(Nowak) Structural Ism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Reports on Philosophy
Reconsidering Aesthetics...
Edited by Krystyna Wilkoszewska
Nr l9
1999
Reports on Philosophy
N 19/1999
ANDRZEJ NOWAK
Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics1
This article consists of four sections. The first deals with Peirce's serial semio tics2. The subject of the second is the functional semiotics of the structuralist Prague Circle. The third concerns Parisian generative structuralist semiotics. The fourth deals with Polish semiotic and structuralist aesthetics.
1. The Unfulfilled Project - The Fullness and Openness of the Aesthetic Sign
One does not need any serious knowledge here to realise that we are dealing with the secret of Charles Sanders Peirce's aesthetics - an aesthetics which was in fact never created and which remained to the end the challenge that Peirce did not confront. What is so strange, though, about a philosopher who does not understand a particular subject? Nothing really, except that in this case we are dealing with something different. To explain this, one must consider Peirce's metaphilosophical views. He believed that philosophy was structured hierarchically in terms of a base, cre1 To be more precise - I will be looking at both semiotic aesthetics and at structura list semiotic aesthetics. This specification is important, because not all structures are composed of signs, and so structuralism need not necessarily be connected with semio tics. With a sufficiently broad understanding of structuralism such as that proposed by Gerard Genette (G. Genette, Narrative Discourse, transl. J.E. Levin, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982, p. 12), one could consider whether Katarzyna Rosner is justified in her belief in the structuralist character of Roman Ingarden's aesthetics (K. Rosner, Semiotyka strukturalna w badaniach nad literatura. Jej osiagnipcia, perspektywy i ograniczenia [Structuralist Semiotics in Litterary Studies. Its Achievements, Perspectives and Limitations], Krakow: V\? ydawnictwo Literackie, 1981, p. 9). 2 The relationsihip of serial thought to structural thought will be interpreted later.
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ated by the descriptive disciplines3, followed by the construction of what he termed the normative disciplines, and completed by metaphysics. The main descriptive discipline was, for Peirce, phaneroscopy (phenomenology), while the three normative disciplines were aesthetics, ethics, and logic. The main concept of phaneroscopy is the "phaneron". The phaneron is a phenomenon which is considered from the point of view of its relational structure rather than from that of its content or existence. Roman Jakobson described phaneroscopy very well indeed when he called it a "structural phenomenology". As for Peirce's aesthetics, it is based on the idea of qualities of feelings. The pivotal component in his ethics is the category of the non-ego. On the other hand, logic develops around the idea of laws. Aesthetics thus amounts here to a theory of ideals which are felt as simple qualities. Ethics searches for ways towards these, which direct man less through his isolated journey through life as in his entanglement with networks of dependencies and co-actions. Peirce described ethics as the theory of rational and self-controlled action. Logic, to his mind, was the theory of rationality - i.e. of thought's self-development salva veritate - and also the study of laws and concepts which, importantly, mark out vectors within the field of actions undertaken by man. To be more visual, and to cut a long story short, one cannot describe the laws of movement if one does not know the concept of a "road", and one cannot construct it if one does not know where it is supposed to lead. This is why Peirce believed that amongst the normative disciplines aesthetics supplies the base4. And this is why he always regretted the fact that he never managed to capture it systematically. However, the truth is that at no point did he really encapsulate anything in such a systematic way. Although Peirce did not avoid terms such as "value" and "beauty", he preferred to talk about "aesthetic ideals" in order to underline their belonging to the world of pure possibility, meaning that they were in no way relative to empirical conditions. It is clear that this was his reason for introducing the concept of "Firstness" - unhappy as he was with the deceptively satisfying notion of simple possibility. Human activity is always an individual endeavour, while Peirce's specific use of the term "existence" (the realm of "Secondness") may be misunderstood if equated with "reality" in the ordinary sense of the word. That which establishes a relation between an ideal and an action, and intertwines a multiplicity of actions into a net3 For Peirce's view of how we should understand the normativity of a discipline, see C.P. 5.39. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Hartshorne and F'aul Weiss (eds.) (Vol. I-VI), Arthur W. Burks (ed.) (Vol. VII-VIII), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Har vard Univ. Press, 1958-1960. 4 See, however, Carl M. Smith, "The Aesthetics of Charles S. Pierce", in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, Fall 1972, pp. 21-29.
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work of rational behaviour ("Thirdness"), is a necessary law, a heibit, as well as something that deserves to be called ultima realitas entis . The opening up of the horizon of ideals before man was perceived by Peirce to be the authentic purpose of art. It is in this sense that one should understand him when he says that "nothing is truer than true poetry" (C.P.I. 315) . Truth, however, is the subject of logic. Therefore, as the summum bonum combines both aesthetics and ethics , veritas is a "bridging idea" for both aesthetics and logic which, for Peirce, makes it tantamount to semiotics. This does not mean, however, that the only aesthetic issue he was interested in was that of truth in art. It is possible to recreate his conception of aesthetic signs, albeit only on the basis of his rather scarce and disparate remarks. Using a term borrowed from Mieczysiaw Wallis, one can say that an aesthetic sign is a semiotic pleroma: it is distinguished by its special quality of fullness. What would this amount to? In order to answer a question such as this it is necessary to recapitulate the basics of Peirce's semiotics: a sign is not a thing but a relation. It has its ground, a direct (immediate) object, and an interpretant. The ground of a sign is an idea . Its direct object is that, and only that, which the sign presents. The interpretant is another sign understood as signifying the previous sign. Peirce called these three elements the "relata" of the sign. A "relatum" is not constituted by a so-called dynamic object, if such an object exists (i.e. a represented object which would be independent of the way in which it is presented, though not necessarily itself real). The ground of a sign can be a notion of quality, an individual fact, or a general law. In relation to this, the sign is then a quali-, sin-, or legi-signum. The direct object of the sign manifests quality, existence, and in some cases correctness. Depending on this, it is either an icon, index or symbol. The interpretant can be an unspecified possib lity of meaning, a specified meaning, or a full, "saturated" meaning. It is therefore called either a rhema, dicent, or argument. Viewed from a different perspective, there may be interpretants of an emotional, energetic (i.e. calling out for action) and logical (i.e. a thought) kind. Using the abovementioned characteristics, Peirce divided signs into a number of classes. One of them, the class of rhematically indexical legis5 Peirce's "habit" here is not a psychological category. It refers rather to the scholastic notion of habitus entis. 6 Peirce's view was more moderate than the only apparently similar view ol Giambattisto Vico as expressed by his claim that, if necessary, the truth of physics must give way to the truth of poetry. 7 T.A. Schulz, Panorama der Astlietik von Charles Sanders Peirce, Stuttgart 1961, pp. 66-67.
8 A common mistake that is made is to interpret Peirce's view by seeing his "ground" as equivalent to a "sign-vehicle" in the sense of Charles W. Morris.
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igna, constitutes the proper domain of aesthetic signs. Although it has only been articulated by Max Bense, it is not difficult to find a sufficient basis for such a claim in Peirce's own studies. To understand the consequences of this claim, one has to know that every sign - as a result of what it is rather than what it says - thematises an ontology: i.e. it marks a thematics of being. For example, the monistic reism of Tadeusz Kotarbiriski may be thematised in the form of indexically dicentic sinsigna. We are dealing here with a homogeneous but extremely impoverished thematics of being. In this respect, the rhematically indexical legisigna, and therefore aesthetic signs as well, are situated at the other extreme. Their heterogeneous ontology is saturated to the maximum possible degree, and includes all three of the basic categories: i.e. Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. The pleroma of the aesthetic sign is, first of all, the fullness of the ontology thematised in it. Bense was himself aware of this, but apparently it did not concern him. He was preoccupied with the heterogeneity of the ontology on the basis of which he posited the Mitrealitat of art9. This meant departing from Peirce and, to put it rather boldly, displaying an obeisance towards conventional European aesthetics. Peirce did not have constraints of this kind, so he consistently claimed that "the highest grade of reality is only reached by signs" (C.P. 8.327). This is another meaning of his phrase "nothing is truer...." and constitutes the second aspect of the fullness of the aesthetic sign. The third dimension is connected to the three references of the sign relation. Let us first emphasise what has de facto already been said: the class of aesthetic signs is a full class, i.e. it is specified in terms of all its constitutive references - to the ground, the object, and the interpretant. Consequently one can say that "asemantic art" is an empty concept. This conclusion may be hard to accept, but the difficulties it leads to are not insuperable. One solution was proposed by Wodzimierz awniczak10. It amounts to making a distinction between sensory analogy and theoretical analogy while at the same time pointing out the relative similarities between art and science. The fact that Lawniczak did not refer to Peirce's writings that were written in a similar vein is not important here - if it were, it would be in a strictly positive sense (C.P. 1.383). This does not mean, however, that the positions of these two authors are identical. A few remarks of the American philosopher - such as the one referred to above - suggest a symmetry of rela9 M. Bense, "Realitatsthematik", in: Aestketica: Einfiihrung in die neue Aesthetik, BadenBaden: Agis Verlag, 1965, pp. 33-34. 10 W. awniczak, "Orientacje filozoficzne w nauce a problem tzw. nieprzedstawiaja.cych dziel sztuki plastycznej" [Philosophical Trends of Science, and the Question Concerning Abstract Painting], in: Studia Estetyczne 15,1978, pp. 185198.
