THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVOLUME 14.3 2004 ISSN 0847-1622http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb

Editorial

The Pleasures of SilenceBy Thomas M. Kemple

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General Editor: Gary Genosko

Associate Editors: Verena Andermatt Conley (Harvard) SamirGandesha (Simon Fraser), Barbara Godard (York), Tom Kemple(UBC), Anne Urbancic (Toronto)

Section Editors: Leslie Boldt-Irons (Brock),William Conklin(Windsor), Paul Hegarty (Cork), Akira Lippit (UCal-Irvine),Alice den Otter (Lakehead), Scott Simpkins (UN Texas), BartTesta (Toronto), Peter Van Wyck (Concordia), Anne Zeller(Waterloo)

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Address: Department of Sociology, Lakehead University, 955 Oliver Road, Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada P7B 5E1

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The SRB is published 3 times per year in the Fall, Winter and Spring/Summer.

Editorial: 1-4The Pleasures of SilenceBy Thomas M. Kemple

Adventures in Music Analysis 4-7By Kofi Agawu

Cultural Junk Shop 8-9By Kristina C. Marcellus

SRB Insight: 10-12Does Saussure Still Matter?By Paul Bouissac

Web Site: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb

THE SEMIOTIC REVIEW OF BOOKSVolume 14.3 (2004)

Table of Contents

Prelude: Friday, March 12, 2004. DavieStreet, VancouverI arrived early at Melriches Café after

spending the morning at the University, so Iwas able to grab a good table with a view ofthe street. The week before, Gary Genoskohad e-mailed me to arrange for us to meet upon his way home to Thunder Bay fromVictoria. As I sipped my latte, I recalled thatthis would be the first time we’d seen eachother since February 2000 when he invitedme to give a talk to his department atLakehead (‘Weber’s Tolstoyan Arts’, I calledit), and before that we were together inToronto in July 1993 at the 60th birthdayparty of John O’Neill, who supervised usboth at York’s graduate programme in Socialand Political Thought. As Gary approachedthe window of the café, I hesitated a momentbefore heading out greet him; I wanted toobserve his uncertainty over whether he’dfound the right place.

At some point in our conversation overlunch he presented me with Stephen Riggins(SR)’s The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life(PT) to ask if I’d review it for the SRB. Afew months ago I’d browsed through it at theChapters on Robson and found SR’sfragmentary diary-like entries fascinating.The moving story of his 30-plus years withhis partner, Paul Bouissac (PB), wasreminiscent of the 15-plus years I’ve spentwith my partner (also called Stephen), eacha tale of two men teaching literature andsociology at Canadian universities, sharing alife together often with long periods apartand despite geographical separations.Though I could have used the gift certificateStephen’s sister had given us for Christmas,the classification on the back – “GayStudies/Cultural Studies” – made me think

that I should buy it at Little Sister’s, ourneighbourhood lesbian and gay bookstorenext to Melriches. I seemed destined to getit for free.

I. Expert sepia tonesThe blurb on the back of PT gives a

sweeping summary which somehow seems atodds with the modest ambitions of itsfragmentary presentation and the anecdotalstyle of its detailed descriptions:

Spanning over most of the pastcentury, The Pleasures of Time is animportant work that not only tracesthe growth of a committed gayrelationship, but also charts theintellectual and artistic ferment of the1970s and 80s. Riggins, who bases hisbook on diaries he has kept since theearly 70s, recreates in expert sepiatones his life with Bouissac – whetherit is in the cafes of Paris, his homestate of Indiana or the rural countrycircuses of 1960s southern Ontario.

The phrase ‘expert sepia tones’ still givesme pause: while SR’s vivid prose does havethe quality of a fading and discolouredphotograph, and its delicate phrasings oftendo have an almost nostalgic musical air, the‘expertise’ on display is more often that ofthe casual biographer and literary stylist thanof the sociologist or semiotician. SR has aremarkable talent for evoking vivid scenes ofdomestic life, private conversations in cafés,quirky encounters on the street, and bizarrepublic spectacles while endowing them withbroader historical significance and providingthem with an almost allegorical meaning.All are culled from an impressively eclecticrange of sources: letters from friends,published works (including novels,

theoretical monographs, and analyticalessays), memorabilia (including circus andconference programs), magazines andnewspapers, photographs (both old andrecent), and most importantly, his owndiaries and recorded interviews. As hewrites in the Preface, “The Pleasures of Timeis a journal of love, friendship anddomesticity, a collection of shards andremnants from two seamless lives,” and yethe immediately acknowledges that tensionsand conflicts lurk between many of thesefragments: “But my Samuel Johnson wasprobably less cooperative than the original… Paul resented my gathering personalinformation because he felt it underminedthe trust in our relationship” (9-10). Publicexposure through texts and images, despitethe devotion of the writer to his subject ofstudy or the presumed generosity of readers,somehow seems to violate the intimacy ofthese relationships.

PT goes beyond mere reporting in itsattempts to capture the very texture andatmosphere of SR’s life with PB in the formof a kind of personal scrap-book and photo-album – depicting friends, colleagues, circusperformers (from PB’s days as a student andorganizer of circuses), and themselves overthe years. Often these images are providedwith some of the musical accompanimentthat guided SR’s own journey into theacademic world in the years after he met PB,especially through his interviews with suchavant-guard composers as BrianFerneyhough, Geoffrey Bush, Francis Routh,and John Cage (the latter appropriatelyinterviewed amidst the random sounds of ahotel swimming pool). Since PT is a collageof images, musical notes and texts, itdemands an effort of looking, listening andreading that exceeds the merely psycho-physiological acts of seeing, hearing anddeciphering to produce the kind of“shimmering” that Roland Barthes (1985: 256) calls signifying (signifiance).Unlike the more solitary outbursts ofBarthes’s lover’s discourse, the often tensecollaborative dialogue between SR and PB issometimes threatened with disruption by theartificial proprieties and conflictingperspectives of the ‘inter-view’: “It isdifficult to step out of the role of lover andformally interview Paul. The interviewer-interviewee relationship seems awkward,distant and judgmental” (97). Onlyoccasionally achieving the fluidity of anamorous monologue or the casual back-and-forth of a friendly chat, the joint-work ofquestioning, listening and recording in PT isfrequently punctuated by the silence of animpending referendum, the grumbles ofmuffled resentment, or the baffled

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speechlessness of incomprehension.

II. Reflexive states of beingAlthough the genre of SR’s account has

more in common with a personal memoirand informal biography than with anintellectual commentary or theoreticalcritique, he does put considerable effort intothe more abstract philosophical task ofexplaining how thoughts emerge fromexperiences and of displaying how incidentsgive rise to ideas. The unusual events andstrange encounters that make the book sucha fascinating read are often sutured ontoPB’s academic and literary output (most ofwhich are listed in the notes on pages 226-227), not just as part of some grand projectfor placing the work in relation to the life,but even more as a way of exhibiting theexperience and effort of insight itself. PBhimself eloquently articulates this point inone of his most important theoreticalstatements:

The little reflexive state of being (lepetit état réflexif) is born quickly – onemay let it come or chase it away – it israrely caused by alcohol or food –more often by fasting, rain, thevibrations of the train, sometimes bycoffee – it forces you to quicklyscribble notes on the margins ofnewspapers or on the backs ofenvelopes – the only problem is tomake it last – to push back the printedtext in the margins, to keep it there,and to let come whatever appears inits place – one may wonder if there isa passive little reflexive state – but it isonly a superior form of sleeping – onlythe active little reflexive stateconstitutes an object that can bedescribed – its greatest enemies aremusic and conversation – the calls ofnature do not interrupt it – a neutralor benevolent presence may befavourable as long as it is silent andodourless.… (Bouissac 1968: 111, inRiggins, 83).

PB’s inspiration emphasizes more theswiftness of the fleeting impression and thedifficulties of its capture than thepermanence of the Great Idea or the patientwork needed to give expression to a BigConcept. One can imagine that SR’s notesmust themselves have been first jotted downand gathered out of his own “little reflexivestates of being,” suspending the flow of talkand its musical accompaniment just longenough to formulate a phrase or to commitan idea to paper. Reacting to minorquotidian stimulants rather than gorging ongrand ideas or intoxicating insights, SR andPB seem to serve as “benevolent presences”for one another – often passing unnoticedand sometimes without passing judgment.

Among SR’s own claims to notoriety ishis skill and good fortune as an interviewer,and in particular, his 1982 interview withMichel Foucault, the entirety of which isreproduced in PT (253-264). SR has goodreason to boast that this is one of the mostpersonal interviews Foucault ever gave. Asin his discussions with composers, hisquestions are unusual in focusing resolutelyon the biographical sources of Foucault’sthought, but without any aim to provokesensational confessions:

I’m not interested in the academicstatus of what I am doing because myproblem is my own transformation.That’s the reason also why, whenpeople say, “Well, you thought this afew years ago and now you saysomething else,” my answer is,[Laughter] “Well, do you think I haveworked like that all those years to saythe same thing and not to bechanged?” (Foucault, in Riggins, 262).

Foucault goes on to compare thispersonal intellectual aim with the aestheticexperience, with the task of making oneselfinto a work of art, and specifically with theway that a painter may himself betransformed by his own painting. It is as ifthe adventure of thought itself may becomean exercise in metanoia, in learning how tochange one’s mind, or as Foucault sayselsewhere, to “penser autrement.” As in hisinterviews with PB, SR has a way ofprovoking Foucault to consider how hemight take as much inspiration from anintimate encounter, a personal memory or aprivate incident, as he would from anhistorical document, a philosophical text ora political event.

III. The academic circusIn fact, much of what makes PT so

delightful is not the often comical orpoignant descriptions of domestic life or thelitany of ordinary occurrences, such as theone which follows a visit to a statuepersonifying ‘La France’ by an obscuresculptor, featuring a mischievous snakeresting its head on a post (which SRdescribes as an “out-of-place bit of comedy”in an otherwise serious work of art): “Eversince that afternoon at the museum, Paulwants to ‘do the Bourdelle snake’ when heand I are alone in the apartment elevator –to rest his chin on my shoulder” (171-172).Rather, what gives the book its critical edgeand its intellectual claim to relevance is theparade of famous academic giants who floatthrough their lives, and beside whom they attimes appear as silly side-kicks, and at othersas serious though often unrecognized rivals.In the chapter that gives the book its title,we catch passing glimpses of Sartre sitting inthe garden and De Beauvoir in the elevatorof the building in which they are living inParis; Alan Bloom invites himself to jointheir table at the famous Café de Flore todismiss angels and communists and appearsat a Toronto party to brag about thebeautiful male prostitutes he bought in Paris;Marshall McLuhan causes an uproar on apanel organized by PB by declaring thatsurrealism has no legitimate claim to depictthe truth about life, but the fuss is dispelledwhen PB orders a pianist to start playingwhile the lights are turned down and a filmby Buñuel is projected; and PB manages tocommission an official portrait of hiscolleague Northrop Frye by an inexperiencedbohemian artist who depicts the greatscholar as a god-like figure floating above adesert landscape. Like the “little reflexivestates of being,” these more grandiloquentones also seem to be induced en passant andoften improvised on the spur of the moment.

