Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and Literary Humanism

4. Reading the World: Structural Analogy

67 Beyond our most elemental responses and biological functions, there is no human acting, thinking, understanding, or organizing separate from language. Our talking and writing are not simply called in to represent things; they actually make, perform, and enact them. To use the language of modern discourse theorists, language is constitutive as well as communicative of consciousness and culture. The meaningful connection of language to the world comes not through individual forms or structures, which are for the most part asymmetrical, but through internal processes and features of design. There are few problems of human culture and understanding that do not have an analogue in the process and design of language. Consequently, there may be ways of learning from language that provide a greater understanding of these problems. These are some of the views about language that lie at the heart of the argument for structural analogy and its claims of symmetry. Clearly, structural analogy incorporates insights from a number of modern language philosophies, and experienced readers will recognize an element of structuralism, a heterogeneous set of theories which share the principle that “cultural forms, belief systems and ‘discourses’ of every kind can best 4 Reading the World Structural Analogy 68 readinG tHe World be understood by analogy with language” (Norris 855). Structural analogy also owes something to British ordinary language philosophy, which spawned what has come to be known as the linguistic turn in modern philosophy (see Rorty). Among its most influential practitioners were the Austrian-born British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the British language philosopher J. L. Austin. The most ambitious and audacious claim of ordinary language philosophy is that many of the traditional problems of philosophy are essentially questions about how to use words. The more modest and demonstrable sort of claim is that every serious investigation ought to begin with an analysis of language. This claim presupposes a connection between linguistic structures and conceptual problems , so that by seriously examining language we have a chance of looking “not merely at words . . . but also at the realities we use the words to talk about: We are using a sharpened awareness of words to sharpen our perception of . . . the phenomena” (Philosophical Papers 182). Structural analogy also owes a good deal to American pragmatism, fathered by the great nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist William James, but represented most notably in recent decades by the American philosopher Richard Rorty. Although pragmatists would affirm the constitutive nature of language, they would be troubled by the notion of symmetry being used here. To say that language in some way mirrors realities or structures of reality outside of language is to imply that such realities exist, and most modern pragmatists have concluded that they do not. Closer to the view being presented here is the work of the great American literary and cultural critic Kenneth Burke, who spent a lifetime exploring analogies between the designs and processes of discourse and the structures of human and social problems. In fact, several passages in Burke’s work The Rhetoric of Religion are highly influential to the arguments being presented, even evoking the term structural analogy itself. Finally, elements of the structural analogy view are embodied or implied in some of the traditions of ancient rhetoric, specifically in the writings of Cicero, and it was in recognition of the insights within that tradition that scholars like Burke sought to revive and draw attention to them. the form/meaning analogy To some readers, structural analogy may seem nearly as amorphous as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s claim in the previous chapter about language and imagination. The superiority of structural analogy over that claim, however , is precisely its greater specificity. I want to look, therefore, at some readinG tHe World 69 specific examples of just what it means to say that there exist human problems that have analogues in structures or processes of language. An initial example can be drawn from the most obvious and pervasive feature of linguistic organization: the pairing of forms to meanings. At every level, from a simple cry, to a sentence, to a play or novel, we encounter a form or structure on the one side, and a meaning on the other side. Modern transformational grammarians have shown that the relationships among such pairings are much more intricate and systematic than traditional accounts of structure were able to demonstrate. It is well-known that a single, basic message or deep structure can...