312
FRANCES C. FERGUSON
so that the book is best read as a preface which tantalizes us with hopes
for his future critical work. Ultimately he promises a theory which will
give an as yet unelaborated concept of history a privileged position.
Even though Jameson's full treatment of the concept of history
remains
in potentia,
however, it has certain actual effects upon
The
Prison-House of Language.
First, Jameson seems most comfortable and
informative when he treats the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and the
Russian Formalists, largely because he is able to see their work as already
historically complete. His account of the history (or prehistory) of
Structuralism begins on a note of appropriate drama with the work of
Saussure, a reluctant rebel who overturned the traditional philological
approach to language (in which he worked for much of his life) with an
insistence upon purely intrinsic analysis. Saussure's linguistic model of
purely synchronic terms (rather than of diachronic philological terms)
represented more than simply a new tool for linguistic analysis; it was
also a symptom of a more profound shift "from a substantive way of
thinking to a relational one," a shift we can see most forcefully at work
in Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, which renews our sense of the
sheer volatility of individual words by putting them into play in seem–
ingly endless varieties of "language-games." Saussure's basic distinctions
-- between diachronic and synchronic,
langue
and
parole,
form and
substance -- constituted a methodological repudiation of the empiri–
cism through which a language and its discrete elements had been seen as
preestablished, fixed objects for study. And, of course, the radically new
method produced radically new insights. Most significantly, Saussure's
treatment of language always involves an emphasis upon the difference
-- or distinctiveness --
between
the individual elements of language;
"in language there are only differences
without positive terms,"
so that
context becomes the preeminent factor in assigning a value or function
to a specific linguistic unit.
The Russian Formalists exploited the Saussurean insistence upon
difference or discontinuity in a literary theory based on Shklovsky's
concept of defamiliarization
(ostranenie)
,
in which the project of pro–
ducing a renewal of perception is seen as determining the very structure
of individual literary works. Within this emphasis on perception, which
Jameson instructively links with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty,
the basic concept of difference was fruitful in constructing larger pat–
terns as well. It generated for the Formalists a delimitation of the field of
literary study (the literary was to be seen as
parole
against the back–
ground of the general
langue
of the society) and a broad theory of
literary history, in which the model was one of discontinuity and abrupt
change rather than of direct and easy linear succession.
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