Though only noted in a few pages in PT(220-224), among PB’s greatest and lastingcontributions to intellectual life is, of course,his quiet and tireless work in promoting

semiotics as a serious intellectual discipline,in particular, by founding the TorontoSemiotic Circle and the Semiotic Review ofBooks, assuming editorship of RechercheSémiotique/Semiotic Inquiry, and serving as theorganizer of over thirty conferences and fourmonth-long International Summer Institutesfor Semiotics and Structural Studies(ISISSS). Besides Foucault, whose presencein 1982 provided the occasion for SR’sinterview, the big names that PB was able tolure for the Institute included JacquesDerrida, Umberto Eco, Paul Ricoeur, MaryDouglas, Luce Irigaray, Theresa de Lauretis,Haydn White, Ivan Illich, and PB’s ownformer mentors, A. J. Greimas and ClaudeLevi-Strauss, along with a host of other greatminds all vying for the attention andapprobation of the mass of students andspectators in attendance. Those fortunateenough to witness any of these oftenmaddening but always stimulating events (Imyself was a devoted auditor at the last oneheld in 1989) would not have been surprisedto learn that its quiet master of ceremonieswas himself both a former organizer and anestablished scholar of the circus:

I often joked that I had to handleelephants and prima donnas. Indeed,we dealt with big egos which requiredconstant attention as do stars anddangerous animals in a circusprogram. They had to be properly fed– paid. We had sometimes to reducethe chances of contact between twoor more elephants because of potentialclashes. They had to be handled withkid gloves.

My personal enjoyment in dealingwith all the problems and difficultieswas that I experienced them in thelight of my previous circus experience.I metaphorized the selection of aprogram as if it were a circus programin which you have to balance variousspecialties. The whole venture wasset up in an environment of risksbecause its success depended entirelyon how many people outside theUniversity of Toronto our programwould attract. The institutes were ina sense nomadic since there was nopermanent institutional structure.Rather it was like pitching our tents inthe no-man’s land of the academicdisciplinary landscape. There were alot of practical problems of securingcontacts with high-profile professorswho would provide a high degree ofvisibility in the same manner as acircus program must have somehighlights that are featured on aposter.

Like a circus, there was noinstitutional burden to carry exceptrepeating the performance with adifferent program. ISISSS was alwayscharacterized by a certain amount ofprecariousness and required a lot ofsnap decisions and improvisationswith the imperative that the showmust go on (Bouissac interviewedSeptember 19, 1999, in Riggins, 223).

This remarkable revelation speaks notonly to PB’s extraordinary good humour andunique political skills in managing resources,taming egos and conducting a massive show

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of intellectual bravado, but also to his moreserious aesthetic sense of the potential forsemiotics to examine the transposition ofmeaning from one interpretive context toanother.

IV. The silence of anecdotal thinkingLike PT itself, this review is doomed to

distort, misrepresent or miss most of themany incidents and events, insights andinfluences that make up the book and thatare destined to strike any given reader asespecially significant. I shall not touchdirectly on the principal passion of PB’s earlycareer and thus a major preoccupation of thebook, namely, the circus, or one of its mostsurprising and unusual charms – its peculiarcontribution to some hybrid field called “GayStudies/Cultural Studies,” as promised on theback cover. SR himself acknowledges that inthe end he has said practically nothing aboutthe early influences on PB’s thinking,including popular and literary romanticism,Catholic mysticism, negative theology andSufism (301). An inadvertent omission ordeliberate silence is as bound to raise aprotest as is the tendency to try to analyseand express everything:

Paul complains that I try to ‘objectify’things. I spell out to everyonesomething he might say one way toone person and another way tosomeone else. Everything does nothave to be said, he protests…Resolutely self-effacing, he is stillproud of the fact that scholars are notfamiliar with the body of his workbecause it is scattered in such obscurejournals. Unfortunately, my summaryof his research on the circus imprisonshim in the past. He feels like anancient archeological site (301).

If one of the most pleasurable aspects of PT is its composition in diary-like entries andits pithy, anecdotal style, then one of its mostinnovative features consists of the way thesepieces perform and exemplify therelationship between SR and PB andbetween them and the reader. Since it isimpossible to say everything or to spell outanything completely, these relationships aredefined as much by what is uttered on theone side as by what remains silent on theother, and thus as much by the significanceof the words, images and sounds thatarticulate these relationships as by the blankspaces, temporal gaps and silences betweenthem (Illich 1969). It is characteristic ofSR’s keen attunement to this unspokendimension of the production andconsumption of meaning and its variationsthat it structures the whole of his account:from the homely ‘Interlude’ on his childhoodin Indiana, which includes an account of theconspiracy of silence concerning the secretsexual use of courthouse toilets (186-188), toFoucault’s sublime response to the firstquestion of the interview, which alludes tothe many forms of silence experienced bythose growing up in Catholic France beforeand during the Second World War: “‘Therewere some kinds of silence which impliedvery sharp hostility and others which meantdeep friendship, emotional admiration, evenlove’” (Foucault 1983, in Riggins, 254-255).The curious proposition that concludesWittgenstein’s Tractatus (1992: 189) –

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darübermuss man schweigen (Whereof one cannotspeak, thereof one must be silent)” – mighttherefore serve not just as a philosophicalmotto for 20th century thought but also as akind of commonsense rule of thumb for theconduct of everyday life in the modernworld.

SR and PB share with me an admirationfor a common philosophical hero, whosecandid moral and social commentaries andfrank self-disclosures provide a model for thepleasurable and painful tasks of reflexivereading and critical writing:

To enjoy life requires some husbandry.I enjoy it twice as much as others,since the measure of our joy dependson the greater or lesser degree of ourattachment to it. Above all now,when I see my span so short, I want togive it more ballast; I want to arrestthe swiftness of its passing by theswiftness of my capture, compensatingfor the speed with which it drainsaway by the intensity of my enjoyment(Montaigne 1991: 1263, in Riggins,165).

Montaigne’s passion for originality ismore modest than monumental, since itconsists of patiently thinking through hisexperiences for long periods of time, often inprivate and in secret, before publishing themfor others to inspect and to judge. LikeMontaigne’s Essais, inspired by anddedicated to his beloved Etienne de laBoétie, SR’s devoted homage to PB in PTalso follows a method and style of “thinkinganecdotally.” To build a thought around ananecdote involves constructing an oftenhumorous or amusing account of an incidentafter the event (après coup, nachträglich),usually in some haste or as a kind ofimprovised post-script or afterword (Gallop2002: 257). Anecdotal thinking and writingtherefore constitute a specialized techniquefor fastening the specific to the general, theintimate to the impersonal, the humourousto the serious, the present to the past, andthe real to the remembered.

All readers of this book will find a pointof reflection or place of resonance in theevents and situations described, as its“allegorical” structure and construction inpieces encourage the pursuit of daydreamsand distracted memories. For me, readingPT evoked a particular memory thathappened to be located at the site of thetext’s conception: “Most of my formalinterviews took place in my windowlessoffice in St. John’s, Newfoundland, whenPaul visited during university holidays,”writes SR in the Preface, adding: “I chose awindowless office to avoid looking out onCanada’s capital of rain and fog” (10). InJune 1997, I was in St. John’s for themeetings of the Learned Societies of Canadaas the organizer of a session on ‘the future ofthe sociological classics’. I had planned totalk about the drawings depicting ‘Death asSavior’ by the proto-expressionist MaxKlinger that the sociologist Max Weber andhis wife Marianne collected in the early yearsof their marriage. But to my irritation,someone had forgotten to announce thesession in the official program, and so withjust a few hours before we were to speak, I

barged into this windowless office,demanding that something had to be done.There I found SR, who was listed was thelocal organizer of the sociology section of themeetings, casually chatting to PB, whom Irecognized from our brief introduction at theISISSS meetings a decade before. With myhysteria subsiding and after combining ourefforts, we managed to recruit a fewaudience members to attend our session,including PB himself, who sat patiently andquietly through to the end before askingeach of us to consider submitting our papersto the SRB. Reading PT seven years later, Ican imagine that the simple title hesuggested for my essay – “TheUnrepresentable” (Kemple 1997) – mightexpress not only the failure of the artist(Klinger) and intellectual (Weber) torepresent death fully, but also the attemptsof the sociologist (SR) and semiotician (PB)to represent life in its particularity.

Coda: September 12, 2004, Cardero Street,Vancouver

Today was the 50th birthday of a goodfriend of mine, whom my partner Stephenhappened to know back in their early days inToronto but who has now moved back to hisnative city. Stephen had to miss the partysince he was away for the weekend in soon-to-be-hurricane-ravaged Tallahassee giving atalk at a colloquium on ‘Queer Masculinities’with Stephen Orgel. It’s still strange to thinkthat we have friends in their 50s who don’tseem much older than we are; what’s notunusual is that a professional commitmenthas meant that we can’t be together for someevent, by now a familiar pattern for us:three or four years together in Toronto andVancouver, not to mention the occasionalconferences and the breaks between termsand for family visits, and as many yearsapart, with one of us in Peterborough,Montreal, and Calgary, or otherwise out oftown for one reason or another.

One of the last entries of Barthes’sposthumously published diaries, datedSeptember 12, 1979 and so exactly 25 yearsago today, speaks first-hand of the anxiety ofaging among many single gay men. It beginswith the name-dropping and romantic ennuithat now strike me as so typical of famousFrench intellectuals, at least those of anearlier era:

At the American cocktail party forRichard Sennett (admirable: awhole sociology in the fact that hecannot express himself in another’spresence, as if expression were aself-evident higher value), where Ifind Edgar Morin, Foucault, andTouraine, trapped (we were told itwas a cocktail party, it was a date), Iwas thinking of nothing but my datewith Olivier G. (Barthes 1992: 69).

On the last entry of the diary a few pageslater Barthes comes to the bitter realizationthat lovely young Olivier will not reciprocatehis love, and that perhaps he’ll remain aloneforever, self-consciously undesirable andanxiously aging: “How clearly I saw that Iwould have to give up boys, because none ofthem felt any desire for me, and I was eithertoo scrupulous or too clumsy to impose mydesire on them; that this is an unavoidablefact, averred by all my efforts at flirting, that

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I have a melancholy life, that, finally, I’mbored to death by it, and that I must divestmy life of this interest, this hope … Morethan Olivier was over: the love of one boy”(Barthes 1992: 73). Although Barthes’s sadresignation is occasionally echoed by some ofthe older single gay men I know inVancouver, including my friend whosebirthday is today, it also seems peculiarlyParisian and infused with intellectualpathos, though perhaps this is because Iknow that Barthes died in an accident just afew months after these lines were written.For him, the lover’s discourse had becomemore desperate and melancholy the more heclung to the fleeting image of youth that wasboth the object of his affections and theatmosphere of his desires.

