Th eory of Literature

How to Make Our Signs Clear (Brill), 2017

The chapter focuses on the problem of divergent (and eventually misleading) interpretations of Ch. S. Peirce’s texts presented by leading philosophical figures of the ‘70 and the ’80, such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Umberto Eco. The poststructuralist re-discovery of Peirce’s semiotics seemed to be a possible “cure” for the totalitarian “disease” of structuralism. Trying to find a way out of “dying” structuralism, the poststructuralists upraised Peirce to one of the main sources of their philosophical inspiration. Thanks to them, Peirce became an attractive, frequent and influential reading for various contemporary semioticians of photographic image, like Rosalind Krauss, Thierry de Duve, Henri Van Lier or Jean-Marie Schaeffer. According to the author’s claim, this situation gave birth to various poststructuralist interpretations that made up Peirce’s texts in order to fit it in poststructuralist context of thinking. On the example of Derrida’s reading of Peirce, the paper analysis poststructuralist intentions, expectations and hopes that shaped these interpretations. Finally, the author points out several distinctions between Peirce’s semiotics and semiotics of poststructuralism (that should be seen as eventual reasons for poststructuralist disappointment by Peirce’s metaphysics).

Criticism and Critical Theory, 1984

This essay attempts not so much to reconcile Marxism and Structuralism as to side-step some of their inbuilt antagonisms. To this end I have found it necessary ro resort to certain theoretical texts and propositions which both pre- and post-date the problem. Exemplary among these is the combined oeuvre of Voloshinov/Bakhtin, especially V.N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (London, Seminar Press, 1973) and Freudianisnz; A Marxist Critique (London, Academic Press, 1976) Under his own name, Bakhtin published two applications of his 'dialogic' theory of the literary utterance, Rabelais and His World, (Cambridge., Mass., MIT Press, 1968) and Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, (Ann Arbor, Ardis, l973). Apart from Julia Kristeva's useful commentary on Bakhtin in the introduction to the French edition of Rabelais, the implications of the work seem to have been ignored by'mainstream structuralism. For a concise and useful account in English though, see Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London, Methuen , 1979). A similar project concerned with a theory of the utterance and the conditions of production of discourse is now being developed by French theorists in, for example, Michel Pêcheux , Les verités de la palice (Paris, Maspero, l975), Régine Robin, Histoire et linguistique (Paris, Colin , 1973) and Françoise Gadet and Michel Pêcheux , La langue introuvable (Paris, Maspero, 1981). Compatible with this project and similarly influenced by the work of Louis Althusser is the work by Renée Balibar and her associates on the question of the 'national language'. See Les francais fictifs: le rapport des styles littéraires au français national (Paris, Hachette ,1974) and R. Balibar and D. Laporte , Le français national: politique et pratique de la langue nationale sur la Révolution (Paris, Hachette, 1974). Two recent works have significantly influenced my own argumenrs about necessary realignments of literature and history. These are Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London, NLB/Verso, 1983) and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, NLB/Verso, 1983). Anderson's analysis of the national context of literarure's purview and Moretti's reintroduction of the techniques of 'Rhetoric' into literary analysis along with the associated conceptions of consent and pact enabled me to attempt to form a bridge with the work of Antonio Gramsci and the concept of hegemony.

Yale Journal of Criticism, 2004

We need to return to the eternal question concerning the "being" and the specificity of literature, but this time we need to recast it. Instead of "What is literature?" 1 we might ask "What does literature do and, from that moment onward, what can literature do?" Ever since the Decadents and the Symbolists of the s, we have been offered the dull replies of aesthetes, which was:"Literature doesn't do anything, and it can't do anything, thank God!" Furthermore, according to the poetry of Edmond Rostand, which has made a comeback in contemporary literary commentary in the form of postmodern paraphrases, a thing is even more beautiful when it's useless. 2 What does literature do, what does it work on, and, at the end of the day, given what it does, what does it know? What does it know that is not known as well, or better, in other knowledge domains? 3 Does it know something about other sectors of language production, but in a mode that is specific to it, that is, with peculiar cognitive instruments? For instance, does it know something about knowledge that is permeated with images (Bildhaftigkeit), an idea that György Lukàcs employs to distinguish literature from scientific knowledge even as he situates both on the same level, thereby rendering one a complement to the other? To take on such questions is not the same thing as posing the following, seemingly related question:"What can literature be used for?" It is by no means an a priori that this literary knowledge, if there is such a thing, should be usable in a practical or a positive sense, nor that it should be redeemable for some purpose or another. With all due respect to Rostand and his Aiglon, such negative determinations are not to be synonymous with "useless." Text sociocriticism interrogates the work of textualization (the miseen-texte) even as it refuses "formal" aestheticism and nihilism that conma r c a n g e n o t   

