The Sound of Silence
Claude Lévi-Strauss, with whom Jakobson collaborated between 1942 and 1946 at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, and where Jakobson fled to from the World-War invasion of then Czechoslovakia, first to Scandinavia and then America, writes the preface to Jakobson’s six lectures on sound and meaning. His contribution corrects one aspect of Jakobson’s concepts that would have changed over time, but one Jakobson himself hazarded at the time of writing. Jakobson had asserted that language is the only system which is composed of elements which are signifiers and yet at the same time signify nothing. The biological revolution, Lévi-Strauss reveals, brought the discovery of the genetic code, and he credits Jakobson as one of the first to marvel at the similarity between the genetic information system and that of verbal information, the verbal codes of all human languages.
Here we have hints of the agalma of the spoken word, relation to time, and the criss-cross of the axes of conjectural science and scientific certainty; space and time, linearity and depth, succession and simultaneity. In his 1955 paper Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances, where he explores selection and combination in the linguistic sign, together with metaphor and metonymy, Jakobson proposed that in any given language there exist coded word groups, the meaning of which cannot be derived by adding together the meanings of its lexical constituents, ergo, the whole is not equal to the sum of its parts. Jakobson insists that a sequence of phonemes is not a simple mechanical aggregation but a structure which must manifest certain additional indices.
He returned to Saussure in the six lectures who stated that should we “record on film all the movements of the mouth and larynx in producing a chain of sounds…..we would not know where one sound began and where another ended”. He understood that to study the phonatory act, phonetic units, is to observe something extrinsic being unconsciously brought in to play.
Jakobson confronts the “mystery of the idea embodied in phonic matter, the mystery of the word”. The word, he says, is a unity of two components, two sides, sound and meaning, a combination of signifier and signified. Already we are drawn to the psychoanalytic parallels of phonic matter, the stuff of the unconscious and the dialectical oppositions latent therein. Jakobson goes on to describe phonic elements as units bearing signifying value, quanta of language, but cautions that these elements are of no value in their own right.
Phonology investigates speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, sounds as signifiers. The phoneme, an element at the service of meaning, is itself devoid of meaning. At the service of meaning! An investigation of the function of speech and language. Jakobson states that we speak in order to be heard and that it is in order to be understood that we seek to be heard. Roman Jakobson opens his first lecture with the example presented in Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven; that of the sound of the closing word, “Nevermore”. He labours the final ‘r’, the most producible consonant, one that projects into the future or even eternity, while announcing negation of the future, negation for ever. His vignette calls to mind a sound that lingered long beyond being uttered at an event in 2018 held by the Association of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland, where extracts of Herman Merville’s Benito Cereno were read aloud. It was from a passage between the two lead protagonists of the novella, the tortured captive Don Benito and the unquestioning Captain Delano, a man of “singularly undistrustful good-nature”. It reads as follows;
(Don Benito replied) ‘The negro.’
There was silence, while the moody man sat, slowly and unconsciously gathering his mantle about him, as if it were a pall.
In language there is neither signified without signifier, nor signifier without signified. The connection is not arbitrary, it is a necessary relation based on contiguity, that is what is outside and what is inside, external and internal. The intimacy of the connection between sounds and meaning of a word express a desire by the speaker to add an internal relation to the external relation, resemblance to contiguity, to complement the signified by a rudimentary image. We arrive at sound symbolism, the latent correspondence in the meaning of a word and towards pairs of words with two opposite meanings. Speaking of our interior speech, Jakobson says the words are not composed of emitted sounds but of their acountic and motor images, and as a rule, language is not for us an end in itself but only a means, the elements of language beneath our conscious deliberation. We might think of how a joke says what it has to say in too few words, something left out to allow more in, it goes without saying as the idiom goes, expressed in absentia, or Freud’s image of pack-ice in the dream work.
Whether it be successive or simultaneous combinations, aggregation does not say it all. This is why Jakobson moves away from Saussure’s linear character of the signifier in his principles of the linguistic sign. He credited Charles Bally’s determination that a sign can accumulate different signifieds simultaneously. Saussure it seems struggled with his own axes of simultaneity and succession, trying to overcome simultaneity by a virtual mnemonic series, therefore conceptually preserving linearity.
Jakobson’s addition was to say that the signifier makes use of both axes, that the time factor itself becomes a value. Just as Lacan declared the objet petit a his private property (though there is no private property in language), the rest inherited from psychoanalytic thinkers before him, Jakobson’s contribution is to add a layer of addition, an extension to the meaning of the word.