Discourse, Figure

Effect of Thickness in the System

90 Effect of Thickness in the System Once evacuated from the spoken and written chain through the elimination of the expressive function of sounds and lines, does opacity not retreat to a higher level, in signification? Is there not a thickness of the signified, in the very existence of words; for example, in the possibility of breaking them down into monemes?1 And is this not what the theorist stumbles upon when discovering that the lexical system, as opposed to the syntactic system, has the property of being an “open”inventory, of taking on new terms and abandoning old ones—all of which suggests the metaphor of a semantic field, and therefore of a horizon on which significations would come into relief and disappear in turn, like things? If an inventory is not limited, which indeed seems to be the case with lexical monemes,2 it would be difficult to deny signification an evanescent and intangible character that would prevent the term that carries it from occupying a fixed place in a system of oppositions. Signification would thus find itself pushed out beyond the system of significative units,inasmuch as it could embody any one of these units,then abandon it,only to invest another, without ever seeming to be frozen in an invariant set of oppositions.It would therefore be tempting to sideline the strictly systematizing pronouncement of the Prague School—“Since in lexical consciousness words are opposed to one another and mutually coordinated, they constitute systems that are formally analogous to morphological systems and likely, as such, to be available to the linguist’s inquiry”3 —in favor of the definition of the linguistic field given by Jost Trier in 1934: “Fields are linguistic realities existing between single words and the total vocabulary; they are parts of a whole and resemble words in that they combine into some higher unit, and the vocabulary in that they resolve themselves into smaller units.”4 Without going any further, these two formulations allow one to grasp 91 effect of thickness in the system what lies beneath the question of signification. Josef Vachek establishes the formal analogy between the system of significative units and that of distinctive units,but he does so with reference to the speaker’s experience of vocabulary . No hiatus here between the speaking subject’s lexical consciousness and the most unconscious system of all, the phonological system: the phoneme’s transparency is positioned on a par with the thickness of the word. Hence the absence of anything like the idea of a field. This idea refers to a finitude in which the word’s openness onto its surroundings and the system’s closure are combined.5 Notwithstanding, it is the one who introduces this concept in linguistic reflection,Trier, who carries the formalist ambition the furthest in the study of semantic fields.6 What remains in question, for us at least, in these curious torsions is the localization of the level of language [langage] where the effect of thickness of signification is produced. This localization can occur in two orders, of language [langue] or of speech [parole] (to follow Saussure’s terminology); and in each of these two orders, it can occur at various levels: in the order of speech, at the level of significative unit—word, sentence, and discourse; and in the order of language [langue], at the level of paradigmatic groupings—“fields,” subsystems, and lexical system. Here we will only pinpoint an anxiety and an uncertainty in Saussure’s reflection that foreshadow his followers’ hesitations. His conception of structure leads him to subsume all of signification under articulation, that is, under the system of intervals between terms or system of values. Yet, at the same time, he does not give up on an idea of signification that opposes the latter to value as the vertical is opposed to the horizontal or depth is to surface . What could pass as a weakness for a linguist bent on limiting his study to the structure of language [langue], that is, the temptation to introduce the thickness of the sign in the transparency of the system, is in fact much more than a mistake or a sign of naïveté. Rather, a fact, which one could call transcendental , thus comes to light: that every discourse constitutes its object in depth.When this discourse is the linguist’s, and she or he takes signification as the object of study, she or he spontaneously thematizes it as something thick, and is led...