Saussure Anagrams Ideological Work

Saussure's Anagrams: Ideological WorkAuthor(s): Samuel KinserSource: MLN, Vol. 94, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1979), pp. 1105-1138Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2906568 .Accessed: 11/09/2014 00:49

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Saussure's Anagrams: Ideological Work

Samuel Kinser

Language signifies, and by the same token ideologizes. The tokens of language, tactile or sonorous, written or spoken, are structured, arbitrarily from a materially referential point of view, coherently from a socially referential point of view. Language's tokens make sense because they cor-respond; they systemically, collectively answer to the system of things useful, desirable, needful in a given social milieu.

Language ideologizes because it inculcates a socio-historically definable, circularly interacting system of needs, uses, and desires. The inculcation has often been noticed, but its linguistic mechanisms have rarely been described. One such description occurs in the notebooks of Ferdinand de Saussure on the anagrammatical character of early Indo-European poems, songs, prophecies and hymns.

Consider, for example, Saussure's detection of the Greek name of Venus in a passage from Book 1 of Vergil's Aeneid. "Aphrodite," Saussure explains, is phonically mimed in two ways in the passage where the goddess, previously in disguise, reveals herself to her son Aeneas:

Ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem Spiravere; pedes vestis defluxit ad imos.....

(and her ambrosial locks sent forth a heavenly fragrance from the crown [of her head], while her robes streamed down to her very feet. .

The simpler of the two mimes offers the listener/reader an outline of "Aphrodite" which Saussure calls a mannequin or "little box." One

MLN Vol. 94 Pp.1105-1138 0026-7910/79/0945-1105 $01.00 ? 1979 by The Johns Hopkins University Press


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word or one phrase in the anagrammatical passage begins and ends with the same sounds as the latent "word-theme." The mannequin "A [phrodit] E" is given here in two ways, either by "A [mbrosiaequ] E" or by "A [mbrosiaeque coma] E."

The more complicated form of miming consists in the "diphonic" reproduction of the sounds of the imitated name. Accepting the Latinf- as the equivalent of the Greek ph-, Saussure explains that after the initial A-, "marked by the mannequin," Af- orfr- would be "necessary." The anagram, he admits, is defective in this respect because "we find onlyfi- in 'defluxit."' The rest of the diphonic imitation is more perceptible:

-RO- in "am-b-ro-siae." -OD-: od-orem. -DI-: given twice: di-vinum; adi-mos. -IT-: deflux-it. -E "given by the end of the mannequin, but," admits Saussure,

with the wrong "quantity"; that is, with a short rather than long -e.

In this way, as Saussure concludes elsewhere, "polyphones visibly reproduce . . . the syllables of a work or a name of importance in the text and thereby become anagrammatical polyphones."2

In the small group of Saussure's anagrammatical exercises so far published in full or in part, divine or semi-divine names (such as those of Aphrodite or the Hindu god Agni) account for about a third of the total. The names of political and military heroes, real or imagined to be real (Hector, Caesar, Hadubrand) make up another third. The names which Saussure finds half hidden in the passages are of central importance to the myths which sustain the social structures in which these discourses circulated. What Saus- sure found-or thought he had found-was a way in which discourse was centered on these central names. "God was, in a manner of speaking, rivetted to the text."3 In a manner of speaking: pre- cisely.

I Ideology/Semiology

This discussion of Saussure's enterprise in his largely unpublished notebooks on anagrams moves in a different direction from those developed in recent years by Kristeva, Starobinski, Jakobson, and others.4 It seeks to develop the initiative of the editors of Semiotext(e) in sponsoring a conference on "two Saussures," ostensi-


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bly to compare the famed Saussure of the Course in General Linguis- tics with the now emerging Saussure of the notebooks. The proceedings of this conference, held at Columbia University in 1974, have recently been published in two issues of Semiotext(e), and among these studies the essay of Sylvere Lotringer pursues the question of the relation between the two Saussures in the most extended and perceptive way.5 Lotringer's study attempts to specify the general linguistic implications of Saussure's theory of anagrams. Previous interpretations have been limited largely to the theory's implications for poetics.

