Structuralism

Side Note**********Linguistic studies usually take one of two approaches: Synchronic or Diachronic. Diachronic linguistic studies are the studies of how a single language develops through time. Synchronic studies isolate a language at a specific instance of time and discuss its facts at that time. The criteria for "meaning" in linguistic studies is referred to as semiology or semiotics. The meaning of a specific concept in linguistic studies is defined as connotative or denotative. Denotation is the primary meaning of a specific word, while connotation is the implied meanings or contributing factors of a specific word in a linguistic study depending on its contextual implementation.********************************************************

The field of objects for the human sciences is always difficult to define. Unlike the objects of the natural sciences, the fields in the human sciences manifest only through social interaction. Whereas the natural sciences can account for the laws and interaction of objects minus human subjectivity, it is only in the interstices of human interaction (inter-subjective space) that the objects of the human sciences emerge. Whether it is economics, sociology, psychology, history, or literature, not only the analysis but even the constituting factors of the objects in the human sciences themselves are continually being revised and called into question. One such field that has proved especially resistant to analysis is linguistics. Not only for the most obvious reasons, i.e. using language to describe language, but also because of the linguistically suffused nature of reality. It seems that the first problem of the linguist is to determine how deep the rabbit hole goes. For example, if one conceives of language as a tool distinct from the independently existing subject, similar to a hammer, used to shape and mold the world then their analysis will look very different from the linguist that presupposes language as a constituting factor for subjectivity in the first place. Whatever school of linguistics one adheres to, no one can deny the influential (but not necessarily positive) contribution to the dialogue made by the structuralists.

A recognized father of linguistic structuralism, Ferdinand De Saussure, in an attempt to formalize linguistics, set down clear categorical distinctions in Course in General Linguistics to be used in the study and analysis of language. Initially, he distinguishes speech and language. Speech is the individual enunciative act that embodies the specific spatiotemporal utterance of a given individual. Every time a unique speaker utters an isolable verbalization their series of sentences or simple utterances will be over-laden with meaning specific to their historical, cultural, economic, psychological, or modal context. In such a case, the utterance would remain subject to constantly revised speculation as to its various connotative influences. So speech (language in its actual application) appears, to Saussure, as too amorphous and slippery of an object for a formalized linguistics. Before he sets down the road of defining the concepts and methodologies of linguistics he wants to clearly define the object of his investigation. In order to remedy this problem Saussure suggests that linguistics disregard the ambiguities of speech in its diachronic dimension and instead focus on language (or the lexicon and the grammatical rules of combination) in its synchronic dimension as the object of linguistics. “In allocating to a science of linguistic structure its essential role within the study of language in general, we have at the same time mapped out linguistics in its entirety. The other elements of language, which go to make up speech, are automatically subordinated to this first science. In this way all the parts of linguistics fall into their proper place.” For example, “I hate you.” has a specific grammatical structure when analyzed from a a-contextual, a-temporal perspective. The subject, I, is followed by the verb, hate, followed by the object of the sentence, you. This type of sentence is even labeled SVO or subject-verb-object. One can add parts of speech to make the sentence more dynamic, “I really hate you.” or add punctuation for emphasis, “I really hate you!” but the basic SVO structure remains intact. These descriptions all contribute to meaning and can be analyzed from the perspective of the linguist. What is difficult however, from the perspective of Saussure, is how to systematically analyze the specific instance of Patty Anderson yelling across the courtroom to her ex-husband “I hate you!” Factors outside of the knowledge of the analyst (i.e., the historical setting, her physical gesticulations while she uttered those words, the cadence of the utterance, how she used inflexion to emphasize or enervate a specific word in the sentence, etc.) would forever bar the analyst from a total understanding of the utterance. In order to eliminate these ambiguities Saussure insists that the study of speech be subverted to the study of language. Any linguistic system, artificial or natural, big or small, can be analyzed according to the internal relations of signifiers dictated by the combinatory rules specific to the language without regard for the specific instances in which that language is employed through speech.

