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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 28-45 Unintentionally Speaking: In his attempt to redefine the coordinates of the field of literary theory, Paul de Man engaged in a series of memorable encounters with the leading figures of the discipline, of which two volumes of his criticism, Blindness and Insight and The Resistance to Theory, are lasting documents. One by one, proponents of various manifestations of "aesthetic ideology" are found wanting in theoretical rigour and — to a differing degree but without exception — they are advised to abandon the extra-textual framing of meaning and to replace it with the method of "mere reading" that would focus on the materiality of language-as-signifier and its workings prior to the moment of (historically or aesthetically grounded) signification. Among the encounters, there are a few that might be considered to be of special interest, as they present duels with opponents situated in too great a proximity for comfortable maneuvering. On these occasions, de Man appears to be compelled to misread the work of the theorist in question in order to set himself apart and secure his own position. The deconstruction of Derrida's De la grammatologie is, in this respect, paradigmatic. As for some of the other instances, they may be less striking, since they often take place in passages that are hidden within discussions of broader issues. Such is also the case of Jan Mukařovský, the leading figure of a movement devoted to implementing "dynamic formalism" in the field of literary studies, known as the Prague School of Structuralism. De Man deals with Mukařovský's work, as it were, in a mere paragraph, buried within his treatment of the Konstanz School of Rezeptionsästetik. The asymmetry of eminence, nevertheless, is not necessarily directly proportional to the theoretical prominence of the two encounters in question. As a matter of fact, the celebrated "Blindness and Insight" essay may be, after all, but a tame instance of a theoretical gigantomachia, for regardless of what side of the divide the reader happens to find herself on, the basic mechanism of deconstruction does not seem to be put in question at any given moment of the argument. There is no call for a radical re-definition of the object of the critic's attention, no need for a [end page 28] ground-breaking overhaul of the protocols of reading; an ever-more radical and rigorous lectio is all that de Man seems to be after, delving deeper and deeper into the bottomless abyss of negative cognition as he accelerates the oscillation of the allegories of reading. In the inconspicuous non-encounter with Mukařovský, on the other hand, considerably more may be at stake. Firstly, the poetics of the Prague School is more sophisticated and complex than the naive proto-formalism for which it is occasionally mistaken,[1] and it would be fatuous to renounce it, tout court, as a specimen of a genre without granting it the right to be read critically on its own terms. Furthermore, during the last years before its forced demise, Prague structuralism, in a certain sense, turned against itself and began probing the very grounds on which the edifice of its theory was erected, producing negative knowledge that was comparable, in its radicality, to de Man's deconstructive insight. It thus may be of more than merely historical interest to foreground the implications of de Man's misreading of Mukařovský's aesthetic theory, for the encounter may shed some new light on the perennial questions concerning the task of literary scholarship. If the aesthetic theory conceived under the auspices of the Prague Linguistic Circle (1926—48) is to be simply labeled as structuralist, it should, for various reasons, always be in collocation with the adjective dynamic. However unified the noetic stance of the Prague School, however rigorous its scientific outlook, it never ossified into a dogmatic doctrine unified around a set of unchangeable truths. The School's attempt to implement a structuralist approach to the study of literature (and art in general) was at once open-minded and open-ended. It began as a bid to found a systematic study of the literary phenomenon and as such, it defined itself against positivistic determinism on the one hand and theories of expression on the other. In contrast to the subjectivism of impressionistic criticism, with its emphasis on singular sensitivity and the uniqueness of any act of interpretation, Prague structuralists believed that literary scholarship should conceive of itself as cumulative (i.e., progressive, systematic, objective).[2] Yet cumulative research should not be mistaken for doctrinarism — all findings, precisely to the extent to which they are objective, are constantly open to a process of critical re-evaluation and can be transformed (or even discarded) when proven wrong by new research. Furthermore, the Prague School's project is dynamic also because of its treatment of the central concept of structure, which sets it apart from [end page 29] previous formalistic research. To be sure, Russian formalism is among the essential, formative sources of Prague structuralism — the reception of the Russian School's achievements took place in Prague decades before formalism's renaissance in France, and it was facilitated, among other factors, by a certain degree of personal continuity between the two projects. As for Mukařovský himself, he never failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to the Russian research. Yet, in terms of their theoretical implications, the central concepts of the two projects do not overlap, and it would be a mistake to overemphasize the continuity between formalist and structuralist thought.