In Lotringer's opinion the discoveries recorded in the notebooks cast doubt on the principles of language set forth in the Course. Indeed, if there are two Saussures, it is because one was "repressed" by the other. The working of "the historical, the declarative, [and] the real" in and on language was acknowledged and pursued in the notebooks, Lotringer believes. But the specification of how social situations influence discursive activity led Saussure in direc- tions which conflicted with his logocentric theory of signification. Consequently, Saussure abandoned his inquiry, refused to publish his notebooks, and left unresolved ("repressed") the differences between anagrammatical practices and linguistic theory.6

Saussure's indecision about the anagrams cannot be resolved retrospectively. Thus, while it is important to affirm with Lotringer that anagrams call in question a logocentric theory of signs, it is also necessary to admit that in Saussure's case their discovery was made possible by the assumptions of logocentric theory. Again, if the anagrams reveal the opening, disseminative character of linguistic meaning, that revelation occurs despite rather than because of Saussure's efforts, which were devoted to specifying how names enclose and control rather than stray from the path of discourse. Saussure both reaffirmed and in reaffirming drew into question the traditional Western metaphysics of language. But unlike Bataille, Derrida, and other recent strayers from the path, Saussure stopped at the point of this duplicity rather than pushing forward. He does not seem to have been interested in the uses of excess, nor in the "polyphonic, polysemic nature of poetic language" which Jakobson believes Saussure discovered in his anagrammatical work.7

Saussure's indecision cannot be resolved, but it must be probed. The question of whether anagrams can be found in the texts of Vergil, of Homer, of the Rig-Veda, of the Hildebrandslied, of the early Latin verse fragments controversially designated "Saturnian,"


1108 SAMUEL KINSER

is inextricably linked with how one tries to find them, for no text is readable without a model of reading.8 If Saussure cannot decide so apparently simple a matter as the number and location of phonemes in a few lines of verse, that is because the entirety of his philosophy of language is at stake in each determination: a 'literal' interpretation of texts is the most, not the least metaphysical.

Saussure's theory of language does not easily fit the texts which he has chosen for investigation. Do the texts then disprove Saus- sure's theory? or have they rather falsified the model-Saussure's anagrammatical "laws"-constructed in accord with theory and texts? Or has the interworking of text and model displaced the problematic itself, dislocating and forcing a shift in the questions-the verbal energies roused by reading; the needs, uses, desires, of a complex personal and historical situation prompting this enterprise-to which the theory and the model propose an answer? Has the dislocation of theory and the tinkering with models revealed another textuality-neither a redoubling of meter nor a redoubling of theme, neither crytographeme nor ana-gram written under or over other grammata, but another system of writing inter- woven with the poetic one?

Without denying the interest and importance of the first alternatives posed here, it is the last possibility, the possibility of a shift in the field of Saussure's investigation, which will be pursued. Theory, model, and "anagrammatical" texts seem to have forced such changes upon each other that there was a shift in the field itself in which and by means of which Saussure observed anagrams. Instead of a field definable in quantifiable, objective terms-a field of verses, of measured and measurable indentations upon the page and upon the ear9-Saussure discovered a field where phonemic configurations indent, measure, and channel a range of non- quantifiable, traditionally "subjective" psychic entities which, Saussure insisted, are socially programmed and derived.

This field, emergent in the anagrammatical notebooks, was given a name in the Course: semiology. Like the name "ideology" given to it by Destutt de Tracy and Marx, the circumscription of this field with a name both stimulates and misleads investigation. Saussure referred to semiology as the "science which studies the life of signs within social life."'10 Like other, lengthier references which he made to it, this description points toward a vastness rather than articu- lates it. It presupposes and encourages the search for a "logic" of signification, a logic which can be reduced to "science," knowledge,


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rational codification, just as the name ideology presupposes and encourages the search for a logic of ideation.