In order for internal analysis to have meaning however the significance of each signifier has to be stabilized. Achieving the stabilization of signifiers in an artificial language is relatively easy; simply set down a set of axioms for defining each signifier in a certain system. Axioms for an artificial language are always described in terms of a natural language. For example, upon opening a mathematics textbook, one is not confronted simply with a listing of formulas, y=mx+b, 2Πr, etc., and expected to know how to employ and use them. Rather, people are trained, within the context of their natural language, the rules for combination and employment of mathematical terms (i.e., a list of natural numbers, a list of whole numbers, a list of rational numbers, the interpretation of mathematical symbols such as +,*,=, etc.) An artificial language and a natural language exist in a hierarchy; the natural language sets out and describes the axioms of the artificial or object language. As long as multiple natural languages similarly define the axioms of an artificial language the artificial language can remain stable across the multiple natural languages regardless of cultural and geographical differences. Mathematics remains constant across French, English, Chinese, Russian, etc., because they describe the rules for mathematical operations, say +, similarly. Mathematics would remain equally as translatable if the rules of operations were simply attached to different symbols (viz., if + in English was % in French). Complications would arise in translatability if the descriptive explanations of the mathematical operators were changed. So, if English speakers employed the function of addition consistently in some cases, but exceptionally, say as synonymous to subtraction when the number to the right of the operator was even, translation between natural languages would become more difficult (subtraction, as well as every other operation, would be effected resulting in a restructuring of the system of mathematics for English speakers; their would be no mutual translatability into French).

A difficulty arises when one attempts to stabilize the meaning of signifiers in a natural language; for there is no higher language to which one can ascend and articulate a natural language’s axioms. Saussure, rather then attempt to define the axioms of a natural language in order to stabilize meaning (grammarians have attempted this feat by conflating the grammatical rules of usage with the axioms of a natural language), he founds the stabilization of the signifier in the mental life of humanity. The signifier is defined as “the acoustic image” and the corollary of the “thought” occurring in the individual during speech. At this point Saussure evokes his now famous image of a piece of paper. On one side of the paper resides the signifier, or “acoustic image”, and on its other side exists the signified, or “thought” of the given speaker. The two are inextricably linked for Saussure in a one-to-one relation. This postulate is not an attempt to identify the meaning of the thought attached to the signifier, but rather to establish a consistency in the relationship between signifiers. “The signal, in relation to the idea it represents, may seem to be freely chosen. However, from the point of view of the linguistic community, the signal is imposed rather than freely chosen. Speakers are not consulted about its choice. Once the language has selected a signal, it cannot be freely replaced by any other.” This is a tenet, Saussure claims, for the functioning of language in a community. A single member cannot one day arbitrarily decide to say up in place of down regardless of the meaning of up and down within that community. In other words, Saussure recognizes that the connotative meaning of signifiers evolve with time and the other contingencies of language usage. But, by founding the signifier in direct correlation with human thought, Saussure hopes to stabilize, if not define, meaning in a natural language in its synchronic dimension. “Linguistics, then, operates along this margin, where sound and thought meet. The contact between them gives rise to a form, not a substance.” The question of linguistics, in this case, is not, “What does above mean? What are the historical, cultural, geographical, etc. contours that define that notion?” but rather “In Greek mythology in what instances does the coupling above: below occur? Where is it used, how often, and in relation to what else? That there is meaning to both above and below is assumed, but speculation as to what that meaning is in the specific instance of the utterance remains in the ambiguous realm of speech. Analysis at the level of language, remains for Saussure, the analysis of the relationship between signifiers with a presupposed signified. What results is structural analysis.

