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Introduction the Linguistic Turn of the Sixties Seemed to Herald a New Focus on Language in Both the Humanities and Social Scien Introduction The linguistic turn of the sixties seemed to herald a new focus on language in both the humanities and social sciences that might break through the disciplin­ ary boundaries separating philosophy, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and literary criticism. The triumvirate of Piaget, Chomsky, and Levi-Strauss created a tantalizing image in which structuralist conceptions of culture and psychology would combine with generative accounts of linguistic structure to create an interlinked model ofthe "deep structures" ofhuman consciousness. The heady days of that initial enthusiasm seem to have passed. Analytic philosophy quickly moved through generative semantics and speech act theory, and many present-day linguists forgo both deep structures and even transfor­ mations. Piaget has now become ofhistorical interest for cognitive psychology, and poststructuralist approaches in literary theory, unlike structuralism in the sixties, have made few inroads into anthropology and have found a generally hostile reception among analytic philosophers. Part ofthis state ofaffairs can be attributed to a divergence in the interests of literary critics, philosophers, and linguists. In the early days of structuralist linguistics, there was a constant interplay among linguists, philosophers, and literary critics. Saussure's students, such as Charles Bally, wrote about literary issues, such as narrative form and free indirect style, as well as formal linguistic problems. After his move to the United States, Roman lakobson transferred his philosophical allegiances from Husserl and phenomenology to semiotics and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, all the while maintaining his interest in poetics. The Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky drew on Russian formalism, Marx, and Sapir to fashion a developmental semiotics that antici­ pated much ofPiaget's work. Some ofthese cross-disciplinary influences come into play in Derrida's early writings; these include not only commentaries on Husserl, Rousseau, and Saussure but also criticisms of the post-Saussurean Indo-European linguist Emile Benveniste on the linguistic interpretation of Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/604760/9780822382461-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 2 Talking Heads Aristotle's categories and their relation to the analysis ofbeing. With the profes­ sionalization ofeach ofthese disciplines, cross-disciplinary links have become increasingly attenuated. Jakobson's dream of a philosophically and linguis­ tically sophisticated semiotics providing a framework for the analysis ofall sign phenomena seems increasingly impractical in an era divided between technical analyses oflogical form and the hermeneutics ofdesire and difference. One area where literary and philosophical methods differ most sharply is in their approaches to language and subjectivity. In contrast to the phenomenolog­ ically grounded inquiries into narrative and textual form in continental philoso­ phy (from Bergson's duree and its connections to stream of consciousness to Ricoeur and Gadamer's hermeneutics ofculture), much ofthe analytic philoso­ phy of language has focused on the logical analysis of epistemic and modal contexts and their relations to speech acts. The increasingly technical nature of these discussions has made it difficult to see what, ifany, relevance they have to problems of meaning and subjectivity in literary studies. Solving the problem of "quantifying into opaque contexts" and making distinctions between inten­ sion and extension seem to have little bearing on or usefulness for the analysis ofnarrated subjectivities or multivoicedness. Poststructuralist works on subjec­ tivity, for their part, except for the debates around Austin's speech act theory, have generally ignored the recent philosophical and linguistic work on inter­ pretation and reference theory. Although Richard Rorty has interpreted some of Donald Davidson's later work as compatible with Derrida's, deconstructionist readings of philosophy have generally avoided analytic texts. Despite their interest in Saussure and Derrida's encounters with Benveniste, poststructural­ ists have shown little interest in either contemporary formal linguistics or post­ Saussurean linguistic theory as developed by the Prague School and others. A large factor in this bifurcation is the difference in the theories of language that have been taken as fundamental by analytic philosophy and literary crit­ icism. In the analytic philosophy oflanguage, the crucial figure is the developer of modem quantification theory and mathematical logic, Gottlob Frege. For structuralist and poststructuralist literary studies, the key figure has been the Indo-European linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Both share certain Kantian assumptions and break with previous theories of language that equate the meaning ofa word with what it picks out or refers to. Instead, they see referen­ tial uses of language as depending on a system of concepts whose internal structuring has only an indirect relation to external reality. For Frege, these concepts, or "senses," are determined by their combinatorial potential to pro- Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/604760/9780822382461-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Introduction 3 duce the "sense" of a sentence that itself is an abstract entity referring not to some external reality but to either the true or the false. For Saussure, concepts are"signifieds," and their conceptual values are determined by their places in a system ofdifferential oppositions. Frege's influence extends from Wittgenstein and Russell to modem speech act theory. The German thinker's discovery of quantification theory cleared up a host of unresolved problems in logic and has had a profound influence on all ofmodem epistemology and reference theory. The British philosopher Michael Dummett, in surveying the origins of the modern analytic philosophy of lan­ guage, traces its "linguistic turn" to Frege's Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, a text that 1. L. Austin would translate into English. Austin, the founder of "ordinary language philosophy," would later use Frege's distinction between sense and reference as a crucial component ofhis typology ofspeech acts. With John Searle's spirited defense ofAustin against Derrida's "misinterpretations" and Habermas's use of speech act theory to ground his universal pragmatics, the Fregean legacy continues to haunt contemporary debates about language and interpretation. The sense-reference distinction has also played an important role in the analysis of subjectivity, particularly in the logical analysis ofepiste­ mic and modal contexts, but these types of analysis have had little influence on poststructuralist approaches to subjectivity. Although these formal distinctions seem at first to be of interest only to logicians, Frege's work changed the directions of both continental and Anglo­ American analytic philosophy. Frege's critique of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic may have led to that thinker's abandonment of psychologism and his shift to phenomenology. Husserl's Logical Investigations was the philo­ sophical inspiration for Jakobson'searly work and also the target of Derrida's critiques of logocentrism and presence. Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl's sign theory is one of his first sustained uses of his ideas of "differance" and "supplement," which will also play key roles in his later analysis of Austin. If Frege's work has been the inspiration for much of the analytic philosophy of language, Saussure's has been its counterpart for several generations of structuralist and poststructuralist scholarship. Saussure revolutionized the way in which people thought about the relationship between linguistic categories and extralinguistic reality. Previously, philologists had traced the shifting rela­ tions between words and their denotations - for example, what class ofobjects would a noun such as "cow" pick out. Saussure argued that the word-object relation was determined by a language-internal structure in which linguistic Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/604760/9780822382461-001.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 4 Talking Heads categories were defined in terms of their place in a structure of systematic oppositions; the word-denotation relation was itself the product of this larger system. There was no simple route from extralinguistic reality to concepts. Although Saussure never applied his distinctions to a systematic analysis of any language, he inspired several generations of linguistic research. Inter­ estingly' the first applications were to phonology, not semantics. Saussure was among the group of linguists who developed the idea that phonemes were the intersections of a system of phonological differences rather than merely amal­ gams of acoustic properties. The linguistic system correlated these phonologi­ cal differences with semantic differences. In the 1930s, N. S. Trubetzkoy, one of the founders of the Prague School of linguistics, and Leonard Bloomfield, the American linguist, applied Saussure's insights to the analysis ofsound systems. Drawing on his knowledge of over two hundred phonological systems, Tru­ betzkoy refined Saussure's insights by showing how different types of pho­ nological oppositions systematically interacted. His colleague Roman Jakob­ son would reduce these types to one basic category, that of binary opposition; binary oppositions playa key role in Jakobson's development
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