The Linguistic Turn

The Linguistic Turn : STRUCTURALISM and SEMIOTICS.

When an artist like M F Hussain draws a naked Saraswati or Bharat Mata, causing the conservative right wingers to fume and send him into exile outside the country, we realize how rigid the ‘structure’ of representation is according to religions. When Marcel Duchamp sends a toilet commode to an art gallery and signs it as “R Mutt”, it demonstrates how he out rightly questions and trivializes the ‘structure’ and the ‘system’ of the gallery space which supposedly patronizes art. Here, it is clear that we need to delve deeper on the question of “Structure”. People like Hussain and Duchamp can almost be seen as playing, breaking, tampering and re-creating the codes and boundaries of the structures they existed in. Their work dealt with signs, symbols, mores, norms and bending them on their own terms in order to question the very structure they exist in. This is the means with which I choose to understand Structuralism and further in the essay - Semiotics.  

Again, to begin towards understanding structuralism, a beautiful quote by the Persian sufi poet Jalal-ud-Din Rumi comes to my mind, which I would choose to state here : “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.” So rightly said! Words do not mean anything inherently, but they work together in a very structural fashion to create a system of meanings. I believe, i could go on to say that Rumi is being a Structuralist here!

Structuralism is primarily a theoretical paradigm and can be defined as concerning with the understanding of human phenomena, such as languages and cultures in their relationship to the structures they are contained in. These relations are specifically governed by certain laws and motives. We shall be able to grasp the goals of structuralism in further discussions.

Ferdinand De Suassure (1857-1913), considered the father of modern linguistics, understood well and challenged the problems of language and intellectual history. In his study of the story of Babel, he is deeply intrigued at how languages tend to move away from the principle of homogeneity, with the instrument of “categories” towards the principle of The Arbitrary. The concept of arbitary is that language here cannot be ‘motivated’ but rather it is learnt and passed on. Yet he went on to state that language is no ‘nomenclature’ (categories), meaning that there are worlds/groups externalized by the use of ‘names’. Illustrating with the help of an example he states, that the French terms : langage, langue, and parole can hardly be translated in english and thus this system is arbitrary. Suassure says that language is like the a game of chess, a rule bound game dealing in vast differences. Signs, as in the words, work in two relations :  the sytagmatic (the grammatical structures) and the associative (in terms of how language works in relative terms). He is also credited for shifting away from the diachronic approach towards the synchronic approach regarding language. Diachronic approach is when we take in account the historical influences, whereas, a Synchronic approach is when we focus on the object/word/language in the present conditions and nothing else, as if frozen in time. This was a rather important input by Suassure as later the anthropologist called Clause Levi Strauss was greatly influenced by this synchronic approach in studying the cultural norms and myths etc. coming back to Suassure, he states that the atom of language is the ‘sign’ which may be split into two – ‘the Signifier’ ( the sound-image) and ‘the Signified’ (the concept) and they are related in an arbitrary fashion. The study of these signs is called SEMIOTICS which later theorists like Roland Barthes went on to explore in fashion, advertising and travel etc. Suassure explains, that the relationship between the ‘signification’ and the ‘value’ of the sign similar to relationship between Marx’s concept of ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’. And this is how he illustrates, with the help of the example of the game of chess, that in language there are only ‘differences’ in a ‘system of oppositions’.

In the often used “The Tree” – example, the word Tree is the signifier and the image is the signified. 

Suassure, the structural linguist,  is considered one of the people at the helm of the ‘linguistic turn’ for the 20^th century intellectual discourse and academia concerning philosophy, history, anthropology, psycho-analysis and literary studies. At the root of the Structuralism was Suassure and that itself set the stage for Post-Structuralism to work upon. People like Jacques Derrida credited Suassure for his utter disapproval of the written word as the most pathological. And also carried forward his own concept of Differ’a’nces from Suassure’s system of differences.

Even for Louis Althusser, he understood that even language as a system has cultural causalities, and coined a term called “Structural Marxism”. Althusser talked of Structural Causality, that even the effect of a Structure exists within the Structure itself.

 And later on, thinkers like Jacques Lacan, derived his psychoanalytical interpretation of linguistics from Suassure. Lacan has heavily based his work - the ‘Real, Imaginary and the Symbolic’ on Structuralism. He goes on to say that the human being is a subject to the linguistic systems and they follow an order. He argues for the unity of the sound and meaning. That is why he says the ‘Speaking is Demanding’. He explains this further with the help of Metaphor and Metonymy which are governed by the laws of sign and signifying and symbolizing. According to Lacan, the unconscious behaves just like the structure of language. Dreams act just like signifiers and thus work on the laws of metaphors and metonymy. 

