4. Paraphrase about the models of structuralism and give additional information that your group can collect from other sources (books or websites)
Models of Structuralism:
- Claude Levi-Strauss
- Roman Jakobson
- A.J. Greimas
- Tzvetan Todorov
- Roland Barthes
- Gerard Genette
1. Claude Levi-Strauss
Levi Strauss was a French anthropologist who really wants to know whether different social life can be analyzed by using the methods applied in language, that the ways of culture are the same as the ways of language. Strauss developed the Phonological Revolution which observes society not as parts but as a unit by borrowing Saussure’s idea on phonology.
Furthermore, through his research in myth, he said that there are 2 dimensions. The first one, which works in a diachronic or syntagmatic way or phonetic, from left to right, the langue; whereas the second a synchronic or paradigmatic or phonemic or mythem, the parole.
According to Strauss, in telling the story of the myth, we should divide the story into sequences and then read it from left to right; we need to focus on the rows of those sequences. Briefly, we need to concentrate on the syntagmatic relation of the sequences. In other hand, if we want to understand the myth, we need to concentrate on the columns which described the paradigmatic or associative relation. Strauss wasn’t interested in the sequences but more in the pattern which means the meaning of the myth.
Literature Review Methodology
It is not possible to utilise a single methodological source for a topic as broad as a social theory of the Internet. Nor is it appropriate to utilise a single methodological source to review literature associated with this topic, as it includes studies into the nature of the online community, technological products, and even fictional narratives. The initial objective here is to develop and justify the use of particular methodologies that can be brought together to show a consistent character. Applying the literary model once again, the Internet is the setting, social theory is the theme, and this literature review is an investigation of character. Of course the essential question that is immediately raised is which character is being investigated? This is the challenge for this particular section, because in order to apply the setting and the theme of this study, the character must take the form of a Generalized Other, a collective consciousness of the entirety of the myriad individual consciousnesses that is the human experience of the Internet.
Methodologies of experience thus becomes the operating principle from which an investigation of the Internet's character through this literature review is possible. Indeed, it is quite possibly that it is the only way that such a investigation can be conducted. Thus when this review investigates the literature associated with Internet as a technological artefact, neither the methodological approach or the literature chosen is that of an objectified orientation towards technical manuals. Likewise in the investigation of the Internet as a community, reference to normative orientation of relevant institutional status is avoided. Finally, when investigating the fictional narratives, the universal aesthetic approach of concentrating on degress of impression, expression and narrative coherence is secondary. All of these do have their place and must of course be referred to (a study of the Internet as a technical artefact with no concern for technical truth is clearly ridiculous for example) be they are not the central concern. Rather, the methodological orientation and chosen literature is primarily concerned with building a potrait and an understanding of the Internet's persona and psyche.
Critical questions are raised in each of these literature reviews. In terms of the technology of virtual reality, it is necessary to enunciate the abilities of technological simulation, to describe the psychological predictions of this simulated environment and finally to evaluate a general teleos and crisis tendancies. With regards to community formation, it is necessary to determine the degree that the Internet can be described as a discrete community within its own right, to elaborate the structure of community symbols and to ascertain the degree of influences and interventions from external social systems. Finally , in the aesthetic expression of the Internet-related future mythology, establishing the relationship between the technology, the community and the expressions, distinguishing between the rational and irrational concerns, and importantly, the characteristics of heroic protagonists.
In order to conduct such a review the general methodological approaches chosen are phenomological theories of technology, symbolic anthropological approaches to culture and contemporary psychoanalytic approaches to literature. In the first case the particular theorists chosen include Lewis Mumford for the concern of authoritarian versus democratic technologies, Doh Ihde for an analytical typology of technical experience, and Zoe Sophia's for a well-grounded critique of the limitations of a purely phenomological approach that elaborates experience to include desire and irrationality. With regards to cultural formation, Clifford Geertz has been chosen for the emphasis on culture interpreted through symbolic significance, Claude Levi-Strauss for a structural methodology that uncovers thematic, unexpected and consistent logic in a community and Pierre Bordieu for establishing the economic and intellectual biases (“symbolic power”) in the formation of choice of cultural products. Finally, in the realm of fictional narratives, Jacques Derrida's deconstructive method is particularly apt, especially given the metaphysical presumptions, Frederic Jameson in elucidating the influence of setting through an exceptionally broad social typology of contemporary and near-future settings, and finally Judith Butler, for an examination of assertive multiplicity of agent performance from individual subjects.
In many ways the choice of these theorists may often seem contradictory. Zoe Sophia, for example, is particularly critical of Don Ihde, who in turn avoids politicizing particular technical artefacts like Mumford does. Levi-Strauss, contrary to Geertz, investigates culture from the very perspective where is does not have clear symbolic significance. Bordieu reckons the entire game is biased anyway, whether the symbolic values are clear or hidden in structure. Derrida is concerned with the minutae of detail in the highly abstracted world of text. Jameson is concerned with broad view with a very strong emphasis on the “metaphysics of presence”. Bulter's perfoming agents seem to cut through both approaches.
The point being of course is to consider the competing perspectives as complementary rather that in competition to each other, where each is actually an elaboration to the other rather than an incommensurable opposite. This dialectical approach to these theories recognizes that even where a particular perspective seems antithetical to another because they are based on the same totalizing common denominator – that of experience – a synthesis must be possible which provides the required character potrait of the Internet's collective consciousness. A consiousness, which it must be noted from outset, consists of diverse individuals who step in and out of the Internet reality, who come with biases and expectations, and who take their Internet altered consciounesses, back into their societies.
As mentioned in the opening section of this study, the choice of the literature reviewed has come down to an attempt to balance the competing requirements of popularity, significance, depth and influence within the chosen orientation of experience. The particular literature chosen for investigating the experience of the Internet as a technological artefact include: Virtual Reality, by Howard Rheingold, Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Benedikt, Silicon Image by Anstaklins and Blatner, GURPS Cyberpunk, by Lloyd Blankenship and War of the Worlds: Cyberspace and the High Tech Assault on Reality, by Mark Slouka. In terms of the experience of the Internet as a community: Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches, by Douglas Ruskoff, the Mondo 2000 User's Guide to the New Edge, edited by Rudy Rucker, R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Computer Frontier, by Bruce Sterling and Hacker's: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. Finally, the texts chosen for the expression of the Internet experience includes: The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, the Neuromancer trilogy, by William Gibson, Do Andriods Dream of Electric Sheep/Blade Runner by Phillip K. Dick and Ridley Scott (dir), the Software series by Rudy Rucker, Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling and Snow Crash by Neal Stephanson.
Apart from providing the necessary means to provide a character portrait of the Internet, the reviews are actually conducted in order of production to also provide a sense of “character development”. Each text is reviewed with a standard template. First, an author and text introduction is provided. Following this, a text synopsis and an application of the methodology of the core characteristics, which includes comparison of author claims with available research and concludes with an evaluation of the text's contribution in elaborating the core characteristics. Whilst the chosen texts are undoubtably designed with a popular rather than academic audience in mind, it is notable that each contain more than requisite academic content for evaluation. Finally, in concluding all these reviews, an attempt is made at a synthetic evaluation and determination of the Internet's character.
