the body’s real: horst ruthrof and the search for the subject in semantics

7/27/2019 THE BODYS REAL: HORST RUTHROF AND THE SEARCH FOR THE SUBJECT IN SEMANTICS

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T H E BODYS RE AL: H ORST RU T H ROF AN D T H E

SE A R CH F O R T H E SU BJE CT IN SE M A N T I C S

Review by Peter McCarthyThe UTS Review, Vol. 7, No. 1, May 2001: 242246

Horst Ruthrof

Semantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the PostmodernMelbourne University Press 1998First published University of Toronto Press 1997Approx. 320 ppISBN 0 522 84812 5

The eponymous subject of Saul Bellows Herzogwrites to Martin Heideggerdemanding an explanation: Dear Doktor Professor Heidegger, I shouldlike to know what you mean by the expression fall into the quotidian.When did this fall occur? Where were we standing when it happened? 1Herzog, himself a Professor of Philosophy, is avowedly losing his mind he witnesses his own disintegration, all the while one corner of his mindcocked open to the world outside. His defiant rhetoric, composed in theform of dispatches to intelligentsia both living and dead, merely serves atragi-comic solicitude; he knows only too well the meaning of Heideggersfall into the everyday. While the rest of us subsist in our tranquillisedeverydayness, blissfully unaware of having suffered a tumble, Herzog beginsto glimpse his own fall into this alienated tranquillity and he doesnt likewhat he sees.2

Something of this interrogative motif may be seen in Horst RuthrofsSemantics and the Body: Meaning from Frege to the Postmodern. In this majorcontribution to the critical endeavour of semantics and, more broadly, thephilosophy of meaning, Professor Ruthrof has crafted a decisive missiveaddressed to a good gallery of philosophers, hermeneuticians, linguists,semiologists, and textual theorists who have come, during this past centuryand more, to influence the search for meaning. Not that this Professor (of

English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University, WesternAustralia) is losing his mind. His cut on the problem of meaning andlanguage is all too grounded, reasoned and erudite to suggest anything otherthan a very sound state in that regard. At a time when less than rigorous ifnot entirely lame, obscurantist or plainly mad incantations of continentalphilosophy have permeated textual and critical theory and their variants inthe wider fields in the Humanities and social sciences, Ruthrofs critical

1.Saul Bellow, Herzog (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1964), 55


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observations and eloquent renderings of the key themes in theories ofsignification are both illuminating and salutary.

Ruthrofs project emerges from the still contested field of representation,the very rock on which the church of present-day textual theory wasfounded. Here, even, we have a major difficulty. It is precisely this kind ofmetaphor which fails in the face of modern textual theorising. The apparentrejection of any representative foundation, any structure, stone or centre onwhich meaning may rest is pretty much the stock in trade of textual theoryas it exists in the Humanities today. While Ruthrof reads important andcritical traces in this tradition, from Derrida through Deleuze and Guattarito Lyotard and Baudrillard, he sees the critical culture emergent from thisrelatively recent and overdetermined theorising as contributing to tooradical a rejection of representation in all its forms.(xi) Where critics heretend to a sort of representative infinite regress, Ruthrof argues thistheoretical concern with essentially realist representation is merely one frontin the battle with meaning, that representation takes many turns and formswhich are key to all meaning and without which the connection betweensimple utterances and non-verbal signs cannot be made.

He discovers both heroes and villains in his gallery, from Gottlob Fregethrough C.S. Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure to Jacques Lacan and JeanBaudrillard, we discover the fathers, sons and daughters of the linguisticturn, now gone berserk.(xii) While he gives Frege, the centre-piece of hisproject, something of a reprieve, Lacan, he argues, has a lot to answer for.He misled an entire generation of feminist theorists and others intobelieving the unconscious was nothing if not linguistic.(xii) Thisobservation is key to Ruthrofs importance in this field. Its one that has nodoubt been made before but nearly always from critically (and putatively)politically conservative quarters, rarely from within the textual-theoreticalcircle itself.

Freges famous (for logicians and linguists) On Sense and Reference,penned late in the nineteenth century, had a profound influence onanalytical language philosophy. In Fregean sense, the subject can know forcertain what appears to their consciousness, they are in no doubt, in Fregesplanet example, that the morning star appears to them in the morningand that the evening star appears to them at night. These senses, howeverperceived as different phenomena, have the same reference in the planetVenus. The reference of both stars is the same, the sense somethingaltogether different. (The germ here of a critique of ideology tangible

views from tangible viewpoints, etc. may be glimpsed.)Ensuing language philosophy owes much to Freges distinction in thatsense contains the manner of the presentation of the sign. For him there isa sign (signifier), a sense (signified 1), and a reference (signified 2), the lastof which is equated with the signified object.(62) Here, however, Ruthrofpoints to what he calls Freges Error, a conflation of two kinds of sense,formal and natural language sense in which too geometric an analysisinheres. For Ruthrof, Frege here has done no more than equate sense witha signifier (signified1=signified2), which varies, and differentiate it from aformal signified, which remains identical (signifed 2=reference).(63) Farfrom dismissing Freges insight, he argues that, like Merleu-Ponty, he failed

to carry through his radical insight, falling on too analytical a frame. Ruthrof


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here moves to natural language where expressions move withouthesitation from expression to reference (actual or fictional, though Fregerejects the idea of fictional reference) (63). While a whole generation ofanalytical philosophy has perpetuated Freges distinction which, whileradical in itself, again does not go far enough. Ruthrofs insight here mayalso be seen to touch on the unglimpsed subtleties of an ideology andfurther the analyses of poststructuralism he will come to deliberate on.

