Interlude XL. Foucault - part 20

Saussure & Barthes & Dumezil + The sign in Faust

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXXIX. Foucault - part 19

From The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller...

Chapter 5 - In the Labyrinth cont...

Saussure.

In his focus on language, Foucault was exploring an area of growing concern... In the late forties, Merleau-Ponty had begun to speak about the philosophical implications of the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Swiss father of structural linguistics. By 1963, when Birth of the Clinic and Raymond Roussel appeared, Saussure was sufficiently well known in France that Foucault was able to signal his own interest in language with a handful of rhetorical gestures: in both books, he spoke of “signifier” and “signified,” borrowing Saussure’s terms for the “sound-image” of a word, and what the “sound-image” was used to indicate. And in The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault placed himself squarely within the intellectual movement, founded on Saussure’s linguistics, then gathering steam in Paris: for his historiography, he declared, offers “a structural analysis.”

These were giddy years in Paris. Dazzled by Saussure’s dictum that “the linguistic sign is arbitrary,” a new generation of writers and thinkers had thrown off the old existentialist stress on the commitments and responsibilities of the individual. Language was a game! In the minds of some, it was as if the discoveries of modern science had vindicated the nihilist slogan: Nothing is true, anything is permitted! The study of language, as one astute observer summed up the Parisian scene in the sixties, became “an aesthetic activity, a release, so to speak, from the tyranny of time and history.”

Barthes.

The oracle of the hour became Roland Barthes, a central figure in the Tel quel group, and also Foucault’s colleague on the editorial board of Critique... As one connoisseur of French intellectual life put it, Barthes conjured up the image of “a spirit floating on every breeze, quivering at every touch, able to absorb every impression and retransmit it in turn, but needing to be set in motion by a neighboring spirit, always eager to borrow a watchword, which so many others would then come to seek from him.” Barthes’s watchword in the fifties had been the “new novel.” For much of the sixties it would be “semiology.” Lured by the idea that the world is one vast text, he was swept away, not simply by his own exquisitely refined powers of interpretation, but also by the prospect of creating a rigorous new source of signs. Tel quel quickly followed his lead. By the end of the sixties, it had become all but impossible to publish an article in the journal without accompanying diagrams and equations, giving its pages the slightly forbidding (and utterly misleading) look of a mathematics journal.

p134

The basic idea behind Barthe’s enthusiasm in the sixties was nothing new: that a science of signs might have applications beyond the narrow field of linguistics had already been demonstrated by Claude Levi-Strauss, an anthropologist of Sartre’s generation. Trained in the French sociological tradition of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, but inspired as well by the theories of Saussure, Levi-Strauss regarded anthropology as the study of “the life of signs at the heart of social life.” Whether analyzing myth and ritual, or marriage rules and kinship systems, his aim, as he once put it, was “to classify types, to analyze their constituent parts, and to establish correlations between them,” bringing to light a cognitive structure that remained unconscious as the system of phonetic differences any given individual put into play in speaking a language.

...Here was a language-game he [Foucault] was perfectly equipped to play. By training and temperament, he was a formalist. The idea of a “structure” of thought, underlying even the apparently random flow of images in reverie, he had long ago learned from such French historians of science as Bachelard and Canguilhem. The jargon of these historians -- their emphasis on revolutionary discontinuities rather than incremental evolution -- Foucault had learned from another master of formalist theory, his old teacher Louis Althusser, who had burst on the Parisian scene in 1965 as an avatar of a rigorously “structuralist” Marxism. Foucault had also become acquainted, years before, with the work of Jacques Lacan, the proponent of a rigorously “structural” reading of Freud, and also the object of intense debate after the publication of his Écrits in 1966 -- though Foucault on at least one occasion blithely declared that Lacan’s impenetrable prose left him baffled.

I guess that means Lacan won, since writing baffling prose seems to have been the aim of all these men.