But the field whose furrows interweave with the writing systems known as 'poetry' and 'art' in the pages of Saussure's notebooks is not circumscribable as sign-logic, any more than the normally chosen 'subject-matter' of ideological analysis-political theory, theol- ogy, or, more recently, the images patterning everyday life, such as those of television and other mass media-is circumscribable as idea-logic. The anagrammatical notebooks discover a signifying mechanism which cannot yet and cannot perhaps ever be scientized either as sign-logic or as idea-logic. The discovery itself is sufficient to draw these two "sciences," semiology and ideology, into connection and thus to collapse their frontiers as well as the frontiers of the sciences to which they seem adjacent. By dislodging the study of measured language from its encapsulation as part of an esthetic reserve with little or no relation to ideas, signification, or society; by indicating the psychic means and social functioning of such measured language, Saussure forces upon those following his inquiry a rethinking of the terms in which art, science, ideas, signs, and social life 'work.'

Work in the sense of social, material, and historical efficacy is the primary feature of Marx's theory of ideology, and this feature is emphasized in our consideration of Saussure's enterprise. Saussure described-partly in the notebooks, partly in the Course-the elements of a linguistic mechanism which works by centering, abstracting, and repeating signs. This centering, abstraction, and repetition reinforce the political, economic, and social ordering of the group in which and on which the linguistic mechanism is used. Because of this power of reinforcement, the linguistic mechanism can be said to perform work which is provisionally called here ideological work-provisionally because the logicality, ideality, and scientificity of knowledge of this work, implied by the term 'ideological,' remain questionable.

The anagrammatical investigations, then, discover a mechanism which performs ideological work. Yet the components of this mechanism are incompletely assembled; its parts are developed in scattered sections of Saussure's writings. To weave these sections together and to indicate their coherence can only be done by con- jecture. It can only be done by assuming, as Saussure did about the texts he was analyzing, that Saussure's writing must be supplemented at certain points where it is blocked by unwritten


1110 SAMUEL KINSER

assumptions, and that it must be pulled apart at other points where it is pieced together by incompatible assumptions. Using these procedures, the following main conjectures will be made: Saussure developed the centering and abstracting element of the linguistic mechanism performing ideological work in relation to a theory of naming processes in language. He developed the repetitive element in relation to a theory of mnemonic ritual and in relation to a theory of the organization of memory.

The theories which Saussure developed were closely related to his professional concern with comparative grammar, Sanskrit, and French versification. As a professor of these subjects in Geneva from 1891 to 1913 he was led both by linguistic and poetic analyses to the investigation of phonic rhythms. Similarly, the conjunction of theological, political, and poetic concerns in early Indo- European poetry made the perception of anagrams in these ar- tifacts always a question of more than esthetic interest.

It is helpful, too, to consider Saussure's social and historical position as part of the pre-World War I elite of European professors whose pretensions and social status, although not usually political power, has been frequently called that of a mandarinate. As the purveyor of a culture comprising lower and higher, less and more pure forms, as the fine fruit of a historical process of acculturation thought to have advanced through millenia from the primitive to the civilized, it is not surprising that the word 'ideology,' tarred by Napoleon and feathered by Marx, does not appear in Saussure's writings. Nor is it surprising that his outwardly sociological definition of linguistics as part of the science which studies the life of signs within society is given mainly psychological rather than social or historical meaning in his anagrammatical analysis. Saussure traced the connections between naming, mnemonic repetition, and the making of discourse not to a relation between signifying activity and differential shares in social power but to a "superstitious idea" perpetuating itself through time with (to Saussure) stupefying and stupid inertia.