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tions: i.e. of truth to the epistemic sign and "beauty" to the aesthetic sign. If this were the case, one would have to assume that the subject for the latter is an aesthetic ideal simpliciter11. Despite being risky, this hypothesis explains in a simple way the seemingly puzzling assumption that the aesthetic sign is an index. An abstract ideal can be pointed out but cannot be presented in a purely sensory form. What should one do, however, with something like "breakfast on the grass". One could say that "breakfast on the grass" is not an objective reference to "Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe" - it is the interpretant of an arrangement of colourful spots which establishes its reference to aesthetic value. As one can see, there is no place here for any self-referentiality on the part of the aesthetic sign. This irritating notion is only necessary if one wishes to defend the idea of the autonomy of art, assuming that qualitative specifications of objects or experiences provide an adequate basis for values . Cutting a long story short, the aesthetic sign is treated as a replete triad with all the consequences that flow from this. But that is not the end of the story. Idealiter, at least, it is also a replete triad that possesses the trichotomies in full. It comes down to what Peirce, referring to the trichotomous nature of the direct object, expressed as follows: "the most perfect signs are those in which the iconic, indicative ar.d symbolic characters are blended as equally as possible" (C.P. 4.448). The same can be said about the other two trichotomies, ending up with the characterisation of the immanent triadic-trichotomous fullness of the aesthetic sign. The pleroma of the aesthetic sign is not, however, exhausted by its ontics and its form. It also appears in its subject-like character. In one of his few lectures Peirce sketched a semiotic anthropology whose foundation stone was the simple claim that "man is a symbol" 14. The most eccentric conclusion to be derived from this is his statement that the opinion that a human being, like a thing, cannot simultaneously be in many places, is a materialistic barbarism (C.P.7.591). Is Peirce talking about some kind of miracle here? Certainly not. Man is his spiritual work, so that where it is present, he is too. That is the reason why we can, according to Peirce, be present in
11 A fuller justification of this conclusion would require an analysis of certain issues linking Peirce's semiotics with that of Gottlob Frege. 12 A similar position to this was adopted by Henryk Markiewicz when arguing
against Ingarden and the latter's conception of intentional objects. 13 We should add that Bense himself did not claim self-refentiality for aesthetic signs, which he was accused of doing by Janina Makota, a Polish pupil of Ingarden (J. Makota, "Estetyka informacyjna Maxa Bensego" (Informatic(s) Aesthetics of Max Bense], ti: Studia Estetyczne XX/XXI, 1983/1984, pp. 291-311. Bense only regarded them as "autothematic", i.e. he thought that their thematics of being is tantamount to the ontology of ttu: sign as a sign. 14 Because man is thought, and thought, for Peirce, is a model example of a symbol.
166 Andrzej Nowak many places simultaneously. It is for this same reason that a poem, a painting, or a sonata possesses the structure of a subject, much as contemporary advocates of "incontrology" (i.e. the "philosophy of meeting") would have it15, rather than possessing the structure of a mere gwasz-subject, as Mikel Dufrenne, for example, has claimed. The above-mentioned view of Peirce, as well as some of his other re marks concerning death, give a picture of the semiosis of man's being as a kind of skillful perishing on the part of a person, where "skillful" refers to the idea that it is not a simple disappearance into the abyss of non-being. Art is simply one way in which this may be accomplished. It is worth adding that in this respect Peirce anticipated the thinking of Alfred. North Whitehead on the subject of perishing (where "perishing" should be understood as the third major, albeit neglected, subject of metaphysics after "becoming" and "being") . Probably the most important point to make here is that the pleroma of Peirce's aesthetic sign, even when manifesting its immanent fullness, does not cut this sign o'ff from the world, but rather it establishes a "full-blooded" relationship with human life. This last point was exposed in his aesthetic by John Dewey. Dewey, however, was an extreme nominalist who, on his own admission, had no comprehension of Peirce's metaphysics. This is the reason why attempts to develop Peirce's aesthetics through projecting it onto Dewey's ideas, as undertaken by J. Jay Zeman, would appear to be mistaken. Charles Morris also referred to Peirce to some extent, but in Morris' semiotics two of the fundamental categories in Peirce's theory of signs are absent, namely the "relation" and the "interpre-tant". The first of these is replaced by the term "relationship" , the second
15 Andrzej Nowicki, a Polish representative of incontrology, claims: "[if we meet someone, having ourselves an open attitude]...the result of such a meeting is [...] the appearance of a form of presence of the second person [...] amongst the subject-consti tuents of our personality" (A. Nowicki, "Metoda inkontrologiczna w histori: filozofii a policentryczna struktura'osobowosci filozofow" [Incontrology in Philosophy and the Policentric Structure of Philosopher's Self], in: Studia Filozoficzne 4, 1983, p. 87). This re sembles Charles S. Peirce's view: "When I communicate my thought and my sentiments to a friend... so that my feelings pass into him.... do I not live in his brain as well as in my own-most literally?" (C.P. 7.591). 16 "Aristotle has some very relevant suggestions on the analysis of becoming and process. I feel that there is a gap in his thought, that just as much as becoming wants analysis so does perishing. Philosophers have taken to easily the notion of perishing. There is a trinity of three notions: being, becoming, and perishing". (A.N. Whitehead, "Process and Reality", in: Essays in Science and Philosophy, New York: Philosophical Li brary, 1948, p. 89). 17 Morris, of course, uses the same word "relation", but this does not alter what is being said here.
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with the term "interpreter". Although signs, for Morris, enter into various relationships without which they could not function, they remain physical objects no less that horses in a meadow . They do not carry any logical thought, and only evoke thinking - psychophysiological processes that are experienced by interpreters. It seems that both the aesthetics of Dewey and that of Morris which involves the conceptual apparatus of sign theory more intensively, belong more to the pragmatist tradition recently revived by the publications of Richard Shusterman. A position which is closer to that of Peirce, though still quite some way away from it, is that of Suzanne Katherina Knauth Langer. In her theory of meaning, Langer rejected the behaviouristic, binary schema "SR". She went back to the idea of "conceptions" in order to supplement the reduced notion of the sign relation proposed by behaviourism with an element that is functionally reminiscent of Peirce's interpretant. Langer chose to differentiate "signals" from "symbols", and feelings from their logical form, and on this basis she claimed that music has no emotivesymptomatic meaning, but only, emotive-symbolic (i.e. semantic) meaning . Peirce, from within his perspective, distinguished individual feelings from common emotions, the latter being signs of the former. In this sense, one might say that emotions are about feelings. Speaking somewhat anachronisti-cally, it would seem to be a generalisation of Langer's well-known belief that music is about feelings - that it is their logical expression. One should not, however, overvalue the above-mentioned similarities between Langer and Peirce. Above all, they are unintentional. They could have occurred as a result of the philosophical education which Langer received from Whitehead. The latter did admit to having been influenced by the American realists. Moreover, the similarities are often fragile, even sometimes superficial. Without wishing to get involved in the details of this issue, one could nevertheless say that while Peirce sometimes subscribed to scientistic beliefs, he was never a positivist, whereas Langer adjusted her thought to fit a positivist - Wittgensteinian framework. And yet, amongst the representatives of the generation of Dewey and Morris, it was she who made the biggest step in the direction of Peirce's semiotics. In this respect only Ezra Pound was able to go further. Pound and Peirce, a poet and a philosopher respectively, interpreted the concept of the icon almost identically. The authentic picture directs our
18 Ch.W. Morris, Symbolism and Reality, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1993, p. 17. J "The concept of 'semblance' ([Friedrich] Schiller's 'Schein') [...] defines the work of art as a wholly created appearance, the Art Symbol") (S.K. Langer (ed.), Reflections on Art. A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961, p. xi).
168 Andrzej Nowak attention towards a certain quality and has little in common with recrea ting or copying, especially in view of the fact that its object can be a merely possibly one20. That is why Pound and Peirce put forward algebraic curve equations as model examples of icons21. Both of them also emphasised the simultaneously heuristic and creative power of this kind of sign. In the same way, they backed up their positions by elevating the importance of the mainly iconic language of children . In a brief fragment which nevertheless speaks for itself, Peirce presents their upbringing as "an act of violence in the name of stereotypes"23. Indeed, one should remember this, since otherwise one may be prone to misunderstanding the concept of "habit" and, as a consequence of this, the whole of Peirce's semiotics. The point here is that for Peirce a "habit" is a real interpretant of a sign thanks to which its meaning goes beyond the world of purely nominal and intra-systemic senses. The habit has nothing to do with automatism, with the non-reflexive schemata of thinking or acting. "Habits" do not control man - man controls "habits" (C.P. 5.487). In this sense the semiosis that aims at producing a "habit" is open, i.e. available for "heterocriticism" and self-control. And despite its having a basis in the form of its historical structure, i.e. the code, this structure which Peirce had in mind is posterius rather than prius in terms of its constitutive elements. This comes from the basic principle of pragmatic idealism, namely that "reality consists in thefuture" (C.P. 8.284). Umberto Eco has made reference to those issues in Peirce's semiotics that share a common denominator in the form of the open-ended character of signs in general and of aesthetic signs in particular. After having been fascinated by structuralism, he realised its limitations. This he expressed in La Struttura Assente, where he opposed serial thinking to structural thinking. The following characteristics of serial thinking point to the inviolable division between these two forms: a) serial thinking does not look for a primordial and a historical generative code, but rather recognises, criticises, and modifies historical codes;
20 T.M. Olshewsky, "Realism and Antifoundationalism", in: G. Debrock and M. Hulswit (eds.), Living Doubt. Essays Concerning the Epistemology ofCliarles Sanders Peirce, Dor drecht, Boston & London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994, pp. 25-32. 21 C.P. 2.282; E. Pound, "Vorticism", in: Fortnightly Review 96,1914,573, pp. 461-471. 22 The role of iconicity in creative thinking is not incongruous with the charac teristics of the aesthetic sign as an index, because Peirce's three forms of reference to an object do not exclude each other. On the contrary, each index rests upon an icon, and each symbol rests upon an index and therefore indirectly also upon an icon. 23 C.P. 1.349; E. Pound, "Vorticism", op.cit., p. 183.
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b) it is multifunctional and so cannot be described according to the Car