Theorizing the Subject, 2020

Ever since the Greek philosophers and fabulists pondered the question "What is man?," inquiries into the concept of the subject have troubled humanists, eventuating in fierce debates and weighty tomes. In the wake of the Descartes's cogito and Enlightenment thought, proposals for an ontology of the idealist subject's rationality, autonomy, and individualism generated tenacious questions regarding the condition of pre-consciousness, the operation of feelings and intuitions, the subject-object relation, and the origin of moral and ethical principles. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Marx, and theorists he and Engels influenced, pursued the materialist bases of the subject, through analyses of economic determinism, self-alienation, and false consciousness. Through another lineage, Freud and theorists of psychic structures pursued explanations of the incoherence of a split subject, its multipartite psychodynamics, and its relationship to signifying systems. By the latter 20th century, theorizations of becoming a gendered woman by Beauvoir, of disciplining power and ideological interpellation by Foucault and Althusser, and of structuralist dynamics of the symbolic realm expounded by Lacan, energized a succession of poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, queer, and new materialist theorists to advance one critique after another of the inherited concept of the liberal subject as individualist, disembodied (Western) Man. In doing so, they elaborated conditions through which subjects are gendered and racialized and offered explanatory frameworks for understanding subjectivity as an effect of positionality within larger formations of patriarchy, slavery, conquest, colonialism, and global neoliberalism. By the early decades of the 21st Formatted: Centered Deleted: Nineteenth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: Twentieth Deleted: racialized, and Deleted: Twenty-first century, posthumanist theorists dislodged the subject as the center of agentic action and distributed its processual unfolding across trans-species companionship, trans-corporeality, algorithmic networks, and conjunctions of forcefields. Persistently, theorists of the subject referred to an entangled set of related but distinct terms, such as the human, person, self, ego, interiority, and personal identity. And across diverse humanities disciplines, they struggled to define and refine constitutive features of subject formation, most prominently relationality, agency, identity, and embodiment.

1980

were), these same "Piagetian" essays are also crucial for documenting an even more important fact: namely, that Goldmann succeeded implicitly in providing for his categories to be made into a systematic dialectical model. In other words, they can be brought together formally in a theoretically coherent fashion. In fact, his primary contribution lies here. As Goldmann 1ays, "We have also defined the positive human sciences and more exactly the Marxist method by means of a nearly identical term (which, moreover, we have borrowed from Jean Piaget), that of genetic structuralism. " 7 According to Goldmann, it is Piaget, "not at all ... influenced by Marx, who has empirically discovered in his research laboratory nearly all of the fundamental positions Marx had formulated a hundred years earlier in the domain of the social sciences. "8 Given this new emphasis on Goldmann's Piagetian context and the possibility of formally organizing his categories on this basis, then, it remains to point out Goldmann's use of certain categories borrowed from Lukacs and to order them into the model he intended. It is hoped that this approach will enable the reader to place the particular heuristic categories of single essays into a theoretical framework where they are related to other such categories. (Thus, while the essay "Subject and Object in the Human Sciences" introduces the reader to the delicate theoretical balance Goldmann achieved, the categories presented there are given a more rigorous order in the following essay, "The Epistemology of Sociology.") 9 The major advantage, but also the major difficulty, of the sociology of literature in general lies in its recognizing the need to 7. Marxisme et sciences humaines (Gallimard: Paris, 1970), p. 246. 8. Entretiens sur Les notions de genese et de structure (Mouton: The Hague, 1965), p. 15. The two major Goldmann essays that most explicitly express his debt to Piaget are "The Epistemology of Sociology" (in this volume) and ''Jean Piaget et la philosophie," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, 10 (1966), pp. 5•23. There are also two essays on Piaget in Goldmann's Recherches Dialectiques (Gallimard: Paris, 1959). 9. The next step would be to use the model in concrete research and then, in terms of current theoretical developments, to incorporate it into the complementary research of Jan Mukarovsky and Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij of the School of Tartu, all of whom attempt to elaborate a semiology of cultural creations using methods strikingly similar to Goldmann's genetic structuralism.