The first literature review is concerned with the development of a “virtual reality”. This is at the time of writing not an Internet specific technology, but in fair estimation, like the almost completely integrated myriad computer networks of recent years, it is clearly only a matter of time before the Internet and virtual reality are for most intents and purposes the same things. The purpose of this investigation into the Internet's character is to examine to what degree the experience of the Internet can elaborate, replace or truncuate the experience of real life, or another words to develop a phenomenology of technology. The second aspect of this character investigation is to elaborate the intentionalist, phenomenological perspective with that of the psychoanalytic, and particularly feminist, tradition to deal with various irrationalities (including gender biases). Finally, taking into accont both perspectives and raising them into a macrological scale, an elucidation of the general telos of virtual reality.
In conducting this review and discerning this character, particular authors and their theoretical standpoints have been considered the most appropriate for each particular issue. Don Ihde, drawing upon the vast phenomenology of technology tradition provides a succinct, formula-driven response whose modelling utility is easily recognizable and understood. Zoe Sophia continues in part with Ihde's typology but elaborates it to include the unconscious, the irrational and the horizonal instances of technology. Further, these elaboration occur through critical examination of the gender biases (both real and mythic) in the production and presentation of the technical media – Sophia's “life-giving, erogenic” approach to technology is a radical and inviting interpretation. In attempt to draw out the emanicpatory elements in Sophia and place them on a macrological scale, the distinction between technics of Lewis Mumford is utilized.
The Don Ihde's phenomenological approach of technology has it's origins in both the idea of technology as “revealing the world” and selectively “enframing” it, which is derived from Heidegger and places primacy in technology over science and has been developed over time in three main texts, . Subjective agents utilize technology with intentionality. The feedback received is the “reflexive arc” as decribed by Maurice Merleu-Ponty. The greater the degree of sensory amplification and less the degree of sensory selectivity the more the technology is described as “transparent” with utopian extremes as “horizonal instances” (e.g., the cyborg). The capacity of a technology to perform a range of functions is described as its “multistability”.
[Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis
Don Ihde, Instrumental Realism
Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld]
A four-part typology of technics is described by Ihde. First, are “embodiment technologies” which amplifiy and extend the body's natural abilities. Simple examples include the shovel or the bicycle. Second, “hermeneutic technologies” which amplify the sensory knowledge of being, such as a map or a compass. The third type of technics are “alterity” technics, where the technology becomes like a second self, capable of providing supplementary memory, action and even giving the appearance of communication. The computer is considered to be the pivotal example, althogh symbolically, Ihde does consider religious icons to have a similar role. Finally, certain technologies have the capacity to act as environment in themselves – these become “background” technics, such as spacecraft or S.C.U.B.A. outfits.
This typology is presented in a formula-like method that provides a succinct and abstract descriptive model which is replicated and slightly elaborated here. Technology is represented by the variable 'T', subject actors by the variable 'H' and the objective world with the variable 'W'. The action of intentionality is expressed through the operator => or <= and the reflective arc through the operators -> or <-. Where variables are brought together and act or are acted upon as a cohesive whole they are bracked and represented as a combined variable (and in the case of the background technology a reduced variable). Thus the typology may be described in formulaic terms as:
No technology: H => <- W
Embodiement technologies: (HT) => <- W
Hermeneutic technologies: H => <- (TW)
Alterity technologies: H => <- T -> W
Background technologies H => <- (T/W)
In elaborating the historical masculine bias and the reproduction of these irrational biases in computer culture, Sophia conducts a detailed expansion of Ihde's analytical types to include semiotic (technology as a sign) and psychoanalytic (technology as desire) derivations. The problem with Ihde's analysis according to Sophia is that being bound in the phenomenological tradition it assumes from the outset that the agent actor is acting with complete mental freedom and is not at all inspired by desire and irrationality in technological relations. Sophia expresses three axioms that explains psychoanalytic interpretations of technology. Firstly, "cosmogony recapitulates erogeny", technology expresses neurotic and erotic unconscious desires as well as beings 'tools' for a means. Secondly, "every tool is a poem", it's presentation ambiguous, and its representations always potentially exceed the language and ideology that it officially sustains. Thirdly, "every technology is a reproductive technology", as it intervenes and changes the life process itself.
When Idhe's analytic categories are elaborated to include a semoitics of technology, embodiment technologies are represented as a metonyn, hermeneutic technologies as syndaecote, alterity technologies as trope and background technologies as narrative. When the categories are elaborated to include irrational desires, the psychoanalytic expressions are [EDIT]. Thus, a more complete (phenomenological, semoitic and psychoanalytic) typology of technics is as follow:
| Analytic Type/Perspective | Phenomenological | Semiotic | Psychoanalytic |
| Embodiment | (HT) => <- W | Metanomy | Projective Identification |
| Hermeneutic | H => <- (TW) | Synecdoche | Epistemophilia |
| Alterity | H => <- T -> W | Metaphor | Narcassistic Fetishism |
| Background | H => <- (T/W) | Narrative | Mastery |
[Zoe Sofia, Whose Second Self? Gender and (Ir)rationality in Computer Culture,
Whilst this typology is useful there there are two aspects in which it is incomplete for deriving a development methodology for the experience of technology and with the virtual reality aspects of the Internet for this study. The first neglected aspect is that is that does not elaborate from individual technologies to those multi-user, large scale technologies. The second aspect is that it does not incorporate a theory of communicative techniques, as described in the first Chapter of this study. In oder to provide this elaboration, the distinction attempted by Lewis Mumford as either “polytechnic” versus “monotechnic” or “democratic” and “authoritarian” technologies. Whilst Mumford conflated scale and orientation (large scale technologies were always authoritarian human scale technologies were always “democratic”), splitting this into effects of scale and orientation – which is rebuilt here as the difference between mediative and instrumental techniques, is still appropriate.
[Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization
Lewis Mumford, Authoritarian and Democratic Technics]
The second literature review, concerned with the Internet as a community, has a methdological orientation derived from Clifford Geertz, Claude Levi-Strauss and Pierre Bordieu. As noted the key questions for characterization include establishing the Internet as a discrete community, to elaborate the symbolic structures and practises that make up this community and to examine the influence of external influences on the formation of these symbolic structures. Each of the key questions is best analyzed from the perspective of a particular theoretical persepctive, although the questions – and the theorists – are complementary and elaborate on each others perspective. Thus, to determine whether the Internet exists as a community, the methodology provided by Clifford Geertz is most appropriate. To elaborate the symbolic and practises, Claude Levi-Strauss is utilized. To determine the degree of external incluences, the inquiry turns to Pierre Bordieu.
Geertz's, “The Interpretation of Cultures” is the primary methodological text for determining the existence of an Internet community. In this text, Geertz emphasizes that a culture consists of symbolic systems of meaning representing “the total way of life of a people”, “the social legacy the individual acquires from the group”. The perspective, as Geertz acknowledge, is derived from Max Weber in recognizing that human beings are suspended in webs of significance. Following the insights of linguistic philosophy, Geertz argues that culture is public because meaning is generated collectively. Thus, in the first instance, determination of the existence and complexity of a culture is determined by the existence and complexity of the symbolic values. Further, the determination of the depth of membership (if any) that an individual has to a culture can be evaluated in terms of their capacity to understand the values ascribed to collective signs.