Taking the discussion on from linguistics into anthropology, we shall now go through the contributions of Claude Levi Strauss ( 1908-2009). The French author of several books and papers is considered the father of anthropology and ethnography. Deeply inspired by Suassure, He defines structuralism as “the search for the underlying patters of thought in all forms of human activity”. By stating that anthropology is the study of Culture and not that of cultures, he go on to declare the ‘death of Enlightenment concept of Man’, and rather propagated a Universal Mind. Soon after he got acquainted with the Suassurian Structuralism, he realized that language doesn’t consist of positive terms with meanings, inherent of themselves, but they work on a system of differences from each other. This is when Strauss, went ahead and stated that ‘kinship system is a language’. In one of his several papers, published as The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), he does a very structural study of the forbidden institution of ‘incest’. He states in the paper that prohibition of indulging in something like Incest has a motive and a utility behind it. He says that incest is prohibited not because of biological or psychological reasons, but in order to keep women outside the family and kinship ‘available’ to men.

For him primarily, and rightly so, kinship structures and cultures etc base themselves on Communication. In ‘Structural Anthropology’ (1958), he also does a study of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925) and analyses the norm of material exchange and wife trafficking as a very symbolic means of communication between communities. According to him, women are circulated between individuals, in a family, clan, group etc just like words are circulated in a language. Of course, feminist theorists have critiqued him for giving a very objectified treatment to women in kinship systems and excludes women from the role of cultural agents.

Strauss was initially and deeply so, interested in Mythologies. He writes about mythologies in his paper called ‘Structural Anthropology” and later on in a book called “Mythologiques” (1964-71) Apparently, he is highly influenced by Suassure, as he chooses mythologies to cope with. He says that myths is the best thing to work on a synchronic pattern as this does not deal with linear time. Here we need to look at myths as if ‘frozen in time’ rather than in the diachronic perspective. He went on to analyze from Old Russian Folklores to the Myth of Oedipus, and stated that myths are repeatedly narrated without resolving the cultural contradiction it talks about. The publishing of his book called Tristes Tropiques around the year 1955-73, marked the turning point of his career. ‘While Tristes Tropiques expresses the pain and mourns the destructive impact of Western civilization on non-Western people, the study of myth sees the different moments of human history as structurally simultaneous’. Thus emerges the contradictory aspects of Strauss’s writings. Clifford Greetz (in Works and Lives, 1988) writes “on the one hand, this allows for a cultural relativism that enables Levi-Strauss to contest any narrative of "progress," with its cqncomitant belief in the superiority of the modern. But on the other hand, it makes the destruction of "primitive" societies total so as to internalize the lost object”.

Published as Mythologies in 1957, Roland Barthes (1915-1980)  does a kind of Marxian semiology of mass culture and everyday life. He states that the the instrument of Myth is so strong that it appropriates almost everything in it’s fold. He gives examples about the Detergent Companies and the Car making companies in France. His object is to show how mass culture is saturated with ideological propositions ("myths") presented as if they were natural and self-evident; the result in many ways anticipates what is today called "cultural studies." Barthes combines a sharp eye for the social life of signs with a subtle critique of the naturalizations of the ethnocentric, patriarchal, petit-bourgeois French worldview. Critical of the covert functions of what-goes-without-saying, he nevertheless enjoys the exhibitions, advertisements, photographs, articles, films, wrestling matches, and commodities that provide the occasion for his little feats of writing.

On similar lines, Barthes talks about the Einstein’s Brain, he delves a upon how his brain was thought to possess superhuman and mythical qualities and there were tests done which were interested in fathoming his mental powers. Barthes states that, on the contrary, physically Einstein’s brain was very similar to every other human of his age. But what he strived was the cosmos itself, “the universe is a safe of which humanity always tries to seek the combination. Einstein almost found it.” This is a dangerous point where the human is almost ‘mystified’ and almost incorporated the object of Einstein’s brain into a myth.

About the mysticism and genius we can mention what Alain Badiou (born 17 January 1937) a French philosopher, mathematician and author of several books has to say. In his public open lecture delivered at the European Graduate School, Switzerland, in 2011 He begins by talking of Differences which are there between existing ‘structures’ of understanding and those which will come to existence because of the possibilities embedded within those structures and beyond that. There is a necessity and an inherent desire to create something with imperfections. It is impossible for god to exist as alone. It is a dialectical problem regarding Perfect / Imperfect, Finite / Infinite etc. God is incomplete if there is no experience of Negativity. He goes on to postulate the Three Possibilities:  -Nothingness, -Naming, -Categorization / making a Collective/ group. In the act of creativity, denoted by OMEGA (even God is an artist) , we indulge in the Void, Nothingness, the Zero, or Shunya, which is a system , he calls ‘Singleton’ and can be further named as ‘1’ again as a device of Imperfection. 1 can be understood as the name of ZERO. As a mathematician, he is interested in the Language of the Computers, the matrix and the binary: 0 and 1.

Finally, I would rather conclude with this image done by the surrealist painter

Rene Magritte.

“this is not a Pipe” Rene Magritte.

And in the words of the artists himself : “The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe," I'd have been lying”.

Bibliography:

Suassure, Ferdinand De, Course in General Linguistics, 1911

Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)

Levi-Strauss, Claude, Structural Anthropology (1958)

Levi-Strauss, claude, The Brain of Einstien

Levi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques (1955-73)

Magrite, Rene, The Treachery of Images (1928)

Torczyner, Harry. Magritte: Ideas and Images. p. 71

Submitted by -

Neha Tickoo

MA Performance Studies