Structuralism, in its most puritanical form, stays at the absolute surface of a text. A text is identified, to use the above example of Greek Mythology, and its internal structure is analyzed according internal relationships of its signifiers. Analysis results, therefore in a topography of the utilization of above:below, infinite:finite, temporal:eternal, good:bad, etc. Speculation about what above means is not proffered, only where above appears in contradistinction to below in the text of Greek Mythology. Structuralism describes this as the differential meaning of binary signifiers. In other words, the meaning of the concept above is defined by being not below. Since the meaning of a singular concept cannot be analyzed without treading the murky waters of connotation, structural analysis has to analyze a signifier against another signifier termed its binary opposite or corollary signifier. Structuralism is always the analysis of internal relations within defined contours. Analysis of the connotations of cure as a common word will never occur in a structural analysis but rather cure/poison or cure/pathogen within the contours of Greek Mythology or within the contours of poetry in the 20^th century. What defines the contours of the “text” to be analyzed only sets the parameter of the analysis (20^th century poetry, the poetry of Romanticism, the book The Da Vinci Code), while the methodology of the analysis remains the same (mapping the internal relations of binary signifiers within the circumscribed text).

Structuralism’s weakness lies in its inability to pronounce value judgments on the worth or purpose of a text because its methodology, in order to remain consistent, seeks only to analyze meaning according to a text’s internal relations and cannot inject connotative judgments into the boundaries set by the text under analysis. Namely, formal structural analysis will never state, “Antigone was a better play then Oedipus at Colonus”, or “Kafka was more interesting then Dostoyevsky”, or “Fascism is a worse political ideology then Democracy”.

A field that has found structural analysis quite useful however, has been cultural anthropology. Claude Levi-Strauss and his book Structural Anthropology is often connected with the beginning of cultural anthropology’s utilization of structural analysis. As observers in the field of other culture’s customs, habits, familial organizations, religious rituals, language, mating customs, diet, etc. anthropologists are in a constant struggle to observe while attempting to remain objective (i.e. reserve judgment and refrain from interfering with the continuation of everyday life in the observed culture). By circumscribing the culture under observation as the “text” for analysis, anthropologists can then proceed to map the relations between words, behaviors, groupings, rituals, etc. Judging the aforementioned structures within one’s own culture is a natural part of participation within society while transposing those same criteria of judgment onto a foreign culture distorts the culture under observation and clouds the observations. Anthropology, for Levi-Strauss, must go further then even attempting to repress ethnocentric judgments. It must even use a methodology that refrains from categorizing the observed culture according to ones own symbolic matrix. “The first aim of anthropology is to be objective, to inculcate objective habits and to teach objective methods. Not simply an objectivity enabling the observer to place himself above his own personal beliefs, preferences, and prejudices…The objectivity aimed at by anthropology is on a higher level: The observer must not only place himself above the values accepted by his own society or group, but must adopt certain methods of thought; he must reason on the basis of concepts which are valid not merely for an honest and objective observer, but for all possible observers.” I.E., structuralism. While structural analysis may not be helpful when attempting to espouse the superiority of a governmentally regulated capitalism over an unregulated free market, it can be useful in an attempt to observe and record the data during anthropological field work without condemning or praising (consciously or unconsciously) the customs of the society under observation.