The methodology for such evaluation here is particularly important. Geertz strongly emphazies the need to avoid a rigid, pseudo-scientific approach considering a intrepetive and hermenutic one. Cultural anthropology is therefore not dissimilar to literary analysis – symbols and structures of significance must be ascertained, the value of actions are determined by their contextual importance. As such decisions necessitate interpretation, Geertz is also steadfastly opposed to anthropological investigation from the perspective of the “detached” observer, where a culture is treated as if it could be examined under laboratory conditions. Rather, in the term of Renato Rosaldo, the appropriate approach for an anthrological ethnography is to be a self-reflexive “positioned observer” where observation, participation, and hermeneutic reflection also lead to the transformation of the anthropologist.
[Clifford Geertz, (1973) The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books.]
More recently Geertz has claimed that this particular methodology leads to a cultural anthropology that is rhetorical. This is not meant, of course, in the prejorative sense, but rather in sense of literary analysis, that awareness of the influence (and prejudice) of accepted canon. The point is not replace research itself, but rather to evaluate the reasons that a particular analysis is more persuasive than another. The importance of these comments in this particular of course, is the constant reflection on whether the general methodological orientations and subject-matter can make claims of persuasive legitimacy. In this particular instance the challenge is placed to assert the validity and significance of the symbolic values noted within the Internet culture.
[Gary A. Olson, (1991) Clifford Geertz on Ethnography and Social Construction (interview), JAC 11.2 ]
The inclusion of Claude Levi-Strauss in this particular point of methodology may initially seem a little incongrous. After all, Levi-Strauss' major investigations were in the structures of myths, which would suggest that this methodology is better suited in an examination of the literary expressions of Internet culture. That however, is the point of this character analysis. The literary expressions of the Internet are chosen as expression within the context of contemporary with a view towards the future. The point of discerning the symbolic values of the Internet community is to establish it's existence and by utilizing Levi-Strauss, to show that degree of complexity in this culture. Levi-Strauss' structuralism, influenced by the sociology of Emile Durkheim, is chosen as a means to determine the collective unconscious in the Internet culture's symbolic structures. Whilst Geertz and Levi-Strauss both engaged in extensive and involved field-work as anthropologists, their methodology of interpretation is vastly different. Geertz is deeply suspicious of Levi-Strauss' claims of innate structures and the use of mathematical models preferring, as stated, a more relativistic analysis.
While Geertz's methodology is indeed useful for elucidating symbolic significance based on the intention of cultural actors, it cannot provide an account for that which is not conscious to the actors themselves and this is where Levi-Strauss comes into use. It is not necessary to claim, like Levi-Strauss does, that this has some sort of special superiority to the significance of historically conscious symbolic values, but rather merely to recognize that they represent an elaboration of those values and because of the different form of consciousness involved, a different methodology is required. The point of a structuralist methodology in cultural anthropology is not do discover what symbolic values exist, but to elucidate the unexpected and hidden values that can be discerned from a structural analysis and thus confirm the continued existence of universal concerns across relative cultures.
The concern here is therefore the structure of symbolic values, rather than their content. Following de Saussere, symbolic values consist of “langue” and “parole”, of ahistorical synchronic structures and the contextual, time-linear, diachronic structures. Once the symbolic values of the Internet culture themselves are ascertained, it is possible to describe them according to the synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The former will elucidate the timeless totality and, to use Levi-Strauss' analogy, the harmony of the symbols, the “bundle of relations”. The latter elucidates the historical evolution of the symbolic values. According to the methodology, universal concerns expressed through binary oppositions will become evident through a logical system of intrepretation of the the symbolic structure.
[Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology.
[Claude Levi-Strauss, The Structure of Myth...]
If Clifford Geertz and Claude Levi-Strauss are the anthroplogical equivalents of the sociologists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, then Pierre Bordieu surely represents the equivalent of Karl Marx. Bordieu's primary concern is the use of “symbolic power” and access to “cultural capital” to classify individuals and to maintain existing relations between social classes. Backed by hefty empirical research, Bordieu examines how supposedly free-choice by social actors in the field of cultural products almost invariably, through class location, education indoctrination and peer relations results in a disposition that regenerates and replicates existing social divisions. In doing so Bordieu undermines the idealized notion of aesthetics as established by Immanual Kant, of the universal agent disinterested in the morality, utility or functionality of an aesthetic product, rather concentrating on the “beauty” of the artefact in it's own right.
The purpose of using Bordieu's methodology in this analysis is to examine the degree of bias and distortion in the supposedly free formation of the Internet's cultural values. Further it provides an opportunity to investigate the degree of division within the community itself, the social spaces and social distances that they inhabit and how these divisions and biases are re-established via the medium itself. Rather than viewing the Internet culture and community as a unified whole, using Bordieu's methodology invites the opportunity to examine it as a space where conflicting values compete for resources and cultural capital. In doing so, the prospect is raised to elaborate the notion of an Internet culture as co-existing with multiple Internet sub-cultures and likewise, the Internet community is elaborated into existing with multiple Internet sub-communities. For the purposes of this study, “culture” is defined as the symbolic values and community as the agents who utilize those values.
[Pierre Bordieu, 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of Taste,
On opportunity does arise however, to bring the form of the medium used in the production of cultural values on the agenda. More recently Bordieu published “On Television”, a surprise best-seller, examined the concerns that the influential role of intellectuals as the specialists of cultural production and creators of symbolic power were being undermined by this pernicious medium that degrades journalism through its sheer inoffensiveness, blandness and inability to elaborate (due to time-limits, the “sound bite” etc) on complex issues or ideas that counter the prevailing point of view. A television-determined conventional wisdom thus stupefies cultural development. A comparison between the information and capital intensive medium of the television and the communicative and intellectual intensive medium of the Internet suggests the prospect of cultural emancipation.
[Pierre Bordieu, On Television, 1996]
The final particular set of methodological perspectives chosen in this literature review refer to understaning the aesthetic character of the Internet as derived through the fictional expressions that the Internet as a collective consciousness identifies with. Whilst the literary sub-genre of cyberpunk science fiction is hardly a institutionally related product of the Internet itself, it is hardly necessary to engage in the empirical research of “deep” community members of the Internet (e.g., those who have a high level of Internet symbolic recognition, achieved through substantial involvement through a variety of communication services) to realize their identification with these texts – the level of anaecdotal evidence is simply overwhelming. The purpose of such a review is to elucidate the relationship between the technology, the community and its expressions, the character of the Internet's collective consciousness in terms of their rational and irrational desires and fears, and the characteristics of their heroic protagonists as role models.
In the first instance the literary methodology developed by Frederic Jameson seems appropriate. The advantage of Jameson is the use of a Marxian-inspired comprehensive framework that grounds “the postmodern condition” or “late capitalism” as a total typology in the way that other frameworks cannot. In doing so however, Jameson also incorporates a great deal of structuralist, post-structuralist and psychoanalytic insights. In doing so postmodernism is described as the cultural logic of a new stage of capitalism whose features include the collapse between high and mass culture, the end of historical thinking, an emphasis on style over substance, pastiche and schizophrenia, These aesthetic feature however must be understood in the context of the new electronic media (television, computerization), the deindustrialization of the technologically advanced nations and the world social system of global capitalism.
