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First person plural: Roman Jakobson’s grammatical fictions

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Abstract

Roman Jakobson, who had left Russia in 1920 and in 1941 took refuge in the USA from the Nazis, was one of the main figures in post war linguistics and structuralism. Two aspects of his work are examined in this article. Firstly, Jakobson purifies his linguistic theory of pragmatic references. Secondly, he develops his own diplomatic mission of mediating between East and West. In this article, I argue that these two aspects did not develop independently from one another. Instead I claim that his theory is designed to slip through the Iron Curtain, while at the same time providing the means to analyse ways of acting politically by using language. This argument is unfolded in two steps, each consisting of two parts. First, I compare the theory of pronominal expressions as developed by Emil Benveniste to Jakobson’s theory of shifters. While Benveniste focuses on the relation of language and its subject using language, Jakobson introduces a model of communication to allow maximal formalisation of language. According to this even the category of person can be freed from its reference to a subject which would be understood as having a place in space and time. Then, Jakobson’s theory of shifters is studied in relation to his analyses of poetry. For this, two examples are chosen: Jakobson’s text on two poems by Russian poet Alexandr Blok, and his text on a poem by Bertold Brecht. In both texts, the theory of shifters—and the alleged purification from pragmatic aspects of language use ensuing from this theory—is challenged by the simple fact that they focus on the pronoun of the first person plural. According to Jakobson, the category of number does not belong to the shifters. Rather, number quantifies participants of the related event. The pronoun ‘we’ is at the same time a shifter and a non-shifter, as it refers to the speech event and the related event. Thus the pronoun ‘we’ opens up the possibility to include or exclude the participants of a communicative situation, and thereby enables the speaker to act socially or even politically by using language. The article concludes by coming back to the historical situation in which Jakobson developed his analyses of poetry. Analysing poetry seems to have been a passe-partout for him, a seemingly harmless subject that allowed him to get a foot in the door of remote and secluded lecture halls.

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Notes

  1. For biographical information see Rudy 1999a, b.

  2. Jakobson 1971a includes an editorial note mentioning the context in which it came to be written: “Prepared in Cambridge, Mass., 1956, for the Project ‘Description and Analyses of Contemporary Standard Russian’” (p. 146).

  3. Benveniste 1956.

  4. Jakobson 1971a, p. 131.

  5. See, for instance, Waugh 1976, particularly p. 24.

  6. Jakobson 1971a, p. 130.

  7. Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, p. 76.

  8. Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, p. 77.

  9. In this sense Jakobson was both present in and absent from the Soviet Union. He enjoyed a broad, intense and even sustained reception according to Gamkrelidze/Elizarenkova/Ivanov (1976); however no edition of Jakobson’s writings was published in the Soviet Union. Igor' Mel'čuk failed in his attempt to publish a collection of Jakobson’s writings in Russian translation at the end of the 1960s. “RJ returned to Russia” (Mel'čuk 1976) only when, in 1985, a selection of his work was finally published in Russian.

  10. Benveniste (1971) p. 219.

  11. Benveniste, op. cit., p. 220.

  12. Benveniste, op. cit., p. 219.

  13. Benveniste (1956) p. 34.

  14. Benveniste (1971) p. 217.

  15. Benveniste 1971, p. 218.

  16. See Benveniste 1971, p. 218.

  17. Benveniste 1971, p. 219.

  18. Benveniste 1971, p. 218.

  19. First published in Journal de Psychologie, juillet-septembre 1958.

  20. Benveniste 1971, p. 224.

  21. Benveniste 1971, p. 226.

  22. Benveniste 1971, p. 226.

  23. Jakobson 1971a, p. 132.

  24. Jakobson 1971a, p. 130.

  25. Jakobson 1971a, p. 130.

  26. Cf. Kay 2000, pp. 297–310, and Gerovitch 2002, pp. 91–94.

  27. Jakobson 1971b, pp. 558f.

  28. See Fehr 1999, p. 1.

  29. In the case of Roman Jakobson, Gerovitch lists the following replacements: “Instead of Ferdinand de Saussure’s opposition langue and parole, Jakobson began using code and message; he substituted subcodes for styles, and replaced contextual variations with redundant features; encoding and decoding supplanted production and comprehension; and speaker and listener became encoder and decoder.” (Gerovitch 2002, p. 92).

  30. Cf. Shannon and Weaver 1949, p. 44.

  31. See Gerovitch 2002.

  32. Jakobson 1971a, p. 133.

  33. Jakobson 1971a, p. 134.

  34. Lyons 1968, p. 277.

  35. On the marked/unmarked distinction, cf. Jakobson 1971c, p. 3. For criticism of the distinction cf. Corbett 2000, pp. 153ff.

  36. Jakobson 1971a, p. 134.

  37. Jakobson 1971c, p. 9.

  38. Benveniste 1971, p. 217.

  39. Foucault 1972, p. 92.

  40. Foucault 1972, p. 92.

  41. Foucault 1972, p. 95.

  42. Foucault 1972, p. 95.

  43. Cf. Foucault 1984: “[…] a text always bears a number of signs that refer to the author. Well known to the grammarians, these textual signs are personal pronouns, adverbs of time and place, and the conjugation of verbs.”

  44. Foucault 1984, p. 101.

  45. The similarity between The Archaeology of Knowledge and Benveniste’s writings has been established by Agamben 2002, p. 137ff.

  46. Foucault 1989, p. 9f.

  47. Foucault 1989, p. 11.

  48. Jakobson 1981c, p. 88.

  49. Jakobson is quoting Edward Sapir, Language (New York, 1921), p. 89. See Jakobson 1981c, p. 88.

  50. Jakobson 1981c.

  51. Foucault 1972, pp. 227–228 (“The Discourse on Language”).

  52. Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 108.

  53. Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, 77.

  54. Quoted in Jakobson 1981c, p. 95.

  55. Jakobson 1981a, p. 563. Cf. most recently the commentary by Sebastian Donat in Jakobson 2007a.

  56. Jakobson 1981a, p. 567.

  57. Quoted in Jakobson 1981b, p. 676. Cf. on this analysis by Jakobson most recently the commentary by Hendrik Birus in Jakobson 2007b.

  58. Foucault 1972, pp. 93–94.

  59. Cf. Brecht 1998, p. 67.

  60. Jakobson 1981b, p. 660.

  61. Jakobson 1981b, p. 662.

  62. Jakobson 1981b, p. 669.

  63. Jakobson 1981b, p. 669.

  64. Jakobson 1981b, p. 669.

  65. Foucault 1972, p. 92.

  66. Jakobson and Pomorska 1983, p. 77.

  67. Jakobson 1981c, p. 89.

  68. According to Vjačeslav Ivanov’s memoirs Jakobson saw himself as an academic diplomat (Ivanov 1999, p. 220).

  69. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 264f. Translation slightly changed by the editor.

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors, an anonymous reviewer, Franziska Thun-Hohenstein and Armin Schäfer for helpful comments; the Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science and the VolkswagenStiftung for support. Translated by Steph Morris.

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  1. Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Boltzmannstraße 22, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    Julia Kursell

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Kursell, J. First person plural: Roman Jakobson’s grammatical fictions. Stud East Eur Thought 62, 217–236 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-010-9115-x

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