ABSTRACT
Lest the foregoing chapters, on the passive and the mediated subject, have left a false impression, I think it best to state openly now what I hope has been clear throughout, that my emphasis on grammatical and syntactic detail does not imply an endorsement of “the linguistic turn” so central to literary theory and criticism over the last 40 or so years. Indeed, quite the opposite. So far from holding that the subject is merely “an effect of language,” I have argued that changes in the disposition of grammatical subjects indicate changes in the condition of a real, ontological subject, one that exists outside language.1 To the degree, then, that my argument has negative force, it is directed against what seems to me the linguistic reductionism of structuralist and post-structuralist theory. Rather than exploring the by-ways, I will address in this chapter a universally acknowledged fountainhead of that theory, the Course in General Linguistics (ca. 1910) of Ferdinand de Saussure. Likewise, I will turn directly to the fundamental tenet of Saussure’s linguistics, namely “the fact that linguistic signs are arbitrary,” an axiom which, according to Saussure, “no one disputes,” although no one but he has grasped its implications.2 It is precisely this “fact” that I intend to dispute, and therefore I shift my focus in this chapter from syntax to lexicon, from syntactic functions to the words that perform those functions and supply their specific content. More generally, I will reject the synchronic view of language that the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, if
1 For a telling account of the linguistic construction of subjectivity, see Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Under the influence especially of Lacan, Fineman maintains that “Shakespeare’s sonnets give off a powerful and … a genuinely new effect of subjectivity,” namely “the subjectivity effect required by a postidealist literariness” (25). Shakespeare turns away from “a poetics centered on the visionary fullness of subject and object” to “a poetics centered instead on the resonant hollowness of a fractured verbal self” (26).