[Frederic Jameson, (1984) "Postmodernism--The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," _New Left Review_ 146
Frederic Jameson (1991) _Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_.
This elaborate typology has almost become conventional wisdom now in cultural theory. However, apart from placing political-economy as the core of the analysis in the first instance Jameson also orientates towards a political agenda within the field of cultural production. Because on one hand there are the postmodernists, infected by neoism and certain of their ageing, who seem to celebrate this change almost without any substantive critique. On the other are traditional modernists – among whom Habermas must surely be counted – who bemoan the cultural impoverishment and the superficiality of the new cultural logic. Jameson avoid both positions and argues instead that regardless of our viewes on the quality of the new culture, we have accept that it has been a shif in the logic of cultural production that these are the conditions that we are dealing with – to accept it without criticism is corrupt and to reject it without criticism is to be in denial.
Jameson's surprising alternative – of which is also encountered in Herbert Marcuse's 'Eros and Civilization' - is a celebration of the utopian and critical moments in popular culture fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction. According to Jameson, even relatively conservative versions of these texts often portray “a better world” and thus, provide a standpoint of criticism of the existing world. Yet at the same time, realistic texts are also celebrated as they provide opportunities for knowledge and identification by the reader of the problems of life under late capitalism. One can conclude that it seems through Jameson's methodology the emancipatory cultural products of contemporary society that are those which are both realistic and critical-utopian (or dystopian), that engage in the mass production of popular culture, and are stylistically avante-garde and high art. Whether cyberpunk science fiction fits this role is a character question that will need to be answered.
To complement Jameson's cultural typology, Derrida's deconstructionalist methodology, especially given its metaphysic presumptions, seems a particularly apt means to discern the rational and irrational desires and fears as expressed through the fictional literature. Whilst taking counter-intuitive positions – a rejection of “metaphysics of presence”, the claim that “there is nothing outside the text”, that writing has “ontological priority” over speech Derrrida provide some unique insights with regards to the formation of consciousness through language and – although rarely, if ever, commented upon – the formation of symbolic values in – rather on - the brain.
[Jacques Derrida, 1967 Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida, 1967, Speech and Phenomen
Jacques Derrida, 1967, Writing and Difference]
The first part of Derrida's methodology is a rejection of a claimed dominant phonocentric analysis of language and a rejection of attempts to anchor a language system through reference semantics. Rather, claims there is no referent outside the system of language itself. This shouldn't be taken as a confusion between the signifier and the signified however. Rather, Derrida elaborates that signifiers and the signifieds are related by their difference to other signifiers and signified. When the difference is combined with a rejection of reference semantics, a concern arises in “the chain of expectations”, leading to difference, a portmanteau of difference and the act of deferring.
[Derrida of course claims that deconstruction is not a method, but reviewers have noted several continuing themes and procedural methods.]
The deconstructive project thus consists of several features; a rejection of objective qualification of language, an analysis that emphasises the narrative over reference semantics, and the possibility of multiple readings of texts (the act of deferr ing meaning or making different meanings). Following this the methodology seeks to discern obvious presentations of hierachial binary oppositions and, rather than simply reverse those hierachial oppositions, it undermines not the opposition itself, but points out the instablility of the hierarchy itself by including the opposition within itself. The purpose not necessarily negative, but also a means to explain the resiliance of some literature and the capacity to provide reader identification over space and time. In other words, the act of deconstruction of a hierachial binary opposition to show how unstable it is, can also serve the purpose of elucidating how texts can reconstruct with equality and unity.
The relevant purpose with regard to a textual analysis of cyberpunk science fiction is to elaborate the fairly obvious thematic content and motifs that show expressions of fear and desire, both in terms of their realistic elements and their utopian/dystopian elements and to also include those which are hitherto hidden by the assumed hierachies in each text and in the subgenre as a whole. The interest is raised whether the cyberpunk subgenre has the capacity for resiliance, or whether, through it's contradictions, inaccuracies and hierarchial binary instabilities it is a thoroughly flawed set of prophecies.
For an analysis of subject performance by protagonist and other major characters in cyberpunk science fiction the assertive assertive multiplicity of agent performance from individual subjects is examined, using the methodology of Judith Butler. Butler's work is primarily directed towards a critique of gender feminism – the notion that there is a single unified character type of woman that is somehow independent or dominant of other subject positions – and as such may on a superficial level, not appear to be particularly appropriate to a literary analysis of the major characters in the subgenre. This however is not true, Butler, like Donna Harraway, understands the subject position as cyborg, consisting of a multiplicity of experiences, identities, some more influential, some less influential but nevertheless with subjective difference from others whom share some of the same characteristics.
[Judith Butler, 1990. Gender trouble : feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge, 1990
Judith Bulter, 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", Routledge,
Donna Harraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs]
Haraway, in describing the cyborg, refers to a being “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intamacy, and peversity”, which accepts the imperfect, rejects the reified absract concepts of purity and separation and seeks unity in diversity. Likewise Judith Butler in acknowledging multiplicity, is no less committed to genuine social emancipation and personal freedom. The point is to understand the complexity that each and every subject must deal with in the typology of formal power relations, irrationalisable cultural distortions, and their own subjective neuroses. This typology weakens the capacity of the subject to experience even their own body in a fully rational way. It is through the act of reiterative performativity that the subject must deal with these relations. Performativity can be distinguished from free expression (which assumes the subject must be free in the first instance) or dramatic expression (a screened alter-identity roleplay).
The relevance of this methodological interpretation of the self and behaviour in cyberpunk literature is to examine the multiple forces of identity on the main characters and to analyze their performative actions. This task will be made somewhat easier by proceeding examinations of setting and thematic considerations, but the contribution to the overall rationale for conducting such an investigation in the first place remains unique. Because if there is cultural identity among the fundamental core of the Internet's community with cyberpunk science fiction and that fiction is a genuine expression of irrationalisable future fears and desires that apart from a realistic evaluation of the potential of these settings to become reality in the style that they express it is also necessary to examine how these protagonists and other characters express themselves with their multiple influences and the particular typologies of social relations.
In addition to these particular methodologies, a general methodology is applied throughout which incorporates the social and political theoretical orientation of Habermas and Arendt with the insights gained from the perspectives just discussed. A methodology of techniques (technologies and systems) needs to be considered not just with success orientations, but with an orientation towards reaching understanding. To be sure, no technology or system is a communicator in itself. But both technologies and systems may expand the scope and scale of communication and also ensure its conditions. This is a synthesis of instrumental and communicative action - or in Weber's terms - a combination of instrumental and value-rationality. In these instances, techniques exist in a non-social situation, yet are orientated towards reaching understanding. It is this category of mediative techniques, described in the previous section, that fulfils these necessary conditions.
Applying mediative techniques to the instrumental genres provided by Ihde and Sophia requires some modification. In terms of technics, every relationship requires at least one other human actor whose intentionalities are of equal capacity. For example, the telephone may be expressed as the formula;
(H-T)=><- W-> <=(T-H)
In all communications technology a protocol of the lowest common denominator must be established. Likewise for system guareentees. Unless universal rights are assuredly universal, the technique ceases to be mediative and becomes instead, strategic.
