Page 158 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes This simple definition assumes that language not be confused with the diverse psychic and somatic
functions which serve it in the individual speaker.
For the primary reason that language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each
individual at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it.
Let us note, then, that aphasia, although caused by purely anatomical lesions in the cerebral
apparatus which supplies the mental center for these linguistic functions, produces language
deficiencies which divide naturally between the two poles of the signifying effect of what we call
here 'the letter' in the creation of meaning. A point which will be clarified later.
The speaking subject, if he seems to be thus a slave of language, is all the morose of a discourse in
the universal moment of which he finds himself at birth, even if only by dint of his proper name.
Reference to the 'experience of the community' as the substance of this discourse settles nothing.
For this experience has as its essential dimension the tradition which the discourse itself founds.
This tradition, long before the drama of history gets written into it, creates the elementary structures
of culture. And these structures reveal an ordering of possible exchanges which, even unconscious,
is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language. With the result that the
ethnographic duality of nature and culture is giving way to a ternary conception of the human
condition: nature, society, and culture, the last term of which could well be equated to language,
or that which essentially distinguishes human society from natural societies. But we shall not
make of this distinction either a point or a point of departure, leaving to its own obscurity the
question of the original relation between work and the signifier. We shall be content, for our little
job at the general function of praxis in the genesis of history, to point out that the very society
which wished to restore, along with the privileges of the producer, the causal hierarchy of the
relations between production and the ideological superstructure to their full political rights, has
none the less failed to give birth to an esperanto in which the relations of language to socialist
realities would have rendered any literary formalism radically impossible.
As for us, we shall have faith only in those assumptions which have already proven their value by
virtue of the fact that language through them has attained the status of an object of scientific
investigation. For it is by dint of this fact that linguistics is seen to occupy the key position in this
domain, and the reclassification of sciences and regrouping of them around it points up, as is the
rule, a revolution in knowledge; only the necessities of communication made us call this volume
and this grouping the 'human sciences' given the confusion that this term can be made to hide.
To pinpoint the emergence of linguistic science we may say that, as in the case of all sciences in the
modern sense, it is contained in the constitutive moment of a formula is its foundation. This
formula is the following:
S/s
which is read as: the signifier over the signified, "over" corresponding to the bar separating the
two stages. This sign should be attributed to Ferdinand de Saussure although it is not found in
exactly this form in any of the numerous schemes, which none the less express it, to be found in
the printed version of his lectures of the years I906-7, I908-9, and I9I0-11, which the piety of a
group of his disciples caused to be published under the title, Cours de linguistique génerale, a
work of prime importance for the transmission of a teaching worthy of the name, that is, that one
can come to terms with only in its own terms.
That is why it is legitimate for us to give him credit for the formulation S/s by which, in spite of
the differences among schools, the beginning of modern linguistics can be recognized.
The thematics of this science is henceforth suspended, in effect, at the primordial position of the
signifier and the signified as being distinct order separated initially by a barrier resisting
signification. And that is what was to make possible an exact study of the connections proper to
the signifier, and of the extent of their function in the genesis of the signified.
For this primordial distinction goes well beyond the discussion concerning the arbitrariness of the
sign, as it has been elaborated since the earliest reflections of the ancients, and even beyond the
impasse which, through the same period, has been encountered in every discussion of the

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