even question the code that determines the thinking itself - each work thus "appears [...] as a discussion of its own poetics" 4. The above-mentioned theses are not Peircean, and yet in a sense they do belong to his thought. One can formulate them and justify them on the basis of his views in a way that would not be possible, for example, on the basis of the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure. Having realised this, Eco - starting with A Theory of Semiotics15, which is a thoroughly transformed version of La Struttura... - aimed to develop the Peircean notion of unlimited yet intentional semiosis. Eco founded his subsequent conceptions -even of an aesthetic kind - on this basis. One of these concerns the problem of interpretations of literary works of art, which remained important even after writers such as Roland Barthes or Stanley Fish had presented persuasive arguments for the absence of literary meaning. Arguing against their semantic-aesthetic nihilism, Eco announced his belief in three kinds of intention: that of the author, the text, and the reader. It is no accident that this differentiation should remind one of the Peircean division of interpretants into direct, dynamic, and logical ones. The analogy runs even deeper, though, indeed maybe as deep as it is possible to go. Interpreting his own conception of the openness of the work of art, Eco emphasised that this is not only a question of a certain indeterminacy pertaining to the artistic text. The most important factor is the accessibility of its source code, which is hidden and yet recognised by the recipient. If Eco's interpretation is not an overinterpretation, one could say that Peirce's idea of the open-ended-ness of semiosis (which in no way resembles the "claustrophobic" language games of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and also has nothing to do with "Structure" - Saussure's pre-existing demon), and along with it Peirce himself, was thus already present in Eco's thought even prior to his "conversion". Apart from Bense, Eco was the second aesthetician who consciously and consistently made use of the legacy of Peirce's semiotics. Despite this, Peirce's projected aesthetics still remains an unfulfilled possibility. One of the reasons for this is probably the antimetaphysical spirit of our times. The system of Peirce was to be fulfilled precisely by a semiotic metaphysics. Another reason, though, is more prosaic. European theoreticians and philosophers of art were either not interested in the issue of signs, or they were under the influence of Saussure's linguistics. As a result, all
24 U. Eco, La struttura assente, Milano: Bompiani, 1968, transl. A. Weinsberg and P. Bravo, Nieobecna struktura, Warszawa: KR Publishers, 1996, p. 306. 25 U. Eco, A Theory - Semiotics, London and Basingstke: Macmillan, 1977.
c) it has access to a metalevel on which it can direct itself towards and
tesian binary axes, i.e. the semantic and the syntagmatic.
170 Andrzej Nowak areas of aesthetics were taken over by a Cartesian-Kantian structuralism that was alien to the spirit of Peirce's semiotics. Perhaps this applies less to the Prague School since its representatives made a significant degree of reference to the German "philosophy of the Spirit" (Geistphilosophie) amidst which the thinking of the creator of American pragmatism also developed.
2. The Aesthetics of Dialectical Structure

