Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation

by Ronald Schleifer

Overview

Analogical Thinking argues that sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, a new mode of comprehension arose, supplementing received Enlightenment ideas concerning the nature of understanding and explanation. Focusing on the innovations of structural linguistics and its poststructural legacy, the individualism of Enlightenment knowledge and the collaborations of post-Enlightenment information, and practices of reading and interpretation across the arts and sciences, Analogical Thinking examines the ways in which analogical presentations of similarities respond to the experiences of twentieth-century culture.
The book traces this mode of thinking in linguistics, collaborative intellectual work in the arts and sciences, and interpretations of literary and sacred texts, concluding with a reading of the concept of Enlightenment in a comparison of Descartes and Foucault. The book examines the poststructuralism of Derrida; the collaborations of information theory and modern science as opposed to the individualism of Adam Smith and others, and analogical interpretations of Yeats, Dinesen, the Bible, Dreiser, and Mailer. Its overall aim is to present an interdisciplinary examination of a particular kind of understanding that responds to the experiences of our time.
Ronald Schleifer is Professor of English, University of Oklahoma. His books include Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory, Criticism and Culture; and Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472110889
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	01/31/2001
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ronald Schleifer is Professor of English, University of Oklahoma. His books include Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory, Criticism and Culture; and Culture and Cognition: The Boundaries of Literary and Scientific Inquiry.

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Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation

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By Ronald Schleifer

University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2000 Ronald Schleifer
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0472110888