Today also marks exactly a half year sincethe day Gary asked me to write this review aswe ate at the café up the street, and as usual,life has interrupted its writing andintervening events have shaped my readingof and thinking about the book: Stephenand I celebrated 15 years together in May,along with our first full year living togetherin our own place and with permanentpositions at the same university; the familyreunion and 70th birthday party for my

parents that my siblings and I organized inJuly at the cottage opened up a flood ofchildhood memories in the form ofphotographs and testimonials from well-wishers; two of my Masters students finishedtheses over the summer on film that led meto reconsider how Barthes’s notion of ‘theobtuse meaning’ is displayed in images, musicand texts; and a conference trip to Spain inAugust has helped to reframe my endlessWeber project in terms of the generalproblem of ‘sociological allegory’. On theirown or simply listed out, these incidentshardly connect up to make a story, much lessdo they immediately provide occasions fortheorizing. But to me they suggest episodesin a fractured narrative of what it means togrow old together with someone, and to havea thought that is as precious to hold as one’sown as it is to share with others.

Thomas M. Kemple is Associate Professorof Sociology at the University of BritishColumbia.

References

Barthes, Roland (1992) Incidents.Translated by Richard Howard. Los Angeles:University of California Press.

Barthes, Roland (1985) “Listening.” InThe Responsibility of Forms. Translated byRichard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.

Bouissac, Paul (1968) “Descriptions despetits états réflexifs.” In Les cahiers du cheminVol. 2 (January).

Gallop, Jane (2002) Anecdotal Theory.Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Illich, Ivan (1969) “The Eloquence ofSilence.” In Celebration of Awareness. NewYork: Pantheon Books.

Kemple, Thomas M. (1997) “TheUnrepresentable.” Semiotic Review of Books8.3: 11-12.

Montaigne, Michel de (1991) The Essaysof Michel de Montaigne. London: PenguinBooks.

Riggins, Stephen Harold (2003) ThePleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life. Toronto: Insomniac Press.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1992) TractatusLogico-Philosophicus. Translated by C. K.Ogden. London: Routledge.

Adventures in Music AnalysisLeonard B. Meyer, The Spheres of Music: A Gathering of Essays. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.Richard Littlefield, Frames and Framing: The Margins of Music Analysis. Acta Semiotica Fennica XII. Helsinki: The InternationalSemiotics Institute, 2001.

By Kofi Agawu

“At this stage of my life,” writes LeonardMeyer in the preface to this newcollection, “I want to ‘put it all together’

in a more or less comprehensive vision thatjoins theory to history, history to culture,culture to aesthetics, aesthetics tomethodology, and methodology back totheory.” What an ambitious project! Yet, ifanyone of his generation — includingdistinguished writers like Joseph Kerman,Edward T. Cone, Allen Forte and MiltonBabbitt — is in a position to pull off such asynthesis, it is likely to be Meyer. In over fourdecades of active research and writing,Meyer has produced four books andnumerous articles on an impressively diverserange of topics. The eight essays reprinted inThe Spheres of Music (henceforth Spheres)

embody one of two parallel trajectories ofthought that define his lifetime project. Theother unfolds in four influential volumes.First in line was Emotion and Meaning inMusic (1956), which appropriated a handfulof core principles from Gestalt psychology inan attempt to convey some of the principalsources of emotion and therefore meaning inmusic. The suggestiveness of Meyer’s theoryis reflected in the fact that philosophers andaestheticians interested in musical meaningtoday often take some of their bearings fromhim. A second book followed in 1960, co-authored with Grosvenor Cooper; it offereda theory of rhythmic organization based inpart on categories of prosody (Cooper andMeyer 1960). Here, as in other analyticalwritings, Meyer’s empiricism is evident, as is

his ability to clarify such basic concepts asbeat, accent, stress, meter and grouping.Although more powerful explanatorytheories have appeared since1960 (see, forexample, Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983,Hasty 1997 and Krebs 1999), few subsequenttheorists of musical rhythm have managed toby-pass entirely the central concernsexpressed by Cooper and Meyer in theirpioneering book.

Meyer’s third book turned from thenarrowly technical to a broader engagementwith the culture of new music composition inthe twentieth century. Music, the Arts, andIdeas appeared in 1967 and was widely readfor its lively treatment of experimentalmusic, complexity, style and artistic choice,

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value and greatness in music, and the futureof Western art music. Meyer’s interest mayhave been sparked by his own studies incomposition, but here as elsewhere hesought to reach not only fellow musiciansbut a wider audience of humanists. In 1973,he turned again to note-by-note analysis,offering a theory of melody in the secondhalf of Explaining Music. Shapes, patternsand tonal tendencies are considered in well-chosen and far from obscure musicalexamples, and one finishes the book with astrong feeling for the ontology of hierarchyin tonal music and the nature of conformantrelationships. For music theorists, ExplainingMusic may well be Meyer’s most interestingbook not only because of its engaging closereadings but also because of its lucidpresentation of the limits of critical discoursein the opening chapter.

Finally in 1989, Meyer published acomprehensive treatise on style, Style andMusic: Theory, History, and Ideology, bringingtogether ideas adumbrated in earlierpublications and laying particular emphasison romantic music. If Style and Music failedto make as big an impact as one might haveexpected, it was partly because the climate ofmusicology had begun to shift decisivelyaround 1990, away from evidence-based andeven empirical work to an engagement –inspired in part by poststructuralist criticalapproaches – with previously marginalizedtopics like gender and difference, the studyof non-canonical repertoires, andhermeneutic analysis. But Style and Musicremains a rich resource, and it may well bethat as the dust settles on the musicologyand music theory wars of the 1990s, somestudents will return to Meyer’s suggestiveperspectives on the enactment andmanipulation of conventional structures inromantic music.

Style and Music may be said to have ‘putit all together’ in 1989, so what does it meanto do so again in Spheres? As we will see in amoment, the specific concerns of its eightessays are not radically different from thosefound in the four books just mentioned, butthe essay format enables a different mode ofexecution: greater detail in some essays,general and speculative perceptions inothers, without a pressing need to unify thewhole. Moreover, the character of histhinking emerges here forcefully. Meyer’swork may be described as semiotic in thebroadest sense because it is concerned aboveall with matters of signification and meaning.Although he never invested in thevocabulary or frames of musical semiotics,his work may be considered semiotic avant lalettre; indeed, a number of leading writershave discussed aspects of it in precisely theseterms. David Lidov for example interruptedan explication of Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s earlytheories of semiotics in order to drawattention to Meyer’s 1956 book as “one wayto attack the problems of meaning in musicon an explanatory level” (1977:24). Jean-Jacques Nattiez borrowed and refined certainkey ideas about the autonomization ofparameters, the significance of universals,and the classification of musico-aestheticconceptions in his Music and Discourse(1990). And Naomi Cumming found someresonance in Meyer’s theory of expectationin advancing her own theory of subjectivity

and signification in music (Cumming 2000).Earlier, she wrote about the concept ofanalogy in Meyer’s work (Cumming 1991)and about his use of metaphors of space andmotion in the analysis of melody (Cumming1990). Let us hope that someday soonsomeone will undertake a study that thinksMeyer’s entire project through in terms ofsemiotics.

Because it is implicitly rather thanexplicitly semiotic, however, andnotwithstanding an ever-present concernwith matters such as motion, dynamism,convention and expectation, Meyer’s work isharder to characterize as system or formula.This may explain in part why it has not hadas full an impact on American music theoryas it surely deserves. For aside from the wingthat deals with the history of music theory,and perhaps a handful of analyticalinitiatives, the discipline of music theory inNorth America has become more of apedagogy than an intellectual practice.Therefore only those methods andapproaches that are readily replicable, thatcan be reduced to formulas and fed tostudents, seem to have a far-reaching impact.(One thinks of methods associated withSchenker, Forte, Lerdahl and Jackendoff, andrecently, neo-Riemannian theory). Indeed,we may have to resign ourselves to theprospect that no music theory that takeshistory, style or aesthetics seriously is likely tomake a big impact on the mass teaching oftheory in North America. Meyer’s impact hasthus been confined to the more advancedlevels of the curriculum, even though thematters that lay close to his heart – like therole of tension and release, the fulfilment andthwarting of expectations, and the mediationof convention in stylistic articulation – couldstimulate thinking at relatively early stages ofmusic study. He is not the only musicalthinker the character of whose ideas resiststhe mass dissemination and replicationassociated with mainstream music theory.But as more people become aware of thecontingency of our ways of proceeding, wemay hope for positive change in thetransmission of ideas about music.

The most impressive of the analyticalessays in Spheres is devoted to 42 bars fromMozart’s late G-Minor Symphony. Entitled“Grammatical Simplicity and RelationalRichness: The Trio of Mozart’s G-MinorSymphony,” this essay was first published inthe interdisciplinary (mainly literary) journalCritical Inquiry in 1976, not in a musicjournal. I doubt that many readers of CriticalInquiry had the background or vocabulary –or patience – to follow Meyer’s overlydidactic and highly disciplined note-by-notediscussion, so it would not be ungenerous tosay that the essay probably fulfilled a largelysymbolic function at the time. And yet, as aprime example of the kind of analysis thatRaymond Monelle has recently dubbed“scorism” (Monelle 2000:3), Meyer’s essaydeserves a more considered critique not fromliterary scholars – whose wishes may notextend beyond knowing whether such a closereading is possible in the first place, or whatMozart’s Trio ‘means’ – but from musicalscholars who are able to take for granted itspossibility and can then proceed to separatethe mundane from the insightful.

Meyer draws on his usual sources ofmeaning – cadential action or closingtendencies, the dynamics of beginning,accentual differentiation, levels and varyingintensities of expectation – to read the Trioas both structure and, to a lesser extent,style. But the line between score description(employing the terminology of music theory)and musical description (employing conceptsand terms that value Mozart’s music less aspattern and more as utterance) is frequentlytransgressed, thus hiding some of Meyer’sachievement. The apparent rigour of theanalysis is deceptive, however, because an in-depth engagement with style, which isnecessarily a comparative exercise, issomewhat muted in this chapter. Mozartanalysis has come a long way since 1976 (seeAgawu 1996), so it is possible for today’sanalyst to extend Meyer’s insights byincorporating a hermeneutic stance via thefruitful notion of topoi (Allanbrook 1992), orto reimagine the composer’s formal strategiesby drawing on recent rehabilitations ofFormenlehre (Caplin 1998, Hepokoski andDarcy 1997). The positivisitic residue ofMeyer’s analysis may not be its most valuablelegacy, but the performance itself isnoteworthy. Analysis, after all, is a mode ofperformance.