[3] Generally speaking, the term structure — like the contemporary holistic concepts of Welt and Gestalt — invokes a totality, "the parts of which acquire a special character by entering it" (Mukařovský 1978, 3). Thinking in terms of structure allows us to go beyond the empiricism of sensual perception (or phenomenalism, in de Manian terms) without resorting to transcendental ideas that would, vis-à-vis particular aesthetic articulations, function as immutable and a-historical controlling principles. What makes Mukařovský's take on the notion of structure original is his insistence on the dynamic nature of the relationship between the structure's components. A structure proper, then, "is only such a set of elements, the internal equilibrium of which is constantly disturbed and restored anew and the unity of which thus appears to us as a set of dialectic contradictions" (4). Mukařovský's dynamization of the structure leads to two complementary consequences: first, his version of literary formalism cannot be identified with essentialism in literary studies; second, the very variability of the structure in question calls for a rigorous thematization of the function of the reader (or "perceiver," in Mukařovský's terminology) in the process of meaning-formation. In de Man's words, aesthetic essentialism materializes when "the study of the production or of the structure of literary texts is pursued at the expense of their reception, at the expense of the individual or collective patterns of understanding that issue from their reading and evolve in time" (1986, 57; emphasis added). Mukařovský's work, even when focused on the "internal composition" of the literary text, never aimed at producing a categorical taxonomy of the poetic discourse that would align formal components with stable aesthetic functions. Instead, under the influence of de Saussure's structural linguistics, Mukařovský upheld the notion of the differential validity of all components: the elements per se are not endowed with stable meaning and their structural validity must always be derived from a particular constellation of which they are but a part. Furthermore, since any signifying element can serve a variety of functions and, conversely, the same function [end page 30] could be fulfilled by various signifiers, the dream of a one-to-one correlation between a signifying element and its immutable, static meaning is a void one.[4] Mukařovský's position inevitably engenders a question concerning the status of the textual constellations. His theory still assumes the permanence of the structure's identity, this permanence, however, is derived from the material being of the work as a sum of signifiers, rather than from the identity of its meaning: "That which endures is only the identity of a structure in the course of time, whereas its internal composition — the correlation of its components — changes continuously" (1978, 4). As a result, it becomes necessary to thematize both the issue of reception and the issue of diachronicity. Consequently, in the 1930s, Mukařovský is preoccupied with the issue of literary evolution, thematizing the workings of literary history in terms of a collision between intrinsic and extrinsic factors.[5] This shift towards a more sociologically informed outlook is not to be identified with a move towards (extrinsic) determinism. For Mukařovský, the influence of external factors on the development of the immanent field of literature is to be understood, from the perspective of literature's autonomy, as a contingency (náhoda), rather than a necessity. Determinism is an impossibility within the Prague School's theoretical framework, for it emphasizes the semantic nature of the work of art: extrinsic factors do influence the concrete form of literary evolution, but only in a mediated way, for they are always filtered through the immanent evolutionary possibilities of literature. The emphasis on the holistic approach to literary study thus only increases — no aspect of the literary process can be determined directly by an extrinsic factor, whether historical, societal, or other.[6] The functional model of structure conceives of components only in relation to the whole (rather than in relation to their particular reference or determinant); consequently, literary structure can relate to non-literary phenomena solely as one totality to another. The totalization of individual literary structures takes place against the backdrop of literary norms, themselves structures of a higher level. But norms — being of the order of nomos, rather than physis — are not (eternally) given. In Mukařovský's aesthetic theory, norms are not only dynamic, and thus constantly evolving, but also capable of existing in parallel with each other. Since the particular organization of a structure's components can arise only against the background of these norms, the stability of any interpretation is necessarily merely provisional. This is not to say that Mukařovský views reception as an "anything goes" activity. Although he insists that "the existence proper of a structure [...] does not lie in material works (which are only its external manifestations) but in [the collective] [end page 31] consciousness" (77), he remains a proponent of "noetic materialisms" and holds that reality exists independently from the subject of knowledge. Structuralist theory presupposes a formal objectivity; it focuses on the composition of the work-as-sign, rather than on the idiosyncratic mental state of the artist or the reader. This presupposition does not preclude a dynamic comprehensive approach to analyzing the literary process; most importantly, it does not prevent change, nor does it pre-empt the perceiver's interpretive activity (as we shall see in section III, below). It remains, however, a necessary condition of any structuralist project. Mukařovský's complex structuralist theory clearly eschews the one-sidedness associated with other modes of criticism, and, in particular, it avoids the usual pitfalls of traditional formalist approaches. Furthermore, in terms of its conceptual make-up, it differs substantially from the static project of French structuralism. It thus remains to be seen how the criticism that the post-structuralists directed against their French predecessors may relate to the teachings of the Prague group. II. The relation of de Man's deconstructive stance to formalistically oriented approaches to studying literature is, expectedly, two-fold: he is both an inheritor (someone who was trained in the practice of close reading and who, to