In 1926 Vilem Mathesius established the Prague Linguistic Circle. The following people belonged to it: Bohuslav Havranek, Josef Hrabak, Jan Mukafovsky, Bohumil Trnka, Jan Vachek, Felix Vodicka. They were joined by the following Russians: Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Yuri Tynianov. In this way two traditions met in Prague. One of them, through Otokar Hostinsky and Otakar Zych, harked back to 19th century German philosophy. The other one was Russian formalism, doubly grounded in both Geneva linguistics and the Kazan school of Polish linguistics of Jan Ignacy Niecistaw, Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikcdaj Kruszewski. This meeting turned out to be fruitful and produced a new brand of theorising semiotic functional structuralism26. From the point of view of its overall synthesis of ideas, its identity was determined by the following four areas of reference: a) the German philosophy of the Spirit; b) the phonology of the Kazan School; c) the semiology of Saussure; and d) the formalism of the Moscow linguists and Opojaz of St. Petersburg. The Prague Circle got from the German philosophy of Spirit their historical sensitivity, which was something unusual for structuralists, as well as their propensity for dialectical perspectives. From Saussure, they took the differentiation of the language-system from the speech act or speech event. From the tradition of
26 This fact was not appreciated by Victor Erlich, who thought of Prague structuralism as a simple continuation of Russian formalism (V. Erlich, Russian Formalism: History Doctrine, The HaguerMouton, 1954). His unjustified opinion has become a canon, repeated amongst Polish researchers such as Maria Renata Mayenowa and Rosner. The only exception was probably Stefan Zotkiewski, who realised that the contacts of the Prague Circle with representations of other tendencies were not of a merely social kind. Those who co-operated with the Prague Circle included, for example, the biologist Jan Belehaadek and the phenomenologist Hendrik Poss. Edmund Husserl had a lecture there on language, Rudolf Carnap on logical syntax, Ladislav Rieger on the relationship of phenomenology to structuralism, while Ludwig Landgrebe talked about the concept of the semantic field. Among aestheticians the Circle invited, for example, Emil Utitz and Borys Tomaszewski. One would have thought that these facts alone should have altered Erlich's opinion. The fact that they did not makes one suspect that he had an interest in defending the myth of the purity of the birth of structuralism along the lines of the geographical axis defined by Geneva, Prague and Moscow.
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Russian formalism they got the idea that the function of normalising speech is not the only function of language. From Baudouin and Kruszew-ski, they took on board the elevated status accorded to phonology as the paradigmatic branch of linguistics. There is more, however, Baudouin knew and discussed the ideas of Jozef Mroziriski, and amongst these was included the one which states that "[the laws] for a language can only be adduced from the mechanism of the language itself" . From the point of view of logic, this idea is a general premise of Wiktor Szktowski's thesis: "the forms of art can be explained by the laws of art"2 . One can accept that this similarity may not have been accidental - Baudouin was active in Russia and he became a decent at the St. Petersburg University. Anyway, this characteristic of the Prague Circle requirement to maintain the immanent character of semiotic and aesthetic analyses is entitled to the name of the "Kazan postulate". The methodological backbone of Prague structuralism is created by two rules. Firstly the language and its homological equivalents cannot be explained through reference to extralinguisric factors. Secondly, each research procedure involves: a) separating out of the speech order a class of phenomena with a common dominating function; b) the analysis of other relations with other functions which modify this class; and c) the discovery and description of the language which makes the given phenomena possible. The first rule expresses the methodological principle of immanence, while the second links inductionism to fuctionalism. Although the Saussurean legacy of the Prague Circle is obvious, it is paradoxical that the concept of structure, which had earlier been absent, appeared in their writing. It was the Circle which produced probably the first systematic questioning of the philosophical grounds of Geneva linguistics. As a result of it, most of the concepts, distinctions and claims of Saussure were rejected or modified. Because of its consequences for aesthetics, one should first of all mention the fact that the Prague Circle were opposed to the unconditional separation of language and speech. This objection took different forms - ranging from the moderate to the extreme. Jakobson gradually inclined towards a belief that even within the dominating social dimension language maintains a trace of its individual dimension, and that speech, with all its individual character, has a social aspect. It
27 R. Jakobson, "Jozef Mrozinski - general-jezykoznawca: pamiajka i przypom-nienie" [Jozef Mrozinski A General and a Linguist: Reminiscence and Reminder], in: W poszukiwaniu istoty jpzyka 2. Wybor pism [In Search of the Essence of Language], M.R. Mayenowa (ed.), Warszawa: PIW, 1988, pp. 7-21. 28 T. Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics, London: Methuen, 1977, transl. I. Sieradzki, Strukturalizm i semiotyka, Warszawa: PWN, 1988, p. 76.
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was more explicitly stated by Mukafovsky, who in 1945 during one of his lectures, said: "language is a tool of practical application", so that "the structure of language cannot be thought to be anything other than diversified language utterances appropriate to the fulfillment of our aims"29. In this way he implied that for him the boundary between language and speech was logical rather than real - conventional rather than natural. The second of the aesthetically significant elements of the questioning of the grounds of Saussure's linguistics was the rejection of its characteristic Leibnizian synchronic determinism. The idea that a pre-existing static language fixes all possible meanings until its displacement by another structure of the same kind was incomprehensible to Jakobson from the outset. Trubetzkoy confirmed Jakobson's doubts, suggesting that "the sensicality of the evolution of language stems directly from the tact that language is a system" . This thought was later supplemented by the thesis that any evolution must flow systematically from its nature. This gave birth to the idea of a dynamic rather than static, and teleological rather than deterministic, semiotic system. Mukafovsky subjected this to still further alterations. Above all, he rejected the rule of pre-existence of structure which, in his understanding, like that of Peirce, stands in an a posteriori relation to its parts31. We may quote two statements from the aforementioned lecture of Mukafovsky. Firstly, he said that "the basis of structuralist thought is an imagining of the acting together of forces which enter mutual relations of agreement and opposition and which re-establish the lost balance with the constantly repeated synthesis"32. Secondly, he stated that "contrary to the social sciences, biology is inclined more towards an acceptance of emergence - i.e. the sudden appearance on the surface of new structures"33. In the first of these statements, Mukafovsky specified the sense of the dynamics of systems, which he described as their inner ability for action directed at achieving further syntheses. In his second utterance, he foregrounded the principle of continuity. In this way, the characteristics of the dynamic system initiated by Jakobson, Trubetzkoy and Tynianow -of "dynamic synchrony", as it was sometimes called - were completed by pointing out clearly four key ideas: inner activity, teleology, continuity and synthesis. A relatively new and philosophically important concept was cre29 J. Mukafovsky, "Pojecie calogci w teorii sztuki" [The Notion of Totality and the Role it Plays in the Theory of Art], in: M. Glowirtski (ed.), Znak, styl, konwencja [Sign, Style, Convention], Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1977, p. 95. 30 R. Jakobson/'Jozef Mroziriski...", op.cit., p. 17. 31 K. Chvatik, "Estetyka strukturalna Jana Mukafovskyego" [The Structuralist Aesthetics of Jan Mukafovsky], in: Studia Estetyczne 4,1967, p. 170. 32 ]. Mukafovsky, "Pojecie catosci...", op.cit., p. 94. 33 Ibid., p. 93.
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ated, which has either been undervalued or overvalued by linguists. The latter tendency can be observed in the work of Janusz Stawiriski - the Polish follower of Prague structuralism. The definition of how structure may be ordered that he was prepared to accept was so restrictive as to eliminate all forms of atemporal structure' - something which does not seem justified. The core of the two elements of the Prague reform of the bases of Gene va linguistics discussed above consists of a couple of developments Firstly, there was a shift from hypostatic to factorial, and maybe even to simply functional differentiation between language and speech. Secondly, the teleological character of speech and other acts of communication was placed beyond the particular determinism of the language. Both of these factors were of considerable importance for aesthetics. They enabled Mukafovsky to develop a conception of creativity and artistic personality as active, while maintaining the general framework of the structuralist ideology. By removing the impossible barrier between language and speech, the rule of continuity allowed the Prague Circle to accept a new, dialectical point of view: "language normalises acts of speech; speech modifies linguistic norms". Extending it to all semiotic systems gave Mukafovsky a justification for his claim concerning" the primacy of art over and above works of art, without diminishing the role of creative personalities.. Struc-turalistically perceived art constituted what he thought of as living artistic tradition. This, he wrote, is how structure, correctly understood, is constituted35. Because of its development he saw particular works of art as small moments in the historical process of constant disruption of balance and renewed syntheses. He was convinced of the superiority of art as a norm in relation to which each artistic utterance defines its identity, gaining by this the locally important status (i.e. confined to within a given tradition) of a work of art. Mukafovsky did not, however, perceive the above-mentioned form of determination as a conformist procedure He believed that each work of art both affirms and negates art - it no more confirms artistic norms than negates them. Furthermore, it is only the synthesis of this affirmation and negation that can establish the identity of the work of art. Because of this, the individual act of speech of an artist breaks the balance of the general structures of art through the sheer power of its own being. According to Mukafovsky the natural return to a state of balance itself requires a new synthesis - a new interpretation, a new creative act, a new affirmation and denial. In short, Mukafovsky saw in the conflict between the normative function of art and the deformative function of the
34 J. Siawiriski, "]. Mukafovsky: program estetyki strukturalnej" [J. Mukafovsky's Programme of Structuralist Aesthetics], in: Wsrod znakow i struktur [Amongst Signs and Structures], Warszawa: PWN, 1970, p. 15. 35 J. Mukafovsky, "Pojecie catosci..." op.cit., pp. 92-93.
