Structure and the Whole

309 Pages·2014·1.972 MB·English

by  Patrick Sériot

Patrick Sériot
Structure and the Whole
Semiotics, Communication
and Cognition
Editors
Paul Cobley
Kalevi Kull
Volume 12
Patrick Sériot
Structure
and the Whole
East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology
in the Origins of Structural Linguistics
Translated from French by Amy Jacobs-Colas
Originally published as Structure et totalité. Les origines intellectuelles du structuralisme en
Europe centrale et orientale
© Presses universitaires de France, Paris, 1999
2nd edition: © Les Éditions Lambert-Lucas, Limoges, 2012
This translation has been made possible by a generous grant of the The Berendel Foundation
(Oxford, UK) and of the Faculty of arts of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland).
ISBN 978-1-61451-730-6
e-ISBN 978-1-61451-529-6
ISSN 1867-0873
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2014 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin
Printing and binding: CPI buch bücher.de GmbH, Birkach
Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin
♾ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Acknowledgments | viii
Foreword (Kalevi Kull) | ix
Introduction | 1
1 Novelty and decentering | 1
2 Three scientific personalities | 3
3 “Suggestions from the East” | 5
4 On traditions | 7
5 Complementarity | 9
First part: Background
Chapter 1
The question of boundaries | 13
1 Boundaries in time: Are there paradigm shifts in linguistics? | 13
2 Boundaries in space: Russian science and European science, same
or other? | 15
3 The boundaries between science and ideology: What is at stake in
comparative epistemology | 21
4 The double helix | 22
Chapter 2
The Eurasianist movement | 24
1 A brief institutional and political history of the movement | 26
2 The main features of Eurasianist doctrine | 29
3 Missing borders, imagined borders | 46
Second part: Closure
Chapter 3
The space factor | 63
1 A brief overview of the question | 64
2 Jakobson’s phonological language union | 68
3 The “oil stain” metaphor | 78
vi       Contents
Chapter 4
Continuous and discontinuous | 91
1 Closure | 92
2 Impossible closure | 99
3 The overlap theory: synthesis or a backward move? | 110
4 Where does a thing begin and end? | 113
Chapter 5
Evolutionism or diffusionism? | 115
1 Marrism | 116
2 Bringing together apparently opposed theories | 118
3 Philosophical categories | 120
4 The enigma of resemblances | 135
Third part: Nature
Chapter 6
Affinities | 141
1 Two types of resemblance | 142
2 A disconcerting ambiguity: acquired or innate resemblances in
linguistics | 150
Chapter 7
The biological model | 159
1 Teleology or causality? | 160
2 Nomogenesis or chance occurrence? | 162
3 Convergences or divergences? | 167
4 The organic metaphor | 172
Chapter 8
The theory of correspondences | 175
1 “Development locale”: a non-deterministic object of
research? | 175
2 The “linkage” method | 182
3 Order and harmony | 190
Contents       vii
Fourth part: Science
Chapter 9
Personology and synthesizing the sciences | 211
1 Synthetic science | 211
2 “Personology” (personologija) | 223
Chapter 10
Holism: What is a whole? | 230
1 Through the looking glass | 230
2 Positivism and holism | 231
3 The question of naturalism | 234
4 Given object versus constructed object | 246
5 Structure or whole? | 248
Conclusion | 253
Appendix | 259
Bibliography | 261
Index of names | 281
Index of subjects | 290
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my friends and colleagues Jean-François Berthon, Jean Breuillard,
Pierre Caussat, Roger Comtet, Georges Nicolas, Gabriel Peyrachon, Jean-Sébas-
tien Sériot, and to many others for their kind support, remarks, and advice;
without them the book would not be what it is. I alone, of course, am responsible
for any errors it may contain.
Thanks also to my wife and children for patiently accepting that the time and
attention I needed to write the book could not be spent on them.
Foreword
At the creative diversity of borders, for under-
standing the structure and the whole
This is a special book on the history of ideas – and beyond. It unfolds the forma-
tion of structural linguistics in the 1920s and 1930s, featuring detailed research
on the Prague linguistic circle and demonstrating the intertwining of ideas in lin-
guistics, geography, and biology. But it also comprehends what ‘history of ideas’
may mean, how it may frame the world …
As Juri Lotman has emphasised, creativity and meaning-making are concen-
trated at the borders.¹ For instance, in the borders between East and West – which
is, in this case, Eastern Europe, or rather, the Intermediate Europe, Zwischeneu-
ropa. Both Prague and Tartu belong to Zwischeneuropa. Prague is the place where
the heroes of this story – semiotician and linguist Roman Jakobson, linguist and
cultural theorist Nikolai Trubetzkoy, and geographer Petr Savitsky – met and,
together with some other top scholars of the field, established the Prague School
of linguistics. Tartu is the place where I am writing this and where I first met with
Professor Patrick Sériot – at a Lotman-conference in 2002².
Each text can be read in many ways: “words do double duty or more”³. What
really attracted me, when first reading the Russian edition of Patrick Sériot’s
book⁴, was the discovery of the deep relationship between some theoretical ideas
1 Lotman, Juri 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, p. 131ff.
2 Conference “Cultural semiotics: Cultural mechanisms, boundaries, identities” dedicated to the
80th anniversary of Juri Lotman, from February 26 to March 2, 2002, in Tartu and Tallinn. Sériot
gave there a talk “The notion of “totality” in Ljubischev’s work from the point of view of the Tartu
Semiotic School”.
3 Bach, Kent 1998. Ambiguity. In: Craig, Edward (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
vol. 1. London: Routledge, 200.
4 The book was initially written and published in French (Sériot, Patrick 1999. Structure et
totalite: Les origines intellectuelles du structuralisme en Europe centrale et orientale. Paris:
Presses universitaires de France.) with a second edition in 2012 (Limoges: Lambert-Lucas). Its
translations have appeared in Russian (Серио, Патрик 2001. Структура и целостность:
об интеллектуальных истоках структурализма в Центральной и Восточной Европе:
1920–30–е гг. Москва: Языки славянской культуры.), in Czech (Sériot, Patrick 2002. Struk-
tura a celek: Intellektuální počátky strukturalismu ve střední a východní Evropě. Praha: Aca-
demia.), in Serbian (Серио, Патрик 2009. Структура и тоталитет: Интелектуално
порекло структурализма у средњоj и источноj Европи. Сремски Карловци: Издавачка
књижарница Зорана Стојановића).