a large extent, assumed the techniques of formalist analysis as his own) and an over-comer (someone who progresses further than most of his formalist teachers and colleagues by unflaggingly adhering to the fundamental principles of formalist research). On a general level, de Man shares with Mukařovský a set of beliefs concerning the nature of literary study. He, too, holds that literary theory comes into being "when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is to say historical and aesthetic, considerations or, to put it somewhat less crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value prior to their establishment — the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline of critical investigation to consider its possibility and its status" (de Man 1986, 7). Accordingly, he attempts to dissociate literary theory from aesthetics, which he considers to be "a phenomenalism of a process of meaning and understanding" (7), and thus "part of a universal system of philosophy rather than a specific theory" (8). Literary theory is, conversely, identified as a discourse that finds itself "outside philosophy" and even "in conscious rebellion against the weight of [the philosophical] tradition" (8). [end page 32] De Man clearly leans towards the linguistically informed branch of literary studies, giving due credit to the role that structural linguistics played in the field of literary theory. At the same time, he is wary of a certain tendency in linguistically oriented research to take for granted the possible continuity between specifically linguistic patterns at work in literary texts and their aesthetic signification.[7] In the particular context of "Reading and History," the binary of literary theory and aesthetics is redrawn in terms of a distinction between hermeneutics (a meaning-oriented, extra-linguistic process based in the faculty of understanding) and poetics (a formalist, intrinsically linguistic approach to the study of the production of meaning).[8] Initially, de Man ranks the literary theorists associated with the Prague Linguistic Circle as primarily poeticians. He identifies their concept of literary language as being inherently semantic, and notes that "the concept of literary sign implies an element of indeterminacy and arbitrariness" (63). Before long, however, he also detects a will to totalization, if not an entire aesthetic ideology inscribed in the School's project, for the polysemy of the literary sign is, in his opinion, "mastered by inscribing it within the historical and social continuum of particular receptions or 'concretizations'" (63). What is more, the foregrounding of the process of signification in literary works is aesthetically charged. Consequently, "the arbitrary and conventional aspects of the sign acquire value as aesthetic features and it is by this same conventionality that the collective, social, and historical dimensions of the work can be reintegrated" (64). In relation to the brief sketch of Mukařovský's theory in the previous section of our text, de Man's indictment of Prague structuralism may sound rather puzzling. He does not seem to register the variability of the work's "collective dimension," nor does he take into account the fact that liaisons between literature on the one hand and society and history on the other are virtually suspended in Mukařovský's work. It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss his criticism off-hand as being simplistic and uninformed. De Man's assessment may be based solely on the anthologized material available to him exclusively in translation and, consequently, it could not profit from a systematic analysis of Mukařovský's oeuvre in its entirety, considering its dynamic character and subtle shifts of emphases. Nonetheless, de Man's suspicion of philosophical and, more narrowly, aesthetic systems enables him to read beyond the hermeneutic message of the text under scrutiny. There is, indeed, a circularity in Mukařovský's argument: to read a text as autotelic, i.e., with a suspended referential function, is to read it as a work of art, and vice versa; the possibility of aesthetic totalization is thus the starting point as well as the end point of aesthetic perception. The concepts of to-[end page 33]tality and closure may have been redefined, but certainly not abandoned. De Man is thus justified in claiming that Mukařovský's conception still relies on aesthetic totalization, in whose absence it cannot function. One has to ask, however, whether Mukařovský further radicalizes his investigations of the concept of totality, and, in particular, whether he conceives of any "exteriority" to semantic unification that would have to be faced in the process of aesthetic interpretation. To answer the two-pronged question one should turn to Mukařovský's most radical and sustained discussion of this complex issue, which appears in his 1943 essay on "Intentionality and Unintentionality in Art." The position of the work of art vis-à-vis the issue of intentionality appears, at first, to be rather paradoxical. On the one hand, "[t]he work of art stands out among human products as the prime example of intentional creation," while on the other one, it is "strikingly apparent to the more careful observer that there is much in the work of art as a whole and in art in general which defies intentionality and which in particular cases exceeds the given intention" (Mukařovský 1978, 89). In addition, unintentionality is often poised at the very centre of a philosophy of aesthetics, such as in the case of Plato (the theory of divine inspiration), the German Romantic Aesthetics (the theory of genius), or psychoanalytical criticism (the theory of the subconscious).[9] The element of unintentionality does not enter the process of artistic creation solely via the maker. Accidents of history or various external factors may not only alter the shape of the artifact, disfiguring the artist's original intention, but can even overwrite the aesthetic message in such a way that they become an integral part of it.