174 Andrzej Nowak creative personality the principal driving force behind the development of each of them. What is important here is that he did not regard this force as blind. He accepted the teleological character of creativity, although he perceived it in a constructivist spirit which excluded absolutism. He did not accept any pre-established harmony of aesthetic ideals, only claiming that art is confronted all the time by the requirements and goals specified by society. The fact that this occurs without having to occur was explained by Mukafovsky in terms of the existential situation of man, who, faced with a transcendent reality, feels a need for self-confirmation from outside himself, such as may be achieved directly through action and indirectly in the realm of symbolic or aesthetic active self-assertion. Apart from the activism discussed here, the important feature of Prague structuralist aesthetics was its axiological commitment. This commitment is so sharply contrasted in comparison with later forms of structuralism, that it was not the product of the sensitivity of the members of the school, .but resulted from certain accepted assumptions. The studies conducted by the Prague Circle concentrated on the functions of art. Although these functions were regarded as signs requiring semiotic analysis, they were also perceived as social roles. The roles which unfold in social space ("so-ciospace") depend upon it, so that if, as they thought, this is the space of human purposes and goals, then art, in serving these, should serve the values that determine them. The values themselves then have no reality at all except as part of the changeable current of social existence: they are relative, created under certain conditions,and disappearing in others. This relativism, however, while weakening the position of values, cannnot undermine their relationship to art, which for the Prague Circle was obvious and inviolable. Vodicka wrote, with specific reference to literature, that one cannot "imagine it merely as a collection of works; it is also a set of literary values""6. Mukafovsky, on the other hand, added that the particularity of the aesthetic sign concerned is its evaluative relation to reality37 . Reminding us of these opinions, Jerzy Ziomek also mentioned the critique directed at Mukafovsky by Rene Wellek38. The most significant charge included in this concerned the absolutising of novelty as the main qualification of art. Just or unjust, Wellek's critique exposed the second, this time implied, level of axiological commitment of Prague structuralism. In this case as well, it neither resulted from individual preferences, nor expressed any form of modernist utopianism. Rather, this commitment came logically from the activistic conception of art and the creative personality.
36 F. Vodifka, "Historia literatury. Jej problemy i zadania" [The History of Literature. Its Issues and Objectives], in: Pamiptnik Literacki 3,1969, p. 257; transl. J. Baluch. 37 K. Chvatik, "Estetyka strukturalna...", op.cit. 38 R. Wellek, Concepts of New Criticism, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963.
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Neither Mukafovsky, Vodicka nor Jakobson valued novelty in abstracto for its own sake. On the contrary they valued it because of the fact that real novelty in art made new ways of seeing the world possible. This idea, which was quite new at the time, is relatively common these days and can be found in the work of aestheticians as far removed from structuralism as Maria Golaszewska. In summary, one can talk about both an explicit and and implicit (or impure) level of axiological commitment within Prague structuralist aesthetics. On both levels it appeared as a consequence of assumptions or insights that had already been accepted or achieved. It is this feature which differentiates the Prague Circle from the background of the diverse forms of structuralism that have appeared. It is different from other axio-aesthe-tics of the same period, such as Ingarden's, thanks to its linkage of values with the semiotic functions of art. The best known aspect of the legacy of the Prague Circle, which con tinues the tradition of Russian formalism, is the conception of the semiotic functions of speech. These were characterised and typologised in a variety of ways. Among the many proposed by Havranek, M^thesius, and Mukafovsky, the most influential turned Out to be Jakobson's typology. This includes the following functions: a) the emotive, b) the epistemic, c) the conative, d) the phatic, e) the metalinguistic, and f) the poetic. The first three of these were modifications of Karl Buhler's functions, which were: a) the symptomatic, b) the symbolic, and c) signalling. Jakobson wanted, however, to avoid the prosaic connotations of the term "symptom", and even the realist intuitions included in the concept of expression. An utterance which has an emotive function need not be symptomatic of a real experience of the speaking subject. It is worthwhile noticing that while introducing the concept of emotiveness, Jakobson consciously went back to the terminology and opinions of Anton Marty - the heir of Franz Brentano. The "epistemic function" is sometimes described as referential, in contrast to the "conative", as the function of ordering, while the purpose of the "phatic" (a term taken from Bronislaw Malinowski) is merely to maintain communication. Meanwhile, the metalinguistic function is used to describe and control the basic code. Jakobson admitted that, while working on this theory, he was influenced by the metalogical theorising of Alfred Tarski. The final function, the "poetic", by highlighting the signifier at the expense of the signified, weakens the semantic transparency of the message and focusses the attention of the recipient upon its form. One should emphasise here that the above-mentioned typology is not a division into disjunctive classes. The semiotic functions can appear together, create hierarchies, and modify one another, and for this reason there is no incongruity between the poetic and epistemic functions. Nevertheless, when the former dominates, the object reference of the latter will become fuzzy. The poetic message
176 Andrzej Nowak loses what Ingarden called "the moment of its truth-claim" - therefore it can neither be true nor false. In this regard, the views of Jakobson were closer to Ingarden's phenomenology than, for example, to Jerzy Pelc's semiotics. Pelc, who is a representative of the Lvov-Warsaw Philosophical School, believed that literature can at times be a sound form of knowledge. The Prague structuralists, then, believed that no adequatff.study of literature or art can afford to limit itself to analysing its poetic or aesthetic function. There were, however, two problems associated with the poetic function. Firstly, the mechanism of its fulfilment needed to be described. Secondly, one had to prove the existence of poetic language - not the lan guage of a work of art, or even of a collection of works, but of a metaindi-vidual structure. The first issue had already been discussed by the Russian formalists. The efforts of the Prague structuralists were focussed upon clarifying results which they already had in their possession. Due to lack of space, it is only possible to add here that, for them, the poetic function is fulfilled through the following: a) overcoded phonic or ganisation, and b) .the manner in which language is organised along its syntagmatic axis according to the rule of similarity which would otherwise organise it along its paradigmatic axis. Both of these mechanisms create a sense of the extraordinary, focussing the attention of the recipient upon the form rather than the content of the message. Faced with the second problem, however, the Prague structuralists turned out to be powerless. After years of research, the American scholar William O. Hendricks concluded that, in relation to Jakobson, the structural equivalent of a poetic function does not exist. The factors that threw the functional-structuralist theory of literature into crisis did not cause any similar breakdown as far as the aesthetics of Mukafovsky was concerned. However, this was a consequence of the fact that he had departed quite early on from the orthodoxy of Prague Theses 9. From the theory outlined in this work he kept only the notion that the work of art is a complex sign and a structured whole of various semiotic functions. Amongst these functions, he ascribed the role of the "dominant" to that which he regarded as a generalisation of the poetic function, and which he called the "aesthetic function". He characterised this, in the spirit of Jakobson, as free from the context of practical teleology. However, the similarities end here and a fundamental difference emerges. Mukafovsky did not postulate the existence of a universal language of art - the structural equivalent of the aesthetic function. He did not postulate it because, amongst other things, he questioned the hypostatising differentiation between language and speech much more strongly than did Jakobson. Ros39
See: U. Eco, La struttura..., op.cit., p. 264.
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ner saw in this the betrayal of the basic ideas of structuralism 40. Even if she was right, due to the self-undermining nature of this direction, the issue involved here seems to have lost much of its pertinence. After the dissolution of the Prague Circle the ideas which had been the longstanding basis of its theoretical project were developed further by Jakobson. Having left for the United States, he discovered the similarity between his ideas, those of the Russian formalists, and the claims of representatives of American New Criticism. He tried to achieve a synthesis of American and Central European structuralism. Through the work of his followers, who were also involved with the theories of Noam Chomsky, he influenced the emerging current of generative structuralism. The connection of the Prague Circle and Jakobson himself to the Tartu School, which continued to work with the idea of functional semiotics, is quite clear in this respect. The wartime and post-war fate of the members of the Prague Circle was typical of Central Europeans. Some left for the West (Jakobson), others made a self-critic along Stalinist lines (Mukafovsky), and many escaped from ideological oppression into a labrynth of mathematical formalism inaccessible to Marxist ideologues. Oldfich Leska reactivated the Prague Circle in the breakthrough year of 1989. For some time Vachek was its honorary president. The tradition of Prague structuralism is currently maintained principally by the Vilem Mathesius Centre for Research and Education in Semiotics and Linguistics under the direction of Eva Hajicova. Whereas the historical significance of the Prague Circle is beyond dispute, the systematic value of its legacy is sometimes called into question. The conception of the poetic function was most severely criticised by R.A. Sharpe: "banality does not rescue one from falsehood"41. Even if this opinion is unjust, it is nevertheless impossible not to notice that there exist certain rather banalised Kantian motifs behind this much criticised idea: aesthetic disinterestedness, teleology without telos, and so on. Jeremy Hawthorn has suggested all the functions that with exception of the "phatic" are equally indispensible to literature. Having assumed the authenticity of the aforementioned similarities between the ideas oi Jakob-son and, for example, those of John Crowe Ransom, one can assume that the devastating criticism by Hawkes impacts indirectly upon Prague structuralism as well. Therefore, bearing in mind the dangers of generalisation, one may express the following opinion: a) the structuralist, Saussurean ele40 K. Rosner, Semiotyka strukturalna w badaniach nad literature}. Jej osiagnipcia, perspektywy i ograniczenia [Structural Semiotics in Literary Studies. Its Achievements, Per spectives and Limitations], Krakow: WL, 1981. 41 R.A. Sharpe, "The Private Reader and the Listening Public", in: J. Hawthorn (ed.), Criticism and Critical Theory, London: Edward Arnold, 1984.
178 Andrzej Nowak ments in Prague structuralism has been invalidated; b) the dialectical, Hegelian elements have at least maintained the value of a living provocation. The rejection of the hypostatising interpretation of the differentiation between language and speech enabled members of the Prague Circle to dismantle the immanentism of the Geneva School. It gave them a real opportunity to connect art with life. The very conception of a teleological system is a challenge for our era that has popularised amorphousness. It is refreshing to note that Mukafovsky managed, even within the canon of structuralist ideas, to develop a conception of the creative subject as one who speaks rather than one through whom language speaks. Yet what is most interesting in his aesthetics - the conception of the meta-aesthetic function and the seeds of "serial thinking" - was left unelaborated - albeit for no apparent reason. Jakobson, introducing the meta-linguistic function, assumed that the act of speech could be directed towards its own bases. Mukafovsky, from his perspective, claimed that there is a dialectical relationship between the structure of art and the speech of an artist. This already created the conditions necessary for the question to be posed as to whether it might be the case that an artist's utterance is or may be, at least sometimes, a meta-utterance - an act directed towards the code which enables it, but at the same time questioning this code in order to eventually transform it. As one can see, Mukafovsky could have reformulated the notion of the meta-aesthetic function to expose not the form of the message, not even its basic code, but rather the dialectical interplay of message and code. He could also have clearly stated that the realness of a structure is future-dependent, yet in spite of his failure to do this, and in spite of his aesthetics being tainted by Kantian traditionalism, the latter remains more resistant to accusations of conservatism than the aesthetics of Claude Levi-Strauss. I will return to this last issue after a brief discussion of "Propp's Machine" - the work of the French generarivist of Lithuanian origin Algir-das J. Greimas.
3. The Generative Aesthetics of Propp's Machine (PM)

