how the dictum "solidarity before criticism" means the end of criticism. I take criticism so seriously as to believethat, even in the very midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousnessif there are to be issues,problems, values, even lives to be fought for. Right now in American cultural historS "Marxism" is principally an academic, not a political, commitment. It risks becoming an academic subspecialty. As corollaries of this unfortunate truth there are also such things to be mentioned as the absenceof an important socialist party (along the lines of the various European parties), the marginalized discourse of "Left" writing, the seeming incapacity of professional groups (scholarly, academic, regional) to orga nrze effective Left coalitions with political-action groups. The net effect of "doing" Marxist criticism or writing at the present time is of course to declare political preference,but it is also to put oneself outside a great deal of things going on in the world, so to speak, and in other kinds of criticism. Perhaps a simpler way of expressingall this is to say that I have been more influenced by Marxists than by Marxism or any other ism. If the arguments going on within rwentieth-century Marxism have had any meaning, it is this: as much as any discourse, Marxism is in need of systematic decoding, demystifying, rigorous clarification. Here the work of non-Marxist radicals (Chomsky's, say, or I. F.

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Stone's)o' is valuable, especially if the doctrinal walls keeping out nonmembers have not been put up to begin with. The same is true of criticism deriving from a profoundly conservative outlook, Auerbach's own, for example; at its best, this work also teaches us how to be critical, rather than how to be good members of a school. The positive uses of affiliation are ma ny after all, which is not to say that authoritarianism and orthodoxy are any less dangerous. Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism (not as a modification but as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. If criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneouslR then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systemsof thought or of method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, special interests, imperialized fiefdoms, and orthodox habits of mind, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma. "Ironic" is not a bad word to use along with "oppositional." For in the main-and here I shall be explicit-criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledg. produced in the interests of human freedom. If we agree with Raymond \Tilliams, "that however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience,which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even proiect ," o' then criticism belongs in that potential space inside civil societS acting on beh alf of those alternative acts and alternative intentions whose advancement is a fundamental human and intellectual obligation. There is a danger that the fascination of what's a2See Chomskl; I. p. Stone(b. t 9o7),Americaniournalist. IEds.] a3Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interuieuts with New Left Reuiew (London: New Left Books, r g T g ) ,p . z s z . [ A u . ]

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difficult-criticism being one of the forms of difficulty-might take the joy out of one's heart. But there is every reason to suppose that the critic who is tired of management and the day's war is, like Yeats'snarrator, quite capable at least of finding the stable, pulling out rhe bolt, and sefting creative energies free. NormallS however, the critic can but entertain, without fully expressirg, the hope. This

is a poignant irony, to be recalled for the benefit of people who maintain that criticism is arr, and who forget that, the moment anything acquires the status of a cultural idol or a commodity, it ceasesto be interesting. That at bottom is a critical attitude, just as doing criticism and maintaining a critical position are critical aspectsof the intellectual's life.

APPENDIX

Gottlob Frege 1 8 4 8 - r 9 2j

orrlos Fnpcn, born six years before the death of F. W. Schelling,was for most of his professional life a professor of philosophy at the Univer-

there (including Fichte, sity of Jena.But unlike his more illustrious predecessors Hegel, and Schelling),Fregeremainedlittle known and evidentlylittle read during his lifetime.Most of his major philosophicalworks focusedscrupulously,if not to sayrelentlessly,on mathematicallogic. His Begriffsschrift,eine der arithmetiscbennachgebildete$87) is arguably the first important work in the developmentof modern symbolic logic, and in this work Fregedevelopeda remarkably expressiveformalism for representing logical propositions and judgments.\fhile generallyneglected,his reputation philosophers)has grown and influence (especiallyamong English-speaking pioneeringefforts in the his acknowledged and lfhitehead Russell steadilysince of logic. formalization Ironically, Fregehad an important, albeit indirect, influenceon the development of modernEuropeanphilosophyin his penetrating(andsomewhatscathing) critique of Edmund Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic ft89r). Husserl's tesponseto Frege'scritique (accordingto JosephKockelmans)was at leastto abandon the psychologismin the book, to which Fregehad obiected; but this took Husserl in the direction of transcendentalpsychology and phenomenologysurelynot a responsethat Fregewould haveapproved.In Husserl'slater attemptto makephilosophy into a rigorous science,the entire matter of representationand expressionis subsumedunder the notion of a cognitiveor perceptualintention, presuming that anything cognizable (including cognition itself) must immeaspresent. diatelyappearto consciousness While in itself this contrastbetweenFregeand Husserlmay be only incidental, it indicatesa fundamental conflict in the developmentof modern critical and philosophicalthought. In rejectingtranscendentalmetaphysicsand both nominalist and formalist accountsof logic and mathematics,Fregenarrowedhis philosophicalalternativesbut radically clarified the importanceof languageand logic for all philosophicalissues.First,he madeit clearthat how any term or proposition is understoodis not necessarilythe sameas its useto designatesomething or entity; but, second,he showedwhy it is not obviouswhat can or will count as an "entity" to be designated.Particularlyin the realm of conceptsand functions, both "sense" (Sinn) and "meaning" (Bedeutung)areintimately bound up with 623

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modesof representationand expression-which, in a philosophicalorientation (suchas Husserl's)that assumesone can eliminate mediation to arrive at some originary intuition, can scarcelybe acknowledgedat all. Frege'sessay"on Senseand Meaning" (1892)is doublyimportantasit illuminatesa fundamentalproblem while illustrating an analyticalmethod that, as developedby such philosophersand logicians as Bertrand Russell,Ludwig rflittgenstein,$7.V. Quine, Alonzo Church, and orhers, has beenrich and fruitful. ru?hilethe essayis written with a logical problem in mind (that is, the relation of "equality"), it is one of the earliestexamplesof philosophicalanalysisro show that the problem pervadesnatural languageand is not restrictedto mathematics or formal logic alone.From this point of view,Frege,like C. S. Peirce,anricipates the concern of later philosophersand critics with problems of languageand meaning,particularly where semanticand epistemologicalissuesoverlapbut require differentiation. An earlier translation of the essayhere was titled "Senseand Reference," rendering Bedeutungas "reference."But for Frege,the issueis not "reference" as such,or "representationr"but the logical condition under which a statement of equality could be asserted.In the relation "a : b," "a" and "b" are presumed to be the namesof relata which can be equatedbecausethey are namesfor the same"object." In casessuchasthat of the planetVenus,wherea singleobjectis beingcalledboth "morning star" and "eveningstarr" the expressionswould have a different sensebut the samemeaningby virtue of singling out only one object. Ifhile such"objects" of expressions neednot be phvsisxlbodiesbut could include numbersand the truth valuesof propositions,the distinction is, as Frege notes,problematicin the caseof a w6rk of art, which has,in his useof the terms, '!7hile Sinn or sensebut not Bedeutung. one could say that "morning star" and "eveningstar" both mean "the planet Venusr"or "a" and "b" both meanthe number r, one would not say that Richard Burton and Hamlet both mean the samething, sincethere is no commonly agreedupon way to singleout what that "thing" might be. Fregewas obviously intrigued by the peculiarity of the case,suggestingonly that expressionswith sensebut not meaning(Sinnbut not Bedeutung)are "representations"(seenote 8); but somephilosophersand logicians influencedby Fregeevidently found such casesmerely otiose-as when, for example,Rudolph Carnap employedFrege'sdistinction to declarethat expressionswith Sinn but not Bedeutung,like works of metaphysicsand poems, were "meaningless"and without cognitivevalue. While part of the problem in this caseis that the characteristicuseof the word "meaning" in English more nearly approximatesFrege'snotion of.Sinn, there is then no word that is not misleadingto translatehis notion of.Bedeutung.It remains that the relation between "reference" and "representation" still resists convincinganalysis,by either logical empiricism,following Frege,or phenomenology, following Husserl,sinceit posesa problem for metaphysicsthat is categorically peculiar wheneverthere is a representationwithout a referent.If one equatesthese terms ("reference" and "representation"), then either term has senseo/ meaningonly in relation to objects,either empirical or transcendental. 'Whether one opts to destroymetaphysicsor merelydeconstructit, the first alter-

On Sense andMeaning

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native deprivesit of meaning (in Frege'ssense),while the seconddeprivesit of both senseand meaning,but neither doesaway with the problem. Severalmajor works by Fregehavebeentranslatedinto Englisht The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin (tSSil; The Basic Laws of Arithtnetic, trans. M. Furth (1964); and Translationsfrom tbe Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege,ed.P. Geachand M. Black (196o). Translationsof severalother essaysare included in E. D. Klemke'simpoftant collection of critical and interpretive articles, Essayson Frege $968). For an important essayon related issues,seeSaul Kripke, "Naming and Necessiry" in Semanticsof Natural Langtrase,ed. Gilbert Harman and Donald DavidsonGgzz).

ON SENSEAND

MEANING Equality' gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer. [s it a relation ? A relation between objects, or between names or signs of objects? In my Begriffsschrift' I assumed the latter. The reasons which seem to favour this are the following: a-- a and a- b are obviously statements of differing cognitive valu e; a- a holds a priori and, according to Kant, is to be labelled analytic, while statementsof the form a- b often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledg. and cannot always be established a priori. The discovery that the rising sun is not new every morning, but always the same, was one of the most fertile astronomical discoveries. Even to-day the reidentification of a small planet or a comet is not always a matter of course. Now if we were to regard equality as a relation be' 'b' fween that which the nam es a' and designate,it would seem that a- b could not differ from A: a (i.e.,provided a- b is true). A relation would thereby be expressedof a thing to itself, and indeed one in oN sENSE ANDMEANTNG was first publishedin Zeitschrift filr Philosophieund philosophischeKritik roo (1892): zS-5o. This translationby Max Black is reprintedfrom Translationsfrom the Philosophical'Writingsof Gottlob Frege,ed. PeterGeachand Max Black,jd ed.(r98o),by permissionof the publisher,BasilBlackwell. I I use this word in the senseof identiry and understand ' d:b' to havethe sens e of ' a is the sameas b' or ' A andb coincide.'[Au.] 2The referenceis to Frege'sBegriffsschrift,eine der arithmetischennachgebildeteFormelsprachedes reinen Denkens(Halle, fi2il.[Tr.]

which each thing stands to itself but to no other 'S7hat thing. we apparently want to state by a: b is that the signs or names 'A' and 'b' designate the same thing, so that those signs themselveswould be under discussion;a relation between them would be asserted.But this relation would hold berween the names or signs only in so far as they named or designated somethitrg. It would be mediated by the connexion of each of the two signs with the same designatedthing. But this is arbitrary. Nobody can be forbidden to use any arbitrarily producible event or obiect as a sign for something. In that case the sentenceA--b would no longer refer to the subiect matter but only to its mode of designation; we would express no proper knowledge by its means. But in many casesthis is just what we want to do. If ' the sign A' is distinguished from the sign 'b' only as an object (here, by means of its shape),not as a sign (i.e, not by the manner in which it designatessomething), the cognitive value of a- a becomes essentially equal to that of a:b, provided a-b is true. A difference can arise only if the difference between the signs corresponds to a difference in the mode of presentation of the thing designated. Let a, b, c be the lines connecting the vertices of a triangle with the midpoints of the opposite sides.The point of intersection of a and & is then the same as the point of intersection of b and c. So we have different designations for the same point, and thesenames ('point of intersection of a and b,' 'point of intersection of b and c') likewise indicate the mode of presentation; and hence the statement contains actual knowledg.. It is natural, trow, to think of there being connected with a sign (name, combination of words, written mark), besides that which the sign desig-

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nates,which may be called the meaning of the sign, also what I should like to call the senseof the sign, wherein the mode of prespntation is contained. In our example, accordinglR the meaning of the ex'the point of intersection of a and b' and pressions 'the point of intersection 6f b and c' would be the 'evening same, but not their sense.The meaning of 'morning starr' star' would be the same as that of but not the sense. It is clear from the context that by sign and name I have here understood any designation figuring as a proper name, which thus has as its meaning a definite object (this word taken in the widest range), but not a concept or a relation, which shall be discussed further in another article.' The designation of a single object can also consist of several words or other signs. For brevitR let every such designation be called a proper name. The senseof a proper name is grasped by everybody who is sufficiently familiar with the language o or totality of designations to which it belongs; but this servesto illuminate only a single aspect of the thing meant, supposing it to have one. Comprehensive knowledg. of the thing meant would require us to be able to say immediately whether any given sense attaches to it. To such knowledge we never attain. The regular connexion berween a sign, its sense, and what it means is of such a kind that to the sign there corresponds a definite sense and to that in turn a definite thing meant, while to a given thing meant (an object) there does not belong only a single sign. The same sense has different expressions in different languagesor even in the same language. To be sure, exceptions to this regular behaviour occur. To every expression belonging to a complete totality of signs, there should certainly correspond a definite sense;but natural languages 3See his 'Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand'(Vierteliahrsschrift fil, wissenschaftlichePhilosophie XVI lt89zl, pp. 4z-SS. [Tr.] r9z-zo j)1rn Translations, aIn the caseof an actualproper namesuchas 'Aristotle' opinionsasto the sensemay differ.It might, for instance, be taken to be the following: the pupil of Plato and teacherof Alexanderthe Great.Anybody who doesthis 'Aristotle was will attach anothersenseto the sentence born in Stagira'than will a man who takesasthe senseof the name: the teacherof Alexanderthe Great who was born in Stagira.So long as the thing meantremainsthe same,suchvariationsof sensemay be tolerated,although they are to be avoidedin the theoreticalstructureof a demonstrativescienceand ought not to occur in a perfect language.[Au.]

often do not satisfy this condition, and one must be content if the same word has the same sensein the same context. It may perhaps be granted that every grammatically well-formed expression figuring as a proper name always has a sense.But this is not to say that to the sensethere also corresponds a thing 'the celestial body most distant meant. The words from the Earth' have a sense,but it is very doubtful if there is also a thing they mean. The expression 'the least rapidly convergent series' has a sensebut demonstrably there is nothing it means, since for every given convergent series, another convergent' but less rapidly convergent, seriescan be found. In grasping a sense, one is not certainly assured of meaning anything. If words are used in the ordinary waY, what one intends to speak of is what they mean. It can also happen, however, that one wishes to talk about the words themselvesor their sense.This happens, for instance, when the words of another are quoted. One's own words then first designate words of the other speaker, and only the latter have their usual meaning. \il7ethen have signs of signs. In writitg, the words are in this case enclosed in quotation marks. AccordinglS a word standing between quotation marks must not be taken as having its ordinary meaning. 'A' In order to speak of the senseof an expression 'the exphrase of the sense one may simply use the pression "A"'. In indirect speech one talks about the sense, €.g., of another person's remarks. It is quite clear that in this way of speakingwords do not have their custom ary meaning but designatewhat is usually their sense.In order to have a short expression, we will say: In indirect speech,words are used indirectly or have their indirecl meaning. We distinguish accordingly the customary from the indirect meaning of a word; and its customary sensefrom its indirecl sense.The indirect meaning of a word is accordingly its customary sense. Such exceptions must always be borne in mind if the mode of connexion between sign, sense,and meaning in particular casesis to be correctly understood. The meaning and senseof a sign are to be distinguished from the associated idea. If what a sign means is an object perceivable by the senses,my idea of it is an internal image,sarising from memos'We may include with ideas direct experiences:here, take the placeof and acts themselves sense-impressions the traceswhich they haveleft in the mind. The distinction is unimportant for our purpose, especiallysince

On Senseand Meaning ries of senseimpressionswhich I have had and acts, both internal and external, which I have performed. Such an idea is often imbued with feeling; the clarity of its separate parts varies and oscillates. The same sense is not always connected, even in the same man, with the same idea. The idea is subjective: one man's idea is not that of another. There result, as a matter of course, a variety of differencesin the ideas associatedwith the same sense.A painter, a horseman, and a zoologist will probably connect different ideas with the name 'Bucephalus.' This constitutes an essentialdistinction between the idea and sign's sense,which may be the common property of many people, and so is not a part of a mode of the individual mind. For one can hardly deny that mankind has a common store of thoughts which is transmitted from one generation to another.6 In the light of this, one need have no scruples in speaking simply of the sense,whereas in the caseof an idea one must, strictly speaking, add whom it belongs to and at what time. It might perhaps be said: Just as one man connects this idea, and another that idea, with the same word, so also one man can associatethis senseand another that sense. But there still remains a difference in the mode of connexion. They are not prevented from grasping the same sense;but they cannot have the same idea. Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If rwo persons picture the same thing, each still has his own idea. It is indeed sometimes possible to esrablish differencesin the ideas, or even in the sensations,of different men; but an exact comparison is not possible, becausewe cannot have both ideas together in the same consciousness. The meaning of a proper name is the obiect itself which we designateby using it; the idea which we have in that case is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense,which is indeed no longer subjective like the idea, but is yet nor the object itself. The following analogy will perhaps clarify these relationships. Somebody observesthe Moon through a telescope. I compare the Moon itself to the meaning; it is the object of the observarion, mediated by the real image projecred by the object glass in the intememories of sense-impressionsand acts always go along with such impressions and acts themselves to complete the perpetual image. one may on the other hand ,tnderstand direct experience as includin g any object in so far as it is sensibly perceptible or spatial. [Au.] 5Hence it is inadvisable to use the word'idea'to designate something so basically different. [Au.]

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rior of the telescope,and by the retinal image of the observer. The former I compare to the sense,the latter is like the idea or experience.The optical image in the telescopeis indeed one-sided and dependent upon the standpoint of observation; but it is still objective, inasmuch as it can be used by several observers.At any rate it could be arranged for several to use it simultaneously. But each one would have his own retinal image. On account of the diverse shapes of the observers' eyes, even a geometrical congruence could hardly be achieved, and an actual coincidencewould be out of the question. This analogy might be developedstill further, by assuming A's retinal image made visible to B; or A might also seehis own retinal image in a mirror. In this way we might perhaps show how an idea can itself be taken as an object, but as such is not for the observer what it directly is for the person having the idea. But to pursue this would take us too far afield. 'We can now recognize three levels of difference between words, expressions, or whole sentences. The differencemay concern at most the ideas, or the sensebut not the meaning, or, finall5 the meaning as well. til7ith respect to the first level, it is ro be noted that, on account of the uncertain connexion of ideas with words, a difference may hold for one person, which another does not find. The difference between a translation and the original text should properly not overstep the first level. To the possible difference here belong also the colouring and shadittg which poetic eloquence seeks to give to the sense. Such colouring and shading are not objective, and must be evoked by each hearer or reader according to the hints of the poet or the speaker. rU7ithout some affinity in human ideas art would certainly be impossible; but it can never be exactly determined how far the intentions of the poer are realized. In what follows there will be no further discussion of ideas and experiences;they have been mentioned here only to ensure that the idea aroused in the hearer by a word shall not be confused with its senseor its meaning. To make short and exact expressionspossible, let the following phraseology be established: A proper name (word, sign, sign combination, expression) expressesits sense, means or designates its meaning. By employing a sign we express its senseand designateits meaning. Idealists or scepticswill perhaps long since have

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'You talk, without further ado, of the obiected: Moon as an object; but how do you know that the name "the Moon" has any meaning? How do you know that anything whatsoever has a meaning?' I 'the Moonr' we do not inreply that when we say tend to speak of our idea of the Moon, nor are we satisfiedwith the sensealone, but we presupposea meaning. To assumethat in the sentence'The Moon is smaller than the Earth' the idea of the Moon is in question, would be flatly to misunderstand the sense.If this is what the speaker wanted, he would '-y idea of the Moon.' Now we can use the phrase of course be mistaken in the presupposition, and such mistakes have indeed occurred. But the question whether the presupposition is perhaps always mistaken need not be answered here; in order to justify mention of that which a sign means it is enough, at first, to point our intention in speaking or thinking. (We must then add the reservation: provided such a meaning exists.) So far we have consideredthe senseand meaning only of such expressions,words, or signs as we have 'We now inquire concerning called proper names. the senseand meaning of an entire assertoric sentence. Such a Sentencecontains a thought.t Is this thought, now, to be regarded as its sense or its meaning? Let us assumefor the time being that the sentencedoes mean something. If we now replace one word of the sentence by another having the same meaning, but a different sense,this can have no effect upon the meaning of the sentence.Yet we can see that in such a case the thought changes; 'The mornsince, €.g., the thought in the sentence ing star is a body illuminated by the Sun' differs 'The evening star is a body from that in the sentence illuminated by the Sun.' Anybody who did not know that the evening star is the morning star might hold the one thought to be true, the other false. The thought, accordingln cannot be what is meant by the sentence,but must rather be considered as its sense.What is the position now with regard to the meaning? Have we a right even to inquire about it? Is it possible that a sentence as a whole has only a sense,but no meaning? At any ratq one might expect that such sentences occur' just as ther e areparts of sentenceshaving sensebut 'By ^ thought I understandnot the subjectiveperfor*"n.. of thinking but its objectivecontent'which l-scapableof beingthe commonproperty of severalthinkers. lAu.l

no meaning. And sentenceswhich contain proper names without meaning will be of this kind. The 'Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sentence sound asleep' obviously has a sense.But since it is 'Odysseusr' occurring doubtful whether the name doubtful whether it is also means anything, therein, the whole sentencedoes. Yet it is certain, nevertheless,that anyone who seriously took the sentenceto 'Odysbe true or false would ascribe to the name of what it is for sense; a seus'a meanitg, not merely the name means that the predicate is affirmed or de'S7hoever does not admit the name has meannied. ing can neither apply nor withhold the predicate. But in that caseit would be superfluous to advance to what the name means; one could be satisfied with the sense,if one wanted to go no further than the thought. tf it were a question only of the senseof the sentence,the thought, it would be needlessto bother with what is meant by a part of the sentence; only the sense,not the meaning, of the part is relevant to the senseof the whole sentence.The thought 'Odysseus' means Someremains the Samewhether thing or not. The fact that we concern ourselves at all about what is meant by a part of the sentence indicates that we generally recognize and expect a meaning for the sentenceitself. The thought loses that the meanvalue for us as soon as we recognize 'We are therefore ing of one of its parts is missittg. sense of a the with satisfied being not in fustified sentence,and in inquiring also as to its meaning. But now why do we want every proper name to have not only sense'but also a meaning? \(hy is " the thought not enough for us ? Because,and to the extent that, we are concerned with its truth-value. This is not always the case. In hearing an epic poem, for instance, apart from the euphony of the irtrgu"g. we are interested only in the sense of the sentencesand the images and feelings thereby aroused. The question of truth would cause us to abandon aesthetic delight for an attitude of scientific investigation. Hence it is a matter of no con'Odysseusr' for incern to us whether the name stance,has meaning, so long as we accept the poem as a work of art.t It is the striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the thing meant. 8It would be desirableto have a specialterm for signs havingonly sense.If we namethem,say'-representations' the w6rds of the actorson the stagewould be representations; indeedthe actor himself would be a representation. [Au.]

On Senseand Meaning We have seenthat the meaning of a sentencemay always be sought, whenever the meaning of its components is involved; and that this is the case when and only when we are inquiring after the truth-value. We are therefore driven into accepting rhe truthualue of a sentenceas constituting what it means. By the truth-value of a sentenceI understand the circumstance that it is true or false. There are no further truth-values. For brevity I call the one the True, the other the False. Every assertoric sentence concerned with what its words mean is therefore ro be regarded as a proper name, and its meaning, if it has one, is either the True or the False. These two objects are recognized, if only implicitly, by everybody who judges something to be true-and so even by r sceptic. The designation of the truth values as objects may appear to be an arbitrary fancy or perhaps a mere play upon words, from which no profound consequencescould be drawn. IThat I am calling an obiect can be more exactly discussedonly in connexion with concept and relation. I will reserve this for another article.t But so much should already be clear, that in every judgmetrt,'ono matter how trivial, the step from the level of thoughts to the leyel of meaning (the objective) has already been taken. One might be tempted ro regard the relation of the thought to the True not as that of senseto meanirg, but rather as that of subject to predicate. One can, indeed, say: 'The thought that 5 is a prime number is true.' But closer examination shows that nothing more has been said than in the simple sen'5 tence is a prime number.' The truth claim arises in each case from the form of the assertoric sentence, and when the latter lacks its usual force, e.g., in the mouth of an actor upon the stage, even the sentence'The thought that 5 is a prime number is true' contains only a thought, and indeed the same thought as the simple'5 is a prime number.'It follows that the relation of the thought to rhe True may not be compared with that of subject to predicate. subject and predicate (understood in the logical sense)are just elements of thought; they srand on the same level for knowledge. By combining subject and predicate, one reaches only a thought, never eSeehis 'ueber Begriff und Gegenstand' (-.}9z), jn Transpp. 4;--4S. [Tr.] Seenote 3 above. [Eds.] .^lations, 10Ajudgmenr, for me, is not the mere graspingof a ihoughr, but the admission of its truth. tAu.l

629

passesfrom senseto meaning, never from a thought to its truth-value. one moves at the same level but never advances from one level to the next. A truthvalue cannot be a part of a thought, any more than, say, the Sun can, for it is not a sensebut an object. If our supposition that the meaning of a sentence is its truth-value is correct, the latter must remain unchanged when a part of the sentence is replaced by an expression with the same meaning. And this is in fact the case. Leibniz gives the definition: 'Eadem sunt, quae sibi mutuo substitui possunt, salua ueritate.' If we are dealing with sentencesfor which the meaning of their componenr parts is at all relevant, then what feaftre except the truth-value can be found that belongs to such sentencesquite generally and remains unchanged by substitutions of the kind just menrioned? If now the truth-value of a sentence is its meanirg, then on the one hand all true sentenceshave the same meaning and so, on the other hand, do all false sentences.From this we see that in the meaning of the sentenceall that is specific is obliterated. 'We can never be concerned only with the meaning of a sentence; but again the mere thought alone yields no knowledge, but only the thought together with its meaning, i.e. its truth-value. Judgments can be regarded as advances from a thought to a truthvalue. Naturally this cannot be a definition. Judgment is something quite peculiar and incomparable. one might also say that judgments are distinctions of parts within truth-values. Such distinction occurs by ^ return to the thought. To every senseattaching to a truth-value would correspond its own manner of analysis. However, I have here used the word 'part' in a special sense. I have in fact transferred the relation between the parts and the whole of the sentenceto its meaning, by calling the meaning of a word part of the meaning of the sentence, if the word itself is a part of the sentence. This way of speaking can certainly be attacked, because the total meaning and one part of it do not suffice to determine the remainder, and because the word 'part' is already used of bodies in another sense.A special term would need to be invented. The supposition that the truth value of a sentence is what it means shall now be put to further test. 'we have found that the truth-value of a senrence remains unchanged when an expression is replaced by another with the same meaning: but we have not yet considered the case in which the expression to be replaced is itself a sentence.Now if our view is

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correct, the truth-value of.a Sentencecontaining another as part must remain unchanged when the part is replaced by another sentence having the same truth-value. Exceptions are to be expected when the whole sentenceor its part is direct or indirect quotation; for in such cases as we have seen' the words do not have their customary meaning. In direct quotation, a sentencedesignatesanother sentence, and in indirect speecha thought. 'We are thus led to consider subordinate sentences or clauses.These occur as parts of a sentencecomplex, which is, from the logical standpoint, likewise a sentence-a main sentence.But here we meet the question whether it is also true of the subordinate sentencethat its meaning is a truth-value. Of indirect speech we alre ady know the opposite. Grammarians view the subordinate clauses as representatives of parts of sentencesand divide them accordingly into noun clauses,adiectiveclauses,adverbial clauses.This might generatethe supposition that the meaning of a subordinate clause was not a truth-value but rather of the samekind as the meaning of a noun or adjective or adverb-in short, of a part of a sentence,whose sensewas not a thought but onl y a part of a thought. Only a more thorough investigation can clarify the issue. In so doing, w€ shall not follow the grammatical categoriesstrictln but rather group together what is logically of the same kind. Let us first search for casesin which the senseof the subordinate clause,as we have iust supposed, is not an independent thought. The caseof an abstractll noun clause,introduced 'that,' includes the caseof indirect quotation, in by which we have seenthe words to have their indirect meaning, coincident with what is customarily their Sense.In this case,then, the subordinate clause has for its meaning a thought, not a truth-value; as 'the sensenot a thought, but the senseof the words thought that (etc.),' which is only a part of the thought in the entire complex sentence.This h"p'hearr' 'be of the opinionr' 'be conpens after'rayr' 'conclude,' and similar words.t' There is a vincedr' different, and indeed somewhat complicated, situa11Fregeprobablymeansclausesgrammaticallyreplaceable 'Smith deniesthat by an-abstractnoun-phrase;9.8., 'Smith deniesthe existenceof dragons'; d'ragonsexist''denies','that Brown is or again, in this context after 'the wisdomof Brown.' by [Tr.] wisetis replaceable 12In'A lied in sayinghe had seenB,' the subordinate clause a thought which is said (r ) to havebeenasdesignates r.tt.d by A (z) while A was convincedof its falsiry.[Au.]

'perceive,' 'know,' 'fancyr' which tion afterwords like are to be consideredlater. That in the casesof the first kind the meaning of the subordinate clause is in fact the thought can also be recognized by seeingthat it is indifferent to the truth of the whole whether the subordinate clause is true or false. Let us comPatq for instance' 'Copernicus believed that the the two sentences 'Copernicus beplanetary orbits are circles' and lieved that the apparent motion of the sun is produced by the real motion of the Earth.' One subordinate clause can be substituted for the other without harm to the truth. The main clause and the subordinate clausetogether have as their senseonly a single thought, and the truth of the whole includes neither the truth nor the untruth of the subordinate clause.In such casesit is not permissibleto replace one expressionin the subordinate clause by another having the same customary meaning, but only by one having the same indirect meaning, i.e. the Same customary sense.Somebody might conclude: The meaning of a sentenceis not its truthvalue, for in that caseit could always be replaced by another sentenceof the same truth-value. But this proves too much; one might iust as well claim that 'morning star' is not Venus, since the meaning of 'Venus' in place of 'morning one may not always say star.' One has the right to conclude only that the meaning of a sentenceis not always its truth value, 'morning star' does not always mean the and that planet Venus, vrz. when the word has its indirect meaning. An exception of such a kind occurs in the subordinate clause iust considered which has a thought as its meaning. 'It 'It If one SayS seemsthat . .' Onemeans seems 'I think that . . .' lUTetherefore to me that . . .' or have the same caseagain. The situation is similar in 'to 'to be pleased,' the case of expressionssuch as 'to 'to 'to approver' 'to blamer' fear.' hoper' regretr' \ililaterloo,t' Wellof battle the of end If, toward the ington was glad that the Prussianswere coming, the basis for his joy was a conviction. Had he been deceived, he would have been no less pleased so long as his illusion lasted; and before he became so convinced he could not have been pleasedthat the Prussians were coming-even though in fact they might have been already approaching. a Just as a conviction or a belief is the ground of 13Fregeusesthe Prussianname for the battle-'Belle Alliance.'[Tr.]

On Senseand Meaning feeling, it can, as in inference, also be the ground of 'Columbus inferred a conviction. In the sentence: from the roundness of the Earth that he could reach India by travelling towards the west,' we have as the meanings of the parts rwo thoughts, that the Earth is round, and that Columbus by travelling to the west could reach India. All that is relevant here is that Columbus was convinced of both, and that the 'sfhether one conviction was a ground for the other. the Earth is really round and Columbus could really reach India by travelling west, as he thought, is immaterial to the truth of our sentence; but it is 'the Earth' not immaterial whether we replace 'the planet which is accompanied by a moon by whose diameter is greater than the fourth part of its own.' Here also we have the indirect meaning of the words. 'in order that' Adverbial final clauses beginning purpose is a for the here; obviously belong also thought; therefore: indirect meaning for the words, subiunctive mood. 'that' after'commandr' A subordinate clausewith 'askr' 'forbidr' would appear in direct speech as an imperative. Such a sentence has no meaning but only a sense. A command, a request) are indeed not thoughts, but they stand on the same level as thoughts. Hence in subordinate clauses depending 'commandr' 'askr' etc., words have their indiupon rect meaning. The meaning of such a clauseis therefore not a truth-value but a command, a request, and so forth. The case is similar for the dependent question 'not 'doubt to know whether' in phrases such as what.' It is easy to see that here also the words are to be taken to have their indirect meaning. Dependent clauses expressing questions and beginning 'whor' 'whatr' 'wherer' 'whenr' 'howr' 'by what with meansr' etc., seem at times to approximate very closely to adverbial clauses in which words have their customary meanings. These cases are distinguished linguistically [in German] by the mood of the verb. \fith the subjunctive, we have a dependent question and indirect meanings of the words, so that a proper name cannot in general be replaced by another name of the same object. In the cases so far considered the words of the subordinate clauseshad their indirect meanitg, and this made it clear that the meaning of the subordinate clause itself was indirect, i.e. not a truth-value but a thought, a command, a request, a question. The subordinate clause could be regarded as a

63t

noun, indeed one could say: as a proper name of that thought, that command, etc., which it represented in the context of the sentencestructure. \We now come to other subordinate clauses, in which the words do have their customary meaning without however a thought occurring as senseand a truth-value as meaning. How this is possible is best made clear by examples. 'S(hoever

discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits died in miserY.

If the senseof the subordinate clausewere here a thought, it would have to be possible to express it also in a separatesentence.But it does not work, be'whoever' has no incause the grammatical subiect dependent sense and only mediates the relation 'died in misery.' For this with the consequentclause reason the senseof the subordinate clause is not a complete thought, and what it means is Kepler, not a truth value. One might object that the senseof the whole does contain a thought as part, vrz. that there was somebody who first discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits; for whoever takes the whole to be true cannot deny this part. This is undoubtedly so; but only becauseotherwise the de'whoever discovered the elliptic pendent clause form of the planetary orbits' would have nothing to mean. If anything is assertedthere is always an obvious presupposition that the simple or compound proper names used have meaning. If therefore one 'Kepler died in miserR' there is a presupposiasserts 'Kepler' designatessomething; tion that the name but it does not follow that the senseof the sentence 'Kepler died in misery' contains the thought that 'Kepler' designatessomethittg. If this were the name the case the negation would have to run not Kepler did not die in misery but Kepler did not die in misery, or the name 'Kepler' has no reference. 'Kepler' designatessomething is just That the name as much a presupposition for the assertion Kepler died in misery as for the contrary assertion. Now languages have the fault of containing expressions which fail to

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designate an object (although their grammatical form seems to qualify them for that purpose) because the truth of some sentence is a prerequisite. Thus it depends on the truth of the sentence: There was someone who discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits whether the subordinate clause 'Whoever

discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits

really designatesan obiect, or only seemsto do so while in fact there is nothing for it to mean. And thus it may appear as if our subordinate clausecontained as a part of its sense the thought that there was somebody who discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits. If this were right the negation would run: Either whoever discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits did not die in misery or there was nobody who discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits. This arises from an imperfection of language, from which even the symbolic language of mathematical analysis is not altogether free; even there combinations of symbols can occur that seem to mean something but (at least so far) do not mean anything, e.g. divergent infinite series.This can be avoided, €.g., by means of the special stipulation that divergent infinite series shall mean the number o. A logically perfect language (Begriffsschrift) should satisfy the conditions, that every expression grammatically well constructed as a proper name out of signs already introduced shall in fact designate an object, and that no new sign shall be introduced as a proper name without being secured a meaning. The logic books contain warnings against logical mistakes arising from the ambiguity of expressions. I regard as no less pertinent a warning against apparent proPer names without any meanirg. The history of mathematics supplies errors which have arisen in this way. This lends itself to demagogic abuse as easily as ambiguity-perhaps 'The will of the people' can serve as an more easily. example; for it is easy to establish that there is at

any rate no generally accepted meaning for this expression. It is therefore by no means unimportant to eliminate the source of these mistakes, at least in science,once and for all. Then such obfections as the one discussedabove would become impossible, because it could never depend upon the ffuth of a thought whether a proper name had meaning. \(ith the consideration of thesenoun clausesmay be coupled that of types of adjective and adverbial clauseswhich are logically in close relation to them. Adjective clauses also serve to construct compound proper names, though, unlike noun clauses, they are not sufficient by themselves for this purpose. These adjective clausesare to be regarded as 'the square root equivalent to adiectives.Instead of 'the of + which is smaller than o,' one can also say 'We negativesquare root of +.' have here the caseof a compound proper name constructed from the expression for a concept with the help of the singular definite article. This is at any rate permissible if the concept applies to one and only one single object." Expressions for concepts can be so constructed that marks of a concept are given by adiective 'which is clausesas, in our example, by the clause smaller than o.' It is evident that such an adjective clause cannot have a thought as senseor a truthvalue as meaning, any more than the noun clause could. Its sense,which can also in many casesbe expressed by a single adjective, is only a part of a thought. Here, as in the case of the noun clause, there is no independent subject and therefore no possibiliry of reproducing the senseof the subordinate clause in an independent sentence. Places, instants, stretches of time, logically considered, are obiects; hence the linguistic designation of a definite place, a definite instant, or a stretch of time is to be regarded as a proper name. Now adverbial clausesof place and time can be used to construct such a proper name in much the same way as we have seennoun and adjective clausescan. In the same way, expressions for concepts that apply to places, etc., can be constructed. It is to be noted here also that the senseof these subordinate clauses cannot be reproduced in an independent sentence, since an essential component, viz. the determinaraIn accordance with what was saidbefore,an expression of the kind in questionmust actuallyalwaysbe assured of meaning,by meansof a specialstipulation,e.g.by the conventionthat it shall count as meaningo when the conceptappliesto no objector to more than one. [Au.]

On Senseand Meaning tion of place or time, is missing and is iust indicated by r relative pronoun or a conjunction.15 In conditional clauses,also, there most often recognizably occurs an indefinite indicator, with a correlative indicator in the dependent clause. (We have already seen this occur in noun, adjective, and adverbial clauses.)In so far as each indicator relatesto the other, both clauses together form a connected whole, which as a rule expresses only a single thought. In the sentence If a number is less than r and greater than o, its square is lessthan r and greater than o the component in question is 'a number' in the an'its' tecedent clause and in the consequentclause.It is by means of this very indefiniteness that the sense acquires the generality expected of a law. It is this which is responsible for the fact that the antecedent clause alone has no complete thought as its sense and in combination with the consequent clause expressesone and only one thought, whose parts are no longer thoughts. It is, in general, incorrect to say that in the hypothetical judgment two judgments are put in reciprocal relationship. If this or something similar is said, the word 'judgment' is used in the same sense as I have connected with the word lsIn the caseof thesesentences, various interpretations are easily possible.The senseof the sentence,'After was separatedfrom Denmark,PrusSchleswig-Holstein sia and Austria quarrelled'can be renderedin the form 'After the separationof Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark, Prussiaand Austria quarrelled.'In this version,it is surelysufficientlyclearthat the senseis not to be taken as havingas a part the thought that Schleswig-Holstein was once separatedfrom Denmark, but that this is the necessarypresuppositionin order for the expression 'after the separationof Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark' to haveany meaningat all. To be sure,our sentencecan also be interpretedas sayingthat SchleswigHolstein was once separatedfrom Denmark. We then havea casewhich is to be consideredlater. In order to understandthe differencemore clearlR let us project ourselvesinto the mind of a Chinesewho, having little knowledgeof Europeanhistory believesit to be false that Schleswig-Holsteinwas ever separatedfrom Denmark. He will take our sentence, in the first version,to be neither true nor false but will deny it to have any meaning,on the groundthat its subordinateclauselacks a meaning.This clausewould only apparentlydetermine a time. If he interpretedour sentencein the secondway, however,he would find a thought expressedin it which he would take to be false,beside^ part which would be without meaningfor him. [Au.]

6ll

'thought,'

so that I would use the formulation: 'A hypothetical thought establishesa reciprocal relationship between fwo thoughts.' This could be true only if an indefinite indicator is absent;tt but in such a casethere would also be no generality. If an instant of time is to be indefinitely indicated in both the antecedent and the consequent clause, this is often achieved merely by using the present tense of the verb, which in such a casehowever does not indicate the temporal present.This grammatical form is then the indefinite indicator in the main and subordinate clauses.An example of this is: ''When the Sun is in the tropic of Cancer, the longest day in the northern hemisphere occurs.' Here, also, it is impossible to express the senseof the subordinate clause in a full sentence,becausethis senseis not a complete thought. If we say: 'The Sun is in the tropic of Cancer,' this would refer to our present time and thereby change the sense.Neither is the senseof the main clause a thought; only the whole, composed of main and subordinate clauses, has such a sense.It may be added that severalcommon components may be indefinitely indicated in the antecedent and consequentclauses. It is clear that noun clauseswith 'who' or 'what' and adverbial clauseswith 'wherer' 'wh€rr' 'whereverr' 'whenever' are often to be interpreted as having the sense of antecedent clauses, €.g. 'who touches pitch, defiles himself.' Adjective clausescan also take the place of conditional clauses.Thus the senseof the sentencepreviously used can be given in the form 'The square of a number which is less than r and greater than o is less than r and greater than o.' The situation is quite different if the common component of the two clauses is designated by a proper name. In the sentence: Napoleon, who recognized the danger to his right flank, himself led his guards against the enemy position two thoughts are expressed: r. Napoleon recognized the danger to his right flank z. Napoleon himself led his guards against the enemy position. 16At timesthere is no linguisticallyexplicit indicator and one must be readoff from the entirecontext.[Au.]

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\il7hen and where this happened is to be fixed only by the context, but is nevertheless to be taken as definitely determined thereby. If the entire sentence is uttered as an assertion, we thereby simultaneously assertboth component sentences.If one of the parts is false, the whole is false. Here we have the casethat the subordinate clauseby itself has a complete thought as sense(if we complete it by indication of place and time). The meaning of the subordinate clause is accordingly a truth-value. We can therefore expect that it may be replaced, without harm to the truth-value of the whole, by sentence " having the sametruth-value. This is indeed the case; but it is to be noticed that for purely grammatical reasons, its subject must be 'Napoleonr' for only then can it be brought into the form of an adjec'Napoleon.' tive clause attaching to But if the demand that it be expressedin this form is waived, and the connexion shown by 'and,' this restriction disappears. Subsidiary clausesbeginning with 'although' also express complete thoughts. This coniunction actually has no senseand does not change the senseof the clause but only illuminates it in a peculiar fashion.tt'We could indeed replace the concessiveclause without harm to the truth of the whole by another of the same truth-value; but the light in which the clause is placed by the coniunction might then easily appear unsuitable, as if a song with a sad subject were to be sung in a lively fashion. In the last casesthe truth of the whole included the truth of the component clauses.The caseis different if an antecedentclause expressesa complete thought by containirg, in place of an indefinite indicator, a proper name or something which is to be regarded as equivalent. In the sentence If the Sun has alr eady risen, the sky is very cloudy the time is the present, that is to say, definite. And the place is also to be thought of as definite. Here it can be said that a relation between the truth-values of antecedent and consequent clauseshas been asserted, vrz. that the casedoes not occur in which the antecedent means the True and the consequent the False. AccordinglS our sentenceis true if the Sun has not yet risen, whether the sky is very cloudy or lTSimilarlyin the caseof 'but,' 'yet.' [Au.]

not, and also if the Sun has risen and the sky is very cloudy. Sinceonly truth-values are here in question, each component clause can be replaced by another of the same truth-value without changing the truthvalue of the whole. To be sure, the light in which the subject then appears would usually be unsuitable; the thought might easily seem distorted; but this has nothing to do with its truth-value. One must always observe that there are overtones of subsidiary thoughts, which are however not explicitly expressedand therefore should not be reckoned in the sense. Hence, also, no account need be taken of their truth-values.tt The simple caseshave now been discussed.Let us review what we have learned. The subordinate clause usually has for its sense not a thought, but only a part of one, and consequently no truth-value is being meant. The reason for this is either that the words in the subordinate clause have indirect meaning, so that the meanirg, not the sense, of the subordinate clause is a thought; or else that, on account of the presenceof an indefinite indicator, the subordinate clause is incomplete and expressesa thought only when combined with the main clause. It may happen, however, that the sense of the subsidiary clause is a complete thought, in which case it can be replaced by another of the same truth value without harm to the truth of the whole-provided there are no grammatical obstacles. An examination of all the subordinate clauses which one may encounter will soon provide some which do not fit well into thesecategories.The reason, so far as I can see, is that these subordinate clauseshave no such simple sense.Almost llways, it seems, we connect with the main thoughts expressedby us subsidiary thoughts which, although not expressed,are associatedwith our words, in accordance with psychological laws, by the hearer. And since the subsidiary thought appears to be connected with our words on its own account, almost like the main thought itself, we want it also to be expressed.The senseof the sentenceis thereby enriched, and it may well happen that we have more simple thoughts than clauses. In many cases the 18The thought of our sentencemight also be expressed thus: 'Eitherthe Sunhasnot risenyet or the sky is very cloudy'-which showshow this kind of sentenceconnexionis to be understood.[Au.]

On Senseand Meaning sentencemust be understood in this way, in others it may be doubtful whether the subsidiary thought belongs to the senseof the sentenceor only accompanies it.t' One might perhaps find that the sentence

Napoleon, who recognizedthe danger to his right flank, himselfled his guardsagainst the enemyposition expressesnot only the rwo thoughts shown above, but also the thought that the knowledge of the danger was the reason why he led the guards against the enemy position. One may in fact doubt whether this thought is just slightly suggestedor really expressed. Let the question be considered whether our sentenceis false if Napoleon's decision had already been made before he recognizedthe danger. If our sentencecould be true in spite of this, the subsidiary thought should not be understood as part of the sense.One would probably decide in favour of this. The alternative would make for a quite complicated situation: We would have more simple thoughts than clauses.If the sentence Napoleon recognized the danger to his right flank were now to be replaced by another having the same truth value, e.g. Napoleon was already more than 45 yearsold not only would our first thought be changed, but also our third one. Hence the truth-value of the latter might change-vrz. if his age was not the reason for the decision to lead the guards against the enemy.This shows why clausesof equal truth-value cannot always be substituted for one another in such cases.The clause expressesmore through its connexion with another than it does in isolation. Let us now consider caseswhere this regularly happens. In the sentence: Bebel fancies that the return of AlsaceLorraine would appease France's desire for revenge

teThis may be important for the question whether an assertion is a lie, or an oath a perjury. [Au.]

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rwo thoughts are expressed,which are not however shown by means of antecedent and consequent clauses) vrz.i (r ) Bebel believesthat the return of AlsaceLorraine would appease France's desire for revenge (z) the return of Alsace-Lorraine would not appeaseFrance'sdesire for revenge. In the expression of the first thought, the words of the subordinate clause have their indirect meanirg, while the same words have their customary meaning in the expression of the second thought. This shows that the subordinate clause in our original complex sentenceis to be taken twice over, with different meanings: once for a thought, once for a truth value. Since the truth-value is not the total meaning of the subordinate clause,we cannot simply replace the latter by another of equal truth-value. Similar considerations apply to expressionssuch as 'knowr' 'discoverr' 'it is known that.' By means of a subordinate causal clause and the associatedmain clausewe expressseveralthoughts, which however do not correspond separately to the 'Becauseice is less original clauses.In the sentence: dense than water, it floats on water' we have (r ) Ice is less densethan water; (z) If anything is less dense than water, it floats on water; (3) Ice floats on water. The third thought, however, need not be explicitly introduced, since it is contained in the remaining two. On the other hand, neither the first and third nor the second and third combined would furnish the senseof our sentence.It can now be seen that our subordinate clause becauseice is less densethan water expressesour first thought, as well as a part of our second. This is how it comes to pass that our subsidiary clausecannot be simply replaced by another of equal truth value; for this would alter our second thought and thereby might well alter its truth value. The situation is similar in the sentence

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If iron were less dense than water, it would float on water. Here we have the two thoughts that iron is not less dense than water, and that something floats on water if it is less dense than water. The subsidiary clause again expressesone thought and a part of the other. If we interpret the sentencealready considered After Schleswig-Holstein was separated from Denmark, Prussiaand Austria quarrelled in such a way that it expresses the thought that Schleswig-Holstein was once separated from Denmark, we have first this thought, and secondly the thought that, at a time more closely determined by the subordinate clause, Prussia and Austria quarrelled. Here also the subordinate clause expresses not only one thought but also a part of another. Therefore it may not in general be replaced by another of the same truth-value. It is hard to exhaust all the possibilities given by language; but I hope to have brought to light at least the essentialreasons why a subordinate clause may not always be replaced by another of equal truth value without harm to the truth of the whole sentencestructure. These reasons arise: (r ) when the subordinate clause does not have a truth-value as its meaning, inasmuch as it expressesonly a part of.a thought; (z) when the subordinate clause does have a truth-value as its meaning but is not restricted to so doing, inasmuch as its senseincludes one thought and part of another.

The first case arises: (a) for words having indirect meaning (b) if a part of the sentenceis only an indefinite indicator instead of a proper name. In the second case, the subsidiary clause may have to be taken twice over, viz. once in its customary meaning, and the other time in indirect meaning; or the senseof a part of the subordinate clause may likewise be a component of another thought, which, taken together with the thought directly expressed by the subordinate clause, makes up the senseof the whole sentence. It follows with sufficient probability from the foregoing that the caseswhe rc a subordinate clause is not replaceable by another of the same value cannot be brought in disproof of our view that a truth-value is the meaning of a sentencethat has a thought as its sense. Let us return to our starting point. til(Ihenwe found ' a: a' and 'a: b' to have different cognitive values, the explanation is that for the purpose of knowledge, the sense of the sentence, viz., the thought expressed by it, is no less relevant than its meaning, i.e. its truth-value. If now d: b, 'b' is the same as then indeed what is meant by 'a,' and hence the truth-value of what is meant by 'a:4.) In spite of this, 'A: b' is the same as that of 'a,' 'b' may and differ from that of the sense of 'A: b' differs from thereby the thought expressedin that of a: a.' In that case the two sentencesdo not have the same cognitive value. If we understand by 'judgment' the advance from the thought to its truth-value, as in the present paper, we can also say that the judgments are different.

CharlesSanders Peirce ,839-r9r4

CharlesSandersPeirce(pronounced"purse") is widely acknowl\Y/"tt" edgedas the founder of pragmatism,he expressedhis own mild disapYY proval of what "pragmatism" had becomeas'lTilliam Jamesand othershad developedit and, typically,mademattersslightly difficult by characterizinghis own view as "pragmaticism." In Peirce'soriginal formulation, pragmatismwas presentedasa way of conceivingobjectsaccordingto their effects;but his later view changedthe emphasisfrom the object to the symbol.The pragmaticistmaxim is that "The entire intellectual purport of a symbol consistsin the totality of all generalmodesof rational conduct which . . . would ensueupon the acceptance of the symbol" (see"Issuesof Pragmaticismr"The Monist r5 [October r9o5]: +8r-gg). WhereasJameshad interpreted pragmatism psychologicallSPeirce treated it logically and semiotically-and in fact coined the word "semiotics" severaldecadesbefore Ferdinandde Saussurepredictedthe emergenceof "semiology" as the generalstudy of signs. Like Gorlob Frege,Peircewas profoundly interestedin the foundations of logic; and, also like Frege,he developeda representationalformalism (which he called "existential graphs") of considerableexpressiveness-but notorious obscurity.rU7illiamJamesis reported to haveviewed Peirceas perhapsthe only one of his fellow studentsand colleaguesat Harvard with genuinephilosophical genius; but Peirce'sdifficulties in receivingand keeping academicappointments left him professionallyisolated, and, for the most part, living in genuine misery. A major difficulty facedby modern studentsof Peirceis the apparentlymiscellaneouscharacterof his papers.Apart from severalseriesof articlesin Thelournal of SpeculatiuePhilosophy ft865), Popular ScienceMonthly ft877-78),and TheMonist (r89t-92, r9o5) and severalarticleswritten for Baldwin'sDictionary ft9oz), the greatbulk of Peirce'swriting was not publishedin his lifetime. He did not write any singlebook but did leave,in manuscript,an extraordinarycollection of loosely connectedpapers,developinga philosophicalposition rhat is diffi cult to characterize. It is important that Peirce'sinterest in signs,having emergedfrom his reflections on classicalproblemsof nominalism,realism,and representation,is hardly evidentat all in his publishedwritings but appearsdominant in the unpublished manuscripts. An important, though difficult, clue lies in Peirce'searly essay,"On a New List of Categories"(1857).The essayis unusualin manyrespects,not leastof which is its style,which is simultaneouslyreminiscentof Duns Scotus,Kant, and Hegel;

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Pnrncn Cnenrrs SeNnnns in this context, seeJohnE. Boler'sCharlesPeirceand ScholasticRealismftg6il. Peirce'sargumentis equallystrange,starting with the premisethat the cognition of an object is alwaysdependenton reducingimpressionsto the unity of a proposition, whereasthe capacityto determinethe identity of an objectis alwaysdependent on the "indefinite determinability" of predicates."Being," in this scheme,is just the copula,the "is" of predication,and as suchthe conceptof "Being" has no content.Thus, accordingto Peirce,if we say,"'The stoveis blackr' the stoveis the substance,from which its blacknesshas not beendifferentiated,and the is, while it leavesthe substancejust as it was seen,explainsits confusedness, by the applicationto it of blacknessas a predicate"(CollectedPapers,r : 548). If this mannerof argumentleavesa readerin somestateof "confusednessr"it is becausePeircediscriminatesin this way between"substance"and "being": "Substanceis inapplicableto a predicate,and beingis equallyso to a subject." The essentialpoint is this: the very conceptionof a "being" dependson the formation of a proposition, linking subject and predicate;but any obiect is then itself a mediatingrepresentationthat is intelligible only by the mental activity of a consciousnessconstructing another mediating representationwhich Peirce calls the "interpretant." The result is that the "substance" of subjectsand the "being" of predicatesjoin in obiectswhich arepropositions,and the highest"reality" belongsto the sign or symbol. While one might observethat this is an ingeniousway to effect a resolution betweennominalismand realism,it is alsothe beginningof a massivespeculative projectin the studyof signs,or "semiotics."In the lemerto Lady Welbyincluded here, Peirceexplains his theory of the categoriesof "Firstnessr""Secondness," and "Thirdness," linking these ideas to his theory of signs as consisting of "Iconsr" "Indicesr"and "Symbols." Most of Peirce'spapershavebeenpublishedin The CollectedPapersof Charles 'Weiss, SandersPeirce,ed. Arthur Burks, CharlesHartshorne, and Paul 8 vols.. (r93r-58). A new chronologicaledition of the papersis now beingpublished by Indiana University Press.Severalshorter selectionsare available:seeespecially CharlesSandersPeirceSelectedVritings: Valuesin a IJniuerseof Chance, ed. Philip P. Weiner (tg j8), and CharlesS. Peirce: The EssentialWritings, ed. Edward C. Moore (tgZz). SeealsoBruceKuklick, The Riseof American Philosophy: Cambridge,Massachusetts, t86o-19 jo (tgZl), and John Boler,Charles Peirceand ScholasticRealismft56i.

Letters to Lady Welby FROM

LETTERSTO

LADY\rE,LBY P.O. Milford, Pa. r9o4, Oct. rz My dear Lady \UTelby: Not a day has passed since I received your lasr letter that I have not lamented the circumstancesthar prevented me from writing that very d^y the letter that I was intent upon writing to you, without my promising myself that it should soon be done. . . . For one thing, I wanted to express my surprise at finding you rather repelled the designation of a "rationalistr" and said that as a woman you were naturally conservative.of course, the lady of the house is usually the minister of foreign affairs (barring those of money and law) and as an accomplished diplomat, is careful and conservative. But when a woman takes up an idea my experience is that she does so with a singlenessof heart that distinguishesher. Some of my very best friends have been very radical women. I do not know that I don't think your recommending a serious consideration of changing the base of numeration is a bit radical. But I wanted to write to you about signs, which in your opinion and mine, are maffers of so much concern. More in mine, I think, than in yours. For in mine, the highest grade of reality is only reached by signs; that is, by such ideas as those of Truth and Right and the rest. Ir sounds paradoxical; but when I have devolved to you my whole theory of signs, it will seem less so. I think that I will today explain the outlines of my classificationof signs. You know that I particularly approve of inventing new words for new ideas. I do not know that the study I call ldeoscopy can be called a new idea, but the word phenomenology is used in a different sense.Ideoscopy consistsin describing and classifying the ideas that belong to ordinary experience or that naturally arise in connection with ordinary life, This letter was written on October r z, r9o4. It originally appearedin cbarles s. Peirce'sLettersto Lady wel"by,ed. Irwin c. Lieb (New Haven, 19s3) and is reprintedirere from charles s. Peirceselected'writings:valLesin a uniuerseof Chant_r,.9d.Philip P. \TeinerltgSg), by permission of Dover Publications.

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without regard to their being valid or invalid or to their psychology. In pursuing this study I was long ago ft867) led, after only three or four years' studS to throw all ideas into the three classesof Firstness, of Secondness,and of Thirdness.t This sort of notion is as distasteful to me as to anybody; and for years, I endeavoredto pooh-pooh and refute it; but it long ago conquered me completely. Disagreeable as it is to attribute such meaning to numbers, 6c to a triad above all, it is as true as it is disagreeable.The ideas of Firstness, Secondness,and Thirdness are simple enough. Giving to being the broadest possible sense,to include ideas as well as things, and ideasthat we fancy we have just as much as ideaswe do have, I should define Firstness,secondness,and Thirdness thus: Firstness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, positively and without reference to anything else. Secondnessis the mode of being of that which is such as it is, with respectto a second but regardless of any third. Thirdness is the mode of being of that which is such as it is, in bringing a second and third into relation to each other. I call these three ideas the cenopythagore an' categories. The typical ideas of Firstnessare qualities of feeli.g, or mere appearances.The scarlet of your royal liveries, the qualiry itself, independently of its being perceived or remembered, is an example, by which I do not mean that you are to imagine that you do not perceive or remember it, but that you are to drop out of account that which may be attached to it in perceiving or in remembering, but which does not belong to the quality. For example, when you remember it, your idea is said to be dimand when it is before your eyes,it is uiuid. But dimnessor vividness do not belong to your idea of the quality. They might no doubt, if considered simply as a feeling; but when you think of vividness you do not .orrsider it from that point of view. you think of it as a degree of disturbance of your consciousness.The tsee "on a New List of categories" (rg6), in The coll-e11edPapers of charles {anders peirce, r : zg799. [Eds.] 2A term coined by Peirce, from Greek kenos, "empty,,, and Pythagorean, after the pre-Socratic creek phii"rophgt and mathematician pythagoras (ca. 5 gz-5o7 n.c.). lEds.l

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quality of red is not thought of as belonging to you, or as attached to liveries. It is simply a peculiar positive possibility regardless of anything else. If you ask a mineralogist what hardnessis, he will say that it is what one predicates of a body that one cannot scratch with a knife. But a simple person will think of hardnessas a simple positive possibility the realization of which causesa body to be like a flint. That idea of hardnessis an idea of Firstness.The unanalyzed total impression made by any manifold not thought of as actual fact, but simply as a quality as simple positive possibility of appearance is an idea of Firstness. Notice the naiUetd of Firstness. The cenopythagorean categories are doubtless another attempt to charact errzewhat Hegel sought to charact errze as his three stages of thought.' They also correspond to the three categories of each of the four triads of Kant's table.o But the fact that these different attempts were independent of one another (the resemblanceof these Categories to Hegel's stages was not remarked for many years after the list had been under study, owing to my antipathy to Hegel) only goes to show that there really are three such elements. The idea of the present instant, which, whether it exists or not, is naturally thought as a point of time in which no thought can take place or any detail be separated,is an idea of Firstness. The type of an idea of Secondnessis the experience of effort, prescindedt from the idea of a purpose. It may be said that there is no such experience, that a purpose is always in view as long as the effort is cogn rzed.This may be open to doubt; for in sustained effort we soon let the purpose drop out of view. However, I abstain from psychology which has nothing to do with ideoscopy. The existence of the wo rd efforl is sufficient proof that people think they have such an idea; and that is enough. The experience of effort cannot exist without the experience of resistance. Effort only is effort by virtue of its being opposed; and no third element enters. 3GeorgWilhelm FriedrichHegel(r7zo-r83r), German philoiopher. Seein this contexrleqefs The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. GeorgeLichtheim G%t; rpt' ry62). [Eds.] almmanuelKant (1724-r8o4), Germanphilosopher. See The Critique of Pure Reason,trans. Norman Kemp Smith(tgig; rpt. r g6+),p. rrl. [Eds.] sPrescind,to deiachor abitract. SeePeirce'sdiscussionof this conceptin "On a New List of Categories."[Eds.]

