Shahar draws our attention to the works of Itamar Even-Zohar, who has worked out a semiotics he calls polysystemic theory. The other day I sort of casually let it slip that I would be reclaiming synchrony from the structuralists on behalf of language and good sense. Well, now I have a project on my hands because Even-Zohar has given the matter a lot of thought and he intends to do some reclaiming of his own. He says that once we recognize that semiotic systems do not exist outside of history we are led to certain conclusions:
First, it must be admitted that both synchrony and diachrony are historical, but the exclusive identification of the latter with history is untenable. As a result, synchrony cannot and should not be equated with statics, since at any given moment, more than one diachronic set is operating on the synchronic axis. Therefore, on the one hand a system consists of both synchrony and diachrony; on the other, each of these separately is obviously also a system. Secondly, if the idea of structuredness and systemicity need no longer be identified with homogeneity, a semiotic system can be conceived of as a heterogeneous, open structure. It is, therefore, very rarely a uni-system but is, necessarily, a polysystem--a multiple system, a system of various systems which intersect with each other and partly overlap, using concurrently different options, yet functioning as one structured whole, whose members are interdependent.
("Polysystem Theory," p. 11).
Of all the things there are, which of them should not be called a system? I'll turn the question on myself: of all the things there are, which of them should not be described by metaphor? Well, what is preliminary to a study of synchrony? I intend to approach synchrony as such (a metaphor, no doubt), schools and poetry in abeyance. (There's only so much a single person can do, I know, and for that matter collectives too have their limitations.) If synchrony means to abolish history, though I may disagree, I will not hesitate to report it. And if it were to emancipate itself from anti-systematicity I won't keep that under my hat either.
I take to heart Evan-Zohar's point that structuralism has been misinterpreted, even by some of its champions, as a statics. I am cognizant of his position that the polysystem is an open system. However, I must reiterate an objection to a structuralist view of culture, and I believe my criticism applies as much to Evan-Zohar's polysystem theory as to structuralist thinking, whatever degree to which the latter has been misconstrued. Evan-Zohar subscribes to cultural holism and he maintains that the literary (poly)system, his primary interest, is isomorphic with the cultural (poly)system. This peculiar idea of isomorphism should be referred to thought rather than to the field of cultural anthropology in order to sort out what exactly we should want it to mean. The doctrinary ideas of cultural holism, functionalism, structural-functionalism, on the other hand, should definitely be referred to cultural anthropology, as that discipline has put these ideas to the test (and, I reckon, has ultimately found them wanting in various ways). For my part, I am uncomfortable with an appeal to a phenomenon that is purported to stand above and beyond one's immediate field of inquiry. Whether that phenomenon would be Mind or Culture, as the case may be, one should be able to interrogate it directly as well as in its relations, or set it aside altogether.
So what kind of a relation is isomorphism, and what can we learn by interrogating it? Even-Zohar, in addition to avowedly presenting a jargon, also presents, in outline at least, a functionalist theory of "literature" (which is also a bit of jargon, as I'm sure you will recognize). Well, we must make allowances for those who would think productively, or, rather, technically. So when I question the use of the word "isomorphic" it must be clear that I am questioning all at once a particular item of language, a more or less systematic method of describing a parcel of reality, and a way of thinking. I make allowances because I know that in key respects I am a rude thinker and I wish to mitigate against my rudeness. I value comity. So it is with all due respect that I ask whether our understandings of phenomena have been tainted by a discourse on forms. (Such a discourse may also be thought of as technical, if that bakes your noodle.) You see, a heteromorphy or an anisomporhy would raise the same issues for me—though by no means do I wish to sweep aside the problem of equation. To use such language means being faced with a dilemma about what to do with forms: are forms anterior or posterior to the activity of thinking? And getting jiggy with that question surely means being able to say something about thinking, whether it is an activity at all, and, if it is, what can reasonably be said about what it does. Is there an isomorphism between the thought and the question? What would it mean to posit an isomorphism between the interrogated and the uninterrogated? In talking about isomorphism in any fashion aren't we left then with precisely a discourse on forms, shakily perhaps, but on forms?