Meyer admits that he presents “manyhypotheses” in Spheres, the implication beingthat not all of them are followed throughly.Two essays,”Process and Morphology in theMusic of Mozart” and “Exploiting Limits:Creation, Archetypes, and Style Change”may serve as illustration. The mainhypothesis in the former is surely plausible:Mozart, following J. S. Bach, oftenestablishes a pattern, breaks it, and thenresumes it later. The moment of resumptionis typically temporally ‘correct’, that is to saythat, had the pattern not been broken, itwould have reached the exact point at whichit is now being resumed. It is as if thepattern’s shadow persisted through thebreak, as if the pattern was active on a kindof subliminal level, absent but present at thesame time, waiting to be returned from thebackground to the foreground. Meyersupports his hypothesis with sixteenexamples of varying length, all of them moreor less convincing. For a potentially far-reaching proposition such as this, however, alarger sampling of the literature would havebeen desirable. This is not a problem withMeyer’s chapter as such, but with the verymedium in which analytical results areconveyed. In an aural or oral mode, it ispossible to play fifty or more musicalexamples for skeptics, but no journal willprint such a large number of score excerptsto serve as ‘mere’ illustration. And so themateriality of music, which ought to be givenpriority in any representation of music, isdeemed unwieldy and is thus barred frommaking a full appearance.

In “Exploiting Limits: Creation,Archetypes, and Style Change,” Meyerisolates a specific musical archetype,represented here in two-voice counterpointand extending over a normative sixteen-barperiod. It is found in compositions byMozart, Beethoven and Berlioz, and so mayserve as a mechanism for distinguishing theirindividual manners. The framing of theinsight is very plausible, for although their

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works are stylistically differentiated, thethree composers worked within a fewdecades of each other and within a relativelystable tonal idiom. Mozart and Beethovenare, of course, associated with themainstream of the Austro-Germanictradition, and so their use of a similararchetype in the 1770s and 1820s is notsurprising. Berlioz, on the other hand, issomething of an outsider, lying at an angle tothis tradition. Meyer shows that whereasMozart normatively actualizes the archetype,Beethoven and Berlioz disguise it in waysthat betray newer stylistic influences, mostnotably a burgeoning romanticism in thecase of Berlioz. Archetypal patterning is arich and suggestive area of research, and it isa pity that it has not been populated witheager graduate students. Meyer elaborates onarchetypes in another chapter from thisbook, “Melodic Processes and the Perceptionof Music” (co-written with Burton S.Rosner), and also in his magnum opus, Styleand Music, while his student RobertGjerdingen has traced the persistence ofanother archetype in 18th-century music(Gjerdingen 1988). But there is room forfurther study of a phenomenon that has thepotential to link repertoires across historical,stylistic and geo-cultural divides.

In a lively and erudite opening chapter,“Concerning the Sciences, the Arts – ANDthe Humanities,” Meyer sets out todistinguish the nature of research activity inthe sciences from the arts and humanities.The fact and nature of scientific discovery,the possibility of simultaneous discovery, thecumulative nature of scientific knowledge,the falsifiability of certain claims – all theseare contrasted with the nature of creativityas the chief element in artistic expression.This is really an attempt in 1974 to explainthe nature of the humanities to others, andit is to Meyer’s credit that he remains one ofthe few music scholars who can writeauthoritatively about broad currents inintellectual history, including the history ofscience. Many of the specific points made inthis essay – about the nature ofunderstanding and explanation in works ofart, or the distinction between criticism andanalysis – have been taken up in subsequentwriting by musicologists, music theorists andphilosophers, so Meyer’s chapter is helpfulchiefly as an indication of his thinkingabound 1974, and of what was possible then.But today’s student venturing into thisterritory would have a sizeablebibliographical supplement to contend with.

For those who have never encounteredLeonard Meyer’s work, Spheres could wellserve as an introduction to the work of adistinguished humanist. Those who had readsome of it in the past may find it rewardingto reread these essays, for not only do theyserve as a record of Meyer’s later intellectualdevelopment, but they show that a goodnumber of the issues that he wrestled withremain with us – diversity versus thepossibility of universals, explaining modes ofknowing, basing analytical theories onspecific repertoires, and neverunderestimating the power of tonaldynamism. Graduate students casting aboutfor dissertation topics may find valuableleads in Meyer. And if the turn from thenarrowly quantitative to the broadly

qualitative within the broader culture ofmusic analysis continues, the significance ofMeyer’s work will be enhanced in future.

Richard Littlefield belongs to a differentgeneration of writers on music. An emergingscholar, his book, too, is a collection ofessays, but they stem from a more recent past(1991-1999) than Meyer’s. The effort tocontain heterogeneity and impose a unity onthe collections is an obvious challenge toboth authors, but Littlefield’s efforts seem tome to be rather strenuous.

Whereas the semiotic element is merelyimplicit in Meyer’s work, it is both explicitand at the same time more diffuse in Framesand Framing: The Margins of Music Analysis.Littlefield has read extensively in many areasof literary theory, and is especially taken withdeconstruction, which he adopts as a kind ofconceptual pose. But the book as a whole ismore conventionally structuralist insofar as itinvests in explication rather than in pursuingradical critique. In other words, he offers asober account of principles and theirpotential for music analysis, and only thebeginnings of a comprehensivedemonstration of such potential. While theintellectual ambition is far from modest (it isnothing less than an “exploration of themargins of music analysis”), the author hasallowed himself only 132 pages divided intofive substantial chapters in which toaccomplish this task. If, in the end, the bookcomes across as a program for further study, aseries of detailed outlines, rather than a fullyworked out demonstration of the potential ofpreviously marginalized approaches(including deconstruction), this may beexplained by its framing.

In the opening chapter, “Preliminaries,”Littlefield describes the current state ofinstitutional music theory (early 1990s) asdominated by Schenkerian and settheoretical approaches. (He does notmention the history of music theory, whichserved to bring historical and theoreticalperspectives together). Literary approachesand the new musicology then came andradically unsettled the status quo. A specialplace is reserved for “deconstructive musicanalysis,” which had hitherto played only amarginal role in the field. Many of theprogrammatic claims for deconstruction aresolemnly rehearsed – “reading against themetaphysics of presence, the undermining ofthe unitary subject, the following of arche-writing (différance, la trace) in and throughtexts” – and the chapter closes with anexplanation of various “strategies andprocedures” that will be invoked insubsequent analyses. These include binaryoppositions and supplemental logic;logocentricism; points of condensation; self-difference; self-description; forecasting; andthe marginal. One finishes this openingchapter unsure of the central question towhich this book provides an answer, butgrateful for the1980s-style explication ofostensibly shiny new tools.

Chapter 2, “Ideological Frames I:Rewriting Schenker: Narrative-History-Ideology,” originally co-written with musictheorist David Neumeyer, is in some waysthe most interesting and substantial in thebook. When it was first published in 1992, itelicited comment from the community of

music theorists mainly because of theseemingly radical claim that “the so-calledintrinsic value of a work of art has little todo, if anything, with its internalrelationships, and everything to do with theexpertise of the professional interpreter.”Some ten years on, one might have expectedto find the argument extended and therepertoire expanded within a more rigorouscomparative framework. But thedemonstration piece remains Czerny’s littlepiano piece for beginners, Op. 599 No. 1.

Included in this chapter is a helpfulsummary of narratological approaches tomusic, but the attempt to establish thesupposed limitations of formalism inconnection with Schenker’s analysis of theseventh piece (“Träumerei”) fromSchumann’s Kinderszenen seems to makeheavy weather of his “poetic asides.”Schenker’s failure to pursue certainhermeneutic leads may be a limitation incertain eyes, but surely not a fatal one. Is itnot enough, in the course of analysis, to hintat certain compositional features, or indeedspeculate on associative meanings, withoutpausing to develop those insights fully,especially if one is engaged in an involvedtracing of a hidden Urlinie? Littlefield’sdesire “to semanticize Schenker’s work”sounds promising, but it seems unlikely thatany such effort will appeal to music theoristsif it does not invest fundamentally in themelodies, rhythms and harmonies thatSchumann wrote.

While the comparative element is notaltogether absent from this chapter, it isconfined in two specific ways. The firstinvolves a tracing of convergences betweenSchenker’s thought and that of Greimas,convergences previously noted by others(including Eero Tarasti, Littlefield’s mentorat Helsinki [Tarasti 1994:6]). We arereminded that notions of depth, for example,which are central to Schenker’s thinking,have historical as well as geo-cultural scope(Watkins 2004) – a heart-warming gesturefor those who need the assurance ofcorroboration.

A second comparative element is evidentin the different well-formed analyses of theCzerny piece using Schenker’s method.Littlefield (and Neumeyer) seem to me to bedistracted by what Milton Babbitt oncecalled“normative irrelevancies” (Babbitt2003:148), giving more attention to well-formedness than to preference. It is a pitythat Littlefield was not able to incorporateCarl Schachter’s discussion of a related issuein an article significantly titled “Either/Or.”Schachter suggests that in certain situations,one of the competing (Schenkerian) analyseswould be “truer to [the work] as a uniqueand individual work of art” (Schachter1990:169). This suggests a different kind ofemphasis than attributing differentiation toideology.

Littlefield laments the sanitization ofSchenker’s work by American theorists, whotend to bracket off his political and elitistviews from the practical activity of musicanalysis. Again the force of this accusationwould have been stronger if he hadsystematically demonstrated the varied andprofound connections between politicalworldview and analytic method. The idea

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that connections across domains link anartist’s life to his or her thought continues tofascinate some people, even though concretedemonstration is hard to come by. Perhapsthe issue is better framed as an invitation toponder and presumably be edified by certainjuxtapositions. In that case those who wishto remain at the technological level ofSchenkerian analysis can be left alone topursue their ostensible blindness, while thosewho insist on joining ethics to politics andmethod can also do their thing.

“Framing the Aesthetic Object: TheSilence of the Frames” is the title ofLittlefield’s third chapter. The transfer hereis mainly from the realm of visual perception,where frames of pictures, for example,perform multiple roles. Following Derrida,Littlefield characterizes this role asparadoxical rather than simply multiple, anddependent on the viewer’s perspective. Heconcludes that “the frame is the thing.”There is nothing surprising about theontology of frames: situated outside thepicture, they also mark the boundarybetween picture and the outside. They areultimately necessary as well as dispensable.But what is vivid in the visual realm may nothave comparable force in the oral or auraldomain. While one can easily gauge theeffect of removing a particular frame from apicture, it is not immediately clear what itwould mean to remove the frame of a pieceof music. And as for internal frames, such asthe bar of silence in an interlude from thearia “La donna e mobile” that Littlefield citesin illustration, the moment is so saturatedwith the suspended tendencies of tonalmeaning that it is hard to hear it as silent inany musically meaningful way. Again theissues raised about musical frames in thischapter are not uninteresting in and ofthemselves, but the scope of the discussionleaves many questions unanswered.