Note that I speak of the experience, not of the feeling, of effort. Imagine yourself to be seated alone at night in the basket of. a balloon, far above earth, calmly enioying the absolute calm and stillness. Suddenly the piercing shriek of a steam-whistle breaks upon you, and continues for a good while. The impression of stillnesswas an idea of Firstness, a qualiry of feeling. The piercing whistle does not allow you to think or do anything but suffer. So that too is absolutely simple. Another Firstness.But the breaking of the silenceby the noise was an experience. The person in his inertnessidentifies himself with the precedent state of feeling, and the new feeling which comes in spite of him is the non-ego. He has a rwo-sided consciousnessof an ego and a nonego. That consciousnessof the action of a new feeling in destroying the old feeling is what I call an ercperience. Experience generally is what the course of life has compelled me to think. Secondnessis either genuine or degenerate.There are many degrees of genuineness.Generally speakinggenuinesecondness consists in one thing acting upon another, brute action. I say brute, becauseso far as the idea of any law or reason comesin, Thirdness comes in.'S(hen a stone falls to the ground, the law of gravitation does not act to make it fall. The law of gravitation is the judge upon the bench who may pronounce the law till doomsdaR but unless the strong arm of the la*, the brutal sheriff, gives effect to the l"*, it amounts to nothing. True, the iudge can create a sheriff if need be; but he must have one. The stone's actually falting is purely the aff.ar of the stone and the earth at the time. This is a caseof reactioz. So is existence which is the mode of being of that which reacts with other things. But there is also action without reaction. Such is the action of the preuious upon the subsequent. It is a difficult question whether the idea of this one-sided determination is a pure idea of secondnessor whether it involves thirdness. At present, the former view seemsto me correct. I suppose that when Kant made Time a form of the internal sensealone, he was influenced by some such considerations as the following. The relation between the previous and the subsequent consists in the previous being determinate and fixed for the subsequent,and the subsequentbeing indeterminate for the previous. But indeterminacy belongs only to ideas; the existent is determinate in every respect; and this is just what the law of causation consists in. Accordingly, the relation of time

Letters to Lady Welby

j;H*:.ff::1i:ffi; ::,.* ":1TJin

there is nothing in the physical universe corresponding to our idea that the previous determines the subsequentin any way in which the subsequent does not determine the previous. For, according to that l"*, all that happens in the physical universe consists in the exchange of just so much uis uiua '/,m (ds/dt) ' for so much displacement. Now the square of a negative quantity being positive, it follows that if all the velocities were reversed at any instant, everything would go on just the same, only time going backward as it were. Everything that had happened would happen again in reverse order. These seem to me to be strong arguments to prove that temporal causation (a very different thing from physical dynamic action) is an action upon ideas and not upon existents. But since our idea of the past is precisely the idea of that which is absolutely determinate, fixed, fait accompli, and dead, as against the future which is living, plasric, and determinable, it appears to me that the idea of one-sided action, in so far as it concerns the being of the determinate, is a pure idea of Secondness;and I think that great errors of metaphysicsare due to looking at the future as something that will have been pasr. I cannot admit that the ide a of the future can be so translated into the Secundalideas of the past. To say that a given Kind of event never will happen is to deny that there is any date at which its happening will be past; but it is not equivalent to any affirmation about a past relative to any assignable date. \Ufhen we pass from the idea of an event to saying that it never will happen, or will happen in endless repetition, or introduce in any way the idea of endless repetition, I will say the idea is mellonized (mdllon, about to be, do, or suffer). '$fhen I conceive a fact as acting but not capable of being acted upon, I will say that it is pareldlythose (past) and the mode of being which consists in such action I will call parelelythosine (-ine - einai, being). I regard the former as an idea of Thirdness, the latter as an idea of secondness. I consider the idea of any dyadic relation not involving any third as an idea of Secondness;and I should not call any completely degenerateexcept the relation of identity. But similarity which is the only possible identiry of Firsts is very near to that. Dyadic relations have been classified by me in a grear variety of ways; but the most important are first with regard to the nature of the

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Second in itself and second with regard to the nature of its first. The Second, or Relate is, in itself, either a Referate, if it is intrinsically a possibilitS such as a Quality or it is a Reuelate if it is of its own nature an Existent. In respect to its first, the Second is divisible either in regard to the dynamic first or to the immediate first. In regard to its dynamic first, a Second is determined either by virtue of its own intrinsic nature, or by virtue of a real relation to that second (an action). Its immediate second is either a Quality or an Existent. I now come to Thirdness. To me, who have for forty years considered the matter from every point of view that I could discover,the inadequacy of Secondness to cover all that is in our minds is so evident that I scarce know how to begin to persuade any person of it who is not already convinced of it. Yet I see a great many thinkers who are trying to construct a system without putting any thirdness into it. Among them are some of my best friends who acknowledge themselves indebted to me for ideas but have never learned the principal lesson. very well. It is highly proper that secondnessshould be searched to its very bottom. Thus only can the indispensablenessand irreducibility of thirdness be made out, although for him who has the mind to grasp it, it is sufficient to say that no branching of a line can result from putting one line on the end of another. My friend Schrodert fell in love with my algebra of dyadic relations. The few pages I gave ro it in my Note B in the "studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins Universify" were proportionate to its import ance.' His book is profound,t but its profundity only makes it more clear that Secondness cannot compass Thirdness. (He is careful to avoid ever saying that it can, but he does go so far as to say that Secondnessis the more important. So it is, considering that Thirdness cannot be understood without Secondness.But as to its application, it is so inferior to Thirdness as to be in that aspect quite in a different world.) Even in the most degen5Theschroderto whom Peirce referswas a Germanprofessorof logic with whom Peircehad correspond.d,in referencero Peirce'sStudiesin Logic (rggl, ipr. tgSl). [Eds.] 7studies in Logic by Members of the Johns Hopkins uniuersity, edited by charles S. Peirce(Boston:Little, Brown 6ccompafry,r883). Peirce's "Note B" is reprinted in CollectedPapers,vol. 3. [Eds.] 8 lorlesungen ilber die Algebra der Logik (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,r 89o- rgo j). tEds.l

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erate form of Thirdness, and Thirdness has two grades of degeneracy, something may be detected which is not mere secondness.If you take any ordinary triadic relation, you will always find a mental element in it. Brute action is secondness, any mentality involves thirdness. Analyze for instance the relation involved in "A gives B to C." Now what is giving? It does not consist in A's putting B away from him and C's subsequentlytaking B up. It is not necessarythat any material transfer should take place. It consists in A's making C the possessoraccording to Lau. There must be some kind of law before there can be any kind of giving-be it but the law of the strongest. But now suppose that giving did consist merely in A's laying down the B which C subsequently picks up. That would be a degenerateform of Thirdness in which the thirdness is externally appended. In A's putting away B, there is no thirdness. In C's taking B, there is no thirdness. But if you say that these two acts constitute a single operation by virtue of the identity of the B, you transcend the mere brute factryou introduce a mental element. As to my algebra of dyadic relations, Russell in his book which is superficial to nauseating ffi€, has some silly remarks, about my "relative addition" etc., which are mere nonsense.tHe says, or \(rhitehead says, that the need for it seldom occurs. The need for it neuer occurs if you bring in the same mode of connection in any other way. It is part of a system which does not bring in that mode of connection in any other way. In that system, it is indispensable.But let us leave Russell and \$Thiteheadto work out their own salvation. The criticism which I make on that algebra of dyadic relations, with which I am by no means in love, though I think it is a pretty thing, is that the very triadic relations which it does not recognize, it does itself employ. For every combination of relatives to make a new relative is a triadic relation irreducible to dyadic relations. lts inadequacy is shown in other ways, but in this way it is in a conflict with itself if it be regarded, as I never did regard it, as sufficient for the expression of all relations. My universal algebra of relations, with the subjacent indices and I and fI is susceptible of being enlarged so as to comprise everything and so, still better, though not to ideal perfection, is the system of existential graphs.'o I eSee Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics ( r g % ) ,p . z a . [ E d s . ] 10See CollectedPapers,vol. a. [Eds.]

have not sufficiently applied myself ro the study of the degenerateforms of Thirdness, though I think I see that it has two distinct grades of degeneracy.[n its genuine form, Thirdness is the triadic relation existing between a sign, its obiect, and the interpreting thought, itself a sign, considered as constituting the mode of being of a sign. A sign mediates between the interpretant sign and its object. Taking sign in its broadest sense,its interpretant is not necessarily a sign. Ary concept is a sign, of course. Ockham, Hobbes, and Leibniz tt have sufficiently said that. But we may take a sign in so broad a sense that the interpretant of it is not a thought, but an action or experience,or we may even so enlarge the meaning of sign that its interpretant is a mere quality of feeling. A Third is something which brings a First into relation to a Second. A sign is a sort of Third. How shall we charactedze it? Shall we say that a Sign brings a Second,its Obfect, into cognitiue rclation to a Third? That a Sign brings a Second into the same relation to a first in which it stands itself to that First? If we insist on consciousness,we must say what we mean by consciousness of an obiect. Shall we say we mean Feeling?Shall we say we mean association, or Habit? These are, on the face of them, psychological distinctions, which I 'What am particular to avoid. is the essential difference between a sign that is communicated to a mind, and one that is not so communicated? If the question were simply what we do mean by sign, it " might soon be resolved. But that is not the point. 'We are in the situation of a zoologist who wants to know what ought to be the meaning of "fish" in order to make fishesone of the great classesof vertebrates. It appears to me that the essentialfunction of a sign is to render inefficient relations efficientnot to set them into action, but to establish a habit or general rule whereby they will act on occasion. According to the physical doctrine, nothing ever happens but the continued rectilinear velocities with the accelerations that accomp any different relative positions of the particles. All other relations, of which we know so many, are inefficient. Knowledg. in some way renders them efficient; and a sign is something by knowing which we know llWilliam of Ockham (or Occam)(ca.r 285-ca.ri4g), Englishscholasticphilosopher,an earlierproponentof nominalism; Thomas Hobbes (r S88- r 629), English philosopherand political theorist; Gottfried \0filhelm and matheLeibnizft646-r7r6), Germanphilosopher matician.[Eds.]

Letters to Lady Welby something more. With the exception of knowledg., in the present instant, of the contents of consciousness in that instant (the existence of which knowledge is open to doubt) all our thought & knowledge is by signs. A sign therefore is an object which is in relation to its object on the one hand and to an interpretant on the other in such a way as to bring the interpretant into a relation to the object, corresponding to its own relation ro the object. I might say "similar to its own," for a correspondenceconsists in a similarity; but perhaps correspondenceis narrower. I am now prepared to give my division of signs,as soon as I have pointed out that a sign has two objects, its object as it is representedand its object in itself. It has also three interpretants, its interpretanr as representedor meant to be understood, its interpretant as it is produced, and its interpretant in itself. Now signs may be divided as to rheir own material nature, as to their relations to their objecrs, and as to their relations to their interpretants.l2 As it is in itself, a sign is either of the nature of an appearance, when I call it a qualisign; or secondly, it is an individual obiect or event, when I call it a sinsign (the syllable sin being the first syllable of semel, simul, singular, etc.); or thirdly, it is of the nature of a general rype, when I call it a legisign As we use the term "word" in most cases,saying that "the" is one "word" and " an" is a second"wordr" a "word" is a legisign. But when we say of apage in a book, that it has z|o "words" upon it, of which fwenty are "the'sr" the "word" is a sinsign.A sinsign so embodying a legisign, I term a "repl ica', of the legisign. The difference berween a legisign and a qualisign, neither of which is an individual thing, is that a legisign has a definite identity, though usually admitting a great variety of appearances.Thus, &, and, and the sound are all one word. The qualisign, on the other hand, has no iden dry. It is the mere quality of an appearance6c is not exactly the same throughout a second.Instead of identity, it has great similarity, & cannor differ much without being called quite another qualisign. In respecrto their relations to their dynamic objects, I divide signs into lcons, Indices, and Symbols (a division I gave in fi67)." I define an Icon as a 12Seecollected^Papers, yol. z, for a fuller expositionof Peirce'sclassification of trichotomiesand signs.Seealso 4pp--enaixB in Lieb, cbarles s. peirce'sLeiers to Lady Welby.[Eds.] 13See "On a New List of Categoriesr" p. 295.[Eds.]

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sign which is determined by its dynamic obf ect by virtue of its own internal nature. Such is any qualisign, like a vision-or the sentiment excited by ^ piece of music considered as representing what the composer intended. Such may be a sinsign, like an individual diagram; say, a curve of the distribution of errors. I define an Index as a sign determined by its Dynamic object by virtue of being in a real relation to it. Such is a Proper Name (a legisign); such is the occurrenceof a symptom of.a disease(the Symptom itself is a legisign, a general type of a definite character. The occurrence in a particular case is a sinsign). I define a Symbol as a sign which is determined by its dynamic object only in the sensethat it will be so interpr€ted. It thus depends either upon a convention, a habit, or a natural disposition of its interprerant, or of the field of its interpretant (that of which the interprerant is a determination). Every symbol is necessarilya legisign, for it is inaccurareto call a replica of a legisign a symbol. In respect to its immediate object a sign may either be a sign of a qualitR of an existent, or of alaw. In regard to its relation to its signified interpretant, a sign is either a Rheffi€, a Dicent, or an Argument. This corresponds to the old triune Term, Proposition, & Argument, modified so as to be applicable to signs generally.A Term is simply ^ classname or proper-name. I do not regard the common noun as an essentiallynecessarypart of speech.Indeed, it is only fully developed as a separ ate part of speechin the Aryan languages& the Basque-possibly in some other out-of-the-way tongues. In the Shemitic languages it is generally in form a verbal affair, & usually is so in substancetoo. As well as I can make out, such it is in most languages.In my universal algebra of logic there is no common noun. A rheme is any sign that is not true nor false, like almost any single word except "yes" and ..nor,, which are almost peculiar to modern languages.A proposition as I use that term, is a dicent symbol. A dicent is not an assertion, but is a sign capable of being asserted.But an assertion is a dicent. According to my presenr view (I may see more light in future) the act of assertion is not a pure act of significadon. It is an exhibition of the fact that or. subjects oneself to the penalties visited on a liar if the proposition assertedis nor rrue. An act of judgment is the self-recognition of a belief; and a belief consists in the acceptance of a proposition as a basis of conduct deliberately.But I think this posi-

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Cuenres SINDERspnlncn

tion is open to doubt. It is simply a question of which view gives the simplest view of the nature of the proposition. Holding, rhen, that a Dicent does not assert, I natur ally hold that an Argument need not actually be submitted or urged. I therefore define an argument as a sign which is represented in its signified interpretanr not as a Sign of that interpretant (the conclusion) (for that would be to urge or submit it) but as if it were a Sign of the Interpretant or perhaps as if it were a Sign of the stare of the universe to which it refers, in which the premisses are taken for granted. I define a dicent as a sign represented in its signified interpretanr as if it were in a Real Relation to its Object. (Or as being so, if it is asserted.)A rheme is defined as a sign which is represented in its signified interpretant as if it were a character or mark (or as being so). According to my present view, a sign may appeal to its dynamic interpretant in three ways: rst, an argument only may be submitted to its interpretant, as something the reasonablenessof which will be acknowledged. znd, an argument or dicent may be urged

upon the interpretant by an act of insistence. jtd, argument or dicent may be and a rheme can only be, presented to the interpretant for contemplation. FinallS in its relation to its immediate interpretant, I would divide signs into three classesas follows: r st, those which are interpretable in thoughts or other signs of the same kind in infinite series, znd, those which are interpretable in actual experiences, jrd, those which are interpretable in qualities or feelings or appearances. Now if you think on the whole (as I do) that there is much valuable truth in all this, I should be gratified if you cared to append it to the next edition of your book, after editing it & of course cutting out personalities of a disagreeablekind especially if accompanied by one or more (running or other) close criticism.s,'for I haven't a doubt there is more or lesserror involved. . . .

Ferdinandde Saussure r8t7-19r3

HE NorIoN of the arbitrary relation of signifier to signified, or the "arbitrary nature of the sign," as Ferdinand de Saussure puts it, was not

inventedby him; the issuewas raised as early as Plato's Cratylus. However, de Saussureis generallyregarded as having developedthe idea, which has had subsequentimportant implications for, first, linguistic and, later, anthropological and psychoanalyticaland literary theory.This idea and the correlariveone of the differential nature of languageprovides the ground for the modern movementknown asstructuralism(seeBarthes,CTSRpp. rrg j-99). A structureis a systemof differences,to be studied independentlyof what it or its parts might refer to outside the system.In structuralist linguistics, one studies words regardedasunits solelyby virnre of their differencefrom other words. Thus a word is known by what it is not more rhan by what it is; the systemis totally "negativer" even though, as de saussurealso argues,the combination of words is a "positive fact." In the course in GeneralLinguistics,de saussureintroduced a synchronicor atemporaltreatment of languagein contrast to his other mainly historical and diachronic studies.Another important distinction made by dL saussurebut not discussedin this selection (it is mentioned by claude L6uistrauss)is that betweenlangue and parole, languebeingthe systemof language in general,parole any particular usagewithin it. In a pieceof structuralisiliteiary criticism, aliterary text is a parole. De saussure'scourse in GeneralLingtistics was not publishedin the author's lifetime, nor did he leavebehind him a manuscriptor iuen note, that might be gatheredinto a text. Rather, the book is a reconstructionby his studerrtJfrorn their own notesof lectureshe gaveat the Universityof Genevabetween19o6 and r9rr. As a result,therehas beensomecriticismof the text by linguists,and at least one has gone so far as to describethe text as by the pszudo--saussure. Indeed,as Emile Benuenistepoints out in his essay"The Nature of the Linguistic sign," there is someconfusionin the course about the extent to which th--e sign is arbitrary. Despiteall of this, the course hasbeenimmenselyinfluential, on.-of the most important texts representingthe advent of the linguistic world. In a variety of fields, analogiesof the differential sign have beendominant. Thus we find in the anthropologicalwork of Ldui-Strauisthe asserrionthat the true units of a myth are "bundles" of "relations" or, in Saussurean terms,differences.Even among his so-calledpostructuralist critics de Saussureremains a major influence.In of Grammatology,which usheredin the poststructuralistmovementby subjectingthe course to critique, JacquesDenidi merelyexrendsde saussurei thought to logical conclusionsthat de saussuredid not anticipate. De saussureis often regardedas having establishedlinguisticsas a scienceby

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FrnorNnuonBSeussunn minimizing the importanceof the conceptof reference,to view languageas an independentsystem.This radical notion has often been the basisof complaint about the structuralistposition. Other views of the relation of languageto externality abound,though in recentyearsthe Saussurean view hastendedto be most popular among literary theorists.This has not been the case,however,among philosophersand linguistsin America and England. publishedrelativelylittle in his lifetime:about6oo pagesin essays De Saussure on such subjectsas Phrygian inscriptions and Lithuanian dialects. Course in GeneralLinguistics(tgtl) first appearedin Englishtranslationin 1959. De Saussure's writings are found in Frenchin Recueildespublicationsscientifique de F. de Saussure(r9zz). SeeRulon S. Wells, "De Saussure's Systemof Linguistics," Word 3 Gg4z), and the introduction by Manuel Mourette-Lema to A GeneuaSchoolReaderin Linguistics,ed. R. Goedel(tg6g).

FROM

COI]RSEIN GENERAL

LINGI.]ISTICS NeruRE

oF THE LINcUISTIC SlcN

r. Sign,Signified,Signifier Somepeopleregardlanguage,when reducedto its only-a list of words, asa naming-process elements, to the thing that it names.For eachcorresponding example:

ARBOR

EQUOS

etc.

etc.

C9URSEIN GENERALLINGUISTICsis a translation by Wade Baskins of Cours de linguistique gdndrale (tgtl).The selection reprinted here is done so by permission of The Philosophical Library copyright 19 59.

This conception is open to criticism at several points. It assumesthat ready-made ideas exist before words; it does not tell us whether a name is vocal or psychological in natu re (arbor, f or instance, can be considered from either viewpoint); finallR it lets us assumethat the linking of a name and a thing is a very simple operation-an assumption that is anything but true. But this rather naive approach can bring us near the truth by showing us that the linguistic unit is a double entity, one formed by the associatingof two terms. 'V[e have seen in considering the speaking-circuit that both terms involved in the linguistic sign are psychological and are united in the brain by an associative bond. This point must be emphasized. The linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image. The latter is not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses.The soundimage is sensory, and if I happen to call it "material," it is only in that sense,and by way of opposing it to the other term of the association, the concept, which is generally more abstract. The psychological character of our sound-images becomesapparent when we observeour own speech. Without moving our lips or tongue, we can talk to ourselvesor recite mentally ^ selection of verse.Because we regard the words of our language as sound-images,w€ must avoid speaking of the "phonemes" that make up the words. This term, which

Course in General Linguistics suggestsvocal activity, is applicable to the spoken word only, to the reahzation of the inner image in 'We discourse. can avoid that misunderstanding by speakin g af the sounds and syllable.sof a word provided we remember that the names refer to the sound-image. The linguistic sign is then a two-sided psychological entity that can be represented by the drawing:

Concept Sound-image

The two elements are intimately united, and each 'sfhether recalls the other. we rry to find the meaning of the Latin word arbor or rhe word that Latin uses to designatethe concept "treer" it is clear that only the associations sanctioned by that language appear to us to conform to realitg and we disregard whatever others might be imagined. our definition of the linguistic sign poses an important question of terminology. I call the combination of a concept and a sound-image a sign, but in current usage the term generally designates only a sound-image, a word, for example (arbor, etc.). one tends to forget that arbor is called a sign only becauseit carries the concept "tree," with the result that the idea of the sensory part implies the idea of the whole.

Ambiguiry would disappear if the three notions involved here were designated by three names, each suggestingand opposing the others. I propose ro retain the word sign lsignel to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectivelv bv signified fsignifie] and signifiir fsignifiantl; the last rwo terms have the advantage oflndicating the opposition that separatesthem iro- each other and from the whole of which they are parts.

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As regards sign, if I am satisfied with ir, this is simply because I do not know of any word to replace it, the ordinary language suggestingno other. The linguistic sign, as defined, has two primordial characteristics.In enunciating them I am also positing the basic principles of any study of this rype. z. Principle I: The Arbitrary Nature of the Sign The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. The idea of "sister" is not linked by any inner relationship to the successionof sounds s-o-r which serves as its signifier in French; that it could be represented equally by just any other sequenceis proved by differencesamong languagesand by the very existence of different languages: the signified "ox" has as its signifier b-o-f on one side of the border and o-k-s (Ochs) on the other. No one disputes the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign, but it is often easier to discover a truth than to assignto it its proper place. principle I dominates all the linguistics of language; its consequences are numberless. It is true that not all of them are equally obvious at first glance; only after many detours does one discover them, and with them the primordial importance of the principle. one remark in passing: when semiology becomes organized as a science, the question will arise whether or not it properly includes modes of expression based on completely natural signs, such as pantomime. Supposing that the new science welcomes them, its main concern will still be the whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign. In fact, every means of expression used in society is based,in principle, on collective behavior or-what amounts to the same thing-on convention. Polite formulas, for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness(as in the caseof a chinese who greershis emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gesturesthat obliges one to use them. Signs that are wholly arbitrary real ize better than the others the ideal of the semiological process; that is why language, the most complet universal of "rJ all systems of expression, is also the most charac-

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FnnolNANDns SeussuRE

teristic; in this sense linguistics can become the master-pattern for all branches of semiology although language is only one particular semiological system. The word symbol has been used to designate the linguistic sign, or more specificall5 what is here called the signifier. Principle I in particular weighs against the use of this term. One characteristic of the symbol is that it is never wholly arbitrary; it is not empty, for there is the rudiment of a natural bond between the signifier and the signified. The symbol of justice, a pair of scales,could not be replaced by just any other symbol, such as a chariot. The word arbitrary also calls for comment. The term should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker (we shall see below that the individual does not have the power to change a sign in any way once it has become established in the linguistic community); I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified. ln concluding let us consider two obiections that might be raised to the establishment of Principle I: r ) Onomatopoeia might be used to prove that the choice of the signifier is not always arbitrary. But onomatopoeic formations are never organic elements of a linguistic system. Besides,their number is much smaller than is generally supposed. \ilfords 'knell' may strike like French fouet'whip' or glas certain ears with suggestivesonority, but to seethat they have not always had this property we need only examine their Latin forms (fouet is derived from 'sotJnd a of fagus'beech-tree,' glas from classicum trumpet'). The quality of their present sounds, or rather the quality that is attributed to them, is a fortuitous result of phonetic evolution. As for authentic onomatopoeic words (e.g., Slugglug, tick-tock, etc.)', not only are they limited in number, but also they are chosen somewhat ar' bitrarily, for they are only approximate and more or less conventional imitations of certain sounds (cf. English bow-bow andFrench ouaoua). In addition, once these words have been introduced into the language, they are to a certain extent subiected to the same evolution-phonetic, morphological, etc.that other words undergo (cf. pigeon, ultimately from Vulgar Latin pVpio, derived in turn from an onomatopoeic formation): obvious proof that they lose something of their original character in order

to assume that of the linguistic sign in general, which is unmotivated. z) Interjections, closely related to onomatopoeia, can be attacked on the same grounds and come no closer to refuting our thesis. One is tempted to see in them spontaneous expressionsof reality dictated, so to speak, by natural forces. But for most interi.ctions we can show that there is no fixed bond between their signified and their signifier. \7e need only compare two languages on this point to see how much such expressions differ from one [anguage to the next (e.g. the English equivalent of French ai'e!is ouchl). We know, moreover, that many interiections were once words with specific mean'darn!' mordieu! 'golly!' ings (cf. French diable! 'God's deathr' etc.). from mort Dieu Onomatopoeic formations and interiections are of secondary importance, and their symbolic origin is in part open to dispute. 3. Principle II: The Linear Nature of the Signifier The signifier, being auditory is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a) it representsa sPan, and (b) the'span is measurablein a single dimension; it is a line. \7hile Principle II is obvious, apparently linguists have always neglected to state it, doubtless because they found it too simple; nevertheless,it is fundamental, and its consequencesarc incalculable. Its importance equals that of Principle I; the whole mechanism of languagedependsupon it. In contrast to visual signifiers (nautical signals,etc.) which can offer simultaneous groupings in severaldimensions, auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession;they form a chain. This feature becomes readily apparent when they are represented in writing and the spatial line of graphic marks is substituted for successionin time. Sometimes the linear nature of the signifier is not 'S7hen I accent a syllable, for instance, it obvious. seems that I am concentrating more than one significant element on the same point. But this is an illusion; the syllable and its accent constitute only one phonational act. There is no duality within the act but only different oppositions to what precedes and what follows.

Course in General Linguistics

LrNcursrrcVnrur

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transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" imr. Languageas OrganizedThought Coupled plies division, and that language works out its units with Sound while taking shape between fwo shapelessmasses. visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if To provethat languageis only a systemof pure valthe atmospheric pressure changes,the sur faceof the ues, it is enoughto considerthe trvo elementsinwater will be broken up inro a series of divisions, volvedin its functioning:ideasand sounds. waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of Psychologically our thought-apart from its exthought with phonic substance. pressionin words-is only a shapeless and indisLanguage might be called the domain of articulatinct mass.Philosophersand linguistshave always tions, using the word as it was defined earlier. Each agreedin recognizingthat without the help of signs linguistic term is a member, an articulu.s in which we would be unableto makea clear-cut,consistint twithout distinction betweentwo ideas. languagr-, an idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea. thought is a vague,unchartednebula.There no "t. Language can also be compared with a sheet of pre-existingideas, and nothing is distinct before paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; the appearance of language. one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at Against the floating realm of thought, would the same time; likewise in language, one can neisounds by themselvesyield predelimitedentities? ther divide sound from thought nor thought from No more so than ideas.Phonicsubstance is neither sound; the division could be accomplished only abmore fixed nor more rigid than thought; it is not a stractedly, and the result would be either pure psymold into which thought musrof necessityfit but a chology or pure phonology. plasticsubstancedivided in turn into distinct parts Linguistics then works in the borderland where to furnish the signifiersneededby thought.The linthe elements of sound and thought combine; their guistic fact can thereforebe pictured in its totalcombination produces a form, not a substance. ity-i.e. language-as a seriesof contiguoussubThese views give a better understandin g of what divisionsmarkedoff on both the indefiniteplaneof was said before about the arbitrariness of ,igrrr. Not (A) ideas and the equallyvagueflane of iumbled only are the rwo domains that are linked by the linsounds(B). The following diagram givesa rough guistic fact shapelessand confused, but the choice ideaof it: of a given slice of sound to name a given idea is completely arbitrary. [f this were not itue, the notion of value would be compromised, for it would include an externally imposed element. But actually values remain entirely relative, and that is why the bond between the sound and the idea is radically arbitrary. The arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create ling,ristic sys" tem. The community is necessaryif values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is The characteristic role of language with respecr incapable of fixing a single value. to thought is not to create a material phonic -."rrc In addition, the idea of value, as defined, shows for expressing ideas but to serve link between that to consider a term as simply the union of acer"r " thought and sound, under conditions that of necestain sound with a certain concept is grossly missity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of leading. To define it in this way woulJ isolate the units. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become term from its system; it would mean assuming that ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither one can start from the terms and construct the sys_ are thoughts given material forrr nor are sounds tem by adding them together when, on the cona

a a

a

5So

FERuNAND or SeussuRE

trary, it is from the interdependent whole that one must start and through analysisobtain its elements. To develop this thesis, we shall study value successivelyfrom the viewpoint of the signified or concept, the signifier, and the complete sign. Being unable to seize the concrete entities or units of language directlS we shall work with words. \7hile the word does not conform exactly to the definition of the linguistic unit, it at least bears a rough resemblanceto the unit and has the advantage of being concrete; consequently, we shall use words as specimensequivalent to real terms in a synchronic system, and the principles that we evolve with respect to words will be valid for entities in general. z. Linguistic Value from a Conceptual Viewpoint \7hen we speak of the value of a word, w€ generally think first of its property of standing for an idea, and this is in fact one side of linguistic value. But if this is true, how does ualue differ from signification? Might the two words be synonyms ? I think not, although it is easy to confuse them, since the confusion results not so much from their similarity as from the subtlety of the distinction that they mark. From a conceptual viewpoint, value is doubtless one element in signification, and it is difficult to see how signification can be dependent upon value and still be distinct from it. But we must clear up the issueor risk reducing language to a simple namingotl::tl,

first take signification as it is generally understood and as it was pictured previously. As the arrows in the drawing show, it is only the counterpart. of the sound-image. Everything that occurs concerns only the sound-image and the concept when we look upon the word as independent and self-contained.

tl ll

But here is the paradox: on the one hand the concepr seems to be the counterpart of the sound-

image, and on the other hand the sign itself is in turn the counterpart of the other signs of language. Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presenceof the others, as in the diagram:

How, then, can value be confused with signification, i.e. the counterpart of the sound-image? It seems impossible to liken the relations representedhere by horizontal arrows to those represented above by vertical arrows. Putting it another way-and again taking up the example of the sheet of paper that is cut in rwo-it is clear that the observable relation between the different pieces A, B' C, D, etc. is distinct from the relation between the front and back of the same piece as in A/A', B/B', etc. To resolve the issue,let us observe from the outset that even outside language all values are apparently governed by the same paradoxical principle. They are always composed: (r ) of a dissimilar thtng that can be excbanged for the thing of which the value is to be determined; and (z) of similar things that can be compared with the thing of which the value is to be determined. Both factors are necessaryfor the existence of a value. To determine what a five-franc piece is worth one must therefore know: (t) that it can be exchanged for a fixed quantify of a different thing, e.g. bread; and (z) that it can be compared with a similar value of the same system, e.g. a one-franc piece, or with coins of another system (a dollar, etc.). In the same way a word can be exchangedfor something dissimilar, an idea; besides, it can be compared with something of the same nature' another word. Its value is therefore not fixed so long as one simply statesthat it can be "exchanged" fot a given concept, i.e. that it has this or that signification: olle must also compare it with similar values, with other words that stand in opposition to it. Its content is really fixed only by the concurrence of everything that exists outside it. Being part of a system, it is endowed not only with a signification but also and especially with a value, and this is something quite different. A few exampleswill show clearly that this is true.

Course in General Linguistics Modern French mouton can have the same signification as English sheep but not the same value, and this for severalreasons,particularly becausein speaking of a piece of meat ready to be served on the table, English uses mutton and nor sheep. The difference in value between sheep and mouton is due to the fact that sheep has beside it a second term while the French word does not. tu7ithin the same langu ag',, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally; synonyms like French redouter 'dread' craindre 'fearr' and auoir peur 'be afraid' have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exisr, all its content would go to its competitors. converselS some words are enriched through contact with others: e.g. the new element introduced in ddcrdpit (un vieillard ddcrdpit) results from the coexistence of ddcrdpi (un mur d6cr6pi). The value of just any term is accordingly determined by its environment; it is impossible to fix even the value of the word signifying "sun" without first considering its surroundings: in some languages it is not possible to say "sit in the sun." Everything said about words applies ro any term of language, e.g. to grammatical entities. The value of a French plural does nor coincide with that of a Sanskrit plural even though their signification is usually identical; Sanskrit has three numbers instead of rwo (my eyes, my ears, my Arms, my legs, etc. are dual); it wouli be wrong ro attribute the same value to the plura, in sanskrit and in French; its value clearly depenos on what is outside and around it. If words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents itr -."rrirrg from one languageto the next; but this is not true. French uses louer (une maison) 'let (a house)' indifferently to mean both "pay for" and "receive payment forr" whereas German uses two words, mieten and uermieteu there is obviously no exact correspondence of values. The German verbs schiitzen and urteilen share a number of significadons, but that correspondence does not hold at several points. Inflection offers some particulaily striking examples. Distinctions of time, which are so familia, to us, are unknown in certain languages. Hebrew does not recognize even the fundamental distinctions between the past, present, and future. protoGermanic has no special form for the future; to say that the future is expressedby the present is wrong,

65 r

for the value of the present is not the same in Germanic as in languagesthat have a future along with the present. The slavic languages regularly single out two aspects of the verb: the perfective represents action as a point, complete in its totality; the imperfective represents it as taking place, and on the line of time. The categories are difficult for a Frenchman to understand, for they are unknown in French; if they were predetermined, this would not be true. Instead of pre-existing ideas then, we find in all the foregoing examples ualues emanating from the system. \il7henthey are said ro corr.rponJ to concepts, it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system. Their most precise characteristic is in being what the others are not. Now the real interpreration of the diagram of the signal becomesapparent. Thus

Signified "to judge" Signifier juger means that in French the concept "to judge" is linked to the sound-image iuger; in short, ii symbolizes signification. But it is quite clear that initially the concept is nothing, that is only a value determined by its relations with other similar values, and that without them the signification would not exist. If I state simply that a word signifies something when I have in mind the associating of a sound-image with a concept, I am making ,t"t." ment that may suggestwhat actually happens, bur by no means am I expressing the linguistic fact in its essenceand fullness. 3. Linguistic value from a Material viewpoint The conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material side. The important thing in the word is not the sound alone but the phonii differencesthat make it possible to distinguish this word from all others, for differences cafiy significadon. This may seem surprisirg, but how indeed could

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the reversebe possible?Sinceone vocal image is no better suited than the next for what it is commissioned to express, it is evident, even a priori, that a segment of language can never in the final analysis be based on anything except its noncoincidence with the rest. Arbitrary and differential are tvvo correlative qualities. The alteration of linguistic signs clearly illustrates this. It is precisely because the terms a and b as such are radically incapable of reaching the level of consciousness-one is always conscious of only the alb difference-that each term is free to change according to laws that are unrelated to its signifying function. No positive sign characterizesthe genitive plural in Czech ien; still the two forms lena: ien function as well as the earlier forms iena: ienb; ien has value only becauseit is different. Here is another example that shows even more clearly the systematic role of phonic differences: in Greek, 6phen is an imperfect and 6st4n an aorist although both words are formed in the same way; the first belongs to the system of the present indicative * 'I saR' whereas there is no present stEmi; of ph|ml now it is precisely the relation phEmT: 6phen that corresponds to the relation bef'weenthe present and the imperfect (cf. ddiknumi: eddiknun, etc.). Signs function, then, not through their intrinsic value but through their relative Position. In addition, it is impossible for sound alone' a material element, to belong to language. It is only a secondarything, substanceto be put to use. All our conventional values have the characteristic of not being confused with the tangible element which rr,tppotts them. For instance, it is not the metal in a pieie of money that fixes its value. A coin nominally worth five francs may contain less than half its worth of silver. Its value will vary according to the amount stamped upon it and according to its use inside or outside a political bound ary. This is even more true of the linguistic signifier, which is not phonic but incorporeal-constituted not by its maieriat substance but by the differences that separate its sound-image from all others. The foregoing principle is so basic that it applies to all the material elements of language, including phonemes. Every language forms its words on the tasis of,a system of sonorous elements, each element being a clearly delimited unit and one of a fixed t,r-b.r of units. Phonemes are characterized not, as one might think, by their own positive quality but simply by the fact that they are distinct.

Phonemes are above all else opposing, relative, and negative entities. Proof of this is the latitude that speakers have between points of convergencein the pronunciation of distinct sounds. In French, for instance' general use of a dorsal r does not prevent many speakers from using a tongue-tip trill; language is not in the least disturbed by it; language requires only that the sound be different and not, as one might imagine, that it have an invariable quality. I can even pronounce the French r like German ch in Bach, doch, etc., but in German I could not use r instead af.ch, for German gives recognition to both elements and must keep them apart. Similarly, in Russian there is no latitude for t in the direction of t' (palatalized t), for the result would be the confusing of two sounds 'speak' differentiated by the language (cf. gouorit' 'he speaks'),but more freedom may be and gouerit taken with respect to th (aspirated t) since this sound does not figure in the Russian system of phonemes. Since an identical state of affans is observable in writing, another system of signs, we shall use writing to draw some comparisons that will clarify the whole issue.In fact: r) The signs used in writing are arbitrary; there is no connection, for example, between the letter t and the sound that it designates. z) The value of letters is purely negative and differential. The Sameperson can write t, for instance, in different ways: The only requirement is that the sign for t not be confused in his script with the signs used for l, d, etc. through re3) values in writing function only ciprocal opposition within a fixed system that consiits of atii .u-ber of letters. This third characteristic, though not identical to the second, is closely related to it, for both depend on the first. Since the graphic sign is arbit rary) its form matters little or rather matters only within the limitations imposed by the system. is produced is 4) The means by which the sign .o-pl.tely unimportant' for it does not affect the system (this also follows from characteristic r )' rU7hetherI make the letters in white or black, raised or engraved,with pen or chisel-all this is of no importance with respect to their signification. 4. The Sign Considered in lts Totality Everything that has been said uP to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences'

Course in General Linguistics

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Even more important: a difference generally implies each other, we can no longer speak of difference; positive terms between which the difference is set the expression would not be fitting, for it applies up; but in language there are only differences withonly to the comparing of two sound-images, e.g. faout positiue terms. tilThetherwe take the signified or ther and mother, or two ideas,e.g. the idea "father" the signifier, language has neither idea rot sounds and the idea "mother"l two signs, each having a that existed before the linguistic sysrem, but only signified and signifier, are not different but only disconceptual and phonic differences that have issued tinct. Between them there is only opposition. The from the system. The idea or phonic substancethat entire mechanism of language, with which we shall a sign contains is of less importance than the other be concerned later, is based on oppositions of this signs that surround it. Proof of this is that the value kind and on the phonic and conceptual differences of a term may be modified without either its meanthat they imply. ittg or its sound being affected, solely because a \what is true of value is true also of the unit. A neighboring term has been modified. unit is a segment of the spoken chain that correBut the statemenr that everything in language is sponds to a certain concept; both are by nature negative is rrue only if the signified and the signifier purely differenrial. are considered separately; when we consider the Applied to units, the principle of differentiation sign in its totality, we have something that is positive can be stated in this way: the characteristics of the in its own class.A linguistic systemis a seriesof difunit blend with the unit itself.In language, as in any ferences of sound combined with a series of differsemiological system, whatever distinguishes one encesof ideas; but the pairing of a certain number sign from the others constitutes it. Diffei.r.. makes of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the character just as it makes value and the unit. mass of thought engendersa system of values; and Another rather paradoxical consequenceof the this system serves as the effective link between the same principle is this: in the last analysiswhat is phonic and psychological elements within each commonly referred to as a "grammatical fact" fits sign. Although both the signified and the signifier the definition of the unir, for it always expressesan are purely differential and negative when considopposition of terms; it differs only in that the opered separately,their combinatiron is a positive fact; position is particularly significant (e.g. rhe formait is even the sole fype of facts that language has, for tion of German plurals of the ryp e Nicht: Nrichte). maintaining the parallelism berween the t*o classes Eagh rerm present in the grammatical fact (the sinof differences is the distinctive function of the lingular without umlaut or final e inopposition to the guistic institution. plural with umlaut and -e) consists of the interplay certain diachronic facts are rypical in this re_ of a number of oppositions within the system. rThen spect. Thke the countless instances where alteration isolated, neither Nacht nor Nijchte is anything: of the signifier occasions a conceptual change and thus everything is opposition. putting it another where it is obvious that the sum or tn. ideaslistir,way, the Na cht: Niichte relation can b. ."pressed guished corresponds in principle to the sum of the by an algebraic formula arb in which o ^nd, b are distinctive signs. sfhen two words are confused not simple terms but result from a set of relations. through phonetic alteration (e.g. French d6cr6pit Language, in a manner of speaking, is a type of aldecrepitus and d6cr6pi from crispus), it . gebra consisring solely of comple" trr.s. flosome of ideas that they express wil[ also tend ro be.om. its oppositions are more significant than others; but confused if only they have something in common. units and grammatical facts are only differ.rrr rr"-., or a word may have different forms (cf. cbaise for designating diverse aspects of ih. ,"-e general 'chair' and chaire'desk'). Ary nascent difference fact: the functioning of linguistic oppositions. This will tend invariably to become significant but with_ statement is so true that we might very well apalways succeeding or being successful on 9,rt the proach the problem of units by starting fiom gr"-first trial. converselS any conceptual difference matical facts. Thking an opposition like fiacht, perceived by the mind seeks to find expression Niichte, we might ask what-are the units involved through a distinct signifier, and rwo ideas ,h"t in it. Are they only the two words, the whole series no longer distinct in the mind tend to merge "r. into of similar wor ds, a and ii, or all singulars and the same signifier. oru 'sfhen rals, etc.? we compare signs-positive terms-with units and grammatical facts would nor be con-

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fused if linguistic signs were made up of something besides differences.But language being what it is, we shall find nothing simple in it regardlessof our approach; everywhere and always there is the same complex equilibrium of terms that mutually condition each other. Putting it another way' language is a form and not a substnnce.This truth could not be overstressed,for all the mistakes in our terminology, all our incorrect ways of naming things that pertain to language,stem from the involuntary supposition that the linguistic phenomenon must have substance.

SYNTAGMMICAND ASSOCIATIVE RELATIONS t. Defi,nitions In a language-stateeverything is based on relations. How do they function? Relations and differencesbetween linguistic terms fall into two distinct groups, each of which generates a certain class of values. The opposition between the two classesgives a better understanding of the nature of each class.They correspond to two forms of our mental activity, both indispensableto the life of language. In discourse,on the one hand, words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together. This rules out the possibiliry of pronouncing two elementssimultanet,rsly. The elements are affanged in sequenceon the chain of speaking. Combinations supported by linearity are syntagms. The syntagm is always composed of two or more consecutiveunits (e.g' French 'against everyoner' la re-Iire're-readr' Contre toUs 'human life,' Dieu est bon 'God is uie humaine 'if the good,' s'il fait beau temps, nous sortirons weather is nice, we'll go outr'etc.). In the syntagm a term acquires its value only becauseit stands in opposition to everything that precedesor follows it, or to both. Outside discourse, on the other hand' words acquire relations of a different kind. Those that have something in common are associatedin the memory, ,es,rliing in groups marked by diverse relations' For instance,the French word enseignement'teaching' will unconsciously call to mind a host of other words (enseigner'teachr'renseigner'acquaint,' etc.I

";,:"1T:::;r":;;i):,0,i:r:: 'apprenticeship,' etc.). All those words are relatedin some way. 'We see that the co-ordinations formed outside discourse differ strikingly from those formed inside discourse. Those formed outside discourse are not supported by linearity. Their seat is in the brain; they are a part of the inner storehousethat makes up the language of each speaker. They are associatiue relations. The syntagmatic relation is in praesentia. It is basedon two or more terms that occur in an effective series. Against this, the associative relation unites terms in absentia in a potential mnemonic series. From the associativeand syntagmatic viewpoint a linguistic unit is like a fixed part of a building, €.9. a column. On the one hand, the column has a certain relation to the architrave that it supports; the arrangement of the two units in space suggeststhe rytrttg*atic relation. On the other hand, if the column is Doric, it suggestsa mental comparison of this style with others (lonic, Corinthian, etc.) although none of these elements is present in space: the relation is associative. Each of the two classesof co-ordination calls for some specific remarks. z. Syntagmatic Relations The examples have already indicated that the notion of syntagm applies not only to words but to groups of words, to complex units of all lengths iyp.r (compounds, derivatives,phrases, whole ""d sentences). It is not enough to consider the relation that ties together the different parts of syntagms (e.g.French 'against' and toUs'everyone' in cOntre tOUs, Contre 'master' in contremattre 'foremattre contre ""a man'), one must also bear in mind the relation that links the whole to its parts (e.g. contre tous in opposition on the one hand to contre andon the other totts, or contremaitre in opposition to contre and maitre). An objection might be raised at this point. The sentenceis the ideal type of syntagm. But it belongs to speaking, not to language. Does it not follow that the rytrt"g- belongs to speaking? I do not think so. Speaking is charact ertzed by freedom of combinations; one must therefore ask whether or not all sYntagmsare equallY free' It is obvious from the first that many expressions

Course in General Linguistics belong to language. These are the pat phrases in which any change is prohibited by usage,even if we can single out their meaningful elements (cf. d quoi bon? 'what's the use?' allons donc! 'nonsense!'). The same is true, though to a lesser degree, of expressions like prendre la mouche 'take offense easilS' forcer la main d quelqLt'un'force someone's handr' rompre une lance 'break a lancer' or even auoir mal (d la t)te, etc.) 'have (a headache, etc.),' d 'by dint of (care, etc.)r' que force de (soins, etc.) 'how uous en semble? do you feel about it?' pas n'est besoin de . . .'there's no need for. . . r'etc., which are cha racterized by peculiarities of signification or syntax. Theseidiomatic twists cannot be improvised; they are furnished by tradition. There are also words which, while lending themselves perfectly to analysis, are cha racterrzed by some morphological anomaly that is kept solely by dint of usage (cf. difficultd 'difficulry' beside facilit|'facility,' etc., and mourrAt'U] shall die'beside dormirai '[I] shall sleep'). There are further proofs. To language rather than to speaking belong the syntagmatic types that are built upon regular forms. Indeed, since there is nothing abstract in language, the types exisr only if languagehas registereda sufficient number of specimens. lD7hen a word like inddcorable arises in speaking, its appearancesupposesa fixed type, and this rype is in turn possible only through i.-.-brance of a sufficient number of similar words belonging to language (impardonable'unpardonable,, int o I6rab le' intolerabl e,' infati gabI e'indefati gab le,' etc.). Exactly the same is true of sentences and groups of words built upon regular patterns. combinations like la terre tourne'the world turnsr' que uous dit-il? 'what does he say to you?' etc. .oir.spond to general types that are in turn supported in the language by correct remembrances. But we must realize that in the syntagm there is no clear-cut boun dary between the language fact, which is a sign of collective usage,and die fa.t that belongs to speaking and depends on individual freedom. In a great number of instancesit is hard to class a combination of units because both forces have combined in producing it, and they have combined in indeterminable proporrions.

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something in common; through its grasp of the nature of the relations that bind the terms together, the mind createsas many associativeseriesas there are diverse relations. For instance, in enseignement 'teachingr' enseigner'teachr' enseignons'(we) teachr' etc., one element, the radical, is common to every term; the same word may occur in a different series formed around another common element, the suffix (cf. enseignement,armement, changement,etc.); or the association may spring from the analogy of the concepts signified (enseignement, instruction, apprentissage, 1ducation, etc.); or again, simply from the similarity of the sound-images (e.g. enseignement and iustement 'precisely'). Thus there is at times a double simil arity of meaning and form, at times similarity only of form or of meaning. A word can always evoke everything that can be associated with it in one way or another. \(rhereasa syntagm immediately suggestsan order of successionand a fixed number of elements,terms in an associativefamily occur neither in fixed numbers nor in a definite order. If we associate painful, deligbtful, frightful, etc. we are unable to predict the number of words that the memory will suggestor the order in which they will appear. A particular word is like the center of a constellation; it is the point of convergenceof an indefinite number of co-ordinated terms. But of the fwo characteristics of the associative series-indeterminate order and indefinite number-only the first can always be verified; the second may fail to meet the test. This happens in the case of inflectional paradigffis, which are rypical of associativegroupings. Latin dominus, domint, domino, etc. is obviously an associativegroup formed around a common element,the noun theme dominbut the series

enselgnement t a

a a '

a t t

j

enseigner a , .

l

.16-.rrt

i

t a

t

a

'.

a . a

'

enselgnOns

etc. etc.

a r o

.'

. apprentissage a

a

lustement

. a

changement

€tc. etc'

a a

6ducation etc. etc.

armement etc. etc.

a

3. Associatiue Relations Mental association creates other groups besides those based on the comparing of terms that have

a

a a

is not indefinite as in the case of enseignement, changement, etc.; the number of cases is definite.

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Againstthis, the words haveno fixed order of succession,and it is by ^ purely arbitrary act that the grammariangroupsthem in oneway ratherthan in another; in the mind of speakersthe nominative

case is by no means the first one in the declension, and the order in which terms are called depends on circumstances.

EdrnundHusserl t8j9-1938

T'l ouuNo Hussen_ris generallyacknowledgedas the founder of modern phef -l-./ nomenology.His early philosophical work included a major treariseon the philosophy of arithmetic (a work that drew sharp criticism from Gottlob Frege)in which he articulated a theme dominant throughout his philosophical career:conceptsare commonly definedaccordingto their extensions,noi their content.Definitionsso derivedobscurethe importanceof the mode or mannerof perceivingand thinking by concentratingattention exclusivelyon agreement(or disagreement)about the extensionof terms. Husserl'sposition is that everything "given" in perceptionis necessarilyconstitutedin and through a specificmode oI consciousness and that the philosophical exploration and iritique of cognition cannot be restrictedto merelylogical or empirical considerations. In his later work, Husserl emphasizedthe importance of intention-in the sensethat everythought is athought of somethingand thereforeactivelyintends its object. ln ldeas,he traced_the_development of a distinctivephilosophicaloutlook achievedby a processof reductioni on" ,.-oues from considerationall the content of a thought or perceptionthat could be representedas external or extensional.what remainsjs 19t nothing but rather ttrepure streamof thinking or perceivingitself, in which all intentional objectsare constituted. Accordingto Hussed,this reduction to the intentional core of perceptionand cognition (which he calls the "epoch6") brings the "natural standpoint" to a crisis, iust as it createsa phenomenologicalstandpoint, from which cognition appearsas the pure function or activity of the ego or self. Husserl doesnot, however'proposean empirical or psychologisticaccountof the ego.For Husserl, the "ego" discoveredthrough the phenomenologicalepoch| is"not empirical but transcendental. In the selectionbelow,an essaywritten for The EncyclopediaBritannica (r4th edition), Husserl offers a global accounr of phenomenolfgy as, first, a radical alternativeto ordinary empirical psychologyind, second,rf,L u"ri, for a universal philosophicalmethod. He seesthe lattii of phenomenologyas deriv"rp..t ing from.Descartes'programof universaldoubt^, with tile differencethat Husserl universalizesthe methodology of the epoch,6or ,,bracketing',to locate a tran_ scendentalcogito as the universalpowei of consciousness. while Husserl'sinfluenceon Europeanphilosophy has been significant and widespread,both in the developmenfof ph.no-*oiogical methJd and in the emergenceof existentialism,his impact on English-spea[ingphilosophy and philosophershas beenrelatively srighi. This -"i b. p"rth to the fact "iriuu,"Ct. that (like Hegel before him) he presumedthat introspective meditation was a

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sufficientanalyticaltool, which in turn may partly explain why neither Husserl nor Hegeldevelopedprecisetheoriesof languageor philosophiesof sciencethat reflectedcurrent scientificpractices. Husserlt influenceon literary theoristsand critics has beenmore pronounced, however,becausethe phenomenologicalmethod as a critique of consciousness and perception (particularly as developedby later phenomenologistssuch as Martin Heideggerand Maurice Merleau-Ponty)encouragesand supportsclose attention to complex processesassociatedwith reading and writing-just as its claimsinvite deconstruction(seeDerrida). metaphysical transcendental rWhilemany of Husserl'swritingshavenot beentranslated,most of his major works are availablein Englishtranslation. Ideas: Generallntroduction to Pure 'W. trans. R. BoyceGibson(r93r, tpt. 196z),is the most comPhenomenology, plete presentationof Hussed'sposition. Severalshorter volumesof lectureshave appearedin a seriesof translations published by Martinus Nijhoff; seeespecially CartesianMeditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology,trans. Dorion Cairns GgZo); TheIdea of Phenomenology,trans.ItrTilliamP.Alston and George Nakhnikian Gg6+); and The Paris Lectures,rrans. PeterKoestenbaumGgzo). For critical and interpretivestudiesof a wide rangeof topicsin Husserl'sphiloso' and existentialists,seePhephy and his influenie on other phenomenologists nomenology: Tbe Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and lts Interpretation, ed. JosephJ. Kockelmans(t967).

PHENOME,NOLOGY Phenomenology denotes a new, descriptive, philosophical method, which, since the concluding years of the last centur% has established (t ) an a priori psychological discipline, able to provide the only ,..,rr. basis on which a strong empirical psychology can be built, and (z) a universal philosophy, wliich can supply an organum for the methodical revision of all the sciences.

I. PsnNoMENoLocICAL PsYcHoLoGY Present-d^y psychology, as the science of the "ptychical" in its concrete connection with spatiotemporal reali ty, regards as its material whatever is present in the world as "ego-istic"; i.e., "livingr" petceiving, thinking, willing, etc., actual, potential d in The EncyclopediaBripHENoMENoLocy first appeare tannica,r4th ed. (r92il. Reprintedwith the permission of The EncyclopediaBritannica,Inc.

and habitual. And as the psychical is known as a certain stratum of existence, proper to men and beasts, psychology may be considered as a branch of anthropology and zoology. But animal nature is a part of physical realitn and that which is concerned with physical reality is natural science.Is it, then, possible to separate the psychical cleanly enough ito- the physical to establish a pure psychology parallel to natural science? That a purely psychoiogical investigation is practicable within limits is shlwn by our obligation to it for our fundamental conceptions of the psychical, and most of those of the psycho-physical. gut before determining the question of an unlimited psychology, we must be sure of the characteristics of psychological experience and the psychical data it provides. tUTeturn naturally to our immediate experiences.But we cannot discover the psychical in any experience, except by a "reflec\We lion," or perversion of the ordinary attitude. matterst the are accustomed to concentrate upon thoughts, and talues of the moment' and not upon the piychical " act of experience" in which these are appieirended. This "act" is revealed by a "reflec-

Phenomenology tion"; and a reflection can be practised on every experience.Instead of the matters themselves,the values, goals, utilities, etc., we regard the subjective experiences in which these "appeat." These ""ppearances" are phenomena, whose nature is to be a "consciousness-of" their object, real or unreal as it be. Common language catches this senseof "relativity," saying, I was thinkin g of somerhirg, I was frightened of somethirg, etc. Phenomenological psychology takes its name from the "phenomena," with the psychological aspect of which it is concerned: and the word "intentional" has been borrowed from the scholastic to denote the essential "reference" character of the phenomena. All consciousnessis "intentional." In unreflective consciousnesswe are "directed" upon objects, w€ "intend" them; and reflection reveals this to be an immanent process characteristic of all experience, though infinitely varied in form. To be conscious of something is no empry having of that something in consciousness. Each phenomenon has its own intentional structure, which analysis shows to be an ever-widening sysremof individually intentional and intentionally related components. The perception of a cube, for example, revealsa muldple and synthesized intention: a continuous variety in the "appearance" of the cube, according to differences in the points of view from which it is seen, and corresponding differences in "perspective," and all the difference between the "front side" actually seenat the moment and the "backside" which is not seen,and which remains, therefore, relatively "indeterminater" and yet is supposed equally to be existenr. observation of this "stream" of "appearance-aspects"and of the manner of their synthesis, shows that every phase and interval is alre ady in itself a "consciousness-of" somethirg, yet in such a way that with the constant entry of new phases the total consciousness,at any moment, lacks not synthetic unity, and is, in fact, a consciousnessof one and the same object. The intentional structure of the ffain of a perception must conform to a cerrain qrpe, if any physical object is to be perceived as there! And if the same object be intuited in other modes, if it be imagined, or remembered, or copied, all its intentional forms recur, though modified in characer from what they were in the perception, to correspond to their new modes. The same is true of every kind of psychical experience.Judgment, valuation, pursuit, thesealso

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are no empty experienceshaving in consciousness of judgments, values,goals and means, but are likewise experiences compounded of an intentional stream, each conforming to its own fast type. Phenomenological psychology's comprehensive task is the systematic examination of the types and forms of intentional experience, and the reduction of their structures to the prime intentions, learning thus what is the nature of the psychical, and comprehending the being of the soul. The validity of theseinvestigationswill obviously extend beyond the particularity of the psychologist's own soul. For psychical life may be revealed to us not only in self-consciousnessbut equally in our consciousnessof other selves, and this latter source of experienceoffers us more than a reduplication of what we find in our self-consciousness,for it establishes the differences between "own" and "other" which we experience,and presentsus with the characteristics of the "social-life." And hence the further task accrues to psychology of revealing the intentions of which the "social life" consists. Ph enomenological-p sycholo gical and Eidetic Reductions The Phenomenological psychology must examine the self's experience of itself and its derivative experience of other selvesand of societg but whethet, in so doing, it can be free of all psycho-physical admixture, is not yet clear. Can one reach a really pure self-experienceand purely psychical data?This difficultL even since Brentano's discovery of intentionality, as the fundamental character of the psychical, has blinded psychologiststo the possibilities of phenomenological psychology. The psychologist finds his self-consciousnessmixed .u.ty*here with "external" experience, and non-psychical realities. For what is experienced as external belongs not to the intentional "intern alr" though our experience of it belongs there as an experience of the external. The phenomenologist, who will only notice phenomena, and know purely his own "life," -urt practice an Bnoyrl.' He must inhibit every ordinary objective "positior," and partake in no judgment concerning the objective world. The experience itself will remain what it was, an experience of this I epocb6:Greek term

meaninga check or suspensionof iudgment, first introducedby the Greek skepticalphilosophers.[Eds.]

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house, of this bodS of this world in general, in its particular mode. For one cannot describe any intentional experience, even though it be "illusorS" a self-contradicting judgment and the like, without describing what in the experience is, as such, the obiect of consciousness. Our comprehensive inoyil puts, as we say, the world benveen brackets, excludes the world which is simply there! from the subject's field, presenting in its stead the so-and-so-experienced-perceivedremembered-judged-thought-valued-etc.,world, as such, the "bracketed" world. Not the world or any part of it appears, but the "sense" of the world. To enjoy phenomenological experiencewe must retreat from the objects posited in the natural attitude to the multiple modes of their "appearance," to the "bracketed" objects. The phenomenological reduction to phenomena, to the purely psychical, advances by two steps: (r) systematic and radical Enoyil of every objectifying "position" in an experience, practised both upon the regard of particular objects and upon the entire attitude of mind, and (z) expert recognition, comprehension and description of the manifold "appearances" of wh at are no longer "objects" but "unities" of "sense." So that the phenomenological description will comprise two parts, description of the "noetic" (voea) or "experiencing" and description of the "noematic" (vor1p"a) or the "experienced." Phenomenological experience, is the only experiencewhich may properly be called "internal" and there is no limit to its practice. And as a similar "bracketing" of objective, and description of what then "appears" ("noema" in "noesis"), can be performed upon the "life" of another self which we represent to ourselves, the "reductive" method can be extended from one's own self-experienceto one's experience of other selves. And, further, that societR which we experience in a common consciousness, may be reduced not only to the intentional fields of the individual consciousness'but also by the means of an inter-subiective reduction, to that which unites these, namely the phenomenological unity of the social life. Thus enlarged, the psychological concept of internal experiencereachesits full extent. But it takes more than the uni ty of a manifold "intentional life," with its inseparable complement of "sense-unitiesr"to make a "soul." For from the

individual life that "ego-subject" cannor be disjoined, which persistsas an identical ego or "pole," to the particular intentions, and the "habits" growing out of these. Thus the "inter-subjective," ph.nomenologically reduced and concretely apprehended, is seento be a "soci ety" of "persons," who share a conscious life. Phenomenological psychology can be purged of every empirical and psycho-physical element, but, being so purged, it cannot deal with "matters of fact." Atty closed field may be considered as regards its "essencer" its eij6os,t and we may disregard the factual side of our phenomena, and use them as "examples" merely.'Weshall ignore individual souls and societies, to learn their a priori, their "possible" forms. Our thesis will be "theoreticalr" observing the invariable through variation, disclosing a typical realm of a priori. There will be no psychical existence whose "style" we shall not know. Psychological phenomenology must rest upon eidetic phenomenology. The phenomenology of the perception of bodies, for example, will not be an account of actually occurring perceptions, or those which may be expected to occur, but of that invariable "structurer" apart from which no perception of a bod5 single or prolonBed, can be conceived. The phenomenological reduction revealsthe phenomena of actual internal experience; the eidetic reduction, the essential forms constraining psychical existence. Men now demand that empirical psychology shall conform to the exactnessrequired by modern natural science.Natural science,which was once a vague, inductive empiric, owes its modern character to the a priori system of forms, nature as it is "conceivable," which its separatedisciplines,pure geometry laws of motion, time, etc., have contributed. The methods of natural science and psychology are quite distinct, but the latter, like the former, can only reach "exactness" by a rationalization of the "essential." The psycho-physical has an a priori which must be learned by any complete psychologR this a priori is not phenomenological, for it depends no less upon the essenceof physical, or more particularly organic nature.

2eidos:Greekterm meaningform or idea.[Eds.]

Phenomenology

il. TnaNSCENDENTAL PurNoMENoLocy Transcendental philosophy may be said to have originated in Descartes,and phenomenological psychology in Locke, Berkeley and Hume, although the latter did not grow up primarily as a method or discipline to serve psychology, but to contribute to the solution of the transcendental problematic which Descarres had posed. The theme propounded in the Meditations was still dominant in a philosophy which it had initiated. All realiry, so it ran, and the whole of the world which we perceive as existent, may be said to exist only as the content of our own representations, judged in our j,rdgments, or, at best, proved by our own knowing. There lay impulse enough ro rouse all the legitimate and illegitimate problems of ranscendence, which we know. Descartes' "Doubting" first disclosed "transcendental subjectiviryr" and his "Ego cogito" was its first conceptual handling. But the cartesian transcendental"Mens" becamethe "Human Mindr" which Locke undertook to explore; and Locke's exploration turned into a psychology of the internal experience. And since Locke thought his psychology could embrace the transcendentalproblems, in whose interest he had begun his work, he became the founder of a false psychologistical philosophy which has persisted becausemen have ttot analysed their concept of "subjective" into its two-fold significance. once the transcendental problem is faiily stated, the ambiguity of the sense of the "subjective" becomes apparent, and establishesthe phenomenological psychology to deal with its one meaning, and the transcendental phenomenology with its other. Phenomenological psychology has been given the priority in this arricle, partly because it forms a convenient stepping-stone to the philosophy and partly becauseit is nearer to the common attitude than is the rranscendental. psychologS both in its eidetic and empirical disciplines, is a "positive" science, promoted in the "natural attitude" with the world before it for the ground of all its themes, while transcendental experience is difficult to realize because it is "supreme" and entirely ..unworldly." Phenomenological psychology, alihough comparatively new, and completely new as far it ", uses intentional analysis, can be approached from

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the gates of any of the positive sciences:and, being once reached, demands only a re-employment, in a more stringent mode, of its formal mechanism of reduction and analysis,to disclosethe transcendental phenomena. But it is not to be doubted that transcendental phenomenology could be developed independently of all psychology. The discovery of the double relativity of consciousnesssuggeststhe practice of both reductions. The psychological reduction does not reach beyond the psychical in animal realities, for psychology subserves real existence, and even its eidetic is confined ro the possibilities of real worlds. But the transcendental problem will include the entire world and all its sciences,to "doubt" the whole. The world "originates" in us, as Descartes led men to reco gnize, and within us acquires its habitual influence. The general significance of the world, and the definite sense of its particulars, is something of which we are conscious within our perceivirg, representing,thinking, valuing life, and therefore something "constituted" in some subjective genesis. The world and its properry, "in and for itself," exists as it exists, whether I, or we, happen, or not, to be consciousof it. But let once this general world, make its "appearance" in consciousnessas "the" world, it is thenceforth related to the subjective, and all its existence and the manner of it, assumes a new dimension, becoming "incompletely intelligible," "questionable." Here, then, is the transcendental problem; this "making its appearance," this "being for us" of the world, which can only gain its significance "subjectivelS" what is it? we may call the world "internal" because it is related to consciousness,but how can this quite "general" world, whose "immanent" being is as shadowy as the consciousnesswherein it "existsr" contrive to appear before us in a variety of "particular" aspectr, *^hi.h experience assuresus are the aspectsof an independent, self-existentworld? The problem also tou.h., every "ideal" world, the world of pure number, for example, and the world of "truths in themselves." And no existence, or manner of existence, is less wholly intelligible than ourselves.Each by himself, and in societS w€, in whose consciousness the world is valid, being men, belong ourselves to the world. Must w€, then, refer ouiselves to ourselvesto gain a worldly sense,a worldly being? Are

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we both psychologically to be called men, subjects of a psychical life, and yet be transcendental to ourselves and the whole world, being subjects of a transcendental world-constituting life ? Psychi(sl" and "we" of everyday incal subjectivity, the tent, may be experienced as it is in itself under the phenomenological-psychological reduction, and being eidetically treated, may establish a phenomenological psychology. But the transcendental subjectivity, which for want of language we can only call again, "I myselfr" "we ourselvesr" cannot be found under the attitude of psychological or natural science,being no part at all of the obiective world, but that subjective conscious life itself, wherein the world and all its content is made for "usr" for "me." We that are,indeed, men, spiritual and bodiln existing in the world, are, therefore, "appearances" unto ourselves, parcel of what "we" have constituted, pieces of the significance"we" have made. The "I" and "we," which we apprehend, presupposea hidden "I" and "we" to whom they are "present." To this transcendental subiectivitS transcendental experience gives us direct approach. As the psychical experiencewas purified, so is the transcendental, by a reduction. The transcendental reduction may be regarded as a certain further purification of the psychological interest. The universal is carried to a further stage. Henceforth the "bracketing" includes not the world only but its "souls" as well. The psychologist reduces the ordinarily valid world to a subiectivity of "souls," which are a part of the world which they inhabit. The transcendental phenomenologist reduces the already psychologically purified to the transcendental, that most general, subiectiviry which makes the world and its "soulsr" and confirms them. I no longer survey my perception experiences' imagination-experiences, the psychological data which my psychological experience reveals: I learn to survey transcendentalexperience.I am no longer interested in my own existence. I am interested in the pure intentional life, wherein my psychically real experienceshave occurred. This step raises the transcendental problem (the transcendental being defined as the quality of that which is conscious'We have to recognize that relaness)to its true level. is tivity to consciousness not only an actual quality of our world, but, from eidetic necessity,the quality of every conceivable world. We may, in a free fancy, vary our acrual world, and transmute it to any

other which we can imagine, but we are obliged with the world to vary ourselvesalso, and ourselves we cannot vary except within the limits prescribed to us by the nature of subjectivity. Change worlds as we may, each must ever be a world such as we could experience,prove upon the evidenceof our theories and inhabit with our practice. The transcendental problem is eidetic. My psychological experiences, perceptions, imaginations and the like remain in form and content what they were, but I seethem as "structures" now, for I am face to face at last with the ultimate structure of consciousness. It is obvious that, like every other intelligible problem, the transcendental problem derives the means of its solution from an existence-stratuffi, which it presupposesand sets beyond the reach of its enquiry. This realm is no other than the bare subjectivity of consciousnessin general, while the realm of its investigation remains not less than every spherewhich can be called "obiective," which considered in its totality, and at its root, is the conscious life. No one, then, can iustly propose to solve the transcendental problem by psychology either empirical or eidetic-phenomenological,without petitio principii, for psychology's "subiectivity" and "consciousness" are not that subiectivity and consciousness,which our philosophy will investigate. The transcendental reduction has supplanted the psychological reduction. In the place of the psycho6(I" 6(f" and and "wer" the transcendental logical "w'e" are comprehendedin the concretenessof transcendentalconsciousness.But though the transcendental "I" is not my psychological "lr" it must not be considered as if it were a second "Ir" for it is no c(I" in the more separated from my psychological conventional senseof separation,than it is ioined to it in the conventional senseof being ioined. Transcendental self-experience may' at any momenr, merely by a change of attitude, be turned back into psychological self-experience. Passing, thus, from the one to the other attitude, w€ notice a certain "identify" about the ego. \fhat I saw under the psychological reflection as "my" obfectifi,ca' tion, I see under the transcendental reflection also say, as obas self-obfectifying, or' as we may 'We "I." have only to transcendental the by fectified recognize that what makes the psychological and transcendental spheresof experience parallel is an "identity" in their significance, and that what differentiates them is merely a change of attitude' to

Phenomenology realize that the psychological and rranscendental phenomenologies will also be parallel. under the more stringent Enoyrl the psychological subjectivity is transformed into the transcendental subjectivitS and the psychological inter-subfectivity into the transcendental inter-subjectiviry. It is this last which is the concrete, ultimate ground, whence all that transcends consciousness,including all that is real in the world, derives the senseof its existence. For all objective existence is essentially "relative," and owes its nature to a unity of intention, which being establishedaccording to transcendentallaws, produces consciousnesswith its habit of belief and its conviction. Ph enomenology, th e Uniuersal Science Thus, as phenomenology is developed, the Leib nitzian foreshadowing of a universal ontology, the unification of all conceivable a priori sciences,is improved, and realizedupon the new and non-dogmatic basis of a phenomenological method. Foi phenomenology asthe scienceof all concretephenomena proper to subjectivity and inter-subjectiviry, is eo ipso an a priori scienceof all possible exisrenceand existences.Phenomenology is universal in its scope, becausethere is no a priori which does nor depend upon its intentional constitution, and derive from this its power of engendering habits in the consciousnessthat knows it, so that the establishment of any a priori must reveal the subjectiveprocessby which it is established. once the a priori disciplines, such as the mathematical sciences,are incorporated within phenomenologS they cannot thereafter be beset Ly ',paradoxes" or disputesconcerning principles: and ihor. scienceswhich have become a priori independently of phenomenology, can only hope ro set their methand premises beyond criticism, by founding 9dr themselvesupon it. For their very claim-to be positive, dogmatic sciences bears witness ro theii dependencS as branches, merelS of that universal, eidetic ontology, which is phenomenology. The endless task, this exposition of iire universum of the a priori, by referring all objectives to their transcendental"origin," may be consideredas

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one function in the construction of a universal science of fact, where every department, including the positive, will be settled on its a priori. So that our last division of the complete phenomenology is thus: eidetic phenomenology, or the universal ontolog5 for a first philosophy; and a second philosophy as the scienceof the transcendental intersubjectivity or universum of fact. Thus the antique conception of philosophy as the universal science,philosophy in the platonic, philosophy in the cartesian, sense,that shall embiace all knowledge, is once more justly restored. All rational problems, and all those problems, which for one reason or another, have come to be known as "philosophical," have their place within phenomenologS finding from the ultimate source of transcendentalexperienceor eidetic intuition, their proper form and the means of their solution. phenomenology itself learns its proper function of transcendentalhuman "living" from an entire relationship to "self." It can intuit life's absolute norms and learn life's original teleological structure. phenomenology is not less than man's whole occupation with himself in the service of the universal reason. Revealing life's norms, he does, in fact, set free a stream of new consciousnessintent upon the infinite idea of entire humanitS humanity in factand truth. Metaphysical, teleological, ethical problems, and problems of the history of philosophy, the problem of judgment, all significant problems in general, and the transcendental bonds uniting them, lie within phenomenology'scapability. Phenomenological philosophy is but developing the mainsprings of old Greek philosophy, th. "rrd supreme motive of Descartes.These have not died. They split into rationalism and empiricism. They stretch over Kant and German idealir-, and reach the present, confused day. They must be reassumed, subject to methodical and concrete treatment. Thev can inspire a sciencewithout bounds. Phenomenology demands of phenomenalists that they shall forgo particular closed systemsof philosophy, and share decisive work with others Lward persistentphilosophy.