Dumézil.

p135

Perhaps more important than any of these estimable figures, though, was the example of Foucault’s most powerful academic patron, Georges Dumézil (1898-1988), who in 1970 would lead a successful campaign to have his protege elected to the Collège de France. A student of comparative mythology trained in philology and the history of religion, Dumézil was a man jealous of his independence, and averse to passing fads and schools of thought. Trained in the old-fashioned evolutionist approach to folklore that the English anthropologist James Frazer had used in The Golden Bough, Dumézil in the 1920s transformed his method after studying Durkheim and Mauss. Like Levi-Strauss, he came to embrace one of Durkheim’s key propositions: that the concepts and supernatural beings of myth “collectively represent” important social and cultural realities. Unlike Levi-Strauss, however, Dumézil never claimed to have discovered universal forms that inhered in the human mind; instead, he emphasized the temporal and spatial limitations of the different structures that he studied. “For me the word ‘structure’ evokes the image of a spider web often used by Marcel Mauss,” he once explained. “In a system of thought, when one draws on a concept everything comes with it, since between all the parts run threads.”

p136

...It was... in the spirit of Dumézil that Foucault joined -- briefly but unmistakably -- the structuralist chorus of the sixties. From his perspective, indeed, a kind of tactical alliance made a great deal of sense. For as different as Dumézil, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, and Lacan obviously were, each from the other, and Foucault from each of them in turn, they all had at least one thing in common: a wish to destroy the intellectual hegemony of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Saussure and Semiotics and Faust.

"The Presence of the Sign in Goethe’s Faust" - Neil M. Flax

This is an attempt to make sense of Saussure through the application of Semiotics to a particular text. The text below, in black, is quoted from the essay by Flax cited above in the Norton Critical Edition of Goethe's Faust. This goes on for too long, but I found myself quite enjoying the intellectual spectacle. You can always skip it if you find it tedious.

p 652 - ...Repeatedly during the drama Faust will interpose the book (or the picture) between himself and the unmediated presence he craves. He will alternatively denounce the futility of words and affirm their revelatory power. Yet instead of being mere contradictions or vacillations, these paradoxical turns reflect a dualistic conception of language that had great currency in the age of philosophical aesthetics and that derived from an ancient hermeneutic [ “...the theory of text interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. The terms "hermeneutics" and "exegesis" are sometimes used interchangeably. Hermeneutics is a wider discipline that includes written, verbal, and nonverbal communication....” -Wiki] tradition. According to this long lived and still flourishing belief, ‘ordinary’ language is mechanical, cliched, empty, lifeless, while ‘mystical’ language (which becomes ‘poetic’ language for the Romantics) is organic, vital, radiant, germinal, revelatory. Following this theory, Faust renounces his academic library and turns to the mysterious signs in the Nostradamus book. The crucial irony here is that Faust’s turn to magical or sacred signs, far from liberating him from the constraints of ‘empty’ language only thrusts him deeper and deeper into the discontents of the semiotic condition. [“Semiotics (also called semiotic studies and in the Saussurean tradition called semiology) is the study of meaning-making, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols... Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. As different from linguistics, however, semiotics also studies non-linguistic sign systems...” -Wiki] Precisely in the attempt to transcend language by means of the revelatory sign, Faust reinforces the linguistic limits he hoped to escape. Wherever he has recourse to a transcendental signifier, he rediscovers the ono-convergence of signifier and signified [“According to Saussure... a sign is composed of the signifier (signifiant), and the signified (signifié)... A famous thesis by Saussure states that the relationship between a sign and the real-world thing it denotes is an arbitrary one. There is not a natural relationship between a word and the object it refers to, nor is there a causal relationship between the inherent properties of the object and the nature of the sign used to denote it....” -Wiki]. As he repeatedly confronts this basic precondition of any sign use, he finds that revelatory language is finally indistinguishable from the ordinary language in his pile of scholarly books. Neither language can provide the direct access to absolute being that he craves. The sacred symbol does not merely come to stand in questionable opposition to conventional language. The opposition itself generates discrepancies that end in undoing the very idea of transcendence to which it first gave meaning....

p 653 - ...The macrocosm sign...

...a map of the universe according to the traditional Ptolemaic-Christian model, is a visualizing diagram of a cross section of the concentric spheres that were held to constitute the creation. In the terminology of traditional semiotics, the macrocosm sign is a ‘natural’ or ‘analogous’ or ‘motivated’ or ‘iconic’ sign. It resembles in some perceptible way what it represents. By contrast, the conjuring sign of the type used by Faust to invoke the Erdgeist... makes no attempt to visualize or resemble its referent... Instead it uses words to refer to and invoke a spirit. It is what semiotics terms an ‘artificial’ or ‘conventional’ or ‘arbitrary’ or ‘immotivated’ sign, relating to its referent through a self-contained system of differential tokens.

