THE SEMIOTIC WOUND
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Read another Perry Anderson recently - In the Tracks of Historical Materialism - and he absolutely murders Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida and the whole French structuralist and post-structuralist thing. Apparently Saussure said from the start that language can't and shouldn't be taken as a model for anything else, but they all ignored that, did it anyway and ended up in a complete mess.
It was Saussure himself, ironically, who warned against exactly the abusive analogies and extrapolations from his own domain that have been so unstoppable in the past decades. Language, he wrote, is ‘a human institution of such a kind that all the other human institutions, with the exception of writing, can only deceive us as to its real essence if we trust in their analogy’.' Indeed, he singled out kinship and economy — precisely the two systems with whose assimilation to language Lévi-Strauss inaugurated structuralism as a general theory — as incommensurable with it. Familial institutions such as monogamy or polygamy, he noted, were improper objects for semiological analysis, because they were far from unmotivated in the same way as the sign. Economic relations were likewise unamenable to his categories because economic value was ‘rooted in things and in their natural relations’ — ‘the value of a plot of ground, for instance, is related to its productivity’.' Saussure’s whole effort, ignored by his borrowers, was to emphasise the singularity of language, everything that separated it from other social practices or forms: ‘We are deeply convinced,’ he declared, ‘that whoever sets foot on the terrain of language can be said to be bereft of all the analogies of heaven and earth.’'
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... linguistic structures have an exceptionally low coefficient of historical mobility, among social institutions. Altering very slowly and, with few and recent exceptions, unconsciously, they are in that respect quite unlike economic, political or religious structures, whose rates of change — once the threshold of class society has been reached — have generally been incomparably faster. Secondly, however, this characteristic immobility of language as a Structure is accompanied by a no less exceptional inventivity of the subject within it: the obverse of the rigidity of langue is the volatile liberty of parole. For utterance has no material constraint whatever: words are free, in the double sense of the term. They cost nothing to produce, and can be multiplied and manipulated at will, within the laws of meaning. All other major social practices are subject to the laws of natural scarcity: persons, goods or powers cannot be generated ad libitum and ad infinitum. Yet the very freedom of the speaking subject is curiously inconsequential: that is, its effects on the structure in return are in normal circumstances virtually nil. Even the greatest writers, whose genius has influenced whole cultures, have typically altered the language relatively little. This, of course, at once indicates the third peculiarity of the structure-subject relationship in language: namely, the subject of speech is axiomatically individual— ‘don’t speak all together’ being the customary way of saying that plural speech is non-speech, that which cannot be heard. By contrast, the relevant subjects in the domain of economic, cultural, political or military structures are first and foremost collective: nations, classes, castes, groups, generations. Precisely because this is so, the agency of these subjects is capable of effecting profound transformations of those structures. This fundamental distinction is an insurmountable barrier to any transposition of linguistic models to historical processes of a wider sort. The opening move of structuralism, in other words, is a speculative aggrandisement of language that lacks any comparative credentials.
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Structuralism as a project, then, was committed from the start to the repression of the referential axis of Saussure’s theory of the sign. The result could only be a gradual megalomania of the signifier.
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... the problem posed for any thoroughgoing structuralism by its cognitive starting point. For if structures alone obtain in a world beyond all subjects, what secures their objectivity? High structuralism was never more strident than in its annunciation of the end of man. Foucault struck the characteristically prophetic note when he declared in 1966: ‘Man is in the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever more brightly upon our horizon.’ But who is the ‘we’ to perceive or possess such a horizon? In the hollow of the pronoun lies the aporia of the programme. Lévi-Strauss opted for the most consistent solution to it. While echoing — even cosmically amplifying — Foucault in his sightings of ‘the twilight of man’, he postulated a basic isomorphism between nature and mind, reflected equally in myths and the structural analysis of them. Mind repeats nature in myths because it is itself nature, and the structural method repeats the operations of myths that it studies; or, in Lévi-Strauss’s words, ‘Myths signify the mind which evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part’. Amidst a plethora of denunciations of philosophy, what reappears in Mythologiques is thus one of the oldest figures of classical idealism — the identical subject-object.
But the identity is, of course, also a figment: for what Lévi-Strauss cannot explain is the emergence of his own discipline itself. How do the unconscious mental structures of the primitive become the conscious discoveries of the anthropologist? The discrepancy between the two fatally retables the question of what guarantees that these are discoveries, rather than arbitrary fancies.
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The lesson is that structure and subject have in this sense always been interdependent as categories. A wholesale attack on the latter was bound to subvert the former in due course as well. The terminus of the operation could only be a finally unbridled subjectivity. Adorno had foreseen this development, often remarking that any theory which sought completely to deny the illusory power of the subject would tend to reinstate that illusion even more than one which overestimated the power of the subject. The structuralist thinker who resisted this movement more than any other was Lacan, precisely because he had started out with a firmer commitment to the subject itself — both from his psychoanalytic profession, where the category could not so lightly be disposed of, and because of his prior philosophical formation, essentially Hegelian rather than Nietzschean or Heideggerian. But his conception of the subject, which abrogated the role of the ego and rescinded the reality principle, as Freud had posited them, to give plenipotentiary powers to a — dematerialized — id alone, cleared the way for its own supersession. Deleuze and Guattari could trump it by turning on the Law of the Symbolic itself, as a removable repression, in the name of the Imaginary and its schizophrenic objects. The disintegrated desiring machines of Anti-Oedipus, bereft of unity or identity, are the final dénouement of the capsizal of psychic structures themselves into a subjectivity pulverized beyond measure or order.
If this, then, has been the approximate curve of the trajectory from structuralism to post-structuralism, our initial question answers itself. The unresolved difficulties and deadlocks within Marxist theory, which structuralism promised to transcend, were never negotiated in detail within this rival space. The adoption of the language model as the ‘key to all mythologies’, far from clarifying or decoding the relations between structure and subject, led from a rhetorical absolutism of the first to a fragmented fetishism of the second, without ever advancing a theory of their relations. Such a theory, historically determinate and sectorally differentiated, could only be developed in a dialectical respect for their interdependence.