Mikhail M. Bakhtin r89j-r97j

pr."nt

Poetics(r929),wherehis conceptof ton Problemsof Dostoyeusky's IJ the dialogical is developed,Bakhtin's work was not publishedunder his own name until the sixties. Certain works of his under the namesof Volosinov and Medvedev appearedin Russia in the thirties, however.Bakhtin spent six yearsin exile in that decade,during which he wrote the long essay"Discoursein the Novel" and much else.Becauseof suppressionof his writings, the disappearanceof a booklength manuscriptduring World War II, and refusal of the authoritiesro grant him the doctorate for his eventuallyinfluential dissertation on Rabelais,submittedfirst in r94o and reiectedfinally in 1949, his work did not becomewell known until recenttranslationsinto English,occurring mainly , amazinglytimely and has in the seventies.Bakhtin'sthought seems,nevertheless of narrative. If the theory in the particularly influence, recent had a powerful fame, he would gained his work which time at were the placement criterion of text. of this belongin the main body Above all, Bakhtin is a theorist of genre,particularly of the novel, the history and nature of which (the two are one for him) he describesin a new way' contrasting the novel with the poem, emphasizingthe "freedom for the point of view of others to revealthemselves"in it (polyphony) againstthe monological poem.In essaysother than the one here,he seesin literary history the gradual i.novelization'!of the poem. The novel and its tendenry toward polyphony and the dialogical (par excellencein Dostoyevsky) he traces back into a "carnivalistic'i senseof the world that leads in literature through its "joyful relativity" and "vitality" to emphasison free heterogenicinvention and multiple stylesin a singlework. The novelistic (and carnivalistic)runs in its early forms from the Socritic dialoguethrough the so-calledMenippeansatire.Its notion of and then truth is that of somethingborn betweenpeople rather than possessed (though Bakhtin expressedby an author. Suchtexts are products of differences doesnot usi this structuralistterm) that are cultural and historical. There is alwaysa dialogical rnakingin the novel.The author is therebut in a specialsort of relation to th1 characteri,text, or truth. Bakhtin makeshis conceptof the novelistic spreadeventuallyover all literary art. the individual asalwaysmultiple, finally, Bakhtin'shistorical view emphasizes gou.rrr.d by what he calls "heteroglossia":all those conditions that impinge in In" -o-.n, on a human event,affectingmeaning.Theseconditions contribute to the idea that truth comes to us only dialogically. The major works of Bakhtin in English translation are Rabelaisand HisWorld Poetics ( t g z 9 ; r e v . 1 9 6 3 ; t r a n s . Ug6S,rrans. 1968); Problems of Dostoyeusky't

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Discourse in the Nouel

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t973, 1984); [V.N. Volosinov], Marxism and tbe Philosophyof Language (tgzg, r93o, trans. U7l); [V. N. Volosinovf, Freudianism:A Marxist Critique (rgz7,trans. 1976);[P.N. Medvedev],Tbe FormalMethod in Literary Scholarship (t928; trans.1978);TheDialogiclrnaginatioa(essays written in the r93os, trans.r98r). SeeKaterinaClark and MichaelHolquist,Mikhail Bakhtin (t98$.

FROM

DISCOTJRSE IN THE NO\IEL MooERN Sryusrrcs AND THENovnr The current state of questions posed by stylistics " of the novel reveals,fully and clearly, that all the categories and methods of traditional stylistics remain incapable of dealing effectively with the artistic uniqueness of discourse in the novel, or with the specificlife that discourseleads in the novel. "Poetic languag€r" "individuality of languager" "imager" "symbolr" "epic style" and other general categories worked out and applied by stylistics, as well as the entire set of concrete stylistic devices subsumed by these categories (no matter how differently understood by individual critics), are all equally oriented toward the single-languagedand single-styled genres,toward the poetic genresin the narrow sense of the word. Their connection with this exclusive orientation explains a number of the particular features and limitations of traditional srylistic categories. All thesecategories,and the very philosophical conception of poetic discourse in which they are grounded, are too narrow and cramped, and cannot accommodate the artistic prose of novelistic discourse. Thus stylistics and the philosophy of discourse indeed confront a dilemma: either to acknowledge the novel (and consequently all artistic prose tending in that direction) an unartistic or quasi-artistic genre, or to radically reconsider that conception of poetic discourse in which traditional stylistics is grounded and which determines all its categories. This excerptfrom DrscouRSErN THENovELis reprinted from The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michall Holquist,translatedby Caryl Emersonand MichaelHolquist, by permissionof the University of Texas Press,copyright r98r.

This dilemma, however, is by no means universally recognized. Most scholars are not inclined to undertake a radical revision of the fundamental philosophical conception of poetic discourse.Many do not even seeor recogntze the philosophical roots of the stylistics (and linguistics) in which they work, and shy away from any fundamental philosophical issues.They utterly fail to seebehind their isolated and fragmented stylistic observations and linguistic descriptions any theoretical problems posed by novelistic discourse. Others-more principledmake a case for consistent individualism in their understanding of language and sryle. First and foremost they seek in the stylistic phenomenon a direct and unmediated expression of authorial individualiry, and such an understanding of the problem is least likely of all to encourage a reconsideration of basic stylistic categoriesin the proper direction. However, there is another solution of our dilemma that does take basic conceptsinto account: one need only consider oft-neglected rhetoric, which for centuries has included artistic prose in its purview. Once we have restored rhetoric to all its ancient rights, we may adhere to the old concept of poetic discourse, relegating to "rhetorical forms" everything in novelistic prose that does not fit the Procrustean bed of traditional stylistic categories.' Gustav Shpetrt in his time, proposed such a solution to the dilemma, with all due rigorousnessand consistency. He utterly excluded artistic prose and its ultimate realization-the novel-from the realm

t Sucha solution to the problem was especiallytempting to adherentsof the formal methodin poetics:in fact, the re-establishment of rhetoric, with all its rights, greatly strengthens the Formalistposition.Formalistrhetoricis a necessaryaddition to Formalistpoetics.Our Formalists were beingcompletelyconsistentwhen they spokeof the necessityof reviving rhetoric alongsidepoetics(on this, seeB. M. Eichenbaum , LiteraturefLiteratura;Leningrad, r9z7l, pp. r47-r48). [Au.] 2Gustav Shpet FSZg-r9j7), professor,University of Moscow. [Eds.]

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of poetry, and assigned it to the category of purely rhetorical forms.' Here is what Shpetsaysabout the novel: "The recognition that contemporary forms of moral propaganda-i.e., the nouel-do not spring from poetic creatiuity but are purely rhetorical compositions, is an admission, and a conception, that appatently cannot arise without immediately confronting a formidable obstaclein the form of the universal recognition, despite everythitg, that the novel does have a certain aestheticvalue."o Shpet utterly denies the novel any aesthetic significance. The novel is an extra-artistic rhetorical genre, "the contemporary form of moral Propaganda"; artistic discourse is exclusively poetic disio.rtr. (in the sensewe have indicated above). Viktor Vinogradov' adopted an analogous point assigningthe of view in his book On Artistic Prose,'Silhile agreeproblem of artistic prose to rhetoric. of definitions philosophical basic ing with Shpet's was' Vinogradov "rhetoricalr" the and "poetic" the however, not so paradoxically consistent: he consideredthe novel a syncretic,mixed form ("a hybrid formation") and admitted that it contained, along with rhetorical elements, some purely poetic ones.6 The point of view that completely excludes novelistic pror., as a rhetorical formation, from the realm of po.t ry-a point of view that is basically false-does neverthelesshave a certain indisputable merit. There resides in it an acknowledgment in principle and in substance of the inadequacy of all contemporary stylistics, along with its philosophical and linguistic base, when it comes to defining the specific distinctive features of novelistic prose. And what is more, the very reliance on rhetorical forms has a great heuristic significance. Once rhetorical discourse is brought into the study with all its living diversity, it cannot fail to have a deeply revolutionizing influence on linguistics and on the philosophy of language. It is precisely those aspects tf rny iir.ourr. (the internally dialogic qualiry of discourse,and the phenomena related to it), not yet sufficiently taken into account and fathomed in all 3Originally in his Aeslhetic Fragments !'oS.lEsteti.ieskie meity]; in a more completeaspectin the book The lnner Form o'lttttWord lVnitrenniaia forma sloual(M., r9z7). lAu.l oVnulrenniaiaforma sloua,p.zrS' tAy'l sViktor Vinogradov GSgS-r969), linguist and theorist. [Eds.] 6V.V. Vinogradov,On ArtisticProseIO xudoiestuennom r93o, pp' 7 5- ro6' [Au'] proze),M6scow-Leningrad,

the enormous weight they carry in the life of language, that are revealed with great external preciiiorr in rhetorical forms, provided a correct and unprejudiced approach to those forms is used. Such is ih. general methodological and heuristic signifi..n.i of rhetorical forms for linguistics and for the philosophy of language. The special significance of rhetorical forms for understanding the novel is equally great. The novel, and artistic prose in general, has the closestgenetic, family relationship to rhetorical forms. And throughout the entire development of the novel, its intimate interaction (both peaceful and hostile) with living rhetorical genres (iournalistic, moral, philosophical and others) has never ceased; this interaction was perhaps no lessintense than was the novel's interaction with the artistic genres (epic, dramatic, lyric). But in this uninterrupted interrelationship' novelistic discourse preserved its own qualitative uniqueness and was never reducible to rhetorical discourse. The novel is an artistic genre. Novelistic discourse is poetic discourse,but one that does not fit within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists. This concept has certain underlying presuppositions that limit it. The very concept-in the course of its historical formulation from Aristotle to the present day-has been oriented toward the specific "official" genresand connected with specific historical tendencies in verbal ideological life. Thus a whole seriesof phenomena remained beyond its conceptual horizon. Philosophy of language, linguistics and stylistics have all [i.e., such as they have come down to us] of relation unmediated and postulated a simple lan"own" singular and unitary his to ipeaker guage, and have postulated as well a simpl e reahzatio" of this language in the monologic utterance of the individual. Such disciplines actually know only two poles in the life of language, between which are located all the linguistic and stylistic phenomena they know: on the one hand, the systemof a unitary lan'guage, and on the other the indiuidual speaking in this language. Various schools of thought in the philosophy of language, in linguistics and in stylistics have, in different feriods (and always in close connection with the diverse concrete poetic and ideological styles of a given epoch), introduced into such concepts as "System Of languaBgr" "monolOgic utteranC€r" "the speaking indiuidnyrn," various differing nu-

Discourse in the Nouel ances of meaning, but their basic content remains unchanged. This basic content is conditioned by the specific sociohistorical destinies of European languages and by the destinies of ideological discourse, and by those particular historical tasks that ideological discourse has fulfilled in specific social spheres and at specific stages in its own historical development. Thesetasks and destiniesof discourseconditioned specific verbal-ideological movements, as well as various specific genresof ideological discourse,and ultimately the specific philosophical concept of discourse itself-in particular, the concept of poetic discourse, which had been at the heart of all concepts of style. The strength and at the same time the limitations of such basic stylistic categories become apparent when such categories are seen as conditioned by specific historical destinies and by the task that an ideological discourse assumes.These categories arose from and were shaped by the historic ally aktuell forces at work in the verbal-ideological evolution of specific social groups; they comprised the theoretical expression of actuali zing forces that were in the processof creating a life for language. These forces are tbe forces that serue to unify and centralize the uerbal-ideological world. Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, dfr expression of the centripetal forces of language.A unitary languageis not something given ldanl but is always in essence posited tzadanl-and at every moment of its linguisdc life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. But at the same time it makes its real presencefelt as a force for overcoming this heteroglossia,imposing specificlimits to it, guaranteeinga certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystali zing into a real, although still relative, uniry-the unity of the reigning conversational (everyd"y) and literary language, "correct language." A common unitary language is a system of linguistic norms. But thesenorms do not constitute an abstract imperative; they are rather the generative forces of linguistic life, forces that struggle to overcome the heteroglossia' of language, forces that unite and central rze verbal-ideological thought, creTHeteroglossia: thoseconditions,the convergingof internal and externalforces,that control the meaningof an utterance.[Eds.]

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ating within a heteroglot national language the firm, stable linguistic nucleus of an officially recognized literary language, or else defending an already formed language from the pressure of growing heteroglossia. What we have in mind here is not an abstract linguistic minimum of a common langu ege, in the sense of a system of elementary forms (linguistic symbols) guaranteeing a minimum level of comprehension in practical communication. We are taking language not as a system of abstract grammatical categories,but rather languageconceivedas ideologically saturated, language as a world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheresof ideological life. Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working toward concreteverbal and ideological unification and central ization, which develop in vital connection with the processesof sociopolitical and cultural centralization. Aristotelian poetics, the poetics of Augustine, the poetics of the medieval church, of "the one language of truthr" the Cartesian poetics of neoclassicism, the abstract grammatical universalism of Leibniz (the idea of a "universal grammar"), Humboldt's insistenceon the concrete-all these, whatever their differencesin nuance, give expression to the same centripetal forces in socio-linguistic and ideological life; they serve one and the same project of centralizing and unifying the European languages.The victory of one reigning language (dialect) over the others, the supplanting of languag€s,their enslavement, the process of illuminating them with the 'Word, True the incorporation of barbarians and lower social strata into a unitary languageof culture and truth, the canonization of ideological systems, philology with its methods of studying and teaching dead languages, languages that were by that very fact "unitiesr" Indo-European linguistics with its focus of attention, directed away from language plurality to a single proto-language-all this determined the content and power of the categoryof "unitary language" in linguistic and srylistic thought, and determined its creative,style-shapingrole in the majority of the poetic genres that coalescedin the channel formed by those same centripetal forces of verbal-ideological life. But the centripetal forces of the life of language, embodied in a "unitary langu ager" operate in the midst of heteroglossia.At any given moment of its evolution, languageis stratified not only into linguis-

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tic dialects in the strict senseof the word (according to formal linguistic markers, especially phonetic), but also-and for us this is the essential pointinto languagesthat are socio-ideological:languages of social groups, "professional" and "generic" languages,languagesof generationsand so forth. From this point of view, literary languageitself is only one of these heteroglot languages-and in its turn is also stratified into languages (generic, periodbound and others). And this stratification and heteroglossia,once reahzed,is not only a static invariant of linguistic life, but also what insures its dynamics: stratification and heteroglossiawiden and deepen as long as language is alive and developitg. Alongside the centripetal forces, the centrifugal forces of language carry on their uninterrupted work; alongside verbal-ideological centralrzation and unification, the uninterrupted processesof decentralization and disunification go forward. Every concrete utterance of a speaking subiect serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear. The processesof central rzatron and decentr ahzatron, of unification and disunification, intersect in the utterance; the utterance not only answers the requirements of its own languageas an individualized embodiment of a speech act, but it answers the requirements of heteroglossia as well; it is in fact an active participant in such speech diversity. And this active participation of every utterance in living heteroglossia determines the linguistic profile and style of the utterance to no less a degree than its inclusion in any normative-cen tralizing systemof a unitary language. Every utterance participates in the "unitary language" (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of social and historical heteroglossia(the centrifugal, stratifying forces). Such is the fleeting language of a day,of an epoch, a social group, a genre, a school and so forth. It is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction-ridden, tension-filled unity of two embattled tendenciesin the life of language. The authentic environment of an utterance, the environment in which it lives and takes shape,is dialogized heteroglossia,anonymous and social as language, but simultaneously concrete, filled with specific content and accentedas an individual utterance. At the time when major divisions of the poetic genres were developing under the influence of the unifying, centralizing, centripetal forces of verbal-

ideological life, the novel-and those artistic-prose genres that gravitate toward it-was being historically shaped by the current of decentralizing, centrifugal forces. At the time when poetry was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralizatron of the verbal-ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels,on the stagesof local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossiaof the clown sounded forth, ridiculing all "languages" and dialects; there developed the literature of the fabliaur and Schwiinke of street songs, folksayings, anecdotes, where there was no language-centerat all, where there was to be found a lively play with the "languages" of poets, scholars, monks, knights and others, where all "languages" were masks and where no language could claim to be an authentic, incontestable face. Heteroglossia, 4s organized in these low genres' was not merely heteroglossiavis-i-vis the accepted literary language (in all its various generic expressions), that is, vis-i-vis the linguistic center of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch, but was a heteroglossiaconsciously opposed to this literary language.It was parodic, and aimed sharply and polemically against the official languages of its given time. It was heteroglossia that had been dialogized. Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language that were born and shaped by the current of centralizing tendenciesin the life of language have ignored this dialogized heteroglossia, in which is embodied the centrifugal forces in the life of language.For this very reason they could make no provision for the dialogic nature of language, which was a struggle among socio-linguistic points of view, not an intra-language struggle between individual wills or logical contradictions. Moreover, even intra-language dialogue (dramatic, rhetorical, cognitive or merely casual) has hardly been studied linguistically or stylistically up to the present dty. One might even say outright that the dialogic aspect of discourse and all the phenomena connected with it have remained to the present moment beyond the ken of linguistics. Stylistics has been likewise completely deaf to dialogue. A literary work has been conceived by stylistics as if it were a hermetic and self-sufficient whole, one whose elements constitute a closed system presuming nothing beyond themselves,no other utterances. The system comprising an artistic work was thought to be analogous with the sys-

Discourse in the Nouel tem of a language, a system that could not stand in a dialogic interrelationship with other languages. From the point of view of stylistics, the artistic work as a whole-whatever that whole might beis a self-sufficientand closed authorial monologue, one that presumes only passive listeners beyond its own boundaries. Should we imagine the work as a reioinder in a given dialogue, whose style is determined by its interrelationship with other rejoinders in the same dialogue (in the totality of the conversation)-then traditional stylistics does not offer an adequate means for approaching such a dialo gized style. The sharpest and externally most marked manifestations of this stylistic category-the polemical style, the parodic, the ironic-are usually classified as rhetorical and not as poetic phenomena. Stylisticslocks every stylistic phenomenon into the monologic context of a given self-sufficientand hermetic utterance, imprisoning it, as it were, in the dungeon of a single context; it is not able to exchange messageswith other utterances; it is not able to realize its own stylistic implications in a relationship with them; it is obliged to exhaust itself in its own single hermetic context. Linguistics, stylistics and the philosophy of language-as forces in the service of the great centralizing tendencies of European verbal-ideological life-have sought first and foremost for unity in diversity.This exclusive"orientation toward unity" in the present and past life of languages has concentrated the attention of philosophical and linguistic thought on the firmest, most stable, least changeable and most mono-semic aspectsof discourseon the phonetic aspects first of all-that are furthest removed from the changing socio-semantic spheres of discourse. Real ideologically saturated "language consciousness,"one that participates in actual heteroglossia and multi-languagedness,has remained outside its field of vision. It is precisely this orientation toward unity that has compelled scholars to ignore all the verbal genres (quotidian, rhetorical, artistic-prose) that were the carriers of the dec entralizing tendencies in the life of language, or that were in any case too fundamentally implicated in heteroglossia.The expressionof this heteroas well as polyglot consciousnessin the specific forms and phenomena of verbal life remained utterly without determinative influence on linguistics and stylistic thought. Therefore proper theoretical recognition and illumination could not be found for the specific feel

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for language and discourse that one gets in srylizations, rn skaz.,t in parodies and in various forms of verbal masquerade, "not talking straightr" and in the more complex artistic forms for the organization of contradiction, forms that orchestrate their themes by means of languages-in all characteristic and profound models of novelistic prose, in Grimmelshausen, Cervantes, Rabelais, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and others. The problem of stylistics for the novel inevitably leads to the necessiryof engaging a seriesof fundamental questions concerning the philosophy of discourse, questions connected with those aspects in the life of discourse that have had no light cast on them by linguistic and stylistic thought-that is, we must deal with the life and behavior of discourse in a contradictory and multi-languaged world.

DrscouRSE rN PoETRYAND DtscouRSE IN THT NOVEL For the philosophy of language, for linguistics and for stylistics structured on their base, a whole series of phenomena have therefore remained almost entirely beyond the realm of consideration: these include the specific phenomena that are present in discourse and that are determined by its dialogic orientation, first, amid others' utterances inside a single language (the primordial dialogism of discourse), amid other "social languages" within a single national language and finally amid different national languageswithin the same cuhure, that is, the same socio-ideological conceptual horizon.t In recent decades, it is true, these phenomena have begun to attract the attention of scholars in language and stylistics, but their fundamental and wide-ranging significancein all spheresof the life of discourse is still far from acknowledged. The dialogic orientation of a word among other words (of all kinds and degreesof otherness)creates new and significant artistic potential in discourse, creates the potential for a distinctive art of prose, 8Skaz:a techniqueof narrationimitating the speechof a narrator.[Eds.] eLinguisticsacknowledgesonly a mechanicalreciprocal influencingand intermixing of languages,(that is, one that is unconsciousand determinedby socialconditions) which is reflectedin abstractlinguistic elements(phonetic and morphological).[Au.]

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which has found its fullest and deepestexpression in the novel. \Wewill focus our attention here on various forms and degreesof dialogic orientation in discourse' and on the special potential for a distinctive prose-art. As treated by traditional stylistic thought, the word acknowledgesonly itself (that is, only its own context), its own object, its own direct expression and its own unitary and singular langu age. It acknowledges another word, one lying outside its own context, only as the neutral word of language, as the word of no one in particular, as simply the potential for speech.The direct word, as traditional stylistics understands it, encountersin its orientation toward the object only the resistanceof the obf ect itself (the impossibility of its being exhausted by a word, the impossibility of saying it all), but it does not encounter in its path toward the obiect the fundamental and richly varied opposition of another's word. No one hinders this word, no one argues with it. But no living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its object, between the word and the speaking subiect, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object, the same theme, and this is an environment that it is often difficult to penetrate. It is precisely in the process of living interaction with this specificenvironment that the word may be individualized and given stylistic shape. Indeed, ?Dy concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already envelopedin an obscuring mist-or, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value iudgments and accents. The word, directed toward its obiect, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents'weaves in and out of complex interrelationshipt, merges with some, recoils from others, intersectswith yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile. The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at aparticular historical moment in a socially specificenvironment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by

socio-ideological consciousnessaround the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it and as a reioinder to it-it does not approach the obiect from the sidelines. The way in which the word conceptualizesits object is a complex act-all objects, open to dispute and overlain as they are with qualifications, are from one side highlighted while from the other side dimmed by heteroglot social opinion, by an alien word about them.'o And into this complex play of light and shadow the word enters-it becomessaturated with this play, and must determine within it the boundaries of its own semantic and stylistic contours. The way in which the word conceives its object is complicated by a dialogic interaction within the object between various aspects of its socio-verbal intelligibility. And an artistic representation, an "im age" of the object, may be penetrated by this dialogic play of verbal intentions that meet and are interwoven in it; such an image need not stifle these forces, but on the contrary may activate and organize them. If we imagine the intention of such a word, that is, its directionality toward the obiect, in the form of a ray of light, then the living and unrepeatableplay of colors and light on the facets of the image that it constructs can be explained as the spectral dispersion of the ray-word, not within the obiect itself (as would be the case in the play of an image-as-trope, in poetic speech taken in the narrow sense,in an "autotelic word"), but rather as its spectral dispersion in an atmosphere filled with the alien words, value iudgments and accentsthrough which the ray passeson its way toward the obiect; the social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the obiect, makes the facets of the image sparkle. The word, breaking through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words and variously evaluating accents,harmonizing with some of the elementsin this environ10Highly significantin this respectis the strugglethat must be undertakenin such movementsas Rousseauism, Naturalism, Impressionism,Acmeism,Dadaism,Surrealismand analogousschoolswith the "qualified" nature of the obiect [" stt,tggleoccasionedby the ideaof a to original conreturn to primordial consciousness' to the obiectitself in itself' to pure percepsciousness, tion and so forth). [A".]

Discourse in the Nouel ment and striking a dissonancewith others, is able, in this dialogized process,to shape its own srylistic profile and tone. Such is the image in artistic prose and the image of nouelistic prose in particular. In the atmosphere of the novel, the direct and unmediated intention of a word presents itself as something impermissibly naive, something in fact impossible, for naivet6 itself, under authentic novelistic conditions, takes on the nature of an internal polemic and is consequently dialogized (in, for example, the work of the Sentimentalists,in Chateaubriand and in Tolstoy). Such a dialogized image can occur in all the poetic genres as well, even in the lyric (to be sure, without setting the tone).tt But such an image can fully unfold, achieve full complexity and depth and at the same time artistic closure, only under the conditions present in the genre of the novel. In the poetic image narrowly conceived (in the image-as-trope), all activity-the dynamics of the image-as-word-is completely exhausted by the play between the word (with all its apsects) and the object (in all its aspects).The word plunges into the inexhaustible wealth and contradictory multiplicity of the object itself, with its "virginal," still "unuttered" nature; therefore it presumes nothing beyond the borders of its own context (except, of course, what can be found in the treasure-houseof language itself). The word forgets that its object has its own history of contradictory acts of verbal recognition, as well as that heteroglossiathat is always present in such acts of recognition. For the writer of artistic prose, on the contrary, the object reveals first of all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its names, definitions and value iudgments. Instead of the virginal fullness and inexhaustibility of the obfect itself, the prose writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness.Along with the internal contradictions inside the object itself, the prose writer witnessesas well the unfolding of social heteroglossia surrounding the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around any obiect; the dialectics of the obiect are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it. For the prose writer, tt The Horatian lyric, Villon, Heine, Laforgue, Annenskij and others-despite the fact that these are extremely varied instances. [Au.]

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the object is a focal point for heteroglot voices among which his own voice must also sound; these voices create the background necessaryfor his own voice, outside of which his artistic prose nuances cannot be perceived, and without which they "do not sound." The prose artist elevatesthe social heteroglossia surrounding objects into an image that has finished contours, an image completely shot through with dialogized overtones; he creates artistically calculated nuances on all the fundamental voices and tones of this heteroglossia.But as we have already said, every extra-artistic prose discourse-in any of its forms, quotidian, rhetori cal, scholarly-cannot fail to be oriented toward the "already uttered," the "already knownr" the "common opinion" and so forth. The dialogic orientation of discourseis a phenomenon that is, of course, a property of any discourse. It is the natural orientation of any living discourse. On all its various routes toward the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction. Only the mythical Adam, who approached a virginal and as yet verbally unqualified world with the first word, could really have escapedfrom start to finish this dialogic interorientation with the alien word that occurs in the object. Concrete historical human discourse does not have this privilege: it can deviate from such inter-orientation only on a conditional basis and only to a certain degree. It is all the more remarkable that linguistics and the philosophy of discourse have been primarily oriented precisely toward this artificial, preconditioned status of the word, a word excised from dialogue and taken for the norm (although the primacy of dialogue over monologue is frequently proclaimed). Dialogue is studied merely as a compositional form in the structuring of speech,but the internal dialogism of the word (which occurs in a monologic utterance as well as in a rejoinder), the dialogism that penetratesits entire structure, all its semantic and expressivelayers, is almost entirely ignored. But it is precisely this internal dialogism of the word, which does not assumeany external compositional forms of dialogue, that cannot be isolated as an independent act, separate from the word's ability to form a concept lkoncipirouaniel of its obf ect-it is precisely this internal dialogism that has such enormous power to shape style. The

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any internal dialogism, that take the listener for a person who passively understands but not for one who actively answers and reacts. The listener and his responseare regularly taken into account when it comes to everyday dialogue and rhetoric, but every other sort of discourse as tures of ordinary dialogue been studied). is oriented toward an understanding that is well reThe word is born in a dialogue as a living this orientation is not par' "responslys"-although indialogic in joinder within it; the word is shaped ticularized in an independent act and is not comteraction with an alien word that is already in the positionally marked. Responsiveunderstanding is a object. A word forms a concept of its own object in lundamental force, one that participates in the fora dialogic way. mulation of discourse,and it is moreover an actiue dialogism But this does not exhaust the internal understanding, one that discourse sensesas resisin only not word alien an of the word. It encounters tance or support enriching the discourse. the object itself: every word is directed toward an Linguistics and the philosophy of language acAnswer and cannot escapethe profound influence of only a passive understanding of disknowiedg. the answering word that it anticipates. moreover this takes place by and large and course, blaThe word in living conversation is directly, of common language, that is, it is an level the on it answer-word: future tantln oriented toward a understanding of an utteran ce'sneutral signification provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itand not its actual meaning. ielf in the answer's direction. Forming itself in an The linguistic significance of a given utterance is atmosphereof the already spoken, the word is at the against the background of language, understood yet not has same time determined by that which meaning is understood against the actual its while anticifact in and needed is been said but which background of other concrete utterances on the pated by the answering word. Such is the situation same theme, a background made up of contradicin any living dialogue. tory opinions, points of view and value judgmentsAll rhetorical forms, monologic in their composithat is, precisely that background that, as we see' listener the toward donal structure, are oriented complicates the path of any word toward its object. listener the toward orientation This and his answer. Only now this contradictory environment of alien is usually considered the basic constitutive feature words is present to the speaker not in the obiect, of rhetorical discourse.t' It is highly significant for but rather in the consciousnessof the listener' as his rhetoric that this relationship toward the concrete apperceptive background, pregnant with responses relationship a is account, into listener, taking him objections. And every utterance is oriented toof construction internal very the into enters that "na ward this apperceptive background of understandrhetorical discourse.This orientation toward an anirg, which is not a linguistic background but rather swer is open, blatant and concrete. one composed of specific obiects and emotional exhis and This open orientation toward the listener pressions. There occurs a new encounter befween forms rhetorical in and answer in everyd^y dialogue ih. ,rtt.rance and an alien word, which makes itself even But linguists. of attention the has attracted felt as a new and unique influence on its style. where this has been the case,linguists have by and A passive understanding of linguistic meaning is large gotten no further than the compositional no understanding at all, it is only the abstract asaccount; into forms by which the listener is taken of meaning. But even a more concrete passiue pect more from springing influence not sought they have understanding of the meaning of the utterance' an profound meaning and style. They have taken into understanding of the speaker'sintention insofar as consideration only those aspectsof style determined that understanding remains purely passive, purely clarityand by demands for comprehensibility receptive,contributes nothing new to the word under of deprived are that aspects those that is, precisely consideration, only mirroring it, seeking' at its most ambitious, merely the full reproduction of that t2Cf..V.Vinogradov'sbook On Artistic Prose,thechapter is already given in the word-even such an which "Rhetoric and Poetics," pp. 7 Sff., where definitions never goes beyond the boundaries of understanding introduced. are rhetorics [Au.] older taken from the

internal dialogism of the word finds exPressionin a series of peculiar features in semantics, syntax and stylistics that have remained up to the present time completely unstudied by linguistics and stylistics (nor, what is more, have the peculiar semantrc fea-

Discourse in the Nouel the word's context and in no way enriches the word. Therefore, insofar as the speaker operates with such a passiveunderstanding, nothing new can be introduced into his discourse; there can be no new aspects in his discourse relating to concrete objects and emotional expressions.lndeed the purely negative demands, such as could only emerge from a passive understanding (for instance, a need for greater clariry, more persuasiveness, more vividness and so forth), leave the speakerin his own personal context, within his own boundaries; such negative demands are completely immanent in the speaker's own discourse and do not go beyond his semantic or expressiveself-sufficiency. In the actual life of speech, every concrete act of understanding is active: it assimilatesthe word to be understood into its own conceptual system filled with specific obiects and emotional expressions, and is indissolubly merged with the response,with a motivated agreement or disagreement. To some extent, primacy belongs to the response,as the activating principle: it creates the ground for understanding, it prepares the ground for an active and engaged understanding. Understanding comes ro fruition only in the response. Understanding and responseare dialectically merged and mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other. Thus an active understanding, one that assimilates the word under consideration into a new conceptual system, that of the one striving to understand, establishesa series of complex interrelationships, consonances and dissonances with the word and enriches it with new elements. It is precisely such an understanding that the speakercounts on. Therefore his orientation toward the listener is an orientation toward a specific conceptual horizon, toward the specific world of the listener; it introduces totally new elementsinto his discourse; it is in this way, after all, that various different points of view, conceptual horizons, systemsfor providing expressiveaccents,various social "languages" come to interact with one another. The speaker strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his own conceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptual sysrem of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relationships with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the lisrener, constructs his own utterance on alien territory,

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against his, the listener's,apperceptivebackground. This new form of internal dialogism of the word is different from that form determined by an encounter with an alien word within the object itself: here it is not the obfect that servesas the arena for the encounter, but rather the subjective belief system of the listener.Thus this dialogism bears a more subiective,psychologicaland (frequently) random character, sometimes crassly accommodating, sometimes provocatively polemical. Very often, especially in the rhetorical forms, this orientation toward the listener and the related internal dialogism of the word may simply overshadow the object: the strong point of any concrete listener becomes a self-sufficient focus of attention, and one that interferes with the word's creative work on its referent. In those examples of the internal dialogization of discoursethat we have chosen (the internal, as contrasted with the external, compositionally marked, dialogue) the relationship of the alien word, to an alien utterance enters into the positing of the style. Style organically contains within itself indices that reach outside itself, a correspondence of its own elements and the elementsof an alien context. The internal politics of style (how the elementsare pur together) is determined by its external politics (its relationship to alien discourse). Discourse lives, as it were, otr the boundary between its own context and another, alien, context. In any actual dialogue the rejoinder also leads such a double life: it is structured and conceptualized in the context of the dialogue as a whole, which consists of its own utterances ("own" from the point of view of the speaker) and of alien utrerances (those of the partner). One cannot excise the reioinder from this combined conrext made up of one's own words and the words of another without losing its senseand tone. It is an organic part of a heteroglot unity. The phenomenon of internal dialogization, as we have said, is present to a greateror lesserextent in all realms of the life of the word. But if in extraartistic prose (everyday, rhetorical, scholarly) dialogization usually stands apart, crystallizes into a special kind of act of its own and runs its course in ordinary dialogue or in other, compositionally clearly marked forms for mixing and polemi cizing with the discourse of another-then in artistic prose, and especially in the novel, this dialogiza-

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tion penetrates from within the very way in which the word conceivesits object and its means for expressing itself, reformulating the semantics and syntactical structure of discourse. Here dialogic inter-orientation becomes, as it were, 4tr event of discourse itself, animating from within and dramatizing discoursein all its aspects. In the majority of poetic genres(poetic in the narrow sense),as we have said, the internal dralogtzation of discourse is not put to artistic use' it does not enter into the work's "aesthetic obie ctr" and is artificially extinguished in poetic discourse. In the novel, however, this internal dialogization becomes one of the most fundamental aspectsof prose sryle and undergoes a specific artistic elaboration. But internal dialogization can become such a crucial force for creating form only where individual differences and contradictions are enriched by social heteroglossia,where dialogic reverberationsdo not sound in the semantic heights of discourse (as happens in the rhetorical genres) but penetrate the deep strata of discourse, dialogize language itself and the world view a particular language has (the internal form of discourse)-where the dialogue of voices arises directly out of a social dialogue of "languagesr" where an alien utterance begins to sound like a socially alien language, where the orientation of the word among alien utterances changes into an orientation of a word among socially alien languageswithin the boundaries of one and the same national language. IN cnNnnS that are poetic in the narrow Sense,the natural dialogization of the word is not put to artistic use, the word is sufficient unto itself and does not presume alien utterances beyond its own boundaries. Poetic style is by convention suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse, any allusion to alien discourse. Any way whatever of alluding to alien languag€S, to the possibility of another vocabularn another Semantics,other syntactic forms and so forth, to the possibiliry of other linguistic points of view, is .q,r"lly foreign to poetic style. It follows that any senseof the boundedness,the historiciry' the social determination and specificity of one's own language is alien to poetic sryle, and therefofe a critical qualified relationship to one's own language (as merely one of many languagesin a heteroglot world) is foreign to poetic style-as is a related phenomenon'

the incomplete commitment of oneself, of one's full meaning, to a given language. Of course this relationship and the relationship to his own language (in greater or lesser degree) could never be foreign to a historically existent poet' as a human being surrounded by living hetero- and polyglossia; but this relationship could not find a pt".. in the poetic style of his work without destroying that style, without transposing it into a prosaic k.y and in the processturning the poet into a writer of prose. ln poetic genres, artistic consciousness-understood as a unity of all the author's semantic and expressive intentions-fully realizes itself within its own language; in them alone is such consciousness fully immanent, expressing itself in it directly and without mediation, without conditions and without distance. The language of the poet is his language,he is utterly immersed in it' inseparablefrom i,, ti. makes use of each form, each word, each expression according to its unmediated power to assign meaning (as it were, "without quotation marks"), that is, as a pure and direct expressionof his own intention. No matter what "agonies of the word" the poet endured in the process of creation, in the finished work language is an obedient organ' fully adequate to the author's intention. The language in a poetic work realizes itself as something about which there can be no doubt, something that cannot be disputed, something allencompassing.Everything that the poet sees'understands and thinks, he does through the eyes of a given language, in its inner forms, and there is nothing that might require, for its expression, the help of atty other or alien language.The languageof the poetic genre is a unitary and singular Ptolemaic *otld outside of which nothing else exists and nothing elseis needed.The concept of many worlds of language, all equal in their ability to conceptualtze and to be expressive, is organically denied to poetic style. The world of poetry, no matter how many contradictions and insoluble conflicts the poet develops within it, is always illumined by one unitary and indisputable discourse. Contradictions, conflicts and doubts remain in the obiect, in thoughts, in living experiences-in short, in the subiect matter-but they do not enter into the language itself. In poetry, even discourse about doubts must be cast in a discourse that cannot be doubted.

Discourse in the Nouel To take responsibiliry for the language of the work as a whole at all of its points as its language, to assume a full solidarity with each of the work's aspects, tones, nuances-such is the fundamental prerequisite for poetic style; style so conceived is fully adequate to a single language and a single linguistic consciousness.The poet is not able to oppose his own poetic consciousness,his own intentions to the language that he uses, for he is completely within it and therefore cannot turn it into an object to be perceived,reflected upon or related to. Language is present ro him only from inside, in the work it does to effect its intention, and not from outside, in its objective specificity and boundedness.Within the limits of poetic style, direct unconditional intentionalitS languagear its full weight and the objective display of language (as a socially and historic ally limited linguistic reality) are all simultaneous, but incompatible. The unity and singularity of language are the indispensable prerequisites for a rcalization of the direct (but not objectively typifying) intentional individuality of poetic style and of its monologic steadfastness. This does not mean, of course, that heteroglossia or even a foreign language is completely shut out of a poetic work. To be sure, such possibilities are limited: a certain latitude for heteroglossia exists only in the "low" poetic genres-in the satiric and comic genres and others. Nevertheless,heteroglossia (other socio-ideological languages) can be introduced into purely poetic genres, primarily in the speechesof characters. But in such a context it is objective. It appears, in essence,os a thing, it does not lie on the same plane with the real language of the work: it is the depicted gesrureof one of the characters and does not appear as an aspect of the word doing the depicting. Elements of heteroglossia enter here not in the cap acity of another language carrying its own particular points of vieq about which one can say things nor expressible in one's own language, but rather in the capacity of a depicted thing. Even when speaking of alien things, the poet speaks in his own langu age.To shed light on an alien world, he never resorts to an alien language, even though it might in fact be more ade's7hereas quate to that world. the writer of prose, b)r contrast-as we shall see-attempts to talk about even his otan world in an alien language (for example, in the nonlite rary language of the teller of tales, or the representative of a specific socio-

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ideological group); he often measureshis own world by alien linguistic standards. As a consequenceof the prerequisites mentioned above, the language of poetic genres,when they approach their stylistic limit,t' often becomesauthoritarian, dogmatic and conservative,sealing itself off from the influence of extraliterary social dialects. Therefore such ideas as a special "poetic langua ge," a "language of the godsr" a "priestly language of poetry" and so forth could flourish on poetic soil. It is noteworthy that the poet, should he not accepr the given literary language,will sooner resort to the artificial creation of a new language specifically for poetry than he will ro the exploitation of actual available social dialects. Social languages are filled with specific objects, typical, socially localized and limited, while the artificially created language of poetry must be a directly intentional language, unitary and singular. Thus, when Russian prose writers at the beginning of the twentieth century began to show a profound interest in dialects and skaz, the Symbolists (Bal'mont, V. Ivanov) and later the Futurists dreamed of creating a special "language of poetryr" and even made experiments directed toward creating such a language (those of V. Khlebnikov). The idea of a special unitary and singular language of poetry is a typical utopian philosopheme of poetic discourse:it is grounded in the actual conditions and demands of poetic style, which is always a style adequately serviced by one directly intentional language from whose point of view other languages (conversational, businessand prose languages,among others) are perceived as obiects that are in no way its equal.'o The idea of a "poetic language" is yet another expressionof that same Ptolemaic conception of the linguistic and srylistic world. The poet is a poet insofar as he acceprs the idea of and singular language and a unitarS monologically sealed-off utterance. These ideas are a unitary

13It goes without saying that we continually advance as typical the extreme to which poetic genres aspire; in concrete examples of poetic works it is possible to find features fundamental to prose, and numerous hy, brids of various generic rypes exist. These are especialiy widespread in periods of shift in literary po.ii. languages. [Au.] 1osuch was the point of view taken by Latin toward national languagesin the Middle Ages. [Au.]

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immanent in the poetic genreswith which he works' In a condition of actual contradiction, these are what determine the means of orientation open to the poet. The poet must assumea complete singlepersonedhegemony over his own language,he must assume equal responsibility for each one of its aspects,and subordinate them to his own' and only itir own, intentions. Each word must express the poet's meaning directly and without mediation; ih.r. must be no distance befween the poet and his *ord. The meaning must emerge from language as a single intentional whole: none of its stratification, its speechdiversitS to say nothing of its languagediu.rrity, may be reflected in any fundamental way in his poetic work. To achievethis, the poet strips the word of others' intentions, he usesonly such words and forms (and only in such a way) that they lose their link with concrete intentional levels of language and their connection with specificcontexts. Behind the words of.apoetic work one should not senseany typical or reifiid images of genres (except for the given poetic genre), nor professions, tendencies, directions (e"..pt the direction chosen by the poet himself ), nor *orld views (except for the unitary and singular world view of the poet himself ), nor typical and individual images of speaking persons' their speech mannerisms or typical intonations. Euerything that enters the work must immerse itself in Lethe, and contexts: Ianforget its preuious tife in any other poetic contexts in life its only gudge may remember reminisconcrete euen howeuer, contexts, 1in trrh cencesare possible). Of course there always exists a limited sphere of more or less concrete contexts' and a connection with them must be deliberately evidenced in poetic discourse. But these contexts are purely semantic and, so to speak, accented in the abstract; in their linguistic dimension they are impersonal or at least no particularly concrete linguistic specificity is sensedUenina them, no particular manner of speech and so forth, no socially typical linguistic face (the possible personality of the narrator) need peek out lto- betrind them. Everywhere there is only one face-the linguistic face of the author, answering for every word as if it were his own. No matter how multiple and varied these semantic and accentual threads, associations, pointers, hints, correlations that emerge from every poetic word, one language, one .on..ptual horizon, is sufficient to them all;

'What there is no need of heteroglot social contexts' is more, the very movement of the poetic symbol (for example, the unfolding of a metaphor) presumes pr.iir.ly this uniry of language, an unmediated .orr.rpondence with its obiect. Social diversiry of speech,were it to arise in the work and stratify its lang,rage,would make impossible both the normal a.uetofment and the activity of symbols within it' The very rhythm of poetic genres does not of stratification' promote -Rhythm, any appreciable degree by creating an unmediated inuoluement between euery aspect of the accentual system of tbe whole (via the most immediate rhythmic unities), destroys in embryo those social worlds of speech and of persons that are potentially embedded in the word: in any case, rhythm puts definite limits on them, does not let them unfold or materiahze' Rhythm serves to strengthen and concentrate even furiher the uniry and hermetic quality of the surface of poetic style, and of the unitary language that this style posits. As a result of this work-stripping all aspectsof language of the intentions and accents of other people, destroying all traces of social heteroglossia anddiversity of langua ge-a tension-filled uniry of language is achieved in the poetic work. This unity mat be naive, and present only in those extremely rare epochs of poetry, when poetry had not yet exceedel the limits of a closed, unit ltY, undifferentiated social circle whose languageand ideology were not yet stratified. More often than not, we experience a profound and conscious tension through which the unitary poetic language of a work rises from the heteroglot and language-diversechaos of the lite rary language contemporary to it' This is how the poet proceeds.The novelist working in prose (and almost any prose writer) takes a completely different path. He welcomes the heteroglosiia and languagediversity of the literary and exiraliterary language into his own work not only not weakening them but even intensifying them (for he interacts with their particular self-consciousness)' It is in fact out of this stratification of language, its speechdiversity and even language diversitR that he constructs his sfyle, while at the same time he maintains the unity of his own creative personality and the unity (although it is, to be sure' unity of another order) of his own sfYle. The prose writer does not purge words of intentones that are alien to him, he does not tions "tta

Discourse in the Nouel destroy the seedsof social heteroglossiaembedded in words, he does not eliminate those language characterizations and speech mannerisms (potential narrator-personalitiis) glimmering behind the words and forms, each at a different distance from the ultimate semantic nucleus of his work, that is, the center of his own personal intentions. The language of the prose writer deploys itself according to degreesof greater or lesserproximity to the author and to his ultimate semantic instantiation: certain aspects of language directly and unmediatedly express (as in poetry) the semantic and expressive intentions of the author, others refract these intentions; the writer of prose does not meld completely with any of these words, bur rarher accents each of them in a particular way-humorousl5 ironically, parodically and so forth; " yer another group may stand even further from the author's ultimate semantic instantiation, still more thoroughly refracting his intentions; and there are) finally, those words that are completely denied any authorial intentions: the author does not express himself in them (as the author of the word)rather, he exhibits them as a unique speech-thing, they function for him as something completely reified. Therefore the stratification of languagegeneric, professional, social in the narrow sense, that of particular world views, particular tendencies, particular individuals, rhe social speechdiversiry and language-diversity(dialects)of languageupon entering the novel establishesits own special order within it, and becomes a unique artistic system, which orchestrates the intentional theme of the author. Thus a prose writer can distancehimself from the language of his own work, while at the same time distancing himself, in varying degrees,from the different layers and aspectsof the work. He can make use of languagewithout wholly giving himself up ro it, he may treat it as semi-alien or completely alien to himself, while compelling language ultimately to serve all his own intentions. The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesserdegree),but he speaks, as it were, througb langu dge, a language that has lsThat is to sar the words are not his if we understand them as direct words, but they are his as thingsthat are beingtransmittedironically,exhibitedand soTorth,that is, as words that are undeistoodfrom the dista".., "ppropriateto humor,irony,parody,etc. [Au.]

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somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates. The prose writer as a novelist does not strip away the intentions of others from the heteroglot language of his works, he does not violate those socioideological culrural horizons (big and little worlds) that open up behind heteroglot languages-rarher, he welcomes them into his work. The prose writer makes use of words that are alre ady populated with the social intentions of others and compels them to servehis own new intentions, to servea secondmaster. Therefore the intentions of the prose writer are refracted, and refracted at different angles, depending on the degree ro which the refracted, heteroglot languages he deals with are socio-ideologically alien, already embodied and akeady objecti vrzed. The orienration of the word amid the utterances and languages of others, and all the specific phenomena connected with this orientation, takes on artistic significance in novel style. Diversity of voices and heteroglossiaenter the novel and organize themselves within it into a srructured artistic system. This constitutes the distinguishing fearure of the novel as a genre. Any srylisticscapable of dealing with the distinctiveness of the novel as a genre must be a sociological stylistics. The inrernal social dialogism of novelistic discourse requires the concrete social context of discourse to be exposed, to be revealed as the force that determines its entire stylistic structure, its "form" and its "contentr" determining it not from without, but from within; for indeed, social dialogue reverberatesin all aspectsof discourse, in those relating to "content" as well as the "formal" aspectsthemselves. The developmenr of the novel is a function of the deepening of dialogic essence,its increased scope and greater precision. Fewer and fewer neutral, hard elements ("rock bottom truths") remain that are not drawn into dialogue. Dialogue moves into the deepest molecular and, ultimatelS subatomic levels. of course, even the poetic word is social, but poetic forms reflect lengthier social processes, i.e., those tendenciesin social life requiring centuries ro unfold. The novelistic word, however, registerswith extreme subtlety the tiniest shifts and oscillations of the social atmosphere; it does so, moreover, while registering it as a whole, in all of its aspecrs. when heteroglossia enters the novel it becomes

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subject to an artistic reworking. The social and historicalvoicespopulatinglanguage,all its words and all its forms, which providelanguagewith its particular concrete conceptuahzations,ate orga-

nizedin the novelinto a structuredsrylisticsystem that expressesthe differentiatedsocio-ideological of position of the author amid the heteroglossia his epoch.

\TalterBenj "*in r89z-rg40

ALrER BrNleMrN displayed throughout his life the vocation of liter ary criticism, as it might be distinguishedfrom the profession.One might

say that Benjamin was always an amateur, though not always happily so: he wrote for love of the activiry realizingwith characteristicirony that he would probably neverbe ableto earn a living at it. "There are placesin which I can earn a minimumr" he wrote, "and placesin which I can live on a minimum,but there is no placewhereI can do both" (llluminations,p. zS).At the sametime, however, Benjamin brought a candor and an intellectual independenceto critical writing that is rare. Without genuinecolleagues,and thereforewithout the independ,he wrote passionately stitutionalsupportupon which professions about as an activity to all civilizing institutions. writing essential Until his tragic suicidein r94o, precipitatedby his unsuccessful attempt to leaveNazi Germany,Benjaminwas known primarily for his penetratingand frequently controversialessaysand reviews. Like other German-Jewishintellectuals, fascismand national socialismpresentedhim with not only the aspectof obscenebarbarismbut a profound dilemma touching the institutionalization of tradition: the oppressedlive in a perpetual"state of emergency"partly because the ruling classespreemptivelycapture the idea of history to justify their own right to rule. The dilemma, simply stated,is that anyonewho seeksa historical justification for the right to rule thereby becomesthe oppressor.Writing selfconsciouslyfrom a position of marginality, Benjamin is therefore uncommonly wary about positive claimsto rightness,virtue, and correct thinking, sincethese are not in themselvespositive attributesof policies,people,or modesof thought but the resultsof a critical dialectic. Thus Benjamin might be describedas a historical materialist, vigilantly concernedwith the relation of writing to political reality, but it would be radically insufficientto sayhe is a Marxist. In the selectionhere,his very manner of theoretical vigilancecalls theory itself into questionas a potential instrument of oppression.The writer is alwaysengagedin the material, historical conditions of which he writes, and the presumptionthat the theorist could occupy a position aboveand removedfrom the historical sceneof conflict is a position that Benjamin seesas not only deludedbut dangerous. Despitehis marginality-or perhaps,becauseof it-Benjamin hasbeeninfluential in shapingsubsequentconceptionsof criticism, most notably through his influence on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and other founders of the Frankfurt School. Benjamin'swritings translatedinto English include two collectionsof essays,

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Illuminations ft96fl and Reflections(1978), and The Origins of GerrnanTragic Drama (tgZZ). SeeespeciallyHannah Arendt'sintroductory essayin llluminations andGeoffreyHartman, Criticism in the'Wilderness.Rorfurther discussion of the critical theoristsof the Frankfurt School,seeMartin lay, The Dialectical lmagination: A History of the Frankfurt Schooland the lnstitute for Social Research,1923- r 9t o (tgZz).

ON THE THE,SES OF PHILOSOPHY HISTORY I The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess,answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A pnppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboardplaced on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chessplayer sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called "historical materialism" is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which todaS as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

U "One of the most remarkable characteristicsof hu' man naturer" writes Lotzert "is, alongside so much selfishnessin specific instances, the freedom from envy which the present displays toward the future." Reflection shows us that our image of happiness is THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY is reprinted

from

Illuminationsby \WalterBeniamin,@ 1955 by-suhrkamp verlag, Frankfurt a. M.; English t-rals., ed. Hannah Arerrii, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: SchockenBooks, ReU69), O 1968 by Harcourt BraceJovanovich,Inc' piiitLawith the plrmission of Harcourt BraceJovanorich' iR,rdolphHerminn Lotze(r8ry-r88r), Germanphilosopher and psychologist,who attemptedto reconcilethe piincipl.s of iotnanticidealismwith mechanisticscience' [Eds.]

thoroughly colored by the time to which the course of our own existencehas assignedus. The kind of happinessthat could arouse envy in us exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to, women who could have given themselvesto us. In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past' which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settledcheaply.Historical materialists are aware of that. ilI A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemedmankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a that d"y is Judgcitation d I'ordre du iour'-and ment Day.

tv Seek for food and clothing first, then the Kingdom of God sball be added unto you. -Hegel, r 8o7 The class struggle, which is always present to a his.torian influen--a Uy Marx, is a fight for the crude "'summons to the order of the d"y." [Eds.]

Theseson the Pbilosophy of History and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

v The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up ar the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen agarn."The truth will not run away from us": in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller' mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recogn ized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.) VI To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was" (Ranke).' It means to seizehold of a memory as it flashesup at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes.In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest madition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of Antichrist. only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the pasr who is 3GottfriedKeller (r819-r89o), swiss novelist,shortstory writer, and poet. [Eds.] aLeopold von Ranke (rz g5- r 88 6), German historian. lEds.l

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firmly convinced that euen the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceasedto be victorious.

vil Considerthedarkness andthegreat cold In this uale which resounds with mystery. -Brecht,

mrn THREErENNvopERA

To historians who wish to relive an era, Fustel de Coulangest recommends that they blot out everything they know about the later course of history. There is no better way of char acterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken. It is a process of empathy whose origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly. Among medieval theologians it was regarded as the root cause of sadness.Flaubert, who was familiar with it, wrote: " Peu de gens deuineront combien il a fallu Atre triste pour ressusciter Carthage." t The nature of this sadnessstands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits rhe rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Ifhoever has emerged victorious participates to this dry in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prost rate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious derachmenr. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contempo5NumaDenisFustelde Coulanges (r8lo-r88g), French historianand professorof antiquitiesat the Universityof Strasbourg,who arguedagainstthe presumedGermanic origins of feudalismand the manorial systemin favor of primarily Romaninfluences.[Eds.] 5"Few will be ableto guesshow sadonehad to be in order to resuscitate Carthage."[Tr.]

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raries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

trophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like "nd to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call

vtil

progress.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the ex'We must attain to a conception ception but the rule. of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly reali ze th^t it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascismhas a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century rs not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge-unless it is the knowledg. that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

tx Mein Fliigel ist zum Scbwung bereit, icb kehrte gern zuriick, denn blieb icb auch lebendige Zeit, icb hiitte wenig Gliick. -Gerhard Scholem, t "Gruss vom Angelus" 'oAngelusNovus" shows an A Klee t painting named he is about to move away though as angel looking from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are of hisspread. This is how one pictures the angel .Where we tory. His face is turned toward the past. catassingle one sees he events, perceive a chain of TGershomGerhardScholem(t8gZ- ), Jewishscholar and translator,born in Berlin, later librarian of the Hebrew Universi$ of Jerusalem(r 94-27) ".t_aNltional Library (t925- iz),le.turer andprofessorof Jewishmysticism at HiUrew University Ggll-65)' [Eds'] "Vy wing is readyfor flight,l I would like to turn back./ If I rt"y".dtimelesstime,7I would havelittle luck." [Tr.] tpaul Klee (t8Zg-r94o), Swisspainter and artist, who taught at the Bauhaus'fromrgzz to r93r, until forcedto resignby the Nazis. [Eds.]

X The themes which monastic discipline assignedto friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developinghere originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascismhad placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians' stubborn faith in progress' their confidence in their "mass basisr" and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspectsof the same thing. It seeksto convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere. XI The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democ racy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in Secularized form. The Gotha Program' already bears eTheGothaCongress of r875 unitedthe two GermanSocialistparties,oie led by feidinand Lassalle,the other by Karl M"r* and\(ilhelm Liebknecht.Theprogram,drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle,was severelyattacked by

Theseson the PhilosoPhy of History traces of this confusion, defining labor as "the source of all wealth and all culture." Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ". . . the man who possesses no other property than his labor power" must of necessitybecome "the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners. . . ." However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen to proclaimed: "The savior of modern times is called work. The . . . improvement . . . of labor constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do." This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labor bypassesthe question of how its producrs might benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal. It recognizesonly the progressin the mastery of nature, not the retrogressionof sociery; it alre ady displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the r8+8 revolution. The new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier's fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient cooperative labor, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salt5 and beastsof prey would do man's bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labor which , far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, 2s Dietzgen puts it, "exists gratisr" is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.

ruI 'We

need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledgt needs it. -Nietzsche, oF THE usE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx in London. Seehis "critique of the Gotha program." [Tr.] l0JosefDietzgen(r828-88), German philosopher. [Eds.]

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Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberarion in the name of generationsof the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgencein the Spartacist group,tt has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. \(lithin three decadesthey managed virtually to erase the name of BlanQui, though it had been the rallying sound rhat had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democ racy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslavedancesrorsrather than that of liberated grandchildren.

run Euerydoy our causebecomesclearer and peopleget smarter. -Wilhelm Dietzgen,DrERELrcroN DER SOZIALDEMOKRATIE

Social Democratic theorS and even more its practice, have been formed by conception of progress " which did not adhere ro realiry but made dogmatic claims. Progressas pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progressof mankind itself (and not just advances in men's ability and knowledge). Secondly,it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibiliry of mankind. ThirdlS progress was regarded as irresistible, something that auromatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of thesepredicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicatesand focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself. tl Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknechtand Rosa I.uxembu-rg at the beginningof \florld \ilfar I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German socialist parry,laterabsorbedby the Communistparry.[Tr.]

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xtv Origin is the goal.

Tiraient sur lescadranspour arr€terle iour.to

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woRrE;5i:i5:+:1" A historical materialist cannot do without History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, emPtY time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit).t' Thus, to Robespi.tt. ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flav for the topical, tro matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past. This ju-p, however, takes place in an arena *h.t. the ruling class gives the commands' The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.

xv The awarenessthat they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classesat the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar' The initial d^y of a calendar servesas a historical time-lapse cam era.And, basicalln it is the same d^y that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which arc d,aysof remembrance.Thus the calendarsdo not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousnessof which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousnessstill alive. on the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from severalplaces in Paris. An eye-witn.rr, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows: contre Q.ti le croirait! on dit, qu'irrites I'heure De nouveaux Josu6sau pied de chaque tour, writer. [Eds'] 12KarlKraus(t8z+-1936), Austrl-an 13Beniamin and indicatesby the quotation says "'Tetztiiit'i to -"ik, that i,. io* not simply mean an -equivalent of the thinking is clearly Hi present. thatis, Gegenwart, myitical nunc stans'[Tr']

the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the "eternal" image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experiencewith the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called "Once uPon a time" in historicism's bordello. He remains in control of his powers' man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

xvil Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a conthe structive principle. Thinking involves not only '\il7here flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions,it givesthat configuration a shock, by which it crystallizesinto a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizesthe sign of a Messianic cessationof happening, of, put differen fly, a revolutionary chance in ln. fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history-blasting a specific hfe ou1 of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preservedin this work and at the same time canceled;" in the lifework, the era; and in the era) the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tastelessseed.

la,,'who would have believedit! we are told that new tow€r' as though irritated Joshuasl;; i6. ioo, of every stop the with / time *ai, fired at the dials in order to d"y." [Tr.] trThe fi.g.ii"n term aufhebezin its threefoldmeaning:to preserve,to elevate'to cancel'[Tt']

Theseson the Philosophy of History XVNI "[n relation to the history of organic life on earth," writes a modern biologist, "the paltry fift1 millennia of bomo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour d^y. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour." The present, which, as a model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe. A Historicism contents itself with establishinga causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. [t became historical post-humously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years.A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequenceof events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps

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the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishesa conception of the present as the "time of the now" which is shot through with chips of Messianic time. B The soothsayerswho found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experiencetime as either homogeneous or empry. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance-namely, in just the same way. \We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayersfor enlightenment. This does not impl5 however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.

