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This chapter looks at the lives and times of two Russian linguists, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson, whose work in Austria and Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s was very influential in the decades that followed.

Chapter 3 is a study of allegory in Language poetry, specifically in the works of Peter Inman, Lyn Hejinian, and Myung Mi Kim (the latter, strictly speaking, a post-Language poet). It begins by discussing the Language poets’ interests in Russian Formalism and particularly in Roman Jakobson’s theory of metaphor and metonymy and axial projection. It then describes how Inman’s poem allegorically transcodes writing and Fordist assembly line production in order to treat American history and especially North American native peoples; how Kim’s poem transcodes colonialism and the printing press; and how Hejinian uses the alphabet as a page-specific grid to organize fragments of texts she collects from various sources, and notably from the works of Jean Piaget.

This chapter examines Roman Jakobson's interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas about linguistics, explaining that Jakobson's approach to Saussure was nothing if not eclectic. He picked out the bits of Saussure's teachings that he liked and rejected or dismissed the rest. Jakobson liked Saussure's distinction between syntagmatic and associative relations but criticised Saussure's failure to appreciate the role of distinctive features. He also argued that Saussure's Course in General Linguistics contained errors, frequent contradictions and dangerous simplification.

This chapter presents a paper published by Roman Jakobson in 1956. His 1941 seminal monograph Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals) was an attempt to identify universal dimensions to phonological analysis and to show that these un- fold at a fixed order in language development and break down at a reverse order in aphasia (the regression hypothesis). Some of Jakobson's later ideas are presented in an excerpt from Fundamentals of Language (co-authored with Morris Halle).

The Prague School drew on the work of Baudouin de Courtenay and Ferdinand de Saussure to address the nature of phonological elements and the structure of phonological systems in long-lasting foundational ways. This chapter presents the theory of the phoneme and the methods of analysis developed by it two primary representatives, Nikolai Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. This chapter describes the formation of the Prague Circle, its debut at the First International Congress of Linguists in 1928, and the evolution of the concept of the phoneme in the writings of Trubetzkoy and Jakobson. A particular focus is Trubetzkoy’s Grundzüge der Phonologie, the main theoretical synthesis, which considered phonological oppositions and their relation to both typology and logic. After Trubetzkoy’s death in 1938, the Grundzüge became the point of departure for much later work, and, with its extension and further interpretation by Jakobson, it was the lodestar for early generative phonology.

Jacques Derrida first uses the expression ‘classical semiology’ in ‘Différance’, to name the metaphysical system in which a sign takes the place of the thing in its absence. According to Derrida, ‘the original and essential link to the phonè has never been broken. It would be easy enough to demonstrate this and I shall attempt such a demonstration later’. At times, Ferdinand de Saussure seems to be merely caught up in this demonstration. This chapter explores the relationship that Derrida wants to establish between classical metaphysics and the semiology of Saussure. It starts with part one of Derrida's Of Grammatology and then looks at how a semiology of a Saussurean kind remains within a heritage of that logocentrism which is also a phonocentrism. Derrida's interrogation of classical metaphysics and its presuppositions begins with a quotation from the opening few lines of Aristotle's On Interpretation. This chapter also discusses the role of medieval theology in phonocentrism and logocentrism, as well as Roman Jakobson's interpretation of Saussure.

Husserl's phenomenology in general and his study of time consciousness in particular retain currency in present-day thought, not least for consciousness studies. Therefore, and also because of its recurring references to music, it promises a productive place from which to launch an inquiry into music and consciousness. This chapter uses Husserl's rich insights to draw out the possibilities that music and consciousness offer for a reciprocal understanding, while at the same time not being oblivious to the various lacunae and (productive) theoretical contradictions of the Phenomenology. The analysis is conducted through three musico-philosophical meditations, each identifying a different standpoint from which to consider Husserl. The first draws on the ‘microgenetic’ theory of Jason Brown; the second on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson; and the third on Derrida's seminal critique of Husserl. These meditations are to a degree autonomous; each pursues its own line of argument to its own conclusion, and tends to unfold as an essay in its own right. Yet, while the intention is not to create a higher synthesis between these three studies, there are connections between them, and their effect is cumulative.

The conclusion offers a theory of literariness based on the “dream of communication” discussed in this study. The conclusion goes on to discuss Walter J. Ong’s critique of the “media model” of communication, Roman Jakobson’s definition of poetic communication, and Jonathan Culler’s idea of “literary competence.” Responding to these other theories, this chapter ultimately recommends a new kind of literary competence for today, one that would include a sensitivity to the different forms of verbal communication in our media-saturated environment.

Chapter 7 discusses the enthusiasts of myth, writers who argue that it represents the lifeblood of language without which any polity is doomed. It begins with a discussion of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of myth, before turning to the Russian Formalists and Futurists—ready to resurrect the word—and concluding with Walter Benjamin’s insistence on the power and magic of pure language. For Walter Benjamin, for Viktor Shklovskii and many of his Futurist brethren, the ‘word as such’ has to be rescued from the deadening ‘bourgeois’ language of the present. Language is out of whack, but what has distorted it is precisely its misuse as a mere tool of communication, against which one has to defend language as naming. The problem is not, according to these writers, that myth threatens the liberal polity, but that liberalism itself, embodied in the deadening language of public life, threatens democracy.