[10] It is understandable, then, that Mukařovský urges us to "free ourselves radically from the psychological considerations" (93) and thematize the issue of intentionality and unintentionality not in relation to the artist who creates, but in relation to the product of creative art — the artifact itself. The turn away from the author to the work itself, as we have already established, does not make Mukařovský a bigoted formalist, unless we were to ignore one of the central tenets of his theory, namely, that a (literary) work of art is not a thing, but a sign. Precisely to the extent to which the work of art is perceived as a sign, it is open to the process of interpretation. This process, although certainly not without its rules and structural regularities, cannot be reduced to a mechanical assignment of meaning to the various signifiers of which the work is composed, for aesthetic communication implies a specific kind of signification: a work of [end page 34] art, being an autonomous sign, "does not enter into a binding relation to reality, which it represents (communicates) by means of its theme, through its separate parts, but only as a whole can it establish a relation to any one of the perceiver's experiences or to a set of his [or her] experiences in his [or her] subconscious" (96). A work of art thus cannot be understood either as a verifiable copy of reality or as a unique expression of the author's subjectivity — it forces us to examine the problem of intentionality an sich, or the intentionality of intentionality. Given the dynamic nature of the aesthetic structure, it is clear that the intentionality of its composition cannot be derived from the composition itself. As a structure that is in constant flux, the composition is charged with intention only in relation to the reader's perspective. What sets the perception of a work of art apart from other kinds of perception is the fact that the perceiver "immediately makes an effort to find in the organization of the work traces of an arrangement that will permit the work to be perceived as a semantic whole" (96). This sense of unity is to be found only in intentionality, which Mukařovský defines as "the force operating within the work which strives toward the resolution of the contradictions and tensions among its individual parts and components, thereby giving each of them a specific relation to the others and all of them together a unified meaning" (96). This radical semantization of intention is evident not only in Mukařovský's categorical refusal to identify intention with the psychology of a specific person,[11] but also in his blurring of the distinction between the author and the perceiver: "at moments when [the artist] regards his [or her] product from the standpoint of pure intentionality in an effort (conscious or subconscious) to introduce traces of this intentionality, he [or she] behaves as the perceiver, and only from the perceiver's viewpoint does the entire scope of the tendency toward semantic unity become clear and distinctly evident" (97). Thus it is the perceiver's, not the originator's attitude toward the work, that is "fundamental," or "unmarked," for understanding what Mukařovský terms the "intrinsic artistic intent" (97). The emphasis on the semantic dimension of the perceiver's role clearly dispels the issue of psychological idiosyncrasies, which so often plagues discussions concerning the theories of reception. At the same time, the very fact that it is now the perceiver-position that ultimately determines the intentionality of the work of art inevitably dynamizes the notion of the work's meaning: the work's "message" is not simply "out there"; instead, it must be re-created from the material that the work provides. Granted, the semantic unification arrived at by the perceiver is motivated by the work's composition. Still, the reader's role involves more than a passive, mechanical assembling of the pre-structured message; [end page 35] rather, it is, in its essence, "an effort by means of which the interrelations among the individual components of the perceived work are bound together" (98). The act of reception is a unique conflation of material predetermination and (conscious or subconscious) interpretative effort which forms a semantic whole that cannot be equated with the mere sum of the work's components. To a large extent, then, the selection of meaning-constituting components and the drawing of hierarchical inter-relations between them is up to the reader. Mukařovský, though a noetic materialist, dissolves the inside/outside binary that governs the theoretical debate concerning intrinsic/extrinsic approaches to literary study. In accordance with his conception of the literary work as a semantic structure that is not reducible to a mere sum of its components, he proclaims the concrete form of the structure to be contingent. The perceiver's initiative may be regulated by supra-individual, historical or societal factors; still, each act of interpretation "will invest the same work with different intentionality, sometimes considerably different from that which its originator gave it and to which he [or she] also adapted it" (98).[12] In view of the fact that interpretation (the standpoint of the perceiver) is the only game in town, we are obliged to part with the notion of the original intention that would ground a correct interpretation: since there are only the perceiver's interpretations and these vary in space and time, and since there is no stable norm outside of these interpretations to objectively validate them, we must conclude that all reading is always already misreading. This becomes strikingly clear when Mukařovský explicitly thematizes the issue of original intention: "Not only can a shift in the dominant component and a regrouping of the components that were the original vehicles of intentionality take place in the perceiver's conception, but those components which were originally outside the intention can even become vehicles of intentionality" (98-9; emphasis added). A "shift in the dominant" and "re-grouping of the components" amount, in the framework of Mukařovský's theory, to a radical re-writing of the work's aesthetic message. Furthermore, the shifts and re-groupings in question are examples