In terms of a semiotics of mediative techniques, there is no change. Signification or trope are clearly defined by the technique genre, and not by the orientation. Not so in terms of a psychoanalysis of techniques. An instrumental or strategic orientation has neurotic tendancies. A mediative one, in virtue of potentially enhancing communicative connections, has a theraupetic tendency. With mediative embodiment techniques this tendency is towards sanguinity, with hermeneutic techniques it is pronoia (the irrational but intuitive sense of social solidarity), with alterity techniques it is identity, and with background techniques it is security.
The category of mediative techniques provides the opportunity to empirically validate changes in the functionalist AGIL schema. In doing so, the functionalist categories cease to be abstract, and gain practical manifestation from which quantities, qualities, and rates of change may be evaluated. The performance of instrumental action equates with the capacity of goal attainment., the performance of strategic action equates with latency, or pattern-maintenance., mediative techniques with adaptability and communicative actions for the ultimate values of a society.
A methodology examining the potential of 'virtual reality' accounts not just technical replication, but also problems in implementing it as a means of production. The most significant problem is developing an alternative set of productive relations that have equivalence with the new productive means, that is, developing a technique. Furthermore, if such techniques are implemented, changes in productive capacity, the mode of consciousness, and potential pathologies must also be identified.
Finally, in an emancipatory interest, such a methodology must also include an empirical category which identifies the degree by which such techniques assist in actions orientated towards understanding. This is achieved by the inclusion of mediative techniques, a category of relevance and elaboration to no less than five theoretical positions of action and technology (Weber, Habermas, Parsons, Sofia, Ihde), which requires no modification to existing models.
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(Source: http://au.geocities.com/lev_lafayette/phd2-1.html)
2. Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson was an important linguist who built the bridge between linguistics and literature. From Saussure’s concepts of langue and parole, syntagmatic and paradigmatic, Jakobson saw that there is a connection between those concepts with 2 figures of speech, Metaphor and Metonymy. In his important research, Aphasia (the los or impairment of the power to understand and to use speech), Jakobson found two Aphasic disorders. The first one is the Contiquity Disorder or the inability to combine elements in a sequence; it’s related to Saussure’s Syntagmatic. The second one is the Similiarity Disorder, the inability to substitute one element for another. To simplify it, we’ll take ‘Hut’ as an example. The first disorder would produce a string of synonym and anthonyms and other substitutions like cabin, hotel, palace, etc. The second disorder would combine this word with other words to perform a sequence. Jakobson saw these disorders were the embodiments of metaphor and metonymy.
Roman Jakobson and the Birth of Linguistic Structuralism
A difficult problem facing historians of twentieth-century linguistics is gauging the impact on the field made by Ferdinand de Saussure's posthumous book Cours de linguistique générale (1916). The by now traditional notion is that this was such a revolutionary book that all forward-looking linguists immediately began drawing inspiration from it and eventually from it alone.
While this perspective contains a grain of truth it overlooks a number of crucial factors. First, Saussure was only one of quite a number of linguistic theorists active in the early twentieth century. The crucial question therefore is why so many linguists chose to regard themselves as followers of Saussure and not some other theorist and how this loyalty to Saussure came about. Second, Saussure was arguably part of a broad trend in the history of ideas beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that rejected the "positivism" prevalent among academics in the humanities and the social sciences.[1] Moreover, when these ideas began to affect linguistics the influence did not come from Saussure alone. For many linguists Saussure's Cours confirmed and reinforced what they already believed.
That this was the case is shown most clearly in the career of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), who had already begun to absorb non-positivistic ideas in the second decade of the twentieth century, long before copies of Saussure's Cours reached
Given facts of this kind, we should perhaps invert the relationship between Saussure's book and twentieth-century linguistic theorizing and try to discover what specific themes in the Cours came to be singled out and promoted by linguists as the theories propounded in that book began to be assimilated.
In the case of Roman Jakobson, we must reckon with an additional complicating factor, namely that he was exposed to Saussure's ideas in two stages. First, he had a colleague and friend, Serge Karcevski, who had studied in
So here we have a group of linguists influenced by some of Saussure's ideas without having ever seen the Cours. Sometime in the early 1920s, Jakobson, now in
As for the term "structuralism," it did not begin to be used by linguists until the late 1920s, over a decade after the Cours first appeared. In fact, it first occurs in the writings of the
In the same year (viz. 1929), Roman Jakobson gave the following much-quoted thumbnail definition of structuralism: "Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations, we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than structuralism. Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and the basic task is to reveal the inner, whether static or developmental, laws of this system. What appears to be the focus of scientific preoccupations is no longer the extrenal stimulus, but the internal premises of the development; now the mechanical conception of processes yields to the question of their functions" (Roman Jakobson, from an article in Czech dating from October 31, 1929 and translated into English and re-published in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language [The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1971], p. 711). This may be the earliest appearance of the word "structuralism" by a linguist.
In the 1920s, furthermore, we already see members of the
"La langue est un système dont toutes les parties peuvent et doivent être considérées dans leur solidarité synchronique." 'Language is a system all parts of which can and should be considered in their synchronic inter-dependence.' Note that Karcevski uses Saussure's idiosyncratic term "synchronique" here, instead of the more traditional "statique." In this connection, see Cours de linguistique générale, 2nd ed., pp. 176-177 and Tullio de Mauro's commentary in his endnotes 256 and 257 of his critical edition of the Cours (Paris: Payot, 1984), p. 470.
The term "structuralism" was, however, not created de novo by linguists in the late 1920s but had already been in use among psychologists a generation earlier. At that time, it referred to the theories professed by the British-born American psychologist E. B. Titchener (1867-1927), who had studied at the
In an earlier period still, moreover, the terms "structure" and "structural" had been current in various scientific and technical fields all the way back to the first half of the nineteenth century. It is instructive to consult the relevant articles in The
As we have seen, these terms were introduced into twentieth-century linguistics by Roman Jakobson. We do not know exactly why he use them to refer to his approach to linguistics and that of his
The use of terms like "structure," "structural," etc. was, I might also suggest, a manifestation of the urge that linguists have had since the early nineteenth century to adopt words redolent of the biological and natural sciences. Think, for instance, of terms like "organism" and "morphology," which were borrowed by comparative philologists in the nineteenth century from biology and geology, two fields with unimpeachably scientific legitimacy. Words of this kind are an important element in the scientific window-dressing that professional linguists have constructed for themselves over the past two centuries. As such, it is not absolutely necessary that they have unequivocal meanings. In this instance, the vagueness of the term "structure" may even have been part of its original cachet. Indeed, the very fact that it was so non-committal may have made it an ideal slogan for the purveyors of various new brands of linguistics that otherwise did not have much in common.