The dichotomy of pictorial and verbal, or ‘motivated’ and ‘arbitrary,’ signs is a fundamental tenet of modern semiotics. The dualism, however, was already a commonplace of semiological and aesthetic discourse in the eighteenth century... The Romantics... often saw the distinction between ‘allegory’ and ‘symbol’ as the difference between arbitrary and motivated representation. The discovery of the semiotic dichotomy in the first scene of Faust cannot be viewed then as an anachronism. By employing the two opposing types of sign use at the outset, the play establishes its concern with the most urgent issue confronting philosophy and literature in the age of Kant: the ability of the representations that mediate all human cognition to deliver some knowledge of ultimate, unmediated, extralinguistic reality.

p 654 - ...Both signs [“macrocosm as a type of divine writing” “Erdgeist... has a similarly redemptive effect”], then, although not in themselves esthetic objects, exemplify the sacral, revelatory, transcendental function of the symbol that is at the heart of Romantic aesthetics and epistemology. [“...the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge and is also referred to as "theory of knowledge". It questions what knowledge is and how it can be acquired, and the extent to which knowledge pertinent to any given subject or entity can be acquired.” -Wiki]

To understand Faust’s turn from the first, pictorial sign to the second, verbal sign, we need to refer briefly to the Enlightenment debate that supplied Romantic writers with the basic terms of their theory of art... Pictorial signs have the virtues of sensory immediacy, clarity, and universality but the limitation of having to resemble slavishly the mere physical aspect of their referents. Verbal signs can deal with abstract ideas and concepts and can freely combine and disconnect the data of the physical world. But they suffer in their lack of sensate, material presence and in their consecutiveness. Since words must occur one at a time in sequence and cannot enter the consciousness all at once, they do not provide that instantaneous, global, all encompassing cognition that truth needs to convey. Nevertheless, Enlightenment aesthetics, culminating in Lessing’s Laokoon, [Horace!] seems to reach a qualified decision in favor of verbal over pictorial semiosis. The superiority of language is that it supposedly affords greater freedom to the creative and productive powers of the human imagination. Moreover, it contains the means to overcome its inherent immateriality and sequentiality.

Faust’s reasons for rejecting the macrocosm sign in favor of the Erdgeist sign directly echo the terms of Enlightenment debate. The pictorial macrocosm sign, while filling him with awe at the revealed forces at work in the universe, reduces Faust to the role of pacified spectator: ‘What glorious show! Yet but a show, alas!’ (454). The verbal Erdgeist sign, by contrast, liberates his powers of imagination and participation: ‘I feel emboldened now to venture forth / To bear the bliss, the sorrow of this earth’ (464-65). Faust’s turn from the immobilizing macrocosm sign to the activating Erdgeist sign thus traces a movement that is clearly marked by the semiotic debates of Enlightenment philosophy. The opening scene of the play defines the fundamental issue as transcendence, specifically transcendence of the constraints of language (exemplified by Faust’s ‘narrow’ study)...

The acute irony of Faust’s turn to the Erdgeist sign lies in the effectiveness of the magical symbol, which succeeds in evoking the Erdgeist. But the epiphany serves only to remind Faust that for him there is to be no transcendence... The encounter dramatizes the governing paradox of the entire play. The epiphanic symbol, precisely when it is most effective, ultimately reaffirms the impossibility of transcendence.

p 655 - ...The hero is perpetually fleeing the library while bringing along a book, and the fine absurdity of that quintessential gesture resounds throughout the play... It represents the most demanding challenges of the high Romantic condition: the quest for unmediated presence in the mediation of signs, the risky wager that language can be at once the obstacle and the means to transcendence. But for Faust, as for many other quest heroes in the literary tradition, a trace of idiocy is never entirely absent from the relentless pursuit of an ideal.

p 659-60 - Acknowledging the impossibility of directly contemplating the sun, he turns to the rainbow as the emblem of the irreducibly mediated nature of all human cognition: 'Life is ours by colorful refraction' (4727). [Goethe wrote Theory of Colours on the light spectrum.]