Cognitio Revista De Filosofia Issn 1518 7187 2316 5278, 2013

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1987

In the final chapter of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke introduces a topic, "the doctrine of signs," which effectively calls into question the very project undertaken in this book. (1959: 11, 461; cf. Deely 1987) The Essay is devoted to "inventing a new way of knowing-by means of ideas." (Locke 1959: I, lviii) However, if the doctrine of signs is taken seriously, then the newly discovered way of ideas must be supplanted by the merely potential theory of signs. (Deely 1987) The ground covered in the Essay must be covered again and, moreover, from the perspective of a discipline yet to be born. What is at stake in choosing between the new way of ideas and the future doctrine of signs is nothing trivial; it is not simply whether one speaks, on the one hand, about ideas or, on the other, about signs. The issue primarily concerns whether one is going to adopt a subjectivist approach, in which an isolated and, in effect, disembodied human subject is treated as the ultimate locus of meaning and truth; or whether one is going to espouse an intersubjectivist approach, in which some human community functions as the fundamental source of both meaning and truth. Locke's new way of ideas is, in reality, Descartes'old way of subjectivism, though at Locke's time Descartes'way was not that old. Semiotic promises a way out of this subjectivism, for in granting priority to signs over ideas it shifts the focus from what occurs within a finite, individual consciousness to what occurs between social beings within a common framework ofexperienceand action. (Cf. Buber 1965: 203f; Buber 1966: 72-88) From the perspective of semiotic, we are always already in the midst of others as well as of meanings; indeed, otherness and meaning are given together in our experience of ourselves as beings embedded in a network of relations-more specifically, enmeshed in the "semiotic web." Vincent M. Colapietro. an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saint Mary S College (Winona. M N) has published articles on Peirce, James, Dewey in such journals as the Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society and The Southern Journal of Philosophy. He is an active member o/. among other organizations, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Charles S. Peirce Society, and the Semiotic Society of America.

The British Journal of Sociology, 1983

were), these same "Piagetian" essays are also crucial for documenting an even more important fact: namely, that Goldmann succeeded implicitly in providing for his categories to be made into a systematic dialectical model. In other words, they can be brought together formally in a theoretically coherent fashion. In fact, his primary contribution lies here. As Goldmann 1ays, "We have also defined the positive human sciences and more exactly the Marxist method by means of a nearly identical term (which, moreover, we have borrowed from Jean Piaget), that of genetic structuralism. " 7 According to Goldmann, it is Piaget, "not at all ... influenced by Marx, who has empirically discovered in his research laboratory nearly all of the fundamental positions Marx had formulated a hundred years earlier in the domain of the social sciences. "8 Given this new emphasis on Goldmann's Piagetian context and the possibility of formally organizing his categories on this basis, then, it remains to point out Goldmann's use of certain categories borrowed from Lukacs and to order them into the model he intended. It is hoped that this approach will enable the reader to place the particular heuristic categories of single essays into a theoretical framework where they are related to other such categories. (Thus, while the essay "Subject and Object in the Human Sciences" introduces the reader to the delicate theoretical balance Goldmann achieved, the categories presented there are given a more rigorous order in the following essay, "The Epistemology of Sociology.") 9 The major advantage, but also the major difficulty, of the sociology of literature in general lies in its recognizing the need to 7. Marxisme et sciences humaines (Gallimard: Paris, 1970), p. 246. 8. Entretiens sur Les notions de genese et de structure (Mouton: The Hague, 1965), p. 15. The two major Goldmann essays that most explicitly express his debt to Piaget are "The Epistemology of Sociology" (in this volume) and ''Jean Piaget et la philosophie," Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto, 10 (1966), pp. 5•23. There are also two essays on Piaget in Goldmann's Recherches Dialectiques (Gallimard: Paris, 1959). 9. The next step would be to use the model in concrete research and then, in terms of current theoretical developments, to incorporate it into the complementary research of Jan Mukarovsky and Jurij Lotman and Boris Uspenskij of the School of Tartu, all of whom attempt to elaborate a semiology of cultural creations using methods strikingly similar to Goldmann's genetic structuralism.