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Chapter 1 - Scientific Semiotics and Interpretation
The two chapters of this section trace the scientific project of semiotics and its relationship to the poststructuralist project of deconstruction. In these chapters--especially in chapter 2--analogy is described as embodying "semantic formalism," which conjoins the formality of language with what Jacques Derrida calls the "phenomenality" of meaning (1981:30). In this conjunction the semantic formalism of analogy comes into play to articulate what David Burrell calls "the relation between language and the world" (1973:224). Still, in this focus on the formal structures of language, part 1 is loosely opposed to the phenomenal, disciplinary analogies--the "postformalist" analogies--of part 2. An important aspect of my point, both here and throughout this book, however, is that analogical thinking supplements the abstract formalism of strict parallels even while it uses the apprehension of similarities--of "parallels"--as its starting point. That is, analogical thinking begins with similarities, even if it never quite apprehends similarities as strict equations. In this chapter, then, I examine the similarity of semiotics to theproject of Enlightenment science--its attempt, formally, to articulate truth in terms of its simplicity, accuracy, and atemporal generalizability. The following chapter focuses on the differences between the semantic project of semiotics and its modeling itself on mechanical science, while the chapters of part 2 attempt to examine these similarities and differences in terms of the historical occasions of these models, the analogical resemblance, as Ricoeur says, "between relations rather than between terms per se" (1988:151).
The World of Signs
In the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels Gulliver visits the School of Languages at the Grand Academy of Lagado, where he encounters a strange scheme for the abolition of all words in order to preserve the health of our lungs. Instead of using words, people would simply carry around with them "such Things as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on" (1961:158). This scheme, Gulliver noted, "hath only this Inconvenience attending it; that if a Man's Business be very great, and of various Kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a great Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him" (1961:158). Such a scheme, as Swift well knew, is impracticable and wrongheaded: not only would such discoursers sink "under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us" (1961:158); more strikingly, as Swift demonstrates in the next voyage of Gulliver's Travels, such a conception of the nature of language as "only Names for Things" does not allow for one of the most powerful aspects of language, the ability of language to say "the Thing which was not"(1961:206): to make promises, to imagine and define worlds different from our own (like those of Gulliver's Travels), to describe the future, to lie, to articulate values, to create communities, to do the work of the negative--all things that cannot fit in the packs people would have to carry with them to replace language.
In this negative example Swift is describing the great convenience of language, the power it affords us to represent or "signify" absent entities. The science of such signification--which studies language more carefully, I think, than the scholars of Lagado--is semiotics. The term semiotics comes from the Greek word semeion, which means "sign," and semiotics is the study--or the science--of the functioning of signs. Signs function all around us every time we use one entity to signify or represent another. For instance, the sounds that constitute the word tree in English signifies the physical object of a tree; and the graphic mark tree signifies the sound tree, etc. Signification takes place all the time, even when we are not intentionally attending to some discursive business or another: this is part of Swift's mockery of the single-minded nearsightedness of the scholars of Lagado. But signification does more than allow us to signify absent entities in thought or speech or other modes of communication; it saves us from more than the heavy bundle of things Swift's scholars carry. More complexly than a simple conception of representation, signification helps determine experience and perception: the fact that English has a sign tree--especially in relation to the sign shrub, for instance--contributes to the determination of experience and perception so that the world takes on an orderly shape, communities are possible, and things gain both value and a future.
This is perhaps clearer in my second example, in which the seeming precise sound of the word tree is designated by a graphic sign (or a combination of graphic signs, t-r-e-e). Even though most of the pronunciations of the sound of the word tree, spoken by old men and young women, children, people with accents from different parts of the country, screams and whispers, are measurably different in terms of the physical properties of sound, we experience or perceive these manifestations of the word as the same. In fact, some variations of the sound tree are far more different from one another than the difference between tree and three just as scrub oaks and palm trees are far more different from each other than scrub oaks and woody shrubs, yet the designation--the sign tree--helps us delimit the "object" the sign represents. This conception of signification does not assume that signs represent preexisting entities (which we could carry around in a sack). Rather, it sees the process of signification as one in which signs designate "mental images" or "thoughts" or "ideas" but in such a way that such ideas or thoughts do not preexist the process of signification but, rather, gain their definition by means of signification. In this conception a sign does not "re-present" some entity or thought but, rather, the process of signification gives definition to an idea--it realizes it--when that idea, like a promised future, was only a vague, indefinite possibility before.