What should isochrony mean to us? I'm going to express an opinion in the hopes that it will not be recieved as a substitute for supple thinking, which we should all aspire to in some measure: isochrony is wrong. It is wrong because it destroys anything approaching eudemonia. Perhaps I'm saying as much as isochrony is irrational. Perhaps. Culture is often irrational. I believe the noblest purpose of studying culture is to emancipate oneself from it, and I believe the same emancipatory impulse should motivate the study of forms, though of course I imagine I could be persuaded otherwise. So we have the question of forms, and here in the problem of isochrony we have a question of times and measures, and all of these questions fall under the shadow of a technocratic culture that, were we so bold as to attempt to master its secrets, would take the life from us in exchange. But my view here is, after all, just an opinion, a starting point, perhaps, for a longer discussion of what time means in our lives, and what it should mean, if time should mean anything.
In what sense can two anisochronic moments be synchronous? How do we measure history? Oh, is that History, "history" in a technical sense, or history in a real sense? Because history in an etymological sense could travel under the name of historiography, and that might be an everyday sense as well. Is it just any kind of thing that can (or cannot) be separated from an inquiry into that thing? I ask about kinds of things in order to ask about the essence of things. Does essence point to inquiry? (Do I have it all backwards?) Does the thing? Does the historicization of the synchronic, in analysis if not in practice, say something about the essence of the synchronic? I think perhaps, and yet we still do not know whether the synchronic has anything like an essence or even an existence and as a concept we have yet to clearly define its scope and its import.
Even-Zohar and I agree that the synchronic is not static, which is to say, achronic or ahistorical. I don't think we will be able to finish taking it apart until we explore togetherness, temporality, and the proper measure of temporality. (We might also ask whether togetherness has its proper measure, naturally). A passage of questions becomes apparent at this juncture, and it may occur to some that this is indeed our main passage forward: do we simply mean to say that the phenomena synchrony is purported to conceptualize are historical? Sure, but there's nothing simple about it. There's nothing simple about a science of historical phenomena, or a discursive history of an historical discourse, or, to borrow a turn of phrase from anthropologist Stephen Tyler, a reality fantasy of a fantasy reality. (I am profoundly indebted to Tyler for saying that "the point of discourse is not how to make a better representation, but how to avoid representation," "Post-Modern Ethnography," in Clifford and Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture, University of California Press, 1986, p. 128). In all this talk of synchrony should we want to concern ourselves with reality in any sense? Should we take the claim that synchrony does not escape the historical as a wake-up call to reality? Very tricky. What is the purpose of studying the historical?
As I was saying, I don't intend to definitively take apart synchrony at this time. I'll leave it on hold until I've thought more about temporality, togetherness and, perhaps, the imagination of meaning.
Labels: culture, discourse, Even-Zohar, form, historicity, Steven Tyler, structuralism, synchrony
The thought occurs to me, and I won't say that it's either pleasant or unpleasant, that in lieu of discussing ideas what I actually do here is play with ideas. Playful discourse, discursive play—and so I begin by playing with the aimless, one of the many destabilizers that will play into this discussion.
In the back of my mind now is Gaston Bachelard's idea that "all rationalism is interrationalism." I favor pluralism and disagree with any equation of pluralism to dialecticism, but I find it difficult to assail the dialectician's position without confirming it, so I will be playing with these ideas instead of assailing them. Mind you, this is all in the back of my mind. I'll waltz with Bachelard's Dialectic of Duration anon. Today I'm going to respond briefly to Agamben's essay "In Playland" (in Infancy and History), which is wonderfully fun to read and in large measure an all around agreeable sort of text.
Agamben gives us the gist of his foray into play: "we can regard ritual and play not as two distinct machines but as a single machine, a single binary system, which is articulated across two categories which cannot be isolated and across whose correlation and difference the very functioning of the system is based" (p. 74, Agamben's emphasis). I might provisionally agree that play can't be isolated, though the provisional nature of the agreement cannot be stressed enough, and yet still question the existence of a single binary system, or more particularly its status as an object of thought or topic of discussion. In what sense would such a system not be a structure? Would a system's inclusion of event warrant making the claim, should our thought be called into question, that the system does not have the properties of a structure? Certainly there are reasons people speak of fluid, dynamic systems, or systematic processes and the like, and one of those reasons may be precisely to avoid confusion with structures. Yet in this case, in the case of the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, to whom "In Playland" is dedicated, given all that is claimed of structure, pointing to a system outside of the existence of structure becomes a dubious gesture, even when the gesture appears to be authorized by Lévi-Strauss himself.