Significantly, moreover, the advent of structuralism coincided chronologically with the appearance of the Saussure myth, i.e. the notion that Saussure was the founder of modern linguistics. Perhaps, therefore, the two were different sides of the same coin. If that is so, it may be that in a strange sense Saussure really was the founder of structuralism: the structuralists themselves saw to that! Although it can be convincingly shown, as I believe I did in my 1981 article in Semiotica, that no immediate Saussurean paradigm was unleashed by the publication of the Cours de linguistique générale in 1916, [5] it may nevertheless be true that the vogue of the term "structuralism" was connected with the need felt by the devotees of that book to believe fervently in various ideas that they read into it and also by their fervent desire to imagine that they were members of a single coherent scientific movement opposed to the linguistics of the nineteenth century. We know something about how these beliefs first took shape, but how they were disseminated and how they came to be accepted by successive generations of professional linguists is still unclear. We need to track the use made by linguists of the cluster of terms surrounding the concept "structure." Imagine comprehensive entries for these terms in the style of the
Needless to say, the phenomenon of "structure talk," i.e. the widespread use of the term "structure" in many different disciplines, raises interesting questions. Here are just a few of them: How has linguistic structuralism nowadays come to be associated with the trend away from historical to descriptive linguistics? In any event, what factors caused this "synchronic turn" in linguistics? Were there perhaps three (not two) fundamental developments in twentieth-century linguistics, namely the rise of structuralism, the turning away from historical studies, and the vogue of Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale. How did structuralism of the linguistic variety subsequently spread to the social sciences, literary studies, philosophy, and even physics? To what extent was the ground prepared in the social sciences by the earlier use of the term "structuralism" in psychology? What led to the expansion of structuralism to include talk of "deep structure," which was not originally part of it? What is the relation between European structuralism and structuralism in the
Last but not least, let me mention an important ingredient that must be added to any well-balanced account of the origins of Prague School structuralism, namely the influence of the Russian Formalist school of literary analysis, mediated first and foremost by Roman Jakobson, who moved from Moscow to Prague in 1920. In addition, of course, the members of the
Facts of this kind lead me to raise the awkward question of the relation between linguistics and literary criticism in the period up to the emergence of structuralism in
The link with contemporary philosophical trends is so obvious that I do not need to emphasize it. Early structuralism in
As regards future research in this area, I might tentatively suggest the following as a reasonable agenda. First, the relations, personal and institutional, between the various structuralist schools will need to be investigated. Second, the initial local theoretical tradition of each school of linguists will need to be established. Third, the impact of Saussure's Cours on each group will need to be tracked. Fourth, the impact of other influential contributions to theoretical linguistics will need to be re-examined pari passu. Fifth, the relations between linguists and scholars/scientists in other fields will need to be focused on. Sixth, the wider ramifications of linguistic theorizing will need to be brought into the picture.[8] In this entire area, if I may return to the question that I raised at the beginning of this essay, the vogue of Cours de linguistique générale may well turn out to function like Ariadne's thread.
(Source: http://people.ku.edu/~percival/Jakobson&Structuralism.html)
3. A.J. Greimas
Greimas was another important structuralist thinker who continued the work of Vladimir Propp who applied the system of language into literature in the form of narrative theory. The difference was that Propp started from one genre, the folktale, while Greimas didn’t make ay limitation. From Saussure and Jakobson’s concept of binary opposition, Greimas described that the oppositions include what he called the Elementary Structure Os Signifiaction, differences give people the ability to construct the world according to their purposes. He later argued that the binary opposition is the basis of an Actantial Model, the superficial surface structure, from where individual stories derived and generated.
Toward a Cognitive Rhetoric
by Jørgen Dines Johansen
The Literary Mind. By Mark Turner. (1996) New York/Oxford:
It may be argued that the sort of cognitive linguistics, semantics and philosophy practised by George Lakoff and his circle of colleagues, associates, and students at
It is fascinating to follow the development of this approach to cognition and representation. Primarily, of course, in order to profit from the insights it offers, but also to see whether it has potential for development beyond what has already been achieved. The latter is not obvious. Glossematics, for instance, was never taken beyond the point to which Hjelmslev himself brought it. The value of glossematics lies rather in the influence it has exercized on other structural approaches of language. Like Russian Formalism and the
There are two ways, however, in which a given theory, or approach, can develop, in breadth and in depths. And whereas glossematics was not very much developed in breadth, both structural semantics and generative grammar were applied outside their original field. Within literary studies, the Chomskyan approach very soon proved abortive, whereas the case of Greimas is different, since Greimas himself applied structural semantics to literature in the last chapter of Semantique structurale (1966), in his book-length study of a short story by Maupassant, and on many other occasions. The debt of literary studies to structuralism and especially to structural semantics is far from negligible.
The reason for which I mention the tradition from Russian Formalism to the
However, for a literary scholar and semiotician, the advent of cognitive semantics (and of pragmatics) meant that the gap between literary studies and linguistics which was created by generative grammar has been bridged again.
Like Jakobson and Greimas, Lakoff has been directly involved in literary studies. He wrote a thesis on the grammar of the folktale, and he co-authored with Mark Turner More Than Cool Reason. A Field Guide To Poetic Metaphor (1989), probably the best introduction to the study of metaphors available to the student of literature. It is Mark Turner, however, who is the literary scholar, and who has developed the cognitive approach to literature in two books of his own: Reading Minds. The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (1991) and The Literary Mind (1996). Consequently, I will concentrate on his contribution to the study of literature and on its relation to the work of cognitive linguistics, philosophy, and neuroscience.
(Source: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/srb/rhetoric.html)
4. Tzvetan Todorov
Todorov believed in the existence of a ‘Grammar’ of narrative form which individual stories ultimately derive. He divided the relations between the elements in literature into 2 types. The first, the Syntagmatic or In-praesentia , is the configuration relation in which there exist the causality between the elements which support the story. The second, Paradigmatic or In-absentia, is the relation between the presence and absence in a text. This relation focuses on the semantic element of the narration.
Life in Common - Review
Tzvetan Todorov, Life in Common, transl. Katherine Golsan and Lucy Golsan
(
(reviewed by Clifford Geertz)
A Bulgarian-born French savant and man of letters, Todorov has engaged, in one fashion or another, with virtually every current in the human sciences of the last quarter century. He has written substantial works on literary theory: the literature of fantasticism, the typology of the detective story, the theory of genres, the poetics of prose. On literary criticism: Proust, Flaubert, Bénichou, Bakhtin. On philosophy: Rousseau, Constant, humanist thought, the morals of history. On semiotics: French structuralism, Russian formalism, theories of the symbol, the grammar of the Decameron, an encyclopedic dictionary of the language sciences.
On totalitarianism: why
Now, in this drifting, compendious little book, crisp, assured, and oddly old-fashioned (nothing wrong with that), he seeks to sum up the overall view of life that has animated everything he has done. This is an essay in what he calls "general anthropology," which has, he says, nothing to do with the jargon-ridden sort of particularistic study that goes under the name today, but is rather a reflection, "half-way between the human sciences and philosophy," on what it amounts to, anywhere and everywhere, to be human.
To this end, he touches episodically, and rather at random, on the work of various writers, some famous (Freud, Sartre, Rousseau, La Rochefoucauld, Bataille, Adam Smith, Proust), some not (Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Romain Gary, Michael Balint, Karl Phillip Moritz), and all European, whose remarks on the matter he has found suggestive or countersuggestive. He concludes from this material that "man" is fundamentally a social being with "a need for the gaze of the other." It is the recognition of us by others that makes us what we are; "to be deprived of [such recognition] is to suffocate."