In chapter 4, Littlefield offers a reader-response critique of the fifth song fromSchoenberg’s cycle The Book of the HangingGardens. This densely motivic and atonallanguage has proved a challenge to many ananalyst, and one hopes for fresh insight fromthis author. Littlefield’s reading traces certainintervallic paths through the song (firststage), explores “conflicts of aesthetics andof genre” (second stage), and incorporatesideas from “reception history and modes ofproduction” (third stage). Similar efforts atmodeling a reading/listening are found inJameson, Nattiez, Cone and others, andalthough they perform an importantmetacritical function, they have rarely beenuseful as prescriptions for actualreading/listening. As elsewhere, Littlefield’semphasis here is on possibility; he does notpursue any one analytical proceeding indepth. While this approach has theadvantage of displaying a variety ofanalytical issues – “vocal meter” in tensionwith notated meter (David Lewin’s insight),for example, or linear projection of certainintervals, or iconic reflection of wordmeanings in the song’s texture and form – ithas the disadvantage of never seeming to getoff the ground. Moreover, one of the specificoppositions invoked by Littlefield in hissecond stage of reading, that betweenmodernism and romanticism, seems to me tobe somewhat fragile, and requires much

more extensive treatment than it receiveshere.

The last of Littlefield’s chapters abandonsthe world of Classical music for a popular,urban, word-based contemporary African-American genre, Gangsta rap. Accusingmainstream music analysts of ignoring “notjust rap, but most popular musics,” Littlefieldleads the reader methodically through theaesthetics of the genre. As always, theframing of the analysis is sensitively done, ifoccasionally fancifully. He draws on“historically black discursive practices,” inparticular the notion of Signifying studied byHenry-Louis Gates, to explain ”theconventions of textual systems in gangsta-rapvideos.” Remarks on the semiotic systems ofmusic videos in general are followed by adetailed study of the 1995 music video,Natural Born Killaz, featuring Death Row rapartists Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. Littlefield isalert to the subversive element in their use oflanguage and their wilful rewriting ofcontemporary history by freely transposingimages between events.

Readers interested in gauging therelevance of literary theory to music analysiswill benefit from Richard Littlefield’s ideas.The book seems surprisingly dated, however.During the 1980s, this kind of speculationwas something of a pastime among thosemusic theorists who could not resist theimpressive-sounding ideas emanating fromliterary-theoretical circles. Twenty years on,however, one expects to have moved beyondprogrammatic assertion to active praxis.Littlefield’s project seems sometimes trappedat this programmatic level. True to its title,however, the book is a useful guide to themechanisms that guide (musical) thought.

Perhaps there is a more fundamentalfactor to consider. Early on in the book,Littlefield wrote that “when one engageswith any text, one also engages with thecritical baggage that accompanies andtransforms it,” and therefore that “thecontext becomes part of the text.” This is asensible position, no doubt, but it isundermined by the view of analysis as amode of performance, as enactment thatnecessarily limits the amount of ‘extra text’in order to maximize the pleasure of hands-on engagement.

Kofi Agawu teaches in the Department ofMusic at Princeton University.

References

Agawu, Kofi (1996) “Prospects for aTheory-Based Analysis of Mozart’sInstrumental Music,” in Wolfgang AmadèMozart: Essays on his Life and his Music,edited by Stanley Sadie. Oxford: ClarendonPress.

Allanbrook, Wye Jamison (1992) “TwoThreads Through the Labyrinth: Topic andProcess in the First Movements of K.332 andK.333,” in Convention in Eighteenth-andNineteenth-Century Music: Essays in Honor ofLeonard Ratner, edited by W. J. Allanbrook,J.M. Levy and W.P. Mahrt. Stuyvesant. NewYork: Pendragon Press.

Babbitt, Milton (2003) The CollectedEssays of Milton Babbitt, edited by StephenPeles et al. Princeton: Princeton University

Press.

Caplin, William (1998) Classical Form: ATheory of Formal Functions for theInstrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, andBeethoven. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Cumming, Naomi (1990) “Metaphors ofspace and Motion in the Linear Analysis ofMelody,” Miscellenea Musicologica[Australia], 17.

Cumming, Naomi (1991) “Analogy inLeonard B. Meyer’s ‘Theory of MusicalMeaning,” in Metaphor: A Musical Dimension,edited by Jamie Kassler. Syndey: CurrencyPress.

Cumming, Naomi (2000) The Sonic Self:Musical Subjectivity and Signification.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Cooper, Grosvenor and Leonard B.Meyer (1960) The Rhythmic Structure ofMusic. Chicago: The University of ChicagoPress.

Gjerdingen, Robert O (1988) A ClassicTurn of Phrase: Music and the Psychology ofConvention. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press.

Hasty, Chirstopher (1997) Meter asRhythm. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hepokoski, James and Warren Darcy(1997)“The Medial Caesura and its Role inthe Eighteenth-Century Sonata Exposition,”Music Theory Spectrum 19/2.

Krebs, Harald (1999) Fantasy Pieces:Metrical Dissonance in the Music of RobertSchumann. New York: Oxford UniversityPress.

Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff (1983)A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Lidov, David (1977) “Nattiez’s Semioticsof Music,” Canadian Journal of Semiotics 5/2.

Meyer, Leonard B (1956) Emotion andMeaning in Music. Chicago: The Universityof Chicago Press.

Meyer, Leonard B (1967, rev. 1994)Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns andPredictions in Twentieth-Century Culture.Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Meyer, Leonard B (1973) ExplainingMusic: Essays and Explorations. Chicago: TheUniversity of Chicago Press.

Meyer, Leonard B (1989) Style andMusic: Theory, History, and Ideology.Philadelphia: University of PhiladelphiaPress.

Monelle, Raymond (2000) The Sense ofMusic: Semiotic Essays. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990) Music andDiscourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, trans.Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Schacter, Carl (1990) “Either/Or,” inSchenker Studies, edited by Hedi SiegelCambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Tarasti, Eero (1994) A Theory of MusicalSemiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress.

Watkins, Holly (2004) “From the Mineto the Shrine: The Critical Origins ofMusical Depth,” 19th-Century Music 27/3.

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Celeste Olalquiaga’s The ArtificialKingdom: On The Kitsch Experiencedraws heavily on the work of Walter

Benjamin, particularly his essay “The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”(1968) as well as on conscious andunconscious modes of memory, toward hergoal of explaining how kitsch comes to be.The book begins with a reflection on her ‘pet’hermit crab, Rodney, who happens to beencased in a glass globe. Rodney figures intothe book at many other points as well, asfurther reflections on his condition andothers’ interactions with him serve asepigraphs to its different sections. Broadly,The Artificial Kingdom deals with three majorareas that have contributed to the creation ofkitsch as Olalquiaga understands it: glass;aura; and death. These themes runthroughout the book, informing andconnecting the examples and contexts uponwhich Olalquiaga draws to make her pointthat kitsch is essentially a modern creation,one that has arisen only because theconditions of modernity have combined tocreate an environment in which kitsch is theonly remainder of a past fundamentallydifferent from the present.

The Artificial Kingdom is richly illustratedwith drawings and photographs included toemphasize the importance of objects atvarious points in history, particularly duringthe Victorian Era. Everything from theCrystal Palace and the Parisian arcades to theinteriors of Victorian homes and collectionsof glass globes, mermaids, and ‘natural’specimens is chronicled, in addition to thevarious fads that swept across England duringthis period, such as fern collecting andaquaria. The illustrations are best viewed aspunctuation for the more literal descriptionsprovided by Olalquiaga, and they arecarefully incorporated into the text tostrengthen the point at hand, while at thesame time serving to connect the variouspoints at which the main themes of glass,aura, and death surface.

Benjamin’s idea of aura, and the wayOlalquiaga explains how kitsch arises from itsshattering, are intimately tied to glass and itsuses. The Crystal Palace, as an example ofnineteenth century thinking about display, isthe Victorian interpretation of the Parisianarcades, one that marks a change in ideology– a “gigantic structure of iron and glassdedicated to a new way of looking, that of thepotential consumer” (31). Olalquiaga’s pointis well taken that the commercial expansionof the uses of glass during the nineteenthcentury helped to create a distance betweenobserver and observed that “change[d] thestatus of the object, which loses itscommonness to become a thing worthy ofsuch attention” (31). The increasinglypopular use of glass for display windowsslowly changed the emphasis of an objectfrom function to fashion. That is, theappearance of the thing gradually became atleast as important as its function. Victorian

ornament in particular was no longer adecorative element of the object but becameits central feature, and once the object’sfunction had been thrown to the wind, theproliferation that followed created anenvironment for the copy to displace theoriginal. Once this proliferation of objectshad begun, the collection of a number ofsimilar things supplanted the collection ofunique things. Prior to this time, uniqueand/or exotic objects had been the maincomponents of collections whereas with thewidespread dissemination of copies andmultiples, the emphasis changed to reflect notonly the larger number of objects but theattention paid by collectors to the commonfeatures of the items in their collections aswell. Although these things may also havebeen kept in glass boxes or under glass plates,the purpose of the glass was different: nolonger used to separate the object from thecollector, glass became a way of freezing theobject so that it could be connected with andcontemplated at any time. The use of glasssubtly changed from allowing the object a lifeseparate from the collector to ensuring thatthe object, as property, would becomeimmortal and be always available forinteraction and reflection.1

Two examples of these principles in theuse of glass stand out: Victorian aquariumsand millefiori or dream spheres. Bothdemonstrate that glass changed the ways inwhich people viewed objects. Althoughaquariums housed live objects and dreamspheres dead ones, the sense of preservationcreated by the use of glass is present, as is theincreasing commodification of the objectsbehind the glass.

One of the most dramatic effects ofglass, therefore, was to enable the kindof deracination typical of nascentconsumer culture: ferns or anemoneswere extricated from their naturalhabitat, relocated into an artificial one,and subordinated to the implicitscopophilia of display. This separationof things from their original – or, insome cases, attributed – context andfunctions made them into commoditiesincreasingly susceptible to theprojection of cultural desires andanxieties. (52)

It is this commodification of the objectthat is facilitated by, as well as facilitating, therising frequency of the use of glass.Olalquiaga makes it clear that glass,increasingly present and widespread in its use,can be viewed as the material that representsthe shattered fragments of aura, this processitself being key to the creation of kitsch.