According to the classic formulation of Roman Jakobson, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics. This idea of the poem as verbal object is so commonplace in modern criticism that one may seem perverse to question it. Still one must do so, for the ‘problem of historical method’ — whether ones approach it from an ‘intrinsic’ or an ‘extrinsic’ point of view — will never be opened to solutions until one sees one of the signal failures of modern criticism: its inability to distinguish clearly between a concept of the poem and a concept of the text. If the poetic work is understood either as a cultural experience or a cultural event, its special structures of uniqueness must be consciously graphed, at some level, in socio-historical terms.

This epilogue offers a reading of Roman Jakobson's 1956 essay “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” and David Goode's 1994 novel A World without Words: The Social Construction of Children Born Deaf and Blind. To read and think about these texts is to rehearse the themes and arguments of this text. Taking them together reveals how figures with impaired language or cognition are placed in texts, generate speculation on impairment, on language as such, particularly on tropes, on subjectivity as linguistic or non-linguistic. The works also show how the figures of the cognitive and linguistic impaired serve also as indices pointing back toward those actual people with cognitive or linguistic impairments and so are obliged to think of the social and ethical conditions of their lives, their material and social needs, their potentials for agency, and their requirements for care.

This chapter begins by outlining some common properties of channels, infrastructure, and institutions. It connects and critiques the assumptions and interventions of three influential intellectual traditions: cybernetics (via Claude Shannon), linguistics and anthropology (via Roman Jakobson), and actor-network theory (via Michel Serres). By developing the relation between Serres’s notion of the parasite and Peirce’s notion of thirdness, it theorizes the role of those creatures who live in and off infrastructure: not just enemies, parasites, and noise, but also pirates, trolls, and internet service providers. And by extending Jakobson’s account of duplex categories (shifters, proper names, meta-language, reported speech) from codes to channels, it theorizes four reflexive modes of circulation any network may involve: self-channeling channels, source-dependent channels, signer-directed signers, and channel-directed signers. The conclusion returns to the notion of enclosure, showing the ways that networks are simultaneously a condition for, and a target of, knowledge, power, and profit.

This chapter examines the difference between metaphor and metonymy by way of Roman Jakobson's discourse from which four key points are highlighted. First is the idea that all tropes can be classified under metaphor and metonymy, where the former expresses internal relations of similarity and the latter focuses on the external. Secondly, metonymic relationships encompass different kinds of contiguity. Third, metaphor is identified with symbolism and poetry while metonymy is associated with realism and prose. Lastly, Jakobson perceived metaphorizing and metonymizing as processes and “acts” that can be used to diagnose speech disorders. The general tendency in the study of metaphor and metonymy is to indicate the structural distinction between the two tropes in terms of linguistic categories.

This chapter uses the aesthetics of dependency to question the relation between the ending of Joyce's short story “The Dead” and the narrative of the Morkan sisters’ annual dance that precedes it. Reconsidering Roman Jakobson's famous distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the chapter argues that “The Dead” is organized by two separate narrative logics that also divide the text into an irreconcilable and ideologically charged opposition between past and present. This contradiction, in turn, is mediated not through a subsumption of its terms to a common identity but through the imposition of a distinct interpretative position that provides the conditions for a purposeful relation to the gap between sign and referent, concept and percept, that underlies modernist experience more generally. As in the other works examined in this book, this purposeful relation is enacted in the story through the constitutive function of a linear progression that negotiates the difference between its various terms.

This chapter offers additional resources for a linguistic phenomenology by drawing on the works of Hegel, Jakobson, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. It develops the idea that, with its admixture of philosophical reflection and scientific rigor, Saussure’s general linguistics is best deciphered by way of Hegel’s phenomenology, especially the notion of science founded on the primacy of consciousness. It then goes on to show that it was relatively common before the Second World War, on an undivided European continent, to apply phenomenological resources to research in general linguistics, as exemplified by the collaboration between the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson and the German phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and their shared attention to structured organization of language and experience. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s efforts to integrate the material from the Course with Husserl’s writings in the 1940s and 1950s in order to develop an emphasis on the speaking subject serves as another resource for linguistic phenomenology.

In the late 1950s and 1960s many of the avant-garde composers produced faux-language pieces—both electronic and acoustic—that took the continuum between speech and music as their primary interest. These similar pieces belie common sources of inspiration. In heterogeneous studios such as the WDR in Cologne and RAI in Milan, composers interacted with linguists and phonetics scientists, read James Joyce together, studied acoustics, and deconstructed recorded speech. The phonetics teachings of Meyer-Eppler, alongside demonstrations of technologies like Bell Labs’ Vocoder, provided much inspiration to avant-garde composers, who used both human and electronic means to isolate and re-create linguistic phonemes. In many of the works, Cathy Berberian’s voice became a particular fascination, serving to feminize and domesticate the provocative sounds. As composers navigated the messy nexus among humans, machines, music, and language, they raised important questions about what it meant to be human in a technologically infused Cold War world. Broadly speaking, the faux-language works performed neutralizations of military technologies like the Vocoder. However tenuous and incomplete these reclamations seem, midcentury electronic music began to recast Cold War technophobic fears.

Biology raises numerous issues that have social and humanistic implications. Bronowski arranged visits of the linguist Roman Jakobson, which are the origin of language studies at the institute. Bronowski was also director of the Council for Biology in Human Affairs (CBHA), created by Slater to examine the consequences of progress in biology. The CBHA made available special postdoctoral fellowships to Michael Jacobson, who founded the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and to Michael Crichton, the science-fiction writer. It promoted study groups in the areas of parasitic diseases and of bioethics of gene manipulations. It sponsored a visiting fellowship for Edgar Morin that led to the creation of the Centre Royaumont pour une Science de L’Homme.