In this conception the ways signs refer to objects (including mental objects) in the world is less important than the generative capacities of signification, the ways that signs create the possibility of definition and intelligibility. In fact, Claude Levi-Strauss, studying the nature and functions of myths in human culture--that is to say, of the meanings or significations of communal narratives--describes the function of signs as the expression of "intelligible" meaning by means of "tangible" physical entities. When we think about it, the fact that intelligibility--the apparently private experience of understanding--can be expressed and communicated by means of things that can be tangibly perceived is remarkable. Yet, as I shall argue, semiotics teaches us that this seeming private process of understanding is socially determined in such a way that we must rethink not only the ordinary conceptions of what meaning and understanding are but even rethink the apparently simply oppositions between meaning and fact, principle and example. If signification helps determine the entities it seemingly represents, then private understanding may not preexist its public communication: signification becomes less an activity we engage in, like taking things out of a sack, than a world we inhabit.
In any case the complex relationship between perception and meaning--between the tangible and the intelligible--is woven closely into everything we do. A striking part of being human is the ability to discern meaning--to apprehend signs--wherever we look: not only in stories we hear or experiences we remember but in things as subtle as the tone of voice of people close to us, facial expressions, the accidental ways light might strike a tree, color of cloths, sequences of sounds. Literature, of course, teaches us to apprehend such signs better than we might--it does so, I believe, by making "accident" an unacceptable mode of explaining the perceptions it presents to us--and, if this is so, then semiotics, the science of signs, can teach us how literature achieves its ends. Later in this chapter I will examine how semiotics can help us to read and understand literary texts more fully (and how literature can help us understand semiotics), and still later I hope to describe the sea change that semiotics suggests in our understanding of what takes place when we "understand" or "comprehend" anything--the analogical thinking I described in the introduction and which I examine more closely in subsequent chapters. But here I want to emphasize that semiotics does not aim to discover particular meanings in its objects of study. Rather, semiotics seeks to understand the conditions of meaning, to isolate and describe those conditions under which signification can take place. (In the following chapter I will suggest the ways that semiotics presents a mode of analogical thinking by examining it in relation to deconstruction.) The great questions of semiotics are: how is meaning possible? what is its nature? how does it work? how is it possible to represent something that is absent? what is the nature of intelligibility and its relationship to representation and signification? and what, finally, is the relationship between signification and what I call the "collaborations" of community?
Humanities and the Human Sciences
A striking fact about the history of science is the ways in which the great revolutionary figures in the development of science--Newton, Darwin, Einstein, perhaps Freud--gained their insights by asking questions where most people had seen simple self-evident truths. For instance, Darwin asked, why are there so many species? Marx asked whether belief systems do more than articulate general truths, and, if so, what particular social ends do they serve? Einstein asked, what is the significance of the nature of light for understanding the relationship between time and space? In each case--and, of course, they could be significantly multiplied--science is asserting there is a question to be asked concerning the human situation and experience that is so close to everyday life that no one ever stopped to notice it was a question. In each case, as Northrop Frye says in "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," science transforms itself from the condition of "naive induction," which attempts to classify the immediate sensations of experience, into more sophisticated questioning, which attempts to explain the very phenomena it examines "in terms of a conceptual framework different in shape" from that phenomena itself (1994:39).
The same is true of semiotics. Just as scientific physics was impossible for the ancients, as Frye argues, because they did not imagine that the different elements so close to human life--earth, fire, air, and water--could be understood beyond the simple recounting of their existence, so the semiotic science of the signifying process is a late development among the sciences because it could not be formulated as a science until basic questions about the nature of meaning that focused on seeming self-evident truths could be asked. One such question (which I have already touched upon) examines the concept of the sameness of different entities or events, the question of the difference between similarity and identity, that I suggested in the introduction analogical thinking raises. What makes two sounds or two concepts or two experiences the same? Such a question--which became more and more pressing to philosophers in the course of the nineteenth century in the work of precursors of semiotics such as Marx, Durkheim, Nietzsche, and Freud--is basic to larger questions of: how is it that signification is possible? what takes place when one entity "stands for," or signifies, another? And, finally, how is it possible for such signification to be interpersonal communication? Roman Jakobson, the great linguist and semiotician, defines meaning itself as the "translation" of one set of signs into another set of signs, a definition of meaning that, raising these questions, is closely tied to the conception of the same.
The science of semiotics attempts to create a conceptual framework in which such questions about language, signification, and communication can be rigorously addressed and answered. As Levi-Strauss has argued, at the heart of signification is the process of analogical translation:

I have tried to transcend the contrast between the tangible and the intelligible by operating from the outset at the sign level. The function of signs, is, precisely, to express the one by means of the other. Even when very restricted in number, they lend themselves to rigorously organized combinations which can translate even the finest shades of the whole range of sense experience. We can thus hope to reach a plane where logical properties, as attributes of things, will be manifested as directly as flavors or perfumes; perfumes are unmistakably identifiable, yet we know that they result from combinations of elements which, if subjected to a different selection and organization, would have created awareness of a different perfume. (1975:14)

In this passage Levi-Strauss is articulating the great ambition of semiotics: to be a science of signs that can account for the myriad meanings of signification--the "phenomenal," or "felt," sense of meaning that experience continuously presents to us--with the same rigor as the articulation of the laws accounting for our experience and perception of chemical compounds and their activity that chemistry has achieved. Just as the smell of perfume is a phenomenal effect of chemical combinations whose invariant elements and active properties can be formulated, recorded, and predicted to behave in certain ways in certain situations, so, Levi-Strauss hopes, meaning is also a phenomenal effect that can be accounted for and predicted by the scientific isolation and discovery of invariant elements and processes of signification.
In other words, Levi-Strauss assumes that the "intelligible" effects of meaning are in no way "mysterious" or "spiritual" or "intangible" or "unique." Rather, he assumes they are recurrent phenomena that, like other phenomena science studies, can be understood in terms of what Frye calls the "conceptual framework different in shape from them" of science. Science begins by assuming that phenomena are more than a collection of unique events; it assumes that they are related to one another and can be explained within a framework that articulates the relationships--the repetition of the same invariant elements--across seeming unique events. In the same way Levi-Strauss assumes that different meanings are related to one another as palpable effects on human perception that can be accounted for in the same way that the effect of smell is accountable in relation to the general laws of chemical combinations--the rigorous scientific analysis of chemistry. How else, Levi-Strauss implies, could meanings present so many seeming invariables (such as the word tree)? How else could meaning be shared? How else could the ability to speak and understand an almost infinite number of sentences be learned in the first three years of life?
For this reason A. J. Greimas, who was an important follower of Levi-Strauss, notes that the science of semiotics assumes that the phenomenon of meaning can be understood in the same ways other phenomena are understood. In Structural Semantics (1966) he says:

It may be--it is a philosophic and not linguistic question--that the phenomenon of language as such is mysterious, but there are no mysteries in language.

The "piece of wax" of Descartes is no less mysterious than the symbol of the moon. It is simply that chemistry has succeeded in giving an account of its elementary composition. It is toward an analysis of the same type that structural semantics must proceed. It is true the effects of meaning do hold good in both cases, but the new analytic plane of reality--whether it is in chemistry or semiology--is not less legitimate. (1983:65)

The "piece of wax" Greimas is talking about is the fact that Descartes notes in his Meditations that wax manifests itself variously--changing its qualities when he brings it close to a fire--so that, while each of the qualities that "came under taste, smell, sight, touch, or hearing, has altered--yet the wax remains" (1984:20). Since Descartes's time chemistry has developed as a science insofar as it can reduce a large number of phenomena such as the perceived different qualities of wax Descartes describes to variations governed by invariant chemical laws and substances. Greimas hopes that semiotics can achieve the same scientific simplicity, coherence, and scope for the science of meaning and signification: that it can account for the effects of meaning such as the "symbolic" meanings associated with the moon with the same kind of abstract formal description that chemistry accounts for the phenomenal effects that chemical compounds produce.
Behind this assumption--as it is behind those of Levi-Strauss and Frye--is a significant reconception of the nature of those areas of knowledge that have traditionally examined the nature of meaning in human affairs, the "humanities." The humanities--whether it studied literary texts, musical compositions, philosophical treatises, works of art--have always assumed that each object of study was a unique and unrepeatable event. After all, Shakespeare only wrote Hamlet once; Descartes meditated on the nature of the human mind once at a particular moment in the history of ideas; Mozart's Hunt quartet is an unrepeatable event in the history of music, just as Darwin's Origin of the Species is a unique event in the development of science. But, since the humanities have always understood the objects of its attention to be unique events, they have always limited themselves as a body of knowledge to description and paraphrase. Thus, literary criticism has interpreted literary works by paraphrasing its meanings in other words, or it has described literary works in terms of its unique elements.
As the linguist, Louis Hjelmslev has noted, according to this traditional view "humanistic, as opposed to natural, phenomena are nonrecurrent and for that very reason cannot, like natural phenomena, be subjected to exact and generalizing treatment.. . . In the field of the humanities," he continues, "consequently, there would have to be a different method [from that of science]--namely, mere description, which would be nearer to poetry than to exact science--or, at any event, a method that restricts itself to a discursive form of presentation in which the phenomena pass by, one by one, without being interpreted through a system" (1961:8- 9). This "method," Hjelmslev suggests, is "history" in its most chronological manifestation. Since the objects of humanistic study are unique, they can be catalogued only in chronological order. For this reason the humanities have traditionally been "historical" studies: the history of philosophy, the history of art, history itself, the history of science, literary history, and so forth. Frye says a similar thing in "The Function of Criticism": "literature as yet being unorganized by criticism, it still appears as a huge aggregate or miscellaneous pile of creative efforts. The only organizing principle so far discovered in it is chronology" (1994:44).
Implicit in Frye and Hjelmslev is the basic assumption of scientific semiotics: that the humanities can reorient themselves and adopt a scientific model in their study. Instead of pursuing the "naive induction" of cataloguing unique events, they can, as Hjelmslev says, attempt "to rise above the level of mere primitive description to that of a systematic, exact, and generalizing science, in the theory of which all events (possible combinations of elements) are foreseen and the conditions for their realization established" (1961:9). Such a discipline could examine signification from a host of different points of view. It could examine the elements that combine to create the "meaning-effects" Greimas describes; it could study the recurrent elements of myth and narrative Levi-Strauss examines; it could explore the ways in which signification takes place in language as Saussure and Hjelmslev do; it could even account for the collaborations of communal meaning-formations in the sciences or in the Bible. In more particularly literary examples it could study the systematic nature of "literature" itself, such as the general theory of genre Frye suggests and Tzvetan Todorov pursues in relation to the genre of the fantastic; it could examine the systematic relationship among the objects of humanistic study conceived in terms of linguistic syntax or the "textuality" and "intertextuality" that Roland Barthes has described and that I examine in the relationship between Norman Mailer and Theodore Dreiser in chapter 7; it could study the genesis or genealogy of intellectual disciplines and organs of knowledge; or it could examine the relationship among the assumptions that govern particular modes of interpretation, as I do later in this chapter in relation to analogical thinking.
In these ways what has traditionally been called the humanities can reconceive themselves as the "human sciences." In such a conception, as Frye notes, literary criticism would take its place among the social sciences rather than the natural sciences. Saussure as well as Frye called for the understanding of semiotic science as a "social" science, and one of the aims of this book is to open up the sense of the sociality of meaning implied in semiotics and criticism by examining strategies of collaboration. In any case the very opposition between "humanities" and "human sciences" can be seen in the social sciences themselves. For instance, Saussure himself notes in The Course in General Linguistics the difference between two methods of studying economics--economic history and the "synchronic" study of the economic system at any particular moment. Most of the social sciences are divided in this way: psychology, for instance, encompasses the analysis of unique case histories of "clinical" psychology and "experimental" psychology that attempts to articulate the "general" functioning of mental activity. Anthropology encompasses both the study of unique cultures and, as in Levi-Strauss's work, the "general" functioning of aspects of culture. Even history, the seeming model of humanistic study of unique and unrepeatable events, is sometimes taken to be a social science in whose conceptual framework, as Frye says, "there is nothing that cannot be considered historically" (1994:42).