Many have taken the monologue as Faust's renunciation of transcendence, an admission that through suffering he has learned to accept the limits to human ambition. But the reading disregards the dialectic of idealist thought, which insists that only through the mediation of the sensuous symbol (the rainbow, for example) can a vision of ultimate truths take place. As a symbol provided by a divinely ordered nature for the essential share of mediation in any redemptive cognition, the rainbow is not at all a token of renunciation for Faust. It is, rather, a reaffirmation of his role as the Quixote of epiphanic signs, only now in the mode of visual instead of verbal revelation. The terminology 'farbigen Abglanz' that Faust uses to describe the rainbow is borrowed from a long Neoplatonic tradition that views 'symbolic images,' whether discovered in nature or created by the pictorial artist, as the visible 'colored reflection' of an ineffable divinity. Faust's homage to the rainbow thus opens the way for the classical works of pictorial art that will now become his primary medium of sacred revelation."

p 660 - The emergence of the work of pictorial art, or symbolic image, as the model of redemptive semiosis in Part Two exposes issues that remained latent in Part One. It was easy enough to distance Faust's faith in magical signs as long as it was associated with necromantic superstition. With the turn to an explicitly aesthetic mode of revelation, matters become more complicated, since the drama now deals with an article of faith that not only is widely shared by its audience but also informs the creation of the work itself. The various works of art that Faust now uses to further his pursuit of a sacred vision are the same works that served as models for the emerging theory of aesthetic symbolism: classical Greek art, Greek mythology, and Italian Renaissance painting.

...Faust's relation to magical signs is credulous and uncritical, and the work gets its ironic energy by systematically exposing the consequences of that naivete from a position of higher wisdom. The play satirizes Faust's chronic refusal to understand that the symbol, as a semiotic phenomenon, can never provide a release from the realm of representations. In contrast, the symbolist text maintains that the proper function of the aesthetic symbol is to announce its semiotic nature, to reveal itself as a sign and declare its fictitiousness, and thereby to affirm the primacy and the verity of the semiotic condition... By a slight but decisive shift, the sign itself has come to occupy the position of metaphysical truth to which it formerly served as the accessory.

p 666-1 - Yet this Romantic doctrine of 'the literary Absolute," which can be taken as the paradoxical governing concept of Faust, repeats the same fantasy of going beyond language that the work satirizes in the figure of Faust. The ironic detachment of the text does not keep it exempt from the impasse it exposes, and symbolist theory eventually smuggles transcendence back into the symbol. The aesthetic sign achieves its power of revelation by referring to its own semiotic nature. The condition of its success is to be overtly autotelic ["having a purpose in and not apart from itself" "An autotelic person needs few material possessions and little entertainment, comfort, power, or fame because so much of what he or she does is already rewarding." -Wiki]. But at the same time, the self-reflexive sign, as undisguised writing, evokes the idea of a prior signatory [Wow, a frenzy of jargon. I'm imagining someone having to hose the writer down at this point]. Its truth is to bear witness both to its own autonomy and to the activity of the divine writer who first inscribed it...   

p 661 - In effect, the Romantic symbol is an attempt to rescue divinity from the depredations of semiotics by deifying the sign. But as soon as the theory of the symbol reestablishes the complementary couple of writer and writing on a cosmic scale, all the uncertainties of representation and presence that Faust confronts in his earthly semiotic condition reemerge in the realm of metaphysical truth. The same problem persists; How can the subject of writing, whether human or divine, overcome the contingency of the writing that constitutes its humanity or divinity?

p 662 - ...The dramatic high point of the Helena and Paris pantomime is a tableau vivant in which the two lovers appear in the stereotyped poses of familiar Endymion and Luna paintings, a pictorial quotation that the audience at court is able to identify at once: 'Endymion and Luna! A tableau!' (6509). The supposed 'model forms' of human beauty appear in the role of copies. What was heralded as a Platonic paradigm materializes as a self-described reproduction and, moreover, a reproduction of a painting of an entirely different couple in classical mythology.

The event illustrates and allegorizes a fundamental principle of semiotics: signs derive their meaning not from any necessary connection to the thing they denote but only from their relation to other signs within the same semiotic system. Helena and Paris can stand for 'ideal beauty' only in relation to another couple who already carry the same predicate. Without the intrasemiotic reference, there is no guarantee that their appearance will signify 'ideal beauty' -- as opposed to some other idea, such as 'adultery' or 'warfare.' And the other couple in turn carries the predicate 'ideal beauty' only by reference to yet another signifier within the code, another representation of the same idea. Semiotic systems are infinitely circular and irreducibly metaphoric. There can never be a 'Musterbild,' [?] an archetype, an origin within the code, because the correlation of the individual with the idea always depends on a detour through a prior token of the same idea.