From the 1950's onwards, France became the centre for both structu ralism and structuralist semiotics . In contrast to Prague, however, no single homogeneous movement was created in Paris; even though one sometimes hears about the "Paris school of formal semiotics", it is a refer42 For many western authors (Peter Barry, Eric Brunick, Francois Dosse, etc.) structuralism was born in the 1950's in Paris. Commenting on incompetent or biased opinions such as these would be a waste of time.
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ence only to the narrow circle of pupils of Greimas. It is in this sense that it is used by Eero Tarasti and Jacques Fontanille. In the broadest sense, one can identify the members of this circle (as distinct from the idea of a school mentioned above) with the territorially uninstitutional - and by no means entirely homogeneous (in terms of its ideas) - group of researchers predicting, realising or basing their analyses on the program of generative structuralism. Apart those already mentioned, one should perhaps then also mention the following: Sorin Aleksandrescu, Barthes, Claude Bremonde, Jean Calloud, Levi-Strauss, and Tzvetan Todorov. One could also point to Teun A. van Dijk and - accepting the definition of narratology given by Gerald Prince 43 - also to Gerard Genette. The two main factors uniting the genera-tivists are: a) a belief in the algorithmic nature of cultural production; b) the acceptance of the tradition constituted, besides the heritage of Saussure, by the morphology of Vladimir Yurievitch Propp, the glossemarics of Louis Hjelmslev and Chomsky's linguistics. Some people, such as Beata Szymariska and Jerzy Topolski, believe generative structuralism to be a phenomenon that is loosely defined by the ideas of Saussure. They do not seem to take under consideration the importance for this current of the Copenhagen School, who were faithful, albeit radical followers of generative linguistics. It seems rather to be the case that the importance of the generativist group entitle them to be considered representatives of the Paris structuralist orthodoxy. However, one can consider the Tel Quel group, including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and late Barthes, as forming a schism within this current. Richard Harland mentioned them as representing post-structuralism, alongside such authors as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and the later Michel Foucault. One of the goals of the developments of the Tel Quel group was what Richard Rorty called "textualism", and what Alex Callinicos summed up in the thesis that we are prisoners of the text - the new version of Plato's cave44. Such a view renders semiotics impossible. One should, however, remember that prior to the formulation of the diagnosis of facias hipocratic, Kristeva had proposed a reform of the phenomenological basis of semiotics rather than the latter's annihilation. To be more precise, she considered that the semiotics of systems originating from Saussure and Peirce had reached its end. It was to be replaced by a semiotics of subjectivity based on the theory of meaning as the theory of the speaking subject45 - a divided one, however,
43 Narratology is defined by the following assumptions: a) the grammar of narration is independent of the medium of narration; b) a narrative competence exists and may be studied; G. Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology, Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1988, p. 65. 44 A. Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, London: Polity Press, 1999. J. Kristeva, r|fitamicri - Recherches pour une semanalyse, Paris: Le Seuil, 1969. Another authors, for instance Teresa de Lauretis described the changes in the 1960 s to the
180 Andrzej Nowak rather than monolithic as in the Kantian or Fichtean model of selfhood. To cut a long story short, it was not the relation to semiotics, but rather to its Saussurean source, that divided the schismatics from the orthodoxy. The voice of the schismatics was best expressed by Derrida, who accused Saussure of logocentrism - of believing in the existence of a transcendental source of all meaning. Between the extremes of the orthodoxy and the schismatics, there is also an area of what we might term heterodoxy. Theoreticians of the latter mould did not question the Saussurean basis of structuralism or structuralist semiotics, but linked these with more remote ideas. For example, Jacques Lacan placed psychoanalysis at the centre of his area of interest, and Jean Piaget did the same with developmental psychology and epistemo-logy. Louis Althusser, Lucien Goldmann and Nicolas Paulantzas, oh the other hand, tried to combine structuralism with Marxism. In addition to overtly heterodox theorists, there was also a large group of outsiders -those who were not interested in philosophical polemics - who simply saw in structuralism a good tool for solving problems that would be hard to solve in any other way. These mainly were representatives of various specialised disciplines. Paris structuralism had an impact on many literary theorists, musico logists, and cinematologists, but it would be difficult to find here an aesthetician in the strict sense of the word, equivalent to Mukafovsky within the Prague Circle. Barthes and Todorov would be closest to this type because of their project of structuralist poetics, which was not only modelled on linguistics and its relation to language, but also expressed an implicit aesthetics. This aesthetics, however, resulted from a general conception of culture which was worked out most fully and radically by Greimas. To sum up, contrary to Prague structuralism, the Paris movement did not leave amidst its legacy any explicitly defined aesthetics, although it did clearly imply a certain shape that any such aesthetics would take on. One may approach this in terms of the Greimasian mechanics of narration46. It was clear to Greimas that culture is a hypertext whose core is created by narrative texts. The later recount rather than describe, or report, while poetry belongs to metaphoricising texts. This was his reason for thinking
model of semiotics less dramatically, but even she concluded that semiotics ceased at this time to be a theory of systems of communication, and became instead a theory of meaning production, and consequently it went from being concerned with semiotic systems to be concerned with the speaking subject (see: T. de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 46 Conceiving Greimas as a representative model of Paris structuralism may seem questionable, yet to include him amongst the Russian formalists, as Eric Brunnick does in a text available via the Internet, is quite unjustified.
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that one can explain the rules of the creation and functioning of culture as a whole by revealing the mechanism of stories, because the latter, mutatis mutandis, is the mechanism by which all texts are generated. Having thus described the aim of his studies, Greimas approached the realisation of his project by starting out from the following assumptions: a) that culture has an axiological and ideological character; b) culture is not a reflection of nature; c) there exists a "pre-code" which generates the homogeneous process of cultural production. It emerges from the first of these points that the mechanism responsible for the functioning of culture is a structure defining the arrangement of signified elements rather than the combinatorics of signs deprived of their meaning. At the same time it is the structure of semantic relations which then points to the order of syntactic operations - as in the third of the above points. The second point, narrowed down and expressed in more technical terms, had the following significance for Greimas: meaning has an intra-linguistic character - so a realist, i.e. referential semantics, is not possible. These, greatly summarised, are the salient points of the conception of Greimas, which eventually enabled him to construct something deserving the title of "Propp's Machine" (PM) - a theoretical tool which made it theoretically possible to generate all possible texts. PM is a complex construct, and it has probably never been described as a homogeneous whole. Structuralist analysts usually treat its particular parts as though they were independent elements within the conception of Greimas - as Rosner, for example, did. This fact should be further emphasised because there is no place left here for any polemics justifying a different point of view. PM can be functionally schematised as follows. The core is the so-called "fundamental model" (FM). In addition to this, there are two sets of interpretative rules: syntactic rules (SR) and anthropomorphic rules (AR). The whole thing is completed by mainly modal categories such as "to want", "to seem", "to know". FM is really a semiotic square. Its morphological content is composed of four terms, existing in paired oppositions matched according to principles of contrariness and contradiction. In addition to contrariness and contradiction, they are also intertwined within a network of implications. The task of FM is to distribute morphological values and establish the initial structure of meaning. The rules from the collection SR make it possible to transform FM into a syntactic order of transformations of the initial meaning (STM). The rules, AR, make it possible to ascribe to the morphological elements of FM and the operations of STM the significance of antagonistic subjects of actions as well as of the corresponding actions themselves. In this way one goes, for example, from contradiction, through negation, to conflict, and, generally speaking, from the fundamental model to the actantial model also known by the term "ac-tional". The roles are then determined: shifting from actions and their abstract subjects, i.e. actants, to concrete events and actors, and, finally, to