of purposeless change — they are neither degeneration nor progress, but mere alteration. "Original intentionality" is thus not original in the strong sense; it is not archè, but rather a simple antecedent that has no special authority. This finding (that the intentionality of the work does not coincide with the — hypothetical — intention of its originator) is further substantiated by Mukařovský's blurring of the boundary that separates the intentional from the unintentional: at different times different components can participate in the process of semantic unification. As the outside/inside barrier collapses, intentionality emerges as only a formal condition, not a materially given fact. [end page 36] By this point in his argument, Mukařovský has managed to provide a powerful re-definition of intentionality that is not reducible to psychological, referential, historical or social-behaviorist models. In spite of this, he is not yet acquitted of the principal charge brought against him by de Man: the exclusive reliance on the category of aesthetic totalization which is, on de Man's terms, always susceptible to remedying arbitrariness. This is the case because intentionality, however variable in time and space, is always, at any moment of reading, acting as a guarantee of semantic unification. But Mukařovský's analysis of intentionality does not end with the finding of its variability. If aesthetic perception presupposes a semantic totalization that is anchored in the concept of intentionality, we should conclude that though diachronically mutable, intentionality remains structurally hegemonic on the synchronic level: all components and aspects of the work are inevitably perceived as intentional, regardless of the particulars of the interpretation in question. At this point, however, Mukařovský raises a question that might potentially undermine the structuralist project as such: "If the perceiver necessarily makes an effort to apprehend the entire work as a sign, hence as a form that has originated from a unified intention and that acquires a unified meaning from this intention, can there be anything unintentional in the work as far as the perceiver is concerned?" (101).[13] Or, to put it differently, is there any exteriority to the totality of semantic intention presupposed by the process of aesthetic perception? An act of reception of the work of art consists, in Mukařovský's opinion, of two concurrent moments: "One is determined by an orientation toward what has semiotic validity [znaková platnost]; the other, on the contrary, tends toward an immediate experiencing of the work as reality" (106). As both moments are equally original, the perceiver must interminably oscillate between the feeling of intentionality and unintentionality, defined respectively as a tendency toward the semantic totalization of the work and a resistance to semantic closure. To appreciate fully the radicality of Mukařovský's stance, we ought to realize that we are now dealing with two different kinds of antinomies. As already mentioned, the "unifying semantic intention" (which Mukařovský christened "the semantic gesture") is dynamic: it resolves the contradictions within the structure of the work and grants a unified semantic totality to the aesthetic sign. Internal contradictions are thus by definition dialectically sublimable, for they can be integrated under the umbrella of the semantic gesture. Unintentionality, on the other hand, is not reducible to mere "semantic discord" — a clash, for instance, between a theme and the lexical register of a text. Unintentionality, from the perspective of the perceiver, comes into being when the discord is radical enough to resist [end page 37] any attempt at semantic unification, that is to say, when one component stands in opposition to all the others. In such a case, the antinomy becomes genuine heterogeneity: "As long as unintentionality is intensely felt by the perceiver, it always evokes an image of a deep rupture (trhlina) which splits the impression of the work into two" (114). In contrast to de Man's treatment of the aporia of reading, Mukařovský does not conceive of the heteronomy intentionality/unintentionality as a binary opposition of two static, mutually exclusive yet internally coherent readings; vis-à-vis the concrete textual material, the intentional-unintentional dyad is in itself dynamic: "viewed from the perceiver's standpoint unintentionality is by no means rooted in the work unequivocally and invariably: different components can appear as unintentional in the course of time" (117). Thus, while the binary is irreducible (any act of reading will produce a semantically unified interpretation based in the semantic gesture and, at the same time, eliminate those components of the text that resist unification and are registered as unintentional), the exact content of the two sets will vary with time: "It is, of course, the fate of every unintentionality that in time it will cross over into the artistic structure of the work, begin to be perceived as a component of it, and become intentionality" (115). Mukařovský documents his thesis by recording the variability of the reception of Karel Hynek Mácha's May (1836). Since subsequent generations of readers uncover different elements violating the semantic unity of the poem, we must conceive of unintentionality as something that, on the diachronic level, lasts in its transformation. Thus, there are two features of unintentionality that should be noted here: (1) in time, unintentional elements lose their strangeness and succumb to the will to totalization; the strange becomes familiar and is consumed in an all-encompassing dialectical movement of semantic unification. At the same time, (2) unintentionality is a structural element in the act of aesthetic perception and, as such, a constant factor. As a result, we must conclude that interpretation is not a cumulative process: there is no end to the dialectic of semantic unification, for it can never achieve ultimate closure. IV. A work of art is a human product and, as such, it is an intentional — rather than an accidental — creation. To take the issue to its extreme: why would anyone bother to read if she did not assume that the text is to communicate something? The presupposition that a work of art is endowed with an intended meaning appears to be a necessary condition of literature's existence. To proclaim intention to be a structural element [end page 38] in the constitution of a text's meaning, however, does not mean that literary theory must resort to a belief in the transcendental authority of authentic origins. De Man, who dissociates the act of reading from the process of understanding, finds the multifarious formalist movements of the 12th century, despite their mistrust of thematic totalizations, to still subscribe to aesthetic and/or conceptual ones. In his view, language is a site of unsublimable negativity that unsettles all attempts at semantic recuperation. In contrast to the theories of historical reception that try to limit the damaging effect of textuality, de Man — following Benjamin — likens the process of reading to translation, which "belongs not to the life of the original, the original is already dead, but the translation belongs to the afterlife of the original" (de Man 1986, 85). Translation, then, is intrinsically allegorical, for it achieves a semantic recuperation only by — at the same time — proclaiming its impossibility: "By invoking the 'translation' rather than the reception or even the reading of a work as the proper analogon for its understanding, the negativity inherent in the process is being recognized: we all know that translations can never succeed and that the task (Aufgabe) of the translator also means, as in the parlance of competitive sports, his having to give up, his defeat 'by default'"(61). It is not without interest that the concept of translation, which was to discredit the Prague School's theory (by extension, via a criticism leveled against Jauss), can be taken as a suitable metaphor for Mukařovský's concept of the semantic gesture. For where is there the original intention in Mukařovský? The semantic gesture that the perceiver (re)constructs in the work is, inevitably, a translation of an original intention that has been always already dead, irrevocably in the absolute past of the text. Instead of an external dichotomy of authorial intention and the reader's reception, Mukařovský's theory works with the concept of the semantic gesture as a dimension in the act of perception. This dimension is a necessary condition of a semantic unification, but, concurrently, it is in constant flux and therefore materializing differently in different readings. Certainly, the crucial role Mukařovský ascribed to the semantic gesture in the process of aesthetic perception may be interpreted as a giving in to the will to totalization. But is not a certain degree of totalization necessary, be it for aesthetic appreciation of works of art or for deconstructive thematization of the opacity of the signifier and unreadability of texts? Even the rhetorical reading advocated by de Man that aims at demystifying of totalizing thought, as Rodolphe Gasché reminds us, produces a closure of its own. Only this time the totality based in logos is replaced by a totality rooted in lexis (Gasché 23). The problem thus is not totalization per se as much as the forgetting of its contingency. [end page 39] Mukařovský, however, is well aware of the fact that aesthetic interpretation encounters resistance, and that aesthetic totalizations are acts of violent elimination. He insists that the irreducible remainder of unintentionality is inscribed in any act of reading, and that even though without a will to totalization there would be no realm of the aesthetic, there will never come a moment of the final recuperation that would heal the rupture that the feeling of unintentionality inevitably causes. Aside from his exorcism of totalization, De Man is doubtful that the alleged task of literary study should be the determination of the meaning of texts, i.e., that literary studies should fulfill a hermeneutic function (1986, 22). The Prague School may supply powerful tools for handling texts, but these tools do not sanction the hermeneutic mission de Man speaks of. He also finds literary study to be traditionally in dangerous proximity to questions of philosophy, ever hopeful that "its technical and descriptive aspects as a science of language dovetail with its historical, theological and ethical function" (22). This humanistic or theological bent in literary studies is remote from the Prague School position. Within the theoretical framework of functional structuralism, literature most certainly is not a vehicle for communicating extra-literary values. Hence, if to the facile humanism in literary studies De Man opposes the willingness to read "texts closely as texts and not to move at once into the general context of human experience or history" (23), he should consider Mukařovský not his opponent, but his ally. The emphasis on the semantic character of literature, so crucial to Mukařovský's aesthetics, disrupts any facile continuity between the sphere of literary discourse and the phenomenal world. The realm of the aesthetic judgment in Mukařovský is not a gate to the realm of ideology, for there is no direct passage connecting the two. It would thus be a mistake to view aesthetic totalization as a by-product of ideological totalization. What applies to ideology applies to history as well. De Man sees in the structuralist project an attempt to build a bridge between the (literary) sign and history. Nevertheless, the interest Mukařovský et al. show in literary history has nothing to do with the passage between literature and history. Literary history is a diachronic study of the literary structure, as opposed to the synchronic analysis of the same phenomenon. As we have already seen, literary history is influenced by history only indirectly, and the influence in question, from the vantage point of the immanence of literary evolution, is in its very essence heteronomous and accidental (that is to say, neither organic nor transcendental). De Man thus forces Mukařovský's text to say the very opposite of what it actually says. [end page 40] De Man's