To the linguistic turn taken in textual and critical theory post-WWII,Ruthrof opposes (adds, would be more apt) what he terms the corporealturn, a hermeneutic and no less heuristic approach to meaning andrepresentation whose legacy he rightly attributes to the embodyingphilosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For Ruthrof, despite his attention tosubjective and bodily positioning in philosophy, Merleau-Ponty didnthowever go far enough. His description of the signifying subject was stilltoo beholden to the notion of figure or form as it is perceived, as it appearsto consciousness, a tendency traceable to his influences in Husserlsphenomenology and here, despite his best intentions, Merleau-Pontyssubject is still missing from his account. He failed, argues Ruthrof, to drawthe radical consequences from his central insight for the study oflanguage.(xii) And here, precisely, is where Ruthrof comes in.

Ruthrof puts the human form and its movement through language andphilosophy at the heart of his own project, arguing traditional semanticsignores the body in the process of reading and constructing meaning. Heproposes an alternative to coldly analytical or syntactical models of meaningin language, arguing overly-formal, syntactic (what he callshomosemantic) approaches cannot relate, either in theory or practice, toour place in the world. This we can do, he argues, only by bumping into it.This parenthesised world is cautionary, nothing here is to be taken as givenand he concedes here a certain concurrence in his project with Derridasinsistence that there is nothing outside of the text, no out-side, unmediatedreferent to give us up to meaning, to the world. He shares Derridas viewof the insecurity of our intuitions, of the unstable nature of ourconstructions both verbal and non.

Semantics and the Bodyargues that language is nothing other than a structurewhich cannot speak, read or write unless it is alive to the possibility of non-linguistic signs and sign-making. The body must be brought, kicking andscreaming if needs be, back into semantics. He calls for a view to a multi-semiotic and inter-semiotic semantics, a more thorough-going attention

to meaning in which the bodily senses olfactory, tactile, gustatory, aural truly get a look in. But what might this corporeal signification look andfeel like to a generation, as he argues, misled by dogmatic linguisticformulations and prescriptions?

Walker Percy illustrates this better than most by way of rumination on howthe wordcame to the deaf, dumb and blind Helen Keller by a well-house inAlabama in 1887. The story is a popular one (aided no doubt, at least forme, by the movie The Miracle Workerwith Patty Duke as Helen). Under thetutelage of Anne Sullivan, Helen had up to this point learned to spell outwords of things desired or needed on the palm of Miss Sullivans hand


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which would then be delivered up to her this was a major move, Helenhad learned to respond like any other good animal, says Percy.3 Butsomething happened by that well-house that turned a critical corner forHelen. As water poured from the pump, Sullivan placed Kellers hand underthe cold stream of water, spelling the word water repeatedly on her hand.Keller later described it herself: I stood still, my whole attention fixedupon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as ofsomething forgotten a thrill of returning thought; and somehow themystery of language was revealed to me. I knew that w-a-t-e-r meant thewonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living wordawakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! ... I left the well-houseeager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a newthought.4 As Percy points out, if one had an inkling of what happened inthe well-house in Alabama in the space of a few minutes, one could knowmore about thephenomenonof language and about man himself than iscontained in all the works of behaviorists, linguists, and Germanphilosophers.5

He we have Patty Duke, real flowing water and the word water scribed onher arm. But what, asks Percy, is the nature of the mysterious event inwhich one perceives that this (stuff) is water? What is the naturalphenomenon signified by the simplest yet most opaque of all symbols, thelittle copula is? 6 Percy reads the Helen water(liquid) w-a-t-e-r (word)triad as irreducible and gives the name to the phenomenon, the Deltafactor, the Greek letter meaning irreducibility. An irreducible triangle thatholds Helen the body, mind and soul tightly in its signifying grasp. Twothings here are certain: first, we are no closer to understanding trulyhowthissignifying transmission occurs or what it really is. Second, and mostimportantly, we know that Helens part in the signifying process is irreducible

as Percy puts it, Helens magic Excalibur which she found in Alabamawater.7 Clearly, the body had to be brought back into it.