The Judge-Penitent meets the Hippopotamus

1956. Two prominent literary figures, over an oceans divide, publish two phenomenally similar books: Albert Camus releases “The Fall” and Saul Bellow issues “Seize the Day”. A judge-penitent meets a hippopotamus. Paris meets New York. And what a delightful meeting it is. With brevity of words and subtlety of thought both authors deliver acute embodiments of humanities existential dilemma.
Structurally the two books are heterogeneous; “The Fall”, employing the relatively simple method of first person narrative, takes the form of a singularly dominated conversation. The readers entrance into the narrative is through the conversation with the judge-penitent and he or she is sporadically reminded of their participation in the story only through the occasional second person accusation. The anonymity of the protagonist’s interlocutor is conserved through their lack of voice; any input into the dialogue has to be inferred from the judge-penitent’s restatement or reaction: the interlocutor is simultaneously the specific reader with the book in hand and the universal individual. This tools’ effect on the reader is marvelous. Unlike many third person narrative forms where the reader stands omnisciently above the action of the characters, Camus forces his reader into psychological participation with the novel. There is no avoiding it, “The Fall” is a forceful ethical incrimination of the 1950’s cultural and ideological milieu.
The accusatory method, employed in the “The Fall”, of addressing the reader, brilliantly utilizes what Louis Althusser called “interpellation”[1]. The reader is initially drawn into the conversation. As the story progresses he/she identifies more strongly with the implied interlocutor. By the end of the novel Camus’ intended effect is to elicit a sense of active creative participation with the progressive unfolding of the conversation. The reader feels more as if they are resuming an ongoing conversation with an old friend then passively reading every time they pick up the book. Then Camus reveals what the occupation of a judge-penitent is. But it is too late to retreat, he has woven his literary web too well, and at the point of accusation the reader can no longer distance themselves from the implied character to which the accusation is addressed; agree with the terms of his accusation or not, the reader cannot simply avoid the judge-penitents pointed finger. Simply through alignment with Camus’ accusatory “you”, one has tacitly assumed their guilt.
“Seize the day” masterfully employs universal relatability in all of its characters particularities. Unlike “The Fall” Bellow hastily, yet thoroughly, casts the reader into the moral and psychological strains which have befallen its main character: Tommy Wilhelm. Rather then slowly draw the reader into moral ensnarement, the reader is thrown, without any moorings, into the heart of Wilhelm’s psychological drama. Effusive anxiety flows from Bellow’s description of Tommy’s ticks, racing thoughts, and palpable unease. Wilhelm occupies the role of irresolvable existential angst. With apprehension the reader wades through Tommy’s recollection of aborted pursuits and ephemeral desires. With a childlike desperation and sense of injustice Tommy attaches his aspirations to progressively more impetuous endeavors.
In “Sieze the Day” Bellow refuses the greatest temptation for philosophers and layman alike: to conclude a narrative with a single universal resolution to an easily identifiable problem. Whether it was his studies in the fields of anthropology and psychology or simply his perspicacity in discerning the subtleties of the human dilemma, Bellow captures the uneasiness of life and the artificiality of despondently concocted solutions. At the end of novel Tommy’s frenzied determination resists the readers desire for sentimental closure.

“‘I’ll get a divorce if it’s the last thing I do,’ he swore. ‘As for Dad—As for Dad—I’ll have to sell the car for junk and pay the hotel. I’ll have to go on my knees to Olive and say, ‘Stand by me a while. Don’t let her win. Olive!’ And he thought, I’ll try to start again with Olive. In fact, I must. Olive loves me. Olive—”