On the dramatic level, the irony of the recognition is devastating. Faust volunteers, with extravagant heroism, to penetrate to the realm of 'the Mothers,' the supposed source of all phenomena, and to bring back the archetypes of human beauty. But the prize of his colossal quest for origins appears as a citation and thus sacrifices the archetypal primacy that motivated its appearance. In effect, the parousia [“Physical presence, arrival – The main use is the physical presence of a person, which where that person is not already present refers to the prospect of the physical arrival of that person, especially the visit of a royal or official personage and sometimes as an extension of this usage, a formal ‘occasion’.” -Wiki] can occur only as a quotation, but to the extent that it is a quotation, it cannot be a parousia.

p 662-3 - The inherent anomalies of Faust's position are underscored by his and Mephisto's consistent references to the realm of the Mothers as a realm of 'images' or 'pictures': 'to forms' 'unbounded swarming!'; 'Enswathed in likenesses of manifold entity'; 'Life's images are floating, live, yet lifeless too' (6277, 6289, 6430). The origin of all existence is conceived as iconocentric, a direct counterpart to the logocentric doctrines that appear in Part One. And yet Faust imagines that he can discover in this realm of icons the transcendent essence of perfect beauty. When the divine 'essence' finally appears as a quotation of a surrogate motif taken from the storehouse of routine iconography, Faust's quest for a revelatory image is seen to be as contradictory as the verbal version in Part One. The pattern is set for the inadvertent demystification of the symbolic icon that will be Faust's fate in Part Two. [I think my spellchecker is having a breakdown.]

The same gesture is soon repeated. Faust is discovered lying unconscious in his laboratory, immobilized by the explosion that took place when he tried to seize the pantomime image of Helena... Faust is 'stupefied' by desire for Helena (6568). But once again a reproduction of a picture interposes itself between the desiring subject and the object of his desire. Faust wants Helena, but his dream vision, as described by Homunculus, reproduces the familiar image of Leda and the swan as stereotyped by countless works in the iconographic tradition. The double displacement enacted in the Helena-Paris pantomime recurs. Faust's desire is deflected to a metaphoric or metonymic appearing as a pictorial citation." [“Metonymy is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is called not by its own name but rather by the name of something associated in meaning with that thing or concept.” -Wiki] substitute (Leda for Helena) [? Not sure whose words these are.]

The encounter of Leda and Zeus as swan is, of course, the moment of Helena's conception, and Goethe scholarship has traditionally taken the episode in Faust's dream as a homage to the 'morphological laws' that require genetic, organic, and incremental preparation for Helena's eventual appearance. ... But the naive literalism of the reading duplicates the Faustian credulity that the text is engaged in satirizing... Faust's evocation of the Leda picture reemphasizes that any appearance of Helena is necessarily embedded in a vast, encoded, literary-iconographic system and as such will never be the experience of pure, noncontingent presence that Faust expects it to be. The allusion's occurrence in a dream lends the episode of the Leda citation its ironic bite. Even in dreams -- the medium of consciousness that one might (innocently) expect to be the least constrained by linguistic rules -- the iron laws of semiosis prevail, and the dreamer sees his beloved through a coded metonymy.

As much as I'm enjoying this guy, I kind of think he's full of shit. I think Goethe references the art he does not to make a semiotic point but as an aid to his (theater) audience... it's a sort of shorthand way of communicating a great deal to the audience in a few words. The use of Helen of Troy in the first place is an instance of this kind of shorthand, and it instantly communicates to the audience what it is that motivates Faust (and Goethe) -- an idealized conception of female beauty.

Interestingly, it is all the more important to use a familiar code for this as it is an area where Platonic Idealism breaks down to a spectacular degree. We might (possibly mistakenly) concede that an ideal “table” might be conceivable, but a single standard of female beauty is inconceivable as, in this case in particular, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Were Faust to be staged, the actress portraying Helen, no matter how carefully chosen, would at best reflect the taste of some people and not others. An animated version of the play -- where you were not limited to actual human actors but could create your ideal of beauty -- would be no better in this respect. Were I to carefully construct my ideal of beauty from a kit of parts, the response of many other viewers would be, “Her?” (Arrested Development reference).

Next: Interlude XLI. Foucault - part 21.