MaxHorkheimer r89j-r973

I" rr,o, Max Horkheimerbecamethe directorof the Institutefor SocialReI r.rt.h in Frankfurt, and under his leadershipthe so-calledFrankfurt School took shapearound an ambitious intellectual (and political) program of philosophicaliriticism. Horkheimer'sown philosophicalwork was basedon a rigorous critique of positivismand a pervasivecommitmentto examiningthe historical and socialconditionsunder which modernindustrial societyhas emerged.In t933, the institute movedto Parisand later to Columbia Universiry just before the Nazi occupationof France' Together with Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm,Franz Neumann, and others, Horliheimer proposed a far-reachingmodel of "theory" that called into question the traditional view that a theory is contained in the logical structure of propositions about a subject."Critical theory" in Horkheimer's.model, differs -ort trotably in positing a social totality within which theory is primarily an activity.Thus, when the human sciences(includingwhat in Americanuniversitiesare called the social sciencesand humanities)attempt to pattern their explanatory and philosophicaldiscourseon the physicalsciences,they losesight of ,h. f"., ih"t a^theoryof sociology,for example,cannot be separatedout from the socialtotality wiihin which the theory is formulated by individuals, for particular reasons. According to Horkheimer, this leadsto an intellectual alienation akin to the alienation ol the working classin the modern capitalist state,with the distinction that it "finds .*pr.rlrion in philosophicalterminology as the separationof valueand research,knowledgeand action" (Critical Theory,p. zo8)' "Critical theory" by contrast,representsan attempt to include within the activity of theory on.L the excludedsubjectsand topics-value, interest,belief, ideologyand"ithe theorist's own complex and sometimesinchoate relation to the same matters. In the essayhere,Horkheimer outlines his critique of positivism, as it has developedsinci plato and through the greatcritiquesof Kant, o11he assumption th"t philosophy ought to producepositiveor "scientific" knowledgeitself' Here, Horkh.i-.i is'at odds wiih both Husserl,for example, and Wittgenstein,as the fi.rt ,o,rght to makephilosophy a rigorous sciencewithout presuppositions,and th. se.olndsought to maki philosophy a rigorously analyticalenterprise. In Horkheimer'sview, philosophy,unlike other disciplines,doesnot havean externat s.rbl.ct matter iro* *-hiilt "data" derive but rather produces its subiect -"".t by falling back upon itself, "upon its own theoreticalactivity"' For this reason,the nita[ty of philosophyis its inherently critical character:philosophy 686

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provides "criticism of what is prevalent," rhrough the distinctive (and dialectical) activiry of reflection; and the distinctivesubjectmatrer of philosophy is then seento be precisely"the developmentof critical and dialecticalthought." Many of Horkheimer'sessaysare availablein English in critical Theory: selectedEssays,rrans.MatthewJ. o'connell and others(rgzz). Seealso Martin Jay,"The Frankfurt school and the Genesisof cultural Theory" in Dick Howard and K. E. Klare, eds., The (Jnknown Dimension: European Marxism since Lenin ft972). see also Martin Jay'sThe Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt scbool and the lnstitute of social Researci, r9z3-19io (1972).

THE SOCIAL FI-]NCTIONOF PHILOSOPHY \ufhen the words physics, chemistrS medicine, or history are mentioned in a conversation, the participants usually have something very definite in mind. should any difference of opinion arise, we could consult an encyclopedia or accepredtextbook or turn to one or more outstanding specialists in the field in question. The definition of any one of these sciencesderives immediately from its place in present -d^y society. Though these sciences may make the greatest advances in the future, though it is even conceivable that severalof them, physics and chemistry for example, may some d^y be merged, no one is really interested in defining these concepts in any other way than by reference to the scientific activities now being carried on under such headings. It is different with philosophy. suppose we "rk " professor of philosophy what philosophy is. If we are lucky and happen to find a specialistwho is not averse to definitions in general, he will give us one. If we then adopt this definition, we shouid probably soon discover that it is by no means the universally accepted meaning of the word. we might then appeal to other authorities, and pore over textbooks, modern and old. The confusion would only inT H E S O C I A L F U NC T ION OF P HILOSOPHY ( ' gIil

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printed from critical Theory: selected nisiyr-by Max Horkheimer, trans. Matthew J. o'connell and others (New York: SeaburyPress, tizz). The essayappeared originally in En_gh-slr and is reprintedwith th.'p.rilirri"n of continuum Publicationcorporarion, .opyright ,91r.

crease.Many thinkers, accepting Plato and Kant as their authorities, regard philosophy as an exact sciencein its own right, with its own field and subiect matter. In our epoch this conception is chiefly represented by the late Edmund Husserl.' other thinkers, like Ernst Mach,t conceive philosophy as the critical elaboration and synthesisof the special sciencesinto a unified whole. Bertrand Russell,too, holds that the task of philosophy is "that of logical analysis, followed by logical synthesis."' He thus fully agreeswith L. T. Hobhouse, who declares that "Philosophy . . . has a synthesis of the sciencesas its goal."o This conception goes back to Auguste comte and Herbert spencer,t for whom philosophy constituted the total system of human knowledg.. Philosophy, therefore, is an independent sciencefor some, a subsidiary or auxiliary discipline for others. If most writers of philosophical works agree on the scientific characer of philosophy, a few, but by no means the worst, have emphatically denied it. For the German poer schiller t whose philosophical essays have had an influence perhaps even more lEdmund Husserl (r8sg -rgig),

German philosopher, founder of modern phlno-."oi"gy. see HisserL iras.l 2ErnstMach (t8l B-igrd), Austria"n physicisrandp'titoroghgr,a stric empiricistwho for the elimination "tg,r.d all metaphysical.or religious eGmentsin science. [Eds.] 3 "of BertrandRussell,, "Logica-lAtomism," in: contr*f iiiry British Philosophy,ed. by J. H. Muirhead, t 119251, p-irs. [Au.] 4L.T. Hobhouse, philosophy "The of Development,,, in: ponlemporary British phitosopity,ed. by i.H. ruuir-head,I (rg zS),p. r jz. [Au.] 'Auguste comre- \tzg8 - r g5il, French philosopher, founder of the plilosophical *our-errt krro*n ;, 'e,.ritivism; Herbert Spencer(rgzo- rgo3;, Englisnpl,iir*pher. [Eds.] 5Friedrichvon Schiller \tzsg-rgo5), Germanpoet,dramatist,and historian.SeeCTSp, 4tg-3r. tEds.l

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profound than his dramas, the purpose of philosophy was to bring aesthetic order into our thoughts and actions. Beauty was the criterion of its results. Other poets, like Holderlin and Novalis,' held a similarposition, and evenpure philosophers, Schelling for instance, came very close to it in some of their formulations. Henri Bergsonr8at any rate, insists that philosophy is closely related to art, and is not a science. As if the different views on the general character of philosophy were not enough, we also find the most diversenotions about its content and its methods. There are still some thinkers who hold that philosophy is concerned exclusively with the highest concepts and laws of Being, and ultimately with the cognition of God. This is true of the Aristotelian and Neo-Thomist schools. Then there is the related view that philosophy deals with the so-called a priori. Alexander describesphilosophy as "the experiential or empirical study of the non-empirical or a priori, and of such questions as arise out of the relation of the empirical to the a priori" (space, time and deity).' Others, who derive from the English sensualists and the German school of Fries and Apelt,to conceiveof it as the scienceof inner experience.According to logical empiricists like Carnap " philosophy is concerned essentially with scientific language; according to the school of \Tindelband tt and Rickert (another school with many American followers), it deals with universal values, above all with truth, beaury, goodness,and holinessFinallS everyone knows that there is no agreement in method. The Neo-Kantians all believe that the procedure of philosophy must consist in the

analysis of concepts and their reduction to the ultimate elements of cognition. Bergson and Max au,'WesensSchelertt consider intuition ("'Wesenssch erschauung") to be the decisive philosophical act. The phenomenological method of Husserl and Heidegger'ois flatly opposed to the empirio-criticism of Mach and Avenarius.'s The logistic of Bertrand Russell, Sfhitehead," and their followers, is the avowed enemy of the dialectic of Hegel. The kind of philosophizing one prefers depends, according to \flilliam James,tton one's character and experience. These definitions have been mentioned in order to indicate that the situation in philosophy is not the same as in other intellectual pursuits. No matter how many points of dispute there may be in those fields, at least the general line of their intellectual work is universally recognized. The prominent representativesmore or less agree on subject matter and methods. In philosophy, however, refutation of one school by another usually involves complete rejection, the negation of the substanceof its work as fundamentally false. This attitude is not shared by all schools, of course. A dialectical philosophS for example, in keeping with its principles, will tend to extract the relative truths of the individual points of view and introduce them in its own comprehensive theory. Other philosophical doctrines, such as modern positivism, have less elastic principles, and they simply exclude from the realm of knowledg. a very large part of the philosophical literature, especially the great systemsof the past. In short, it cannot be taken for granted that anyone who uses the term "philosophy" shareswith his audience more than a

few very vague conceptions. The individual sciencesapply themselvesto probwhich must be treated becausethey arise out lems TFriedrich Holderlin(rZZo-fi4i), Germanpoet;Novalis, life process of present-day society. Both the of the Hardenberg von Friedrich G77z-r8or), pseudonymof individual problems and their allotment to specific Ger*an poet and writer. [Eds-] 8Henri Beigson(r 8S9- r94r),Frenchphilosopher,_winner disciplines derive, in the last analysis, from the of Nobel Prize in-literature for r9z7; seeT. E. Hulme, "Bergson'sTheory of Art" in CTSP,pp. 774- 8r ' [Eds'] 13MaxScheler(t8z+-rgz8), Germanmoralphilosopher, eS[am;el] Alexander, Space, Time and Deity, vol' I influencedby Husserl.[Eds.] (i9zo), p. 4. [Au.]SeeCTSRpp. 86o-69. [Eds.] l'See Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.[Eds-] toJacobFrederickFries Gzzl-:.843), Germanphiloso15 Richard Heinrich Ludwig Avenarius(r 8+3-96), Gerphiih.t; Ernst FriedrichApelt (r8r z-59), German man philosopher.[Eds.] losopher.[Eds.] t6Bertrand Russell (r87z- r97o), British philosopher, tt Rudolf Carnap (r 8gr - r g7o), German-American -phiAlfredNorth \Thitehead(r86r- 1947), mathematician; losopher,memberof the Vienna Circle, a principal figand mathematician-Tb. principal philosopher British Positivism. tEds.] ,rt. itt the developmentof Logical ad'sPrin12WilhelmWindelband(r848 -:r9r5), Germanphilosowork referredio here is F.usselland r0(lhitehe cipiaMathematica(t9to- r 3). [Eds.] pher and historian of philosophy; Heinrich Rickert tt william James (r 8+z- rg r o), American philosopher German philosopherand historiograirse-rg36), psychologist. and [Eds.] pher. [Eds.]

Tbe Social Function of philosophy needs of mankind in its past and present forms of organization. This does not mean that every single scientific investigation satisfies some urgenr need. Many scientific undertakings produced results that mankind could easily do without. Scienceis no exception to that misapplication of energy which we observe in every sphere of cultural life. The development of branches of science which have only a dubious practical value for the immediate present is, however, part of that expenditure of human labor which is one of the necessaryconditions of scientific and technological progress. \7e should remember that certain branches of mathematics, which appeared to be mere playthings at first, later t,rrrr.d out to be extraordinarily useful. Thus, though there are scientific undertakings which can lead to no immediate use, all of them have some potential applicability within the given social t."litr remote and vague as it may be. By its very nature, the work of the scientist is capable of enriching life in its present form. His fields of activity are therefore largely marked out for him, and the amempts to alter the boundaries between the several domains of science,to develop new disciplines, as well as continuously to differentiate and integrate them, are always guided by social need, whether consciously or not. This need is also operative, though indirectlS in the laboratories and lecture halls of the university, not to mention the chemical laboratories and statistical departments of large industrial enterprises and in the hospitals. Philosophy has no such guide. NaturallS many desires play upon it; it is expected to find slutiorrs for problems which the scienceseither do not deal with or treat unsatisfactorily. But the practice of social life offers no criterion for philosophy; philosophy can point to no successes. Insofar as individual philosophers occasionallydo offer something in this respect, it is a matter of serviceswhich are not specifically philosophical. we have, for example, ,t . mathematical discoveries of Descartes and Leibniz, the psychological researchesof Hume," the physical theories of Ernst Mach, and so forth. The tpponents of philosophy also say that insofar as ii irrs 18Ren6 Descartes(r 596-165o), - Frenchphilosopherand mathematician,__{g.u.l oped lh e field of e.";."tr"lyti."i C.r-"r, try; Gottfried r7ilhelm Leibniz ft646-r7r6), philosopherand mathematician,made major contributions to the_developmentof calculus; David Hume (t7rr-76), scottishphilosopher and hiitorian.[Eds.]

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value, it is nor philosophy but positive science. Everything else in philosophical systems is mere talk, they claim, occasionally stimulating, but usually boring and always useless. philosophers, on the other hand, show a certain obstinate disregard for the verdict of the outside world. Ever since the trial of socrates, it has been clear that they have a strained relationship with realiry as it is, and especially with the community in which they live. The tension sometimes takes the form of open persecution; at other times merely failure to trnd.rrtand their language. They must live in hiding, physically or intellectually. Scientists,too, have come into conflict with the societies of their time. But here we must resumethe distinction betweenthe philosophical and the scientific elementsof which we have already spoken, and reversethe picture, becausethe reasonsfor the persecution usually lay in the philosophical views of these thinkers, nor in their scientific theories. Galileo's bitter persecurorsamong the Jesuits admitted that he would have been free ro publish his heliocenrric theory if he had placed it in th9 rroper philosophical and theological conrext. Albertus Magnus " himself discussJ the heliocentric theory in his Summa, and he was never artacked for it. Furthermore, the conflict between scientists and sociery, at least in modern times, is not connected with fundamentals but only with individual doctrines, not tolerated by this or that authority in one country at one time, tolerated and even celebrated in some other country at the same time or soon afterwards. The opposition of philosophy to reality arises from its principles. philosophy insists that the actions and aims of man must not be the product of blind necessity.Neither the concepts of science nor the form of social life, neither the prevailing way of thinking nor the prevailing -or., shoulJ be accepted by custom and practiced uncritically. philosophy has set itself against mere tradition and resignation in the decisiveproblems of existence,and it has shouldered the unpleasant task of thro-irrg th. -relalight of consciousnesseven upon those human tions and modes of reaction which have become so deeply rooted that they seem narural, immutable, and eternal. one could reply that the sciences, too, teAlbertusMagnus (also saint Albert the Great) (ca. ry93-rz8o), scholasticphilosopher,soughtto reconcile apparentcontradictionsof Aristotelianand christian thought. [Eds.]

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and particularly their inventions and technological changes,savemankind from the deep-worn grooves 'Sfhen we compare present-day life with of habit. that thirty, frfty, or a hundred years a9o, we cannot truthfully accept the notion that the scienceshave not disturbed human habits and customs. Not only industry and transportation, but even art, has been rationalized. A single illustration will suffice. In former years a playwright would work out his individual conception of human problems in the seclusion of his personal life. \When his work finally reached the public, he thereby exposed his world of ideas to conflict with the existing world and thus contributed to the development of his own mind and of the social mind as well. But today both the production and reception of works of art on the screen and the radio have been completely rationahzed. Movies are not prepared in a quiet studio; a whole staff of experts is engaged.And from the outset the goal is not h"r-otty with some idea, but harmony with the current views of the public, with the general taste' carefully examined and calculated beforehand by these experts. If, sometimes,the pattern of an artistic product does not harmonize with public opinion, the fault usually does not lie in an intrinsic disagreement, but in an incorrect estimate by the producers of the reaction of public and press. This much is certain: no sphere of industry' either material or intellectual, is ever in a state of complete stability; customs have no time in which to settle down. The foundations of present-day society are constantly shifting through the intervention of science. There is hardly an activity in business or in government which thought is not constantly enin simplifying and improvittg. gaged But if we probe a little deeper, we discover that despite all these manifestations, man's way of thinking and acting is not progressing as much as one might be led to believe. On the contrary, the principles now underlying the actions of men, at least in alarge portion of the world, are certainly more mechanical than in other periods when they were grounded in living consciousnessand conviction. Technological progress has helped to make it even easierto cement old illusions more firmly, and to introduce new ones into the minds of men without interference from reason. It is the very diffusion and industrialization of cultural institutions which cause significant factors of intellectual growth to decline even disappear, becauseof shallowness of con"tta

tent, dullness of the intellectual organs, and elimination of some of man's individualistic creative powers. In recent decades,this dual aspect of the triumphal processionof scienceand technology has been repeatedly noted by both romantic and progressive thinkers. The French writer Paul Ya\6ty'o has recently formulated the situation with particular cogency. He relates how he was taken to the theater as a child to see a fantasy in which a young man was pursued by an evil spirit who used every sort of devilish deviceto frighten him and make him do his bidding. When he lay in bed at night, the evil spirit surrounded him with hellish fiends and flames; suddenly his room would become an ocean and the bedspread a sail. No sooner did one ghost disappear, than a new one arrived. After a while these horrots ceased to affect the little boR and finallR when a new one began, he exclaimed: voili les b6tises qui recommencent! (Here comes some more of that nonsense!) Some daR Val6ry concludes' mankind might react in the same way to the discoveries of scienceand the marvels of technology. Not all philosophers, and we least of all, share Paul Val6ry's pessimistic conception of scientific progress.But it is true that neither the achievements of scienceby themselves,nor the advance in industrial method ) are immediately identical with the real progress of mankind. tt is obvious that man may be materially, emotionallR and intellectually impoverished at decisivepoints despite the progress of science and industry. Scienceand technology are only elements in an existing social totality, and it is quite possible that, despite all their achievements, other l".tott, even the totality itself, could be moving backwards, that man could become increasingly be stunted and unhappy, that the individual could 'We are ruined and nations headed toward disaster. fortunate that we live in a country which has done away with national boundaries and war situations over half a continent. But in Europe, while the means of communication became more rapid and complete, while distancesdecreased,while the habits oi life became more and more alike, tariff walls grew higher and higher, nations feverishly piled up armaments, and both foreign relations and internal political conditions approached and eventually ariiued at a state of war. This antagonistic situation assertsitself in other parts of the world, too, and 2oPaul Val6ry(r87r -1945),Frenchpoetandwriter' [Eds']

The Social Function of Philosophy who knows whether, and for how long, the remainder of the world will be able to protect itself against the consequencesin all their intensify. Rationalism in details can readily go with a general irrationalism. Actions of individuals, correctly regarded as reasonable and useful in daily life, may spell waste and even destruction for sociery. That is why in periods like ours, we musr remember that the best will to create something useful may result in its opposite, simply becauseit is blind to what lies beyond the limits of its scientific specialry or profession, becauseit focuseson what is nearest at hand and misconstruesits true nature, for the latter can be revealed only in the larger context. In the New Testament,"They know not what they do" refers only to evildoers. If these words are not to apply to all mankind, thought musr not be -.t.1y confined within the special sciences and ro the practical learning of the professions,thought which investigaresthe material and intellectual presuppositions that are usually taken for granted, thought which impregnateswith human purpose those rJrtionships of daily life that are almost blindly created and maintained. \il7henit was said that the tension betweenphilosophy and realiry is fundamental, unlike the occasional difficulties against which sciencemust struggle in social life, this referred to the tendency embodied in philosophy, not to put an end to thoughr, and to exerciseparticular control over all those factors of life which are generally held to be fixed, unconquerable forces or eternal laws. This was precisely the issue in the trial of Socrates.Against the demand for submission to the customs protected by the gods and unquestioning adaptation to the traditional forms of life, socrates asserred the principle that man should know what he does, and shape his own destiny. His god dwells within him, that is to say, in his own reason and will. Today the conflicts in philosophy no longer appear as strugglesover gods, but the situation of the world is no less critical. 'we should indeed be accepting the present situation if we were to maintain that reason and reality have been reconciled, and that man's autonomy was assuredwithin this society. The original function of philosophy is still very relevant. It may not be incorrect to suppose that these are the reasonswhy discussionswithin philosophy, and even discussionsabout the concept of philosophy, are so much more radical and unconciliatory than

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discussionsin the sciences.Unlike any other pursuit, philosophy does nor have a field of action marked out for it within the given order. This order of life, with its hierarchy of values,is itself a problem for philosophy. rilThilescienceis still able to refer to given data which point the way for it, philosophy must fall back upon itself, upon its own theoretical activity. The determination of its object falls within its own program much more than is the case with the special sciences,even today when the latter are so deeply engrossedwith problems of theory and methodology. our analysis also gives us an insight into the reason why philosophy has received so much more attention in European life than in America. The geographical expansion and historical development have made it possible for certain social conflicts, which have flared up repeatedly and sharply in Europe becauseof the existing relationships, to decline in significance in this continent under the strain of opening up the country and of performing the daily tasks. The basic problems of societal life found a temporary practical solution, and so the tensions which give rise to theoretical thought in specific historical situations, never became so important. In this country, theoretical thought usually lags far behind the determination 's7hether and accumulation of facts. that kind of activity still satisfies the demands which are justly made upon knowledg. in this country too, is a problem which we do not have the time to discussnow. It is true that the definitions of many modern authors, some of which have already been cited, hardly reveal that characer of philosophy which distinguishesit from all the special sciences.Many philosophers throw envious glances at their colleagues in other faculties who are much better off becausethey have a well-marked field of work whose fruitfulness for soci.ry cannot be questioned. These authors struggle to "sell" philosophy as a particular kind of science,or at least, to prove thai it is very useful for the specialsciences.presentedin this way, philosophy is no longer the critic, but the servant of scienceand the social forms in general. Such an attitude is a confession that thought which transcends the prevailing forms of scientific activiry, and thus transcends the horizon of contemporary society, is impossible. Thought should rather be conrent ro accept the tasks set for it by the ever renewed needs of government and industry, and to deal with these tasks in the form in which they are received. The

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extent to which the form and content of these tasks are the correct ones for mankind at the present historical moment, the question whether the social organrzation in which they arise is still suitable for mankind-such problems are neither scientific nor philosophical in the eyes of those humble philosophers; they are matters for personal decision, for subjectiveevaluation by the individual who has surrendered to his taste and temper. The only philosophical position which can be reco gnized in such a conception is the negative doctrine that there really is no philosophy, that systematic thought must retire at the decisive moments of life, in short, philosophical skepticism and nihilism. Before proceeding further, it is necessaryto distinguish the conception of the social function of philosophy presentedhere from another view, best represented in several branches of modern sociology, which identifies philosophy with one general social function, namely ideology.tt This view maintains that philosophical thought, or, more correctly' thought as such, is merely the expression of a specific social situation. Every social group-the German Junkers,tt for example-develops a conceptual apparatus, certain methods of thought and a specific style of thought adapted to its social position. For centuries the life of the Junkers has been associatedwith a specific order of succession;their relationship to the princely dynasry upon which they were dependent and to their own servants had patriarchal features. ConsequentlR they tended to base their whole thought on the forms of the organic, the ordered succession of generations, on biological growth. Everything appeared under the aspect of the organism and natural ties. Liberal bourgeoisie, on the other hand, whose happiness and unhappiness depend upon business success, whose experience has taught them that everything must be reduced to the common denominator of moneR have developed a more abstract, more mechanistic way of thinking. Not hierarchical but leveling tendencies are characteristic of their intellectual style, of their philosophy. The same approach applies to other groups, past and present. \7ith the philosophy of Descartes, for example, we z'Cf. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and utopia (London, r%7). [Eds.] ,, irti^n generallya term of repro".lt derived ;,rttk.rs,'?Ierrr" or "young lordr" appliedto the from "irrig" and PrussiannobilitY.[Eds.]

must ask whether his notions corresponded to the aristocratic and Jesuit groups of the court, or to the noblessede robe, or to the lower bourgeoisieand the masses.Every pattern of thought, every philosophical or other cultural work, belongs to a specific social group, with which it originates and with whose existence it is bound up. Every pattern of thought is "ideology." There can be no doubt that there is some truth in this attitude. Many ideas prevalent today ate revealed to be mere illusions when we consider them from the point of view of their social basis. But it is not enough merely to correlate these ideas with some one social group, as that sociological school 'We must penetrate deeper and develop them does. out of the decisive historical process from which the social groups themselvesare to be explained. Let us take an example. In Descartes'philosophy' mechanistic thinking, particularly mathematics, plays an 'We can even say that this whole important part. philosophy is the universalization of mathematical thought. Of course, we can now try to find some group in society whose character is correlative with this viewpoint, and we shall probably find some such definite group in the society of Descartes' time. But a more complicated, yet more adequate, approach is to study the productive system of those days and to show how a member of the rising middle class,by force of his very activity in commerce and manufacture, was induced to make precise calculations if he wished to preserve and increase his power in the newly developed competitive market, and the same holds true of his agents, so to speak, in science and technology whose inventions and other scientific work played so larg e a patt in the constant struggle between individuals, cities, and nations in the modern era.For all thesesubjects,the given approach to the world was its consideration in -"thematical terms. Becausethis class, through the development of society, became characteristic of the whole of society, that approach was widely diffused far beyond the middle class itself. Sociology is 'We must have a comprehensive thenot sufficient. ory of history if we wish to avoid serious errors. Otherwise we run the risk of relating important philosophical theories to accidental, or at any rate, not decisive groups, and of misconstruing the significance of the specific group in the whole of society, and, therefore, of misconstruing the culture pattern in question. But this is not the chief obiec-

The Social Function of Philosophy tion. The stereotyped application of the concept of ideology to every pattern of thought is, in the last analysis,based on the notion that there is no philosophical truth, in fact no truth at all for humanity, and that all thought is seinsgebunden(situationally determined). In its methods and resuks it belongs only to a specific stratum of mankind and is valid only for this stratum. The attitude to be taken to philosophical ideas does nor comprise objective testing and practical application, but a more or less complicated correlation to a social group. And the 'we claims of philosophy are thus satisfied. easily recognrze that this tendencR the final consequence of which is the resolution of philosophy into a special science,into sociology, merely repeats the skeptical view which we have already critic ized.It is not calculated to explain the social function of philosophy, but rather to perform one itself, namelR to discourage thought from its practical tendency of pointing to the future. The real social function of philosophy lies in its criticism of what is prevalent. That does not mean superficial fault-finding with individual ideas or conditions, as though a philosopher were a crank. Nor does it mean that the philosopher complains about this or that isolated condition and suggests remedies. The chief aim of such criticism is to prevent mankind from losing itself in those ideas and activities which the existing organization of sociery instills into its members. Man must be made to see the relationship between his activities and what is achieved therebr between his particular existence and the general life of society, between his everyday projects and the grear ideas which he acknowledges. Philosophy exposes the contradiction in which man is entangled in so far as he must attach himself to isolated ideas and concepts in everyday life. My point can easily be seenfrom the following. The aim of western philosophy in its first complete form, in Plato, was to cancel and negate on.rid.dness in a more comprehensive system of thought, in a system more flexible and better adapted to realiry. In the course of some of the dialogues, the teacher demonstrates how his interlocutor is inevitably involved in conrradictions if he maintains his position too onesidedly. The teacher shows that it is necessary to advance from this one idea to another, for each idea receivesits proper meaning only within ,lt. yhole system of ideas. consider, for example, the discussionof the nature of courage in the Laclhrr.

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\il7hen the interlocutor clings to his definition that courage means not running away from the battlefield, he is made to reali ze that in certain situations, such behavior would not be a virrue but foolhardiness, as when the whole army is retreating and a single individual attempts to win the battle all by himself. The same applies to the idea of sophrosyne, inadequately translated as temperance or moderation. sophrosyne is certainly a virtue, but it becomes dubious if it is made the sole end of action and is not grounded in knowledg. of all the other virtues. Sophrosyne is conceivable only as a moment of correct conduct within the whole. Nor is the case less true for justice. Good will, the will to be just, is a beautiful thing. But this subjectivestriving is not enough. The title of justice does not accrue to actions which were good in intention but failed in execurion. This applies to private life as well as to state activiry. Every measure, regardless of the good intentions of its author, ffiay become harmful unless it is based on comprehensive knowledge and is appropriate for the situatio n. summum ius, says Hegel in a similar context, may become summa iniuria. We may recall the comparison drawn in the Gorgia.s. The trades of the baker, the cook, and the tailor are in themselves very useful. But they may lead to injury unless hygienic considerations determine their place in the lives of the individual and of mankind. Harbors, shipyards, fortifications, and taxes are good in the same sense. But if the happiness of the community is forgotten, these factors of security and prosperity become instruments of destruction. Thus, in Europe, in the last decades before the outbreak of the present war, we find the chaotic growth of individual elements of social life: giant economic enterprises,crushing taxes, oo enormous increase in armies and armaments, coercive discipline, one-sided cultivation of the natural sciences, and so on. Instead of rational org anization of domestic and international relations, there was the rapid spread of certain portions of civili zationat the expense of the whole. one stood against the other, and mankind as a whole was destroyed thereby. Plato's demand that the state should be ruled by philosophers does not mean that theserulers should be selected from among the authors of textbooks on logic. In businesslife, the Fachgeist, the spirit of the specialist, knows only profit, in military life power, and even in scienceonly successin a special

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discipline. \When this spirit is left unchecked, it typifies an anarchic state of society. For Plato, philosophy meant the tendency to bring and maintain the various energiesand branches of knowledg. in a unity which would transform these partially de' structive elements into productive ones in the fullest sense.This is the meaning of his demand that the philosophers should rule. It means lack of faith in the prevailing popular thought. Unlike the latter, reason never losesitself in a single idea, though that idea might be the correct one at any given moment. Reason exists in the whole system of ideas, in the progression from one idea to another, so that every idea is understood and applied in its true meaning, that is to say, in its meaning within the whole of knowledg.. Only such thought is rational thought. This dialectical conception has been applied to the concrete problems of life by the great philosophers; indeed, the rational organrzation of human existenceis the real goal of their philosophies. Dialectical clarification and refinement of the conceptual world which we meet in daily and scientific life, education of the individual for right thinking and acting, has as its goal the reahzation of the good, and, during the flourishing periods of philosophy at least, that meant the rational organization of human sociery.Though Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, regards the self-contemplation of the mind, theoretical activitS as the greatest happiness' he expressly statesthat this happinessis possible only on a specificmaterial basis, that is, under certain social and economic conditions. Plato and Aristotle did not believe with Antisthenes" and the Cynics that reason could forever continue to develop in people who literally led a dog's life, nor that wisdom could go hand in hand with misery. An equitable state of was for them the necessarycondition for the "ff"itt unfolding of man's intellectual powers, and this idea 'Western humanism. lies at the basis of all of Anyone who studies modern philosophy, not merely in the standard compendia, but through his own historical researches,will perceive the social problem to be a very decisive motive. I need only mention Hobbes and Spinoza.24 The Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus of Spinoza was the only maior work which he published during his lifetime. \7ith other thinkers, Leibniz and Kant for instance, a more penetrating analysis reveals the existence of social and historical categories in the foundations of the most abstract chapters of their works, their metaphysical and transcendental doctrines. rilfithout those categories,it is impossible to understand or solve their problems. A basic analysisof the content of purely theoretical philosophical doctrines is therefore one of the most interesting tasks of modern research in the history of philosophy. But this task has little in common with the superficial correlation to which reference has akeady been made. The historian of art or literature has correspond-

ing tasks. Despite the important part played in philosophy by the examination of social probleffis, expressedor unexpressed,consciousor unconscious,let us again emphasize that the social function of philosophy is not to be found f ust there, but rather in the development of critical and dialectical thought. Philosophy is the methodical and steadfast attempt to bring reason into the world. This precarious and controversial position results from this. Philosophy is inconvenient, obstinate, and with all that, of no immediate use-in fact it is a source of annoyance. Philosophy lacks criteria and compelling proofs. Investigation of facts is strenuous, too, but one at least knows what to go by. Man is naturally quite reluctant to occupy himself with the confusion and entanglementsof his private and public life: he feels insecure and on dangerous ground. In our present division of labor, those problems are assignedto the philosopher or theologian. Or, man consoles himielf with the thought that the discords are merely transient and that fundamentally everything is all right. In the past century of European history, it has been shown conclusively that, despite a semblance of security, man has not been able to arrange his life in accordance with his conceptions of humanity. There is a gulf between the ideas by which men one hand, iudge themselvesand the world on the through reproduce they which realiry and the social their actions on the other hand. Becauseof this cir23Antisthenes (ca.+++-ca. 37r B.c.),Greekphilosopher, cumstance, all their conceptions and iudgments are two-sided and falsified. Now man seeshimself headarguedthat virtue'shouldb. p,ttsuedfor its own sake, to that end one shouldr..tot'tttcethe externalworld ".ri and live in poverty.[Eds.] 2aBaruch1oi Benedict)Spinoza(t6lz-77), Dutch phi,*rr, for pantheism. Hts Tractatus Theologico-Politicus argu*", b"s"d on work by Ren6 Descartes' [Eds'] classic now losopher,whose Ethics set forth the

The Social Function of Philosophy ing for disaster or already engulfed in it, and in many countries he is so paralyzed by approaching barbarism that he is almost complerely unable to react and protect himself. He is the rabbit before the hungry stoat. There are times perhaps when one can get along without theory, but his deficiency lowers man and renders him helplessagainst force. The fact that theory may rise into the rarefied atmosphere of a hollow and bloodless idealism or sink into tiresome and empty phrasemongering, does not mean that these forms are its true forms. As far as tedium and banaliry are concerned, philosophy often finds its match in the so-called investigation of facts. Todan at any event, the whole historical dynamic has placed philosophy in the cenrer of social actuality, and social actuality in the center of philosophy. Attention should be drawn to a particularly important change which has taken place along these lines since classical antiquiry. plato held that Eros enablesthe sageto know the ideas.He linked knowledge with a moral or psychological state, Eros, which in principle may exist ar every historical moment. For this reason, his proposed state appeared to him as an eternal ideal of reason, not bound up with any historical condition. The dialogue on thi LAws, then, was a compromise, accepted as a preliminary step which did not affect rhe eternal ideal. Plato's State is an utopia, like those projected at the beginning of the modern era and even in our own days. But utopia is no longer the proper philosophic form for dealing with the problem of society. It has been recogn ized that the contradictions in thought cannot be resolved by purely theoretical reflection. That requires an historical development beyond which we cannot leap in thought. Knowledge is bound up not only with psychological and moral conditions, but also with social conditions. The enunciation and description of perfect political and social forms out of pure ideas is neith., -."rringful nor adequate. utopia as the crown of philosophical systems is therefore replaced by a scientific description of concrete relationships and tendencies,which can lead to an improvement of human life. This change has the most far-reaching consequencesfor the ,tru.ture and meaning of philosophical rheory. Modern philosophy shares with the ancients ih.ir high opinion of the potentialities of the human ,^ir, their optimism over man's potential achievements.

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The proposition that man is by nature incapable of living a good life or of achieving the highest levelsof social organization, has been rejected by the greatest thinkers. Let us recall Kant's famous remarks about Plato's utopia: "The Platonic Republic has been supposed to be a striking example of purely imaginary perfection. It has become a byword, as something that could exist in the brain of an idle thinker only, and Bruckner thinks it ridiculous that Plato could have said that no prince could ever govern well, unless he participated in the ideas. 'we should do better, however, to follow up this thought and endeavor (where that excellent philosopher leaves us without his guidance) to place it in a clearer light by our own efforts, rather than ro throw it aside as useless,under the miserable and very dangerous pretext of its impracticability. For nothing can be more mischievous and more unworthy a philosopher than the vulgar appeal to what is called adverse experience, which possibly might never have existed, if at the proper time institutions had been framed according to those ideas, and not according to crude concepts, which, because they were derived from ."p.ri.nce only, have marred all good intentions."t, since Plato, philosophy has never deserted the true idealism that it is possible to introduce reason among individuals and among nations. It has only discarded the false idealism that it is sufficient ro ser up the picture of perfection with no regard for the way in which it is to be attained. In modern times, loyalty to the highest ideas has been linked, in a world opposed ro rhem, with the sober desire ro know how these ideas can be real ized on earth. Before concludirg, let us return once more to a misunderstanding which has already been mentioned. In philosophy, unlike businessand politics, criticism does not mean the condemnation of a thing, grumbling about some measure or other, or mere negation and repudiation. Under certain conditions, criticism may actually take this destructive turnl there are examples in the Hellenistic age. By criticism, w€ mean that intellectual, and eventually practical, effort which is not satisfied to accepr the prevailing ideas, actions, and social conditiom urrthinkingly and from mere habit; effort which aims to coordinate the individual sides of social life with 2sL Kant, Critique, of Pure Reason,trans. by F. Max Mtiller (New York, rgzo),pp. zj 7-z1g. tAu.i

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each other and with the gen eral ideas and aims of the epoch, to deduce them genetically, to distinguish the appearancefrom the essence,to examine the foundations of things, in short, really to know them. Hegel, the philosopher to whom we are most indebted in many respects,was so far removed from any querulous repudiation of specific conditions, that the King of Prussia called him to Berlin to inculcate the students with the proper loyalty and to immunize them against political opposition. Hegel did his best in that direction, and declared the Prussian state to be the embodiment of the divine Idea on earth. But thought is a peculiar factor. To iustify the Prussian state, Hegel had to teach man to overcome the onesidednessand limitations of ordi naty human understanding and to see the interrelationship between all conceptual and real relations. Further, h. had to teach man to construe human history in its complex and contradictory structure' to searchout the ideas of freedom and iustice in the lives of nations, to know how nations perish when their principle proves inadequate and the time is ripe for new social forms. The fact that Hegel thus had to train his students in theoretical thought, had highly equivocal consequences for the Prussian state. In the long run, Hegel's work did more serious harm to that reactionary institution than all the use the latter could derive from his formal glorification. Reason is a poor ally of reaction. A little less than ten years after Hegel's death (his chair remained unoccupied that long), the King appointed a successorto fight the "dragon's teeth of Hegelian pantheismr" and the "arrogance and fanaticism of his school."

'We

cannot say that, in the history of philosophy' the thinkers who had the most progressive effect were those who found most to criticize or who were always on hand with so-called practical programs. Things are not that simple. A philosophical doctrine has many sides, and each side may have the most diverse historic al effects. Only in exceptional historical periods, such as the French Enlightenment, does philosophy itself become politics. In that period, the word philosophy did not call to mind logic and epistemology so much as attacks on the church hierarchy and on an inhuman iudicial system. The removal of certain preconceptions was virtually equivalent to opening the gatesof the new world. Tradition and faith were rwo of the most powerful bulwarks of the old regime, and the philosophical attacks constituted an immediate historical action. Today, however, it is not a matter of eliminating a creed, for in the totalitarian states,where the noisiest appeal is made to heroism and a lofry W eltan schauun g, neither faith nor W ehan schauun g rule, but only dull indifference and the apathy of the individual towards destiny and to what comes from above. Today our task is rather to ensure that, in the future, the capacity for theory and for action which derives from theory will never again disappear, even in some coming period of peacewhen the daily routine may tend to allow the whole problem to be forgotten once more. Our task is continually to struggle, lest mankind become completely disheartened by the frightful happenings of the present, lest man's belief in a worthy, peaceful and htppy direction of society perish from the earth.

IsArahBerlin b. rgog

philosopher,and social-politicaltheorist,Sir IsaiahBerlin At l HISToRIAN, L r has been most widely recognizedfor individual essays(such as .,The Hedgehog and the Fox," elaboratedfrom the aphorism attiibuted to Archilochus, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehogknows one big thing',) that exemplify a distinctivemode of critical thinking. Berlin'sessaysare typicilly basedon particularly apposite-andtelling metaphols,figures,or'examplis that not only facilitate his own explanationof a topic or pro-blem-butproviie para_ digms for other, similar analyses. essayheredisplaysBerlin'scharacteristiclucidity and penetration,but it is . th: included for other reasons.As a*enrion in many fieldi shifted to language early in this century, a number of vexing problems quickly appeared:how does one connect"reference"and "meaning" (see,for example Frege);how can a,,fact, , .,sign,,.,signify,,, beconnectedto a "propo_sition"(cf. wittgensteid; what d;; or how is it connectedto "reality" (cl. saissure,Benueniste,peirce,"anawTrorflt All of theseissuesrook an unusuallycontroversialfocus in the pioblem of ver_ ification. wlen r(ittgenstein proposed inthe Tractatusthatlarrg.rag.provided a picture of the logical srrucrureof a fact, it was assumedthat eithl iirectly or indirectly one could ascertainthe adequacyof the representation.Most notably, philosophersof the vienna circle (as weli as other positivists) argued th"t th. "meaning" of a proposition was functionally identical with the irethod of its verificationand, in moving to expungemetaphysicalissuesfrom the language of philosophy,insistedthat for any propositionio-be meaningful,it had to be verifiableby somemeans. This position led to a number of philosophicalembarrassmenrs. If, for example,.thelanguagcof natural scienCeis reconstructedinto a deductive logical formalism (derived from Frege, Russell and whitehead, and wittg.rrrt.irr;, it then appearsthat "observationstatements"can be isolaied and treated as con_ firmation or verification of deductivepredictions,derived from the logically reconstructedscientifictheory. !7hen this doctrine was presentedin Aly. Ayer,s Language,Truth, and Logic (tgl6), reviewers*.r. qli.k to point out that a peculiarity of the logical formalism employedto ,.pr.r..rt implication rendered the requirement of verification radically ambiguour, ,,"ri-.rri, it appears, could be-interpreted to verify any prediction. (For a"rry more technical treatmenr of- this dilemma, see H_aroldBrown, perception, Theory, and Commitment: The Neu Philosophy of science[chicago: university or chil"g" p ress,1977], pp.z5-33.) Berlin'sessayprovides both an elegantreview of this problem and an exem_

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IserenBrnrrr.t plary clarificationof different contextsin which the problem may appearby disobservingrules of grammar; statements'obeying iinguishing betweensentences, rules of logic; and propositions,subjectto judgmentsof truth or adequacy. For other .rr"ys ott this and relatedtopics, seeG. H. Parkinson,ed. Theory of Meaning Gg6il. Other major works by Berlin include The Hedgehogand the. Fox GgtS); Vico and Herder: Two Studiesin the History of ldeas $976); and RussianThinkers,ed. Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (1978).

\IE,RIFICATION This paper is an attempt to estimate how far the principli of verification fulfils the purpose for which it is employed by many contemporary empiricist philosophers. The general truth of their doctrines I inrn not call into question. The thesis which I shall try to establish is that the principle of verifiability or verification after playing a decisive role in the history of modern philosophy, by clearing up confusions, exposing maior errors and indicating what were and what were not questions proper for philosophers to ask, which has enabled it to exercisein our d"y a function not unlike that which Kant's critical method performed for his generation' cannot, for all that, be accepted as a final criterion of empirical significance, since such acceptanceleads to wholly untenable consequences.I shall consequently urge that after due homage has been paid to iis theiapzutic influence, it needs to be abandoned or else considerably revised, if it is to be prevented from breeding new fallacies in place of those which it eradicates. I propose to begin by assuming that what the principle sets out to do both can and should be iot.;-tnd to consider whether it can do this alone and unassisted.I shall seek to show that it cannot, and that to maintain the opposite entails a view of empirical propositions too paradoxical to deserve serious notice. As is well known, its supporters claim that the function which it fulfils is that of acting as a criterion for determining whether assertionsof a certain to mean' The rype mean in fact what they purport of was originally publishedin Proceedings vERIFICATIoN tbe AristotelianSociety 39 GglS-39): zz5-48' .Reprinted by permissionof t[. AristotelianSocieryand Sir IsaiahBerlin.

pressing need for such a criterion arises out of the view on which much modern empiricism rests' according to which all truly significant assertions must be concerned either with the facts of experience, in the sense in which they are the subiect matter of the judgements of common senseand of empirical science, or else with the verbal means used to symbolize such facts. The task in question is to find some infallible criterion by which to distinguish assertions of the first, i.e. experiential type, from all other possible modes of employing symbols. I must begin by making clear my use of certain essential terms: by a sentence I propose to mean any arrangement of words which obeys the rules of gramm ar by a statement any sentencewhich obeys the rules of logic; and finall5 by ^ proposition any Sentencewhich conveysto Someonethat something is or is not the case.And this seemson the whole to accord with common usage.In addition I propose, at any rate in the first section of the argument' to mean by the term experience only what phenomenalists' s"y they mean by it, that is, only such actual or possible data as are provided by observation and introspection. I do not wish to assertthat phenomenalism is self-evidently true. On the contrary' no method yet suggested of translating the propositions about material objects into propositions about observation and introspection data seems wholly satisfactory. But for the purpose of my thesis it will be sufficient to confine myself to the latter, i.e. to propositions concerned solely with obiects of immediate acquaintance; since if the verification criterion is inadequate in dealing with them it will a fortiori farl to apply to the much more complex t phenomenalismis the generalphilosophicalview-that -aptnowledge is restricted1o phenomexaor empirical is "appearance" that view tlie pearanc.]tt may include unih. *hole of t."iity or that "noumerx," presume$_tg arenot knowable.[Eds.] derlieor inform appearances,

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case of statementsabout material objects. If this is cant in the above sense.In its earliest and most untrue it will tend to show that historical connexion compromising form it declared that the meaning of between phenomenalism and 'verificationism' is nor a proposition resided in the means of its verificaa logical one, and that the failure of the latter does tion; the questions ''sfhat does the statement p not necessarilyinvalidate the former. This conclumean?' and 'what must one do to discover whether sion I should like to believe to be true, since the opp is true?' were logically equivalent-the answer to posite would prove fatal to the view which seemsro one was the answer to the other. The most obvious me to be true on other grounds, as I shall urge in objection to this doctrine, which critics were nor the last section of this paper, that whereas the ptt.slow to urge, was that this formulation involved a nomenalist analysis of statementsof common sense glaring hysteron proteron; ' for before I could think is fundamentally correct, and has not proved conof possible ways of verifying a given srarement I first vincing more on account of insufficient ingenuity must know what the statement means, otherwise in the formulation of specific analyses, or of the there could be nothing for me to verify. How can I vagueness of the analysandum, than because of ask whether a group of symbols assertsa truth or a some fatal defect in the method itself, the principle falsehood if I am not certain of what it means, or of verification, in spite of its undoubted effi cacy in indeed whether it means anything at all ? Surely, the past in detecting and destroying unr ealpuzzles, therefore,understandingwhat the sentencemeanshas now begun to yield diminishing rerurns, and what proposition it expresses-must in some sense even to create new spurious problems of its own. be prior to the investigation of its truth, and cannot This, I shall argue, is due to the fact that it is not in be defined in terms of the possibility of such an inprinciple capable of being applied to the whole field vestigation-on the contrary the latter must be deof empirical belief and knowledgr, but only to a fined in terms of it. But this objection is not as forlimited portion of it- a fact which is brought o,rt midable as it looks. A supporter to the theory may particularly clearly by the examination of that verreply that what he means by the expression .to sion of it, sometimescalled operationalism, accordknow the means of the verification of pl i, knowing ing to which the different logical or epistemological in what circumstancesone would iudge the group categories ro which a given proposition may belong of symbols 'p' to convey something which was or are determined by the differencesin the kind of tests was not the case; adding that what one means by normally employed to discover its truth or falsity. saying that one understands a given sentence, or The essenceof the principle of verification will that the senrencehas meaning, is precisely this, it rt appear clearly if one considersits progressivemodione can conceive of a state of affans such that if it is fication in the faceof difficuldes. The t"r. assertion the case-exists-the sentence in question is the that all significant statementswere concerned either proper, conventionally correct description of it, i.e. with facts about experience or with the symbolic the proposition expressedby the sentenceis true, means of expressing them was too vague and exwhile if it is not the case,rhe proposition expressed cluded roo little. Metaphysicians and theologians is false. To understand a sentengs-fo ..rtify it as could claim that theS too, reported facts of experiexpressing a given proposition-is thus equivalent ence, although facts of a very different order iroto knowing how I should set about to look for the those which were of interest to empirical scientists, state of affairs which, if the state of affairs exists, it arrived at by non-empirical processesof cognition, correctly describes.To say that a sentenceis inteland thus wholly outside the range of any .uid.n.. ligible, i.e. that it expressesa proposition, without drawn from the data of observation or introspecspecifying what the proposition ii, is to say that I tion. A stricter criterion of significance seemed know that I could set about to look for the ,elevant therefore to be required, at any rate in the case of situation without saying what kind of situation it is. propositions claiming to describe experience. To It follows that any sentencesuch that I can conceive supply it (I do not vouch for the historical accu racy of no experience of which it is the correct descripof this account) the principle of verification was adopted, a test, which, so it is claimed, made it pos2"Hysteronproteron," the logi cal fallacyof assumingto sible to determine without further ado whethlr a be true asa premisethat which is to b. prou.d asthe congiven collocation of words was or was not significlusion;i.e.,beggingthe question.tEd;.1

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tion, is for me meaningless.The limits of what I can conceive are set by experience-that is, I can conceive only whatever is either identical with, of else in some respect similar to the kind of situation which I have already met with or imagined; the possible is a logical alternative of, and conceivable only by reference to, the actual; whatever is wholly different from it is wholly inconceivable. The actual, on this view, consistsof the data of observation' sensibte and introspective, and what can be inferred from them. The logically possible is conceivedonly by analogy with it; sentenceswhich purport to refer to something outside this are therefore meaningless. If nevertheless I claim that they mean some'meaning' ambig.tthing to me I am using the term ously or loosely: I may wish to say that they suggest, or are evidence for, a situation, without formally describing it, as tears are evidence of distress without being a statement about it; or else that they evoke an emotion in me, convey or induce a mood or an attitude, stimulate behaviour' or even that no more is occurring than that I am acquainted with the normal use of the individual words in the sentences to which I attribute meaning and that they are grouped in accordance with the rules of grammar and of logic, 4S in certain types of nonsense verse.This seemsprima facie plausible enough, and successfullyeliminates whole classesof expressions as being meaninglessin the strict sensebecausethey seem t; describe no conceivable experience' and t safely can therefore, as Hume recommended, b. 'Sfhatrejected as so much metaphysical rubbish. ever survives this drastic test can then be classified exhaustively as being either direct statements about possible experience,that is empirical Propositions, t, ,..ond or higher order statementsabout the relations of types of such statementsto each other, i'e' propositions of logic and other formal sciences' AnJ this was as much as the anti-metaphysical party had ever claimed. It was soon seen however that as it stood this position was wholly untenable' 'means of veriTo begin with the concePtion of fication' was far too narrow. If it was interpreted literally it always referred to the present or the immediate future in which alone sensible verification of what I was assertingcould take place. This gave all statements about the past, and a great many about 3DavidHume (t7rr-76),Scottish philosopher andhistorian. [Eds.]

the present and future, a meaning which was prima facie very different from that which they seemedto 'lt have. Such a sentencefor example as was raining half an hou r ago' had to be regarded as equivalent 'I am now to one or more of such Statementsas having a moderately fresh memory rmage of falling 'l 'My shoes look fairly, but not very' wet', am rain', looking at the chart of a recording barometer and 'I observean undulating line of a certain shape', expect, if I ask you "'Was it raining half an hour ago?" to hear the answer "Yes"' and the like. This is unsatisfactory on two grounds both equally fatal. ln the first place by translating all propositions about the past (and about the future) into propositions about experiencein the present (which alone I can conclusively verify) it gives two sensesof the word 'present'; the sense in which it is distinguishable 'past' and 'future', i.e. the normal sense,and fio* the sense in which it includes them; the second sense,being contrastable with nothing, adds nothing to any statement in which it occurs; to say in this sensethat all significant statementsrefer only to the present is thus to utter a pointless tautology- Yet the iense in which alone it was relevant to say that all conclusively verifiable propositions were concerned only with the present, was the first, not the second, sense; the sense in which to speak of the present state of something is to distinguish it from p"rt and future states. Moreover' the translation leels wrong. One does not usually mean by the sen'It tence rained yesterday' the present empirical evidence for it, not even the total sum of such evi'being evidenceof' not being dence.For the relation that of logical implication, the evidential proposition may be true and the proposition which it claims to establish false; the two therefore cannot 'What I mean to assert is that it was be equivalent. raining yesterdaR not that events which are now o..,rrring make it unreasonable to doubt that it did: the rain I speak of is the rain of yesterday, whatever may ot -"y not be happening today. To verify yesterday's rain conclusively (the verificanduma t.ittg talen in a phenomenalist sense as a logical .o.rirrrction out of observation data), one has to have lived through yesterday and to have observed whether it rained or not. To do this now is in some senseof the word impossible: yet the meaning of the sentenceis not seriously in doubt. It follows that eia"Verificandum,"that which is to be verified.[Eds.]

Verification ther all propositions save those about the immediate present are meaningless:or that meaning cannot depend on conclusive verifiability. Tlo this the defenders of the theory can answer that in saying that the meaning of p residesin (liegt in) the means of its verification they did not literally mean to assert any such equivalence: they meant only that 'p is significant' entails that some means of verifying is possible. The proposition is never equivalent to the sum of evidence for it; but unless one can say that there could be a situation in which an observer could verify it, one cannot say that the sentence has any meaning. Thus 'p is significant' where p is empirical entails and is entailed by 'p is verifiable', but is not equivalent to any specific group of actual propositions cited as evidence for it. Moreover by verifiability what is meant is verifiability nor in practice, but in principle; this last being needed to eliminate nor only the objection that some propositions e.g. that there are mountains on the other side of the moon are clearly significant and yet, cannot be verified on account of technical difficulties which observers with more luck and skill than ourselves might overcome, bur to secure plausible analysesof propositions about the past, which we are prevented from verifying by the accident of our position in time as well ri ,p"... 'we might have been born earlier than we were, and lived in counrries other than those which in fact we inhabit; I cannot now, do what I will, verify the proposition 'Julius caesar was bald' by direct inspection, but there is no logical reason why I should not have been born in ancient Rome in time to have observedCaesar'shead; the reason is causal, unlessindeed I define myself as having been born in the rwentieth century, in which casesome other observer could have carried out this observation. For there is no reason why 'p is verifiable' should mean 'p is verifiable by me." Solipsism even of the socalled methodological variery is a wholly gratuitous assumption. I can conceive of other observers by analogy with my own self, however the notion of a particular self is to be analysed. So much has been pointed out by Berkeley.' To verify the proposition that such observers actually exist, and n-"u. experienceswhich are not ours, is of course a very differsuide'Unverifiable-by-D€', by G. Ryle, Analysis,4, r.[Au.] 'rrish 5GeorgeBerkeley(r68j-r phiorlph.r'""a 7slJ, bishop.[Eds.]

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ent and much more difficult task. Thus ( c(p)) is significant' has now come to mean 'it is conceivable (i.e. there is no logical contradiction in supposing) that someone should observe or should have observed what is correctly described by Kp" '. In this watered-down form the principle does seem to acquire a much wider sphere of application and attempts at 'silly' analysescan be successfullyfoiled. But the position is still far from secured. For all that can be accounted for on this hypothesis are such singular categorical propositions as are conclusively verifiable, ar any rate in principle, by ^ suitably situated observer. This leavesthree classes of propositions unaccounted for, and these by far the most commonly used:-(r) Propositions which are not singular:-(z) Propositions which are not categorical,-(l) Propositions which seem ro be both singular and caregorical, but not to be conclusively verifiable by observation. (r ) General propositions offer the most obvious difficulty. No senrenceof the form 'all s is p' ,whether taken in extension or intension, where s denotes an infinite set (or at any rate does not explicitly denote a finite one) can be verified by any finite number of observations. That is to say it is not conclusively verifiable at all. The same applies ro all propositions containing'^ny' or'every' as components. The attempt made by Ramseyt and those who accept his view to treat them as rules or prescriptions, logical or empirical, and therefore neither true nor false, cannot be defended since, ?S they are used, they are held to be refutable by a single negative instance, and it is nonsenseto say of rules that they have instances or can be refuted. yet they have clear empirical meaning, particularly when taken in extension, and cannot be left out of account. To meet this difficulty the principle of verification was revised and rwo types of it distinguished: the firsr, called verification in the strong sense,was the familiar version. The second, or 'weak' verification was invented to apply to general propositions and to singular-seeming propositions about marerial objects, in so far as these were thought to entail general propositions about sensedata-a view which it has proved far from easy to hold. Tr,vo versions of 'weak' verifiability are given by Mr. Ayer: r accordTFrank P.

Ramsey (r9o 1'-3o), British mathematician and logician. [Eds.] 8Langudg€, Truth and Logic, p. :z6.[Au.]

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ing to the first we ask about a given proposition 'Would any observations be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood?' If so the proposition is significant. This may well be true, but as it stands the suggestedcriterion is far too vague to be of use.' Relevanceis not a precise logical category, and fantastic metaphysical systems may choose to 'relevant' to their claim that observation data ate truth. Such claims cannot be rebutted unless some precise meaning is assignedto the concept of relevance,which, becausethe word is used to convey an 'weak' essentiallyvague idea, cannot be done. Thus verification, designed to admit only general, and material object, statements, cannot be prevented from opening the gates for any statement, however meaningless,to enter, provided that someone can be found to claim that observation is in some sense relevant to it. As a criterion for distinguishing sense from nonsenserelevanceplainly does not work: indeed to accept it is in effect to abrogate the principle of verification altogether. Mr. Ayer, conscious of this perhaps, attempts to provide another fat 'weak' verification, more rigorous formulation of which at first seems to fit our needs more ade'To make our position clearer we quately.toHe Says, another way . . . \Me may say it in may formulate a genuine factual proposition of mark is the it that . . . that some experiential [i.e. strongly verifiable] propositions can be deduced from it in coniunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premisesalone. This criterion seems liberal enough.' Unfortunately it is a good deal too liberal, and does not guarantee us against nonsenseany better than the previous test. What it appearsto assertis this: given three propositions p, in principle, 4, ', where r is conclusively verifiable ih.tt p is weakly verified, and therefore significant, if r follows from p and q, and does not follow from 'all men are mortal' is 'weakly' verifiq alone.Thus 'socrates will die' which does not folbecause 'socrates is a man' by itself, follows from "b1., low from 'verifithe two in coniunction. It may be noted that 'rendered of able' seemshere to have lost its sense 'established beyond doubt,' and is equivatrue' or 'made probable' lent to something much looser, like 'plausible', itself an obscure and unexamined or eon this uide 'Meaninglessness" by Dr. A. C. Ewing, Mind, N.S., Vol. xLVL' No. r83, particularlypp' 35:-l. [Au.] lolbid.,a few lineslater.[Au.]

concept. However, even in this diluted form the principle will not do. For if I say This logical problem is bright green' I dislike all shadesof green, Therefore I dislike this problem, I have uttered a valid syllogism whose maior premise has satisfied the definition of weak verifiability as well as the rules of logic and of grammar) yet it is plainly meaningless.One cannot reply to this that it is put out of court by the confusion of categories which it contains, or some such answer, since this entails the direct applicability of acriterion of signifi'weak' verification, which makes cance other than the latter otiose. No criterion which is powerless in the face of such nonsense as the above is fit to sur''Weak' verifiability is a suspicious device in vive. any case, inasmuch as it bears the name without fulfilling the original function of verification proper' and appears to suggestthat there is more than one senseof empirical truth. The chief argument in its favour seemsto be that unlessit is valid, any theory which entails it must be false. Sincethe contrary instance cited above is fatal to it, this consequence must be accepted.\feak verification has thus failed to provide the needed criterion. ny far the most ingenious attempt to solve the difficulty is that made by Dr. Karl Popper " who suggeststhat a proPosition is significant if and only if it can be conclusively falsified by the conclusive verification of a singular proposition which contradicts it-as when a law is refuted by the occurrence of one negativeinstance.But while this may provide a valid criterion of significancefor general propositions about observation data, it throws no light on whether the sensein which they are called true is or is not identical with that in which singular propositions are so called. The implication which one may be tempted to draw from this is that propositions of different logical types are true or false, verifiable and falsifiable, each in its own specific fashion: indeed that this is what is meant by saying that they belong to different categories;that is to say that the logical (and epistemological) character of a proposition is determined by the way in which it is verifi11Inhis book Logik der Forschung.[Au.] Revisedversion publishedin Englishas Tbe Logic of ScientificDiscouery (r9sil. [Eds.]

Verification able (or falsifiable), the rwo being alternative ways of saying the same thing about it. This view which if true would solve many difficulties cannot, however, be accepted, as I hope to show in the next section of the argument. It should further be noted that popper's criterion of falsifiabiliry, while it may deal successfully with general propositions of observation, does not apply equally well to propositions about material objects for whose benefit it was originally introduced. But as we have agreed to accept phenomenalism this is beside the issue, and the criterion may therefore be provisionally accepted. (z) The second type of proposition not covered by the original 'strong' verifiability criterion consists of those which are not categorical. These are highly relevant to the whole issue, and repay exceptionally close attention. It has roo often been assumed by logicians that all hypothetical propositions are general, and all general propositions are hypothetical: 'all s is p'is equivalentto'if s then p' and vice versa. Nothing could be further from the truth. tu7hile some hypothetical propositions are general, others are not. The commonest of all propositions which occur in the writings of contemporary positivists, the propositions indispensable to any discussionof meaning or verification, the familiar 'if I look up I shall observea blue parch', are indubitably hypothetical, but in no sense general. To show this one need only point out that th.y ,r. conclusively verifiable. Indeed it was becausean artempt was made to reduce all other sratements to verifiable propositions of this rype that absurdities resulted. I verify the proposition mentioned above by looking up and observing a blue patch: if conclusive verification ever occurs, it occurs in this case. It must be noted that I have actually proved more than I have asserted: not merely the- hypothetical but a conjuncive proposition ;I ,h"ll i"ok up and I shall see a blue patch' has been verified. This is unavoidable from the nature of the case.Bur although the conjunctive proposition entails the hypothetical, it is not enrailed by it, and the rwo are therefore not equivalent. The conjunction is falsified if (a) I do not look up and seea blue patch, (b) r do not look up and do not see a blue fatch,' irj r look up and see no blue patch. The hypoth.ii."t proposition is falsified by the occurrence of (c) alone. If either (a) or (b) is the case, the hypothetical proposition is rendered neither true' ,o, false, and may be either. It is essentialto nore firstlv

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that the relation berween the protasis 'I shall look up' and the apodosis12sl shall see a blue patch' is not one of material implication, otherwise the whole would be falsified by denying the protasis. Secondly, that it is not one of strict implication, since the antecedent may be affirmed and the consequent denied without a formal contradiction. Thirdly, that it is not necessarilycausal: I may, of course,when I declare that if I look rp I shall see a blue patch, say this becauseI believethat there is causal ionnexion between the two events, but equally I may not believe this, and decide to bet that this will happen because I am by temperament a passionate gambler, and all the more stimulated if I believe that the weight of inductive evidenceis against me; or I may say it becauseit is an exception which disprovesone causal l"*, without necessarilyregarding it as being itself an instance of another law; or I may say it out of sheercontrariness,or any other motive whatever. My rational ground for saying what I do would doubtless take the form of ageneral causalproposition which entails the proposition on whose truth t am betting, but I may choose to behaveirrationallS or use the proposition in an ad absurdum argument to prove its opposite: the general proposition .observers in conditions similar to these normally see blue patches if they look up' entails, but is nor entailed by, the proposition 'if A looks up he will observe a blue patch': the latter proposition, so far from being equivalent to the for-.r, may be ffue where the other is false, and, as we said above, may be conclusively verifiable-a condition which the general proposition is logic ally incapable of attainThe proposition is therefore both singular and ing. hypothetical, its subject being nor a hypothetical variable, but a nameable particular. So fai allseems clear. The difficulty ariseswhen the antecedentis nor 'v7hen fulfilled: I assert, for example, that if I look up I shall seea blue patch, and then fail to look up. The proposition appears now to be no longer conclusively verifiable. The opportunity for th"t has been missed and cannot be recovered. I must now resort to the roundabout method of producing evidence for it, i.e. 'weakly' verifying th. g.n.r"l caus-alproposition of which the proposirion ro be verified is an instance; nor can the instantial propolz"Protasis"

is the clause expressing the conditional in a conditional sentence,while "apodosis" is the clause expressing the conclusion or result. [Eds.]