Ruthrof traces this irreducible body in meaning from L eibniz throughKant and Frege defining and grappling with issues of logic and formalsemantics. He traces the subtleties of meaning through Heidegger to thepoststructuralist enterprise. Here, argues Ruthrof with some criticalqualifications, the project of semantic recovery is abandoned to a radicalformalisation of semantics the subject is virtually lost while

3 Walker Percy, The Delta Factor: How I Discovered the Delta Factor Sitting at My

Desk One Summer Day in Louisiana in the 1950s Thinking About an Event in the Life ofHelen Keller on Another Summer Day in Alabama in 1887, The Message in the Bottle(NewYork: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1981), 34

4As cited in ibid., 34-5

5Ibid., 36

6Ibid., 40

7Ibid., 45


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methodological concern with more or less radical semantic elaborations isretained.(20) While Lacan is despatched early in the piece and only mildlyexcused for his heresy in Ruthrofs conclusion (he concedes a certain iffleeting attention to the body in Lacans linguistics (Berninis St Teresa, theimago, desire in the mirror stage, etc.) (22, 259), Derrida gets more than aguernsey in Ruthrofs account, his meticulous craftsmanship given someattention in the canon of French post/structuralism. Here, along with thelikes of other players such as Deleuze and Lyotard, the French game isgiven very serious attention.

This is not a bad thing and Ruthrofs reading has the double blessing ofboth criticising and illuminating these scholars. However, it may be arguedLacan is too easily abandoned in the pantheon, his influence on the majorplayers here nothing if not significant. Derrida himself defended Lacanagainst what he called Foucaults monologue of reason about madness 8,arguing Foucaults position was only tenable in light of Lacanian theorising.It is true their relationship was uneasy. Lacan, himself musing on the risingtide of the signifier, of poststructuralisms increasingly overdeterminedphilosophemes, piquantly included Derridas diffrance(with an a!)in thespume along with trace, gramme, et al.9 Lacan, no doubt bolstered by thephilosophical and political clout of Althusser, had and still has some cachetwithin the textual-critical circle. The alacrity with which certain andsubstantial philosophers and critics are still reading him against new politicaland cultural terrain is testimony to that.

That said, it is also true that theoretical masters and slaves alike get caughtup in their own contradictions, their readings overdetermined, lost toreflections of a merely fashionable surface. Ruthrof is rightly harsh on thefetishised surface phenomena of the postmodern, arguing that in the latter this touted end point of history, the very relation of syntax to semantics(semantics is lost to the overly-syntactic rendering of surface) a crisisinheres. Where reams of literature laud this surface phenomena in oftencelebratory and emancipatory terms (21), Ruthrof sees reflected merely acontrol base for a wholly divergent semantics, that of the powerstructures of international capital.(21) Postmodernism has gone radicalonly to extent that it has come to be defined by its own hyperbolicmetaphors, to believe its own press. As Ruthrof further points out,postmodern style is merely a surface semantics is in free play, rendering itboth aesthetically attractive and politically insidious.(238) Ruthrof pushesthis point home, arguing that this postmodern fascination with artifice,elides important questions about possible social and cultural conditions

which allow for such surface phenomena and, importantly, in whoseinterest it is to propagate such shiny surfaces. Ruthrof cites Jameson here,concurring that in attempting to theorize the postmodern we are trying totake the temperature of the age without instruments(245) the

8As cited in Translator=s Preface to Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), lxxii

9Lacan, as cited in ibid., lxxiii


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conditions which make the apparent parade of surface phenomena possibleremain invisible.

It is no coincidence that here too theoretical and critical players, howevermeticulous their craftsmanship, get turned out in the artifice. What ismissing from the postmodern account is precisely the subject needed toapprehend anymeaning that may in fact be lost to the surface that nowsimply reflects and re-reflects it. If there is no prior basis for critique,statistics, argues Ruthrof, no matter how elegant and complex, will not beable to provide one. Like statistics syntax needs to be told what to do ....The social is always available only as a semantics, its syntax being no morethan the formalization of its skeletal dynamics. Importantly, one can alwaysproceed from semantics to syntax but not vice versa. In the social, as innatural languages, one cannot reconstruct a semantics from a syntax.(229)

In all this Ruthrof professes to offer no counter-theory in his ownaccount of this struggle for semantics in the history of textuality. His criticalsweep however is wide and deep enough to ground his notion ofcorporeality in such a significant philosophical context as to put that idea torest. What emerges from Semantics and the Body is a powerful and lucidproject which does significantly more than it proposes. While attempting torestore the body to meaning, reintegrate the subject in semiotics andmodern philosophy (no mean feat in and of itself) Professor Ruthrofengages whole generations of critics and philosophers, tackling them in thevery modalities of their own game. A major work in its own right, thisvolume also serves as reliable guide to any who wish to either watch fromthe sidelines or get into the game themselves. Its attention to detail and thetight, dark alleys of over a century of difficult philosophy enliven thatpossibility for any who care to venture there.

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Peter McCarthyResearch AssociateUniversity of Technology, Sydney

the body’s real: horst ruthrof and the search for the subject in semantics

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