As God turns out to be a spider for Ingmar Bergman, resoluteness for Tommy only reeks of his imminent disintegration.
How then, do these two tales meet? Hegel called it “the night of the world”, Nietzche called it “beyond good and evil”, and Lacan the “smooth surface of the real”. Though both narratives deal with specific circumstances of individuals they are allegories for the human condition at the time the authors were writing. Each novel is a narrative deliberation on the question of life after order, life in the face of absolute freedom. Neither author attempts to conclusively resolve the dilemma. Both stories result in the dissolution of reality, where the semblance of unity that binds actuality for its characters unravels at the seams. Camus’ method binds the reader—and by proxy, humanity—to his narrative, while Bellow grants access to psychological disillusionment through the character Tommy Wilhem; which is none the less as effective.
Camus’ judge-penitent resolves his unraveling by heralding and hoping for the coming of a new order, a new master who will tell him how to live. “In short, you see, the essential is to cease being free and to obey, in repentance, a greater rogue than oneself. When we are all guilty, that will be democracy. Without counting, cher ami, that we must take revenge for having to die alone. Death is solitary, whereas slavery is collective.” Like Tommy Wilhelm’s final shallow resoluteness quoted above, the judge-penitent’s desire to return to order, to bow before a different god, offers little solace to the reader. The judge-penitent readily admits the emptiness of his resolution—“I occasionally hear a distant laugh and again I doubt”—but knows of no other way to deal with his freedom.
Bellow gives Tommy no such temporary fix. His story concludes with the culmination of Tommy’s breakdown. “The flowers and lights fused ecstatically in Wilhelm’s blind, wet eyes; the heavy sea-like music came up to his ears. It poured into him where he had hidden himself in the center of a crowd by the great and happy oblivion of tears. He heard it and sank deeper than sorrow, through torn sobs and cries toward the consummation of his heart’s ultimate need.”
The inherently moral character of both stories is found in the creative space that comes after the narratives end. It is the reader that must pick up the remains of post WWII reality and use it to build the latter half of the twentieth century. We can almost conclusively say however, that our parents chose the route of the judge-penitent and worshiped at the altar of a new god: the religion of the market. Like the former divine will, their new order came in the form of “market laws” and which—like God’s laws in the 17^th and 18^th centuries—were mistaken for “objective reality”. Nevertheless, dissolution with laws of the market are reaching a new height today. The general economic prosperity which was to follow on the heels of privatization, free trade, greater economic interdependence, and deregulation has failed to manifest itself. Instead, economic instability over much of the globe has caused an unprecedented degree of outrage and social anxiety. Like the fervent bishops who would march their armies ill-equipped into crusades reliant upon distorted faith, insulated politicians deny—in the face of all evidence—any flaw in free market neo-liberal ideology. If we have ears to hear, we must work towards the creative restructuring of society prior to a catastrophic event like WWII. The lesson to be drawn from Camus and Bellow is not to wait until one has fallen into “the night of the world” in order to reflect on the path down which humanity is heading.

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[1] Interpellation implies the assumption of guilt by acknowledging an anonymous address. For example when a police officer yells “you there, stop!” and four people turn around to look, on some level each person experienced a subjective assumption of guilt.

Forgotten Camus?