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sition be made more probable than the general proposition which entails it. But clearly the state'if I look up I shall see a blue patch', which ment 'if now becomes I had looked up I should have seen a blue patch', expressesa proposition which is still true or false in precisely the same senseas before, although the means of its verification have altered; yet clearly the statement cannot have changed in meaning becauseI did not in fact look up. Yet if it were true that the impossibility of strongly verifying a given proposition entailed that it had a logical character different from propositions which can be strongly verified, the Proposition in question would alter in character solely because I did or did not choose to act in a certain fashion. This would mean that the kind of meaning possessedby singular hypothetical sentencesor statementswould depend on the empirical fact that their protases did or did not actually come true, which is patently absurd. It seemsto me to follow that neither the meaning, nor the logical character, of a statement can possibly depend on what steps one would naturally take to ascertain its truth: and in so far as operationalists assert this without qualification, they are mistaken. At this point someone might reply that although an unfulfilled singular hypothetical statement (or for that matter a hypothetical statementwhose protasis is not known to be fulfilled) cannot be verified conclusively in actu al fact, it can be so verified in principle. I did not in fact look up and so I cannot know for certain what would have happened if I did; but I might have looked up: or rather it is not self-contradictory to assert that an observer could or did look up; and such an observer, possible in principle, is in a position to verify the proposition conclusively. And so such propositions are) after all, no worse off than categorical statements about the vanished past: they too may not in fact have been verified conclusively; but they could have been so verified; and so are verifiable conclusively in principle. This argument, plausible though it is, is ultirnately untenable, for the reason that were I situated favourably for verifying theseunverified hypotheses, I should ipsa facto not have been able to verify some of those which I in f act did: and I could not, 'could not', have done both. in the logical senseof An eternal omnisentient being, which is in all places at all times can, if it chooses, verify all categorical propositions about past, present and future phettott .ta: but even it cannot verify what did not oc-

cur; that which might have occurred had not that happened which in fact did. And if it is omniscient as well as omnisentient, and if there is any sensein which it could be said to know this too, it knows it by means other than sensibleverification. A simple example will, I hope, make it clear. Supposethat instead of assertingone singular hypothetical proposition, I asserttwo such propositions in the form of the premisesof a dilemma, such that the protasis of each is incompatible with the protasis of the other. 'if I remain here I shall have a headFor instance: ache. If I do not remain here I shall be bored'. Each of thesepropositions may itself be verifiable in principle: the conjunction of both cannot be verified conclusively,even in principle, since it involves me in the logical impossibility of being in a cefiain state and not being in it at the same time. Of course I can adduce the evidence of various observers for what would happen under these two logically incompatible sets of conditions. But such inductive evidence 'weakly' (whatever meanin g may be atverifies only 'lf tached to that unfortunate phrase). I were now at the North Pole I should feel colder than I do' cannot in principle be strongly verified, since I cannot even in principle be simultaneously here and at the North Pole and compare the different temperatures. It is beside the point to say that this arises only if I am defined as capable of being situated here or at the North Pole but not at both; whereas I might have been a giant with one foot on the North Pole and the other in this room, in which case I might have verified the proposition conclusively. I could myself be defined differently, but the same problem would still arise whatever the defined scope of my powers; a proposition asserting anunfulfilled possibility can always be constructed to contradict whatever is the case,and this can be made the protasis of a second singular hypothetical proposition whose verifiability is incompatible with that of the first. To put it semi-formally: given that for every empirical proposition p at least one contradictory not-p is .ottitt.tctable; then for every singular hypothetical 'if p then q' (let us call it proposition of the form 'if not p then r' may be pq), a second proposition pr), where r may or may constructed (let us call it. it is the casethat where Then to not be equivalent 4. pq and pr are propositions describing the possible data of a given observer, the conclusive verification pr is not compossible, and the truth of of pq ".Jcompatible with the falsenessof the other. is either

Verification And yet each of the rwo alternatives of the disjunction is in irs own right a proposition which in suitable circumstances could be conclusively verified; either may be true and the other false, either probable and the other improbable; their only logical relation is that of unco-verifiability-they cannot both be conclusively verified even in principle. And this plainly cannot alter the meaning which either has in its own right. If this conclusion is correct it follows that the meaning of a proposition need not be affected-let alone determined-by the fact that a given means of verification is or is not logically possible in its case. I have emphasized the case of singular hypotheticals becausethey seem to bring out particularly clearly that if meaning depends on the relevant type of verifiabiliry, then in order ro know what one of these conjunctions of propositions means one requires to know whether both the protases are true. And this is self-evidently false. Yet these are the very propositions which occur in all philosophical analysesof empirical statemenrs, the stuff of which logical constructions are built, the basic propositions ro which propositions about the public world are commonly reduced by phenomenalists of all shadesand hues. Perhaps another example will make this even clearer. Supposing that I have a bet with you that all persons seen entering this room will appear to be wearing black shoes.Let the term 'this room' be defined as anything recognized by both of us as being correctly described as this room in virtue of certain observable characteristics, such that if either of us certifies their disappearance from his sense field, the entity described as this room shall be deemed to have ceased to exist. under what conditions can such a bet be lost or won? we may begin by affirmirg the truth of the analytic proposition that the room will last either for a finite time or forever. In either case the set of persons observed to enter it, is similarly either finite or infinire. only if it is the case that the observed set of visitors is finite, that the r-oom visibly comes to the end of its existence, and that each of the persons who are seen to enter appears to wear black shoes, can I win the bet. ril7hen, on the other hand, it is the caseeither that rhe room lasts for ever, or that the set of persons seento enter it is without limit, or both these, but at least one person appears to wear shoes of some other colour than black, or no shoes at allr l lose the bet. There are however further possibilities: when, for ex-

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ample, either the room lasts for ever or the number of persons seen to enter is limitless, or both, and every person entering appears to wear black shoes; in that event the bet is undecided since the proposition on whose truth or falsity it turns, has been neither verified nor falsified conclusively. In all possible casesit could in principle be falsified by seeing the arrival of a person not wearing black shoes. But whereas in some casesit could also be verified conclusively, in others it can not. yet when we arrange the bet neither of us need know whether I am in principle capable of winning or not. Nevertheless the proposition in terms of which the bet is stated is not in the least ambiguous. It is not the casethat the words 'all persons . . .' must if the proposition is to have a definite meaning be used to refer eitber ro a finite set (in which case conclusive verifiability is possible), or an infinite set (in which caseit may not b.), but not to both. Yet if the meaning of a proposition always depended upon the rype of verifiruitiry of which it is capable,the above would be systematically ambiguous: we should have to be regarded as having made fwo separate bets, one on th. behaviour of a finite set, the other on that of an infinite one. Yet we are under the impression that only one bet had been made because we attributed ro the proposition beginning with the words .all persons will . . .' not many senses but one, n",'aiy, that in which it is equivalent to 'no one person will not . . . .' And we are right. Like the previous example this tends to show that if one wishes to understand a sentence which purports to express a proposition when it is assertedby someone, while it is doubtless generally useful to discover under what conditions h. *ould consider its truth as established, to regard its meaning as dependent on what kind of conditions thesewould be, is to hold a false doctrine of what constitutes meani.g. of course I do not wish to deny that in general I can only discover the difference between senrences of different kinds, e.g. between those used to refer to visual data and those concerning auditory ones, or between propositions concerning persons and propositions about physical objects or about sense data, by observing in what kind of experience verification for them is sought. But it does not follow from this that the kind of verification which a given proposition can in principle obtain, determinei the type of meaning which it possesses,and so can act as a principle of logical or epistemological classifi-

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cation, such that the propositions belonging to two different classesdefined in this way, cannot for that reason belong to one and the same logical or epistemological category, or be answers to questions of the same logical type. And yet this is the fallacy which seemsto me to underlie much that is said by upholders of theories of verification and operationalism. That significance is connected with verifiability I have no wish to deny. But not in this direct fashion, by ^ kind of one-to-one correspondence. @ This brings us to the third type of propositions mentioned above: the apparently categorical, but not conclusively verifiable propositions, as for example those about material obiects or other selves.The scope of this paper does not permit an adequate discussion of the merits and defects of phenomenalism; but even if we conceive it to be in principle correct, however inadequate all existing formulations of it, we must allow that among the experiential propositions into which a proposition asserting the existenceof a material object must be analysed, there must inevitably be some which describe how the object would appear to an observer' were conditions different from those which in fact obtain; if in other words he were not observing 'I what he is. The proposition am holding a brown pencil in my hand' may or may not entail proposiiionr about past and future actual and hypothetical data presented to me; analysts differ on this point; 'this some hold theseto be part of what is meant by pencil', others maintain them to be only evidence for the existence of, but not elements in the analysis of it. And this holds equally of the actual and hypothetical data of observersother than myself. What is common however to all phenomenalist accounts, is that part, at ^ny ratq of what I mean by saying that it is an actual pencil that is now before ffi€, and not the phantom of one, is that the datum which I am now observing belongs to a group of visual, tactual, auditory etc. data some of whose members are the subject matter of hypothetical propositions which describewhat I should be experiencing if I were not at this moment in the circumstances in which in fact I am. These propositions ate, as was shown above, not coverifiable with the propositions which describe what I am actually observing, and this f-act alone is quite sufficient to make propositions about physical obfects not conclusively verifiable in prin.ipl., whether or not they are held to contain, telescbped with rhem, various causal and general prop-

ositions 4s, according to some philosophers, they do. Indeed the assertion that general propositions enter into the analysis of prim a facie singular propositions about material obiects seemsto me a good deal more dubious than that these last are not conclusively verifiable; if this seemscertain, that is due to the unco-verifiability of some of the singular propositions which are true of the obiect, not as it is in the past or in the future' but at any given moment. Indeed when anti-phenomenalists maintain that every suggestedtranslation of a given common sensestatement into sensedatum language, however richly it is equipped with general and hypothetical propositions, fails to render in full the meaning of the original, because material objects possess attributes which necessarilyelude observation, when t' for example, Prof. G. F. Stout in discussingwhat we mean by the solidity of material objects as conceived by common sense,observesthat we think of it not as a permanent possibility but as a permanent impossibility of sensation, what gives such objections apparent plausibility and Prof. Stout's epigram its point, is that there is indeed something which *,rtt for logical reasons elude verification by the most exhaustive conceivableseriesof observations' carried out by any number of possible observers, namely, propositions about what I, or some other given observer, could verify, were we not situated as we are. And this the most thorough going phenomenalism must do justice to, however successfullyit may have exorcisedthe last remaining vestigesof the concept of matter as an invisible, intangible, dimly conceivedsubstratum. If what I have urged above is true' verification 'strong' or 'weak' fails to perform its task whether even within the framework of pure phenomenalism which must not therefore be so formulated as to entail it as its primary criterion of significance.And to establishthis negativeconclusion was the main purpose of my thesis.In conclusion I should like to add f.* remarks on what this seems to suggest with " regard to the question of the proper analysis of physical obiects and other selves.If following the view suggestedby Prof. C. D. Broad'o we look upon our concept of a given material obiect as a finite 13Studiesin Philosophyand Psycholog!,P: 116' tAq'] laDiscussed and,Veriin Metaphysics by Mr. jotrn \07isdom pp' 48o-r' r88, No' xLVII' Vol. N.S., (l), Mind fication lAu.l

Verification complex of sensible characteristics (to be referred to as m) selected more or less arbitrarily and unselfconsciously from the wider ser of uniformly covariant characteristics n, then m which is constitutive of the obiect for a given observer, will differ for different individuals, times and cultures, although a certain minimum of overlapping common reference is needed for the possibility of communication in the present, and of understanding records of the past. The set of characteristicsm, if it is affirmed to have an instance, will turn out to render true a finite number of categorical and a potentially infinite number of hypothetical propositions; and the paradoxical fact often urged against phenomenalism that any given proposition or set of propositions recording observations may be false, and yet the relevant proposition about a marerial object which is 'based' upon them may remain true-that in other words the latter type of proposition cannot be shown either ro entail or be entailed by the former-is explained by the fact.that m is vague and n (for all we know) infinite, and consequently however much of m you falsify it will never demonstrare that n has been exhausted. But when m, which representsyour personal selection out of n, is progressively falsified, a point will arise at which you will probably abandon your belief in the existenceof rhe material object in question, since your experience does not present a sufficient number of chaiacteristics defined as m. But where this point will arise for a given individual is a purely psychological or sociological question; and I, who carve an m which differs from yours, out of the common totality n, will understand you only to the extent to which our respective m's overlap; and therefore what will seem to you evidence adverse to your proposition will seem to weaken mine at the very -ort only to the extent to which your m overlaps with rnirr.. Even if 'a case of m exists' were far more precisely formulated than it ever is in ordinar y life, r col"r not lection of singular propositions, ir would still be conclusively verifiable becausesome of its components are hypothetical and unco-verifiable; bui as words are commonly used it is always fluid and vague, and so cannot be conclusively falsified either. Thus the verification crirerion which was intended to eliminate metaphysical propositions in order to save those of science and common sense, cannot deal with these even in its loosest and most enfeebled form.

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other selvesare more recalcitrant still. The strict verification principle seemsro demand a behaviourist analysis of selvesother than that of the observer, introspection data being confined to, becauseconclusively verifiable by, him alone. Even if, as was argued above, this be rejected and the existence of other selves, conceived by analogy with the given observer's own, be conceded at least the same obscure status as is, in the present state of philosophical discussion, enjoyed by material objects, each self being allowed to verif y at any rateits own experience, it still seems difficult to explain, even in terms of the falsifiability criterion, what could show that the sentences 'My toothache is more violent than yours' or 'smith thinks faster than Jones' are not meaningless.Each observer, we say, can vouch for the occurrence or the non-occurrence only of events in his own experience. \ilThatevermay be said about the meaning of such terms as 'priv acy' and 'publicity' as applied to data which are evidence for material objects, introspected states must, as language is ordinarily used, be declared to be private in some sense in which material objects are not: an inter-subjective observer who perceivesmy thoughts and feelings as well as his own seems a self-contradictory concepr: otherwise it would be no more absurd to say that he and I experiencethe same headacheas that we seethe same table. Here, once again, the verification principle does not apply in either of its forms; and yet the propositions ;;paring the experiencesof several observersseem ar once intelligible, empirical, and as often as not precise and true. The conclusion which follows if the above account of the matter is correct, is this: that the criterion provided by 'srrong' verification at best applies to a very narrow range of observation propositions; while 'weak'verification either fails to act as a criterion of sense altogether or, if made equivalent to 'strong' falsification, and in that form made sole arbiter of meanirg, entails a brand of phenomenalism which provides unsarisfactory analysesof propositions about material objects and other selves.ti rotlows a fortiori that the criterion of rypes of verifiability cannot ac as the basis of classification of empirical propositions into logical categories.For it can neither distinguish statementsrecording observations from other categories of empirical fropositions, nor enable us ro distinguish different-rypes of observation statements from each other. In view of

7o8

IsenH BnnuN

this complete failure to satisfy our demand f.or a criterion, are we to abandon our search for a criterion altogether, or even declare the demand itself to be senseless,saying that meaning is meaning-an unanalysable concept-that to understand is an ultimate form of activity like seeing or hearing, that 'empirical' is an ultimate category, and can not be explained or defined otherwise than ostensivelR that is by examples? This is perhaps the case.But if so, statements like the above express the fact too 'S7hat one ought rather to say baldly and obscurely. is that verifiability dependson intelligibility and not vice versa; only sentenceswhich are constructed in accordancewith the rules of logic and of grammar, and describe what can logically be conceived as existing ) are significant, are empirical statements, express genuinely empirical propositions. The notion of the logically conceivable must not be misunderstood. It must not be confused with the view ultimately derived from Russell, and sometimes offered as a substitute for verification theories, according to which a sentencehas empirical meaning when every variable which occurs in it is such that one at least of its values denote an actual or possible object of sensibleor introspective knowledg.; or, as it is sometimes put, when all the concepts in a iudgement are a posteriori concepts; or, if a more familiar formulation is preferred, when understanding a proposition entails actual or possible acquaintance with at least one instance of every universal which occurs in it. Even if we ignore the difficulties of the phenomenalism which this entails it can only be a necessary,never a sufficient condition of empirical significance, at most a negative test. For I can formulate a sentencecorrect by the rules of logic and of grammar and containing as variables only the names of observable characteristics,which yet may 'red turn out to be meaningless, as for example hours are not more passionate than his ambition': this would doubtless involve a glaring confusion of 'weak' vericategories,but the criterion, like that of to powerless fication and for the same reason, is be cannot significance of notion prevent this. The determined by any such mechanical test: to say oI a sentencethat it means something, that I and others understand it, in other words that it conveysa proposition, is to say no more and no less than that we can conceive what would be the caseif it were true. 'I As for the meaning of can conceive', only that is conceivableby me, which in some respectresembles

my actual experience, as it occurs in observation or introspection, memory or imagination, or any other form of direct acquaintance,which can be described only by reference to it, as a determinate however logically distant from its source' of some determinable with at least one of whose determinates I am acquainted; much as a man born blind may understand propositions of visual experience The by analogy with the senseswhich he possesses. proposition that what is conceivable is necessarily similar to actual experience is analytic, being part 'conceivable'. To of what is meant by the word speak therefore of conceiving an experience dissimilar in all respects, wholly different, from my own, is to advance a self-contradictory concept, suggestingas it does that I both can apply my habitual logical categoriesto it, inasmuch as it is called experience,and that I cannot do so, inasmuch that it is declared to be wholly and utterly different from it. Statements which are metaphysical in the bad sense are meaningless not because they are unverifiable-but because they purport, in the language which resemblesthat which we normally use to describesituations which we regard as capable of being empirically experienced, to describe something which is allegedto transcend such experience' and to be incommunicable by any kind of analogy with it. Since, so far as we mean anything by these words, the limits of what can be conceivedare set by analogy to what we are acquainted with, to deny such resemblanceis tantamount to saying that what the proposition affects to describe is inconceivable; and this is to say that it is not a genuine proposition, but, in the empirical sense of meaning as descriptive, and not, e.g. emotive or evocative' a meaninglessstatement, linguistically similar to significant ones. Such a statement is unverifiable because, when examined, it turns out to be meaningless and not vice versa, and it is meaningless, becausealthough words are being used in it in accordance with the accepted conventions of logic and of grammar, they represent the result either of genuine confusion, or of a pursuit of obscurity from whatever cause or motive, since they are used in a fashion different from that in which words are used when they are intended to describe the experienced world. And so, while they may resemble genuinely descriptive expressions, whatever else they may or may not be doing, they literally describe nothing.

BenjarninLee\fhofi r897-r94r

ENJAMTN Lns'STHonr is best known for his thesisconcerning linguistic relativitg an idea also develop.d by Edw ardSapir, X7horf 's teachei and some-

time colleague.In its most generalform, the "s7horf-sapir" hypothesisis that human perception, cognition, and behavior are structuied and in part determined by language.whorf's own developmentof this thesiswas basei primarily on his researchon North AmericanIndian languages,notably uopi. rwhile there appearsto be a superficialsimilarity betweenwhorf's researchind, saussure,s claims concerningthe arbitrarinessof the sign, rJ7horfpursuesthe idea of linguis-ucrelativity aspreciselymotivatedby the distinctiveiircumstancesof a particular culture. In the essayhere, he also arguesthat verbal and grammaiical structures_ are directly connectedto behavior,to emphasizethe pra-tical consequenceof his general thesis. In a well-kno*n .""mple, one may find several words for "snow" in the languageof an Alaskan tri6e t,rt only trre word for "bird," "airplane," and "aviator" in Hopi, sincein both casesal--on experience-ofthe world is segmentedaccordingto prevailinginterestsand needs.How "rea!i-q" appearsis then reflectedin languageand, reiiprocallS affectshow the world is perceived. Among the most striking implicationsof this thesisis that rermsand concepts that appear to be self-evidentprimitives in Europeanlanguages(or, as rrhlrf says,"standard AverageEuropean" or "sAE"), eipecial[1erim tir"t pertain to time, space,measurement,and counting, appearto b. highly dependenton linguistic conventions.From this point of view, claims of ,rniversalityfor certain philosophicalmethods (as,for example, HusserPsidea of phenomlnology) are immediatelysuspect. whorf posits a "thought wodd" as the linguisticallyshaped,.microcosmthat eachman carriesabout within himself, by which he -easrires and understands what he can of the macrocosm."Moreover, the relation betweentwo different lSr,rguaSes, as eachmay shapea different ..thought world," pr"r.nr, an obvious difficulty of commensurability:if fundamentalIoncepts qsuchas tie idea of an "entity" or "event" ) differ,it is not certainthat adequatetranslationcan be made. -rn this context, it is important to note that r7horf's thesishad an important effect.on the developmentof a particular variant of sffucturalist linguistics in American universitiesthat is quite different from structuralismfollowing Sanssure, Ldui-Strauss,or Roland Barthes (see CTSp, pp. rr95_rzrr). Among Americanlinguists, "structuralism" is most.om-orrlyid.rriin.a with the worf of_G. L. Trager, H. L. Smith, Charles Fries, or R. B. Lees, for example, and is taken to refer to grammatical/syntacticalstructurespresumedto be derivable from empirical observation and expressiblein so-calledslot-and-substitution 709

7To

BrNleurnLrr'S(Honr of syntacticalrelations.Thus, Chomsftyt ideaof transformationalrepresentations generativegrammararrdhis espousalof linguistic universalsor Cartesian"innate Ideas" is irisharp opposition to both the "structural" linguistics(i.e., "slot-andlwhorf. substitution,'grammars)and the linguistic relativismof Whorf's mo-stimportant papersare collectedin Language,Tbought, and' Reality: SelectedWritings of Beniamin Lee Wborf, ed. John B. Carroll (r 9 56). See alsoHarry Hoijer, ed-.,Languagein Culture: Conferenceon the Intetrelationsof Languageand Otber Aspectsof Culture(rgS4.

THE RE,LATIONOF

HABITI.]ALTHOUGHT ANDBEHAVIORTO LANGUAGE Human beings do not live in the obiective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular languagewhich has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. . . . \(/e see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interPretation. Edward Sapir THE RELATION OF HABITUAL THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR TO LANGUAcE first appeared in Language, Culture, and Per-

tvtr*ory of Edwal(S.apir, ed. Leslie sonality: Essaysii's7l: Sapii Memorial PublicationFund, spi.i 1tvt.n"sha, r94r), pp. 7 5-9i.lt*"t t.printedrn Lang'a89,7\ought' oii Ciitttyi SelectedWritings of BeniqryinLee Whorf, ed.JohnB. carroll (cambridge,MA:.Y.I.T. Press,1956) reprintedhereby permissionof the M.I.T. Press. "rrdi,

There will probably be general assentto the proposition that an accepted pattern of using words is often prior to certain lines of thinking and forms of behavior, but he who assentsoften seesin such a statement nothing more than a platitudinous recognition of the hypnotic power of philosophical and learned terminology on the one hand or of catchwords, slogans, and rallying cries on the other. To see only thus far is to miss the point of one of the important interconnections which Sapir saw betr"..tr language, culture, and psychology, and succinctly expressedin the introductory quotation. It is not so much in thesespecialusesof languageas in its constant ways of arranging data and its most ordinary everyd^y analysis of phenomena that we need to reco gnize the influence it has on oth er activities, cultural and Personal.

THs

Nnup

oF THr

AFpgcTING

StruATIoN

AS

BnHevIoR

I came in touch with an aspect of this problem before I had studied under Dr. Sapir, and in a field usually consideredremote from linguistics. It was in the course of my professionalwork for a fire insurance company,-in which I undertook the task of analyzing many hundreds of reports of circumstancessurrounding the start of fires, and in some cases,of explosions. My analysis was directed toward purely physical conditions, such as defective wiring, pr.r.n.e or lack of air spacesbetween metal woodwork, etc., and the results were preflues ""d sented in these terms. Indeed it was undertaken with no thought that any other significanceswould or could be revealed. But in due course it became evident that not only a physical situation qud phys-

The Relation of Habitual Thougbt and Behauiorto Language ics, but the meaning of that situation to people, was sometimes a factor, through the behavior of the people, in the start of the fire. And this factor of meaning was clearest when it was a LrNcursrrc MEANTNG,residing in the name or the linguistic description commonly applied to the siruarion. Thus, around a storage of what are called "gasoline drums," behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called ".-pty gasoline drumsr" it will tend to be different-careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about. yet the "empty" drums are perhaps the more dangerous, since they contain explosive vapor. Physically the situation is hazardous, but the linguistic analysis according to regular analogy musr employ the word '.-pry,'which inevitably suggesrslack of hazard. The word 'empry' is used in two linguistic patterns: (r) as a virtual synonym for 'null and void, negative, inert,' (z) applied in analysis of physical situations without regard to, €.g., vapor, liquid vestiges, or stray rubbish, in the container. The situation is named in one pattern (z) and the name is then "acted out" or "lived up to" in another (r), this being a general formula for the linguistic conditioning of behavior into hazardous forms. In a wood distillation plant the metal stills were insulated with a composition prepared from limestone and called at the plant "spun limestone." No attempt was made to protect this covering from excessiveheat or the contact of flame. After a period of use, the fire below one of the stills spread to the "limestoner" which to everyone's great surprise burned vigorously. Exposure to acetic acid fumes from the stills had converred part of the limestone (calcium carbonate) to calcium acetate.This when heated in a fire decomposes,forming inflammable acetone. Behavior that tolerated fire close to the covering was induced by use of the name "limestone," which because it ends in "stone" implies noncombustibility. A huge iron kettle of boiling varnish was observed to be overheated, nearing the temperamre at which it would ignite. The operaror moved it off the fire and ran it on its wheels to a distance, but did not cover it. In a minute or so the varnish ignited. Here the linguistic influence is more complex; it is due to the metaphorical objectifying (;f which more later) of "cause" as contact or the spatial j,r*taposition of "things"-16 analyzing the situation

7rr

'on' 'aff'the as versus fire. In realitS the stagewhen the external fire was the main factor had passed; the overheatingwas now an internal processof convection in the varnish from the intensely heated kettle, and still continued when 'off' the fire. An electric glow heater on the wall was little used, and for one workman had the meaning of a convenient coathanger. At night a watchman entered and snapped a switch, which acrion he verbalized as 'rurning on the light.' No light appeared, and this result he verb alizedas 'light is burned out.' He could not see the glow of the heater becauseof the old coat hung on ir. soon the heater ignited the coat, which set fire to the building. A tannery dischargedwaste water containing animal maffer into an outdoor settling basin partly roofed with wood and partly open. This situation is one that ordinarily would be verbalized as 'pool of water.' A workman had occasion to light a blowtorch near b5 and threw his match into the water. But the decomposingwaste matter was evolving gas under the wood cover, so that the setup was the ieverseof 'watery.' An instant flare of flame ignited the woodwork, and the fire quickly spread into the adjoining building. drying room for hides was arranged with a blower at one end to make a current of air along the room and thence outdoors through a vent at the other end. Fire started at a hot bearing on the blower which blew the flames directly intoin. hides and fanned them along the room, destroying the entire stock. This hazardous serup followed naturally from the term 'blower' with its linguistic equivalence to 'that which blows,' implying that its function necessarily is to 'blow.' Also its function is verbalized as 'blowing air for drying,' overlooking that it can blow other things, €.g., flames and sparts. In realitS a blower simply makes a current o? air and can exhausr as well as blow. It should have been installed at the vent end to DRAw the air over the hides, then through the hazard (its own casing and bearings), and thence outdoors. Beside a coal-fired melting por for lead reclaiming was dumped a pile of "scrap lead,,-a misleading verbalization, for it consisted of the lead sheets of old radio condensers, which still had paraffin paper berween them. Soon the paraffin blazed up and fired the roof, half of which was burned off. such examples, which could be greatly multiplied, will suffice to show how the cue to a certain

7T2

BrNlnnarN LnB'S7uonr

line of behavior is often given by the analogies of the linguistic formula in which the situation is spoken of, and by which to some degreeit is analyzed,classified, and allotted its place in that world which is "to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group." And we always assume that the linguistic analysis made by our group reflects reality better than it does.

GnnrvrMATrcAL INTpnPRETATIONS

PAT TERNS AS oF EXPERIENCE

The linguistic material in the above examplesis limited to single words, phrases,and patterns of limited range. One cannot study the behavioral compulsiveness of such material without suspecting a much more far-reachingcompulsion from large-scalepatterning of grammatical categories,such as plurality, gender and similar classifications (animate, inanimate, etc.), tenses, voices, and other verb forms, classifications of the type of "parts of speechr" and the matter of whether a given experienceis denoted by ^ unit morpheffi€, an inflected word, or a syntactical combination. A category such as number (singular vs. plural) is an attempted interpretation of a whole large order of experience, virtually of the world or of nature; it attempts to say how experience is to be segmented,what experience is to be called "one" and what "several." But the difficulty of appraising such a far-reaching influence is great becauseof its background character, becauseof the difficulty of standing aside from our own language, which is a habit and a cultural non est disputandum, and scrutinizing it objectively. And if we take a very dissimilar language, this language becomesa part of nature, and we even do to it what we have 'We tend to think in our own already done to nature. language in order to examine the exotic language. Or we find the task of unraveling the purely morphological intricacies so gigantic that it seems to absorb all else.Yet the problem, though difficult, is feasible; and the best approach is through an exotic language, for in its study we are at long last pushed willy-nilly out of our ruts. Then we find that the exotic language is a mirror held up to our own. In my study of the Hopi language, what I now see as an opportunity to work on this problem was first

thrust upon me before I was clearly aware of the problem. The seemingly endlesstask of describing the morphology did finally end. Yet it was evident, especiallyin the light of Sapir'slectures on Navaho, that the description of the LANGUAGEwas far from complete. I knew for example the morphological formation of plurals, but not how to use plurals. It was evident that the category of plural in Hopi was not the same thing as in English, French, or German. Certain things that were plural in these languages were singular in Hopi. The phase of investigation which now began consumed nearly two more years. The work began to assume the character of a comparison between Hopi and western European languages. It also became evident that even the grammar of Hopi bore a relation to Hopi culture, and the grammar of European tongues to our own "'Western" or "European" culture. And it appeared that the interrelation brought in those large subsummations of experienceby language,such as our own and'matter.' Since, terms'timer''spacer''substancer' with respect to the traits compared, there is little difference between English, French, German, or other European languages with the possIBLE (but doubtful) exception of Balto-Slavic and non-IndoEuropean, I have lumped these languages into one group called SAE, or "Standard AverageEuropean." That portion of the whole investigation here to be reported may be summed up in rwo questions: (r) Are our own concepts of 'timer' 'spacer' and 'matter' given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages? (z) Are there traceable affinities between (a) cultural and behavioral norms and (b) large-scalelinguistic patterns? (I should be the last to pretend that there is anything so definite as "a correlation" between culture and language, and especially between ethno'agricultural, huntitg,' etc., logical rubrics such as 'inflect€dr' 'syntheticr' or and linguistic ones like 'isolating." \trhen I began the study, the problem was by no means so clearly formulated, and I had little notion that the answers would turn out as they did.) 1'Wehaveplenty of evidencethat this is not the case.Consideronly the Hopi and the Ute, with languagesthat on the overt morphologicaland lexical level are as similar as, say,Englishand German.The idea of "correlation" betweenlanguageand culture,in the generallyaccepted senseof correlation,is certainlya mistakenone. [Au.]

The Relation of Habitual Tbought and Behauior to Language

Prunet-rTy AND NurvrERATroNrN SAE AND Hopr ln our language, that is SAE, plurality and cardinal numbers are applied in two ways: to real plurals and imaginary plurals. Or more exactly if less tersely: perceptible spatial aggregares and mera'We phorical aggregates. say 'ten men' and also 'ten days.' Ten men either are or could be objectively perceivedas ten, ten in one group perceptionr-ten men on a street corner, for instance. But 'ten days' cannot be objectively experienced. \(e experience only one d^y, today; the other nine (or even all ten) are something conjured rp from memory or imagination. If 'ten days' be regarded as a group it must be as an "im aginaryr" mentally constructed group. whence comes this mental pattern ? Just as in the case of the fire-causing errors, from the fact that our language confuses the two different situations, has but one pattern for both. lu7henwe speak of 'ten steps forward, ten strokes on a bell,' or any similarly described cyclic sequence,"times" of any sort, we are doing the same thing as with .days.' cycI.lcrry brings the response of imaginary plurals. But a likeness of cyclicity ro aggregatesis not unmistakably given by experience prior to language, or it would be found in all languages,and it is not. our AvARENESS of time and cycliciry does contain something immediate and subjective-the basic senseof "becoming later and later." But, in the habitual thought of us sAE people, this is covered under something quite different, which though mental should not be called subjective. I call it onJECTIFIED,or imagin dry, becauseit is patterned on the ourER world. It is this that reflects our linguistic usage. our tongue makes no distinction befween numbers counted on discrete entities and numbers that are simply "counting itself." Habitual thought then assumesthat in the latter the numbers are just as much counted on "something" as in the former. This is objectification. concepts of time lose contact with the subjective experience of ..becoming later" and are objectified .o,rrrted quaN", TITIES,especially as lengths, made up of units as a 2As we sar 'ten at the sAME TrME,' showing that in our language and thought we resrate the fact Jf group perception in terms of a concept 'rime,' the largi linguistic component of which will appear in rhe courc. 6f thi, paper. [Au.]

7T3

length can be visibly marked off into inches. A 'length of time' is envisioned as a row of similar units, like a row of bottles. In Hopi there is a different linguistic situarion. Plurals and cardinals are used only for entities that form or can form an objective group. There are no imaginary plurals, but instead ordinals used with singulars. such an expression as 'ten days' is not used. The equivalent statement is an operational one that reachesone d^y by ^ suitable count. 'They stayed ten days' becomes 'they stayed until the eleventh d^y' or 'they left after the tenth d^y.' 'Ten days is greater than nine days' becomes 'the tenth day is later than the ninth.' our "length of time" is not regarded as a length but as a relation between rwo events in lateness.Instead of our linguistically promoted objectification of that datum of consciousness we call 'rime,' the Hopi language has not laid down any pamern that would cloak the subjective "becoming later" that is the essenceof time.

NouNs oF PrrysrcAt,QunNTrTy rN SAE AND Hopl we have two kinds of nouns denoting physical things: individual nouns, and mass nouns, €.g., 'water, milk, wood, granite, sand, flour, meat.'tnJividual nouns denote bodies with definite oudines: 'a tree, a stick, a man, a hill.' Mass nouns denote homogeneous continua without implied boundaries. The distinction is marked by linguistic form; €.9., mass nouns lack plurals,, in English drop articles, and in French take the partitive article di, de Ia, des. The distinction is more widesp read.in language than in the observable appearance of things. Rather few natural occurrences present themselues as unbounded extentsl 'air' of course, and often 'water, rain, sno% sand, rock, dirt, grass.' \il7edo not encounter 'butter, meat, cloth, iron, glass' or 3It is no exceptionto this rule of lacking a plural that a massnoun may sometimescoincidein lexemewith an individualnoun that of coursehasa plurali e.g.,'stone'(no pl.) with 'a stonel(pl. 'srones'). Th; plural foi- denoting varieties,€.9.,'wines'is of coursea differentsort of thing from the true plural; it is a curiousoutgrowth from the sAE massnouns,leadingto still anothersorr of imaginary aggregates, which will haveto be omitted from tiiis paper. [Au.]

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Bnn;er"rtNLen'WHonr'

most "materials" in such kind of manifestation, but in bodies small or large with definite outlines. The distinction is somewhat forced upon our description of events by an unavoidable pattern in language. It is so inconvenient in a great many cases that we need some way of individualizing the mass noun by further linguistic devices. This is partly 'stick of wood, piece done by names of body-types: also, and even soap'; of glass, cake pane of of cloth, more, by introducing names of containers though 'glass water, cup of their contents be the real issue: of coffee, dish of food, bag of flour, bottle of beer.' These very common container formulas, in which 'of' has an obvious, visually perceptible meaning ("contents"), influence our feeling about the less 'stick of wood, lump obvious type-body formulas: of dough,' etc. The formulas are very similar: indi'of'). In vidual noun plus a similar relator (English the obvious case this relator denotes contents. In the inobvious one it "suggests" contents. Hence the 'lumps, chunks, blocks, piecesr'etc., seem to contain somethitg, a "stuffr" "substancer" or "matter" 'waterr' 'coffeer' or 'flour' in that answers to the the container formulas. So with SAE people the philosophic "substance" and "matte r" ate also the naive idea; they are instantly acceptable,"common sense." It is so through linguistic habit. Our language patterns often require us to name a physical thing by binomial that splits the referenceinto a " formless item plus a form. Hopi is again different. It has a formally distinguished class of nouns. But this class contains no formal subclass of mass nouns. All nouns have an individual sense and both singular and plural forms. Nouns translating most nearly our mass nouns still refer to vague bodies or vaguely bounded extents. They imply indefiniteness,but not lack, of 'water' outline and size. In specific Statements' means one certain maSSor quantity of water, not what we call "the substancewater." Generality of statement is conveyed through the verb or predicator, not the noun. Since nouns are individual alreadn they are not individualized by either typebodies or names of containers, if there is no special need to emphasizeshape or container. The noun itself implies a suitable type-body or container. One 'a 'a SayS,not glassof water' but ka'yi'a waterr' not 'a dish of cornflour' pool of water' but p7.ha,4not aHopi has two words for water quantities; ka'yi and pa.hr. The differenceis somethinglike that between

but ryamni'a (quantity of ) cornflour,'not'a pieceof 'a meat.' The language has neither meat' but sik*i need for nor analogies on which to build the concept of existence as a duality of formless item and form. It dealswith formlessnessthrough other symbols than nouns.

PHesnsor CvcLESIN SAE AND HOPI 'summer, winter, September,mornSuch terms as irg, noon, sunset' are with us nouns, and have little formal linguistic differencefrom other nouns. They 'at sunset' or can be subjectsor obiects, and we say 'in winter' just as we say'at a corner'or'in an orchard." They are pluralized and numerated like nouns of physical obiects, as we have seen. Our thought about the referents of such words hence becomes objectified. tilTithout objectification, it would be a subiectiveexperienceof real time, i.e., of the consciousnessof "becoming later and lxgs1"simply a cyclic phase similar to an earlier phase in that ever-later-becomingduration. Only by imagination can such a cyclic phase be set beside another and another in the manner of a spatial (i.e. visually perceived) configuration. But such is the power of linguistic analogy that we do so objectify cyclic 'a phase' and phasing. \ile do it even by saying 'phases' instead of, e.8., 'phasing.' And the pattern of indiuidual and mass nouns, with the resulting binomial formula of formless item plus form, is so general that it is implicit for all nouns, and hence 'substance' our very generaltzedformless items like matter,' by which we can fill out the binomial for an enormously wide range of nouns. But even theseare not quite gen erahzed enough to take in our phase nouns. So for the phase nouns we have made a 'time.' 'We have made it by using 'a formless item, time,' i.e., an occasionor a phase,in the pattern of a 'SUmmaSSnoun, juSt aSfrOm'a Summer'we make 'r,"t*' tock' in English,pa.haimplying greatersize ""d flowing water,whetheror not outdoors and "wildness"; 'moisture.'But, unlike 'stone' or in nature,is pa.ha;so is 'rock,' the differenceis essential,not pertainingto a and connotativemargin,and the two canhardlyeverbe interchanged.[Au.] 5To b; tuti, there area few minor differencesfrom other nouns,in Englishfor instancein the use of the articles. lAu.l

The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behauior to Language mer' in the pattern of a mass noun. Thus with our binomial formula we can say and think 'a moment of time, a second of time, a year of time.' Let me again point out thar the pamern is simply that of 'a bottle of milk' or'a pieceof cheese.'Thus we are assisted to imagine that 'a summer' actually contains or consistsof such-and-sucha quantity of 'time.' In Hopi however all phase terms, like 'summer, morningr' etc., are not nouns but a kind of adverb, to use the nearest SAE analogy. They are a formal part of speech by themselves,distinct from nouns, verbs, and even other Hopi "adverbs." Such a word is not a case form or a locative pattern, like 'des Abends' or 'in the morning.' It contains no morpheme like one of in the house'or'at the tree.,6It means 'when it is morning' or 'while morningphase is occurring.' These "temporals" are not used as subjectsor objects, or at all like nouns. one does not say 'it's a hot summer' or 'summer is hot'; summer is not hot, summer is only wHEN conditions are hot, vHEN heat occurs. One does not say .THrs summerr' but 'summer now' or 'summer recently.' There is no objectification, as a region, an extent, a quantity, of the subjectiveduration-feeling. Nothing is suggestedabout time except the perpetual "getting later" of it. And so there is no basis here for a formless item answering to our 'time.'

TnupoRAL Fonus oF Vpnss rN SAE AND Hopr The three-tensesystem of SAE verbs colors all our thinking abour time. This system is amalgamated with that larger scheme of objectification of the subiective experience of duration already noted in other patterns-in the binomial formula applicable to nouns in general, in temporal nouns, in plurality and numeration. This objectification enables us in imagination to "stand time units in a row." Imagination of time as like a row harmonizes with ryrtem of THREE tensesl whereas a system of "T\vo, an earlier and a later, would seem to correspond better to the feeling of duration as it is experienced. For if we inspect consciousnesswe find no pasr, 5'Year'and certain combinations 'year' of with name of season,rarelyseasonnamesalone,can occur with a lo'at,' but this is exceptional.It appears 91tiv.emorpheme like historicaldetritusof an earlierdifferentpatterning, \ or the effectof Englishanalogy,or both. tAu.i

7rs

present, future, but a unity embracing complexiry. EvrnvrHrNc is in consciousness,and everything in consciousnessrS, and is together. There is in it a sensuous and nonsensuous. We may call the sensuous-what we are seeing, hearing, touchitrgthe 'present' while in the nonsensuous the vast image-world of memory is being labeled 'the pasr' and another realm of belief, intuition, and uncertainty 'the future' ; yet sensation, mem ory, foresight, all are in consciousnesstogether-one is not "yet to 'ufhere be" nor another "once but no more." real time comes in is that all this in consciousnessis "getting laterr" changing certain relations in an irreversible manner. In this "latering" or "durating" there seemsto me to be a paramount contrast between the newest, latest instant at the focus of attention and the rest-the earlier. Languages by the score get along well with two tenselike forms answering to this paramount relation of "later" to '$(/'e "earlier." can of course CoNSTRUCT AND coNTEMPLATE

IN THOUGHT

A SYSTCIn Of PASI, PTCSCNt,

future, in the objectified configuration of poinrs on a line. This is what our general objectification tendency leads us to do and our tense system confirms. In English the present tenseseemsthe one least in harmony with the paramount temporal relation. It is as if pressed into various and not wholly congruous duties. one duty is to stand as objectified middle term between objectified past and objectified future, in narration, discussion, argument, logic, philosophy. Another is to denote inclusion in the sensuous field: 'I sEE him.' Another is for nomic, i.e. customarily or generally valid, statements: ''We snp with our eyes.'These varied usesintroduce confusions of thought, of which for the most part we are unaware. Hopi, as we might expefi, is different here too. verbs have no "tenses" like ours, but have validiryforms ("assertions" ), aspects, and clause-linkage forms (modes), that yield even grearer precision tr speech.The validity-forms denote that the speaker (not the subject) reports the situation (answering to our past and present) or that he expects it (answering to our future) ' or that he makes a nomic stateTTheexpectiveand reportiveassertionscontrastaccording.tothe "paramountrelation."The expectiveexpresses anticipationexistingEARLTER than objectivefact, and coinciding-with-objective fact rnrrn than the statusquo of the speaker,this srarusguo, includingall the subsurrr-"tion of the pas-ttherein,beingr*ptes.d by the reportive. our notion "future" seemsto representat onceih. ."r-

7T6

BnNleutN LrE'S[Honp

ment (answeringto our nomic present).The aspects denote different degrees of duration and different kinds of tendency "during duration." As yet we have noted nothing to indicate whether an event is sooner or later than another when both are REpoRTED.But need for this does not arise until we have two verbs: i.e. two clauses.In that casethe "modes" denote relations between the clauses,including relations of later to earlier and of simultaneity. Then there are many detached words that express similar relations, supplementing the modes and aspects.The duties of our three-tense system and its tripartite linear obfectified "time" are distributed among various verb categories, all different from our tenses; and there is no more basis for an obiectified time in Hopi verbs than in other Hopi patterns; although this does not in the least hinder the verb forms and other patterns from being closely adjusted to the pertinent realities of actual situations.

DunerloN,

INrnNsITy, AND TnNoENCY IN SAE ENN HOPI

To fit discourse to manifold actual situations, all languages need to express durations, intensities, and tendencies.It is characteristic of SAE and perhaps of many other language types to express them metaphorically. The metaphors are those of spatial extension, i.e. of size, number (plurality), position, 'We 'long, express duration by shape, and motion. short, great, much, quick, slowr' €tc.; intensity by 'large, great, much, heavS light, high, low, sharp, 'more, increase,gro% turn, faint,' etc.; tendency by get, approach, Bo, come, rise, fall, stop, smooth, even, rapid, slow'; and so on through an almost inexhaustible list of metaphors that we hardly recognize as such, since they are virtually the only linguistic media available. The nonmetaphorical terms 'early, late, soon, lasting, intense, in this field, like very, tendingr' are a mere handful, quite inadequate to the needs. It is clear how this condition "fits in." It is part of our whole schemeof onlecTlFYlNc-imaginatively spatiali zing qualities and potentials that are quite lier (anticipation) and the later (afterwards, what will be), as Hopi shows. This paradox may hint of how elusive the mystery of real time is, and how artificially it i_s.expressed by- ^ linear relation of past-present-future. [Au.]

nonspatial (so far as any spatially perceptive senses can tell us). Noun-meaning (with us) proceedsfrom physical bodies to referents of far other sort. Since physical bodies and their outlines in pERcEIvED spACE are denoted by size and shape terms and reckoned by cardinal numbers and plurals, these patterns of denotation and reckoning extend to the symbols of nonspatial meanings, and so suggestan 'move, stop, TMAGINARvspACE. Physical shapes rise, sink, approachr' etc., in perceived space; why not these other referents in their imaginary space? This has gone so far that we can hardly refer to the simplest nonspatial situation without constant resort to physical metaphors. I "grasp" the "thread" of another's arguments,but if its "level" is "over my head" my attention may "wander" and "lose touch" with the "drift" of it, so that when he "comes" to o'views" being his "point" we differ "widely," our 'ofat apart" that the "things" he says indeed so "appear" "much" too arbitrary, or even "a lot" of nonsense! The absenceof such metaphor from Hopi speech is striking. Use of space terms when there is no space involved is Nor rHERE-as if on it had been laid the taboo teetotal ! The reason is clear when we know that Hopi has abundant conjugational and lexical means of expressing duration, intensify, and tendency directly as such, and that major grammatical patterns do not, as with us, provide analogies for an imaginary space. The many verb "aspects" express duration and tendency of manifestations,while some of the "voices" expressintensiry, tendency, and duration of causes or forces producing manifestations. Then a special part of speech, the "tensorsr" a huge class of words, denotes only intensity, tendencR duration, and sequence. The function of the tensors is to express intensities, "strengths," and how they continue or vary, their rate of change; so that the broad concept of intensity, when considered as necessarily always varying and/or continuitg, includes also tendency and duration. Tensors convey distinctions of degree, rate, constancy, repetition, increase and decreaseof intensity, immediate sequence, interruption or sequence after an interval, etc., also QUALITIESof strengths, such as we should expressmetaphorically as smooth, even, hard, rough. A striking feature is their lack of resemblance to the terms of real space

i[ffi""ff#ff;.1*:; ilfffi'fr::j',11'J:

The Relationof Habitual Thoughtand Behauiorto Language from space terms.t So, while Hopi in its nouns seems highly concrete, here in the tensors it becomes abstract almost beyond our power to follow.

HesrTuAL THoucHT rN SAE AND Hopl The comparison now to be made between the habitual thought worlds of SAE and Hopi speakersis of course incomplete. It is possible only to touch upon certain dominant contrasts that appear to stem from the linguistic differences already noted. By "habitual thought" and "thought world" I mean more than simply language, i.e., than the linguistic patterns themselves.I include all the analogical and suggestivevalue of the patterns (e.g., our "imaginary space" and its distant implications), and all the give-and-take berween language and the culture as a whole, wherein is a vast amount that is not linguistic but yet shows the shaping infltrence of language. In brief, this "thought world" is the microcosm that each man carries about within himself, by which he measuresand understandswhat he can of the macrocosm. The SAE microcosm has analyzed reality largely in terms of what it calls "things" (bodiesand quasibodies)plus modes of extensionalbut formlessexistence that it calls "substances" or "matter." It tends to seeexistencethrough a binomial formula that expressesany existent as a spatial form plus a spatial formless continuum related to the form, as conrents is related to the outlines of its container. Nonspatial existents are imaginatively spatialized and charged with similar implications of form and continuum. The Hopi microcosm seemsto have analyzed resone suchtraceis that the tensor'long in duration,'while quite differentfrom the adjective'long' of space,seemsro contain the sameroot as the adjective'large' of space. Another is that 'somewhere'of spaceusedwith certain tensorsmeans'at someindefinitetime.'Possiblyhowever this is not the caseand it is only the rensorthat givesthe time element,so that 'somewhere'still refers io tpa.t and that under theseconditionsindefinitespacemeans simply generalapplicabilitRregardless of eithertime or space.Another traceis that in the temporal(cycleword) 'afternoon' the elementmeaning'aftei' is deiived from the verb 'to separate.'There are other such traces,but they are few and exceptional, and obviouslynor like our own spatialmetaphorizing. [Au.]

7T7

ality largely in terms of EVENTs(or better "eventing" ), referred to in two ways, objective and subjective. Objectivel5 and only if perceptible physical experience,eventsare expressedmainly as outlines, colors, movements, and other perceptive reports. Subjectively, for both the physical and nonphysical, events are considered the expressionof invisible intensity factors, otr which depend their stabiliry and persistence,or their fugitivenessand proclivities. It implies that existents do not "become later and later" all in the sameway; but some do so by growittg like plants, some by diffusing and vanishing, some by ^ procession of metamorphoses, some by enduring in one shape till affected by violenr forces. In the nature of each existent able to manifest as a definite whole is the power of its own mode of duration: its growth, decline, stability, cyclicity, or creativeness.Everything is thus already "prepared" for the way it now manifests by earlier phases, and what it will be later, partly has been, and partly is in act of being so "prepared." An emphasis and importance rests on this preparing or being prepared aspect of the world that may to the Hopi correspond to that "quality of reality" that 'matter' or 'stuff' has for us.

HenrTuAL BBHnvroRFreruREs oF Hopr CurruRE Our behavior, and that of Hopi, can be seen to be coordinated in many ways to the linguistically conditioned microcosm. As in my fire casebook,people act about situations in ways which are like the ways they talk about them. A characteristic of Hopi behavior is the emphasis on preparation. This includes announcing and getting ready for eventswell beforehand, elaborate precautions to insure persistence of desired conditions, and stresson good will as the preparer of right results. Consider the analogies of the day-counting pattern alone. Time is mainly reckoned "by day" (tark, -tala) or ,.by night" (tok), which words are not nouns but tensors, the first formed on a root "light, d^yr,, the second on a root "sleep." The count is by oRDTNALS. This is not the pattern of counting a number of different men or things, even though they appear successivelRfor, even then, they cout-D gather into an assemblage.It is the pattern of counting successive

7rB

BrNleurx Lrn'STHonr

reappearances of the SAMEman or thing, incapable The analogyis not to beof forming an assemblage. haveabout day-cyclicityas to severalmen ("several days"), which is what wt tend to do, but to behave as to the successivevisits of the seun ueN. One does not alter severalmen by working upon just one, but one can prepareand so alter the later visits of the same man by working to affect the visit he is making now. This is the way the Hopi deal with the future-by working within a presentsituation which is expectedto carry impresses,both obvious and occult, forward into the future eventof interest. One might say that Hopi society understandsour proverb 'Well begunis half done,' but not our'Tomorrow is another day.' This may explain much in Hopi character. This Hopi preparingbehaviormay be roughly divided into announcing,outer preparing, inner preparing, covert participation, and persistence.Announcing, or preparativepublicity, is an important function in the handsof a specialofficial, the Crier Chief. Outer preparing is preparation involving much visible activity, not all necessarilydirectly useful within our understanding.It includes ordinary practicing,rehearsing,gettingready,introductory formalities,preparing of specialfood, etc. (all of theseto a degreethat may seemoverelaborateto us), intensivesustainedmuscular activity like running, racing, dancing,which is thought to increase the intensity of developmentof events (such as growth of crops),mimetic and other magic,preparations basedon esoterictheory involving perhaps occult instrumentslike prayer sticks, prayer feathers, and prayer meal, and finally the great cyclic ceremoni;sand dances,which havethe iignificance of preparing rain and crops. From one oithe verbs meaning "prepare" is deiived the noun for "har'in vest" or ".iof" , na'twani'the prepared'or the preparation.'; Inner preparing is use of prayer and meditation, and at lesse,int.*ity good wishesand good will, to further desired resulti. Hopi attitudes stress the power of desire and thought. !flith their "micro-cosm" it is utterly natural that they should. Desire and thought u.. ,i!. earliest,and thereforethe most importarri, most critical and crucial, stageof pre-

paring. Moreover, to the Hopi, one's desiresand thoughtsinfluencenot only his own actions,but all nature as well. This too is wholly natural. Consciousnessitself is aware of work, of the feel of effort and energy,in desire and thinking. Experiencemore basic than languagetells us that, if energy is expended,effectsare produced. $(/etend to believethat our bodiescan stop up this energy,prevent it from affectingother things until we will our BoDIESto oveft action. But this may be so only becausewe haveour own linguistic basisfor a theory that formlessitems like "matter" are things in themselves,malleable only by similar things, by more matter, and henceinsulatedfrom the powers of life and thought. It is no more unnatural to think that thought contactseverythingand pervadesthe universe than to think, as we all do, that light kindled outdoors doesthis. And it is not unnatural to supposethat thought, like any other force, leaves everywheretracesof effect.Now, when vn think of a certain actual rosebush,we do not supPosethat our thought goesto that actual bush, and engages with it, like a searchlightturned upon it. What then is dealing with do we supposeour consciousness when we are thinking of that rosebush?Probably we think it is dealingwith a "mental image" which is not the rosebushbut a mental surrogateof it- But why shouldit be Naruner to think that our thought dealswith a surrogateand not with the real rosebush? Quite possibly becausewe are dimly aware that we carry about with us a whole imaginary space,full of mental surrogates.To us, mental surrogatesare old familiar fare' Along with the images ofimaginaryspace,whichweperhapssecretlyknow to be only imaginary we tuck the thought-of actually existing rosebush'which may be quite another story,perhapsjust becausewe havethat very convenient "place" for it. The Hopi thought-world has no imaginary space.The corollary to this is that it may not locatethought dealingwith real spaceanywherebut in real space,nor insulatereal spacefrom the effectsof thought. A Hopi would_naturallysuppose that his thought (or he himself) traffics with the actual rosebush-or more likely, corn plantthat he is thinking about. The thought then should leavesometrace of itself with the plant in the field.

'*;,T::'ff:1il:i:::31'liffi#iY#,?:::if:',1'* ll*fi,;','ili.13::flhJ"T;Ti,|lX rendired'thepraiticed-upon,thetried-for,'andotherwise. [Au.]

reverse' The Hopi

emphasize the intensity-factor

of

The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behauior to Language thought. Thought to be most effective should be vivid in consciousness,definite, steadR sustained, charged with strongly felt good inrentions. They render the idea in English as 'concentratirg, holding it in your heart, putting your mind on it, earnestly hoping.' Thought power is the force behind ceremonies,prayer sticks, ritual smoking, etc. The prayer pipe is regarded as an aid to "concentrating" (so said my informant). Its name, nt'twanpi, means 'instrument of preparing.' covert participation is mental collaboration from people who do not take parr in the actual affair, be it a job of work, hunt, race, or ceremony,but direct their thought and good will roward the affair's success. Announcements often seek to enlist the support of such mental helpers as well as of overr participants, and contain exhortations to the people to aid with their acrive good will.'o A similariry to our concepts of a sympathetic audience or the cheering secrion at a football game should not obscure the fact that it is primarily the power of directed thought, and not merely sympathy or encouragement, that is expected of covert participants. In fact theselatter ger in their deadliest work before, nor during, the game! A corollary ro the power of thought is the power of wrong thought for evil; hence one purpose of covert participation is to obtain the mass force of many good wishers to offset the harmful thought of ill wishers. such attitudes greatly favor cooperation and community spirit. Not that the Hopi communiry is not full of rivalries and colliding interests. Against the tendency to social disintegration in such a small, isolated group, the theory of "preparing" by the power of thought, logically leading to the grear power of the combined, intensified, and harmon ized thought of the whole communitn musr help vastly toward the rather remarkable degreeof cooperarion that, in spite of much private bickering, the Hopi village displays in all the important cultural acivities. Hopi "preparing" activities again show a result of their linguistic thought background in an emphatoL.:,

g.S;,ErnestBeaglehole,No/es on Hopi economic life (Yaleuniversily Publicationsin Anthropology,no. r5, r %7), especially the reference to the announcemenr of.a rabbit hunt, and on p. 3o, descriptionof the activities in connectionwith the cleaningof Torevaspringannouncing,various preparing activities, and fina1ly, preparingJ\. continuiryof the good resultsalreadyobtainedand the continuedflow of the spring.[Au.]

7r9

sis on persistenceand constant insistent repetition. A sense of the cumulative value of innumerable small momenta is dulled by an objectified, spatialized view of time like ours, enhancedby a way of thinking close to the subjective awarenessof duration, of the ceaseless"latering" of events.To us, for whom time is a motion on a space,unvarying repetition seemsto scatter its force along a row of units of that space,and be wasted. To the Hopi, for whom time is not a motion but a "getting later" of everything that has ever been done, unvarying repetition is not wasted but accumulated. It is storing up an invisible change that holds over into later events.ll As we have seen,it is as if the return of the day were felt as the return of the same person, a little older but with all the impressesof yesterday, not as "another d^yr" i.e., like an entirely different person. This principle joined with that of thought-power and with traits of general Pueblo culrure is expressed in the theory of the Hopi ceremonial dance for furthering rain and crops, as well as in its short, piston-like tread, repeatedthousands of times, hour after hour.

Soun IupnrssEsoF LrNcursrrcHnsru IN WESTERNCTTuzATIoN It is harder to do iustice in few words to the linconditioned features of our own culture than in the case of the Hopi, because of both vast guistically

scope and difficulty of objectivity-because of our deeply ingrained familiarity with the attitudes to be analyzed. I wish merely to sketch certain characteristics adjusted to our linguistic binomialism

of form

11Thisnotion ofstoring_up power, which seemsimplied by much Hopi behavior, has an analog in physics: acceleraIt !t_ott. might be said that the linguistic background of Hopi-thought equips it to recognize naturally ihat force manifests not as motion or velociry, but as cumulation or acceleration. our linguistic background tends to hinder in us this same recognition, for having legitimately conceived force to be that which producerih"ig., we then think of change by our linguistic metapho"ri.."1 analog, motion, instead of by i pur. moti,onless changingness concept, i.e., accumulation or acceleration. Hence it comes to our naive feeling as a shock to fro_mphysical experiments that it isiot possible to {"{ define force by motion, that motion and speld, as also "being at rest," are wholly relative, and thai force can be measured only by acceleration. [Au.]