In this way literary study also can be seen to offer two "methods" of study--in Frye's terms, literary history and more or less systematizing criticism. What allows the systematization of criticism, however, is the common and most "recurrent" element of traditional humanistic study, the fact that, as Hjelmslev notes, all the humanities deal in the study of language and discourse--in the study of signification. In other words, if the humanities all participate in areas of the social sciences, they do so because the foundation of society are the signifying systems that allow for intelligible social intercourse. From this vantage the overarching social science is semiotics: it studies the functioning of signs as an always social functioning basic to psychology, sociology, history, economics, and the other social sciences. In this framework literary criticism would take its place among the social and, more broadly speaking, the human sciences: its study of the signifying forms of literature would be a special case of the study of signification altogether, the study of semiotics. Such a human science would attempt to describe what distinguishes literature from other signifying practices and what literature shares with them. It would attempt, as many have already attempted, to situate literary practice within other cultural practices (including linguistics, teaching, politics, psychology, history, philosophy, ideology, sociology, and so forth). It would study literary works not as special cases but as representative cases, as possessing and presenting the forms of signification that can help us to understanding the nature and generation of meaning in general.
Structural Linguistics
Levi-Strauss, Greimas, and Hjelmslev base their understanding of signification on the studies of the great linguists of the twentieth century and especially the work of Continental (as opposed to Anglo-American) linguistics. At the head of this tradition is the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whom I've already mentioned in passing. In fact, Saussure called for a science of "semiology" in the several courses in general linguistics he offered at the University of Geneva in 1907- 11. Almost simultaneously in the first decade of the twentieth century the American philosopher and logician Charles Sanders Peirce used the term semeiotic to describe the general science of the functioning of signs in various sciences--what Jonathan Culler describes as the "science of sciences" (1981:23). (In the 1970s the International Association for Semiotic Studies opted for Peirce's term semiotics.) Peirce saw semiotics in relation to logic and developed elaborate taxonomies of types of signs. Saussure, on the other hand, has exerted much greater influence by calling for semiotics to model itself as a discipline in relation to linguistics (even if, as some recent writers have noted, this modeling has produced a narrow definition of the sign based upon the special properties of linguistic signs [Culler 1981:23; Blonsky 1985:xvii]).
In any case the coincidental articulation of a neologism to describe a science that did not exist but which, as Saussure said, had "a right to exist" (1959:16) is one of the remarkable events in the history of ideas, comparable to the coincidental development of calculus by Isaac Newton and
G. W. Leibniz at the turn of the eighteenth century. Moreover, like the introduction of calculus, which allowed Newton to calculate and predict in a short time the elaborate measurements of planetary motion that Johann Kepler had recorded over the course of more than twenty years, and like the linguistic science Saussure developed and the discovery of "the truth about the general reference of symbols to their objects" that Peirce was pursuing (1958:403), semiotics is an attempt to reduce the myriad of facts about signification--that is, about meaning in human affairs--to a manageable number of propositions about the functioning of the signifying process in human life within a rigorous conceptual framework.
Saussure defined semiology as the science "that studies the life of signs within society," which "would be part of social psychology and consequently of general psychology." "Semiology," he goes on, "would show what constitutes signs, what laws govern them.. . . Linguistics is only a part of the general science of semiology; the laws discovered by semiology will be applicable to linguistics, and the latter will circumscribe a well-defined area within the mass of anthropological facts" (1959:16). Whether linguistics is "part" of semiotics, as Saussure contends here, or whether semiotics is modeled upon linguistics is a debate that has received a good deal of attention in the last three decades. At the other extreme from Saussure's position is Roland Barthes's contention that all semiotics systems--including the "natural semiotics" of animal sign and signal languages, the "connotations" (as opposed to the "denotations") of human linguistic systems, and nonverbal semiotic systems such as music and painting--can be understood as species of what Umberto Eco has called "translinguistics" examining "all sign systems with reference to linguistic laws" (Eco 1976:30). It is Barthes's position that linguistic science, rather than psychology, has developed the conceptual framework in which to understand signification in general.
Whether scholars assume semiotics simply extends linguistics beyond the sentence or that it subsumes linguistics in its understanding of the functioning of signs in general, it is clear to all that linguistics has offered the most rigorous examination of the process of signification of all the "branches" of semiotic science. I believe this is because the object of linguistics is more rigorously defined than other semiotic systems (see Schleifer 1987:169- 72). Moreover, despite Saussure's description of semiology's inclusion within general psychology, the rigor of structural linguistics and semiotics has established itself, as we shall see, in their avoidance of psychological and cognitive explanations--causal explanations--in defining the linguistic (and semiotic) sign. It is precisely this avoidance that situates semiotics as a species of analogical thinking, despite its aim at making itself a "nomological" science governed by a small number of rigorous and universal laws. The definition of the linguistic sign begins with Saussure's reorientation of linguistics in the Course of General Linguistics from the historical study of language--and especially etymology--to the "systemic" study of language that he inaugurated in his work. Saussure's reexamination of language is based upon three assumptions. The first of these, which I have already touched upon, is the assumption that the scientific study of language needs to develop and study the system rather than the history of linguistic phenomena. In Saussure's terms he distinguishes between the particular occurrences of language--its particular "speech-events," which he designates as parole; and the proper object of linguistics, the system that governs those events--its "code," which he designates as langue. Moreover, he argues for the "synchronic" study of the relationship among the elements of language at a particular instant rather than the "diachronic" study of the development of language through history.
This assumption gave rise to what Jakobson came to call "structuralism" in 1929: "Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations," he wrote,