Let's examine the problem from a slightly different angle. If one were to speak of an interpolation of some entity or force with structure, just supposing, what qualities would the interpolated necessarily possess? What qualities would have to belong to the context of interpolation? (What qualities would have to belong to a context of an interpellation?) For structure to remain structure in such a context what qualities would it appear to impart? Alternatively, we might simply ask what properties must structure have in order for there to be metamorphosis, for metamorphosis is very much at issue.
Can culture rationally be isolated in the way Agamben intends? Agamben's binary systems are entirely coextensive with cultures in a Boasian sense, and this occasions the question of whether contemporary ethnography would endorse such a view. Provisionally, sure, we can isolate culture. However, we may want to introduce more than a few caveats before jumping to descriptions of the functioning of the cultural system, were that our aim, and we should want know about such caveats before deciding on questions of isolation. I don't doubt that culture can be isolated, for heuristic purposes, for instance, but I shall never tire of questioning how and to what purpose one isolates culture or any other phenomenon for that matter.
If anything can be isolated, and of course we would issue provisos, then we have to keep our minds open to the possibility that play can indeed be isolated with reason. Isn't this what we do for the sake of discussion? And perhaps also we isolate play for the sake of play, though I am not sure what happens to reason in that case. Is there something like a spirit of play that would animate our toys, fill our playgrounds with laughter, guide our most theatrical gestures, even the aimless ones? Does play have something to teach us about rationality? If there is a spirit of play, or a muse, surely she would smile, bemusedly, on an idle engagement with play, jealously guarding against interference from the forces of seriousness. Above all play demands to be played with. In subscribing to the position that the phenomenon suggests how it ought to be approached, I am conscious of making a move I might not want to make if I were coaching myself from the sidelines. Why, one could insist that play must be approached with seriousness, because dialectic demands it, or for some other reason.
Agamben draws the following formula from his reading of Lévi-Strauss' La Pensée Sauvage: "while rites transform events into structures, play transforms structures into events" (p. 73). My translated edition (from 1966, UCP) differs somewhat. The passage at issue would be the end of the chapter titled "The Science of the Concrete," beginning with the discussion of the Fox Indian funeral rites on page 31. On page 32 Lévi-Strauss talks about the disjunctive function of play as opposed to the conjunctive function of ritual and he says, "Like science (though here again on both the theoretical and the practical plane) the game produces events by means of a structure." In either case play, or a certain structured kind of play known as the game, creates events. Structure is transformed, or, having served a purpose, it slips behind the event; it allows the event its lambency. You see the danger of slipping straight into the binaries, though, don't you? Elision, elusion, illusion. Is it really play if this is the way it ends up, as the mirror of ritual, or as a machine part? I rather feel that play must involve an openness, and that means play must allow for play itself, which may not mean conclusively play all by itself, like you could pack it up and take it home with you and that would still be play, but would involve spending some time at play itself.
I want to introduce a few more terms, cautious of the danger of allowing them to form a "permutation group," that is, to be deployed in the service of myth rather than some other kind of thought I might rather prefer. Levi-Strauss' formula for myth, Fx(a):Fy(b) ⋍ Fx:Fa-1(y) ("The Structural Study of Myth," Structural Anthropology, p. 228) might serve as a model for how not to play with ideas if one is to play in the spirit of play, or, indeed, the spirit of ideas, or of thought, if we presume to speak of thought. Should we allow the structuralists to distinguish the diachronic from the synchronic, as is their custom, without questioning the commonplace implication that the synchronic is in fact timeless? Isn't timelessness, or achrony, sufficiently less than synchrony in any temporal sense so as to warrant its own concept? Is there room for polychrony at any moment in the thinking of the structuralists? Will the dialecticians allow us to speak of polylectic—why should bees have all the fun?—or will they take their ball and go home at the first hint of the many? For my part I will not assume that theses and antitheses exhaust the things that may be synthesized, which is to say I will not let the thesis be pre-emptorily defined in such a way as to prejudice the synthesis. I don't mean to dwell in a paradox of allowing a synthesis to precede a thesis, but rather I merely wish to avoid too much seriousness for fear of being dreadfully wrong about how to live, or, more immediately, how to enjoy the play of ideas.