72o

BrNlennINLrn'WHonr

plus formless item or "substancer" to our metaphoricalness, our imaginary space, and our obfectified time. These, as we have seen,are linguistic. From the form-plus-substance dichotomy the philosophical views most traditionally characteristic of the "'Western world" have derived huge support. Here belong materialism, psychophysical parallelism, physics-at least in its traditional Newtonian form-and dualistic views of the universe in general. lndeed here belongs almost everything that is "hard, practical common sense."Monistic, holistic, and relativistic views of reality appeal to philosophers and some scientists, but they are badly handicapped in appealing to the "common sense" 'Western average man-not because nature of the herself refutes them (if she did, philosophers could have discovered this much), but becausethey must be talked about in what amounts to a new language. "Common sens€r" as its name shows, and "practicality" as its name does not sho% are largely matters of talking so that one is readily understood. It is sometimes stated that Newtonian space, time, and matter are sensedby everyoneintuitively, whereupon relativity is cited as showing how mathematical analysiscan prove intuition wrong. This, besides being unfair to intuition, is an attempt to answer offhand question (r ) put at the outset of this paper, to answer which this researchwas undertaken. Presentation of the findings now nears its end, and I think the answer is clear. The offhand answer,l^ying the blame upon intuition for our slowness is discovering mysteries of the Cosmos, such as relativity, is the wrong one. The right answer is: Newtonian space,time, and matter are no intuitions. They are receipts from culture and language. That is where Newton got them. Our obiectified view of time is, however, favorable to historiciry and to everything connectedwith the keeping of records, while the Hopi view is unfavorable thereto. The latter is too subtle, complex, and ever-developing,supplying no ready-made answer to the question of when "one" event ends and '\il7hen it is implicit that every"another" begins. is, but is in a necesstill happened ever that thing sarily different form from what memory or record reports, there is less incentive to study the past. As foi the present, the incentive would be not to record it but to treat it as "preparing." But oUR obiectified time puts before imagination something like a ribbon or scroll marked off into equal blank spaces'

'$Triting suggestingthat each be filled with an entry. has no doubt helped toward our linguistic treatment of time, even as the linguistic treatment has guided the uses of writing. Through this give-andtake between language and the whole culture we Bet, for instance: r. Records, diaries, bookkeeping, accountirg, mathematics stimulated by accounting. z. lnterest in exact sequence,dating' calendars, chronology, clocks, time wages, time graphs, time as used in physics. 3. Annals, histories, the historical attitude, interest in the past, archaeology, attitudes of introiection toward past periods, €.g., classicism, romanticism. Just as we conceive our obiectified time as extending in the future in the same way that it extends in the past, so we set down our estimates of the future in the same shape as our records of the past, producing programs, schedules,budgets. The formal equaliry of the spacelike units by which we measure and conceive time leads us to consider the "formless item" or "substance" of time to be homogeneous and in ratio to the number of units. Hence our prorata allocation of value to time, lending itself to the building up of a commercial structure based on time-prorata values: time wages (time work constantly supersedespiecework), rent, credit, interest, depreciation charges, and insurance premiums. No doubt this vast system,once built, would continue to run under any sort of linguistic tteatment of time; but that it should have been built at ali-, reaching the magnitude and particular form it world, is a fact decidedly in conhas in the \U7estern patterns of the SAE languages. the sonance with \(rhether such a civilization as ours would be possible with widely different linguistic handling of time is a large question-in our civrhzation, our linguistic patterns and the fitting of our behavior to the temporal order are what they arq and they are 'We are of course stimulated to use calenin accord. dars, clocks, and watches, and to try to measure time ever more precisely; this aids science,and science in turn, following these well-worn cultural grooves, gives back to culture an ever-growing store of applications, habits, and values, with which culture again directs science.But what lies outside this spiral? Science is beginning to find that there is

The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behauiorto Language something in the Cosmos that is not in accord with the concepts we have formed in mounting the spiral. It is trying to frame a NErv LANGUAcnby which to adjust itself to a wider universe. It is clear how the emphasis on "saving time" which goes with all the above and is very obuio,r, objectification of time, leads to a high valuation of "speed," which shows itself a great deal in our behavior. Still another behavioral effect is that the cha racter of monotony and regularity possessed by our image of time as an evenly scaledlimitless tape measure persuades us to behave as if that monotony were more true of eventsthan it really is. That is, it helps to routinize us. 'we tend to ,.i..t and favor whatever bears out this view, to ,,pl^y up to" the routine aspectsof existence. one phase of this is behavior evincin g a false sense of securiry or an assumption that all will always go smoothlR and a lack in foreseeingand protecting ourselves against hazards. our technique of harnessing energi does well in routine performance, and it is along routine lines that we chiefly strive to improve it-w e are) for example, relatively uninterested in stopping the energy from causing accidents, fires, explosions, which it is doing consrantly and"rrd on a wide scale. Such indifference to the unexpectedness of life would be disastrous ro a society as small, isolated, and precariously poised as the Hopi society is, or rather once was. Thus our linguistically determined thought world not only collaborares with our cultural idols and ideals, but engageseven our unconscious personal reactions in its patterns and gives them certain typical characters. one such character, as we hav. ,..rr, is cenrlEssNEss, as in recklessdriving or throwing cigarette stubs into wasre paper. Another of different sort is crsruRrNc when we talk. Very many of the gestures made by English-speaking people at least, and probably by all SAE speakers,serve to illustrate, by a movement in space,not a real spatial reference but one of the nonspatial refer.rr.., that our language handles by metaphors of ima ginary space.That is, we are more apt to mak, ^ grisping gesture when we speak of grasping an elusive id." than when we speak of grasping doorknob. The " gesture seeks to make a metaphorical and hence somewhat unclear reference more clear. But, if a language refers ro nonspatials without implylrrg , spatial analogR the referenceis nor made ani clea-rer

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by gesture. The Hopi gesrurevery little, perhaps not at all in the sensewe understand as gesture. It would seem as if kinesthesia, or the sensingof muscular movement, though arising before i"rrguage, should be made more highly conscious by linguistic use of imaginary space and metaphorical images of motion. Kinesthesia is marked in rwo facets of European culrure: art and sport. European sculpture, an art in which Europe excels, is strongly kinesthetic, conveying great senseof the body's motions; European painting likewise. The dance in our culture expresses delight in motion rather than symbolism or ceremonial, and our music is greatly influenced by our dance forms. our rpoir, are strongly imbued with this element of the .loetry of motion." Hopi races and games seem to emphasize rather the virtues of endurance and sustaineJ intenHopi dancing is highly symbolic and is perlity. formed with great intensity and earnestness, but has not much movement or swing. Synesthesia,or suggestion by certain sensereceptions of characters belonging to another sense, of ", light and color by sounds and vice versa, should be made more conscious by a linguistic metaphorical system that refers to nonspatial experiences by terms for spatial ones, though undoubtedly it arises from a deeper source. probably in the firsi instance metaphor arises from synesthesiaand not the reverse; yet metaphor need not become firmly rooted in linguistic pattern, as Hopi shows. Nonspatial experience has one well-or ganized sense,HEARTNGfor smell and taste are but little organized. Nonspatial consciousnessis a realm chiefly of thought, feeling, and souND. spatial consciousness i; a realm of light, color, sight, and touch, and presents shapes and dimensions. our metaphorical system, by naming nonspatial experietr..r after spatial ones, imputes to sounds, smells, tastes, emotions, and thoughts qualities like the colors, luminosities, shapes,angles,textures, and motions of spatial experience. And to some extent the reverse transference occurs; for, after much talking about tones as high, low, sharp, dull, heavg brilliant, slow, the talker finds it easy to think of some factors in spatial experience as like factors of tone. Thus we speak of "tones" of color, a gray "monotoner,, a "loud" necktie, a "taste" in dress: all spatial metaphor in reverse. Now European art I distinctive in the way it seeks deliberately to play with synesthesia.Music tries to suggestscenes,color, *ou.-

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menr, geometric design; painting and sculpture are often consciouslyguided by the analogiesof music's rhythm; colors are conioined with feeling for the analogy to concords and discords. The European theater and opera seek a synthesisof many arts. It may be that in this way our metaphorical language that is in some sensea confusion of thought is producing, through art, a result of f,at-teachingvaluea deeperestheticsenseleading toward a more direct

of semantic changein all languaE€s,and for the per'Western learned circles (in strong sistent notion in that obiective experience ones) Eastern to contrast is prior to subiective. Philosophies make out a weighty case for the reverse,and certainly the direction of development is sometimesthe reverse.Thus the Hopi word for "he art" can be shown to be a late formation within Hopi from a root meaning think or remember. Or consider what has happened to the word "radio" in such a sentenceaS"he bought a new radior" as compared to its prior meaning "sci-

:i; ilH:l;::T,':'":ti#3,T:T"i:l;:3.ffi HtsToRICAL IUPUcATIoNS How does such a network of language, culture' and behavior come about historically? \hich was first: the language patterns or the cultural norms ? In main they lrave grown up together, constantly influencing each other. But in this partnership the nature of the language is the factot that limits free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development in the more autocratic way. This is so becausea language is a system, not iust an assemblageof norms. Large systematic outlines can change to something really new only very slowlR while many other cultural innovations are made with comparative quickness. Language thus represents the mass mind; it is affected by inventions and innovations, but affected little and slowl1 whereas To inventors and innovators it legislateswith the decree immediate. The growth of the SAE language-culture complex dates from ancient times. Much of its metaphorical reference to the nonspatial by the spatial was already fixed in the ancient tongues, and more especially in Latin. It is indeed a marked trait of Latin. If we compare, say Hebrew, we find that, while Hebrew has some allusion to not-spaceas space' Latin has more. Latin terms for nonspatials, like educo, religio, principia, comprehendo, are usually metapholized physical references:lead out, tying back, etc. This is not true of all languages-it is quite untrue of Hopi. The fact that in Latin the direction of development happened to be from spatial to nonspatial (partly becauseof secondary stimulation to thinking when the intellectually crude Ro"brtrt.t encountered Greek culture) and that later mans tongues were strongly stimulated to mimic Latin, ,..-t a likely reason for a belief, which still lingers on among linguists, that this is the narural direction

enceof wireless telePhony." In the Middle Ages the patterns already formed in Latin began to interweave with the increased mechanical invention, industrS trade, and scholastic and scientific thought. The need for measurement in industry and trade, the storesand bulks of "stuffs" in various containers, the typebodies in which various goods were handled, standardizing of measure and weight units, invention of clocks and measureltimer" keeping of records,accounts,chronment of icles,histories, growth of mathematics and the partnership of mathematics and science,all cooperated to bring our thought and language world into its present form. In Hopi historS could we read it, we should find a different fype of language and a different set of cultural and environmental influences working together. A peaceful agricultural society isolated by in a land of [togt"phic featuresand nomad enemies r.tttty rainfall, arid agriculture that could be made successfulonl y by the utmost perseverance(hence the value of persistence and repetition), necessity for collaboration (hence emphasis on the psychology of teamwork and on mental factors in general), .oitt and rain as primary criteria of value, need of and precautions to assure extensive PREPARATIoNS precarious climate, keen and crops in the poor soil upon nature favoring dependence of on ,r^irr^t prayer and a religious attitude toward the forces of nature, especially prayer and religion directed toward the ever-needed blessing, rain-these things interacted with Hopi linguistic patterns to mold them, to be molded agarnby them, and so little by little to shape the Hopi world outlook' To sum up the matter, our first question asked in the beginning is answered thus: Concepts of. "time" and "matter" are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languagesthrough the use

The Relationof Habitual Thoughtand Behauiorto Language of which they have been developed. They do not depend so much upon ANy oNE sysrEM (e.g.,tense,or nouns) within the grammar as upon the ways of analyzing and reporting experience which have become fixed in the languageas integrated"fashions of speaking" and which cur across the typical grammatical classifications,so that such a "fashion" may include lexical, morphological, syntactic, and otherwise systemically diverse means coordinated in a certain frame of consistency. our own "time" differs markedly from Hopi "duration." It is conceived as like a space of strictly limited dimensions, or sometimes as like a motion upon such a space,and employed as an intellectual tool accordingly. Hopi "duration" seems to be inconceivable in terms of space or motion, being the mode in which life differs from form, and consciousnessin toto from the spatial elements of consciousness. Certain ideas born of our own time-concept, such as that of absolute simultaneity, would be either very difficulr to expressor impossible and devoid of meaning under the Hopi conception, and would be replaced by operational concepts. our "matter" is the physical subtype of "substance" or "stuffr" which is conceived as the formless extensional item that must be joined with form before there can be real existence. In Hopi there seemsto be nothing corresponding to it; there are no formless extensional items; existence may or may not have form, but what it also has, with or without form, is intensity and duration, thesebeing nonextensional and at boftom the same. But what about our concept of "spacer" which was also included in our first question? There is no such striking difference berween Hopi and sAE about space as about time, and probably the apprehension of space is given in substanii"tty ,h. same form by experience irrespective of language. The experiments of the Gestalt psychologists *Ith visual perception appear to establish this as a fact. But the coNCEpr oF spAcE will vary somewhat with language, because,as an intellectual tool,r2 it 12Here belong "Newtonian" and "Euclidean,, space, . etc. [Au.]

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is so closely linked with the concomitanr employment of other intellectual rools, of the order of "time" and "matterr" which are linguistically conditioned. we see things with our eyes in the same space forms as the Hopi, but our idea of space has also the properry of acting as a surro g ti of nonspatial relationships like time, intensity, tendencg and as a void to be filled with imagined formless items, one of which may even be called 'space.' Space as sensed by the Hopi would nor be connected mentally with such surrogates,but would be comparatively "purer" unmixed with extraneous notions. As for our second question: There are connections but not correlations or diagnostic correspondences between cultural norms and linguistic patterns. Although it would be impossible to infeithe existence of Crier Chiefs from the lack of tenses in Hopi, or vice versa, there is a relation between a language and the rest of the culture of the society which uses it. There are caseswhere the ..fashions of speaking" are closely integrated with the whole general culture, whether or not this be universally true, and there are connections within this integration, berween the kind of linguistic analyse, .-ployed and various behavioral reactions and also the shapestaken by various cultural developments. Thus the importance of crier chiefs does have a connection, not with tenselessness itself, but with a system of thought in which categories different from our tensesare natural. These .orrr..tions are to be found not so much by focusing attention on the typical rubrics of linguistic, ethnographic, or sociological description as by examining ihe culture the language (always and only *h.r, the two -"nd have been together historically for a considerable time) as a whole in which concatenations that run across these departmental lines may be expected to exist, and, if they do exist, eventuaily t" be discoverable by study.

EmileBenveniste rgoz-t976

HE coLLECTToNof Emile Benveniste'sessaysin linguistics written from the thirties to the late fifties covers a variety of subjects,from consideration

of Aristotle to the relation of the behavior of beesto language.The two essays printedhere,onepublishedin ry39 and onein 1958,havein commona concern ?o, the question of the refetent. In "The Nature of the Linguistic Sign," Benideaof the venistepoirrr, out that thereis a fruitful contradictionin de Saussure's arbitrary an as containing the sign sign. On the one hand, de Saussureregards that the admits tacitly he time ,iation of signifier to signified.Yet atlhe same Benreferent. or "reality" same Frenchand German *otdt for ox apply to the a referent of notion a tacit is veniste'spoint about de Saussureit ttt"t there presentaiter all. The very arbitrarinesson which de Saussureinsistsis dependent in th" presenceof the real object to which two entirely different signsrefer' Furth.r*or., the sound image, or signifier, and the signified are inextricably one and canhardlybe regardJ asin an arbitraryrelationif it is not possibleto think the conceptapart from the word, as de Saussureavers' ClearllBenvenistethinks of languageas fundamentalto thought. In "Subjecpursuesthis notion further by making a distinction betiurty i" ianguage" ""ndhe speech;by the latter term he meanscommunication. His t*..r, l"ngrr"'g. point is th""t *rrr-onication is a property of languagebut not its fundamental Languageis "constituent" and constitutesman assubiect'The natureor essence. product of lan"I" of discourseis a liigulstic creation,the polarity of "I-you" a of which -,tti bt, one supposes'a consequence to .o--lrli."rion, guagerprior ^Benveniste's other on each view that the "I" and the other are dependent i"t.It"is from this opposition, that reality is linguistically constiapart and are nothing ilted as dialectical. orione seesin Benvenistean approachto linguisticsmore philosophically between d. S"ott,tre. Thereare obviouslylinks entedthan that of his predecessSt back to rU(ilhelmvon Humboldt' In his discusneo-Kantians him and the earlier an affinity sion of verbsin the later part of "subiectivity in Language"one detects with the speech-acttheorizing of J. L' Austin andlohn Searle'- . . Problemsin Gineral Linguistics,a translationof his maior essays' Benveni-ste's i" English in r97r. Untranslatedworks include origine de la forrnad'actionsen "pp.ir.J tiin d", noms en indo-iuropden(r%il; Nom d'agent et,noms des Le.uocabulaire and Hittiie ft962); indo_europ1enft948); "t;ni,d.o-eirop6en by him to reference considerable Despite (rg6g-7d. institutionsindo-europ^en work, though ,.".rr, literary theorists,littie-hasbeenwritten about Benveniste's scholes's Robert as works such in authoritative as quoted remarks by him are \Ufl. (tgZ Said'sBeginnings S). Structuralismin Liteiture (tgZ+) and Edward 724

The Nature of the Linguistic Sign

THENATI.JRE OFTHE LINGUISTICSIGN The idea of the linguistic sign, which is today asserted or implied in most works of g.n.r"i linguistics, came from Ferdinand de saussure. And it was as an obvious truth, not yet explicit but neverthelessundeniable in fact, that Sausiure taught that the nature of the sign is arbitrary. The form,rla immediately commanded aftention. Every ufferance concerning the essenceof languageor the modalities of discourse begins with a sratement of the arbitrary character of the linguistic sign. The principle is of -beating such significance that any thinking upon -.rrany parr of linguistics whatsoever necessaiily counters it. That it is cited everywhere and always granted as obvious are two good reasons fo, s.eling at least to understand the sensein which saussure took it and the nature of the proofs which show it. In the cours de linguistique gdn6rale,' thisdefinition is explained in very simple statemenrs. one calls sign "the total resultant of the association of a signifier [-sound image] and what is signified [-concept] . . ." "The idea of 'sister' is notlirrk.d by any inner relationship to the successionof sounds s-ti-r which servesas its signifier in French; that it could be representedequally by just any other sequence is proved by differences among languages and b1 very exisrenceof different lattgu"g".r, Ih. $. signified 'ox' has as its signifier b-6-fon one side of the border and o-k-s (ochs) on the orher.,, This ought to establish that "The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbit rary," or, more simpig that "r!. linguistic sign is arbit ra.ry."By ..arbirr^iyl, the author means that "it is unmotiua'ted, i.e., arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified." This characeristic ought then to explain the very fact by which it is verified: namelS that expressionsof a given notion vary in time and space and in consequencehave no necessary relationship with it. THE NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN OTigiNAIIY APPCATCd

i2 A,cyaLinguistica (po_penhagen, r93e).hepri"rri fi"Problems in Ge.neralLlnguisiici, tiiir. Mirv Elizabeth Meek, by permissionof ihe Universiry of ruri",,,i p;.;, @ry7r. l Seede Saussure. tEds.l

7zs

rufedo nor contemplate discussing this conclusion in the name of other principles or by starting with different definitions. The question is whether it is consistent and whether, having accepted the bipartite nature of the sign (and we do accepr it), it follows that the sign should be charact eiized, as arbitrary. It has just been that Saussuretook the linguistic sign to be made up of a signifier and signified. Now-and this is essential-he meant ty "signifi€rr" the concept. He declared in so many words that the "linguistic sign unites, not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image." But immediately afterward he stated that the nature of the sign is arbitrary because it "actually has no natural connection with the signified." It is clear that the argument is falsified by an unconsciousand surreptitious recourse to a third term which was not included in the initial definidon. This third rerm is the thing itself, the realiry. Even though Saussure said that the idea of "sister" is not connected to the signifier s-t)-r,he was nor thinking any the less of the reality of the notion. \il(rhenhe ipoke of the differencebetween b-d-f and o-&-s, he was referring in spite of himself to the fact that these rwo terms applied to the same reality. Here, then, is the thing, expressly excluded at first from the definition of the sign, now creeping into it by a detour, and permanently installing a contradiction there. For if one states in principle-and with reason-that language is form, not substance,it is necessaryto admit-and Saussure asserred it plainly-tir^t linguistics is exclusively a scienceof forms. Even more imperative is the necessiry for leaving the ..substancer" sister or ox, outside the realm of the sign. Now it is only if one thinks of the animal or inlts concrete and "substantial" particularity, that one is justified in considering "arbirr ary,, the relationship between bt)f on the one hand and oks on the other to the same reality. There is thus a contradiction between the way in which saussure defined the linguistic sign and the fundamental nature which he attributed to it. such an anomaly in Saussure'sclose reasoning does not seemto me to be imputable to a relaxation of his critical aftention. I would see insread a distinctive trait of the historical and relativist thought of the end of the nineteenth centurS an inclination often met with in the philosophiial reflection of comparative thought. Different people reacr differently to the samephenomenon. The infinite diversity of attitudes and judgments leads to rhe considerarion

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Conversely, the mind accepts only a sound form that apparently nothing is necessary.From the unithat incorporates a representation identifiable for versal dissimilarity, a universal contingency is init; if it does not, it reiects it as unknown or foreign. ferred. The Saussurianconcept is in some measure The signifier and the signified, the mental represendependent on this system of thought. To decide that tation and the sound ima ge, are thus in reali{ the anithe linguistic sign is arbit rary becausethe same two aspects of a single notion and together make elseOchs and mal is called beuf in one country up the ensemble as the embodier and the embodiwhere, is equivalent to saying that the notion of ment. The signifier is the phonic translation of a mourning is arbitrary becausein Europe it is symconcept; the iignified is the mental counterpart of bolized by black, in china by white. Arbitrary, Yes, the signifier. This consubstantiality of the signifier for or Sirius but only under the impassive regard of and the signified assuresthe structural unity of the from observing to the person who limits himself linguistic sign. Here again we appeal to Saussure o,rmid. the bond established between an obiective himself for what he said of language: reality and human behavior and condemns himself thus to seeing nothing in it but contingency. CerLanguage can also be compared with a sheet tainly with respect to a same reality, all the deof paper: thought is the front and the sound thus is exist they that value; nominations have equal the bick; one cannor cut the front without the proof that none of them can claim that the decu6ing the back at the same time; likewise in nomination in itself is absolute. This is true. It is language, one can neither divide sound from real The only too true and thus not very instructive. thought nor thought from sound; the diviin discernconsists It problem is far more profound. sion iould be accomplishedonly abstractedly, ing th. inner structure of the phenomenon of which and the resuh would be either pure psycholotrly the outward appearance is perceived, and in ogy or pure phonology. of describing its relationship with the ensemble manifestations on which it depends. What Saussuresayshere about languageholds above And so it is for the linguistic sign. One of the all for the linguistic sign in which the primary charcomponents of the sign, the sound image, makes up acteristicsof language are incontestably fixed. the signifier; the other, the concept, is the signified. One now seesthe zone of the "arbitraryr" and one connecBetween the signifier and the signified, the 'What is arbitrary is that one cercan set limits to it. tion is not arbitrary; on the contrary' it is necessary' applied to a certain eleis tain sign and no other The concept (the "signified" ) beuf is perforce idenany other- In this sense' to not and reality, ment of tical in my consciousnesswith the sound sequence permissible to speak of it is sense, this in only and (the "signifier") bdf.How could it be otherwise? doing we would seek in so even and contingency, tomind, Togethei the two are imprinted on my to point it out and than less to-solve the problem g.th.t they evoke each other under any circumFor the problem temporarily. it of leave then to take itrrr... There is such a close symbiosis between or 06aec? famous the than other Quaec none is them that the concept of beuf is like the soul of indeed the is It decree. by resolved be only can and the sound image bdf.The mind does not contain metaphysical problem of the agreement berween empty forms, concepts without names. Saussure the mind and the world transposed into linguistic himself said: rerms, a problem which the linguist will perhaps one d^y be able to attack with results but which he Psychologically our thought-apart from its will do better to put aside for the moment. To estabexpressionin words-is only a shapelessand lish the relationshiP as arbitrary is for the linguist a inJistinct mass. Philosophers and linguists way of defending himself against this question and have always agreed in recognizing that withalso against the solution which the speaker brings our the help of signs we would be unable to instinctively to it. For the speaker there is a commake a clear-cut, consistent distinction beplete equivalence between language and reality. The rween two ideas. \il7ithout langu lge, thought rigtt overlies and commands reality; even better, it ls is a vague, uncharted nebula. There are no (nomenlomen, speechtaboos, the magic thlt reality 'the preexisiitrg ideas, and nothing is distinct beword, etc.). As a matter of fact, the power of fore the aPPearanceof language'

The Nature of the Linguistic Sign point of view of the speaker and of the linguist are so different in this regard that the assertion of the linguist as to the arbitrariness of designations does not refute the contrary feeling of the speaker. But, whatever the case may b., the nature of the linguistic sign is not at all involved if one defines it as Saussuredid, since the essenceof this definition is preciselyto consider only the relationship of the signifier and the signified. The domain of the arbrtrary is thus left outside the extension of the linguistic sign. It is thus rather pointless to defend the principle of the "arbitrariness of the sign" against the objection which could be raised from onomatopoeia and expressivewords. Not only becausetheir range of use is relatively limited and becauseexpressivity is an essentially transitorS subjective, and often secondary effect, but especially because, here again, whatever the reality is that is depicted by the onomatopoeia or the expressiveword, the allusion to that reality in most casesis not immediate and is only admitted by a symbolic convention analogous to the convention that sanctions the ordinary signs 'We of the system. thus get back to the definition and the characteristicswhich are valid for all signs. The arbitrary does not exist here either, except with respect to the phenomenon or to the material obiect, and does not interfere with the actual composition of the sign. Some of the conclusions which Saussure drew from the principle here discussed and which had wide effect should now be briefly considered. For instance, he demonstrated admirably that one can speak at the same time of the mutability and immutability of the sign; mutabilitS because since it is arbitrary it is always open to change, and immutabilitS becausebeing arbitrary it cannot be challenged in the name of rational nor m. "Language is radically powerlessto defend itself against the forces which from one moment to the next are shifting the relationship between the signified and the signifier. This is one of the consequencesof the arbitra ry nature of the sign." The merit of this analysis is in no way diminished, but on the con trary is reinforced, if one states more precisely the relationship to which it in fact applies. It is not berween the signifier and the signified that the relationship is modified and at the same time remains immutable; it is between the sign and the object; that is, in other terms, the objective motiuation of the designarion,submitted, as

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such, to the action of various historical factors. tVhat Saussuredemonstrated remains true, but true of the signification, not the sign. Another probleffi, no less important, which the definition of the sign concerns directly, is that of ualue, in which Saussurethought to find a confirmation of his views i ". . . the choice of a given slice of sound to name a given idea is completely arbitrary. If this were not true, the notion of value would be compromised, for it would include an externally imposed element. But actually values remain entirely relative, and that is why the bond between the sound and the idea is radically arbitra ry." It is worth the trouble to take up in successionthe several parts of this argument. The choice that invokes a certain sound slice for a certain idea is not at all arbitrary; this sound slice would not exist without the corresponding idea and vice versa. In reality Saussurewas always thinking of the representation of the real obiect (although he spoke of the "idea" ) and of the evidently unnecessaryand unmotivated character of the bond which united the sign to the thing signified. The proof of this confusion lies in the following sentencein which I have underlined the characteristicpart: "If this were not true, the notion of value would be compromised since it would include an externally imposed element." It is indeed an "externally imposed elemertr" that is, the obiectiue reality which this argument takes as a pole of reference.But if one considersthe sign in itself and insofar as it is the carrier of value, the arbitrary is necessarilyeliminated. For-the last proposition is the one which most clearly includes its own refutation-it is quite true that values remain entirely "relative" but the question is how and with respect to what. Let us state this at once: value is an element of the sign; if the sign taken in itself is not arbitrary, as we think to have shown, it follows that the "relative" character of the value cannot depend on the "arbitr ary" nature of the sign. Since it is necessaryto leave out of account the conformity of the sign to reality, all the more should one consider the value as an attribute only of the form, not of the substance. From then on, to say that the values are "relative" means that they are relative to each other. Now, is that not precisely the proof of their necessifyl \Wedeal no longer here with the isolated sign but with language as a system of signs, and no one has conceived of and described the systematic economy of language as forcefully as Saus-

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'S7hoever Says system says arrangement or sure. in a structure which transcends parts conformity of and explains its elements. Everything is so necessary in it that modifications of the whole and of details reciprocally condition one another. The relativity of values is the best proof that they depend closely upon one another in the synchrony of a system which is always being threatened, always being restored. The point is that all values are values of opposition and are defined only by their difference. Opposed to each other, they maintain themselvesin a mutual relationship of necessity.An opposition is, owing to the force of circumstances, subtended by necessity,as it is necessirywhich gives shape to the opposition. If language is something other than a fortuitous conglomeration of erratic notions and sounds uttered at randoffi, it is becausenecessityis inherent in its structure as in all structure. It emerg€s,then, that the role of contingency inherent in language affects denomination insofar as denomination is a phonic symbol of reali ty and affects it in its relationship with reality. But the sign, the primordial element in the linguistic system, includes a signifier and a signified whose bond has to be recognized as necessAry,these two components being consubstantially the same. The absolute character of tbe linguistic sign thus understood commands in its turn the dialectical necessityof values of constant opposition, and forms the structural principle of language.It is perhaps the best evidence of tht fruitfulness of a doctrine that it can engender a contradiction which promotes it. In restoring the true nature of the sign in the internal conditioning of the system, w€ go beyond Saussurehimself to af' firm the rigor of Saussure'sthought.

IN SUBJECTIVITY LANGUAGE If language is, as they say, the instrument of communiiation, to what does it owe this property? The question may cause surprise, as does everything that seems to challenge an obvious fact, but it is original[ lnnealtd i] Jout' suBJEcrIVIryIN LANGUAGE (rgS8). ReprtLi.d.from Problemsin ;;t"i; fs,ychotogie perC,rnrroi Unguist;cs,trans. Mary ElizabethMeek, by -irrion of th'eUniversiryof Miami Press,copyrightr97r.

sometimes useful to require proof of the obvious. Two answers come to mind. The one would be that language is in fact employed as the instrument of communication, probably because men have not found a better or more effective way in which to communicate. This amounts to stating what one wishes to understand. One might also think of replying that language has such qualities as make it iuited to serve as an instrument; it lends itself to transmitting what I entrust to it-an order, a question, an announcement-and it elicits from the interlocutor a behavior which is adequate each time. Developing a more technical aspectof this idea, one might add that the behavior of language admits 9f ^ behaviorist description, in terms of stimulus and response,from which one might draw conclusions as to the intermediary and instrumental nature of language. But is it really language of which we ate rp.rt ing here? Are we not confusing it with discourse? If we posit that discourse is language put into action, and necessarilybetween partners' we show amidst the confusion, that we are begging the question, since the nature of this "instrument" is explained by its situation as an "instrument." As foi the role of transmission that languageplays' one should not fail to observe, oD the one hand, that this role can devolve upon nonlinguistic meansotr the other hand, gesrures and mimicry-and, that, in speaking here of an "instrument"' we are letting ourselvesbe deceivedby certain processesof trrnr-ission which in human societies without exception com e after language and imitate its functioning. All systems of signals, rudimentary or complex, are in this situation. In fact, the comparison of language to an instrument-and it should necessarilybe a material instrument for the comparison to even be comprehensible-must fill us with mistrust, as should every simplistic notion about language.To speak of an instrument is to put man and nature in opposition' The pick, the arro% and the wheel are not in nain the nature. Th.y are fabrications. Language is 'We are alit. fabricate not ture of man, and he did primordial a of concept naive that to ways inclined p.riod in which a complete man discoveredanother trr., equally complere, and between the two of them lang.ragewas worked out little by little. This is pure 'We can never get back to man separated fiction. from language and we shall never seehim inventing 'We shall t.u.t get back to man reduced to himit. self and exercising his wits to conceive of the exis-

Subiectiuity in Language tence of another. It is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition of man. All the characteristics of language, its immaterial nature, its symbolic functioning, its articulated arrangement, the fact that it has content, are in themselves enough to render suspect this comparison of language to an instrument, which tends to dissociate the property of language from man. certainly in everyday practice the give and take of speaking suggests an exchange, hence a "thing,' which we exchange, and speaking seemsthus to assume in instrumental or vehicular function which we are quick to hypostasize as an "obiect." But, once again, this role belongs to the individual act of speech. once this function is seenas belonging to the act of speech,it may be asked what predisptsition accounts for the fact that the act of speech should have it. In order for speech ro be th. vehicle of "communicatiorr" it must be so enabled by language, of which it is only the act ualization. Indeed, it is in language that we must search for the condition of this aptitude. It seemsto us that it residesin a property of language barely visible under the evidence that conceals it, which only sketchily can we yet cha ractenze. It is in and through language that man constitutes himself as a subject, because language alone establishesthe concept of "ego" in realiry, in its reality which is that of the being. The "subjectivity" we are discussing here is the capacity of the speaker to posit himself as ,.subject." It is defined not by the feeling which everyone experiencesof being himself (this feeling, to the degree that it can be taken note of, is only a reflection) but as the psychic unity that rranscends the totality of the actual experiences it assembles and that makes the permanence of the consciousness.Now we hold that that "subjecrivirS" whether it is placed in phenomenology or in psychology, as one may wish, is only the emergencein the biing of a fundamental property of language. "Ego" is he who says "ego." That is where we seethe foundation of ..subjectivitg" which is determined by the linguistic status of "person." consciousnessof self is only possible if it is experienced by contrasr. I use / only when I am speaking to someone who will be a you in my address. It is this condition of dialogue that is constitutive of person, for it implies that reciprocally / becom es'you

7zg

in the addressof the one who in his turn designates himself as r. Here we see a principle whose ionr.quences are to spread out in all directions. Language is possible only because each speaker sets himself up as a subject by referring to fiimself as I in his discourse. Becauseof this, / posits another person, the one who, being, as he is, completely exterior to "mer" becomes my echo to whom I say you and who says you to me. This polarity ofpersons is the fundamental condition in language, of which the process of communication, in wnicn we share, is only a mere pragmatic consequence.It is a polarity, moreover, very peculiar in itself, as it offers a type of opposition whose equivalent is encountered nowhere else outside of language. This polarity does not mean either equality or symmetry: "ego" always has a position of transcendencewith regard to you. Nevertheless, neither of the terms can be conceived of without the other; they are complementarS although according to an ..int eriorl exterior" opposition, and, at the same time, they are reversible. If we seek a parallel to this, we will not find it. The condition of man in language is unique. And so the old antinomies of "1" and "the otherr" of the individual and societR fall. It is a duality which it is illegitimate and erroneous to reduce to a single primordial term, whether this unique term be the "I," which musr be established in the individual's own consciousnessin order to become accessible to that of the fellow human being, or whether it be, on the contrarS society, which as a totaliry would preexist the individual and from which the individual could only be disengaged gradually, in proportion to his acquisition of self-consciousness. It is in a dialectic reality that will incorporate the two terms and define them by mutual relationship that the linguistic basis of subjectiviry is discovered. But must this basis be linguistic? By what right does language establish the basis of subjectivityl As a marter of fact,language is responsible ior it in all its parts. Language is marked so deeply by the expression of subjectiviry that one might ask if it could still function and be called langu age ifit were constructed otherwise. We are of course talking of language in general, nor simply of particular l"rrguages. But the concordant facts of particular languages give evidence for language. we shall give only a few of the most obvious examples. The very terms we are using here, / and you, are not to be taken as figures but as linguistic forms in-

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dicating "person." It is a remarkable fact-but who would notice it, since it is so familiar?-that the "personal prOnouns" are never missing from among the signs of a language, no matter what its type' epoch, or region may be. A language without the expression of person cannot be imagined. It can only happen that in certain languages, under certain circumstances, these "pronouns" are deliberately omitted; this is the case in most of the Far Eastern societies, in which a convention of politenessimposes the use of periphrasesor of special forms between certain groups of individuals in order to replace the direct personal references.But theseusagesonly serveto underline the value of the avoided forms; it is the implicit existence of these pronouns that gives social and cultural value to the iubstitutes imposed by class relationships. Now these pronouns are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or to an indiuidual. There is no concept "I" that incorporates all the /'s that are uttered at every moment in the mouths of all speakers,in the sensethat there is a concept "tree" to which all the individual usesof tree refer. The "Ir" then, does not denominate any lexical entify. Could it then be said that / refers to a particular individual ? If that were the case, d permanent contradiction would be admitted into language, and anarchy into its use. How could the same term refer indifferently to any individual whatsoever and sdll at the same time identify him in his individualiry? \7e are in the presenceof a classof words, the "personal pronounsr" that escapethe status of all the other signs of language.Then, what does I refer to ? To something very peculiar which is exclusively linguistic: I refers to the act of individual discourse in which it is pronounced, and by this it designates the speaker.It is a term that cannot be identified except in what we have called elsewherean instanceof discourse and that has only a momentary reference. The reality to which it refers is the reality of the discourse. It is in the instance of discourse in which I designatesthe speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the "subiect." And so it is literally true that the basis of subiectivity is in the exerciseof language. If one really thinks about it, one will seethat ih.t. is no other obiective testimony to the identity of the subject except that which he himself thus gives about himself.

Language is so organized that it permits each speaker to appropriate to himself an entire language by designating himself as /. The personal pronouns provide the first step in this bringing out of subiectivity in language. Other classesof pronouns that share the same status depend in their turn upon these pronouns. These tther classes are the indicators of deixis, the demonstratives, adverbs, and adjectives,which organrze the spatial and temporal relationships around the "subject" taken as referent: "this, here, nowr" and their numerous correlatives, "that, yesterday, last yearrtomorrowr" etc. They have in common the feature of being defined only with respect to the instancesof discourse in which they occur' that is, in dependenceupon the I which is proclaimed in the discourse. It is easy to seethat the domain of subiectivity is further expanded and must take over the expression of temporality. No matter what the type of language, there is everywhere to be observed a certain ling.titti. organrzation of the notion of time. It ,rr"tt.r, little whether this notion is marked in the inflection of the verb or by words of other classes (particles,adverbs,lexical variations, etc.); that is a -rtt.t of formal structure. In one way or another, a language always makes a distinction of "tenses"l whether it be a past and a future, separated by a ..present," as in French [or English], or, as in various Amerindian languag€s, of a preterite-present opposed to a future, or a present-future distinguished from a past, these distinctions being in their turn capable of depending on variations of aspect, etc. But the line of separation is always a referenceto the "present." NOw thiS "present" in its turn has only a linguistic fact as temporal reference:the coincidenceof the event describedwith the instance of discoursethat describesit. The temporal referent of the present can only be internal to the discourse' The Dictionnaire gdndrale defrnesthe "present" as "le temps du verbe qui exprime le temps oi I'on est." But let us beware of this; there is no other criterion and no other expressionby which to indicate "the time at which one ls" except to take it as "the time at which one is speaking." This is the eternally "present" moment, although it never relates to the sameeventsof an "objective" chronology becauseit is determined for each speaker by each of the instancesof discourse related to it. Linguistic time is

Subjectiuity in Language self-referential. ultimately, human temporaliry with all its linguistic appararus reveals the subjectivity inherent in the very using of language. Language is accordingly the possibility of subjectivity becauseit always contains the linguistic forms appropriate to the expression of subjectivitS and discourse provokes the emergence of subjectivity because it consists of discrete instances. In some way language puts forth ".-pty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person," at the same time defining himself as I and p"rttrer as you. The instance of discourse is thus "constitutive of all the coordinates that define the subject and of which we have briefly pointed out only the most obvious. THn ESTABLTsHMENT of "subjectivity" in language creates the category of person-both in language and also, we believe,outside of it as well. Moreover, it has quite varied effects in the very srructure of languag€S,whether it be in the arrangement of the forms or in semantic relationships. Here we must necessarily have particular languages in view in order to illustrate some effects of the change of perspective which "subjectivity" can introduce. 'we cannot say what the range of the particular phenomena we are pointing out may be in the universe of real languages; for the moment it is less important to delimit them than ro reveal them. English provides severalconvenient examples. In a general wdy, when I use the present of a verb with three persons (to use the tr"ditional nomenclature), it seemsthat the difference in person does not lead ro any change of meaning in a conjugated -.o-verb form. I eat, you ent, and he iats have ir, mon and as a constant that the verb form presents a description of an action, attributed respectively and in an identical fashion to ..fr" ,,your,, and i.he.,, Similarly, I suffer, you suffer, he su,ffershave the description of the same state in common. This gives the impression of being an obvious fact and !ur' the formal alignment in the paradigm of the conjugation implies rhis. Now a number of verbs do not have this permanence of meaning in the changing of persons, such as those verbs with which *. d.rrot. dispositions or mental operations. In saying I suffer, I describe my presenr condition. In saying I feel (that the weatber

71 r

is going to change), I describe an impression which I feel. But what happens if, instead of I feel (that the weather is going to change), I say I belieue (that tbe weather is going to change) ? The formal symmetry between I feel and I belieue is complere. Is it so for the meaning? can I consider I belieue to be a description of myself of the same sort as / feel? Am I describing myself believing when I say I belieue (that . . .) i Surely not. The operation of thought is not at all the object of the utterance; I belieue (that . . .) is equivalent ro a mitigated assertion. By saying I belieue (tbat . . .), I convert into a subjective utterance the factassertedimpersonally, namelS the weather is going to change, which is the true proposition. Let us consider further the following utterances: "You are Mr. X., I suppose.,,',1presumethatJohn received -y letter." "He has left the hospital, from which I conclude that he is cured." These sentences contain verbs that are verbs of operation: suppose, presume, and conclude are all logical operations. But suppose,presuffi€, and conclude, put in the first person, do not behavethe waR for example, reuson and reflect do, which seem, however, io be very close. The forms I reason and I reflecl describe me as reasoning and reflecting. euite different are I suppose, I presuffie, and I conclude. In saying I conclude (that . . ./, I do not describe myself as occupied in concludirg; what could the activity of "concluding" be? I do not representmyself as being in the process of supposing and presuming when I say / suppose, I presume. I conclude indicates thar, in the situation set forth, I extract a relationship of conclusion rouching on a given fact.It is this logical relationship which is marerialized in a perslnal verb. SimilarlS I suppose and I presuffi€, are very far from I pose and I resume. In I suppo.seand I presume, there is an indication of attitude, not a description of an operarion. By including I suppose and I presume rn my discourse, I imply th"i i ,taking a certain attitude with regard to the utterance that follows. It will have been noted that all the verbs cited are followed by that and a proposition; this proposition is the real ufteran.., noi the personal verb form that governs it. But on the oih., that personal form is, one might say, the in!1td' dicator of subjectiviry. It gives the assertion that follows the subjective context-doubt, presumption, inference-suited to char acterize the attitude tf th.

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speaker with respect to the statement he is making. This manifestation of subjectivity does not stand out except in the first person. One can hardly imagine similar verbs in the second person except for taking up an argument again uerbatim; thus, you suppose that he has left is only a way of repeating what "you" has iust said: " I suppose that he has left." But if one removes the expression of person' leaving only " he supposes that . . . ," \^/eno longer have, from the point of view of I who utters it, anything but a simPle statement. \We will perceive the nature of this "subjectivity" even more clearly if we consider the effect on the meaning produced by changing the person of certain verbs of speaking. These are verbs that by their meaning denote an individual act of social imporr: swear, promise, guarantee, certify, with locutional variants like pledge to . . . , commit (oneselfl to. .. . In the social conditions in which a language is exercised, the acts denoted by these verbs are regarded as bindittg.Now here the differenceberween ih. "s,rbjective" utterance and the "nonsubiective" is fully apparent as soon as we notice the nature of the opposition between the "persons" of the verb. We must bear in mind that the "third person" is the form of the verbal (or pronominal) paradigm that does not refer to aperson becauseit refers to an object located outside direct address.But it exists and is characterized only by its opposition to the person I of the speaker who, in uttering it, situates it as "non-person." Here is its status. The form he ' ' ' takes its value from the fact that it is necessarily part of a discourse uttered by "I." Now I swear is a form of peculiar value in that it

places the reality of the oath upon the one who says I. This utterance is a performance; "to swear" consists exactly of the utteran ce I su)ear,by which Ego is bound. The utterance I sweAr is the very act. which pledges ffie, not the description of the act that I am performing. In saying I promise, I guarantee,I am actually making a promise or a glrarantee. The consequences(social,judicial, etc.) of my swearing, of my promise, flow from the instance of discourse containing / swear, I promise.The utterance is identified with the act itself. But this condition is not given in the meaning of the verb, it is the "subjectivity" of discoursewhich makes it possible. The difference will be seen when I swear is replaced by he swears.lil(rhile I swear is a pledge, he swears is simply a description, on the same plane as be runs' he imokes. Here it can be seenthat, within the conditions belonging to these expressions, the same verb, according as it is assumedby a "subject" or is placed outside "person," takes on a different value. This is a consequenceof the fact that the instance of discourse that contains the verb establishesthe act at the same time that it sets up the subiect. Hence the act is performed by the instance of the utterance of its "name" (which is "swear" ) at the same time that the subiect is established by the instance of the ufferance of its indicator (which is "I")' Many notions in linguistics, perhaps even in psychologS will appear in a different light if one reestablishesthem within the framework of discourse' This is language in so far as it is taken over by the man who it tp.tking and within the condition of intersubiectivitS which alone makes linguistic communication possible.

IacquesLacan rgor-198r

Tecques LaceN wasfor sometime known asthe enfant terrible of the psycho-

f analyticalmovement,partly for his unconventionalanalyticalmethodsand J partly for his reading of Freud. His "deviance" causeda break with the International PsychoanalyticAssociationin 1953, the year of his famous Discoursde Rome, which appearsin the English translation of Ecrits as "The Function and Field of Speechand Languagein Psychoanalysis"lit is perhapsbestconsultedin Anthony r7ilden's The Languageof the self (t968) with noresand a far-ranging commentaryconnectingLacan to twentieth-centurythought. Lacan reads Freud through structuralism, particularly de Saussure'stheory of the signifierand Ldui-strauss'sanrhropology.However,he alsodisplaysthe influenceof phenomenologyand, particularly in his early work, Hegel'sPhenomenology of Mind. He harshlycriticizesAmericanpsychoanalysisfor its tendencies toward behaviorism,empiricism, and ego psychology.He seizeson the texts of Freudthat are particularly concernedwith languageand readsthem through the lens of structuralist linguistics.For Lacan, the unconsciousis "structured like a language."He proceedsto interpret de saussure'stext asprivileging the signifier over the signified, dominating linguistic structure. This model gives language (and the unconscious)a sort of autonomy,which decentersboth languageand the unconsciouswith respectto externality or the referent.By an irony familiar sincestructuralism,the unconsciousis centeredon lack or absenceof the desired object. Although Lacan saysthat human beingsare always already enmeshedin the chain of signifiers,he also offersa story of entranceinto that chain in his theory of three stagesof human development,which he occasionallytreats as if they actually occur diachronically but more often seesas synchronousor at least ovedapping:the mirror stage,the imaginarS and the symbolic.Lacan'stheory of subjectivity, based on these stages,displays phenomenologicalinfluence. The mirror stage,symbolizedasthe child's discoveryof its image,establishesthe idea of subjectivity by introducing the idea of alienationof the subiectin the image, which becomesother to the self. The imaginary involvesthe child's simple dualistic relation with this mirror image. The symbolic is the entranceinio language,wherethe subjectis consrantlydeferredalong the chain of signifiers.Thus the old "know thyself" becomesa naivesimplificationof a situation in which the subjectis linguisticallyconstitutedelsewherebut neveradequately.This concept of the subject is beyond the simple cartesian subject and suggeststhat subjeitivity is always (after entranceinto the symbolic via the mirror stage)really an intersubjectivityformed in and as dialogue.This dialogue,which appearsto be 733

734

JacquEsLecel becauseit is a versionof structuralist difference,cannot end, exceptwith death, terms' in Freudian therefore desire. It is, fredicated on absenceor lack and "overdetermined." Four Lacan,swritings now rranslatedinclude Ecrits:A SelectionFszzh The pubFundamentalCincepts of Psychoanalysis(the eleventhseminarof ry64, France in lishedin Francein rg73,trans. 1978); FeminineSexuality(published of the Self(1968);"Semiil;;"" ry66 and,i75',t ^n". r98z); Tbe Language of the nar on the purloined L-.i ..," Yile Frencb Studies48 ft972). A number commenoti.r r.rnin"rs havebeenpublishedin French.In addition to Wilden's SchneiderStructuralism;.Stuart of The Age il, kurzwe t"iy -.ntioned, seeEdith Languageand ^^n, ii, oeaih of an lntellectual Hero; R. coward and J. Ellis, schlegelto Frotn Narratiue: in Ethics and Irony Materialism; Gary Handwerk, and Lacan; of Legends and Liues lacques Lo,ron, Catherine Clement, The Bibliograpby' Michael Clark, lacquesLacan: A

THEMIRRORSTAGE as Formativeof the

Functionof the I as Revealedin PsychoanalyticE Perience The conception of the mirror stage that I introduced at our last congress, thirteen years ago' has since become more or less established in the practice of the French group. However' I think it worthwhile to bring it again to your attention' especially todaR for the light it shedson the formation of the I as we experienceit in psychoanalysis.It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito. Some of you may recall that this conception origiSTAGE AS FORMATIVE

THE

MIRROR

THE

I AS REVEALED

OF THE

IN PSYCHOANALYTIC

FUNCTION

EXPERIENCE

OF IWAS

first delivered as a lecture in r 936.An early version apof Psychoanalysis in p."red 'rgiZ in The International.lournal A later version was delivered as a lecture rn ry49 @t ,t . ittr.rnational Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich) p"Ulished in Reuie franqaise de psychanaly-sein.the ""a ;;"r; ye^r. Reprinted from Ecrits (trans. Alan Sheridan) if W.'W. Norton Ec CompanR Inc.,.an{TavL;ri-ission Ltd. Copyright 1977 by Tavistock Publications, irlo.t Publications, Ltd.

nated in a feature of human behaviour illuminated fact of comparative psychology. The child, at by " an agewhen he is for a time, however short' outdorrJ by the chimpa nzee in instrumental intelligence, can neverthil.s already recognize as such [i, o*n image in a mirror. This recognition is -indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha' Erlebnis, which Kohlert sees as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence. This act) far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a seriesof gesturesin which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and befween this virrual complex and the reality it ,ed,rplicates-the child's own bod5 and the persons and things, around him' This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, from the age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the startling spectacleof the infant in front of the mirror. unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up' and held tightly (what, as ire is by some support, human or artificial 'trotte-bdb6'), he nevertheless in France, we call a overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and' fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it 1!(/olfgang Kohler (1887- ry67), American psychologist. [Eds.]

The Mirror Stage in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. For ffi€, this activity retains the meaning I have given it up to the age of eighteen months. This meaning disclosesa libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure of the human world that accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledg.. we have only to understand the mirro, ,tu ge as an identification, in the full sensethat analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that t"k., place in the subject when he assumesan imagewhose predestination ro this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago. This jubilant assumption of his specularimage by the child at the infans stage,still sunk in his rnoto, incapaciry and nursling dependence,would seemto exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the / is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialeciic of identification with the orher, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject. This form would have to be called the Ideal-I,, if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sensethat it will also be the source of secondary identifications, under which term I would place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rarher, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (le deuenir) of the subiect asymptoticallS whatever the success of the dialectical synthesesby which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own reality. The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a consrrasting size (un relief de stature) that fixes it and in a symmerry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him. Thus, this Gestalt-whose pregnancy should b. ,.'zJhloughoutthis article I leavein its peculiarirythe trans; lation I have adopted for Freud's ldeal-Ich [i.e., i, i.ddal'1, without further commenr,other than to ,"y il,at r havenot maintainedit since.[Au.]

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garded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcelyrecognizable-blthese two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pr.gn"rr, with the correspondencesthat unite the / with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the auromaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion. Indeed, for the imagos-whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in outline in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efficacifyrthe mirror-image would seem to be the threshoid of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one's own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features,or even its infirmities, or its objectproiections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested. That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by r piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causaliry that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognizesthat it is a necessarycondition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its speiies, of either sex; so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual within reach of the field of refle.tion of a mirror. similarlS in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the soli tary to the gregarious form i"r, be obtained by exposing the individual, at a cerrain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beaury as both formative and erogenic. But the facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as casesof heteromorphic identification, in as much as they raise the problem of the 3cf. claude L6vi-Strauss, structuralAnthropology,chapter X. [Au.] SeeLdui-Straus.s. [Eds.]

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signification of space for the living organism-Psychological concePts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly suPreme law of adaptation. We have only to recall how Roger Cailloiso (who was then very young' and still fresh from his breach with the sociological school in which he was trained) illuminated the subiect by 'legendary psycbastbenia'to classify using the term morphological mimicry as an obsession with space in its derealizing effect. I have myself shown in the social dialectic that structures human knowledge as paranoiact why human knowledg. has greater autonomy than animal knowledg. in relation to the field of force of desire, but also why human knowledge is determined in that'little reality' (ce peu de rdalitd),which the Surrealists, in their restless way, saw as its limitation. These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial captation manifested in the mirror-stage' even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality-in so far 'nature'. as any meaning can be given to the word of the function the regard to I am led, therefore, mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality-or, as they say, between the lnnenwelt and the Umwelt. In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscenceat the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neonatal months. The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal system and likewise the presenceof certain humoral residues of the maternal organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fact of a real specific prematurity of birth in man. It is worth noting, incidentallR that this is a fact recogn ized as such by embryologists, by the term of foetalization, which determines the prevalence and neurax, the of aPparatus the so-called superior especialty of the cortex, which psycho-surgical operations lead us to regard as the intraorganic mirror. This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively proiects the formation of aRogerCaillois(r9r 3-78), Frenchcritic and poet.[Eds.] 5Cf.- 'Aggressiviryin Psychoanalysis', p. 8 and Ecrits, p. r 8o. [Au.]

the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from inwhich manufacsufficiency to anticipation-and lure of spatial the in up caught the subject, tures for identification, the successionof phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic-and, lastlS to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with is rigid structure the subiect's entire mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the lnnenwelt into the Umwelt generatesthe inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications. term I have also This fragmented body-which introduced into our system of theoretical references-usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressivedisintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disiointed limbs, or of those organs representedin exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions-the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Boscht has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man. But this form is even tangibly re'fragilizavealed at the organic level, in the lines of tion' that define the anatomy of phantasy, as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria. Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, of a stadium-its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes id iuxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the in a quite startling way. SimilarlR on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arisesspontaneouslS as if issuing from the symptoms themselves,to designate the mechanismsof obsessionalneurosis-inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement. But if we were to build on these subiective givens alone-however little we free them from the condition of experience that makes us seethem as partaking of the nature of a linguistic technique-our theoretical attempts would remain exposed to the 5HieronymusBosch(t 462?-r 5r 6),Flemishpainter.[Eds.]

The Mirror Stage charge of proiecting themselves into the unthinkable of an absolute subject. This is why I have sought in the present hypothesis, grounded in a conjunction of objective data, the guiding grid for a method of symbolic reduction. It establishesin the defencesof the ego a genetic order, in accordance with the wish formulated by Miss Anna Freud,t in the first part of her great work, and situates (as against a frequently expressed preiudice) hysterical repression and its returns at a more archaic stage than obsessionalinversion and its isolating processes,and the latter in turn as preliminary to paranoic alienation, which dates from the deflection of the specular I into the social I. This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial iealousy (so well brought out by the school of Charlotte Btihler' in the phenomenon of infantile transitiuism), the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations. It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledg. into mediatizatron through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation-the very normalization of this maturation being henceforth dependent, in man, oo a cultural mediation as exemplified, in the case of the sexual object, by the Oedipus complex. In the light of this conception, the term primary narcissism, by which analytic doctrine designates the libidinal investment characteristic of that moment, reveals in those who invented it the most profound awarenessof semantic latencies. But it also throws light on the dynamic opposition benveen this libido and the sexual libido, which the first analysts tried to define when rhey invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in order to explain the evident connection bet'ween the narcissistic libido and the alienating function of the I, the aggressivity it releases in any relation to the other, TAnna Freud, Austro-English(b. r89 j), psychoanalyst, daughterof SigmundFreud.[Eds.] 8CharlotteBrihler (x8gl-r974, German psychologist. lEds.l

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even in a relation involving the most Samaritan of aid. In fact, they were encountering that existential negativity whose realiry is so vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of being and nothingness. But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness,which, as one of its premises, links to the mdconnaissancesthat constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. This flight of fancy, for all that it draws, to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience, culminates in the pretention of providing an existential psychoanalysis. At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the'concentrational'e form of the social bond that seemsto arise to crown this effort, existentialism must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousnessto master any situation; a voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousnessof the other that can be satisfied only by Hegelian murder. These propositions are opposed by all our experience, in so far as it teachesus not to regard the ego as centered on the perception-consciousness system, or as organized by the 'reality principle'-a principle that is the expressionof a scientific preiudice most hostile to the dialectic of knowledg.. Our experience shows that we should start instead from the function of mdconnaissance that characterizes the ego in all is structures, so markedly articulated by Miss Anna Freud. For, if the Verneinungto represents the patent form of that function, its effects will, for the most part, remain latent, so long as they are not illuminated by some light reflected on e'Concentrationnaire',an adiectivecoined after lU7orld War II (this article was written in 1949)to describethe life of the concentration-camp. In the hands of certain writers it became,b)r extension,applicableto many aspectsof 'modern'life. [Tr.] roVerneinung:negation. [Eds.]

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to the level of fatality, which is where the id manifests itself. We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis-just as the cap' tation of the subject by the situation gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylufrS, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury. The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passionsof the soul, iust as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales,when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passionsin society. At this iunction of nature and culture, So persistently examined by modern anthropologR psychoanalysisalone recognizesthis knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever. For such a task, we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressivirythat underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer. In the recourse of subject to subiect that we preserve,psychoanalysismay accompany the patient to 'Thou art that', in which is the ecstatic limit of the revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real iourney begins.

THE AGENCYOF THE LETTERTNTHE OR UNCONSCIOUS REASONSINCEFREUD 'Of

Children in Swaddling Clothes

O cities of the sea, I behold in You your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will

not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and senseof loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them.' Leonardo da Vinci'

Although the nature of this contribution was determined by the theme of the third volume of La Psychanalyse,tI owe to what will be found there to insert it at a point somewhere benveen writing (l'6crit) and speech-it will be half-way between the two. Writing is distinguished by a prevalence of the text in the sensethat this factor of discourse will assume in this essay a factor that makes possible the kind of tightening up that I like in order to leave the reader no other way out than the waY in, which I prefer to be difficult. In that sense, then, this will not be writittg. BecauseI always try to provide my seminars each time with something new, I have refrained so fat from giving such a text, with one exception, which is not particularly outstanding in the context of the series,and which I refer to at all only for the general level of its argument. For the urgency that I now take as a pretext for leaving aside such an aim only masks the difficulty that, in trying to maintain it at the level at which I ought to present my teaching here, I might push it too far from speech, whose very different techniques are essential to the formative effect I seek. That is why I have taken the expedient offered me by the invitation to lecture to the philosophy group of the F6d6ration des 6tudiants ds lettres' to pro-

THE AGENCY OF THE LETTER IN THE UNCONSCIOUS OR REASoN SINCE FREUD was originally delivered as a lecture in r 957 and published in Psychanalyse rn 1958. It is repri"ied here fiom Ecrits (trans. Alan Sheridan)-by permis\W. Norton Inc., and Tavistock EC Company, riotr of \0.

Publications, Ltd. Copyright r 977 by Tavistock Publications, Ltd. I Codice Atlantico r4S. [Au.] 2Psychanalyse et sciencesde l'homme. [Au.] 3Tlre lectuie took place on 9 M"y, 1957, in the Amphith6Atre Descartes of the Sorbonne, and the discussion was continued afterwards over drinks. [Au.]

The Agencyof the Letter in the [Jnconscious or ReasonSinceFreud duce an adaptation suitable to what I have to say: its necessary generality matches the exceptional character of the audience, but its sole obfect encounters the collusion of their common training, a literary one, to which -y title pays homage. Indeed, how could we forget that to the end of his days Freud constantly maintained that such a training was the prime requisite in the formation of analysts, and that he designated the eter nal uniuersitas litterarum as the ideal place for its institution.o Thus my recourse (in rewriting) to the movement of the (spoken) discourse, restored to its vitality, by showing whom I meant it for, marks even more clearly those for whom it is not intended. I mean that it is not intended for those who, for any reason whatever, in psychoanalysis,allow their discipline to avail itself of some false identitya fault of habit, but its effect on the mind is such that the true identity may appear as simply one alibi among others, a sort of refined reduplication whose implications will nor be lost on the mosr subtle minds. So one observeswith a certain curiosity the beginnings of a new direction concerning symbol ization and language in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, with a great many sticky fingers leafing through the pages of Sapir and Jespersen.t These exercisesare still somewhat unpractised, but it is above all the tone that is lacking. A certain .seriousness' as one enters the domain of veraciry cannot fail to raise a smile. And how could a psychoanalystof today not realize that speech is the k.y to that truth, when his whole experience must find in speech alone its instrument, its context, its material, and even the background noise of its uncertainties.

I. THr MreNrNG oF THELrrrnn As my title suggests,beyond this 'speech',what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language. Thus from the outset I have alerted informia minas to the extent to which the notion that the unconscious is merely the sear of the instincts will have to be rethought. '.Pt: Frage_ der Laienanalyse, G.W., XIV: zgr-;. [Au.] sEdwardSapir (1884-1939), Americananrhr.i"ioji.rr linguist; otto Jespersen (r86o- rg4il, Danislrling"uist. lEds.l

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But how are we to take this 'letter' here? euite simplS literally.' 'letter' By I designate the material support that concrete discourse borrows from language. This simple definition assumesthat language is not to be confused with the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking subject-primarily becauselanguage and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subiect at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it. Let us note, then, that aphasias,although caused by purely anatomical lesions in the cerebral apparatus that supplies the mental centre for these functions, prove, on the whole, to distribute their deficits between the two sides of the signifying effect of what we call here 'the letter' in the creation of signification.t A point that will be clarified later. Thus the subject, too, if he can appear to be the slave of language is all the more so of a discoursein the universal movemenr in which his place is already inscribed ar birth, if only by virtue of his proper name. Referenceto the experience of the communiry, or to the substance of this discourse, settles nothing. For this experienceassumesits essentialdimension in the tradition that this discourseitself establishes. This tradition, long before the drama of history is inscribed in it, lays down the elemenrary structures of culture. And these very structures reveal an ordering of possible exchangeswhich, even if unconscious, is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language. with the result that the ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a rernary concept of the human condition-nature, society, and culture-the last rerm of which could well 6. ,.duced to language, or that which essentially distinguisheshuman society from natural societies. But I shall not make of this distinction either a point or a point of departure, leaving to its own obscurity the question of the original ielations be' 'A la lettre'. [Tr.] TThisaspectof aphasia,so usefulin overthrowingthe con'psychological cept of function', which only"obscures everyaspectof the question,becomesquite i1.", in the p.urelylinguisticanalysisof the rwo maior forms of aphasia worked out by one of the leadeis of modern linguistics,RomanJakobson.seethe most accessible of his works, the Fundamentalsof Language (with Morris Halle), Mouton, 's Gravenhage, p"ri il,"ctraprersr to 4. lAu.l

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tween the signifier and labour. I shall be content, for my little f ab at the general function of praxis in the genesisof history, to point out that the very society that wished to restore, along with the privileges of the producer, the causal hierarchy of the relations between production and the ideological superstructure to their full political rights, has none the less failed to give birth to an esperanto in which the relations of language to socialist realities would have rendered any literary formalism radically impossible.' For my part, I shall trust only those assumptions that have already proven their value by virtue of the fact that language through them has attained the status of an obiect of scientific investigation. For it is by virtue of this fact that linguistics' is seento occupy the k.y position in this domain, and the reclassification of the sciencesand a regrouping of them around it signals, as is usually the case, a revolution in knowledg.; only the necessities of communication made me inscribe it at the head of 'the sciencesof pzn'this volume under the title covered over.'o is thereby despite the confusion that sciencewe linguistic of emergence the pinpoint To may say that, as in the case of all sciences in the modern sense, it is contained in the constitutive moment of an algorithm that is its foundation. This algorithm is the following:

: which is read as: the signifier over the signified, 'over' correspondingto the bar separatingthe two stages. This sign should be attributed to Ferdinandde althoughit is not found in exactly this Saussurett s'We may recall that the discussion of the need fot a new language in communist society did in fact take place, and Staiin, iruch to the relief of those who adhered to his philosophn put an end to it with the following formulation: language is not a superstructure. [Au.] eny:linguistics' I mian the study. of existing languages in their structure and in the laws revealed liargrit) ih.rEit ; this excludes any theory of abstract codes sometimes included under the heading of communication theory as well as the theorS originating in the physical called information theory or any semiology ,.ittt..t, more or less hypothetically generalized. [Au'] roPsychanalyseet sciencesde l'homme. [Au'] tt See de Saussure. lEds.l

form in any of the numerous schemas' which none the less express it, to be found in the printed version of his lectures of the years t9o6-7, r9o8 -9, and which the piety of a group of his disrgro-rr, ciples caused to be published under the title, Cours de linguistique gdndrale, a work of prime importance for the transmission of a teaching worthy of the name, that is, that one can come to terms with only in its own terms. That is why it is legitimate for us to give him credit for the formulation S/s by which, in spite of the differences among schools, the beginning of modern linguistics can be recognized. The thematics of this science is henceforth suspended, in effect, at the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as being distinct orders separated initially by a barrier resisting signification. And that is what was to make possible an exact study of the connections proper to the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesisof the signified. For this primordial distinction goes well beyond the discussion concerning the arbitrariness of the sign, as it has been elaborated since the earliest reflections of the ancients, and even beyond the impassewhich, through the same period, has been encountered in every discussion of the bi-univocal correspondence between the word and the thing, if only in the mere act of naming. All this, of course,is quite contrary to the appearancessuggestedby the importance often imputed to the role of the index finger pointing to an obiect in the learning process of the infans subject learning his mother tongue, of the use in foreign language teaching of so-called 'concrete' methods. One cannot go further along this line of thought than to demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another sigtt nification : in its extreme form this amounts to the proposition that there is no language (langue) in e"istettce for which there is any question of its inability to cover the whole field of the signified, it being an effect of its existence as language (langue) that it necessarily answers all needs. If we try to grasp in language the constitution of the obiect, we .rnnot fail io notice that this constitution is to be 12Cf. the De Magistro of St. Augustine'-especiallythe 'De signi-ficatione locutionis'which I analysedin chapter myieminar of 4 June,1954.[A"']

The Agencyof tbe Letter in the (Jnconsciausor ReasonSince Freud f-ound only at the level of concepr, a very different thing from a simple nominative, and that the thing, when reduced to the noun, breaks up into th. double, divergent beam of the 'cause' (causa) in which it has taken shelter in the French word ch,orr, and the nothing (rien) to which it has abandoned its Latin dress (rem). These considerations, important as their existence is for the philosopher, turn us away from the locus in which language questions us as to its very nature. And we will fail to pursue the question furthgr as long as we cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing th. signified, or better, that the signifier has to "**., for its existence in the name of any signification whatever. For even reduced to this latter formulation, the heresy is the same-the heresy that leads logical positivism in search of the 'meaning of meaning'," as its objective is called in the language of its devotees. As a result, we can observe that- even a text highly charged with meaning can be reduced, through this sort of analysis, to insignifican t bagatelles, all that survives being mathematical algorithms that are, of course, without any meaning.to To return to our formula s/s: if we could infer nothing from it but the notion of the parallelism of its upper and lower terms, each one taken in its globalitS it would remain the enigmatic sign of a total mystery. luThichof course is not the case. In order to grasp its function I shall begin by reproducing the classic, yet faulty illustration by which its usageis normally introduced, and one can 13Englishin the original. toso,Mr. I. A. Richards,tli.l author of a work preciselyin accord with suchan objecrive,hasin anothir workshown us its application.He took for his purposesa pagefrom Mong-tse(Mencius,to the Jesuitslani called^th"e piece, Mencius on the Mind. The guaranreesof the puri ty oi the experiment are nothing to the luxury of the' ^pproaches.And our experton the traditionaiCanonthat contains the text is found rig-h!on the spot in peking whereour demonstratiott-model manglehas been,r"rrrported regardlessof cost. But we shallbe no lesstransported,if lessexpensivelS to seea bronze that givesout-bell-tonesat the slightest contactwith thought, ftansformedinto a ragto wiie the blackboardof the most dismaying Britishpiycholoii*. -being And not withour eventually identified *ith' th. meninx of the author himself-af that remainsof him or his object afterhaving exhausredthe meaningof the v latter and the good srnseof the former. [Au.]