182 Andrzej Nowak complete the generation of the story, placing a sonorous linguistic flesh onto the actorial skeleton. This finishes the work. In addition to recently recognised weaknesses, PM has some features that are important to the shape of the aesthetics implied by Greimas's conception. These include: a) determinism, b) self-completeness, c) unreflexiveness. PM is deterministic because with a given structure of meaning it unambiguously defines the entire course of its subsequent transformations. The same applies to the unfolding of the narrative. Even at the points where a bifurcation is permitted, there is no freedom of choice - as there is in the alternative proposal by Bremond47 - because even then the course of telling is precisely defined by its previous states. Greimas claimed that with the semantic outline of a story known, one can generate all its versions, i.e. a "full version". The question of why it is that in such a situation incomplete texts are created was answered by him through pointing out various limitations, ranging from lack of imagination to taboo constraints. This may sound banal, but in fact is not. It means that although PM is perfect in itself, its human vessel is imperfect, and this is why "complete" literary works are not created. PM is not subjected to any external influences, nor does it intervene directly in a metalinguistic reality. It is self-complete. The products of its action do not modify the rules - they do not change the structure of the machine. If someone were to say that after Franz Liszt composed the Sonata in B minor the sonata form ceased to be what it had been, it certainly would not be Greimas. It is easier to imagine Todorov in this role - someone whose grammar of genres allows for a dialectics of structure and utterance. Although PM is supposed to generate all texts, it does not generate the text about itself. It is unreflexive. The language of narration is flat - deprived of a metalevel. One can recount through it. but not where the basis of the story is concerned. Because PM generates the narrational core of the hypertext of culture, the features of this tool allow us to observe the characteristics of Greimas's implied aesthetics. The fist series of consequences here concern our understanding of creativity and the author. If the machine described here transforms rather than produces meanings and narrational streams, creativity
47 One can ascribe to Bremond: a) the opinion of Mukafovsky that it is impossible to separate out the knowledge of the parts of a structure from knowledge regarding the whole of it; b) the prospective conception of meaning as "fabula", i.e. "fabula" meanings are given to us independently of the results to which they are leading. The function (the meaning) of a series of quarrels between lovers is always a fight (the trial of love) independently of whether it leads to victory (the strengthening of the relationship) or not. The idea of Bremond was vehemently opposed by Jonathan Culler, whose arguments, though evidently circular, were considered conclusive by Rosner. The latter went even further, saying that Bremond is the author of only "a trivial ontology of human behaviour" (K. Rosner, Semiotyka strukturalna..., op.cit., p. 142).
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cannot be understood as creatio ex nihilo. It also cannot be understood as inventio, because determinism limits the area of creative invention as far as designing narrational sequences is concerned to zero, where the latter are not predicted by the algorithm of PM. It could be the case that the concept of "worldmaking" introduced by Nelson Goodman might help to clarify the significance of Greimas's conception of creativity. Yet it is hard not to notice that it has two main dimensions: as conservatio, creativity means maintaining the replicated pre-existent structure; as reprehensio, it means restraining oneself from grasping its fullness - creating incomplete versions of replicas. Greimas's creator is not Acteon. The author, however, is, in a sense, the negative author. His copyright mainly consists of that from which he restrained himself rather than what he did. PM has the right to claim ownership of copyright in the more positive sense of this word. One could say that Greimas worked out the semiotic-philosophical staging of the ideological critique of the concept of the author conducted by Barthes and Foucault. The second series of consequences concern the character of art itself. The self-completeness of a PM which is based on intralinguistic semantics removes the problem of realism, getting rid of realistic art. Levi-Strauss, close to Greimas in his position, made a claim with similar consequences. He considered the belief in the existence of a single reality independent of its linguistic articulation to be a symptom of futile empiricism. What should one do, however, with a belief in the existence of, for example, the realist novel? The answer was supplied by Barthes in his S/Z. He assumed that the deep structure of the literary work could be presented within the surface structure, by dividing the work into "units of reading" (lexia). This technique was applied to Saracine by Honore de Balzac, to "prove" that the realism of this novel was questionable. The last feature of PM referred to was unreflexiveness, which leads to a conclusion that no artistic utterance can be a meta-utterance, meaning that it can neither establish nor question nor modify the basic code on which it is founded. From this position, amongst other things, Levi-Strauss criticised serialism in music and serial thinking in general. For him it was a "structuralistically impossible" type of thinking which, expressed as an act of speech, would have to contain an element of discussion regarding the language enabling this act of speech itself. In connection with these opinions of Levi-Strauss, Eco came to the conclusion that methodologically avant-garde structuralism is unable, in its nature, to generate a theory of the artistic avant-garde48. It is he who is right rather than Rosner, who explained the conservatism of Levi-Strauss's
! U. Eco, La struttura..., op.at., pp. 303-320.
184 Andrzej Nowak aesthetics by saying that by viewing art in the context of social communi cation he was obliged to privilige comprehensibility as a value . Barthes as a theoretician of literature owed most to Todorov, but he found a philosophical basis in the works of Greimas. Thanks to these, he confirmed his belief that the originary authorial idea is a mirage, and the authorial interpretation is only ever one of many. Whereas Greimas thought that finished products leave PM because it is not important for the text how it is manifested on the level of signs. Barthes thought that if someone tells someone something in some way, it has a meaning. Put another way, the transformation of the meaning lasts continuously outside of PM at the level of sign manifestation, at the point of convergence of language and speech. The reading itself means entering the territories of what has been left out by the writer; it means further writing, not confined by any source or author's idea. This claim has strengthened Barthes' reputation as a defender of the freedom of the interpreter, and Terry Eagleton included him as part of the "Front for Liberation of the Reader". This is rather mistaken. Barthes's readir\g is steered by codes that are insensitive to the inten tions of the reader and which nevertheless give him "orgasmic" bliss. One of these, the code of cultural context,- means that reading-writing is also constituted by a "tautological reading" which copies the text in its literal form. Independently of Barthes, this motif was instructively used by Jorge Luis Borges, in the story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote. To sum up: a) reading has no end-point; b) it is writing; c) it is not a free act of the subject but a coded process; d) it is independent of the authorial idea; e) it is unreflexive it does not thematise the codes that enable it to operate. Out of these points, only the first has an anti-Greimasian character. As one can see, by questioning the self-completeness and finalism of the PM production process, Barthes in effect complemented the automatism of textgeneration with the automatism of its interpretation, merging these two ideas into a single conception of reading-writing. This constitutes a modification of Greimas's theories rather than a major departure from them, and does not change the main features of the profile of the aesthetics implied by the work of the authors belonging to the circle of generative structuralism. This profile also confirms the opinions of Eco, marked as it is by conservatism, passivism, and unreflexivity. This may be seen most clearly in the locating of art below the level of techne. The Platonic conception of techne refers to selfknowledge - something not required by Greimas's version of artistic production. Its organisation reminds one of the stages of mass-production in a car factory. One should not see in it
49 K. Rosner, "Tworczosc Levi-Straussa jako zrodio inspiracji w badaniach estetycznych" [Levi-Strauss' Output: An Inspiration for Aesthetics Inquiries], in: Studia Estetyczne 9, 1972, p. 309.
185
a trivial idea: here a "transcendental" concept is at stake. Greimas, indirect ly and in a Kantian way, justified the opinion directed against Kant, that the determinism of nature is no different from the determinism of culture, and that in both cases the final claims to Tightness come with the social infrastructures of consciousness. Like no-one before him, he showed the technological aspect of transcendentalism which enables one to better understand the growing interest in Kant observed nowadays. The paradox of this lies in the fact that while the myth of a semiotic-artistic production line is fulfilled, aesthetics has been dominated by the influence of the schismatics, who rejected structuralism and considered semiotics to be impossible. Unfortunately one has to admit that a much more sober evaluation of the legacy of the Tel Quel group was performed by the Polish Marxists, who were not deceived by the attempt to replace the class struggle with the struggle between the signifier and the signified conducted under the banner of lecriture.
4. Appendix - Structuralism and Semiotics in Polish Aesthetics