When one looks to play for models of how to think (or how to live), among the terrible mistakes one can make is to regard a model as the model. Happily, playgrounds don't have just one kind of equipment which would model play for life. Alongside the teeter-totters are the swing sets, the monkey bars, the slides, the sandboxes, the balance beams, the jungle gyms, the merry-go-rounds and what have you. It is probably a grievous intellectual mistake to believe that a society's toys and games can't be played with. Societies might rather be heating and cooling instead of hot and cold, if those are the terms one insists upon, because it's not for nothing that people play. Does play impart something to structure, even, were we to accept the idea, in transforming structure into event? How do we think around transience?
Agamben cites Fragment 52 of Heraclitus (αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττεύων· παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη), which, as he puts it, says that Aion is a child playing dice. Agamben doesn't cite Fragment 70 (perhaps because it's apocryphal) which says that human opinions are children's toys (παίδων ἀθύρματα νενόμικεν εἶναι τὰ ἀνθρώπινα δοξάσματα). The Italian word cianfrusaglie (trinkets, rags, junk) came up in my searches for ἀθύρματα. Although cianfrusaglie resonates with Lévi-Strauss' theme of bricolage, which Agamben takes up, I would be cautious about defending opinion in these terms, whose values we would be playing with, and not at all keen to see too rigid a separation of logos from opinion, which might be implied, and which I might have already leaned towards in my wish to avoid slipping into myth. (It's hard, I know.) Agamben says, speaking of the scraps that fall into the world of the child, "Everything which is old, independent of its sacred origins, is liable to become a toy" (p. 70). The essence of the toy, he tells us, is "the Historical in its pure state" (p. 71, my emphasis). Well, what isn't δοξάσματα? What isn't cianfrusaglie? How can we be sure that Aion (or the Diachronic) or the Historical aren't cianfrusaglie? Would it be horrible to be locked inside a world of cianfrusaglie? Might that be the question of play?
Labels: Agamben, Bachelard, Heraclitus, Lévi-Strauss, play, structuralism
Structural linguistics is all about the question "Where does meaning come from?" The simplest way to undermine structural linguistics is to turn the question into "Who does meaning come from?" However the result of such a turn tends to be that people talk past one another, each side believing that the other is responding to a question that really doesn't matter. But if we stick with the question "where does meaning come from?" it is not a foregone conclusion that structural linguistics provides an answer that is true to language or necessarily adequate for general purposes.
A case in point is the phenomenon of phonesthesia or sound symbolism. Phonesthesia is perhaps best attested in "exotic" languages, but it occurs in European languages too. In English phonesthesia is frequently found in the elements of speech known as phonaesthemes. Are phonaesthemes rather anomolies, or are they rather more pervasive? Is there in English a broad pattern of creating meaning from the way a word is spoken?
Take for example the set of words tip, tap and top which are not, as far as I know, commonly regarded as phonaesthemic. Also keep in mind tape, type, and taupe. The structuralist is absolutely correct about taupe. The difference between taupe and top for instance is a case of a purely abritrary relation between sounds and meanings. Is the same true of the differences between tip, tap and top? I don't believe so. All three convey a meaning of being at an extremity symbolized by the letter t; the p symbolizes abruptness; and the vowels indicate the nature of the extremity, whether pointed, flattened or rounded.
What then of tape? It's a little sticky, as is type. Are the meanings of these words colored by the phonaesthemic element of tip, tap and top? It's ambigiuous. They could be ceded to the structuralist, but perhaps the poet would take better care of them.
The claim against structuralism is not absolute here. Frequently, but not in all cases, meaning comes directly from the way a word is spoken. The claim gives us sufficient reason to question some of the conclusions that are drawn from structural linguistics. The reality of language may be more ambigiuous than any current theory admits.
Labels: meaning, phonaesthesia, structuralism