we could hardly find a more appropriate designation that structuralism. Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and the basic task is to reveal the inner . . . laws of this system. What appears to be the focus of scientific preoccupations is no longer the outer stimulus, but the internal premises of the development: now the mechanical conception of processes yields to the question of their function. (1971:711)

In this dense passage Jakobson is articulating the scientific aim of linguistics I have described more generally as the aim of semiotics. But, more than this, he is also describing the second foundational assumption in Saussurean-- we can now call it "structural"--linguistics. The second assumption is that the basic elements of language, and of signification more generally, can only be studied in relation to their function rather than their cause. Instead of studying particular and unique events and entities, those "events" and "entities" have to be situated within a systemic framework in which they are related to other so-called events and entities. This is a radical reorientation in conceiving of the world, one whose importance the philosophy Ernst Cassirer has compared "to the new science of Galileo which in the seventeenth century changed our whole concept of the physical world" (cited in Culler 1981:24).
I have already touched upon this matter when I attempted to define sign at the beginning of this chapter. Saussure describes the nature of the linguistic sign as the union of "a concept and a sound image," which he called "signified [signifie] and signifier [signifiant]" (1959:66- 67). But the nature of their "combination" is what makes this conception functional: for Saussure neither the signified nor the signifier is the "cause" of the other. Rather, they exist within the linguistic sign in what Greimas calls a relationship of "reciprocal presupposition": the signifier presupposes the signified that, after all, it signifies; but at the same time the signified presupposes the signifier: otherwise it couldn't be "signified [by something]." Such reciprocal presupposition governs the relationship between the elements of analogies as well: to assert that my love is like a rose connects love and roses in a way that doesn't allow either the love or the rose to so overwhelm and absorb its analogue that one is reduced to the other. Similarly, Saussure defines the basic element of language, the sign, analogically and relationally. Such a relational definition allows him to explain the problem of the identity of units of language and signification I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: the reason we can recognize different pronunciations of the word tree as the same word is that the word is not defined by inherent qualities--it is not a "mechanical agglomeration" of such qualities--but, rather, it is defined in relation to other elements in a system, a "structural whole," of the English language. In the context of a positivism that assumes irreducible, positive qualities of entities, such a relational mode of understanding is "negative," a product of the work of the negative.
For Saussure this relational definition of an entity--it is sometimes also called a "diacritical" definition--governs the conception of all the elements of signification. This is clearest in the most impressive achievement of Saussurean linguistics, the development of the concepts of the phonemes and "distinctive features" of language. Phonemes are the smallest articulated and signifying units of a language. They are opposed to "phones," which are the actual sounds that a language utilizes. Phonemes are not the sounds that occur in language but the sounds that are phenomenally apprehended as conveying meaning: for instance, in English the letter t can be pronounced with an aspiration (a slight h sound seemingly added to it) as in an emphatic pronunciation of the word take [t']; or it can be pronounced unaspirated, as in steak. But in both cases an English speaker will recognize it as variations (or "allophones") of a /t/ phoneme so that someone speaking with an accent that aspirates all /t/s could still be understood. In some languages what are variations of a single phoneme in one language constitute distinct phonemes: thus, English, unlike Chinese, distinguishes between /l/ and /r/, and native Chinese speakers have great trouble with the distinction between these English phonemes precisely because in their native language they are simply variations of the same sound. In every natural language the vast number of possible words is a combination of a small number of phonemes. English, for instance, possesses less than forty phonemes that combine to form over a million different words and the vast number of different pronunciations these words are susceptible to.
The phonemes of language, however, are themselves systematically organized. In the 1920s and 1930s, following the lead of Saussure, Jakobson and the great Russian phonologist, N. S. Trubetzkoy isolated the distinctive features of phonemes. These features are based upon the physiological structure of the speech organs--tongue, teeth, vocal chords, etc.--and they combine in "bundles" to form phonemes. No distinctive feature can exist outside of combination with others within a phonemic articulation (one cannot engage the vocal chords without doing other things to produce a sound), and this fact has led some "positivist" thinkers to assert that distinctive features are simply heuristic devices that do not "really" exist. What is more striking, however, is that distinctive features organize and define themselves through a logic of binary opposition in terms of their presence and absence. For instance, in English the difference between /t/ and /d/ is the presence or absence of "voice" (the engagement of the vocal chords), and on the level of voicing these phonemes reciprocally define one another; the difference between /p/ and /t/ is that the former possesses the feature of "labiality" (i.e., it is produced by the lips) while the latter is "dental," and again they are defined in relation to one another. In this way phonology is a specific example of a general rule of language Saussure describes:

in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sound that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. (1959:120)

In this framework "positive" identities--what constitutes sameness and, finally, meaning itself--is determined not by inherent qualities but by systemic, structural, relationships.
This conception of the elements of signification being diacritically determined through a system suggests a third assumption governing Saussurean linguistics and semiotics, what Saussure calls "the arbitrary nature of the sign." By this he means that the relationship between the signifier and signified in language is never necessary (or "motivated"): one could just as easily find the sound signifier arbre as the signifier tree to unite with the concept of "tree." But, more than this, it means that the signified is arbitrary as well: one could as easily define the concept "tree" by its woody quality (which would exclude palm trees) as by its size (which excludes the "low woody plants" we call shrubs). This relationship is not necessary because it is not based upon inherent qualities of signifier or signified: the nature of the sign--and of signifiers and signifieds--is governed by systematic diacritical relationships. Moreover, this should make clear that the numbering of assumptions I have been making is not an order of priority: each assumption--the systemic nature of signification (best apprehended by studying language synchronically), the relational, or "diacritical," nature of the elements of signification, the arbitrary nature of signs--is in relationships of reciprocal presupposition with the others.
In this we can see that the science of signification, like the science of chemistry, is governed by a conceptual framework that understands the phenomena it studies in overarching relationships of contrast and combination. The elements of language are defined on any particular "level" of understanding in terms of the ways in which they contrast with other elements on that level (just as the periodic table offers the chemical elements in a systematic framework of contrasts); while they combine with elements from their own level to create the elements of the next linguistic level (just as chemical elements combine in a systematic fashion determined by their contrasting qualities). Thus, distinctive features combine to form phonemes, and phonemes combine to form morphemes (the smallest units of meaning such as prefixes, suffixes, etc.), and morphemes combine to form words, and words combine to form sentences. In each instance the "whole" of an element is greater than the sum of its parts (just as water, H2O, is, in Saussure's example, more than the mechanical agglomeration of hydrogen and oxygen).
The great difference, however, between a semiotic (or human) science such as linguistics and a natural science such as chemistry is Saussure's third assumption: the arbitrary nature of the sign. In chemistry the elements of the framework of understanding--particles, chemical elements, molecules--do not present themselves as "arbitrary" but, rather, seem inherent and necessary within the object of study. In studying meaning, on the other hand, the elements present themselves as arbitrary: signification can use any phenomena to signify. In this aspect of signification we can see the both the basis and manifestation of analogy. Analogues do not seem motivated the way in which the systematic analyses of chemistry do. Rather, analogues, in the very multiplicity, seem arbitrary and capricious. That is, the particular cases of analogy are not in the same relation to the science of meaning that the particular cases of chemical compounds are in relation to the science of chemistry. As Charles Taylor notes in a passage I quote in chapter 4, an analogue is "not a mere example, nor is it a particular case of a regularity" (1991:176). Instead, it is an orientation or an orienting feature that points in a particular direction of developing thought.


Continues...

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Excerpted from Analogical Thinking: Post-Enlightenment Understanding in Language, Collaboration, and Interpretation by Ronald Schleifer Copyright © 2000 by Ronald Schleifer. Excerpted by permission.
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