It will be maintained, then, that Saussure did not develop an explicit theory nor assemble a model of how language is woven in relation to a pattern of social power because of his assumptions about history and the psyche. These assumptions are not personal; they are temporally, spatially, socially commonplace, working ideologically on and through his writing in a way identified by Marx in The German Ideology.


M L N 1111

In both the notebooks and the Course Saussure separates what he calls "pure" psychology from the mixed psycho-social sphere which he calls "language" (langue). He separates both these fields in turn from the sphere of "historical" or contingent, material change. As we will see, this double separation produces in his work an inversion of the relation between mental and non-mental reality similar to that which Marx called the characteristic mark of ideological work: the material conditions of human existence are polarized as something 'outside' which is photographed and projected 'inward' by the camera obscura of the mind. Given a reserved space of psychic activity, 'inside' and separate from the material world, it was as difficult for Saussure as for most Western thinkers since Plato to avoid the concept of a pure spiritual force emanating 'outward' from that space, incarnating itself in language, and thence directing the affairs of the 'world.'

Marx's concept of inversion as the characteristic manner of ideological work will thus be helpful in understanding how Saus- sure's investigation of anagrams was blocked at a certain point. But Saussure's investigations of the linguistic elements of ideological work are no less helpful in unblocking the impasses of Marxian ideological theory. It is not enough to identify how mind and reality become inverted if the two entities remain polarly opposed after the reversion as before. For if mind does not interpenetrate with reality, but rather "reflects" it truly or falsely, then the passage from "subjectivity" toward "objectivity," from "false consciousness" to "true" can never end, and yet must end-must always already have ended. Only by coming to an end and offering a reflection of reality so perfect that it cannot henceforth be contaminated by the partialities of experience, can the mind distinguish between its good and bad reflections. Since Marx was not inclined to suppose that such a power of differentiation had a supernal source, there could be only a "material," "real" way for mind to come to this end in each and every moment. But if the mind's light comes from material reality, then the polarity of mind from the materials upon which it reflects is abolished and the possibility of distinguishing true from false consciousness of that reality becomes questionable because it is contingent upon the circumstances of its materiality.

A science begins ideologization of its models, its theories, its facts at the point when it declares itself liberated from ideology, when it declares its knowledge of reality to be independent of the terms of its development. Those terms are social, material, and historical, as


1112 SAMUEL KINSER

Marx emphasized. But they are also linguistic, and as language they have a semio-logic, a verbal systematicity which must be studied as such and then integrated with non-semiological systems rather than being either reduced to 'mind' or engulfed in 'matter.'

Reality/matter/the world is neither wholly 'outside' something 'inside' called the 'mind' nor are signs emanations from the latter which imitate the former. The arbitrary relation between signs and their referents, emphasized by Saussure, is double: signs are arbitrarily related to the material elements to which they refer (this house, that idea) and by which they refer (this pen, that paper): arbitrarily, not necessarily illogically nor unsystematically. Single signs are logically specifiable with respect to each other. They are not logically specifiable with respect to what they refer to, because single signs do not always refer to single things. Signmaking achieves referential meaning by intertwining words in phrases, sentences, and still longer units, and not by one-to-one corre- spondences. Thus, sign systems are logically comparable to the referents which they place together in groups, and are specifiable thereby as true or false systems vis-A-vis those groups of things. They are not, as systems, specifiable as true or false with respect to each other as alternate systems of reference.

The problematic of the arbitrary logic of signs and sign systems advanced by Saussure breaks open the problematic of ideology outlined by Marx, just as the reverse is true. Marxian theory exposes the ideological effects of Saussure's polarizing dialectics of individuals versus masses and of inward versus outward experience. Saussure's theory exposes the ideological effects of Marx's polarizing dialectics of true versus false social organization and of objective versus subjective experience. One deconstructs the characteristic ideologization of the other, and makes it possible to envi- sion a nonreductive, historically open-ended way of relating psychic to social organization and of connecting sign-making to other material practices.

