Abstract
Language and discourse are fundamentally material and the subject is constituted and decentered in relation to this materiality. It is the theories emerging from structuralism that dealt most thoroughly with the relation between material language and subjectivity. After giving a brief introduction to Saussure’s structural linguistics and the diverse assemblage of writers often labeled ‘post-structuralists,’ the chapter discusses the materialities of language and discourse as they were conceptualized by Bachtin, Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, and others. In the second part, different post-structuralist approaches to the constitution and decentering of the subject in material language and discourse are presented.
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Notes
- 1.
The content of the book can be summed up in one quote: ‘QUESTION: Is it true that language is a superstructure on a base? ANSWER: No, it is not true’ (Stalin 1972, p. 3).
- 2.
But see, for example de Freitas and Curinga (2015).
- 3.
See, for example the contributions by Balibar, Derrida, Nancy, Deleuze, Irigaray, and Rancière in the book Who Comes After the Subject? (Cadava et al. 1991).
- 4.
The book was compiled from notes by some of Saussure’s students in Switzerland.
- 5.
- 6.
The term was coined by Richard Rorty’s book The Linguistic Turn (Rorty 1992).
- 7.
See, for instance, his article ‘Language and the Analysis of Social Laws’ (Lévi-Strauss 1951).
- 8.
Cf. e.g. Bowie 2010, p. 37.
- 9.
Here too, Nietzsche, who would become a major reference for ‘post-structuralists’ like Deleuze or Foucault preempted those ideas. In his early notebooks, he describes the impossibility to think outside the constraints of language and notes: ‘Language, the word, nothing but symbol. Thinking, i.e. consciously imagining, is nothing but envisioning and linking linguistic symbols’ (Nietzsche 2009, p. 27).
- 10.
‘Semiology’ and ‘semiological’ is here used to designate the Saussurean notion of semiotics. In the subsequent chapter (Chapter 6), semiotics will be used to designate the study of signs and meaning.
- 11.
Jameson writes that ‘they know Marx so well as to seem constantly on the point of translating him into something else’ (Jameson 1974, p. 102).
- 12.
Althusser does not speak of the political unconscious. That aspect in the characterization of Althusser’s understanding of history was added by the great Fredric Jameson.
- 13.
Marx and Engels (1965, pp. 41–42).
- 14.
At least not since Marshall McLuhan’s famous chapter titled ‘The Medium is the Message’ in ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’ (McLuhan 1994, pp. 7ff).
- 15.
For an interesting approach to this problem, see Michaels (2004, especially pp. 11ff.).
- 16.
Shifting out or disengagement are defined by Greimas and Courtés as ‘the operation by which the domain of the enunciation disjuncts and projects forth from itself, at the moment of the language act and in view of manifestation, certain terms bound to its base structure, so as thereby to constitute the foundational elements of the discourse-utterance’ (Greimas and Courtés 1982, p. 87). And Bruno Latour remarks rightly that ‘nothing can be said of the enunciator of a narration if not in a narration where the enunciator becomes a shifted-out character’ (Latour 1988, p. 27).
- 17.
From a slightly different perspective, Regenia Gagnier, who understands subjectivity and the subject as a mode of self-representation in language, writes: ‘First, the subject is a subject to itself, an ‘‘I,’’ however difficult or even impossible it may be for others to understand this ‘‘I’’ from its own viewpoint, within its own experience’ (Gagnier 1991, p. 8).
- 18.
And it is not what Benveniste does. But the quote illustrates a point, namely, that it is hard to find an entry point into the process of subjectivation by language.
- 19.
The book influenced, for example, Roman Jakobson (cf. especially the chapter ‘Shifters and Verbal Categories’ in Jakobson 1990, pp. 386ff.).
- 20.
On this theory, see: Clark and Holquist (1984).
- 21.
The difference to Lacan’s Symbolic Order is that Althusser sees the individual subjected before language acquisition.
- 22.
He defines a discursive formation as that which ‘in a given ideological formation [of ISAs], i.e., from a given position in a given conjuncture determined by the state of the class struggle, determines what can and should be said’ (Pêcheux 1982, p. 111).
- 23.
The position in the discursive formation also determines what can and should be said. For example, it makes a difference from which subject-position I diagnose someone with a disease (doctor, veterinarian, philosopher…).
- 24.
Enunciation can here be understood as the production situation of the text or utterance.
- 25.
Literature makes wide use of this operation to convey a sense of realism. When Boris Pasternak writes in Doctor Zhivago: ‘One evening at the end of November Yuri came home late from the university; he was tired and had eaten nothing all day’ (Pasternak 1959, p. 69), the reader (enunciatee) is lead away from Pasternak at his study in Moscow. Instead, the reader’s attention is moved to an actor (Yuri), at another time (one evening at the end of November in the last century), in another place (Yuri’s home). There is actantial disengagement, which consists of a disjunction of a ‘not-I’ from the subject of the enunciation, and projection into the utterance; temporal disengagement, which postulates a ‘not-now’ distinct from the time of the enunciation; and spatial disengagement, which opposes a ‘not-here’ to the place of the enunciation (cf. Greimas and Courtés 1982, p. 88).
- 26.
Who is ‘the deictic center of the enunciation’ (Angermuller 2009, p. 122).
- 27.
That there is ‘an unprecedented time of crisis’ functions as a preconstructed that does not have to be explained anymore and is presented as common knowledge. The concept of the preconstructed goes back to Pêcheux (cf. e.g. Pêcheux 1982, p. 64).
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Beetz, J. (2016). The Materiality of Language and the Decentered Subject. In: Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59837-0_5
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