Albert Camus is a canonized literary figure. No one leaves high school without having to confront "The Stranger". His philosophy, however, occupies a strange interstice in the philosophical canon. Not overly academic and rigorous, not totally minimalist, he has been relegated to the French existentialists of the mid 20th century, a kind of lesser Jean-Paul Sartre. But it is precisely today that he needs to be revived as more then a literary giant, that his insights are the most pressing, and his call for contemplative action the most urgent.
"The Rebel" stands out as Camus' most concise political treatise--part literature, part poetry, part historical reflection, but everywhere suffused with a call to action. His dual opponents are the polar extremes at work in ideology today: the complete nihilistic fatalism of those who have resigned themselves to carrying out the tasks of international capitalism, accepting their fate as representing a certain value of expendable labor and those who recognize the necessity of change whom have determined that the only effective recourse is violent revolution.
He begins with a literary exploration of the origins of rebellion. What are its psychological motivations? What is the trigger of individual revolt? He concludes that, "Rebellion is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition...It protests, it demands, it insists that the outrage be brought to an end, and that what has up to now been built upon shifting sands should henceforth be founded on rock." There will always be the oppressed that declares a metaphysical "No, I will obey up until this point, but beyond this line, beneath my submission, is the last remnants of human dignity that you cannot have". With this metaphysical "No", the rebel recognizes simultaneously his/her own worth and the minimum equality of human value. The difficulty, Camus says, lies not in the origins of rebellion, which are universal, but in the means in which rebellion attempts to found itself on rock.
In an illuminated survey Camus analyzes the forms that philosophical rebellion, historical rebellion, and artistic rebellion have taken in the past. All rebellions, he concludes end up in a form of totalitarianism. Sade, the malcontent despiser of cultural constrictions, whose work cries out for libertarian freedoms ends in the formulation of a closed city of executioners where all are killed by all (murder being the fulfillment of nihilistic freedom). The French revolutionaries affirm the fraternity of humanity only to institute an order that crushes all who resist the expression of the general will, namely, themselves. The Russian nihilists come close to ethical revolution when they recognize that by violent terrorism they surrender their own right to enter the fraternity of man. Knowing it could not take place in their own life time they appeal to future generations to vindicate their actions. This same appeal to future vindication is what fuels the later Communist revolutionaries; everything is expendable now in order to guarantee the ideal society of the future. The ideological offspring of the French nihilists and the Russian revolutionaries are respectively, Hitler's Fascism and Stalinist Communism.
In the first case, the humiliated Germany of the 1930's exerts itself against divinity in the form of national mobilization. With no transcendental reference, no God, and no religion to foster the reconciliation of there shattered national status only results, only victory, and only subservience to the state equate to true freedom and morality. It is not that the Nazi expansion is too precipitous, it must advance for there is no other measurement of freedom besides conquest. What begins in the French Revolution as the denial of the divine right of kingship ends in the attempt to impose the despotic kingdom of man on earth.
In the case of Stalinist Russia, there is the same result with an opposing operating ideology. The divine mechanism of history will eventually justify the "dictatorship of the proletariat". The solidification of the totalitarian regime was done, not for itself as with the above case, but to protect the revolution until it could be employed on a worldwide basis. Stalin saw himself, not as a dictator, but as a mechanism of history, the harbinger and protector of the communist revolution.
Camus concludes with both a warning and a imprecation to future generations. The rebel, if he is to avoid both the above ideological traps must "undoubtedly demand a certain degree of freedom for himself; but in no case, if he is consistent, does he demand the right to destroy the existence and the freedom of others". Simultaneously he must, "Instead of saying, with Hegel and Marx, that all is necessary, he only repeats that all is possible and that, at a certain point on the farthest frontier, it is worth making the supreme sacrifice for the sake of the possible". Whatever rebellion longs for, it betrays itself as soon as it solidifies into a totalitarian order. However, authentic rebellion "indefatigably confronts evil, from which it can only derive a new impetus". Rebellion, if it is to remain alive and creative, must never impose order and demand what it cannot give. "Real generosity toward the future", says Camus, "lies in giving all to the present".
In the United States today, we are confronted by both pervasive nihilism and appeal to history as justification for actions. When President Bush commented that "Iraq will only be a comma in the history books" or that "History will justify my actions" we can immediately see-if we are able to learn from the past-the direction in which he is leading American foreign policy. The agenda of perennial worldwide American economic and military hegemony is an admitted goal of conservative think-tanks throughout the country. What we are witnessing is the rise of historical justification to vindicate oppressive contemporary action. One wonders if the cold war was not so much decided in favor of one country but dissolved into a triumph of western capitalism as a means of production and concurrent Russian historical determinism as a ruling ideology. It is important in this instance to heed Camus' warning: "History only exists, in the final analysis, for God. Thus it is impossible to act according to plans embracing the totality of universal history...In so far as it is a risk it cannot be used to justify any excess or any ruthless and absolutist position".
At the same time, those who recognize the totalitarian nature of the prevailing political ideology respond in two ways. There are those who admit the exploitation of labor and life but acquiesce when confronted with the monumental task of revolution. On the other hand, there are those who recognize global injustice and, for lack of any other alternative, resort to impotently hurling rocks and protesting "the world order" at the entrance of WTO meetings. For Camus, and imperative for us today, is the ability to recognize that rebellion remains effective only when it is creative; it is this creativity which will "arithmetically decrease human suffering". Rebellion today cannot effectively take the form of 19th century riots or 20th century non-violent protests. Rather, rebellion must adapt to and utilize current institutions (and the law) to alleviate suffering. "In history, as in psychology, rebellion is an irregular pendulum, which swings in an erratic arc because it is looking for its most perfect and profound rhythm. But its irregularity is not total: it functions around a pivot. Rebellion, at the same time that it suggests a nature common to all men, brings to light the measure and the limit which are the very principle of this nature."