radical rejection of history as a framework of totalization is well known. It concerns even art-historical period terms such as "romanticism" or "classicism," which he finds "at the furthest remove from the materiality of actual history" (1984, 262). In contrast to them, he proposes a new concept of history and historicity based on the occurrence of the event (1996, 133). Significantly, Mukařovský's theory invites us to proceed along similar lines. His notion of a semantic gesture, given the dynamic character of the literary structure in combination with similarly dynamic element of unintentionality, must be thematized as radically singular, and hence as a semantic event. Literary theory thus may provide us with an investigation into the conditions of possibility of aesthetic signification, or even document the general protocols of reading. As for the particular embodiment of the semantic gesture, however, we have to content ourselves merely with allegories. [1]. For a pertinent criticism of the misled or uninformed reception of the Prague School project see Lubomír Doležel's "Epistemology of the Prague School," in V. Macura & H. Schmid, eds., Jan Mukařovský and the Prague School/und die Prager Schule. Potsdam: Universität Potsdam, 1999, 15-25. Given the scope and originality of Mukařovský's thought, the star-crossed reception of his work, which was largely ignored even during the theory boom of the 1970s and 80s, remains a puzzle. Jiří Veltruský, in a judicious, comprehensive essay that maps out Mukařovský's theoretical career, enumerates several possible reasons for the baffling neglect of this singular achievement; these range from the relatively short period of Mukařovský's life that was devoted to structuralist research; to Mukařovský's choice of material for analysis (which consisted almost exclusively of modern Czech literature); to his epistemological stance, dialectically balancing theoretical a priori with a sensibility for particular textual facticity; to the fact that Mukařovský's intended magnum opus, that was to revise and systematize his findings hitherto, never materialized (Veltruský 1981, 118-20). Of Veltruský's suggestions, Mukařovský's choice of his exemplary material appears to be the decisive one. To appreciate the richness, insightfulness, and complexity of Mukařovský's thought, one must be able to comprehend his theoretical stance and follow the line of his analysis of a particular literary text. The linguistic barrier (that the Czech language presents) thus may have prevented [end page 41] many a foreign theoretician from intuitively grasping those elements of Mukařovský's analysis that, to a Czech-speaker, would seem self-evident. [2]. For Mukařovský, subjectivity in scientific research was but an "irreducible remainder," rather than a value in itself. Literary scholars should not strive for novelty per se and seek innovation as a mark of their own inventiveness. [3]. Veltruský opines that Prague structuralism was, in fact, "as much a negation of the formalist school as its continuation," blaming Victor Erlich's Russian Formalism (1955) for "spread[ing] the entirely mistaken notion that in the study of literature the Czechoslovak structuralism was just an offspring of the Russian formal method" (1981, 121). [4]. Mukařovský's structuralism, even when engaged in a small-scale analysis of phonetic or syntactic aspects of a work of art, is immune to the criticism leveled by Stanley Fish against linguistically informed stylistics in his two-part "What Is Stylistics and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?" In Fish's reading, "stylisticians purport to substitute precise and rigorous linguistic descriptions and to proceed from these descriptions to interpretations for which they can claim a measure of objectivity" (1980, 69-70). The enterprise, in his opinion, betrays "the desire for an instant and automatic interpretative procedure based on an inventory of fixed relationships between observable data and meanings, meanings which do not vary with context and which can be read out independently of the analyst or observer, who need only to perform the operations specified by the 'key'" (70-1). Mukařovský, however, is not after a finite — and final, immutable — classification of stylistic devices; he is not cataloguing context-free elements from which he might build up to the determination of meaning. Rather, he, like other proponents of functionalist structuralism, holds that the validity of each and every "stylistic element" is structure-specific, whereas structure is understood as a temporal (rather than permanent) equilibrium of components' inter-relations. [5]. Peter Steiner subdivides the development of Mukařovský's aesthetics into three successive stages: "In the first stage, Mukařovský paid most attention to the object itself — the internal organization of the work of art. By 1934, however, he saw such an approach as insufficient and began to investigate what he termed social awareness or consciousness — the set of norms valid for a particular collectivity, which every work of art implements. Coinciding roughly with the onset of World War II, the third period turned from the previous emphasis on supra-individual codes to the role which the subject plays in the aesthetic process. The subject was no longer conceived of as a mere passive vehicle of supra-individual struc-[end page 42]tures and changing them in the course of this interaction" (1978, xi-xii). The re-activation of the subject-position in the literary process, however, is not equivalent to an annihilation of the supra-individual normativity: the (genderless) individual is itself thematized as a structural component, irreducible to psychological idiosyncrasies (cf. part III, below). [6]. "Semiotic aesthetics is a negation of all forms of determinism and stands in contrast to established views of art, specifically to the formalist, the expressive, the mimetic and the sociological conceptions" (Doležel 1995, 39). [7]. De Man identifies this aesthetic inclination in literary studies with Cratylism, which "assumes a convergence of the phenomenal aspects of language, as sound, with its signifying