74r

see how it opens the way to the kind of error referred to above. In my lecture, I replaced this illustration with another, which has no greater claim to correctness than that it has been transplanted into that inconTREE

gruous dimensionthat the psychoanalyst has not yet altogetherrenouncedbecauseof his quite iustified feelingthat his conformismtakesitr value entirely from it. Here is the other diagram: LADIES

GENTLEMEN

where we see that, without greatly extending the scope of the signifier concerned in the experiment, that is, by doubling a noun through the mere ju"taposition of two terms whose complementary meanings ough t. apparently to reinforce each other, a surprise is produced by an unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbol rzing, through the solitary confine'Western ment offered Man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative that he seemsto share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation. It is nor only with the idea of silencing the nominalist debate with a low blow that I use this example, but rarher to show how in fact the signifier enters the signified, namely, in a form which, nor being immaterial, raises the question of its place in reality. For the blinking gazeof a short sighied person might be justified in wondering whether thit was indeed the signifier as he peered closely at the little enamel signs that bore it, a signifier whose signified would in this call receive its final honourc

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from the double and solemn procession from the upper nave. But no contrived example can be as telling as the actual experience of truth. So I am happy to have invented the above, since it awoke in the person whose word I most trust a memory of childhood, which having thus happily come to my attention is best placed here. A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister,are seatedin a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen 'Look', passing as the train pulls to a stop. saysthe 'Idiot!' 'we're replieshis sister, at Ladies!'; brother, 'Can't you seewe're at Gentlemen'. Besidesthe fact that the rails in this story materiahze the bar in the Saussurianalgorithm (and in a form designedto suggestthat its resistancemay be other than dialectical), we should add that only someone who didn't have his eyes in front of the holes (it's the appropriate image here) could possibly confuse the place of the signifier and signified in this story, or not see from what radiating centre the signifier sendsforth its light into the shadow of incomplete significations. For this signifier will now carry a purely animal Dissension, destined for the usual oblivion of natural mists, to the unbridled power of ideological warfare, relentlessfor families, a torment to the Gods. For these children, Ladies and Gentlemen will be henceforth two countries towards which each of their souls will strive on divergent wings, and between which a truce will be the more impossible since they are actually the same country and neither can compromise on its own superiority without detracting from the glory of the other. But enough. It is beginning to sound like the his'Which it is more human, as it ought tory of France. to be, to evoke here than that of England, destined to tumble from the Large to the Small End of Dean Swift's egg. It remains to be conceived what steps,what corridor, the S of the signifier, visible here in the plurals tt in which it focuses its welcome beyond the window, must take in order to rest its elbows on the ventilators through which, like warm and cold air, indignation and scorn come hissing out below. 15Not, unfortunately,the casein the English here-the plural of 'gentleman'beingindicatedother than by the additionof an 's'. [Tr.]

One thing is certain: if the algorithm S/s with its bar is appropriate, access from one to the other cannot in any casehave a signification. For in so far as it is itself only pure function of the signifier, the algorithm can reveal only the structure of a signifier in this transfer. Now the structure of the signifier is, as it is commonly said of language itself, that it should be articulated. This means that no matter where one starts to designate their reciprocal encroachments and increasing inclusions, these units are subjected to the double condition of being reducible to ultimate differential elementsand of combining them according to the laws of a closed order. These elements,one of the decisivediscoveriesof linguistics, are phonemes; but we must not expect to find any phonetic constancy in the modulatory variabiliry to which this term applies, but rather the synchronic system of differential couplings necessary for the discernment of sounds in a given language. Through this, one seesthat an essentialelement of the spoken word itself was predestined to flow into the mobile characters which, in a jumble of lower-caseDidots or Garamondsrtt render validly present what we call the 'letter', namelS the essentially localized structure of the signifier. With the second property of the signifier, that of combining according to the laws of a closedorder, is affirmed the necessityof the topological substratum of which the term I ordinarily use, namelS the signifying chain, gives an approximate idea: rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings. Such are the structural conditions that define grammar as the order of constitutive encroachments of the signifier up to the level of the unit immediately superior to the sentence,and lexicology as the order of constitutive inclusions of the signifier to the level of the verbal locution. In examining the limits by which these two exercisesin the understanding of linguistic usageare determined, it is easy to seethat only the correlations between signifier and signifier provide the standard for all researchinto signification, as is indicated by 'usage' the notion of of a taxeme or semanteme which in fact refers to the context iust above that of the units concerned. But it is not becausethe undertakings of graml5Namesof differentrype-faces. [Tr.]

The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud mar and lexicology are exhausted within certain limits that we must think that beyond those limits signification reigns supreme.That would be an error. For the signifier, by its very nature, always anticipates meaning by unfolding its dimension before it. As is seen at the level of the sentencewhen it 'I shall is interrupted before the significant term: 'And yet 'All the same it is . . .', there never . . .', may be. . .'. Such sentencesare not without meanirg, a meaning all the more oppressivein that it is content to make us wait for it.tt But the phenomenon is no different which by the 'but' brings to the light, comely mere recoil of a as the Shulamite, honest as the d.*, the negress adorned for the wedding and the poor woman ready for the auction-block.tt From which we can say that it is in the chain 'insists' but that of the signifier that the meaning 'consists' in the signification of none of its elements which it is at the moment capable. 'We are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier-which Ferdinand de Saussure illustrates with an image resembling the wavy lines of the upper and lower'Waters in miniatures from manuscripts of Genesis; a double f.lux marked by fine streaks of rain, vertical dotted lines supposedly confining segmentsof correspondence. All our experience runs counter to this linearitS which made me speak once, in one of my seminars on psychosis, of something more like 'anchoring points' ('points de capiton') as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject.tt The linearity that Saussureholds to be constitutive of the chain of discourse, in conformity with its tTTowhich verbalhallucination,when it takesthis form, opensa communicatingdoor with the Freudianstructure of psychosis-a door until now unnoticed(cf. 'On a QuestionPreliminaryto any PossibleTreatmentof Prychosis',pp. r T9-zz1). [Au.] 18The allusionsare to the 'I am black, but comely . . .' of the Song of Solomon, and to the nineteenth-century 'poor, clich6of the but honest'woman. [Tr.] teI spokein my seminarof e June,1956,of the first scene of Athalie, incited by an allusion-tossed off by a highbrow critic in the New Statesmanand Nation-to the 'high whoredom' of Racine'sheroines, to renouncereferenceto the savagedramasof Shakespeare, which have becomecompulsionalin analyticcircleswherethey play the role of status-symbol for the Philistines.[Au.]

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emission by a single voice and with its horizontal position in our writing-if this linearity is necessary, in fact, it is not sufficient. It applies to the chain of discourse only in the direction in which it is orientated in time, being taken as a signifying 'Peter factor in all languages in which hits Paul' reits verses time when the terms are inverted. But one has only to listen to poetrS which Saussure was no doubt in the habit of doing,'o for a polyphony to be heard, for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along the several staves of a score. There is in effect no signifying chain that does not have, as if attached to the punctuation of each of its units, a whole articulation of relevant contexts 'vertically', suspended as it were, from that point. Let us take our word 'tree' again, this time not as an isolated noun, but at the point of one of these punctuations, and seehow it crossesthe bar of the 'Arbre'and Saussurianalgorithm. (The anagram of 'bArre' should be noted.) For even broken down into the double spectre of its vowels and consonants, it can still call up with the robur and the plane tree the significations it takes on, in the context of our flora, of strength and majesry. Drawing on all the symbolic contexts suggestedin the Hebrew of the Bible, it erectson a barren hill the shadow of the cross. Then reducesto the capital I the sign of dichotomy which, except for the illustration usedby heraldrn would owe nothing to the tree however genealogical we may think it. Circulatory tree, tree of life on the cerebellum, tree of Saturn, tree of Diana, crystals formed in a tree struck by lightning, is it your figure that ffaces our destiny for us in the tortoise-shell cracked by the fire, or your lightning that causesthat slow shift in the axis of being to surge up from an unnamable night into the "Eznavra of language: No ! says the Tree, it says No ! in the shower of sparks Of its superb head lines that require the harmonics of the tree just as much as their continuation: 20Thepublicationby JeanStarobinski,in Le Mercurede France(February1964 of Saussure's noteson anagrams and their hypogrammaticaluse, from the Saturnine versesto the writings of Cicero,providethe corroboration that I then lacked(note ry66). [Au.]

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tU7hichthe storm treatsas universally As it doesa bladeof grass.t' For this modern verse is ordered according to the same law of the parallelism of the signifier that creates the harmony governing the primitive Slavic epic or the most refined Chinese poetry. As is seenin the fact that the tree and the blade of grass are chosen frorn the same mode of the existent in order for the signs of contradiction-saying 'No!' and 'treat x5'-1e affect them, and also so as to bring about, through the categorical contrast of 'superb' with the 'universally' the particularity of 'head' that reduces it, in the condensation of the 'storm' (temp)te), the indiscernible (Thte) and the shower of sparks of the eternal instant. But this whole signifier can only operate, it may be said, if it is present in the subfect. It is the obfection that I answer by supposing that it has passed over to the level of the signified. For what is important is not that the subject know anything whatsoever. (If reolEs and 6ENTLEMEN were written in a language unknown to the little boy and girl, their quarrel would simply be the more exclusively a quarrel over words, but no less ready to take on signification.) Ifhat this structure of the signifying chain disclosesis the possibility I have, precisely in so far as I have this language in common with other subjects, that is to say, in so far as it exists as a language, to use it in order to signify something quite otber than what it says. This function of speech is more worth 'disguising the thought' pointing out than that of (more often than not indefinable) of the subiect; it is no less than the function of indicating the place of this subject in the search for the true. I have only to plant my tree in a locution; climb the tree, even project on to it the cunning illumination a descriptive context gives to a word; raise it (arborer) so as not to let myself be imprisoned in some sort of communiqui ofthe facts, however official, and if I know the truth, make it heard, in spite of all the between-the-linescensuresby the only signifier my acrobatics through the branches of the tree can constitute, provocative to the point of bur21'Non!dit I'Arbre,il dit: Non! dansl'6tincellement De sa tdte suPerbe Que la temp6tetraite universellement Commeelle fait une herbe.' (PaulVal6rn 'Au Platane',Les Charmes)'[Au']

lesque, or perceptible only to the practised eye, according to whether I wish to be heard by the mob or by the few. The properly signifying function thus depicted in 'We learned this name in some language has a name. grammar of our childhood, on the last PaBe,where the shade of Quintil ranr" relegated to some phan'final considerations on tom chapter concerning style', seemedsuddenly to speed up his voice in an attempt to get in all he had to say before the end. It is among the figures of style, or tropes-from 'to find' (trouuer) comesto us-that which the verb this name is found. This name is metonymy. I shall refer only to the example given there: 'thirty sails'. For the disquietude I felt over the fact 'ship', concealed in this expression, that the word on its figurative sense, through taking by seemed, the endlessrepetition of the same old examPle, only to increase its presence, obscured (uoilait) not so much those illustrious sails (uoiles) as the definition they were supposed to illustrate. The part taken for the whole, we said to ourselves,and if the thing is to be taken seriouslR we are left with very little idea of the importance of this 'thirty sails' is precisely supposed to fleet, which give us: for each ship to have just one sail is in fact the least likely possibility. By which we seethat the connexion between ship and sail is nowhere but in the signifier, and that it is in the word-to-word connexion that metonymy is based." 22Marcus Fabius Quintilianus (c. 4o-c. r r 8), Roman rhetorician.[Eds.] RomanJakobson-to " l p^y homagehereto the works of whith I owJ muchof this formulation;works to which a can constantlyrefer in order to structure psychoanalyst itii o*tt experience,and which render t"pgt-flYousthe 'personalcommunications'of which I could boast as much asthe next fellow. Indeed,one recognizesin this oblique form of allegiancethe style of that immortal couple, Rosencrantz I"d Guildenit.rn, who are virtually indistinguishable, evenin the imperfectionof their destiny,!o1 it survives by the samemithod asJeannot'sknife, and for the same for pre,."ron for which GoethepraisedShakespeare sentingthe characterin doubleform: they represent,in the Associathemsllvesalone,the whole Gesellschaft, (Vilheim MeistersLehriahre,ed.Trunz,Christion itself 'Wegner Verlag,Hamburg,V (il' zgil -I meanthe tian Association. Psychoanalytical International 'We should savour the passagefrom Goethe as a 'Diesesleise Auftriten diesesSchmiegenund whole: dieses Streichelnund Schmeicheln, Bi.g.r,, diesJasagen,

The Agencyof the Letter in the [Jnconsciousor ReasonSinceFreud I shall designate as metonymy, rhen, the one side (uersant) of the effecdve field consriruted by the signifier, so that meaning can emerge there. The other side is metaphor. Let us immediately find an illusrrarion; Quillet's dictionary seemedan appropriate place to find a sample that would not seem to be chosen for my own purposes, and I didn't have to go any further than the well known line of Victor Hugo: His sheaf was neither miserly nor spitefu| . . .'o under which aspect I presented metaphor in my seminar on the psychoses. It should be said that modern poerry and especially the Surrealist school have taken us a long way in this direction by showing that any conjunctLn of rwo signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor, except for the additional requirement of the grearestpossible dispariry of the images signified, needed for the production of the po.ti. spark, or in other words for metaphoric .r."tion to take place. It is true this radical position is based on the experiment known as automatic writing, which would not have been attempted if its pioneers had not been reassured by the Freudian discovery. But it remains a confused position becausethe doctrine behind it is false. The creative spark of the metaphor does nor spring from the presentation of fwo images, that is, of rwo signifiers equally actualized. It flashes between two signifiers one of which has taken the place of the other in the signifying chain, the ocBehendigkeit, dies schwin zein, diese Allheit und Leerheit, diese rechtliche Schurkerei, diese Unfdhigkeit, wie kann sie durch einen Menschen ausgedruckt *".rd.r, i E, sollten ihrer wenigstens ein Dutzend sein, wenn man sie haben kcinnte; denn sie bloss in Gesellschaft etwas, sie sind die Gesellschaft . . .' Let us thank also, in this conrext, the author R. M. Loewenstein of 'Some Remarks on the Role of Speechin Technique' (1. ]. p., Nov.-Dec., 19 l:_y:logalytic 56, (5) , Tx4vII 162) for taking the trouble to poinf o"t that his remarks are 'based on' work dating from 9sz. This is no doubt the explanarion for the faJt that hJh", learned nothing fro-m work done since then, yet which he is-not ignorant of, as he cites me as their ..ditor' (sic). [Au.] 2a'sa-gerbe n'6tait pas avare ni haineuse', a line from .Booz endormi'. [Tr.]

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culted signifier remaining presenr through its (metonymic) connexion with the rest of the chain. one word for another: that is the formula for the metaphor and if you are apoet you will produce for your own delight a continuous stream, a dazzling tissue of metaphors. If the result is the sort of intoxication of the dialogue that Jean Tardieurr wrote under this title, that is only becausehe was giving us a demonsrration of the radical superfluo,rrniss oi ail signification in a perfectly convincing representation of a bourgeois comedy. It is obvious that in the line of Hugo cited above, not the slightest spark of light springs from the proposition that the sheaf was neither miserly nor spiteful, for the reason that there is no question of the sheaf's having either the merit or demerit of these attributes, since the attributes, like the sheaf, belong to Booz, who exercisesthe former in disposing of the latter and without informing the latter of his sentiments in the case. If, however, his sheaf does refer us to Booz, and this is indeed the case,it is becauseit has replaced him in the signifying chain at the very place where he was to be exalted by the sweeping away of greed and spite. But now Booz himself has been r*.p, away by the sheaf, and hurled inro the outer darknesswhere greed and spite harbour him in the hollow of their negation. But once his sheaf has thus usurped his place, Booz can no longer return there; the slender thread of the little word his that binds him to it is only one more obstacle ro his return in that it links him ro the notion of possession that retains him at the heart of greed and spite. so bis generosity, affirmed the passage,is yet reduced to lessthan nothing in by the munificence of the sheaf which, coming from nature, knows neither our reservenor our reje-tions, and even in its accumulation remains prodigal by our standards. But if in this profusion the giver has disappeared along with his gift, it is only in order to rise again in what surrounds the figure of speechin which [. *", annihilated. For it is the figure of the burgeoning of fecundity, and it is this that announ.., tl,. ,,rrpiir. that the poem celebrates,namelS the promise that the old man will receive in the sacred context of his accessionto paternity. so, it is between the signifier in the form of the 2sJean Tardieu(b. ryq), Frenchwriter. [Eds.]

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proper name of a man and the signifier that metaphorically abolishes him that the poetic spark is produced, and it is in this caseall the more effective in reali zing the signification of paternity in that it reproduces the mythical event in terms of which Freud reconstructed the progress' in the unconscious of all men, of the paternal mystery. Modern metaphor has the same structure. So the line Loue is a pebble laughing in the sunlight, recreateslove in a dimension that seemsto me most tenable in the faceof its imminent lapse into the mil:ageof narcissisticaltruism. 'We see,then that, metaphor occurs at the precise point at which senseemerged from non-Sense,that is, at that frontier which, as Freud discovered,when crossed the other way produces the word that in French rs the word par excellence,the word that is 'esprit'126 is at this frontier it simply the signifier that we realize that man defies his very destiny when he derides the signifier. But to come back to our subiect, what does man find in metonymy if not the power to circumvent the obstaclesof social censure? Does not this form, which gives its field a truth in its very oppression, manifest a certain servitude inherent in its presentation? One may read with profit a book by Leo Strauss, from the land that traditionally offers asylum to those who choose freedom, in which the author reflects on the relation between the art of writing and persecution.z7 By pushing to its limits the sort of connaturality that links this art to that condition, he lets us glimpse a certain something which in this matter imposes its form, in the effect of truth on desire. But haven't we felt for some time now that, having followed the ways of the letter in search of Freudian 26'Mot',in the broadSense, means'word'.In the narrower 'es' 'a sense,however,it means witticism'. The French 'wit', the equivalent prit'is translated,in this context,as of Freud'sWitz. [Tr.] 'Esprit' is certainlythe equivalentof the GermanWitz with which Freudmarkedthe approachof his third fundamentalwork on the unconscious.The much greater difficulty of finding this equivalentin Englishis instructive: 'wit', burdenedwith all the discussionof which it Popeand was the object from Davenantand Hobbesto'humour', Addison, abandonedits essentialvirtues to 'pun', which is somethingelse.There only remainsthe but this word is too narrow in its connotation.[Au.] 27Leo Strauss,Persecutionand the Art of Writing, The FreePress,Glencoe,Illinois. [Au.]

ffuth, we are getting very warm indeed, that it is burning all about us ? Of course, as it is said, the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life. \U(/ecan't help but agreq having had to pay homage elsewhereto a noble victim of the error of seeking the spirit in the letter; but we should also like to know how the spirit could live without the letter. Even so, the pretentions of the spirit would remain unassailable if the letter had not shown us that it produces all the effects of truth in man without involving the spirit at all. It is none other than Freud who had this revelation, and he called his discovery the unconscious.

II. Tnp LBTTERIN THE UNcoNsclous In the complete works of Freud, one out of every three pages is devoted to philological references' one out of every fwo pages to logical inferences' everywhere a dialectical apprehension of experience,the proportion of analysisof languageincreasi.g to the extent that the unconscious is directly concerned. 'The Interpretation of Dreams' every Thus in page deals with what I call the letter of the discourse,in its texture, its usage,its immanence in the matter in question. For it is with this work that the work of Freud begins to open the royal road to the unconscious. And Freud gave us notice of this; his confidence at the time of launching this book in the early days of this century" only confirms what. he continued to proclaim to the end: that he had staked the whole of his discovery on this essential expressionof his message. The first sentence of the opening chapter announces what for the sake of the exposition could not be postponed: that the dream is a rebus. And Freud goes on to stipulate what I have said from the start, that it must be understood quite literally. This derives from the agency in the dream of that same literal (or phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analysed in discourse. So the unnatural images of the boat on the roof, or the man with a comm a for a head, which are specifically mentioned by Freud, are examples of dreamimages that are to be taken only for their value as 28Cf. the correspondence, namely letters Io7 and ro9. lAu.l

The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud signifiers, that is to say, in so far as they allow us to 'proverb' presented spell out the by the rebus of the dream. The linguistic structure that enables us to read dreams is the very principle of the 'significance of the dream', the Traumdeutung. Freud shows us in every possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with its signification, giving as an example Egyptian hieroglyphics in which it would be sheer buffoonery to pretend that in a given text the frequency of avulture, which is an alepb, or of a chick, which is a uau, indicating a form of the verb 'to be' or a plural, prove that the text has anythin g at all to do with theseornithological specimens.Freud finds in this writing certain uses of the signifier that are lost in ours, such as the use of determinatives, where a categorical figure is added to the literal figuration of a verbal term; but this is only to show us that even in this writing, the so-called 'ideogram' is a letter. But it does not require the current confusion on this last term for there to prevail in the minds of psychoanalystslacking linguistic training the prejudice in favour of a symbolism deriving from natural analogy, or even of the image as appropriate to the instinct. And to such an extent that, outside the French school, which has been alerted, a distinction must be drawn between reading coffee grounds and reading hieroglyphics, by recalling to its own principles a technique that could not be f ustified were it not directed towards the unconscious. It must be said that this is admitted only with difficulty and that the mental vice denounced above enjoys such favour that today's psychoanalyst can be expected to say that he decodes before he will come around to taking the necessary tour with Freud (turn at the statue of Champollion," saysthe guide) that will make him understand that what he does is decipher; the distinction is that a cryptogram takes on its full dimension only when it is in a lost language. Taking the tour is simply continuing in the Traumdeutung. Entstellung, translated as 'distortion' or 'transposition', is what Freud shows to be the general precondition for the functioning of the dreaffi, and it is 2eJean-Frangois Champollion (tZ9o-:.832), the first scholarto decipherthe Ancient Egyptianhieroglyphics.

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what I designatedabove, following Saussure,as the sliding of the signified under the signifier, which is always active in discourse (its action, let us note, is unconscious). But what we call the fwo 'sides' of the effect of the signifier on the signified are also found here. Verdichtung, or 'condensation', is the structure of the superimposition of the signifiers,which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name, condensing in itself the wo rd Dichtung, shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the raditional function proper to poetry. In the case of Verschiebung,'displacement', the German term is closer to the idea of that veering off of signification that we seein metonymy, and which from its first appearancein Freud is representedas the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship. What distinguishesthesetwo mechanisms,which play such a privileged role in the dream-work (Traumarbeit), from their homologous function in discourse? Nothing, except a condition imposed upon the signifying material, called Rilcksicht auf Darstellbarkeit, which must be translated by 'consideration of the means of representation'. (The translation by 'role of the possibility of figurative expression' being too approximative here.) But this condition constitutes a limitation operati ng within the system of writirg; this is a long way from dissolving the system into a figurative semiology on a level with phenomena of natural expression. This fact could perhaps shed light on the problems involved in certain modes of pictography which, simply becausethey have been abandoned in writing as imperfe c\ are not therefore to be regarded as mere evolutionary stages.Let us say, then, that the dream is like the parlour-game in which one is supposed to get the spectators to guess some well known saying or variant of it solely by dumb-show. That the dream uses speech makes no difference since for the unconscious it is only one among several elements of the representation. It is precisely the fact that both the game and the dream run up against a lack of taxematic material for the representation of such logical articulations as caus ality, contradiction, hypothesis, etc., that proves they are a form of writing rather than of mime. The subtle processesthat the dream is seento use to represent these logical articulations, in a much less artificial way than games usually employ, are the object of a

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special study in Freud in which we see once more cbnfirmed that the dream-work follows the laws of the signifier. The rest of the dream-elaboration is designated as secondary by Freud, the nature of which indicates its value: they are phantasies or daydreams (Tagtraum) to use the term Freud prefers in order to emphasize their function of wish-fulfillment (Wunscherfilllung). Given the f act that these phantasies may remain unconscious, their distinctive feature is in this case their signification. Now, concerning these phantasies, Freud tells us that their place in the dream is either to be taken up and used as signifying elements for the statement of the unconscious thoughts (Traumgedanke), of to be used in the secondaryelaboration iust mentioned, that is to say, in a function not to be distinguished from our waking thought (uon unserem wachen Denken nicht zu unterschieden). No better idea of the effects of this function can be given than by comparing it to areas of colour which, when applied here and there to a stencilplate, can make the stencilled figures, rather forbidding in themselves,more reminiscent of hieroglyphics or of a rebus, look like a figurative painting. Forgive me if I seem to have to spell out Freud's text; t do so not only to show how much is to be gained by not cutting it about, but also in order to rit,rtt. the development of psychoanalysis according to its first guide-lines, which were fundamental and never revoked. Yet from the beginning there was a generaI mdconncfissanceof the constitutive role of the signifier in the status that Freud from the first assigned to the unconscious and in the most precise formal manner. There are two reasons for this, of which the least obvious, of course, is that this formalization was not sufficient in itself to bring about a recognition of the agency of the signifier because the Traum' deutung appeared long before the for malizations of linguistics for which one could no doubt show that it javed the way by the sheer weight of its truth. The second reason, which is after all only the reverse side of the first, is that if psychoanalysts were fascinated exclusively by the significations revealed in the unconscious,it is becausethese significations derived their secret attraction from the dialectic that seemedto be immanent in them. I have shown in my seminars that it is the need to counteract the continuously accelerating effects of this bias that alone explains the apparent changes

of direction or rather changesof tack, which Freud, through his primary concern to preserve for posterity both his discovery and the fundamental revisions it effected in our knowledg., felt it necessary to apply to his doctrine. For, I repeat, in the situation in which he found himself, having nothing that corresponded to the object of his discovery that was at the same level of scientific development-in this situation, at least he never failed to maintain this obiect on the level of its ontological dignity. The rest was the work of the gods and took such a course that analysis today takes its bearings in those imagin ary forms that I have iust shown to be 'resist-sfyle' (en reserue)on the text they mudrawn tilate-and the analyst tries to accommodate his direction to them, confusing them, in the interpretation of the dream, with the visionary liberation of the hieroglyphic aviary, and seeking generally the control of the exhaustion of the analysis in a sort of 'scanning"o of these forms whenever they appear, in the idea that they are witnessesof the exhaustion of the regressionsand of the remodelling of the obf ect relation from which the subiect is supposed to derive his'character-tyPe."t The technique that is based on such positions can be fertile in its various effects, and under the aegis of therapS difficult to criticize. But an internal criticism must none the less arise from the flagrant disparity berween the mode of operation by which the iechnique is iustified-namely the analytic rule, all 'free assothe instruments of which, beginning with ciation', depend on the conception of the unconscious of its inventor-and, oo the other hand, the general mdconnaissance that reigns regarding this .on..ption of the unconscious. The most ardent adherenis of this technique believe themselves to be freed of any need to reconcile the t'wo by the merest pirouette: the analytic rule (they say) must be all the more religiously observed since it is only the result of a lucky accident. In other words, Freud never knew what he was doing. A return to Freud's text shows on the contrary the 30Thatis the processby which the results9f piece.ofre" through a mechanicalexplorationof search "lrr,rred "r. object' its of field the [Au'] the entireextentof of the organism, " By referringonly to the development the typolosy fails to recognrzg(mdconnait)the structure itt *itich t"hesubiectis ciught up respectivelyin.phantasy,in drive,in sublimation.I am at presentdeveloping the iheory of this structure(note ry66) ' [A"']

The Agency of the Letter in the (Jnconscious or Reason Since Freud absolute coherence betrveen his technique and his discoverR and at the sametime this coherenceallows us to put all his procedures in their proper place. That is why any rectification of pry.hoanalysis must inevitably involve a return to the truth of that discoverg which, taken in its original moment, is impossible to obscure. For in the analysis of dreams, Freud inrends only to give us the laws of the unconscious in their mosr general extension. one of the reasons why dreams were most propitious for this demonstration is exactlS Freud tells us, that they reveal the same laws whether in the normal person or in the neurotic. But in either case, the efficacy of the unconscious does not ceasein the waking state. The psychoanalytic experience does nothing other than establish that the unconsciousleavesnone of our actions outside its field. The presenceof the unconscious in the psychological order, in other words in the relationfunctions of the individual, should, however, be more precisely defined: it is not coextensive with that order, for we know that if unconscious motivation is manifest in conscious psychical effects, as well as in unconscious ones, conversely it is only elementary to recall to mind that a large number of psychical effects that are quite legitimately designated as unconscious, in the senseof excluding the characteristic of consciousness, are nonetheless without any relation whatever to the unconscious in the Freudian sense.So it is only by an abuse of the term that unconscious in that senseis confused with psychical, and that one may thus designare as psychical what is in fact an effect of the unconscious, as on the som atic for instance. It is a matter, therefore, of defining the topography of this unconscious. I say that it is the uery ,opography defined by the algorithm:

I

s

what we have been able to develop concerning the effec$ of the signifier on the signified suggesrs its transformation into:

I

f(s)-

74g

vertical dependenciesin the signified, divided into two fundamental sffuctures called meronymy and 'We metaphor. can symbolize them b5 first:

f(S...S')S=S(-)s that is to say, the metonymic structure, indicating that it is the connexion between signifier and signifier that permits the elision in which the signifier installs the lack-of-being in the object relation, using the value of 'referenceback' possessedby signification in order to invest it with the desire aimed at the very lack it supporrs. The sign-placed between ( ) representshere the maintenance of the bar - which, in the original algorithm, marked the irreducibility in which, in the relations berween signifier and signified, the resisranceof signification ls constituted." SecondlS

'(;),=s(+)s the metaphoric strucrure indicating that it is in the substitution of signifier for signifier that an effect of signification is produced that is creative or poetic, in other words, which is the advent of the iignification in quesrion." The sign + berween ( repre) sents here the crossing of the bar - and the ionstitutive value of this crossing for the emergenceof signification. This crossing expressesthe condition of passage of the signifier into the signified that I pointed out above, although provisionally confusing it with the place of the subject. It is the function of the subject, rhus introduced, that we must now turn to since it lies at the crucial point of our problem. 'I think, therefore I am' (cogito ergo sum) is not merely the formula in which is constituted, with the historical high point of reflection on the conditions of science, the link between the transparency of the transcendental subject and his existential affirmation. PerhapsI am only obiect and mechanism (and so nothing more than phenomenon), but assuredly in

s

'we

have shown the effects not only of the elements of the horizontal signifying chain, but also of its

= congruence.[Au.] ]iT.h: si.Sn heredesignates 33s'.designating herethe term prJd.r.tive of the signifying effect(or significance); one."t s.e that th. t.i-;;i;l;;, rn metonymy,patentin metaphor.[Au.]

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so far as I think so, I am - absolutely. No doubt philosophers have brought important corrections to this formulation, notably that in that which thinks (cogitans), I can never constitute myself as anything but object (cogitatum). Nonetheless it remains true that by way of this extreme purification of the transcendentalsubject, my existential link to its project seemsirrefutable, at least in its present 'cogito ergo sum' ubi cogito, ibi form, and that: sLtm,overcomesthis objection. Of course, this limits me to being there in my being only in so far as I think that I am in my thought; just how far I actually think this concerns only myself and if I say it, interests no one.'o Yet to elude this problem on the pretext of its philosophical pretensions is simply to admit one's inhibition. For the notion of subject is indispensable even to the operation of a sciencesuch as strategy (in the modern sense)whose calculations exclude all'subjectivism'. It is also to deny oneself accessto what might be called the Freudian universe-in a way that we speak of the Copernican universe. It was in fact the so-called Copernican revolution to which Freud himself compared his discovery,emphasizingthat it was once again a question of the place man assigns to himself at the centre of a universe. Is the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric, in relation to the place I occupy as subject of the signified?-that is the question. It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to 'thought' here. use the word For Freud uses the term to designatethe elements involved in the unconscious, that is the signifying mechanisms that we now recognize as being there. It is nonethelesstrue that the philosophi cal cogito is at the centre of the mirage that renders modern man so sure of being himself even in his uncertainties about himself, and even in the mistrust he has learned to practise against the traps of self-love. Furthermore, if, turning the weapon of metonymy 3aIt is quite otherwiseif by posinga questionsuchas''Why philosophers ?' I becomemore candid than nature, for then I am askingnot only the questionthat philosophers have been asking themselvesfor all time, but also the one in which they are perhapsmost interested.[Au.]

against the nostalgia that it serves,I refuse to seek any meaning beyond tautologS if in the name of 'a 'war penny's a penny' I decide to be is war' and I how only what am, even here can I elude the obvious fact that I am in that very act? And it is no lesstrue if I take myself to the other, metaphoric pole of the signifying quest, and if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being, I cannot doubt that even if I lose myself in the process,I am in that process. Now it is on these very points, where evidence will be subverted by the empirical, that the trick of the Freudian conversion lies. This signifying game berween metonymy and metaphor, up to and including the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and a lack of being, and links my fate to the question of my destinS this game, in all its inexorable subtletS is played until the match is called, there where I am not, becauseI cannot situate myself there. That is to say, what is needed is more than these words with which, for a brief moment I disconcerted my audience: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Words that render sensibleto an ear properly attuned with what elusive ambiguity" the ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread. What one ought to say is: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think. This two-sided mystery is linked to the fact that the truth can be evoked only in that dimension of 'realism' alibi in which all in creativeworks takes its virtue from metonyml; it is likewise linked to this other fact that we accede to meaning only through the double twist of metaphor when we have the one and only key: the S and the s of the Saussurianalgorithm are not on the samelevel, and man only deludes himself when he believeshis true place is at their axis, which is nowhere. 'Was nowhere, that is, until Freud discovered it; for if what Freud discovered isn't that, it isn't anything. TnB coNTENTSof the unconscious with all their disappointing ambiguities give us no reality in the 3s'Ambiguitdde furet'-literally,'ferret-like ambiguity'. This is one of a number of referencesin Lacan to the 'hunt-the-slipper' game (jeu du furet). [Tr.]

The Agency of the Letter in tbe (Jnconscious or Reason Since Freud

7 5T

subject more consistent than the immediate; their virtue derives from the truth and in the dimension of being: Kern unseres Wesent' are Freud's own terms. The double-triggered mechanism of metaphor is the very mechanism by which the symptom, in the analytrcsense,is determined. Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessibleto the conscious subject in which that symptom may be resolved-a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element. And the enigmas that desire seemsto pose for a 'natural philosophy'-its frenzy mocking the abyss of the infinite, the secret collusion with which it envelops the pleasure of knowing and of dominating with iouissance, these amount to no other derangement of instinct than that of being caught in the rails-eternally stretching forth towards the desire 'perfor something else-of metonymy. Hence its the of at the very suspension-point fixation verse' signifying chain where the memory-screenis immobilized and the fascinating image of the fetish is petrified. There is no other way of conceiving the indestructibility of unconscious desire-in the absence of a need which, when forbidden satisfaction, does not sicken and die, even if it means the destruction of the organism itself. It is in a memory, comparable to what is called by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which are in turn based on an electronic reahzation of the composition of signification), it is in this sort of memory that is found the chain that insists on reproducing itself in the transference,and which is the chain of dead desire. It is the truth of what this desire has been in his history that the patient cries out through his symptom, as Christ said that the stones themselves would have cried out if the children of Israel had not lent them their voice. And that is why only psychoanalysis allows us to differentiate within memory the function of recollection. Rooted in the signifier, it resolves the Platonic aporias of reminiscence through the ascendancy of history in man. 'Three One has only to read the Essayson Sex-

uality' to observe, in spite of the pseudo-biological glosseswith which it is decked out for popular consumption, that Freud there derives all accession to the obiect from a dialectic of return. Starting from Holderlin's uocrros, Freud arrives less than twenfy years later at Kierkegaard's repetition; that is, in submitting his thought solely to the 'talking humble but inflexible consequencesof the cure'r" he was unable ever to escapethe living servitudes that led him from the sovereign principle of the Logos to re-thinking the Empedoclean antinomies of death. And how else are we to conceive the recourse of a man of science to a Deus ex mdchina than on that 'other scene'he speaksof as the locus of the dream, a Deus ex machina only less derisory for the fact that it is revealed to the spectator that the machine directs the director? How else can we imagine that a scientist of the nineteenth century, unless we realize that he had to bow before the force of evidence that went well beyond his prejudices, valued more highly than all his other works his Totem and Taboo, with its obscene, ferocious figure of the primordial father, not to be exhausted in the expiation of Oedipus' blindness, and before which the ethnologists of today bow as before the growth of an authentic myth ? So that imperious proliferation of particular symbolic creations, such as what are called the sexual theories of the child, which supply the motivation down to the smallest detail of neurotic compulsions, these reply to the same necessitiesas do myths. Thus, to speak of the precise point we are treating in my seminars on Freud, little Hans, left in the lurch at the ageof five by his symbolic environment, and suddenly forced to face the enigma of his sex and his existence,developed,under the direction of Freud and of his father, Freud's disciple, in mythic form, around the signifying crystal of his phobia, all the permutations possible on a limited number of signifiers. The operation shows that even on the individual level the solution of the impossible is brought within man's reach by the exhaustion of all possible forms of the impossibilities encountered in solution by recourse to the signifying equarion. It is a striking demonstration that illuminares the labyrinth of

36'Thenucleusof our being'. [Tr.]

3TEnglish in the original. [Tr.]

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a casewhich so far has only been used as a source of demolished fragments. We should be struck, too, by the fact that it is in the coextensivity of the development of the symptom and of its curative resolution that the nature of the neurosis is revealed: whether phobic, hysterical, or obsessive,the neurosis is a 'from question that being poses for the subiect where it was before the subject came into the world' (Freud'sphrase, which he used in explaining the Oedipal complex to little Hans). 'being' referred to is that which appears in a The 'to be' and lightning moment in the void of the verb 'What I said that it posesits question for the subject. does that mean? It does not pose it before the subiect, since the subject cannot come to the place where it is posed, but it poses rt in place of the subiect, that is to Say,in that place it poses the question with the subiect, 4s one poses a problem with a p€n, or as Aristotle's man thought with his soul. Thus Freud introduced the ego into his doctrine,3s by defining it according to the resistances that are proper to it. til(rhatI have tried to convey is that these resistances are of an imaginary nature much in the same sense as those coaptative lures that the ethology of animal behaviour shows us in display or combat, and that these lures are reduced in man to the narcissistic relation introduced by Freud, which I have elaborated in my essay on the mirror stage. I have tried to show that by situating in this ego the synthesis of the perceptual functions in which the sensorimotor selections are integrated, Freud seems to abound in that delegation that is traditionally supposed to represent reality for the ego, and that this reality is all the more included in the suspension of the ego. For this €Bo,which is notable in the first instance for the imaginary inertias that it concentratesagainst the message of the unconscious, operates solely with a view to covering the displacement constituted by the subject with a resistancethat is essential to the discourse as such. That is why an exhaustion of the mechanisms of defence, which Fenichel" the practitioner shows us so well in his studies of analytic technique (while his whole reduction on the theoretical level of neuroses and psychosesto genetic anomalies in libidinal de38This and the next paragraphwererewritten solelywith a view to greaterclarity of expression(note ry68)' t|"'l 3eOtto Fenichel (r 8gg- rg 46), Austrian psychoanalyst. lEds.l

velopment is pure platitude), manifests itself, without Fenichel's accounting for it or realizing it himself, as simply the reverseside of the mechanisms of the unconscious. Periphrasis, hyperbaton, ellipsis, suspension, anticipation, retraction, negation, digression, irony, these are the figures of sryle (Quintilian's figurae sententiarum); as catachresis,litotes, antonomasia, hypotyposis are the tropes, whose terms suggestthemselvesas the most proper for the labelling of these mechanisms. Can one really see these as mere figures of speechwhen it is the figures themselvesthat are the active principle of the rhetoric of the discoursethat the analysandin fact utters? By persisting in describing the nature of resistance as a permanent emotional state' thus making it alien to the discourse,today's psychoanalystshave simply shown that they have fallen under the blow of one of the fundamental truths that Freud rediscovered through psychoanalysis. One is never h"ppy making way for a new truth, for it always means making our way into it: the truth is always 'We cannot even manage to get used to disturbitrg. the real. The truth we repress. to used it. We are Now it is quite specially necessaryto the scientist, to the seer,even to the quack, that he should be the only one to know. The idea that deep in the simplest (and even sickest) of souls there is something ready to blossom is bad enough! But if someone seemsto know as much as they about what we ought to make of it . . . then the categoriesof primitive, prelogical, archaic, or even magical thought, so easy to impute to others, rush to our aid ! It is not right that these nonentities keep us breathless with enigmas that prove to be only too unreliableTo interpret the unconscious as Freud did, one would have to be as he was, an encyclopedia of the arts and muses,as well as an assiduousreader of the Fliegende Bkitter.ooAnd the task is made no easier by the fact that we are at the mercy of a thread woven with allusions, quotations, puns, and equivocations. And is that our profession, to be antidotes to trifles ? Yet that is what we must resign ourselves to. The unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual; what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier. The three books that one might call canonical a0A Germancomic newspaperof the late nineteenthand earlytwentieth centuries.[Tr.]

The Agency of tbe Letter in the (Jnconscious or Reason Since Freud with regard to the unconscious-.The Interpretation of Dreaffis', 'The Psychopathology ofEveryday Life', and 'Jokes and their Relation to the unconscious'-are simply a web of exampleswhose development is inscribed in the formulas of connexion and substitution (though carried to the tenth degree by their particular complexity-diagrams of tt*are sometimes provided by Freud by way of illustration); these are the formulas we give to the signifier in its transference-function. For in 'The Interpretation of Dreams' it is in the senseof such a function that the term tlbertragultg,or transference, is introduced, which later gave its name ro the mainspring of the intersubjective link between analysi and analysand. such diagrams are not only constitutive of each of the symptoms in a neurosis, but they alone make possible the understanding of the thematic of its course and resolution. The great case-historiesprovided by Freud demonstrate this admirably. Tlo fall back on a more limited incident, but one more likely to provide us with the final seal on our proposition, let me cite the article on fetishism of rg2Trot and the caseFreud reports there of apatient who, to achieve sexual satisfaction, needed a certain shine on the nose (Glanz auf der Nase); analysis showed that his earlS English-speakingyears had seen the displacement of the burning curiosity that he felt for the phallus of his mother, that is to say, for that eminent manque-d-0tre, for that want-tobe, whose privileged signifier Freud revealed ro us, into a glance at the noseo' inthe forgotten language of his childhood, rather than a shine on the iose.o' It is the abyss opened up at the thought that a thought should make itself heard in the that "bys provoked resistanceto psychoanalysis from the outset. And not, as is commonly said, the emphasis on man's sexualiry. This latter has after all been the dominant object in literature throughout the ages. And in fact the more recent evolution of psychoanalysis has succeededby a bit of comical iegerdemain in turning it into a quite moral affairrthe cradle and trysting-place of oblativity and attraction. The Platonic setting of the soul, blessed and illuminated, rises straighr to paradise. The intolerable scandal in the time before FreudarFetischismus, G. w. XIV: :'rr; '.FetishiSh,,collected V: r98 ; StandardEdition XXI: r49. [Au.] ,^!ap9rs, a2Englishin the original. [Tr.] a3English in the original. [fr.j

7 Sj

ian sexuality was sanctified was that it was so .intellectual'. It was precisely in that that it showed itself to be the worthy ally of all those rerrorists whose plottings were going to ruin society. At a time when psychoanalysts are busy remodelling psychoanalysis into a right-thinking movement whose crowning expressionis the ,o.i,ological poem of the autonomous €go,I would like ,o ,"-y,,o all those who are listening to me, how they can'i"rognize bad psychoanalysts;this is by the word they use to deprecate all technical or theoretical research that carries forward the Freudian experience along its authentic lines. That word is intellectualization'-slrssrable to all those who, living in fear of being tried and found wanting by the wine of rruth, spit on the bread of men, although their slaver can no longer have any effect other than that of leavening.

ilI. THp Lprrnn, BuNG AND THE OTHTR44 Is what thinks in my place, then, another I ? Does Freud's discovery represent the confirmation, on the level of psychological experience, of Manicheism ?o' In fact, there is no confusion on this point: what Freud's researchesled us to is not a few more or less curious casesof split person ality. Even at the heroic epoch I have been describi.g, when, like the animals in fairy stories, sexualiry talked, the demonic atmosphere that such an orientation might have given rise to never mater ialtzed.o, The end that Freud's discovery proposes for man was defined by him at the apex of his thought in these moving terms: wo es wur, soll lch werden. r must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmonS I could even say of reconciliation (Versohnung). aaLa lettre I'Atre et l'autre. [Au.] aione 9f qy colleagu* *.t t to f"r in this directionas to wonder if the id (Es) of the last phasewasn'tin fact the 'f"d ego'. (It shouldnow be obviouswhom I am refernng to-t965.) [Au.] a5Note,nonethelgss, the tott. with which one spoke in that-peqiodof the.'elfinpranks' of the ur.orrriious; a work of Silberer'sis called Der zufatt und die Kobo'ld_ streichedes unbewussten(chance and the Elfin tii.k, of the unconscious)-completelyanachronisticin the contextof our presentsoul-managers. [Au.]

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But if we ignore the self's radical ex-centricity to itself with which man is confronted, in other words, the truth discovered by Freud, we shall falsify both the order and methods of psychoanalytic mediation; we shall make of it nothing more than the compromise operation that it has, in effect, become, ,r"*lly, just what the letter as well as the spirit of Freud's work most repudiates. For since he constantly invoked the notion of compromise as supporting all the miseriesthat his analysisis supposed to assuage,we can Saythat any recourse to compromise, explicit or implicit, will necessarilydisorient action and plunge it into darkness. psychoanalytic ^ 'grrt neither does it suffice to associate oneself with the moralistic tartufferies of our time or to be 'total personforever spouting something about the aliry' in order to have said anything articulate about the possibility of mediation. The radical heteronomy that Freud's discovery shows gaping within man can never again be covered over without whatever is used to hide it being profoundly dishonest. 'Who, then, is this other to whom I am more attached than to myself, since, at the heart of my assent to my own identity it is still he who agitates me ? His presencecan be understood only at a second degreeof otherness,which already placeshim in the position of mediating between me and the double of myself, as it were with my counterpart. If I have said that the unconscious is the discourse of the Other (with a capital O), it is in order to indicate the beyond in which the recognition of desire is bound up with the desire for recognition. In other words this other is the Other that even my lie invokes as a guarantor of the truth in which it subsists. By which we can also see that it is with the appearance of language the dimension of truth emerges. Prior to this point, we can recognize in the psychological relation, which can be easily isolated in the observation of animal behaviour, the existence of subiects, not by means of some proiective miragq the phanrom of which a certain type of psychologist delights in hacking to pieces, but simply on account of the manifested presenceof intersubjectivity. In the animal hidden in his lookout, in the well-laid tt"p of certain others, in the feint by which an apparent straggler leads a predator away from

the flock, something more emergesthan in the fascinating display of mating or combat ritual. Yet there is nothing even there that transcends the function of lure in the serviceof a need, or which affirms a presencein that beyond-the-veil where the whole ofN"trrre can be questioned about its design. For there even to be a question (and we know 'Beyond the that it is one Freud himself posed in PleasurePrinciple'), there must be language' For I can lure my adversary by means of a movement contrary to my actual plan of battle, and this movement will have its deceiving effect only in so far as I produce it in realiry and for my adversary. But in the propositions with which I open peace negotiations with him, what my negotiations propoi. to him is situated in a third locus which is neither my speechnor my interlocutor. This locus is none other than the locus of signifying convention , of the sort revealed in the comedy 'S(hy do oflhe sad plaint of the Jew to his crony: you tell me you are going to Cracow so I'l[ believe you are going to Lvov, when you really are going to Cracow?' Of course the flock-movement I iust spoke of could be understood in the conventional context of game-strategy, where it is a rule that I deceive my but in that case my successis evaluated "du.tt"rn within the connotation of betrayal, that is to say, in relation to the Other who is the guarantor of Good Faith. Here the problems are of an order the heteronomy of which is completely misconstrued (mdcon'awarenessof others', or whatnue) if reduced to an 'existence of the ever we choose to call it. For the the ears of reached time other' having once upon a partition the through psychoanalysis the Midas of that separateshim from the secret meetings of the phenomenologists, the news is now being whis'Midas, King Midas, is the pered through the reeds: has said it.' himself He patient. bther of his \[hat sort of breakthrough is that? The other, what other? The young Andr6 Gide,o' defying the landlady to whom his mother had confided him to treat him as a responsible person, opening with a key (false only in that it opened all locks of the same make) the lock that this lady took to be a worthy signifier of her educational intentions, and doing it quite oba7Andr|Gide (t86g-r95r), Frenchnovelist.[Eds.]

The Agencyof the Letter in the Unconsciousor ReasonSinceFreud 'other' was he aiming viously for her benefit-what at? She who was supposed to intervene and to 'Do you think my obewhom he would then say: dience can be securedwith a ridiculous lock?'. But by remaining out of sight and holding her peaceuntil that evening in order, after primly greeting his return, to lecture him like a child, she showed him not iust another with the face of anger, but another Andr6 Gide who is no longer sure, either then or later in thinking back on it, of just what he really meant to do-whose own truth has been changed by the doubt thrown on his good faith. Perhaps it would be worth our while pausing a moment over this empire of confusion which is none other than that in which the whole human opera-buffa plays itself out, in order to understand the ways in which analysis can proceed not just to restore an order but to found the conditions for the possibiliry of its restoration. 'Wesen, the nucleus of our being, Kern unseres but it is not so much that Freud commands us to seek it as so many others before him have with the '-3s to reconsider the empty adage'Know thyself ways that lead to it, and which he shows us. Or rather that which he proposes for us to attain is not that which can be the object of knowledge, but that (doesn't he tell us as much?) which creates our being and about which he teaches us that we bear witness to it as much and more in our whims, our aberrations, our phobias and fetishes,as in our more or less civilized personalities. Madness, you are no longer the obf ect of the ambiguous praise with which the sage decorated the impregnable burrow of his f.ear; and if after all he finds himself tolerably at home there, it is only because the supreme agent forever at work digging its tunnels is none other than reason, the very Logos that he serves. So how do you imagine that a scholar with so 'commitments' little talent for the that solicited him in his age (as they do in all ages),that a scholar such as Erasmus held such an eminent place in the revolution of the Reformation in which man has as much of a stake in each man as in all men? The answer is that the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of exegesis,changes the whole course of histo ry by modifying the moorings that anchor his being. It is precisely in this that Freudianism, however

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misunderstood it has been, and however confused its consequenceshave been, to anyone capable of perceiving the changeswe have lived through in our own lives, is seento have founded an intangible but radical revolution. There is no point in collecting ot witnessesto the fact: everything involving not just the human sciences,but the destiny of man, politics, metaphysics, literature, the arts, advertising, propaganda, and through these even economics, everything has been affected. Is all this anything more than the discordant effects of an immense truth in which Freud traced for us a clear path ? rUThatmust be said, however, is that any technique that basesits claim on the mere psychological categorization of its obiect is not following this path, and this is the case of psychoanalysis today except in so far as we return to the Freudian discovery. Furthermore, the vulgarity of the concepts by which it recommends itself to uS, the embroidery of pseudo-Freudianism (frofreudisme) which is no longer anything but decoration, as well as the bad repute in which it seemsto prosper, all bear witness to its fundamental betrayal of its founder. By his discovery, Freud brought within the circle of science the boundary between the object and being that seemedto mark its outer limit. That this is the symptom and the prelude of a reexamination of the situation of man in the existent such as has been assumed up to the present by all our postulates of knowledge-dsnrt be content, I b.g of you, to write this off as another case of HeideggerianiSffi,o' even prefixed by a neo- that adds nothing to the dustbin style in which currently, by the use of his ready-made mental jetsam, one excusesoneself from any real thought. \il7hen I speak of Heidegg€r, or rather when I translate him, I at least make the effort to leave the speech he proffers us its sovereign significance. 48To pick the most recentin date,FranEoisMauriac,in the Figaro littdraire of z5 May, apologizesfor refusing 'to tell the story of his life'. If no one thesedayscan undertake to do that with the old enthusiasm,the reasonis that, 'a half centurysince,Freud,whateverwe think of him' hasalreadypassedthat way.And afterbeingbriefly temptedby the old saw that this is only the 'history of our body', Mauriac returns to the truth that his sensitiviry as a writer makeshim face:to write the history of oneselfis to write the confessionof the deepestpart of our neighbours'soulsas well. [Au.] oeSeeMartin Heidegger. [Eds.]

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If I speak of being and the letter, if I distinguish the other and the Other, it is because Freud shows me that they are the terms to which must be referred the effects of resistance and transference against which, in the twenty years I have engagedin *h", we all call after him the impossible practice of psychoanalysis, I have done unequal battle. And it is also becauseI must help others not to lose their way there. li is to prevent the field of which they are the inheritors from becoming barren, and for that reason to make it understood that if the symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so' any more than to t"y that man's desire is a metonymy. For the

symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not' as desire is a metonyffiy, however funny people may find the idea. Finalln if I am to rouse you to indignation over the fact that, after so many centuries of religious hypocrisy and philosophical bravado, nothing has yet been validly articulated as to what links metaphor to the question of being and metonymy to its lack, there must be an obiect there to answer to that indignation both as its instigator and its victim: that object is humanistic man and the credit, hopelessly affirmed, which he has drawn over his intentions. 14-z6May, rgiT

Mar.trnHeidegger r889-r976

ARrIN HelnnccER, the famous philosopher of Being and Time and many other important works, is especiallyimportant to liter ary criti-

cism for his theory and practice of phenomenologicalhermeneutics."Hermeneutics"is usually translatedas "interpretationr" but Heidegger'stheory of interpretationis complicatedby his awareness of a variety of problemsfrequently ignored by his predecessors. The term comes,Heideggerinforms us, from the Greek verb hermeneuein,relatedto the name of Hermes,bringer of messages. But Heideggerassertsthat the bringing of a messageis alwaysa listening aswell and is thereforea sort of intersubjectivedialoguebetweeninterpreter and interpretant, in which being emerges.Thus Heideggeremphasizesthe remark "we have been a conversation"in the essayon the German poet J. C. F. Holderlin (r77o-r84) that follows here.It is an excellentexampleof Heideggertway with a text. For Heidegger,all interpretationsare in time, and the temporal situation governsand is part of the interpretationitself. Another word for this is "fore-sight" or the position from which one interprets.At the sametime, interpretationis not a subjectivedomination of the text. It is a striving to let the text be, or to listen. The mediumof all of this is language,which Heideggerregardsasa power rather than a tool, and a power in which man lives.To discoverthe origin of languageis impossible,for it is in onesensepreviousto man,beingwhat composes him or in which he lives. Heideggertherefore claims that not only does man speak language,languagespeaksman. For Heidegger,the usual analytic procedureson the analogyof scienceand the production of technologydo not let be and listen but insteaddominate.This sort of subjectivemastery or subjectism,Heidegger's hermeneuticsopposes. The result is a mode of interpretationthat vergeson the poetic, for the poetic is for Heideggerthe hermeneutic.Thereis no real differencebetweenphilosophy and poetry. Both are hermeneutic,and Heidegger'sown discourseabout poetry or poemshas characteristicsof the poemshe is apparentlydiscussing-except that "discussion"is hardly the word. The aim is to open up by performing a linguisticmediation,conversingwith the text. Heideggeris one of thoseresponsible for a notion that has frequently beenuttered in recentcritical theory that criticism is itself literature (see,for example,Hartman). This view tendsto assimilate all languageto poetry rather than declaring poetry some special and curious form of language,conceivedof in its purity on the model of symbolic logic or mathematics.The latter view may be tracedback asfar asSocrates'remarkin the Republic(CTSP,p. 38) that one ought to giveup poetry and trust mathematicsif 757

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MenrIN Hnrorccnn one wants to approachthe truth. The former view is held by Vico and a number of poetsin the romantic Period. I-port"nt translatedworks by Heidegger'particularly for literary theorn are Being and Time (rgz7, trans. ry62); Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (t925-26, trans. r97z); An lntroduction to Metapbysics(r95i, trans' t974); tir"ilty and Diffeience(1957, trans. 1957); The.End of Pbilosopfu f162, trans. t97z); On' the Way to-Language(r97r); and Poetry,Language'Thought (r97x),'which containsthe well-knownessay"The Origin of the'Work of Art" Philosopby,which infty6).see Michael Murray, ed.,Heideggerand Mgderl cl,ri.s a bibliography of Heidegger'swork and works about him.

HOLDERLINAND THE, OFPOETRY ESSE,NCE, Tnp Fryn PotNrERs r.

'Sflriting poetry: "That most innocent of all occupations." (tlt, 377)

z. "Therefore has language, most dangerous of possessions,been given to man . . . so that he may affirm what he is. . . ." (w, 246) 3. "Much has man learnt. Many of the heavenly ones has he named, Sincewe have been a conversation And have been able to hear from one another." (tv,i +i) 4. "But that which remains, is establishedby the poets." (tv, $) 5. "Full of merit, and yet poeticallS dwells Man on this earth." (vr, z5) \(rhy has Holderlin's work been chosen for the purpose of showing the essenceof poetry? \ilhy not Ho-.t or Sophocles,why not Virgil or Dante, why not Shakespeareor Goethe? The essenceof poetry is realized in the works of thesepoets too, and more OFPOETnvis from ErlautsOror,nLINANDTHEESSENCE (r95I) and is reprinted enungenzu Hiilderlins Dichtung'Werner Broch, by perfrom Existenceand Being, ed. missionof the publishers,RegneryGateway'Inc., copyright 1967.

richly even, than in the creative work of Holderlin, which breaks off so early and abruptly. This may be so. And yet Holderlin has been chosen, and he alone. But generally speaking is it possible for the universal essenceof poetry to be iead off from the work of one single poet? Whatever is universal, that is to say, what is valid for many, can only be reached through a process of comparison. For this, one requires a sample containing the greatestpossible diversity of poems and kinds of poetry. From this point of view Holderlin's poetry is only one among many others. By itself it can in no way suffice as a criterion for determining the essenceof poetry. Hence we fail in our purpose at the very outset. Certainly-so long as we take "essenceof poetry" to mean what is gathered together into a universal concept, which is then valid in the same way for every poem. But this universal which thus applies equally to every particular, is always the indifferent, that essencewhich can never become essendal. Yet it is precisely this essentialelement of the essence that we are searching for-that which compels use to decide whether we are going to take poerry seriously and if so ho*, whether and to what extent we can bring with us the presuppositions necessary if we afe to come under the sway of poetry. Holderlin has not been chosen becausehis work, one among many, realizes the universal essenceof poetry, but solely because Holderlin's poetry was 6ot.,. on by the poetic vocation to write expressly of the essenceof poetry. For us Holderlin is in a preeminent sensethe poet of the poet. That is why he compels a decision. But-to write about the poet, is this not a symp-

Hiilderlin and tlte Essence of Poetry tom of a perverted narcissism and at the same time a confession of inadequate richness of vision ? To write about the poet, is that not a senselessexaggeration, something decadent and a blind alley? The answer will be given in what follows. To be sure, the path by which we reach the answer is one of expediency. We cannot here, as would have to be done, expound separately each of Holderlin's poems one after the other. Instead let us take only five pointers which the poet gave on the subject of poetry. The necessaryorder in these sayings and their inner connectednessought to bring before our eyes the essentialessenceof poetry. I.

In a letter to his mother in Janu aty, 1799, Holderlin calls the writing of poetry "rhat most innocent of all occupations" (lrr, 377). To what exrent is it the "most innocent" ? \Triting poetry appears in the modest guise of play. unfettered, it invents its world of images and remains immersed in the realm of the imagined. This play thus avoids the seriousnessof decisions, which always in one way or another create guilt. Hence writing poetry is completely harmless. And at the same time it is ineffectual, since it remains mere saying and speaking. It has nothing about it of action, which grasps hold directly of the real and alters ir. Poerry is like a dream, and not reality; a playing with words, and not the seriousnessof action. Poetry is harmless and ineffectual. For what can be less dangerous than mere speech?But in taking poerry ro be the "most innocent of all occupationsr" we have not yet comprehended its essence.At any rate this gives us an indication of where we must look for it. poetry creates its works in the realm and out of the "material" of language. \flhat does Holderlin say about language?Let us hear a second saying of the poet. 2.

rn a fragmentary sketch, dating from the same period (r8oo) as the letter just quoted, the poer says: But man dwells in huts and wraps himself in the bashful garment, since he is more fervent and more attentive too in watching over the spirit, as the priestess the divine flame; this is his understanding. And therefore he has been given arbitrariness,and to him, godlike, has been given higher power to com-

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mand and to accomplish, and therefore has language, most dangerous of possessions, been given to man, so that creating, destroyirg, and perishing and rerurning to the everliving, to the mistress and mother, he may affirm what he is-that he has inherited, learned from thee, thy most divine possession, all-preservinglove. (w, 246) Language, the field of the "most innocent of all occupations," is the "most dangerous of possessions." How can thesetwo be reconciled?Let us put this question aside from the moment and consider 'whose the three preliminary questions: r. possession is language? z. To what extent is it the most dangerous of possessions ? 3. In what sense is it really a possession? First of all we notice where this saying about language occurs: in the sketch for a poem which is to describewho man is, in contrast to the other beings of nature; mention is made of the rose, the swans, the stag in the forest (rv, 3oo and l8s).So, distinguishing plants from animals, the fragment begins: "But man dwells in huts." And who then is man? He who must affirm what he is. To affirm means to declare; but at the same time it means: to give in the declaration a guarantee of what is declared. Man is he who he ls, precisely in the affirmation of his own existence. This affirmation does not mean here an additional and supplementary expression of human existence, but it does in the processmake plain the existenceof man. But what must man affirm? That he belongs to the earth. This relation of belonging to consists in the fact that man is heir and learner in all things. But all thesethings are in conflict. Thar which keeps things apart in opposition and thus at the same time binds them together, is called by Holderlin "intimacy." The affirmation of belonging to this intimacy occurs through the creation of a world and its ascent, and likewise through the destruction of a world and its decline. The affirmation of human existence and hence its essential consummation occurs through freedom of decision. This freedom lays hold of tle necessary and places itself in the bonds of a supreme obligation. This bearing witness of belonging to all that is existent becomes actual as histoty. In order that history may be possible, language has been given to man. It is one of man's possessions. But to what extent is language the "most danger-

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ous of possessions"? It is the danger of all dangers, becauseit creates initially the possibility of a danger. Danger is the threat to existence from what is existent. But now it is only by virtue of language at all that man is exposed to something manifest, which, as what is existent, afflicts and enflames man in his existence,and as what is nonexistent deceives and disappoints. It is language which first createsthe manifest conditions for menaceand confusion to existence, and thus the possibility of the loss of existence, that is to say-danger. But language is not only the danger of dangers, but necessarily concealsin itself a continual danger for itself. Language has the task of making manifest in its work the existent, and of preserving it as such. In it, what is purest and what is most concealed,and likewise what is complex and ordinarn can be expressedin words. Even the essentialword, if it is to be understood and so become a possessionin common, must make itself ordinary. Accordingly it is remarked in another fragment of Holderlin's: "Thou spokest to the Godhead, but this you have all forgotten, that the first-fruits are never for mortals, they belong to the gods. The fruit must become more ordinary, more everyday, and then it will be mortals' own" (tv, 48). The pure and the ordinary are both equally something said. Hence the word as word never gives any direct guarantee as to whether it is an essentialword or a counterfeit. On the conessential word often looks in its simtrary-an plicity like an unessential one. And on the other hand that which is dressedup to look like the essential is only something recited by heart or repeated. Therefore language must constantly present itself in an appearancewhich it itself attests, and hence endanger what is most characteristic of it, the genuine saying. In what sense however is this most dangerous Language is his own thing one of man's possessions? property. It is at his disposal for the purpose of communicating his experiences,resolutions and moods. Language servesto give information. As a fit instrument for this, it is a "possession."But the essenceof language does not consist entirely in being a means of giving information. This definition does not touch its essentialessence,but merely indicates an effect of its essence.Language is not a mere tool, one of the many which man possesses;on the contrary, it is only language that affords the very possibility of standing in the openness of the existent.