II Phonism Directed Toward Names

Saussure's theory of anagrams is implicitly a theory of ideological work because of the links which the theory establishes between three activities: psycho-linguistic processes which 'center' the human signifying apparatus, sensory and neural, are connected with names as language and with naming as a social process; nam-


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ing is connected with reiteration of the phonic elements of names as a mode of constructing discourse; and constructing discourse is connected with verbal associations held in memory. To observe this linkage requires shifting away from the topics which have attracted previous students of Saussure's unpublished notebooks. What has most concerned these scholars is a kind of anagram not even men- tioned by Saussure in his work on Aphrodite in Vergil's Aeneid.

In addition to mannequins and diphonic anagrams, there was a "monophonic" type of anagram, Saussure believed, which con- sisted of finding in every line of poetry an even number of each of the vowels and consonants used in it. Saussure thought that he had discovered a verse form written in accordance with a "law" pairing off each acoustic element in this way. This verse form was called the "Saturnian" and was found in documents preserving early Latin verse, anonymously written and of a mixed religious, legal, and political character.

Saussure abandoned pursuit of the monophonic anagram after a brief period. "As soon as one does not push analysis to the system- atic limit of the monophone, which requires a strict arithmetic, . . . one is confronted with a more immediately apprehensible phenomenon ...." "Starting with the Saturnian, I investigated or thought of investigating whether in the Greek epic[s of Homer] there was anything as bizarre at first sight as the phonic imitation by means of verse of the names which have importance for each passage."" Thus, the pursuit of the monophonic anagram led Saussure to uncover something quite different: a technique of naming.

Not only Latin but Greek, Sanscrit, and Old German verse seemed to be ordered in accordance with a naming system so insis- tent and omnipresent that it appeared to be an inescapable part of the tradition of early Indo-European writing. Saussure's problematic in the notebooks on anagrams thus moved away from try- ing to understand the generalized phonic patterning of poetry ex- hibited in the "monophonic" form of anagram. Not this "general phonism," but what he later called "anagrammatical phonism" (phonism "directed toward a name") came to fascinate Saussure, just as, he believed, it had fascinated Latin writers from the earliest period of their literature to the "last limits of Latinity."'12

How does Saussure know which name will be anagrammatized in a particular text? One "could not doubt," he tells us, that a verse like "Aasen argale&n anemon amegartos autme" was "related in its syllables" to Agamemnon. But how does Saussure know that this


1114 SAMUEL KINSER

verse, which occurs in the Odyssey as part of Odysseus' tale to King Alcinous of his encounter with the shade of Agamemnon in Hades, is "on Agamemnon" rather than on Alcinous, Odysseus, or Poseidon? (Odysseus is addressing the shade: "Did Poseidon smite you, . . . when he roused afurious blast of racking winds?"')13 Presumably in a case like this Saussure checked whether the phonemic ordering allowed a mannequin or diphone rendering of such alternatives as Odysseus, Alcinous, or Poseidon. This was easy enough, since the mannequin aspect of the anagram allowed one to quickly eliminate names whose first and last phonemes did not occur in the passage in question.

The more important question to ask is this: how does Saussure know that a passage is about a name at all? Is it perhaps that Saussure "knows" that every literary passage is 'on' a signified ex- pressed by a signifier in the form of a noun or name, a 'word- theme' name which captures and encloses, like a mannequin, the verbal energy of the linguistic movement? If this is so, then the thematic reading of literary passages upon which Saussure's anagrammatical exercises partly depend is entailed by the logocentric theory of signs developed in the Course.