function as referent" (1986, 9). [8]. "Hermeneutics is, by definition, a process directed toward the determination of meaning; it postulates a transcendental function of understanding, no matter how complex, deferred, or tenuous it might be, and will, in however mediated a way, have to raise questions about the extralinguistic truth of literary texts. Poetics, on the other hand, is a metalinguistic, descriptive or prescriptive discipline that lays claim to scientific consistency. It pertains to the formal analysis of linguistic entities as such, independently of signification; as a branch of linguistics, it deals with theoretical models prior to their historical realization" (de Man 1986, 55-6). [9]. This is not to say that the issue of unintentionality can be reduced to the issue of the subconscious. Mukařovský points out that "modern psychology has perceived that even the subconscious has its own intentionality" and further supports his claim by citing Josef Rybka's studies in modern metrics, which uncover regularities in a sphere outside the control of the artist's conscious intention (Mukařovský 1978, 92). Consequently, as Mukařovský cautions us, the problem of intentionality is to be kept separate from the problem of consciousness. [10]. In Mukařovský's view, the sculptural torsos of antiquity are a prime example of the latter process: "Today [...] when artificial torsos occur so frequently in sculpture, it can hardly be disputed that in perceiving the sculptural torsos of antiquity, we spontaneously comprehend the truncation as a component of their artistic effect. If we stand before the Aphrodite of Melos, we do not contemplate the contour of this statue with helmet and a hand holding a pomegranate, as one reconstruction wishes, or with a shield resting on a thigh, as another reconstruction imagines; and we may even say in general that the idea of any contemplation of the present state of a statue would have a disturbing effect on our perception. Yet, the perfect three-dimensionally enclosed contour of a statue, as we [end page 43] see it and as it has been emphasized in recent years by a revolving pedestal, is largely the result of the intervention of external accident which the artist could not have controlled in any way whatsoever" (1978, 93). Mukařovský's assertion that "the intervention of external accident" (that is to say, an intervention of the contingent and unintentional) can be read as "a component of [an artifact's] aesthetic effect" seems to be compatible with de Man's notion of reading. In his analysis of Shelley's The Triumph of Life, de Man invests significantly into the fact that the "final form" of the poem is dictated by factors other than the authorial intention, yet it is these same external factors that are constitutive of the meaning produced by de Man's reading. [11]. The perceiver is neither a specific individual, nor is s/he (primarily) a member of a collective. The perceiver, rather than being he or she (an important distinction for Derrida, though a negligible one for de Man), becomes an it — a mere structural component of the semantic process. The result is a virtualization of the perceiver. [12]. Intentionality, which is at the very center of the meaning-unification process, is thus far from being immutable: "The perceiver's active participation in the formation of intentionality gives this intentionality a dynamic nature. As a resultant of the encounter between the viewer's attitude and the organization of the work, intentionality is labile and oscillates during the perception of the same work, or at least — with the same perceiver — from perception to perception" (Mukařovský 1978, 99). [13]. In this context, it is worth mentioning that Mukařovský sharply defines his approach in opposition to the formalist concept of intentionality, which — through the deployment of the concepts of stylization and deformation — attempts to "obscure the necessary presence of unintentionality as a factor of the impression which the work of art makes" (1978, 101). Mukařovský's rationale for this claim is as follows: "The notion of stylization tacitly but effectively pushes unintentionality outside the work of art itself into its antecedent state, into the reality of the represented object, or, better, into the reality of the material that is used for the work. This 'reality' is overcome, or 'digested,' by the creative process. The notion of deformation then attempts to reduce unintentionality to the disagreement between two intentionalities, the one being overcome and the actual one" (102). In Mukařovský's view, the investment into the two concepts went sour, for, on the one hand, a work of art is to be perceived as an aesthetic sign, while, on the other one, "a living work which is not automatized for the perceiver necessarily evokes besides an impression of intentionality (or rather: integrally along with it) an immediate impression of reality, or rather: an impression from [end page 44] reality" (102). That is to say, a living work that is as yet "untamed" by the protocols of semantic unification contains an irreducible material remainder that leaves indelible traces in the process of reading. References De Man, Paul, The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984 ___, The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986 ___, Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996 Doležel, Lubomír, "Structuralism of the Prague School." In Raman Selden, ed., The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995 Fish, Stanley, Is There a Text in This Class: The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980 Gasché, Rodolphe, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998 Mukařovský, Jan, Structure, Sign, and Function. Trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978 Steiner, Peter, "Jan Mukařovský's Structural Aesthetics." In Jan Mukařovský, Structure, Sign, and Function. Trans. and ed. John Burbank and Peter Steiner. New Haven: Yale UP, 1978: ix-xxxix. Veltruský, Jiří, "Jan Mukařovský's Structural Poetics and Aesthetics." In Poetics Today 2, no. 1b, 1981: 117—57
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