Only where there is language, is there world, i.e., the perpetually altering circuit of decision and production, of action and responsibilitS but also of commotion and arbitrariness, of decay and confusion. Only where world predominates, is there history. Language is a possessionin a more fundamental sense.It is good for the fact that (i.e., it affords a guarantee that) man can exist historically. Language is not a tool at his disposal, rather it is that event which disposesof the supreme possibility of 'We must first of all be certain of human existence. this essenceof language, in order to comprehend truly the sphere of action of poetry and with it poetry itself. How does language become actual? In order to find the answer to this question, let us consider a third saying of Holderlin's. 3. \il7ecome across this saying in a long and involved sketch for the unfinished poem which begins "Versohnender, der du nimmergeglaubt . . ." (IV, fizff.

and tgtr): Much has man learnt. Many of the heavenly ones has he named, Since we have been a conversation And have been able to hear from one another. (tv,J$) Let us first pick out from these lines the part so which has a direct bearing on what we have said 'Wefar: "Since we have been a conversation . . ." mankind-are a conversation. The being of men is founded in language. But this only becomes actual in conuersation. Nevertheless the latter is not merely a manner in which language is put into effect, rather it is only as conversation that language is essential. \7hat we usually mean by language, namelR a stock of words and syntactical rules, is only a threshold of language. But now what is meant by " a conversation" ? PlainlS the act of speaking with others about somethittg. Then speakittg also brings about the process of coming together. But Holderlin says: "Since we have been a conversation and have been able to hear from one another." Being able to hear is not a mere consequence of speaking with one another, on the contrary it is rather presupPosedin the latter process. But even the ability to hear is itself also adapted to

Hiilderlin and the Essence of Poetry the possibility of the word and makes use of it. The ability to speak and the abiliry to hear are equally that fundamental. \(e are a conversation-and 'We are a means: we can hear from one another. conversation, that always means at the same time: we are a single conversation. But the unity of a conversation consists in the fact that in the essential word there is always manifest that one and the same thing on which we agree,and on the basis of which we are united and so are essentiallyourselves.Conversation and its unity support our existence. But Holderlin does not say simply, we are a conversation-but: "Since we have been a conversa'Vfhere the human faculty of speech is tion . . ." present and is exercised, that is not by itself sufficient for the essential actualization of languageconversation. Since when have we been a conversation ? \Ufherethere is to be a single conversation, the essentialword must be constantly related to the one and the same. \Tithout this relation an argument too is absolutely impossible. But the one and the same can only be manifest in the light of something perpetual and permanent. Yet permanenceand perpetuiry only appear when what persistsand is present begins to shine. But that happens in the moment when time opens out and extends. After man has placed himself in the presence of something perpetual, then only can he expose himself to the changeable,to that which comes and goes; for only the persistent is changeable.Only after "ravenous time" has been riven into present, past and future, does the possibility arise of agreeing on something permanent. We have been a single conversation since the time when it "is time." Ever since time arose, we have existed historically. Both-existence as a single conversation and historical existenceare alike ancient, they belong together and are the same thing. Since we have been a conversation_man has learnt much and named many of the heavenly ones. Since language really became actual as conversation, the gods have acquired names and a world has appeared. But again it should be noticed: the presence of the gods and the appearance of the world are not merely a consequenceof the actualization of language, they are contemporaneous with it. And this to the extent that it is precisely in the naming of the gods, and in the transmutation of the world into word, that the real conversation, which we ourselves ar% consists.

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But the gods can acquire a name only by addressing and, 4S it were, claiming us. The word which names the gods is always a responseto such a claim. This response always springs from the responsibility of a destiny. It is in the process by which the gods bring our existence to language that we enter the sphere of the decision as to whether we are to yield ourselves to the gods or withhold ourselves from them. Only now can we appreciate in its entirefy what is meant byr "Since we have been a conversation . . ." Since the gods have led us into conversation, since time has been time, ever since then the basis of our existencehas been a conversation.The proposition that language is the supreme event of human existence has through it acquired its meaning and foundation. But the question at once arises: how does this conversation, which we arq begin? Who accomplishes this naming of the gods? \fho lays hold of something permanent in ravenous time and fixes it in the word ? Hdlderlin tells us with the sure simplicity of the poet. Let us hear a fourth saying. 4. This saying forms the conclusion of the poem "Remembrance" and runs: But that which remains, is establishedby the poets. (w, 63) This saying throws light on our question about the essenceof poetry. Poetry is the act of establish'What ing by the word and in the word. is established in this manner? The permanent. But can the permanent be establishedthen ? Is it not that which has always been present? No! Even the permanent must be fixed so that it will not be carried awaS the simple must be wrested from confusion, proportion must be set before what lacks proportion. That which supports and dominates the existent in its entirety must become manifest. Being must be opened out, so that the existent may appear. But this very permanent is the transitory. "Thus, swiftly passing is everything heavenly; but not in vain" (rv, r 6 jf .). But that this should remain, is "Entrusted to the poets as a care and a service" (ry, r4S). The poet names the gods and names all things in that which they are. This naming does not consist merely in

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something already known being supplied with a name; it is rather that when the poet speaks the essential word, the existent is by this naming nominated as what it is. So it becomesknown Asexistent. Poetry is the establishing of being by means of the word. Hence that which remains is never taken from the transitory. The simple can never be picked out immediately from the intricate. Proportion does 'We never find the not lie in what lacks proportion. foundation in what is bottomless. Being is never an existent. But, because being and essenceof things can never be calculated and derived from what is present, they must be freely created, laid down and given. Such a free act of giving is establishment. But when the gods are named originally and the essenceof things receivesa name, so that things for the first time shine out, human existenceis brought into a firm relation and given a basis.The speechof the poet is establishment not only in the sense of the free act of giving, but at the same time in the senseof the firm basing of human existenceon its foundation. If we conceivethis essenceof poetry as the establishing of being by means of the word, then we can have some inkling of the truth of that saying which Holderlin spoke long after he had been received into the protection of the night of lunacy.

t. \7e find this fifth pointer in the long and at the same time monstrous poem which begins: In the lovely azure there flowers with its Metallic roof the church-tower(vt, z,4tr) Here Holderlin says (line 3zf.): Full of merit, and yet poeticallS dwells Man on this earth. rUfhat man works at and pursues is through his 6(Js1"-says own endeavors earned and deserved. not touch this does all Holderlin in sharp antithesis, the essenceof his sojourn on this earth' all this does not reach the foundation of human existence. The latter is fundamentally "poetic." But we now understand poetry as the inaugural naming of the gods and of the essenceof things. To "dwell poetically" means: to stand in the presence of the gods and to be involved in the proximity of the essenceof

things. Existence is "poetical" in its fundamental aspect-which means at the same time: in so far as it is established (founded), it is not a recomPense, but a gift. Poetry is not merely an ornament accompanyirg existence, not merely a temporary enthusiasm or nothing but an interest and amusement. Poetry is the foundation which supports history, and therefore it is not a mere appearance of culture, and absolutely not the mere "expression" of a "culture-soul." That our existence is fundamentally poetic, this cannot in the last resort mean that it is really only a harmless game. But does not Holderlin himself, in the first pointer which we quoted, call poetry "That most innocent of all occupations" ? How can this be reconciled with the essenceof poetry as we are now revealing it? This brings us back to the question which we laid asidein the first instance.In now proceeding to answer this question, we will try at the same time to sum marrze and bring before the inner eye the essenceof poetry and of the poet. First of all it appeared that the field of action of poetry is language. Hence the essenceof poetry must be understood through the essenceof language. Afterwards it became clear that poetry is the inaugural naming of being and of the essenceof all just any speech, but that particular things-not the first time brings into the open all for which kind that which we then discuss and deal with in everyd"y language. Hence poetry never takes language as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible. Poetry is the primitive languageof ahistorical people. Therefore, in just the reversemanner, the essenceof language must be understood through the essenceof poetry. The foundation of human existence is conversation, in which language does truly become actual. But primitive language is poetry, in which being is established.Yet language is the "most dangerous of possessions." Thus poetry is the most dangerous work-and at the same time the "most innocent of all occupations." In fact-it is only if we combine these two definitions and conceive them as one that we fully comprehend the essenceof PoetrY. But is poetry then truly the most dangerous work? In a letter to a friend, immediately before leaving on his last journey to France, Holderlin writes: "O Friendl The world lies before me brighter than it was, and more serious. I feel pleasure at how it

Hdlderlin and the Essenceof Poetry

r;ruLii: ;ff'[,'Jl;: ilffi:l;iii;l'::' nings of benediction out of the rosy clouds.' For amongst all that I can perceiveof God, this sign has become for me the chosen one. I used to be able to exult over a new truth, a better insight into that which is above us and around us, now I am frightened lest in the end it should happen with me as with Tantalus of old, who received more from the gods than he was able to digest" (vr3 zr). The poet is exposed to the divine lightnings. This is spoken of in the poem which we must recognize as the purest poetry about the essenceof poetry, and which begins: When on festive days a countryman goes To gaze on his field, in the morning . . . (tv, r5rff) There, the last stanza says: Yet it behoves us, under the storms of God, Ye poets ! with uncovered head to stand, tUfith our own hand to grasp the very lightning-flash Paternal, and to pass, wrapped in song, The divine gift to the people. And a year later, when he had returned to his mother's house, struck down with madness, Hdlderlin wrote to the same friend, recalling his stay in France: "The mighry element, the fire of heaven and the stillness of men, their life amid nature, and their limitation and contentment, have constantly seized ffie, and, as it is told of the heroes, I can truly say that I have been struck by Apollo" (v, jL7). The excessivebrightnesshas driven the poet into the dark. Is any further evidence necessaryas to the extreme danger of his "occupation" ? The very destiny itself of the poet tells everythirg. The passagein Holderlin's "Empedocles" rings like a premonition: He, through whom the spirit speaks,must leave betimes. (ttI, r 54) And nevertheless:poetry is the "most innocent of all occupations," Holderlin writes to this effect in his letter, not only in order to spare his mother, but becausehe knows that this innocent fringe belongs

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to the essenceof poetry, iust as the valley does to the mountain; for how could this most dangerouswork be carried on and preserved, if the poet were not "cast out" ("Empedocles" III, T9r) from everyday life and protect ed against it by the apparent harmlessnessof his occupation? Poetry looks like a game and yet it is not. A game does indeed bring men together, but in such a way that each forgets himself in the process. In poetry on the other hand, man is reunited on the foundation of his existence.There he comes to rest; not indeed to the seemingrest of inactivity and emptiness of thought, but to that infinite state of rest in which all powers and relations are active (cf. the letter to his brother, dated rst Janudty, 1799. III, 368f). Poetry rousesthe appearanceof the unreal and of dream in the faceof the palpable and clamorous reality, in which we believeourselvesat home. And yet in iust the reversemanner, what the poet says and undertakes to b., is the real. So Pathea, with the clairvoyance of a friend, declares of "Empedocles" (rrt, Z8): That he himself should be, is rilfhat is life, and the rest of us are dreams of it. So in the very appearance of its outer fringe the essenceof poetry seemsto waver and yet stands firm. In fact it is itself essentiallyestablishment-that is to say: an act of firm foundation. Yet every inaugural act remains a free gift, and Holderlin hears it said: "Let poets be free as swallows" (tv, r 68 ). But this freedom is not undisciplined arbitrariness and capricious desire, but supreme necessity. Poetry, as the act of establishing being, is subject to a twofold control. In considering these integral laws we first grasp the essenceentire. The writing of poetry is the fundamental naming of the gods. But the poetic word only acquires its power of naming when the gods themselvesbring us to language. How do the gods speak? . . . . And signs to us from antiquity are the language of the gods. (rv, r35) The speechof the poet is the intercepting of these signs, in order to pass them on to his own people. This intercepting is an act of receiving and yet at the

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same time a fresh act of giving; for "in the first signs" the poet catches sight already of the completed message and in his word boldly presents what he has glimpsed, so as to tell in advanceof the not-yet-fulfilled. So: . . . the bold spirit, like an eagle Before the tempests, flies prophesying In the path of his advancing gods. (rv, r35) The establishment of being is bound to the signs of the gods. And at the same time the poetic word is only the interpretation of the "voice of the peopl.." This is how Holderlin names the sayingsin which a people remembers that it belongs to the totality of all that exists. But often this voice grows dumb and weary. In general even it is not capable of saying of itself what is true, but has need of those who explain it. The poem which bears the title "Voice of the People," has been handed down to us in two versions. It is above all the concluding stanzas which are different, but the difference is such that they supplement one another. In the first version the ending runs: Becauseit is pious, I honor for love of the heavenly ones The people'svoice, the tranquil, Yet for the sake of gods and men M"y it not always be tranquil too willingly ! (rv,r4r) And the second version is: ... andtruly Sayings are good, for they are a reminder Of the Highest, yet something is also needed To explain the holy sayings. (w;44) In this way the essenceof poetry is joined onto the laws of the signs of the gods and of the voice of the people, laws which tend toward and away from each other. The poet himself stands between the former-the gods, and the latter-the people. He is one who has been cast out-out into that Between, between gods and men. But only and for the first time in this Between is it decided, who man is and where he is settling his existence."Poetically, dwells man on this earth."

Unceasingly and ever more secureln out of the fullness of the images pressing about him and al' ways more simplS did H6lderlin devote his poetic word to this realm of Berween. And this compels us to say that he is the poet of the poet. Can we continue now to suppose that Holderlin is entangled in an empty and exaggerated narcissism due to inadequate richness of vision ? Or must we reco gnize that this poet, from an excessof impetus, reaches out with poetic thought into the foundation and the midst of being. It is to Hdlder' lin himself that we must apply what he said of Oedipus in the late poem "In the lovely azute there flowers . . .tt: King Oedipus has one Eye too many perhaps. (vt,z6) Holderlin writes poetry about the essenceof poetry-but not in the senseof a timelesslyvalid concept. This essenceof poetry belongs to a determined time. But not in such a way that it merely conforms to this time, as to one which is already in existence. It is that Holderlin, in the act of establishingthe essenceof poetry, first determines a new time. It is the time of the gods that have fled and of the god that is coming. It is the tim e of need, becauseit lies under a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming. The essence of poetry, which Holderlin establishes, is in the highest degreehistorical, becauseit anticipates a historical time; but as a historical essenceit is the sole essentialessenceThe time is needy and therefore its poet is extremely rich-so rich that he would often like to relax in thoughts of those that have been and in eager waiting for that which is coming and would like only to sleep in this apparent emptiness. But he holds his ground in the Nothing of this night. tilfhilst the poet remains thus by himself in the supreme isolation of his mission, h. fashions truth, vicariously The seventh and therefore truly, for his people. 'Wine" (tv, tz3f-.) stanza of the elegy "Bread and tells of this. \(hat it has only been possible to analyzehere intellectually, is expressedthere poetically. "But Friend! we come too late. The gods are alive, it is true,

Hiilderlin and the Essence of Poetry But up there above one's head in another world. Eternally they work there and seem to pay little heed To whether we live, so attentive are the Heavenly Ones. For a weak vesselcannot always receive them, Only now and then does man endure divine abundance. Life is a dream of them. But madness Helps, like slumber and strengthensneed and night. Until heroes enough have grown in the iron cradle,

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Hearts like, as before, to the Heavenly in power. Thundering they come. Meanwhile it often SCCInS

Better to sleep than to be thus without companions, To wait thus, and in the meantime what to do and say I know not, and what use are poets in a time of need? But, thou sayest,they are like the wine-god's holy priests, til7ho go from land to land in the holy night."

Ludwig \fiffgenstein 1889-19jr

Tuo*r" WrrrcrrsruN's importancefor modernphilosophyand criticismlies I-r ,rot just in a set of conceptsand doctrinesbut in a distinctiveview of the lVhitehead, and Frege, purpose of philosophy.Under the influenceof Russell, Vit?g.nrt.in developedthe view that philosophy w1s not and.coxld not be a but had, instead,the distinctive aresciences asphysicsor mathematics "scie-nce" task of eluciiatingthe logicalform of propositions.I(hile his accountof logical form altered significantly from his first publishedwork, the TractatusLogicoPhilosophicu.s frgzr), to the posthumouslypublishedPhilosophicalInuestigations (i9g), his view of the eisentiallycriticalfunction of philosophyremained remarkablyconstant. In the iro"totur, Wittgenstein developedwhat has been characterizedas a "picture theory" of meaning,basedon the principlethat what a logicalproposition offersis a picture of thi logical structure of a fact. "The world is all that is the case," I0itigenstein asserts,in the famous first proposition in that early work, but he continues,in the second(andnotablylessfamoussecondproposition), "The world is the totality of facts not things." In this account,\Tittgenstein maintained that propositions could represent"the whole of reality" but could only show or displaythe logical form propositionsmust sharewith reality in order to representii (cf. #+.:ruJ.In this respect'the "pictures" in questionin the theory ari the result of a method of projection or depiction in which logical structuresare the relevant"obiects." In the preface to Philosophicallnuestigations,l7ittgenstein expressedthe def sire to republish his earlier work so as to ensurethat his later view be seen in the rightiight." The Inuestigations,for example,appearto-abandonthe picture theor| of rieaning, sincefurther work on languagehad madeit clear that aslangu"g. i, acquireJ-andused,the method of projectionor depjctioncannot be Ide[,ratety eiucidatedas if it were concernedonly with the truth valueof propositions. One might say that the differenceis a broadeningof scopefor the philosopher,sactivi-ty,languageis deployedfor many more Purposesthan making Ar hir attintion shiftedto the multifarious deployments tr,r. o, falsestatemetrrc. of language,$(ittgensteinelaboratedhis notion of the "languagegame" to show tne inlima'teand fervasivelinks betweenlanguageand "forms o{ life." The InuestigationsbegSnwitha quotation from Augustine'sConfesslozsthat ."fi.rr., the Iradition"iui.* of languagethat \rittgenstein had tacitly adopted arecombinationsof inthe Tra"tatus: thatwords nam. obJ..is and that sentences of oversimplification gross suchnames.$Tittgensteinthen proceedsto show the common a have not do this premise,in showing that expressionsin a language 766

Philosophical Inuestigations 767 essenceby virtue of which they are all included in .,language"but rather present a complex network of relations in which similarities (like ,.family ,.r.-_ blances")permit us to traversethe network and see.onn..tion, without the requirementthat words and objectsalwayscorrespond. r7ittgenstein'sinfluencehasbeenexceptionallywide, ashe hasbeenclaimedas an ancestoror progenitor for sometimesmutually incompatible views of phi_ losophy.The Tractatu.s, for-example,was especiallyimportant for the early work of philosophersin the so-calledvienna circli, including Moritz schlick, nudolph carnap, and Herbert Feigl, who elaborated the radical program of logiial positivismto eliminatemetaphysicalstatementsas meaninglessand to unifyimpirical scienceby a critique of the logical strucrureof its language.vork that led to the lnuestigations,on the other hand, was equally influentia'lin the development of linguistic and philoiophy and the theory of ..speech :ld1rly language" 'waismann, acts" in the work of Friedrich Gilbert Ryle, /. L. Austin, sianley cauell, and others. For literary critics (such as chailes Altieri, for examplei, '\trTittgenstein providesboth exemplary,arguments and methodologicalparadigms for explicatinglanguageas action and criticism as itself a ,,form"of liie." only the Tractatuswas publishedduring wittgensteint lifetime, but his note_ books and other works haveappearedsre;dily sincehis death,including philosophicallnuestigations,trans. G. E. M. Anscombe(New york: Macmillan company, ry53); On Certainty,ed. G. E. M. Anscombeand G. H. von.Wright, trans. DenisPaul and G. E. M. Anscombe(oxford: BasilBrackwell, ry69); and Lectures (s conuersationson Aesthetics,psychology,and Religiour'n"i;i1,ed. cyril Barrett (Berkeley:university of california press,r97z). seealsoAnthony Kenny, Wittgenstein(Cambridge,MA: Harvard Universitypress,1973). FROM

PHILOSOPHICAL INryESTIGATIONS r. "cum ipsi (majores homines) appellabant rem aliquam, €t cum secundum eam vocem corpus ad aliquid movebant, videbam, et tenebam hoc ab eis vocari rem illam, quod sonabant, cum eam vellent ostendere. Hoc autem eos velle ex motu corporis aperiebatur: tamquam verbis naturalibus omnium gentium, quae fiunt vultu et nutu oculorum, ceterorumque membrorum actu, et sonitu vocis indicante affectionem animi in petendis, habendis, rejiciendis, fugiendisverebus. Ita verba in variis senExcerptsfrom pHrl-osopHrcArINVESTTcATToNS are rep^rintedby -permission of Basil Blackwell and Moft, @_t958,and the literaryexecutorsof the estareof Ludwig \ilTittgenstein.

tentiis locis suis posita, et crebro audira, quarum rerum signa essent, paulatim colligebsffi, measque jam voluntates, edomito in eis signis ore, per haec enuntiabam." (Augustine, Confessions,I. g.) t These words, it seems to ffi€, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: the individual words in language name objectsSentences are combinations

1"when

of such names._Jn

they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that the thing was called by the sound they uttere? *ir.r, ,!t.y meaxt to point it out. Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the express-ionof the face, rhe play 5r tfr. eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expressesour state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting,-or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in-their prop".t places in various sentences,I gradually learnt to ,rnderstand what obiects ,!.y signified; and I had trained -y ;;;h to form these signs, I used"ft.t them to express my own desires." tTr.]

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this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the obiect for which the word stands. Augustine does not speak of there being any difi ference between kinds of words. If you describe the learning of language in this way you atq I believe, thinking primarily of nouns like "table", "chair", ..bread", and of people'snames,and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word as something that will take careof itself. Now think of the following use of language: I send someone shoppittg. I give him a slip marked "five red apples". He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked "apples"; then he looks up the word "red" in a table and finds a colour sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers-I assumethat he knows them by heart-up to the word "five" and for each number he takes an apple of the same colour as the is in this and simisample out of the drawer.-11 lar ways that one operates with words.-('$s1 how does he know where and how he is to look up 'red' and what he is to do with the word the word 'five' ) "-\Well, I assume that he acts aS I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.-But what is the meaning of the word ..five" ?-No such thing was in question here, only how the word "five" is used. z. That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours. Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right. The language is meant to servefor communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with buildittgstones; there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, and that in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pill at" , "slab", "beam". A calls them out;-B brings the stone which he has learnt to bring at such-and-such this as a complete primitive a call.-Conceive language. a sys3. Augustine, we might saR does describe tem of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system.And one has to say this

in many caseswhere the question arises "Is this an appropriate description or not? " The answer is: "Yes, it is appropriate, but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe." It is as if someone were to say: "A game consists in moving obiects about on a surface according to certain ,.r1., . . ."-2nd we replied: You Seemto be thinking of board games, but there are others. You can make your definition correct by expressly restricting it to those games. were used 4. Imagine a script in which the letters to stand for sounds, and also as signs of emphasis and punctuation. (A script can be conceived as a language for describing sound-patterns.) Now imagine someone interpreting that script as if there *.r. simply a correspondenceof letters to sounds 'completely differand as if th. letters had not also ent functions. Augustine'sconception of languageis like such an over-simple conception of the script. j. If we look at the example in $r' we may perhaps get an inkling how much this general notion of th; meaning of a word surrounds the working of language with a haze which makes clear vision impossible. [t dispersesthe fog to study the phenom.tr" of language in primitive kinds of application in which one can command a clear view of the aim and functioning of the words. A child uses such primitive forms of language when it learns to talk. Here the teaching of language is not explanation, but training. 'Sile could imagine that the language of $2 was 6. the wholelanguage of A and B; even the whole language of atribe. The children are brought up to perfor- these actions, to use these words as they do so, and to react in this way to the words of others' An important part of the training will consist in the teacher's pointing to the objects, directing the child's attention to them, and at the same time uttering a word; for instance,the word "slab" as he points io that shape. (I do not want to call this "osiensive definitioo", because the child cannot as yet ask what the name is. I will call it "ostensive teaching of words".-I say that it will form an important part of the training, becauseit is so with human beirgr; not because it could not be imagined otherw[e.) This ostensiveteaching of words can be said to establish an association between the word and

Pbilosophical Inuestigations the thing. But what does this mean? \Well, it may mean various things; but one very likely thinks first of all that a picture of the object comes before the child's mind when it hears the word. But now, if this does happen-is it the purpose of the word?-Yes, it may be the purposs.-l can imagine such a use of words (of seriesof sounds). (Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination.) But in the languageof $z it is not the purpose of the words to evoke images. (It ffioy, of course, be discovered that that helps to attain the actual purpose.) But if the ostensive teaching has this effect,am I to say that it effects an understanding of the word? Don't you understandthe call "Slab!" if you act upon it in such-and-such a way?-Doubtless the ostensive teaching helped to bring this about; 'With but only together with a particular training. different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding. "I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lsys1."-Yes, given the whole of the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and separatedfrom its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothittg. 7.In the practice of the use of language (z) one party calls out the words, the other acts on them. In instruction in the language the following process will occur: the learner nnmes the objects; that is, he utters the word when the teacher points to the stsns.-And there will be this still simpler exercise: the pupil repeats the words after the teacher-both of these being processesresembling language. \il(e can also think of the whole process of using words in (z) as one of those games by means of which children learn their native language. I will call these games "language-games" and will sometimes speak of a primitive language as a languagegame. And the processesof naming the stonesand of repeating words after someone might also be called language-games.Think of much of the use of words in games like ring-a-ring-a-roses. I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the "language-game". 8. Let us now look at an expansion of language (z). Besidesthe four words "block", "pillar", etc., let it contain a series of words used as the shop-

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keeper in (r ) used the numerals (it can be the series of letters of the alphabet); further let there be two words, which may as well be "there" and "this" (becausethis roughly indicates their purpose), that are used in connexion with a pointing gesture; and finally a number of colour samples.A gives an order like: "d-slab-there". At the same time he shews the assistant a colour sample, and when he says "there" he points to a place on the building site. From the stock of slabs B takes one for eachletter of the alphabet up to "d", of the same colour as the sample, and brings them to the place indicated by A.-On other occasions A gives the order "thi At "this" he points to a building stone. And ::Ti.. 'S7hen a child learns this language, it has to 9. 'numerals' learn the seriesof a, b, c, . . . by heart. And it has to learn their use.-'Will this training include ostensive teaching of the words?-Well, people will, for example, point to slabs and count: "a, b, c slabs".-g6pething more like the ostensive teaching of the words "block", "pillar", etc. would be the ostensiveteaching of numerals that serve not to count but to refer to groups of objects that can be taken in at a glance. Children do learn the use of the first five or six cardinal numerals in this way. Are "there" and "this" also taught ostensively?Imagine how one might perhaps teach their use. One will point to places and things-but in this case the pointing occurs in the use of the words too and not merely in learning the use.ro. Now what do the words of this language signify?-What is supposedto shew what they signifS if not the kind of use they have? And we have already described that. So we are asking for the expression "This word signifies this" to be made a part of the description. In other words the description ought to take the form: "The word . . . . signifies....". Of course, one can reduce the description of the use of the word "slab" to the statement that this word signifies this obiect. This will be done when, for example, it is merely a matter of removing the mistaken idea that the word "slab" refers to the shape of building-stone that we in fact call a "block"-[u1 the kind of 'referring' this is, that is to say the use of these words for the rest, is already known. Equally one can say that the signs "a"r "b", etc.

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signify numbers; when for example this removes 'oa" "b", "c", play the part r the mistaken idea that actually played in language by "block", "slab", ..pillar;,. And one can also say that "c" means this n,rmber and not that one; when for example this serves to explain that the letters are to be used in the order a) b, c, d, etc. and not in the order 3, b, d, c. But assimilating the descriptions of the uses of words in this way cannot make the usesthemselves any more like one another. For, as we see, they are absolutely unlike. r r. Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a sa% a screw-driver, a rule, a gluepot, glue, nails and screws.-The functions of words diverseas the functions of theseobjects- (And "t. "i casesthere are similarities.) in both Of course what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. For their application is not presentedto us so clearly. Especiallywhen we are doing philosoPhY! tz. lt is like looking into the cabin of a loco'We see handles all looking more or less motive. alike. (Natur ally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulatesthe opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a tlrird is the handle of a brake-lever' the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes; a fourth, the handle of a pump: it has an effect only so long as it is moved to and fro. 'When we say: "Every word in language sig13. nifies somethirrg" we have so far said nothing wbateuer; unlesswe have explained exactly what distinction we wish to make. (It might be, of course' that we wanted to distinguish the words of language (8) 'without meaning' such aS occur in from words Lewis Carroll's poems, or words like "Lilliburlero" in songs.) 14. Imagine someone'ssaying: " All tools serveto modify somethittg. Thus the hammer modifies the position of the nail, the saw the shape of the board, a"d so on."-And what is modified by the rule, the glue-pot, the nails)-'6Qsr knowledge of a thing's Ltrgrit, the temperature of the glue, and the solidity anything be gained by this asof the $s;."-\7ould similation of exPressions?-

r 5. The word "to sign rfy" is perhaps used in the most straight-forward way when the obf ect signified the tools A is marked with the sign. Suppose that 'When A shews usesin building bear certain marks. that has tool the brings h. his assistantsuch a mark, it. on that mark It is in this and more or less similar ways that a name means and is given to a thing.-lt will often prove useful in philosophy to say to ourselves:namirrg ro-ething is like attaching a label to a thing. '\il7hat about the colour samplesthat A shews r6. to B: are they part of the languagei'Well, it is as you please. They do not belong among the words; yet when I sayto someone:"Pronounce the word'the"', you will count the second "the" as part of the seni.n... Yet it has a role just like that of a coloursample in language-game(8); that is, it is a sample of what the other is meant to say. It is most natural, and causesleast confusion' to reckon the samples among the instruments of the

language. ((Remark on the reflexive Pronoun sentence".)) 17. k will be possibleto say: In language (8) we have different kinds of word. For the function of the word "Slab" and the word "block" are more alike than those of "slab" and "d". But how we group words into kinds will depend on the aim of the classification,-and on our own inclination. Think of the different points of view from which one can classify tools or chess-men. r 8. Do not be troubled by the fact that languages (z) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that this shews them to be incomplete, ask yourself whether our languageis complete;-whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incoporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it trk. before a town begins to be a town? ) Our language canbe seenas an ancient city: a maze of little Jrr..6 and squares,of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streetsand uniform houses. consisting ry. lt is easy to imagine a language language a in battls.-Q1 reports and only of orders consisting only of questions and expressionsfor answering yes and no. And innumerable others.-

Philosophical Inuestigations And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life. But what about this: is the call "Slab!" in example (z) a sentenceor a word?-lf a word, surely it has not the same meaning as the like-sounding word of our ordinary language,for in $z it is a call. But if a sentence,it is surely not the elliptical sentence: "Slab!" of our language.-As far as the first question goes you can call "Slabl" a word and also a sentence;perhaps it could be appropriately called 'degenerate a sentence'(as one speaksof a degenerate hyperbola); in fact it ,s our 'elliptical' sentence.-But that is surely only a shortened form of the sentence"Bring me a slab", and there is no such sentencein example (z).-But why should I not on the contrary have called the sentence"Bring me a slab" a lengthening of the sentence"Slab !" ?-Becauseif you shout "Slab !" you really mean: "Bring me a slab".-But how do you do this: how do you mean that while you say "Slab !" ? Do you say the unshortened sentenceto yourself ? And why should I translate the call "Slab !" into a different expression in order to say what someonemeans by it? And if they mean the same thing-why should I nor say: "'S7henhe says 'Slab!' he means 'Slab!" ? Again, if you can mean "Bring me the slab", why should you not be able to mean "Slab !" ?-But when I call "Slab !", then what I want is, that he should bring me a slab!-CertainlS but does 'wanting this' consist in thinking in some form or other a different sentencefrom the other you utter?zo. But now it looks as if when someone says "Bring me a slab" he could mean this expression as one long word corresponding to the single word "Slab !"-Then can one mean it sometimesas one word and sometimes as four? And how does one usually mean it?-l think we shall be inclined to say: we mean the sentenceas four words when we use it in contrast with other sentences such as " Hand me a slab", "Bring him a slab", "Brin g two slabs", etc.; that is, in contrast with sentencescontaining the separatewords of our command in other combinzliens.-But what does using one sentence in contrast with others consist in ? Do the others, perhaps, hover before one's mind? AII of them? And while one is saying the one sentence, or before, or afterwards?-No. Even if such an explanation rather tempts us, we need only think for a moment of what actually happens in order to see that we 'We are going astray here. say that we use the com-

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mand in contrast with other sentencesbecause our language contains the possibility of those orher sentences.Someone who did not understand our language, a foreigner, who had fairly often heard someone giving the order: "Bring me a slab!" might believe that this whole series of sound, *", one word corresponding perhaps to the word for "building-stone" in his language.If he himself had then given this order perhaps he would have pronounced it differentlg and we should say: he pronounces it so oddly becausehe takes it for a single 'e1,'61d.-Butthen, is there not also something different going on in him when he pronounces itr-something corresponding to the fact that he conceives the sentence as a single word?-Either the same thing may go on in him, or something different. For what goes on in you when you give such an order? Are you conscious of its consisting of four words while you are uttering it? Of course you have a mastery of this language-which conrains those other sentencesas well-but is this having a mastery something that happezs while you are uttering the sentence?-And I have admitted that the foreigner will probably pronounce a sentence differently if he conceivesit differently; but what we call his wrong concept need not lie in anything that accompanies the utterance of the command. The sentenceis 'elliptical', not becauseit leaves out something that we think when we utter it, but becauseit is shortened-in comparison with a particular paradigm of our gramma1.-Qf course one might object here: "You grant that the shortenedand the unshortened sentence have the same sense.\il7hatis this sense,then? Isn't there a verbal expression for this sense)"-!,st doesn't the fact that sentences have the same senseconsist in their having the same use?-(ln Russian one says "stone red" instead of "the stone is red"l do they feel the copula to be missing in the sense,or attach it in thought?) zt. Imagine a language-game in which A asks and B reports the number of slabs or blocks in a pile, or the colours and shapes of the buildingstones that are stacked in such-and-sucha placs.such a report might run: "Five slabs". Now what is the difference between the report or statement "Five slabs" and the order "Five slabs!" ?-'Well, it is the part which uttering these words plays in the language-game.No doubt the tone of voice and the look with which they are urtered, and much else besides,will also be different. But we could also imag-

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ine the tone's being the same-for an order and a report can be spoken in a uariety of tones of voice with various expressions of face-the differ"na being only in the application. (Of course' we ence might ,rrJth. words "statement" and "command" ,o irrnd for grammatical forms of sentenceand indo in fact call "Isn't the weather tonations; ; glorious to-day?" a question, although it is used.as a statement.)\iZ. .ould imagine a languagein which all statementshad the form and tone of rhetorical questions; or every command the form of the question "'Would you like to . . .?". Perhapsit will then be said: "'What he says has the form of a question is, has the funcbut is really a command",-that tion of a command in the technique of using the language. (Similarly one says "You will do this" not as . p-phecy but as a command. \(hat makes it the one or the other ?) zz. Frege'Sidea that every assertion contains an assumption, which is the thing that is asserted, really i.ttt on the possibility found in our language of writing every statement in the form: "It is asserted that such-and-suchis the g25s."-But "that such-and-suchis the case" ts not a sentencein our language-so far tt is not a moue in the languagegarna. And if I write, not "It is assertedthat. . . .", but "It is asserted:such-and-suchis the case", the words "It is asserted" simply become superfluous' \We might very well also write every statement in by "Yes"; for inthe form of a question followed 'Would" this shew that stance: "Is it raining? Yes!" ? question a contained every statement Of course we have the right to use an assertion sign in contrast with a question-mark, for example, oi if we want to distinguish an assertion from a fiction or a supposition. It is only a mistake if one thinks that the assertion consists of two actions, ertertaining and asserting (assigning the truth-value, of the kind), and that in performo6o-.ihing ing these actions we follow the propositional sign roirghly as we sing from the musical score. Reading the written sentenceloud or soft is indeed compa'mednrable with singing from a musical score, but ing' (thinking) the sentencethat is read is not. 1r.g.', assertion sign marks the beginning of the sentence. Thus its function is like that of the fullstop. It distinguishesthe whole period from a clause wlihln the period. If I hear someone say "it's raining" but do not know whether I have heard the beginning and end of the period, so far this sentence do.t not serve to tell me anYthing'

z3.But how many kinds of sentenceare there? Sayassertion,question'and command?-Thereare kinds: countlessdifferentkinds of useof countle.ss What We Call"SymbOlS","WOfdS", "Sentenges".And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but ne* rypes of language, new languagegames, as we may say, come into existence, and 6thets become obsolete and get forgotten. (\7e can ger a rough picture of this from the changes in mathematics.) Here the term "langu age-game" is meant to of bring into prominence the fact that the speaking life. of form a of or langirage is part of an activity, n.ui.* the multiplicity of language-gamesin the following examPles,and in others: Giving orders, and obeYing themDescribing the appearanceof an obiect, or giving its measurementsconstructing an obiect from a description (a drawing)Reporting an sYsnfSpeculatingabout an eventImagine a picture representing a boxer in a particulai stance.Now, this picture can be used to tell someonehow he should stand, should hold himself; or how he should not hold himself; or how a patticular man did stand in such-and-sucha place; and so on. One might (using the language of chemistry) call this picture ^ propositional-radical. This will be how Frege thought of the "assumption"' Forming and testing a hYPothesisPresenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagramsMaking up a story; and reading Play-actingSinging catchesGuessing riddles-

Making a ioke; tellingitsolvinga problemin practicalarithmeticTranslatingfrom one languageinto anotherAsking, thanking, cursing, Eteeting, praying. is interesting to compare the multipliciry of the tools in lang,t"g. and of the ways they are used, the multiplicity of kinds of word and sentence, with what logicians have said about the structure of

-It

Philosopbical Inuestigations language. (Including the aurhor of the Tractatus Lo gico -Ph ilo sop h i cus.) 24. If you do not keep the multiplicity of language-games in view you will perhaps he inclined to ask questions like: "'W'har is a question ) "-ls it the statementthat I do not know suchand-such, or the statementthat I wish the other person would tell me. . . . ? Or is it the description of my mental state of uncertainty?-And is the cry "Help!" such a description? Think how many different kinds of thing are called "description" : description of a body's position by means of its co-ordinates; description of a facial expression; description of a sensation of touch; of a mood. Of course it is possible to substitute the form of statement or description for the usual form of question: "I want to know whether . . . ." or "I am in doubt whether . . . ."-fut this does not bring the different langu age-gamesany closer together. The significanceof such possibilities of transformation, for example of turning all statements into sentencesbeginning "l think" or "I believe" (and thus, as it were, into descriptions of my inner life) will become clearer in another place. (Solipsism.) 25. It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capaciry. And this means: "they do not think, and that is why they do not talk." But-th.y simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language-if we except the most primitive forms of language.-Commandirg, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playitrg. 26. One thinks that learning language consistsin giving names to objects. Viz, to human beings, to shapes,to colours, to pains, to moods, to numbers, etc. To repeat-naming is something like attaching a label to a thing. One can say that this is preparatory to the use of a word. But what is it a preparation for? 27. "'We name things and then we can talk about them: can refer to them in talk."-[5 if what we did next were given with the mere act of naming. As if there were only one thing called "talking about a 'SThereas thing". in fact we do the most various things with our sentences.Think of exclamations alone, with their completely different functions.

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'Water! Away! Ow! Help! Fine ! No! Are you inclined still to call these words "names of objects" ? In languages (z) and (8) there was no such thing as asking something'sname. This, with its correlate, ostensive definition, is, we might say, a langu agegame on its own. That is really to say: we are brought up, trained, to ask: "'What is that called) "upon which the name is given. And there is also a language-gameof inventing a name for something, and hence of saying, "This is . . . ." and then using the new name. (Thus, for example, children give names to their dolls and then talk about them and to them. Think in this connexion how singular is the use of a person'sname to call himl)

4o. Let us first discuss this point of the argument: that a word has no meaning if nothing corresponds 1e lg.-It is important to note that the word "meaning" is being used illicitly if it is used to signify the thing that 'corresponds' to the word. That is to confound the meaning of a name with the '$fhen bearer of the name. Mr. N. N. dies one says that the bearer of the name dies, not that the meaning dies. And it would be nonsensical to say that, for if the name ceased to have meaning it would make no senseto say "Mr. N. N. is dead." 4 r. In $. S we introduced proper names into language (8). Now supposethat the tool with the name 66N" is broken. Not knowing this, A givesB the sign "N". Has this sign meaning now or not?-What is B to do when he is given it?-I7e have not settled anything about this. One might ask: what will he do ? \ilell, perhaps he will stand there at a loss, or shew A the pieces. How one might say: "N" has become meaningless; and this expression would mean that the sign 65N" no longer had a use in our language-game (unless we gave it a new one). 6(N" might also become meaningless because, for whatever reason, the tool was given another name and the sign "N" no longer used in the languagegame.-But we could also imagine a convention whereby B has to shake his head in reply if A gives him the sign belonging to a tool that is broken.-ln

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65N" might be said to be this way the command when the given a place in the language-game even 66N" to have sign the and exists, Iool no longer meaning even when its bearer ceasesto exist. a name which has neuer 42. But has for instance been used for a tool also got a meaning in that game?-Let uS assumethat "X" is such a sign and t"tr", A gives this sign to B-well, even such signs could be given a place in the lan gvage-game,and B might haue, say,to answer them too with a shake of thJhead. (One could imagine this as a sort of ioke between them.) not for 43. For a large class of cases-though all-in which we employ the word "meaning" it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language. And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer' "Excalibur has a 44. \(/e said that the sentence Excalibur was when sharp blade" made senseeven in this lanbecause so is this Now brokett in pieces. of its absence the in used also is name a guage-game b."r.r. But we can imagine a language-gamewith names (that is, with signswhich we should certainly include among names) in which they are used only in the presenceof the bearer; and so coul d always be ,epiaced by a demonstrative pronoun and the gesture of pointing. never be with4 5. The demonstrative "this" can as there is a long "so out a bearer. It might be said: 'this' has a meaning too' whether tbis, the word this is simple or complev."-$q1 that does not make the word into a name. On the contraryi for a name is not used with, but only explained by means of, the gestureof Pointing. names really a6. \[hat lies behind the idea that signify simples?-Socrates says in the Tbeaetetus: "I] I make no mistake, I have heard some people say this: there is no definition of the primary elementsso to speak-out of which we and everything else are composed; for everything exists' in its own right ."tt only be named, no other determination is neither that it ls nor that it is not . . . . . possible, -gut what exists in its own right has to be . . . . . named without any other determination. In consequence it is impossible to give an account of any primary elemerrt; for it, nothing is possible but the 2I havetranslatedthe Germantranslationwhich steinusedratherthan the original' [Tr']

'Wittgen-

just as what bare name; its name is all it has. But complex, itself is elements primary consistsof these descriptive become elements the of so the names language by being compounded together. For the .rrJn.. of speechis the composition of names." Both Russell's'individuals'and my'objects' (Tractutus Logico-Philosophicus) were such primary elements. constituent parts of 47. But what are the simple which reality is composed?-\What are the simple constituent parts of i chair?-The bits of wood of which it is made?Or the molecules,or the atoms?"Simple" means:not composite.And here the point 'composite'? It makes no sense is: in what sense 'simple parts of at all to speak absolutely of the a chair'. Again: Does my visual image of this tree' of this chaii, consist of parts? And what are its simple component parts? Multi-colouredness is one kind of .o-pl.*ity; another is, for example, that of abroken outline composed of straight bits. And a curve can be said to be composed of an ascending and a descending segment. If t tett someone without any further explanation: "'W'hat I seebefore me now is composite", he will have the right to ask: "'What do you mean by 'composite'? For there are all sorts of things that that can mean ! "-The question "Is what you see composite?" makes good senseif it is already established what kind of complexity-that is, which particular use of the word-is in question. If it had been laid down that the visual image of a tree was to be called "composite" if one saw not iust a single trunk, but also branches, then the question "Is the visual image of this tree simple or composite?", and the question "'What are its simple component parts?", would have a clear sense-a clear use.And tf .o,ttse the answer to the second question is not "The branches" (that would be an answer to the gr amm ati c alquestion: "'Wh at areh ere called' simple component prrtr' ?" ) but rather a description of the individual branches. But isn't a chessboard, for instance, obviously, and absolutely, composite?-You are probably thinking of the composition out of thirry-two white and thiity-two black squares.But could we not also say, fo, irrstance, that it was composed of the colours black and white and the schema of squares? And if there are quite different ways of looking at it, do you still wanfto say that the chessboardis abso'composite'?-Asking "Is this obiect comlutely

Pbilosophical Inuestigations posite?" otttside a particular language-gameis like what a boy once did, who had to say whether the verbs in certain sentenceswere in the active or passive voice, and who racked his brains over the question whether the verb "to sleep" meant something active or passive. .We use the word "composite" (and therefore the word "simple" ) in an enormous number of different and differently related ways. (Is the colour of a square on a chessboardsimple, or does it consist of pure white and pure yellow? And is white simple, or does it consist of the colours of the rainbow?-Is this length of z cm. simple, or does it consist of rwo parts, each r cm. long? But why not of one bit 3 cm. long, and one bit r cm. long measured in the opposite direction ?) To the philosophical question: "ls the visual image of this tree composite, and what are its component parts?" the correct answer is: "That depends on what you understand by 'composite'." (And that is of course not an answer but a rejection of the question.) 48. Let us apply the method of $z to the account in the Tbaeaetetus. Let us consider a languagegame for which this account is really valid. The language servesto describe combinations of coloured squares on a surface. The squares form a complex like a chessboard.There are redr green, white and black squares.The words of the language are (correspondingly)"R", "G", "W", "B", and a sentence is a seriesof thesewords. They describean arrangement of squaresin the order:

trtrtr trtrtr trtrtr And so for instance the sentence "RRBGGGRwv" describes an arrangement of this sort:

trtqE EtrE

trtr@

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Here the sentenceis a complex of names, to which corresponds a complex of elements. The primary elements are the coloured squares. "But are these simple?"-I do not know what elseyou would have me call "the simples", what would be more natural in this language-game. But under other circumstancesI should call a monochrome square "composite", consisting perhaps of two rectangles,or of the elements colour and shape. But the concept of complexiry might also be so extended that a smaller areawas said to be 'composed' of agreater areaand another one subtracted from it. Compare the 'composition of forces', the 'division' of a line by ^ point outside it; theseexpressionsshew that we are sometimes even inclined to conceive the smaller as the result of a composition of greater parts, and the greater as the result of a division of the smaller. But I do not know whether to say that the figure described by our sentenceconsists of four or of nine elements! \7ell, does the sentenceconsist of four letters or of nine?-And which are irs elements, the types of letter, or the letters ? Does it matter which we say, so long as we avoid misunderstandings in any particular case? 49. But what does it mean to say that we cannot define (that is, describe) these elements, but only name them? This might mean, for instance, that when in a limiting case a complex consists of only one square, its description is simply the name of the coloured square. Here we might say-though this easily leads to all kinds of philosophical superstition-that a sign 66R" or "B", etc. may be sometimes a word and sometimes a proposition. But whether it 'is a word or a proposition' depends on the situation in which it is uttered or written. For instance, if A has to describe complexes of coloured squares to B and he uses the word "R" alone, we shall be able to say that the word is a description-a proposition. But if he is memorizing the words and their meanings, or if he is teaching someone else the use of the words and uttering them in the course of ostensive teachirg, we shall not say that they are propositions. In this situation the word "R", for instance, is not a description; it names an element-but it would be queer to make that a reason for saying that an element can only be named! For naming and describing do not stand on the same level: naming is a preparation for description. Naming is so far not a move in the language-game-any more than putting a piece in its place on the board is a move in

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'We may say: nothing has so far been done, chess. when a thing has been named. It has not even got a name ."..pi in the language-game. This was what Frege meant too, when he said that a word had meaning only as Part of a sentence' say that we can at5o.'what does it mean to tribute neither being nor non-being to elements?One might say: if everything that we call "being" and "non-being" consistsin the existenceand nonexistence of .onn.*ions between elements' it makes no senseto speak of an element'sbeing (non-being); call "destruction" iust as when everything that we iies in the separation of elements' it makes no sense to speak of the destruction of an element' One would, however, like to say: existence cannot be attributed to an element, for if it did not exist,one could not even name it and So one could say nothing at all of it.-But let us consider an analogous case.There rs one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris.-But this is, of course' not to ascribe any extraordinary proPerty to it, but only to mark its peculiar role in the language-game of measuring with a metre-rule.-Let us imagine samples of colour being preserved in Paris like the standard 'We define: "sepia" means the colour of the metre. standard sepia which is there kept hermetically sealed. Then it will make no sense to say of this sample either that it is of this colour or that it is not. We can put it like this: This sample is an instrument of the language used in ascriptions of colour. In this language-gameit is not something that is represented, but is a means of representation.And iust this goes for an element in language-game (+8) when we name it by uttering the word "R": this gives this object a role in our language-game; it is now a means of representation. And to say "If it did not exist, it could have no name" is to say as much and as little as: if this thing did not exist, we could not use it in out language-game.-rU(hat looks as if it had to exist, is part of the language. It is a paradigm in our language-game; something with which .o-p"rison is made. And this may be an important observation; but it is none the less an observation concerning our language-game-our method of rePresentation. (+8) I said that 5r. In describing language-game tO the cOlourS "8", CgrreSpOnded etc. "R", the wOrds of the squares. But what does this correspondence

consist in; in what sense can one say that certain colours of squares correspond to these signs? For the account in (+8) merely set up a connexion between those signs and certain words of our language (the names of colours).-'Well, it was presupposed that the use of the signs in the language-gamewould be taught in a different way, in particular by pointing to paradigms. Very well; but what does it mean to sayihrt in the technique of using the language certain elements correspond to the signs?-Is it that the person who is describing the complexes of (5R" where there is a coloured ,q,r"tes always says one' and so black is a red squ^tr;668" when there description the in wrong goes he if on ? But what 65R" where he sees a black says mistakenly and square-what is the criterion by which this is a mistakel-Or does "R"s standing for a red square consist in this, that when the people whose lan66R" red square always a guage it is use the sign comes before their minds ? In order to see more clearl5 here as in countless similar cases,we must focus on the details of what goes on; must look at them from close to' a mouse has 52. lf,I am inclined to suppose that come into being by spontaneous generation out of grey rags and dust, I shall do well to examine those I"gr u.ry closely to seehow a mouse may have hidd; in them, how it may have got there and so on. But if I am convinced that a mouse cannot come into being from these things, then this investigation will perhaps be suPerfluous. nut first we must learn to understand what it is that opposes such an examination of details in philosophy. (+ has uarious possi53 . our language-game 8 ) bilities; there is a variety of cases in which we the name of a should say that a sign in the game was 'We should say so square of such-and-such a colour. if, for instance, we knew that the people who used the language were taught the use of the signs in such-and-sucha way. Or if it were set down in writirg, say in the form of a table, that this element cort.ipottded to this sign, and if the table were used in t.".hittg the language and were appealed to in certain disputed cases. 'We can also imagine such a table's being a tool in the use of the language. Describing a complex is then done like this: the person who describes the complex has a table with him and looks up each elernent of the complex in it and passesfrom this to

Pbilosophical Inuestigations the sign (and the one who is given the description may also use a table to translate it into a picture of coloured squares).This table might be said to take over here the role of memory and association in other cases.(\[e do not usually carry out the order "Bring me a red flower" by looking up the colour red in a table of colours and then bringing a flower of the colour that we find in the table; but when it is a question of choosing or mixing a particular shade of red, we do sometimes make use of a sample or table.) If we call such a table the expression of a rule of the language-game, it can be said that what we call a rule of a language-game may have very different roles in the game. 54. Let us recall the kinds of case where we say that a game is played according to a definite rule. The rule may be an aid in teaching the game. The learner is told it and given practice in applying it.Or it is an instrument of the game itself.-Or a rule is employed neither in the teaching nor in the game itself; nor is it set down in a list of rules. One learns the game by watching how orhers play. But we say that it is played according to such-and-such rules because an observer can read these rules off from the practice of the game-like a natural law governing the play.-But how does the observer distinguish in this case berween players' misrakes and correct play?-There are characteristic signs of it in the players' behaviour. Think of the behaviour characteristic of correcting a slip of the tongue. It would be possible to reco gnrzethat someone was doing so even without knowing his language. 5 5. "'S7hatthe names in language signify must be indestructible; for it must be possible to describe the state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. And this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot then be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have .no meaning." I must not saw off the branch on which I am sitting. One might, of course, object at once that this description would have to except itself from the destruction.-But what corresponds to the separate words of the description and so cannot be destroyed if it is true, is what gives the words their meanitrgis that without which they would have no meaning.-In a sense,however, this man is surely what corresponds to his name. But he is destructible, and his name does not lose its meaning when the bearer

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is destroyed.-An example of something corresponding to the name, and without which it would have no meaning, is a paradigm that is used in connexion with the name in the language-game. 5 6. But what if no such sample is part of the language, and we bear in mind the colour (for instance)that a word stands for?-"And if we bear it in mind then it comes before our mind's eye when we utter the word. So, if it is always supposed to be possible for us to remember it, it must be in itself indestructible."-911t what do we regard as the criterion for remembering it right?-\Ufhen we work with a sample instead of our mernory there are circumstances in which we say that the sample has changed colour and we iudge of this by memory. But can we not sometimesspeak of a darkening (for example) of our memory-image?Aren't we as much at the mercy of memory as of a sample? (For someone might feel like saying: "If we had no memory we should be at the mercy of a sample".)-Or perhaps of some chemical reaction. Imagine that you were supposed to paint a particular colour 66C" which *"i the colour that appeared when the chemil cal substancesX and Y combined.-suppose that the colour struck you as brighter on one d"y than on another; would you not sometimes say: "I must be wrong, the colour is certainly the same as yesterd^y"? This shews that we do not always resort to what memory tells us as the verdict of the highest court of appeal. 57. "Something red can be destroyed, but red cannot be destroyed, and that is why the meaning of the word 'red' is independent of the existence of a red thing."-Qertainly it makes no senseto say that the colour red is torn up or pounded to bits. But don't we say "The red is u"nirhing" ? And don't clutch at the idea of our always being able to bring red before our mind's eye even when there is nothing red any more. That is just as if you choseto say that there would still always be a chemical reaction producing a red flxps.-For suppose you cannot remember the colour any more?-lfhen we forget which colour this is the name of, it loses meaning for us; that is, we are no longer able to play a particular language-gamewith it. And the situation then is comparable with that in which we have lost a paradigm which was an instrument of our language. 65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all theseconsiderations.-For some-

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the easy one might obiect against me: "You take you language-games, of sorts all about talk ouit way of a but have nowhere said what the essence is what is: language, of language-game, and hence makes what and activities, these common to all you-let them into language or parts of language. So that yo.rrrrl f off t[e very part of the investigation part the yourself most headache, once gave you 'general of about the form of propositions and langua ge." A"d this is rrue.-Instead of producing something common to all that we call language,I am sayin ing ihat these phenonema have no one thing for word same the use us makes common whictrthat they are related to one another in all,-but *rny different ways. And it is becauseof this relationshipr or these relationships, that we call them all "language". I will try to explain this' 66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games,card-games' is balt-ga.n.r, Olympic games' and so on' \rhat say: "There must be common to them ttti-Oon't something common, or they would not be called .games'"-bu t look and see whether there is anyttting common to all.-For if you look at them you witt not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!Look for example at board-games,with their multifarious relationships.Now pass to card-games;here you find many correspondenceswith the first group' but many colnmon features drop out, and others 'when we pass next to ball-games, much appear. tfiat is common is retained, but much is lost.-Are 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts they all and crosses.Or is there always winning and losing, or competition bet'weenplayers? Think of patience' In ball g"-.t there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the plrr, played by skill and luck; and at the difference skill in chessand skilt in tennis. Think now t.t*..n of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the eleof amusement, but how many other charac-rit go teristic features have disappeared! And we can in games of groups other through the many, many and up crop similarities how see can way; the same disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapPing and

somecriss-crossing:Sometimesoverall similarities' times similarities of detail' 62. lcan think of no better expressionto characterrzethesesimilarities than "family resemblances"I of a for the various resemblancesbetween members temfamily: build, features, colour of eyes' gart' in the perament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross 'games' form a family. same way.-And I shall say: a And for instance the kinds of number form a something call we do way.\0hy same the in family ..number,, ? \well, perhaps because it has a-dihlve rect-relationship with several things that to said be can this and hitherto been catled number; we things other to relationship give it an indirect of call the same name. And we extend our concept on number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre fibre. And the sirengtlr of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres. But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions-namely the disiunction of all their common propslgiss"-l shouldreply: Now you are only playing with words. One might'as well say: "something runs through the whole thread-namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres". 68. "All right: the concept of number is defined for you as th; logical sum of these individual interrelaied concepts: cardinal numbers' rational numbers, real numbers, etc.; and in the same way the concept of a game as the logical sum of a corresponding set of sub-concep15."-tt need not be so. 'number' rigid limits in For I can give the concept this way, that is, use the word "number" for arigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier' And this is how we do use the word "game". For how is the concept of a game bounded? V/hat sdll counts as a game and what no longer does?Can you give the boundary? No. You can draw one; for none f,", ,o far been drawn. (But that never troubled you before when you used the word "game"') "But then ih. ,6. of the word is unregulated, the 'game' we play with it is unregul2lsd."-It is not .u.ry*here circumscribed by rules; but no more are there any rules for how high one throws the ball in tennis, oi how hard; yet tennis is a game for all that and has rules too. 69. How should we explain to someone what a game is? I imagine that we should describe *alnes to

Philosophical Inuestigations him, and we might add: "This and similar things are called 'games"'. And do we know any more about it ourselves? Is it only other people whom we cannot tell exactly what a game is?-But this is not 'we ignorance. do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To rep eat, we can draw a bounda ry-for a special purpose. Does it take that to make the concept usable?Not at all! (Except for that specialpurpose.) No more than it took the definition: r pace - 7 S cm. to make the measure of length 'one pace' usable. And if you want to say "But still, before that it wasn't an exact measure", then I reply: very well, it was an inexact one.Though you still owe me a definition of exactness. 'game' is uncircumscribed 70. "But if the concept like that, you don't really know what you mean by 'game'."-'When a I give the description: "The ground was quite covered with plants"-do you want to say I don't know what I am talking about until I can give a definition of a plant? My meaning would be explained by, sah a drawing and the words "The ground looked roughly like this". Perhaps I even say "it looked exactly like 1[is."-Then were just this grass and these leaves there, arranged f ust like this? No, that is not what it means. And I should not accept any picture as exact in tbis sense. Someonesaysto me: "Shew the children a game." I teach them gaming with dice, and the other says"I didn't mean that sort of game." Must the exclusion of the game with dice have come before his mind when he gave me the order? 'game' is a 7t. One might say that the concept concept with blurred edges.-"But is a blurred concept a concept at all ?"-ls an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all ? Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often exactly what we need? Frege compares a concept to an area and says that an areawith vague boundaries cannor be called an area at all. This presumably means that we cannot do anything with ir.-But is it senselessto say: "Stand roughly there" ? suppose that I were standing with someone in a ciry square and said that. As I say it I do not draw any kind of boun dary, but perhaps point with my hand-as if I were indicating a particular spof. And this is just how one might explain to someone what a game is. one gives examples and intends them to be taken in a particular

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way.-I do not, however, mean by this that he is supposed to see in those examples that common thing which l-foriome reason-was unable to express; but that he is now to employ those examples in a particular way. Here giving examples is not an indirecl means of explaining-in default of a better. For any general definition can be misunderstood too. The point is that this is how we play the game. (I mean the language-gamewith the word "game".) 72. Seeing wbat is common. Suppose I shew someone various multicoloured pictures, and say: "The colour you see in all these is called 'yellow ochre"'.-f[is is a definition, and the other will get to understand it by looking for and seeing what is common to the pictures. Then he can look at, can point to, the common thing. Compare with this a case in which I shew him figures of different shapes all painted the same colour, and say: "What these have in common is called'yellow ochre"'. And compare this case: I shew him samples of different shadesof blue and say: "The colour that is common to all these is wh at I call 'blue"'. 7 j. When someone defines the names of colours for me by pointing to samples and saying "This colour is called 'blue', this 'green' . . . . ." this case can be compared in many respects to putting a table in my hands, with the words written under the colour-samples.-Though this comparison may mislead in many ways.-One is now inclined to extend the comparison: to have understood the definition means to have in one's mind an idea of the thing defined, and that is a sample or picture. So if I am shewn various different leaves and told "This is called a'leaf' ", I get an idea of the shapeof aleaf, a picture of it in my mind.-But what does the picture of a leaf look like when it does nor shew us any particular shape,but 'what is common to all shapes of leaf'? \7hich shade is the 'sample in my mind' of the colour green-the sample of what is common to all shadesof green? "But might there not be such 'general' samples? S"y a schematicleaf, or a sample of pure green)"Certainly there might. But for such a schema to be understood as a schema, and not as the shape of a particular leaf, and for a slip of pure green to be understood as a sample of all that is greenish and not as a sample of pure green-this in turn resides in the way the samples are used. Ask yourself: what shape must the sample of the

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or would colour green be?should it be rectangular? rectangle?-So green a of sample the it then be 'irregular' in shape?And what is to preshould it be vent us then fto- regarding it-that is, from using it-only as a sample of irregularity of shape? the idea that if you seethis 74.Her,e also belongs 'leaf shape in general' you see it of sample a leaf.as say' a differently from someone who regards it as, might this Now sample or this parricular shape. well be so-though it is not so-for it would only be to say that, as a matter of experience' rf you see the leaf in a particular waR you use it in such-andto such-and-such rules. Of such a way * "..ording as seeing in this way or a thing course, there is such where whoever seesa cases also are there that; and use it in this way, and general in thiswill like sample whoever Seesit otherwise in another way. For example, if you seethe schematicdrawing of a cube as a pl"tr. figure consisting of a square and two rhombi yo,, will, perhaps, carry out the order "Bring me so*ethi"g like thir" differently from someone who seesthe picture three-dimensionally' what a game is? 75.strhat does it mean to know rUfrh"tdoes it mean, to know it and not be able to say it? Is this knowledg. somehow equivalent to an unformulated definition? So that if it were formulated I should be able to reco gnrzeit as the expression of my knowledg.? Isn't my knowledg., my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanaiions that I could give? That is, in my describitrg examples of various kinds of game; shewing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these; saying that I should scarcely include this or this among games; and so on. sharp boundary I 76.lf.someone were to draw a could not acknowledge it as the one that I too always wanted to draw, or had drawn in my mind. For I did not want to draw one at all. His concept can then be said to be not the same as mine, but akin to it. The kinship is that of two pictures, one of which consists of colour patches with vague contours, and the other of patchessimilarly shaped and distributed, but with clear contours. The kinship is just as undeniable as the difference' still further 77. And if we carry this comparison picture sharp the which to it is clear that the degree latter's the on depends one blurred the cctnresemble degree of vagueness.For imagine having to sketch a 'corresponding' to a blurred shirply defined picture

for orle. In the latter there is a blurred red rectangle: courseof one. it you put down a sharply defined be drawn ,.urrri such sharply defined rectanglescan if the one.-But indefinite to correspond to the any of hint a without merge original the colours in draw a to task hopeless a bicome it won't outline one? sharp picture corresponding to the blurred \Won t yor then have to say: "Here I might just all as well draw a circle or heart as a rectangle, for nothing-is Anything-and merge. the colours this is the position you are in if you right."-And toik for definitions corresponding to our concepts in aestheticsor ethics. In such a difficulty always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good" for instance)? From what sort of examples? in what language-games?Then it will be easier for you to ,.. th"i th. word must have a family of meanings' for what 489.Ask yourself:On what occasion, purpose,do we saythis? Sfhat kind of actions accompany these words? (Think of a greeting.)In what sceneswill theY be used;and what for? of tboughthas 4go. How do I know that this line led me to this action?-\7ell, it is a particular picture: for example, of a calculation leading to a further experiment in an experimental investigation. tt looks like this-and now I could describe an example. ..without language we could not com4gr. Not: for sure: without municate with one anothel"-fst people in -suchother language we cannot influence and machines, roads build cannot ways; arrd--s,rih etc. And also: without the use of speechand writing people could not communicate. mean to invent 4gz. To invent a language could on the basis purpose particular an instrument for a them); with (or consistently nature of of the laws but it also has the other sense'analogous to that in which we speak of the invention of a game' Here I am stating something about the grammar of the word "langu age" by connecting it with the grammar of the word "invent"' 'we ..The cock calls the hens by crowsay: 4g3. irrg!!-but doesn't a comparison with our language hJat the bottom of this?-Isn't the aspect quite altered if we imagine the crowing to set the hens in motion by some kind of physical causation?

Philosophical Inuestigations But if it were shewn how the words "Come ro me" act on the person addressed,so that finall5 given certain conditions, the musclesof his legs are innervated, and so on-should we feel that that sentence lost the character of a sentence? 494. I want to say: It is primarily the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word-language, that we call language; and then other things by analogy or comparabiliry with this. 49 S. Clearly, I can establish by experiencethat a human being (or animal) reacts to one sign as I want him to, and to another not. That, e.g., a human being goes to the right at the sign 6(-1" and goes to the left at the sign ccq-"; but that he does not react to the sign "o-1", 4s to "