Well, yes: but after G. H. Mead, Wittgenstein, and Todorov’s--alas, inimitable--model, Montaigne, this conclusion is hardly news. Except for an interesting distinction, borrowed from Moritz, between "life" and "existence," there is not much new here for those of us still mired in the fact and detail of the special sciences.
—Clifford Geertz
(Source: http://www.iwp.uni-linz.ac.at/lxe/sektktf/gg/GeertzTexts/Todorov2002Review.htm)
5. Roland Barthes
Roland Barthes was a structuralist who focused on the role, function, and contribution of the reader and the relation between the signifier and the signified. There are two types of readers according to Barthes, Writerly (when the reader acts as a producer of a text) and Readerly (left with very poor freedom-simply to accept or to reject a text).
Roland Barthes (1915-1980)
French social and literary critic, whose writings on semiotics made structuralism one of the leading intellectual movements of the 20th century. In his lifetime Barthes published seventeen books and numerous articles, many of which were gathered to form collections. His ideas have offered alternatives to the methods of traditional literary scholarship. Barthes' writings have had a considerable following among students and teachers both in and outside
The writer's language is not expected to represent reality, but to signify it. This should impose on critics the duty of using two rigorously distinct methods: one must deal with the writer's realism either as an ideological substance (Marxist themes in Brecht's work, for instance) or as a semiological value (the props, the actors, the music, the colours in Brechtian dramaturgy). The ideal of-course would be to combine these two types of criticism; the mistake which is constantly made is to confuse them: ideology has its methods, and so has semiology. (from Mythologies, 1957)
Roland Barthes was born in Cherbough, Manche. After his father's death in a naval battle in 1916, Barthes' mother Henriette Binger Barthes moved to
In 1934 Barthes contracted tuberculosis and spent the years 1934-35 and 1942-46 in sanatoriums. During the Occupation he was in a sanatorium in the Isère. Numerous relapses with tuberculosis prevented him from carrying out his doctoral research, but he read avidly, founded a theatrical troupe, and began to write. Barthes was a teacher at lycées in Biarritz (1939), Bayonne (1939-40), Paris (1942-46), at the French Institute in Bucharest, Romania (1948-49), University of Alexandria, Egypt (1949-50), and Direction Générale des Affaires Culturelles (1950-52). In 1952-59 he had research appointments with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, from 1960 to 1976 he was a director of studies at École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1967-68 he taught at
Barthes entered the French intellectual scene in the 1950s. The work which brought him into modern literature was Sartre's What is Literature? (1947) LE DEGRÉ ZÉRO DE L'ÉCRITURE (1953, Writing Degree Zero) was initially published as articles in Albert Camus' journal, Combat. It established Barthes as one of leading critics of Modernist literature in
In MICHELET PAR LUI-MÊME (1954), a biography of Jules Michelet, a 19th-century historian, Barthes focused on Michelet's personal obsessions and saw that they are part of his writing, and give existential reality to the historical moments related by the historian's writing. In MYTHOLOGIES (1957) Barthes used semiological concepts in the analysis of myths and signs in contemporary culture. His material was newspapers, films, shows and exhibitions, because of their connection to ideological abuse. Barthes' starting point was not in the traditional value judgements and investigation of the author's intentions, but in the text itself as a system of signs, whose underlying structure forms the "meaning of the work as a whole" An advertising firm found Barthes' works so compelling that it persuaded him to work briefly as a consultant for the auto manufacturer Renault.
Barthes' study SUR
I speak in the name of what? Of a function? A body of knowledge? An experience? What do I represent? A scientific capacity? An institution? A service? In fact, I speak only in the name of language: I speak because I have written; writing is represented by its contrary, by speech... For writing can tell the truth on language but not the truth on the real... (from Image-Music-Text, 1977)
During his career, Barthes published more essays than substantial studies, presenting his views among others in subjective aphorism and not in the form of theoretical postulates. In LE PLASIR DE TEXTE (1973) Barthes developed further his ideas of the personal dimensions in relationship with the text. Barthes analyzed his desire to read along with his likes, dislikes, and motivations associated with that activity. L'EMPIRE DES SIGNES (1970) was written after Barthes's visit to
In ELÉMENTS DE SÉMIOLOGIE (1964) Barthes systematized his views on the "science of signs", based on Ferdinand de Saussure's (1857-1913) concept of language and analysis of myth and ritual. Barthes made his most intensive application of structural linguistics in S/Z (1970). By analyzing phase-by-phase Balzac's short story 'Sarrasine', he dealt with the experience of reading, the relations of the reader as subject to the movement of language in texts. According to Barthes, classic criticism has never paid any attention to the reader. But the reader is the space, in which all the multiple aspects of the text meet. A text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. "... the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author." The study has become the focal point and model for multilevel - nearly playful - literary criticism because of its analytical concentration on the structural elements that constitute the literary whole.
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor." (from Camera Lucinda, 1980)
Barthes' last book was LA CHAMBRE CLAIRE (1980, Camera Lucinda), in which photography is discussed as a communicating medium. It was written in the short space between his mother's death and his own. The author himself confesses that he is too impatient to be a photographer, but whenever he poses in front of the lens, his "body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother? For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image - the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police - but love, extreme love)." Photography, especially portraits, was for him "a magic, not an art." Through his life Barthes lived with or near his mother, who died in 1977. During her illness Barthes nursed her, and later wrote in Camera Lucinda, that "ultimately I experienced her, strong as she had been, my inner law, as my feminine child... Once she was dead I no longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the superior Life Force (the race, the species)." Barthes died three years later in
(Source: http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rbarthes.htm)
6. Gerard Genette
Summary of Gerard Genette,
"Structuralism and Literary Criticism"
Prepared for his students in ENGL 4F70, "Contemporary Literary Theory" at Brock University by Professor John Lye, who takes full responsibility for any distortions he may have effected in the meanings of Genette's work.
The pagination in brackets refers to the text as republished in David Lodge, Modern Criticism and Theory.
1: The critic and the literary: Genette first introduces the good structuralist conception of the bricoleur as opposed to the engineer; it will turn out that a critic is a bricoleur , working with what is to hand. Genette turns the artist into the engineer, a rather literary-critical thing to do.
Genette then makes the point that as literary criticism uses language to speak of language use, it is in fact a metaliterature, a literature on a literature. Poststructuralists will challenge the distinction between the two, and Genette here refers to Barthes distinctions to suggest that some literary criticism may be literature.
He then defines literariness in a way much like a formalist would: literariness is language production in which the attention is addressed to spectacle rather than message -- something one supposes like Jakobson's poetic function, or meta-poetic; in fact to put it right into Jakobson's terms, the attention is on the poetic rather than on the referential function, on medium rather than on message. Genette will later in the essay insist that this does not degrade the meaning-function of the language.
Genette as well refers to that aspect of literature which is so close to the New Critical understanding of ambiguity, the 'halt', the attention to the constitution of meaning under a different aspect, that also characterizes the literary; so it is that there is only a literary function , no literariness in any essential or material sense. Genette's sense of the ambiguity of literature is similar to Jakobson's in "Linguistics and Poetics", in which essay he writes that "Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry...Not only the message itself but the addresser and the addressee become ambiguous." (pp 49-50 in Lodge).