Benjamin’s notion of aura, andparticularly the fragments that remain once ithas been shattered, inform much ofOlalquiaga’s position on the formation ofkitsch: “Kitsch is [the] scattered fragments ofthe aura, traces of dream images turned loosefrom their matrix, multiplied by the incessantbeat of industrialization, covering the

emptiness left by both the aura’s demise andmodernity’s failure to deliver its promise of aradiant future” (84). For Benjamin, thetechnique of reproduction itself is whatdetaches the reproduced object from thedomain of tradition and causes the object’saura to be destroyed. Mechanization, massreproduction, and the death/disappearance ofthe original are important factors in theascent of kitsch. The aura, that halo ofexclusivity and originality, is shattered as theoriginal begins to be mass-produced.Olalquiaga extends her understanding of aurato include not only works of art (as in theoriginal Benjaminian reading) but also thoseobjects that are prized and collected as worksof art might be and once were. Authenticity,intimately connected to the idea of aura,became irrelevant as the form of collectionschanged from the display of rare or uniquespecimens in an ornamental way to manyversions of the same or similar items arrangedsystematically to show common features.Mechanical reproduction broke the bond thathad existed until the nineteenth centurybetween uniqueness and authenticity. A newdefinition of uniqueness thus arose, onewhere experience and interaction replacedauthenticity. In other words, uniqueness, inOlalquiaga’s view, is not intrinsic to an objectbut is rather something that is established bythe historical interaction between subject andexperience. In this way, then, uniqueness canbe said to occur when objects are personalizedin the privacy of a person’s specific universe.Personal meaning and context are key toestablishing uniqueness, and thus recapturingpart of an object’s or collection’s aura.Interestingly, Olalquiaga puts a great deal ofemphasis on the (re)creation of theuniqueness of an object only in the context ofa collection, a point that is further explainedby Jean Baudrillard (1996) where he notesthat “what is possessed is always an objectabstracted from its function and thus brought intorelationship with the subject. […] Such objectstogether make up the system through whichthe subject strives to construct a world, aprivate totality” (86). The relationshipbetween the object in a collection and thesubject-collector is thus one that is bothintimate and, for the collector, vital to thecreation of a personal universe, regardless ofthe use value of the objects that comprise thecollection.

The aura is fundamentally connected totradition and is an incidental aspect of anobject, derived from its use value (whoseinnocence and transparency Marxunderlined) or its direct relationship to itsmode of production (usually made by hand orduring the early stages of industrialization).The process of industrialization helped totransform the dominant view of history andtime, Olalquiaga points out, and objects suchas dream spheres help to illuminate thischange. In short, modernization is said tohave put an end to the pre-industrial ideathat experience is a unified and coherentwhole in favour of the very modern idea of

Cultural Junk ShopCeleste Olalquiaga, The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

By Kristina C. Marcellus

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linear progression where cause and effectfollow one another in a mechanical way.Benjamin is again enlisted, this time for hisdistinction between reminiscence andremembrance, on which Olalquiaga dwells forsome time, particularly as these concepts areapplied to souvenirs.

What is most interesting aboutOlalquiaga’s discussion of aura is the sense ofloss with which it is infused. Throughout TheArtificial Kingdom, aura is connected morewith loss and change than with anything else.It is the loss of aura as a whole entity uponwhich Olalquiaga claims that kitsch isfounded; loss of the original in favour of serialand mechanical reproduction are alsoimportant. The point at which loss andrebirth intersect mark the birth of kitsch.

Death looms throughout The ArtificialKingdom after having first been introduced inthe figure of Rodney, dream sphere hermitcrab and kitsch object extraordinaire. Earlyin the book, during her discussion of thesouvenir, Olalquiaga states that “kitsch isdead from the moment it is born” (67). Thisis true in many different senses, and is mostsuccinctly summarized in the final chapter,“Mythical Memory,” in which Olalquiagareturns to Benjamin’s two different ways ofperceiving events in modern time. Consciousand unconscious modes are both connectedto memory and are also tied to reminiscenceand remembrance, respectively. Becausememory is formed after the event or object inquestion has ceased to be part of the present,death figures here. Olalquiaga also includes achapter on “The Dying Salon,” in which shebriefly but explicitly covers death andbereavement as it applies to interior design,Victorian mourning practices and mementosthat arose from the “great age of mourning,”such as hairwork. In this chapter, Olalquiagaconnects mourning, the preservation ofnatural specimens, and the increasingimportance of private space andcontemplation. Time, she writes, is presentin the Victorian interior in “the form ofdeath: dried flowers, stuffed animals, theclaustrophobic clutter of a place where thereis no space for movement nor windows for airor light” (288). This relationship betweentime and death is highly relevant in thediscussion of the formation of kitsch, not onlybecause of the ties to memory but sincekitsch appears to be at its most potent afteran imprecise and indefinable span of time.Kitsch at once represents something partiallyarisen from some past era, something maderelevant in the present through the processesof remembrance and reminiscence, and alsosomething that only ‘lives’ when it is prized inan individual’s personal world.2

Two of the most interesting aspects of TheArtificial Kingdom are the richness and varietyof the illustrations, photographs, and artisticembellishments of the pages, and the themeof water that infuses the book. It is Rodney,one-time sea creature now trapped in hisglass globe, that appears on the otherwiseplain cover, introducing at once both of theseaspects. Many of the examples andaccompanying figures are of other sea lifesuch as an anatomical drawing of ananemone, photographs of a series of castEnglish shore crab shells and of matingseahorses, as well as more mythic underseaphenomena like the sunken Titanic and

reproductions of original illustrations fromJules Verne’s 20 000 Leagues Under The Sea.The discussion of this book alone comprisesan entire chapter and it is illustrative of thetendency toward water and its accompanyingforces and inhabitants enlisted by Olalquiagato illustrate kitsch. Another chapter, “TheMissing Link,” chronicles the fascination withmermaids (in the context of discussing copiesand fakes) and, indeed, much of the firstsection of The Artificial Kingdom deals withthe Victorian aquarium fad as it relates to theincreasing use of glass and the collection ofnatural specimens. Olalquiaga relies heavilyon Benjamin’s point that the aura of naturalobjects is a unique phenomenon of distance,no matter how close it may be.

The Artificial Kingdom is a fascinatingexploration of material culture from ahistorical point of view. Olalquiaga’s use ofmany of Benjamin’s ideas is both engagingand relevant in that it provides a way ofexamining the formation of kitsch that allowsthe object to retain something of its originalexistence as either (or both) naturalspecimen and/or art object. Her choice ofexamples, so extensively drawn from aquaticlife both real and fictional, are fascinating, asis her use of fiction to situate and clarify thescene of the objects. Above all, The ArtificialKingdom is a book about collections, howthey have changed, and the factors to whichthese changes can be attributed. It is veryuseful to note the difference betweenOlalquiaga’s definition of kitsch and the onethat seems most popular in contemporarylingo. Where The Artificial Kingdom dealswith kitsch in an almost metaphysical way,current vernacular paints kitsch as moreabout being cheap, tacky and outdated. Noris the contemporary meaning of kitsch nearlyas concerned with the personal significanceof the kitsch object. The flavour ofcollections is maintained, but kitsch in thepopular sense seems to be more aligned withthe creation or maintenance of a personalstyle, and this gives to it a dimension of self-consciousness that some deny to sentimentaltat (see Windsor 1994: 53ff). In addition,popular senses of the word are differentiallyapplied – my collection of 1950s brand-namespice containers has been labelled kitsch butwhile still in my grandmother’s possession,Olalquiaga’s meaning of kitsch was far moreappropriately applied. My grandmother mayinteract with the spice containers as objectsshe remembers. I do not remember them, noteven as part of her household. They are,instead, examples of mid-twentieth centurycorporate packaging, existing only in massproduction. Olalquiaga maintains that kitschresults from the engagement of a subject withexperience and that in each kitsch objectindividuals see something of themselves;indeed, writers on collectors often note thedevelopment of specialised knowledge, aproto-academic impulse (Gelber 1999: 79).How, then, can the currently popularmeaning of kitsch with its lack of aura at anystage and connotations of industrialized,mass-produced origins be reconciled withOlalquiaga’s understanding of the term?Perhaps this is a new dimension of kitsch, thecollection of objects that initially possess littlepersonal significance, purchased or acquiredmore for their stylistic, thematic, or previoususe value, than for the remembrances or

reminiscences they evoke. Or, perhaps, thisnewer meaning of kitsch is the final step in aprogression away from what Benjamin called‘cult value’. Olalquiaga’s use of kitschdescribes the shattering of the auras of objectsin the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. For Benjamin, however, the finalblow to the glass box of the aura came withthe advent of film (sound film in particular),a moment that did not reach its height untilwell into the twentieth century. Thus, ifcontemporary kitsch is the object fullyremoved from all traces of cult value,originating in mass production, and withoutany traces of the aura that stems fromauthenticity or uniqueness, it must haveprogressed beyond the point of an originalobject copied and mass-produced, that is,beyond the period of kitsch with which TheArtificial Kingdom concerns itself.

Kristina Marcellus is pursuing a PhD inSociology at Queen’s University.

Notes

1. Jean Baudrillard, in his System of Objects(1996), further elucidates the properties ofglass to which Olalquiaga points: “Above all,though, glass is the most effective conceivablematerial expression of the fundamentalambiguity of ‘atmosphere’: the fact that it isat once proximity and distance, intimacy andthe refusal of intimacy, communication andnon-communication. Whether as packaging,window or partition, glass is the basis of atransparency without transition: we see, butcannot touch. […] Not to mention glass’scardinal virtue, which is of a moral order: itspurity, reliability and objectivity, along withall those connotations of hygiene andprophylaxis which make it truly the materialof the future – a future, after all, that is to beone of disavowal of the body, and of theprimary and organic functions, in the name ofa radiant and functional objectivity” (41-42).

2. Baudrillard (1996) points to the Freudiannotion of collecting when he notes that “theobject is the thing with which we construct ourmourning: the object represents our owndeath, but that death is transcended(symbolically) by virtue of the fact that wepossess the object” (97). This reveals anotherdimension of the relationship between kitschand death – not only can the object serve as amemento mori for a dead loved one, it can bethought of, in the context of a collection, as adeath ‘souvenir’ in advance of the collector’sown death and an attempt to halt or capturethe change that is embodied in the creationof kitsch objects and/or collections.

References

Baudrillard, Jean (1996) The System ofObjects. London: Verso.

Benjamin, Walter (1968) “The Work ofArt in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York:Schocken, pp. 217-51.

Gelber, Steven M. (1999) Hobbies: Leisureand the Culture of Work in America, New York:Columbia University Press.

Windsor, John (1994) “Identity Parades,”in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsnerand Roger Cardinal, Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, pp. 49-67.