Saussure's logocentric or concept-centered understanding of signification associates "concept" (signified) with a corresponding "sound-image" (signifier). These two make up the indissoluble oneness of verbal signs. The examples of verbal signs which Saus- sure uses to explain the theory in the Course are nouns ("horse," "tree"), and this is not an accident. Concepts can be summed up in nouns, offered in unified, delimited words rather than in phrases or in fragments, as would be the case with other parts of speech ("up," "run," "to"). To make the paradigm of verbal sign be a noun, a substantive, a naming segment of language, thus parallels and reinforces Saussure's tendency to favor synchrony over diachrony, his tendency to try and discover "language-states" which can be fixed, defined, and summed up rather than to investigate language dynamically, as a set of reciprocal movements which flow into and out of each other and their contexts.

The effect of these doctrines of language on Saussure's analysis of the texts considered in the notebooks is double. On one hand, the coherence of the text is understood to consist of a set of sound-images which unfolds in parallel with a set of concepts. This coherence builds, increment by increment, sign by sign, the text's meaning. On the other hand, such a building could not take place if the signs were not capable of being considered as increments. Thus


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the signs have to be self-centered; each one must approximate to the "state" of being a substantive or noun so that it can incremen- tally combine with others. Since approximation to the nominative state is not clear in the case of conjunctions, prepositions, and some other words taken singly, it becomes easier to posit such approximation if one considers them not one by one but as parts of sentences, as parts of signifying chains which present, taken as a whole, a statement. Given a logocentric theory of signification, a text's meaning emerges ultimately from the conjuncture of its parallel movement with its centering movement.

To discover the phonemic repetition of names in texts power- fully reinforces these assumptions. For the name thus hidden is the center of the passage, the meaning toward which it moves (sound-image by sound-image, phoneme by phoneme) and around which it moves. (The anagram repeats the meaning which the chain of signs is unfolding.) An anagrammatical text, then, does not simply offer sound-images cohering to concepts one by one. It reinforces and offers a kind of guarantee for this incremental movement by providing the sound-image of the passage's central concept, spaced out over the passage as a whole: A-ph-ro-od-di-it-e.

Saussure's project, insofar as it is given impetus by a logocentric theory of sign, is to prove that the phonic movement of texts is in agreement with their centering concepts. The central concepts/sound-images will nearly always be nouns because nouns best sum up the text. As nouns they name the text, pulling it together-like the mannequins-into little boxes.

It is not surprising, then, that Saussure discovered a noun, and usually a name, in all but two of the some ninety exercises thus far published which are concerned with anagrammatical phonism.14 Nor should it be surprising to discover among Saussure's other unpublished manuscripts, as Levi-Strauss has recently done, a text which describes the process of naming as if it were a movement which, by centering and abstracting a concept, purifies and even deifies the concept's sound-image.

III The Purification of Names

The Saussurean text published by Levi-Strauss, untitled and full of erasures, announces its subject as "the deification of a thing."'15 It is a remarkable fragment because of the extraordinary lengths to which Saussure here pushes his characteristic dichotomy between the chaos of material contingencies and the logic internal to langue.


1116 SAMUEL KINSER

The deification of a thing, Saussure says, is a naming process which comes about by historical accident. The process consists of two steps. First there is a stage in which the name of an everyday "object" is the same as the name of the power of that object, a power somewhat mysterious and thus somehow divine. The household fire, for example, is at one time called "agni" in Sanskrit. A "community of name" "subsists" in this case between the sensible object fire and the abstract power of fieriness. At a second stage some other name is given to the everyday object and the old name is reserved for the abstraction. Thus Agni becomes "a figure of the same order as Varuna or Apollo, whose names have the particular- ity of not referring to anything [in particular] on earth at the same moment." Such abstract beings fill the "purely mythological" realm of "Olympus," Saussure declares.

The linguistic cause of this evolution of names is a historical "accident." The accident which "brings the rupture of the name from the sensible object" is "at the mercy of the first linguistic fact which happens along and has no necessary relation to the sphere of mythological ideas. Just as one may call a cauldron first and then [Saussure left blanks for these names], so one may call fire first agni and then something else." "Nothing," then, determines such a "capital" change in "mythology" except a "purely linguistic fact without any visible importance in the flow of linguistic events which take place every day."'16 Thus, the evolution of religious thought toward more abstract and general notions of divine power is given the form of a familiar scene-something like a kitchen scene in which Goodwife Brown calls the cauldrony instead of x and the fire a thingamajig instead of agni.