2: The role of the critic: The critic is secondary to the writer, a bricoleur to the writer's engineer, but in a position therefore to be primary in the analysis of culture. The critic treats as signs what the writer is creating as concept: the attitude, the disposition is different. The critic in reading literature as signs is reading it as a cultural production, constructed according to various preconceptions, routines, traditions and so forth of that culture. The critic does not ignore the meaning, but treats it as mediated by signs, not directly encountered. (65T) Where the post-structuralist will differ is in their denial that anything can be transparent: all concepts are themselves constructed of signs, there is no unmediated thought, all mediated thought is social thought, there is no attachment to anything beyond the sign.
3: Structuralism is more than a linguistic exercise. While structuralism historically (in
- First of all, literary language is language used to certain ends, having a certain function and therefore featuring the qualities of linguistic production and the relationships of sounds and meaning in a particular way. The ends then are important. As he writes on page 66, structuralist method as such is constituted at the very moment when one rediscovers the message in the code, uncovered by an analysis of the immanent structures and not imposed from the outside by ideological prejudices. (Poststructuralists will deny that anything can be innocent of ideology.)
- Second, there is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an analogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with:
- the relation between forms and meanings,
- the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience,
- the cultural perception of reality, and
- the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.
Genette writes on p. 67 of the idea of a table of concordance, variable in its details but constant in its function: it is the function, not the detail, that concerns structuralist thought. One of the elements of literature that Genette deals with later is genre, which segments experience in certain ways, and controls the attitudes towards it. What is the place of this individual work in the systems of representation? That is a key question.
4: Structuralism is about meaning, not just about form. Genette is at pains to point out that structuralism is not just about form, but about meaning, as linguistics is about meaning. It is a study of the cultural construction or identification of meaning according to the relations of signs that constitute the meaning-spectrum of the culture. (67 ft) When Jakobson writes of the centrality of tropes to imaginative writing, he places the categories of meaning at the heart of the structural method, as tropes, including metaphor and metonymy, are the way we say something by saying something else, figures of signification. Ambiguity, which is a meaning-function, is at the heart of the poetic function, as we saw in #1 above. Finally in this section, Genette looks forward to structural analysis at the more macro level of the text, of the analysis of narratives, for instance -- "an analysis that could distinguish in them [that is, larger units], by a play of superimpositions [and hence knowledge through difference], variabvle elements and constant functions, and to rediscover in them the bi-axial system, familiar to Saussureanlinguistics, of syntagmatic relations (real connections of functions in the continuity of a text) and paradigmatic relations (virtual relations between similar or oposed functions, form one text to another, in the whole of the corpus considered)>"[68t]
5: Structuralism is a general tendency of thought (Cassirer) Structuralism is, however, not necessarily an intrinsic fact of nature but rather is a way of thinking; [68] structures are"systems of latent relations, conceived rather than perceived, which analysis constructs as it uncovers them, and which it runs the risk of inventing while believing that it is discovering them" -- that is, structures are explanations of coherence and repetition, they appear in what they seek to explain, they in a sense provide the terms and the vehicle of explanation. as we can only now through knowledge frames. Structuralism is the explanation of texts or events in their own terms (as those terms are conceived), not in relation to external causes.
When one turns to the internal dynamic of a text as an object, a field of meanings, and to the coherence of it as a text, rather than as biography or sociology, one reads structurally. Structuralist reading abandons pyschological, sociological, and such explanations. One can see New Criticism as a structural methodology, although it is not structuralism: in structural analysis of theme, for instance, theme would be seen in the context of the relations of themes, that is, of certain elements of filaments of the configuration, or network or matrix of, of social meanings, which meanings constitute culture.
6: Structuralism is however not merely intrinsic criticism, the criticism of the thing itself. Genette mentions the other form of intrinsic criticism, phenomenological criticism, in which one becomes in touch with the subjectivity of the creative voice of the work. Ricoeur refers to this, Genette writes, as the hermeneutic method: the intuitive convergence to two consciousnesses, the authors and the readers. This is a little confusing, because this is not hermeneutics properly speaking, but rather phenomenological hermeneutics. When there is hermeneutics, Genette says, when the text is available to us in that immediate a way, then structural reading fades; but whenever we have to look more objectively, when we are transversing barriers of time, say, or of culture or interest, then the structural method, the search for principles of order, coherence and meaning, becomes dominant -- literatures [71t] distant in place and time, children's literature, popular literature. Genette goes on to suggest that the difference between hermeneutic and structural reading is a matter of the critical position of the critic -- (between identity and distance, say). Structuralism is an intrinsic reading free from subjectivity, when we become the ethnomethodologists of our culture (71).
7: Structuralism ties the meaning of the work to the meanings of the culture. (72) Genette suggests that topics is an area of study that structuralism can bring us to -- the traditional subjects and forms of the culture (from the Greek topos, 'place'; I prefer to refer to culturally-constucted sites of meaning as topoi, to try to retain the full meaning of the idea). Topics, or topoi, are structural in that they underlie the way we talk and think about things in our culture. They are in a sense psychological, Genette says [72], but collectively so, not individually. Throughout, in writing of the cultural knowledge that structuralism provides, Genette has been suggesting that 'high' literature is not the only, perhaps not the primary, location for the study of cultural meanings: the serious study of popular culture has begun.
8: Structuralism opens the study of genre to new light. Different genres predispose the reader to different attitudes, different expectations [cf. the saying, attributed to Voltaire, that life is a comedy to he who thinks and a tragedy to he who feels, which saying suggests a way in which genres might look differently at experience]. Different genres lead to different expectations of types of situations and actions, and of psychological, moral, and esthetic values. Without conventional expectations we cannot have the difference, the surprise, the reversals which mark the more brilliant exercise of creativity. Hence creativity is in a sense structural, as it depends on our expectation, which it them plays upon.
9: Structuralism can be applied to the study of literature as a whole, as a meaning system. Structurally, literature is a whole; it functions as a system of meaning and reference no matter how many works there are, two or two thousand. Thus any work becomes the parole, the individual articulation, of a cultural langue, or system of signification. As literature is a system, no work of literature is an autonomous whole; similarly, literature itself is not autonomous but is part of the larger structures of signification of the culture.
10: Structuralism studies literature synchronically, but with diachronic awareness. Structuralism studies literature historically by studying it as it were in cross-section at different times, by seeing in what way literature divides up the traditional topics of the cultural imagination. Change is intrinsic to literature, as the Russian formalists thought; what the change registers is the alterations of the relations of meaning within the culture. Structuralism can then yield a fruitful approach to the history of literature, not as a series of great works, or of influences of one writer upon another, but more structurally, more systematically, as the way in which a culture's discourse with itself alters. The meaning of an individual work is ultimately and inevitably only the meaning within a larger frame of cultural meanings, and these meanings change in relation to one another across time and cultures. As well, the addition of other signifying systems, such as cinema, alter but do not disrupt the system of literature. A structural analysis of the construction of cultural meaning can thence replace the meaning of the individual instance, the particular work, while the meaning of the individual work is illumined and rendered more fully significant by being read in the context of its full systemic, cultural meaning.
(Source: http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/genette.html)