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The discovery, in 1996, of somemanuscripts penned by Ferdinand deSaussure, which had been stored in the

“orangerie” of the family estate in Geneva,brought again to the fore the linguistic andsemiotic legacy of the Swiss philologist whohad been obsessed all his life by the truenature of languages and, more generally, signs.The publication of these manuscripts in 2002,under the editorship of Simon Bouquet andRudolph Engler, was preceded, in June 2001,by an international conference in Archampand Geneva, whose aim was both to takestock of Saussurean scholarship and to assessthe history and current state of Saussurism inthe world. The newly discovered manuscriptsare due to appear in English, translated byCarol Sanders, who is also the editor of TheCambridge Companion to Saussure (2004). Thisrenewal of interest should not make oneforget that, since his death in 1913, there hasbeen a continuous stream of inquiries, bothphilological and interpretative, bearing onSaussure’s texts and thought. The highlightsof this research included, during the last fewdecades, the monumental critical edition ofthe sources of the Course in General Linguisticsby Rudolph Engler (1968-1989), the separateediting of the notes taken by the studentswho followed Saussure’s courses on generallinguistics between 1907 and 1911 (Komatsuand Harris 1993; Komatsu and Wolf 1996,1997), and the publication of the Harvardmanuscripts by Herman Parret (1993). Inaddition, numerous historiographic andexegetic exercises have been devoted toreinterpreting, year after year, Saussure’scontribution to linguistics and semiology (e.g.Koerner 1973; Harris 1987, 2001: Thibault1997; Choi 2002). The Cahiers Ferdinand deSaussure, published by the University ofGeneva, remain the main outlet forSaussurean scholarship and keep track of allother relevant publications.

In view of such an abundance of editorialand hermeneutic activities close to a centuryafter Saussure’s premature death, it seemsdifficult not to raise the following question: isall this scholarship of strictly historicalinterest or does Saussure’s thought still matterto the advancement of linguistics andsemiotics? But, before answering thisquestion, a brief recapitulation of Saussure’semergence as a fountainhead of semiology isin order.

It is indeed important to recall that,during his lifetime, Saussure was knownmainly as a specialist of Indo-Europeancomparative and historical linguistics. Hisfame among other linguists was due to a 1879publication on the early system of Indo-European vowels, in addition to his teachingin this philological domain at the Ecole desHautes Etudes in Paris, until he wasappointed to the University of Geneva in1891, where he taught Sanskrit and Indo-European Comparative Linguistics. It is onlytoward the end of his life that, between 1907and 1911, he was entrusted the task ofteaching a course in general linguistics. The

SRB Insight:

Does Saussure Still Matter?By Paul Bouissac

three courses he gave on this subject matterattracted only a handful of students, and theway in which the lectures were delivered hasbeen interestingly characterized thirty yearslater by Albert Sechehaye in the followingmanner: “Having been asked to teach coursesin general linguistics, which, incidentally, hadbeen allotted a very short time, the master,whose thought on this topic was still inprogress, hardly could do more than conveyto his students the problems with which hewas struggling and the few certainties he hadreached so far concerning some essentialpoints. Three times, each time from adifferent angle, he expounded his views, thusmaking his listeners reflect upon these issuesanew. He was thinking aloud to stimulatetheir own thinking” (quoted in French inGodel 1969: 139 – my translation).

It is all too often forgotten that the bookto which Saussure’s name became indissolublyattached, the Course in General Linguistics(1916), is a posthumous publication that wasneither composed nor even approved by him.Even when the conditions of its productionare perfunctorily acknowledged, it is assumedthat its contents faithfully reflect Saussure’sideas. Hence the abundant quotations foundin the literature that are introduced by: “ForSaussure…” or “Saussure says that ….” Tomake things still worse, most references foundin today’s critical discourse are second-handparaphrases by scholars who are hardly awareof the scholarship mentioned above. UsingSaussure as a straw man is a popular topos inpost-structuralist cultural theory and beyond.In fact, as more manuscripts andcorrespondence come to light, it isincreasingly obvious that the Course is largelya fabrication (Harris 2003). Using students’notes, personal recollections and fragmentarymanuscripts to reconstruct a systematictreatise on the nature of language was all themore dubious an enterprise as Saussurehimself had always refused to give such a formto his speculations. He refused on the groundthat the only thing he was sure of was thatnone of the ideas that formed the linguisticsof his time had any value, and that he hadnot come yet to any conclusions that wouldallow him to formulate a consistent theory oflanguage within a comprehensive semiology.

Nevertheless, Saussure’s name has beenendlessly invoked through most of theprevious century in the structuralist and post-structuralist literature. It must be emphasized,however, that it is essentially on the basis oftwo short paragraphs from the Course that hewas posthumously elevated first to the statusof founder of semiology, then co-founder ofsemiotics when C.S. Peirce’s contrastinglyprolix speculations entered the fray. Whoeverhas perused the sources of the Course, canonly be struck by the gap that exists betweenthe dogma that was derived from this formallywritten text, following a conventional,rational plan, and the often erratic andemotional autographic notes, full of boldassertions as well as self-doubting reflexions,that the book purports to selectively

systematize and normalize in a didacticmanner. From the beginning until today,whatever manuscripts have been found havebeen assessed and organized by their editorsthrough the filter of the Course whichremains the reference with respect to whichtheir contents are classified and interpreted.Precious little effort is made to restore themto their chronological order within thecontext of the linguistic and philosophicaldebates of their time. The curse of the Coursekeeps casting its shadow on one of the mostdaring minds of the century. The fact that hisoriginal thoughts are accessible only in theform of fragments, tentative notes,contradictory statements, should not detractus from granting them our utmost attention.A century after they were jotted down onpaper, their counterintuitive insights retaintheir provocative force and challenge theestablished doxa that now reigns in linguisticsand semiotics. It may be the case, however,that Saussure’s epistemological vision is at lastcoming of age.

It was after re-reading the Course that theRussian linguist Nikolaj Trubetzkoy wrote toRoman Jakobson in 1932: “For inspiration Ihave reread de Saussure, but on a secondreading he impresses me much less. There iscomparatively little in the book that is ofvalue; most of it is old rubbish. And what isvaluable is awfully abstract, without details”(Trubetskoy 2001:255). In view of some ofthe remarks found in his notes there is nodoubt that Saussure himself would haveagreed, had he been given an opportunity tolook at the work of his well-intending editors.The intellectual picture that emerges from hismanuscripts is indeed strikingly different fromthe posthumous text that fed theepistemological myth of Saussurism.

A recurring theme in the Course and inSaussure’s own notes is the notion of langue.This notion has challenged all translators ofthe text into English, and probably into otherlanguages as well. Exegetes and commentatorshave also inconclusively debated on the statusof this term, whether it refers to some mentalentity, perhaps a sort of Platonic idea, ormerely designates a methodological concept,an abstraction that is a part of a heuristicstrategy. The issue has been, and remains, thearticulation of the twin notions of langue andparole, the latter being no less difficult totranslate into English than the former. Somehave opted for an ontological distinction onthe model of the philosophical tradition thatopposes essence and existence or “accidents”;others have reduced the difference to thepragmatic necessity of evaluating instances of“languaging” with respect to the oppositepoles of a continuum going from thenormative, idealized representation of alanguage to the open-ended actual utterancesthat are usually observed in verbalinteractions. That Saussure himself was notentirely satisfied with these correlate notionsof langue and parole seems obvious from hisnumerous attempts to specify the distinction.In fact, in spite of almost a century of

SRB 14.3 (2004) - 11

controversies, neither Hjelmslev’s conceptualsleight of hand that consisted of rewriting theterminological pair as “system” and “process,”nor the Derridean debunking of its allegedmetaphysical assumptions, have totallydefused the issue. As various linguisticparadigms are still jockeying for the finalword regarding the nature and origin oflanguage (e.g. Trabant and Ward 2001,Christiansen and Kirby 2003), Saussure’suneasy, often ambiguous circumlocutions andoccasional images continue to engage theresearchers who get to the manuscriptsources.

Saussure struggled inconclusively with theissue of what kind of object is language, thatis, the object of general linguistics which hewas supposed to teach, and the notion oflangue was for him a sort of notion by default,in the sense that there appeared to be noother way to account, albeit imperfectly, for arange of observable language phenomena.Examining his successive attempts atclarifying his own thought leads one to theevidence that the various characters andaspects of language he could identify seemedto him contradictory. The manuscriptsdiscovered in 1996 do not appear to sensiblymodify this outlook. Excerpts from a draftentitled “De l’essence double du langage”[On the dual essence of language] rehash, ifnot compound, the ambiguities anduncertainties which Saussure confronted: “Ilest profondément faux de s’imaginer qu’onpuisse faire une synthèse radieuse de lalangue, en partant d’un principe déterminéqui se développe et s’incorpore avec [ ]” [it isdefinitely a mistake to fancy that it is possibleto derive an unproblematic synthesis oflangue from a determinate principle whichwould develop and become embodied in [it];or: “Quand un système de signes devient lebien d’une collectivité [...] Nous ne savonsplus quelles forces et quelles lois vont êtremêlées à la vie de ce système de signes”.[Once a sign system has taken root in a socialgroup [...] we do not understand which forcesand which laws become involved in the life ofthis system.] (Bouquet & Engler 2001: 15-16).

Langue was the label Saussure attachedto the elusive object of general linguistics andwhich could not be captured by the detailedstudy of the innumerable languages thatcould be experienced in the contemporaryworld and through history. But since, for him,languages constituted merely a subset, albeitan important one, of a more encompassingclass of sign systems, the notion of langueneeded to be given a semiological rather thanpurely linguistic definition. His agenda was tocapture this elusive object and his effortstowards this goal remain relevant today sincenobody has yet proposed a convincing answerto Saussure’s pertinent question. As long as itis believed that Saussure had reached aconclusion regarding this problem, it ispossible to try and give an explanation of his“theory,” but if, as it is contended here,Saussure merely attempted again and again toget a grip on the intractable difficulty ofconceptualizing language as an object ofscientific knowledge that would transcendthe indefinite variety of observable languagesand nevertheless account for each one ofthem, understanding the problem is what weshould try to achieve without limiting our

inquiry to the historical circumstances withinwhich Saussure was immersed during the lastdecade of the nineteenth century.

The great debate of the time waswhether languages were kinds of organismswhich changed along the same patterns asother organisms’ life cycles or whether theywere social institutions based on conventionssupported by human mental abilities. In oneof his rare references to other linguistsreported in the Course, Saussure designatesW.D.Whitney as a valuable exponent of thelatter approach. At the same time, he directsderogatory remarks to some insane theorists,without naming them, who support theorganicist view. This allusion obviously echoesWhitney’s harsh criticisms of AugustSchleicher’s crude Darwinism (1863).However, the reference to Whitney isaccompanied by some reservations, and,further, his endorsement of the movementwhich then defined itself by opposition to theorganic hypothesis is not expressed in awholehearted manner. Again and againSaussure returns to the stubborn evidencethat led him to grapple with a paradox: langueas a set of differential terms is founded onarbitrary conventions that totally escape theconscious intentions of the individuals whouse its resources for expressing their thoughtsand communicating among themselves.Paradoxically, it is a contract withoutcontractants. Because none of the empiricalinvestigations of the multifarious aspects oflanguage communication appear to besufficient to found a scientific knowledge ofthis phenomenon, something he calls languemust be assumed to exist by default. But,actually, langue is the unknown in theequation.

