STRUCTURALIST USES OF PEIRCE: JAKOBSON, METZ ET AL.

Abstract

Most of this paper will consist in the setting up of premises for the purpose of making two or three fairly simple points. Some of those premises will be about structuralist semiology, which I take to be relatively familiar. Nevertheless, for the purposes of exposition, I shall take the familiar version of structuralism, as a homogeneous theoretical field identifiable by a few key terms ('synchronic/diachronic', langue/parole, 'arbitrary/motivated' etc.) as imprecise, and shall re-do it as a set of controversies over particular issues. The use of Peirce made, for instance, by Jakobson or by Eco are intelligible from the positions taken in these debates. The other premises will be about Peirce, which I take to be relatively unfamiliar, and which, I shall 'do', taking the risks of an objectifying exegesis. The points I shall make will pertain to both the "theory" and the "applications" of semiotics, principally during the 1970s. What I am calling, with scare marks, the "theory" is the set of propositions taken to define the presuppositions of semiotics and the range of objects to which they are deemed to apply. Under the head of "applications", I shall limit my discussion to Jakobson on language, and Metz and Wollen on the cinema. The scare marks, of course, are pincers, designed to show that what was joined in heaven has been put asunder by the unnatural tendency of language, and theory, to make problematical distinctions.