The influence of Pierce's semiotics on Polish aesthetics is simply under valued, due to uncritical interpretations of western philosophers whose output distorted the content as well as meaning of original insights on the part of Polish thinkers in this respect. That is why some of them zealously uphold a view that Peirce is an heir of the so-called British empiricism, paying no heed to his severe criticism of Thomas Hobbes, George Berkeley, David Hume, etc. (C.P. 8.11-38). On the other hand there are Polish philosophers who try to approach Peirce's thought through its post-modern, Derridian, readings. Those are usually drawn to a conclusion that Peirce cut language off reality. This is, however, an untenable point of view for one thing, Peirce emphasised that truth is a matter of facts, and, oddly enough, charged Husserl with making truth the matter of language structures (C.P. 8.189). Finally there are representatives of Polish philosophy who take for granted Habermas' and Apel's over-interpretations of Peirce's idea of "scientific community", which usually results in reducing his philosophy to what might be called "transcendental sociology". Leaned against the authority of the aforementioned German philosophers, such a reduction seems to be at least questionable as seen against the late writings of Peirce in which an attack against transcendentalism is evidently carried out. Although less than to Peircean semiotics, Polish aesthetics turns out immune to semiotic structuralism as well. Concerning structuralist semiotics, neither its functional nor generative variety could influence Polish aesthetics, for its representatives either neglected semiotic issues entirely, or approached them in ways characteristic
187
xism they made every endeavour to show that structuralism could be rec onciled with historicism. Needless to say, for this reason Polish neostructuralists used to make avowal of theirs affinity to the Prague Circle instead of setting forth ideas they actually shared with Paris School. In 1966 Glowiriski published an article in which he elaborated his no tion of virtual reader. He believed he was the first to work it out. However, one can hardly deny that Glowiriski's finding essentially resembled Wayne Booth's idea of mock reader as described in his Rhetoric of Fiction (1961). A few years later Gtowiriski came to a conviction that there were styles of reading apart from styles of writing. Following Barthes' famous claim, he completed it with a thesis that there was no degre zero of reading. Slawiriski who was Gtowiriski's colleague also took lesson from generative structuralism. Consequently he sketched out his conception of literary competence, which echoed probably the most celebrated idea of Chomski53. OkopieriStewiriska endeavoured in turn to discriminate textual Ego from writer's one in terms of semantics54. Bartoszynski used to mention Bre-mond and Todorov while examining structures of literary fiction. To sum up, although Polish neostructuralists were tightly wedded to the Prague functionalism, they drew lessons from French generativism too. Neostructuralist bias was characteristic not only of theorists of literature but also of Polish cinematologists. A group of them was drawn round Alicja Helman and Hanna Ksiazek-Konicka. Its representatives were Wiestaw Godzic, Andrzej Gwozdz, Maryla Hopfinger, Lukasz Plesnar, Eugeniusz Wilk, and many others. Needless to say, Christian Metz's thought served as the point of departure for almost all of the above-mentioned. At first Polish cinematologists concentrated on issues evoked by iconicity of speech acts. They were also interested in ways of co-ordinating different codes within at least apparently consistent work of art. They tried to unearth deep grammar of film. With all these tendencies and goals, Polish cinematologists resembled some western groups, for instance the Glasgow University Media Group. Unfortunately, they also shared theirs fate. That is to say, investigations of Polish thinkers resulted in a view most dramatically expressed by James Monaco - "film has no grammar". This calamity pushed Helman's formation to reshaping the methodological background of theirs inquiries. They gave up French structuralism and turned towards Peirce's semiotics and Morris' pragmatism. However, this turn did not yield results which were expected by Polish cinematologists.
53 J. Stawiriski, "Socjologia kultury a poetyka historyczna" [Sociology of Culture and
the Historical Poetics], in: Dzieto, jpzyk, tmdycja [History, Language, Tradition], Warszawa: PWN, 1974. 54 A. Okopieri-Stawinska, Semantyka wypowiedzi poetyckiej [The Semantics of Poetic Speech-Act], Warszawa: PAN-IBL, 1985.
188 Andrzej Nowak Oddly enough, it seems nowadays that former representatives of Helman's group set theirs hopes on hermeneutics. This fills the story of defeat. Writings of Leszek Polony and Michal Bristiger could represent semiotic drift within Polish musicology. While Polony was close to Langer, Bristiger preferred more exact and formal research methods. However the most original and extreme strategy of structural investigations was worked out by Mieczystaw Por^bski. Por^bski, whose main interests were in the history of art, counted formal generativism of Greimas for little. He believed that structural analyses should be based upon mathematics. (His favourable proposals were: Eresmann's theory of categories, Georg David Birkhoff's theory of lattices, and mathematical theory of games.) Incidentally, Por^bski's project betrays a trait of strictness so characteristic of the Lvov-Warsaw School. Probably for this reason it turned out to be of no importance for aesthetics. By way of summing up, Polish semiotic structuralism was an important movement comparable to Ingarden's phenomenology and Marxism. The role it played in Ppland could be hardly overestimated. Due to struggles undertaken by structuralists Polish aesthetics was enriched with ideas worked out in Prague and Paris. However, there is something Polish structuralism lacks. I dare say it is originality of thought which, for instance, makes Ingarden's theory a unique one. To put it in a nutshell. While the output of Polish structuralists is rich with (over)sophisticated writings, it is scant of irreplaceable works.
Only small people die a quiet death. The same concerns ideas. Semio tics and structuralism are two of the great philosophical ideas of the 20th century. They contained a spirit of sometimes extreme anti-individualism, and a tendency to look for universals where few expected to find them, e.g., in art. The fact that this search ended up in a fiasco does not mean it was a futile endeavour. During its realisation, many social meta-individual mechanisms involved in the production of culture were revealed, which had been inaccessible to researchers with traditional methodogical outlooks. On the other hand, however, the over-interpretation of a priori roles and common structures for generating cultural products meant that structuralism at least implied conservative, if not trivial, axiologies. It aimed, explicitly, for a complete reduction of issues of value. This project, however, should be interpreted as political rather than theoretical. Many influential western structuralists, with their self-declared relativism,, wanted to be critics of bourgeois consumer society. A relativist, however, is not able to oppose another relativist by presenting a positive system of values - this is obvious. He can only oppose him with axiological emptiness. Therefore,
189
in all probability, the actant of the hidden axiology of structuralism is nihil ism, and the actor, relativism. While structuralism collapsed, semiotics degenerated. Many contemporary observers of this phenomenon have emphasised the political involvement of semiotics. On the other hand, certain notions are put forward which, by trapping man in the world of signs, disable its systematic studies. One cannot analyse that which one stands in a relationship of mystical unity with. Yet, all this should not come as a surprise. It seems that the development of the theory of signs has manifested certain consistencies in the history of philosophy described by Twardow-ski, according to whom four stages regularly follow on from one another: the theoretical, the sceptical, the practical, and the mystical. Using this schema one can divide up the history of 20th century semiotics into the following periods: a) theoretical studies, from Peirce and Saussure to Grei-mas and Eco; b) sceptical reaction as associated with post-structuralism; c) practical interest, i.e. political concerns expressed during the 1980's and 1990's; and d) the concurrent mysticism of thinkers who, having acquired elements of the Heideggerean philosophy of speech, consistently rejected the possibility of systematic study of semiotic structures. It is difficult to say what the future will bring. One thing is sure: the world of signs is getting denser and denser, which does not make theoretical reflection any easier, but does make it more necessary. We certainly need a new semiotics, a new semiotic metaphysics something Peirce himself gave thought to.
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Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics1

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

b) it is multifunctional and so cannot be described according to the Car

c) it has access to a metalevel on which it can direct itself towards and

tesian binary axes, i.e. the semantic and the syntagmatic.

2. The Aesthetics of Dialectical Structure

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

172 Andrzej Nowak

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

See: U. Eco, La struttura..., op.cit., p. 264.

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

3. The Generative Aesthetics of Propp's Machine (PM)

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

! U. Eco, La struttura..., op.at., pp. 303-320.

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

4. Appendix - Structuralism and Semiotics in Polish Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

190 Andrzej Nowak

Structuralism and Semiotics in Philosophical Aesthetics

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