A common misreading has construedlangue as a static, achronic or synchronicsystem, depending on the temporal order towhich it is opposed. But, for Saussure, time isof the essence for understanding the notion oflangue. For instance, following the sequenceof Saussure’s own notes in the column inwhich Engler lists them in his critical editionof the Course, one cannot avoid coming tothe conclusion that this notion, which hasoften been foregrounded by commentators asan achronic mentalist or cognitive “reality,” isfar from being the whole picture. It is a set ofconstraints that can be expressed as analgorithm or a coherent body of algorithms ata given moment but that is conceived bySaussure as an object for which time is of theessence. Repeatedly, his notes allude to thisundeniable characteristic which must beaccepted in spite of the equally undeniableevidence of its contrary: “On peut parler à lafois de l’immutabilité et de la mutabilité dusigne” (Engler 1989:165) [the sign can be saidto be both immutable and mutable]. Thisremark appears in the context of attempts atcircumscribing the elusive object of generallinguistics, and more generally semiology:“Tout ce qui comprend des formes doit entrerdans la sémiologie” (154) [whatever involvesforms must come under the purview ofsemiology]; but contrary to thecomtemplative rationality of geometry, langueis an irrational force which imposes itself onhumans (“La langue est quelquechose quel’on subit” (159) [langue is something whichimposes itself upon us]; its very foundationsare irrational and it is driven by blind forces

(“fondée sur l’irraison même”[162], “desforces aveugles”[171]).

Indeed, alterations occur in the systemitself and these alterations are not functionalin the sense that they would be the effects ofconscious changes consensually made to asocial contract in order to improve itsefficiency. Instead, they are neither free norrational. “Quand intervient le Tempscombiné avec le fait de la psychologie sociale,c’est alors que nous sentons que la languen’est pas libre [...] parce que principe decontinuité ou de solidarité indéfinie avec lesâges précédents. La continuité enferme le faitd’altération qui est un déplacement devaleurs” (173-174). [When Time combineswith the reality of social psychology, we cometo realize that langue is not free [...] becauseof the principle of continuity and solidaritywith previous states. Continuity includesalterations in the form of shifting values.]

This way of thinking is remarkablyDarwinian and more specifically adumbratescontemporary speculations on evolutionarysemiotics and memetics which construesemiotic systems, including language(s), assemi-autonomous algorithms endowed withan evolutionary dynamic of their own akin toparasitic modes of adaptation, survival andreproduction (e.g., Deacon 1997, Worden2000, van Driem 2000). Saussure’s puzzlingimage of langue as somewhat like “a duckhatched by a hen,” whose essential characteris to “always escape to some extent individualor social will” and which “exists perfectly onlyin the mass of brains” (Engler 1989: 40-41,51, 57), evokes some kind of yet unclassifiedorganism (see also Engler 1989: 169). Hespecifies his approach to which he seems tobe led almost reluctantly throughcompounding the range of evidence he hasreached as a compelling, albeit counter-intuitive conclusion: “Notre définition de lalangue suppose que nous en écartons tout cequi est étranger à son organisme, à sonsystème”, “l’organisme intérieur de la langue”,“On s’est fait scrupule d’employer le termed’organisme, parce que la langue dépend desêtres vivants. On peut employer le mot, en serappelant qu’il ne s’agit pas d’un êtreindépendant” (Engler 1989:59) [Ourdefinition of langue implies that we discardwhatever is foreign to its organism, its system,the inner organism of langue. The wordorganism is used here reluctantly becauselangue depends on living organisms. Let ususe it any way, keeping in mind that thisorganism is not independent]. It isinteresting to note that this characterisationmeets the definition of a parasitic organism, arecurrent theme in contemporary memetictheories of language. Furthermore, Saussure’sparadoxical insights do not apply only to theobject of linguistics but to semiology as awhole: “La continuité du signe dans le temps,liée à l’altération dans le temps, est unprincipe de la sémiologie générale” (171) [thecontinuity of the sign in time, linked to itsalteration, is a principle of generalsemiology]. But this continuity depends ontransmission “selon des lois qui n’ont rien àfaire avec les lois de création” (170)[according to laws which are totally differentfrom the laws of creation]. Saussurerepeatedly emphasizes that the social natureof semiological systems is “internal” ratherthan “external” to these systems (173).

SRB 14.3 (2004) - 12

Continuity and change belong to their veryessence and unambiguously, albeit notexplicitly, locating them within anevolutionary process whose description fits,avant la lettre, the neo-Darwinian models.This vision is emphatically underlined in thefirst Geneva lectures of 1891 in which evenpauses in the evolution of “langue” – whatsome contemporary evolutionistcontroversially term “punctuations” – aredenied (Engler 1990: 3-14).

Such remarks, and many other of thesame vein, have not been foregrounded bythe epigones and commentators, or they havebeen interpreted as mere metaphors.Similarly, Saussure’s assertions regarding theplace he envisioned for semiology as a part ofgeneral psychology has been glossed over.However, the latter is no less striking andmany written remarks by Saussure anticipatethe tenets of modern cognitive neurosciences.His occasional criticisms of Broca’s approachbears upon the restrictive localisations oflinguistic functions. “Il y a une faculté plusgénérale, celle qui commande aux signes”(Engler 1989: 36) [there exists a more generalfaculty, one which governs signs]. This facultyis conceived as a brain function which makeslanguage possible without being its originsince the law of continuity shows that anylangue must be transmitted. A definite vision,well ahead of Saussure’s time, emerges fromhis concise, at times cryptic, assertions:“L’essentiel de la langue est étranger aucaractère phonique du signe linguistique”(22) [the essence of langue is alien to thephonic character of linguistic signs]; “Lalangue n’est pas moins que la parole un objetde nature concrète” (44) [langue is as muchas parole a concrete object] and “Tout estpsychologique dans la langue” (21) [thewhole of langue is psychological]. But shiftingthe problem to psychology is also a way toproject its solution into an unknown futurebecause Saussure’s conception of psychologyis a critical one. It is, like semiology, orsignology as he preferred at times to call thescience of signs, something to come which isbound to be different from the disciplineknown by this name at the turn of thecentury. The condition for the emergence of apsychology that would encompass semiology isthat psychology take the temporal dimensioninto account and overcome its tendency tospeculate on intemporal signs and ideas [”[...]sortir absolument de ses spéculations sur lesigne momentané et l’idée momentanée”(Engler 1990:47)]. This approach, perhaps,echoes more closely than it is suspected JamesMark Baldwin’s (1861- 1934) evolutionarypsychology and epistemology. The Americanpsychologist, contemporary of Saussure,whose impact on Piaget and Vygotsky isgenerally acknowledged, was widely read anddiscussed in Europe and in France inparticular where he lived from 1908 until hisdeath (Wozniak 1998). Baldwin’s use ofDarwinism in the rethinking of the traditionaldisciplines of his time may have been indeedmuch less objectionable than Schleicher’sliteral and narrow Spencerian applications ofevolutionism to the history of languages thatWhitney and Saussure considered to be“laughable.”

Are Saussure’s tentative ideas nowcoming of age? Can they provide a usefulreference point for today’s researchers, a sortof reflexive temporal depth, a heuristic

framework beyond the earlier fossilisation ofsome restrictive interpretations? Bringing allthe problems he raised and all the insights hejotted down in a single, not exclusive purviewremains one of the most stimulating andchallenging tasks of today. After all, theemergence of the epistemological resourcewhich Saussure called semiology is notnecessarily to be found under the official labelof semiotics and its cohorts of scholasticdebaters. For instance, George SpencerBrown’s logic of distinctions expounded inLaw of Forms (1969) and the use of hiscalculus of indications by Francisco Varela inPrinciples of Biological Autonomy (1979) pursueone of the tenets of Saussure’s conviction that“tout signe repose purement sur un co-statusnégatif” [any sign is purely based upon anegative co-status] or that “l’expressionsimple sera algébrique ou ne sera pas” [thesimple expression will be algebraic or will notbe at all] (Engler 1990: 28-29). Such is thegoal of today’s algorithmic and computationalsemiotics.

One may wonder whether, once thecomplete manuscripts left by Saussure willhave been published in their chronologicalorder irrespective of the prism of the Course inGeneral Linguistics through which previouslyavailable autographs were perceived untilrecently, a novel, perhaps surprisingconceptual landscape will emerge. This newcontextualisation, both internal and external,may indeed show that Saussure hadanticipated theoretical directions which hecould not fully explore in his own time, giventhe state of scientific knowledge at the turn ofthe twentieth century, and the linguistic doxawhich then prevailed. This will put to the testthe various versions of Saussurism that havebeen constructed, and criticized, so far on thebasis of limited information, and stimulateanew the semiotic, or semiological, projectwhich Saussure envisioned as an open-endedprocess when he wrote “Où s’arrêtera lasémiologie? C’est difficile à dire.” (Engler1989: 46) [How far will semiology go? It isdifficult to predict]. Saussure’s questionsremain valid and his elusive agenda stillprovides a challenge for today’s spirit ofscientific inquiry.

Paul Bouissac is founding editor of TheSemiotic Review of Books.

References

Brown, G. S. (1969) Laws of Form.London: G. Allen & Unwin.

Deacon, Terrence (1997) The SymbolicSpecies. The Co-evolution of Language and theBrain. New York: Norton.

Christiansen, Morten and Simon Kirby,eds. (2003) Language Evolution. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Choi, Yong-Ho (2002) Le problème dutemps chez Ferdinand de Saussure. Paris:L’Harmattan.

Driem, George van (2001) Languages ofthe Himalayas. An Ethnolinguistic Handbook ofthe Greater Himalayan Region Containing anIntroduction to the Symbiotic Theory ofLanguage. Vol. 1. Leiden: Brill.

Engler, Rudolph, ed. (1968-1989)Ferdinand de Saussure. Cours de linguistiquegénérale. Edition critique. Tome 1 and II.Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.

Godel, Robert (1957) Les sourcesmanuscrites du cours de linguistique generale de F.De Saussure. Genève: Droz and Paris: Minard.

Godel, Robert (ed.) (1969) A GenevaSchool Reader in Linguistics. Bloomington:Indiana University Press.

Harris, Roy (1987) Reading Saussure.London: Duckworth.

Harris, Roy (2000). Saussure for allSeasons. Semiotica 131-3/4: 273-287.

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