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The Prison-House of Language Princeton E ssays in L iterature Advisor)' Committee: Robert Fagles, A. Bartlett Ciamatti, Claudio Guillen, Theodore Ziolkowski ( For a list of the other titles in this series, see page following index.) The Prison-House of Language A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism B y F r e d t . i c J a m e s o n Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. Copyright © 1972 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press. Princeton and London .I I I Wights Rksluved L C . Card: 78-173757 I S B N'.: 0-69141316-0 (paperback edn.) I.S.B.N.: 0-09Wlfi226-f> ( hardcover cdn.) First nusceroN iMftABACK Edition. 1974 Scamd Hardcover Printing. 1974 This book h*2 Iteen composed in Ijuotvpc Caledonia rrinted in tic United stares of America hy Princeton University Press. Frmeeton, New Jerscs This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not. by way of trade, lie lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the :>ubli>herN consent, in anv form of himling or cover other than that in which it is published. Preface The history of thought is the history of its models. Clas­ sical mechanics, the organism, natural selection, the atomic nucleus or electronic field, the computer: such are some of the objects or systems which, first used to organize our understanding of the natural world, have then been called upon to illuminate human reality. The lifetime of any given model knows a fairly predicta­ ble rhythm. Initially, the new concept releases quantities of new energies, permits hosts of new perceptions and dis­ coveries , causes a whole dimension of new problems to come Into view, which result in turn in a volume of new work and research. Throughout this initial stage the model itself remains stable, for the most part serving as a medium through which a new view of the universe may be ob­ tained and catalogued. I q the declining years of the model's history, a propov- tionately greater amount of tunc has to be spent in read­ justing the model itself, in bringing it back into line with its object of study. Now research tends to become theoreti­ cal rather than practical, and to turn back upon its own presuppositions (the structure of the model itself), finding itself vexed by the false problems and dilemmas into which the inadequacy of the model seems increasingly to lead it One thinks, for example, of the ether or of collective con­ sciousness. At length the model is exchanged for a new one. This momentous event has been described by some of the think­ ers with whom this book is concerned as a kind of muta­ tion ( itself an excellent example of the metaphoric applies- PREFACE tion of one model to a wholly different field of study). It is certain, indeed, that such a replacement marks an absolute break, an absolute end and the- beginning of something hitherto unprecedented, even if it cannot always be dated as cleanly as a single revolutionary experiment or the publi­ cation of a single decisive work. Nor, it would seem, can the new be consciously prepared, any more than those dis­ satisfied with the old paradigm can, by taking thought, sim­ ply devise some new one out of whole cloth. Such was indeed the history of the organic model, that concept of the organism as a prototype which with a single spark touched off Romantic philosophy and nineteenth cen­ tury-scientific thinking. The advantage of the notion of organism was that in it the realms of the diachronic and the synchronic found a living synthesis, or rather had not yet been separated, for it is the diachronic (the observation of gradual changes in the organism) which leads the attention of the observer to the synchronic structure (those organs which have changed and evolved and which are now to be understood in their simultaneous coexistence with each other in the life of the organism itself). Such notions as function are thus to be found at the very intersection be­ tween the two dimensions, and with them history wins its claim to be an independent mode of understanding in its own right Yet in the long run the organic model relies too heavily on substantialist thinking. If its objects of study are not given in advance as autonomous entities, it tends to invent fictive ones for methodological purposes, as in the various organic theories of society or culture. Of the reactions against such substantialist thinking, of the various images of "field’* or of relationality, none has been more thorough­ going than that which now proposes as its basic model language itself. vi PREFACE Language as a model! To retliink everything through once again in terms of linguistics! What is surprising, it would seem, is only that no one ever thought of doing so before; for of all the elements of consciousness and of social life, language would appear to enjov some incomparable onto­ logical priority, of a type yet to be determined. It will be objected that to describe the Structuralist enterprise this way is to admit that it recapitulates the earlier problematics of the history of philosophy, that it returns to pre-Marxist and indeed pre-Hegelian conceptual dilemmas and false problems with which we no longer have to concern our­ selves. Yet this holds true, as we shall see later in the present essay, more for the ultimate contradictions of Structuralism than for its concrete daily work: the latter, its content— the organization and status of Language—furnishes a new body of material in terms of which the old problems are raised again in new and unforeseen ways. Thus to “refuse” Structuralism on ideological grounds amounts to declin­ ing the task of integrating present-day linguistic discov­ eries into our philosophical systems; my own feeling is that a genuine critique of Structuralism commits us to working our way completely through it so as to emerge, on the other side, into some wholly different and theoretically more satisfying philosophical perspective. This is not to say that the very point of departure of Structuralism—the primacy of the linguistic model—is wholly unrelated to the conceptual dilemmas with which we shall shortly be concerned: for such a starting point is no less arbitrary' for being unique, and the systems of thought which emerge from it will not themselves be exempt from some eventual, problematical, and painful reexamination of their own enabling premise. One is tempted to evoke the antinomies of pre-Socratic thought, which sought to isolate the single constitutive ele­ vii PREFACE ment of the world’s fabric—let us say water or fire—only to find that the constitution of water or fire itself would have to be of a different type. To be sure, when today we say that everything is ultimately historical, or economic, or sex­ ual, or indeed linguistic, we mean thereby not so much that phenomena are made up, in their very bone and blood cells, by such raw material, but rather that they are susceptible to analysis by those respective methods. Yet there result analogous paradoxes. Nothing could be more fitting, one would think, than the application of lin­ guistic methods to literature, itself essentially a linguistic structure. Yet the older stylistics, that of Spitzer and Auer­ bach, or more recently of J.-P. Richard, worked much more closely with the verbal texture of the work itself. We find ourselves ultimately before the conclusion that the attempt to see the literary work as a linguistic system is in reality the application of a metaphor. Such dialectical reversals may also be found at the outer limits of the system. I think, for example, of Greimas’ de­ scription of the object of study of a structural semantics as a meaning-effect: as though, having taken all meanings for our object, we can no longer speak about them in terms of signification as such, and find ourselves obliged somehow to take a position outside the realm of meanings in order to judge what they all, irrespective of their content, have formally in common with each other. Expression as a con­ tent turns out to demand impression ns its form, and we end up having to describe a structure of intellection in terms of what it “feels like" to think it. The deeper justification for the use of the linguistic model or metaphor must, I think, be sought elsewhere, outside the claims and counterclaims for scientific >*alidity or techno­ logical progress. It lies in the concrete character of the social life of the so-called advanced countries today, which v i i i PREFACE offer the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and in­ formation, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs. There is there­ fore a profound consonance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture today. The present survey does not aim at a sociological analy­ sis of the new linguistic disciplines. It does not even pretend to offer a historical and anecdotal account of the develop­ ments of the movements in question. Such an account, for the Formalists, is available to the English-speaking reader in Victor Erlich’s definitive Russian Formalism (The Hague, 1955), which traces the destiny of Formalism from its ori­ gins in meetings of linguists and literary students in Peters­ burg and Moscow during the First World War to its dis­ appearance as a recognizable polemic posture in the fateful year 1929.
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