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J arneson's critique of both Saussurean linguistics and Russian
Formalism is, basically, that their formulations are incapable of dealing
with diachrony in any meaningful way. Their sense of time is, for him,
too distant from the time in which people live, in which readers read.
Saussure, for instance, was finally incapable of dealing with the mysteri–
ous process in which sentences are built up, because syntax inevitably
eluded his rigorous methodological insistence upon a study of purely
synchronic structures (as Chomsky has repeatedly argued in developing
his own syntactic structures). And Jarneson feels that even the perspec–
tive of the Russian Formalists was insufficiently historical : by seeing
literary change as a uniform mechanism the sarne at all times and all
places, the Formalists ended up "turning diachrony into mere appear–
ance and undermining any genuine historical awareness of the changing
of forms."
After these cogent insights, Jameson's sense of history becomes
more troublesome for his treatment of the Structuralists, With Saus–
surean linguistics and Russian Formalism, J arneson's historical perspec–
tive enables him to work a certain irony upon their models: they could
not adequately deal with history, but history enables us to deal with
them. With Structuralism, the availability of that irony is in question
because the limits of Structuralism remain to be determined. And Jame–
son's exposition is inevitably vexed by the possibility that the Structural–
ists' radical critique of traditional concepts of history will itself generate
a theory of history which might be persuasive to him.
After nicely formulating the distinctiveness of Structuralism in
terms of "its insistence on the signifier," J arneson offers intelligent
though rather brie f discussions of such diverse figures as Levi-Strauss,
Lacan, Greimas, Barthes, and Derrida. And it is with the psychologist
Lacan and the philosopher Derrida that Jameson appears most engaged
and engaging. Their attention to the total sign itself, to the process of
signification, strikes him as the most thorough working out of the
Structuralist enterprise. Particularly appealing to Jameson is Derrida's
recent questioning of the privileged position of the very structures of
Structuralism -- a highly reflective elaboration of his earlier critique of
the metaphysics of "presence" attached to the word, in the form of the
traditional belief that words can be - - or could once, before the fall,
have been -- what they mean. Derrida's critique of Structuralism is,
Jameson asserts, the resu lt of his knowledge that "to choose to speak of
reality in terms of linguistic systems, to re-express the problems of
philosophy in the new linguistic terminology, is of necessity an arbitrary
and absolute decision, one which makes of language itself a privileged
mode of explan ation." Even the nearly endless regress of Structuralist
thought has a suspicious fixity to it.
