Academic Waste Products
Further to this, here’s a little more from Keith Windschuttle’s lecture, History, Truth and Tribalism:
“One reason I chose to cite this passage from Bhabha* was because… it contains terminology such as ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’, which no self-respecting, theoretically correct postmodernist would use today. For these are terms that derive from the now out-of-date theory of structuralism, which has since been completely superseded by the theory of poststructuralism. One index of the achievements of academic theory today can be gauged by its waste matter; that is, the range of concepts and methods jettisoned along the way to its present position. The great majority of these concepts were adopted not because of their intellectual weight or clarity but because they were mouthed by whoever was the then prevailing theoretical guru…
No-one bothers any more with once solemnly-made distinctions within the field of semiotics between the ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’ or between ‘denotation’ and ‘connotation’. Indeed, whatever happened to semiotics? All these concepts are now museum pieces. Yet in the 1980s, each was taught as gospel by the same people who are now recommending a postmodernist or a cultural studies approach as the definitive word on their subject. One can only feel terribly sorry for the generations of humanities students once forced to dutifully learn and regurgitate these now dead and useless concepts.”
*Homi Bhabha, former professor of English at the University of Chicago and a “leading voice in post-colonial studies.”
Denis Dutton should sue you for theft of intellectual property.
Semiotics. Don’t get me started. On being an usher for Umberto Eco’s talk and having to walk him to the podium because he was too drunk to stand up. Or Thomas Sebeok’s class. Or Thomas Sebeok period.
Sebeok and Eco are still quite influential (Eco channeling CS Peirce) — and the “science” of literary theory still appeals to the semiotic when theoreticians get down to nuts and bolts.
Post-Colonial / new historical theory are tied to an idea of the semiotic that adopts a particular view of the signifier / signified relationship (Saussure, or for Peirceans, add “referent” to complete the tripartite makeup of the sign). Generally, the post-structuralists like to believe they are doing away with the “mechanical” analysis of texts that the structuralists undertook and that the narratologists (among whom I’ve counted myself) really DID work to make into a kind of textual science — replacing it with (what seems to me) a rather simplistic and reductionist return to new criticism, albeit one gussied up with all sort of fancy notions concerning liminality and differance and &tc.
Which is to say, in Derrida’s (in)famous formulation that provides the justification for the semiotic idea that underlies poststructuralist thinking, the sign is haunted by the ghost of all its signifieds.
One can easily see that from here (or from de Man’s perspective, wherein the signifier can remain unsignified and still come to count as language), what is happening is a “democratic” (to be generous) or “mob rules” (to be less so) conception of how “interpretation” functions.
The intent of the original is discarded as non-controlling; the drift of language is celebrated; and those on the receiving end of a set of ordered signifiers (from the perspective of the semiotic, this can be any text — and, given that EVERYTHING is a text, means that the shift in who controls the text’s “meaning,” by way of “decoding and re-encoding,” encompasses the stuff of all “reality”) are the intepretive community who comes to define meaning.
This consensus view of meaning — which begins from an innocuous postmodern suggestion that language, being man-made, is what defines and constrains “truth,” but becomes adulterated when the important step of appealing to originating intent (which can be, of course, that there WAS no intent, in which case we can conclude that what we are “interpreting” is accidental) is discarded — allows interpretive communities to galvanize, insist, determine, and later defend a notion of truth that have adopted.
And one of the successful ways they can protect such things is by taking the post-colonial position that only those in a privileged position (of “authenticity,” with respect to the interpretive community that defined the narrative to begin with) are permitted to define and determine the truth value of their own narratives.
Respect for this repellent intellectual fraud — perversely called “tolerance” by some — is the basis for multicultural social theory, though the idea falls apart when, as its truly pressured, we realize that it was all but a bit of ego gratification on the part of those who believed themselves to be enlightened and accommodating, but who were actual the very linguistic imperialists they often criticized.
For when multiculturalism is pressured — when it is pushed beyond simple boutique multiculturalism — THEN comes the point when those who have “allowed” different interpretive communities to lay claim to their own narratives and defend them against western bourgeois imperialist universalism, become all buggy and try to put a stop to it.
The wogs, you see, have gone too far, and are taking advantage of the enlightened largesse offered by their erstwhile champions.
Problem is, there is no way back, unless those erstwhile benefactors renounce the entire semiotic house of cards upon which they’ve built their theories, and which they themselves have been able to use to gather power by virtue of pure will (and against any standard of defining meaning that appeals to anything less tractable than the whims of a determined subgroup).
Which is why, I think, semiotics remains important: it shows, quite clearly, in my mind, how language MUST work (though there are those who argue that found language is possible without appeals to original intent; I believe they are wrong, that the intent to see something as language is always part of the equation), and in concretizing the relationship between the signifier and the signified — between the mark/ sound form and the concept to which it is tethered — we can examine and articulate how linguistic ideas work, and why some are incoherent with respect to their insistence on what “meaning” is and who, ultimately, can (vs should) lay claim to its control.
And no, I’m not going to proofread this and correct any mistakes. So please approach the above as an off-the-cuff comment and not as an academic treatise.
It’s the 4th of July, after all, and I’m already 4 Red Stripes into the day.
Jeff,
[ Dave surveys previous comment then hangs large notice on wall: “Please drink responsibly. Leave your semiotics textbooks behind the bar.” ]
“Authenticity” seems to be a key hang-up of post-colonial claptrap and of leftwing thinking more generally. There’s the obvious fetishism regarding primitive societies, the “authenticity” of which is imagined to be much greater than our own. This malign romanticism has led some on the left (La Bunting, for instance) to claim that mothers in the third world should reject capitalism and instead keep hauling their children about in the flies and dirt in order to maintain their “traditions”. Traditions that she, and others like her, romanticise from a safe distance. Others find themselves having to defend the beating of small children to exorcise “bad spirits”, or the mutilation of young girls, or widespread child mortality, all as expressions of “authenticity”.
I suspect there’s more than a little projection involved here on the part of the people who mouth this kind of bollocks. They – as pretentious middle-class lefties – may well feel inauthentic, and for very good reasons; but displacing their personal feelings onto the rest of us is a wee bit grandiose.
Louis Proyect,
Shamefully, I hadn’t heard of Denis Dutton until you mentioned him. His site is now added to the blogroll and I may bring some of his more amusing broadsides to the attention of my regulars. Thanks very much.
The reason semiotics is one of the greatest academic hoaxes of all time is that it proposed absolutely nothing new, and boiled down previous observations into ridiculous overgeneralizations. Semiotics was — unsurprisingly — most successful among non-linguists. Linguists for the most part saw it for what it was: a hoax.
If you want to know more about language, start reading Pullum, Sag, and other linguists, and leave Eco and Sebeok to collect dust.