Of course such paroles must be adopted by others, must become socially general, in order to become part of the associative series which are integral to langue. But whether or not the definition of the relation of language-states to language flows, of synchrony to diachrony, had already been achieved by Saussure by 1894 (the date of this fragment), his theory of the fortuitousness of language-states, of the dependency of linguistic features upon accidents of historical context, remained the same. As Saussure put it in the Course, "No [linguistic] characteristic has a right to perma- nent existence; it persists only through sheer luck."'17

Implicit in this depiction of the fortuitous cause of the linguistic rise of Agni from earth to heaven are two other assumptions which both aided and hindered Saussure in his attempts to find and ex-


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plain anagrammatized names. One is the assumption of a one-way movement from "mixed" toward "pure" names. The naming process moves away from physically existing mixtures of sensibles and intelligibles, away from a referential orientation to the physical world, and toward pure forms, "purely mythological beings."'18

Is this naming perhaps a kind of historicized projection of Saus- sure's doctrine of the arbitrary relation between signs and their referents? Could this theory of the movement of religious thought be considered a fictitious representation of one of the structural assumptions of his linguistics-in this case, the raising of the semiological bar between words and things? Certainly the useful- ness of the fragment for anthropological study of the naming process is rather slight. In addition to the exiguity of the references to particular gods and to particular tribal usages, Levi-Strauss shows in his commentary that Saussure's theory is false with respect to a number of known tribal naming processes. Naming seems to be a circulatory rather than one-way process in "savage thought," with words passing from secular to sacred usage and back again in a complex way regulated by and explicable in relation to a particular tribe's social structure.19

As long as there was any logic in the adhesion of word to thing, any rationally specifiable relations 'outside' or 'beyond' the associative and syntagmatic relations 'in' the mind, it did not seem possible to Saussure for there to be a purely mythological thought, a clear analysis of the relations among the gods in heaven, a clarity about a science of names. (Manuscript note, undated, concerning the state of linguistics as Saussure found it: ". . . I assert as a fact that there is not a single term whatsoever in that science [linguistics] which has ever rested on a clear idea . . . Any clear theory, in the measure in which it is clear, is inexpressible in linguistics.")20 Only with the 'rupture' of name from sensed object, only with the dissolution of all 'sensible' ties, could the chimera of some 'natural relation' between signs and referents be exposed as illusion. Just as clarity about the logic relating different mythic beings requires thinking about their relations on Olympus rather than about their relations to particular things on earth, so linguistic rules can be specified only by isolating signs from referents.

The first of the three assumptions which Saussure makes in this fragment on Agni is thus paradoxically connected with the second. Linguistic rules can be specified because of the logical independence of signs from things. But this very independence from the


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rationality governing entities 'outside' language only makes linguistic signs the, more vulnerable to temporally definable as opposed to logically definable influence: ". . . Language changes, or rather evolves, under the influence of all the forces which can affect either sounds or meanings. The evolution is inevitable; there is no example of a single language that resists it."'21 The peculiarity and interest of the fragment on Agni is that no contrast is made in it between logical and temporal influences, the one 'inside' and the other 'outside' language. Instead, the attempt to formulate the separation of logical from temporal influence is given in the historicizing form of a movement from mixed toward pure names.

In Saussure's Course the logical implications of language are con- sistently set forth in terms suggesting stasis rather than dynamism. The study of langue is a study of simultaneities, of language-states. Saussure's 'project' in the largest sense is to change linguistics from a primarily dynamic, diachronic science to a primarily static, synchronic science of logical implications. There is a metaphorical bias in Saussure's work toward representing logical implications as stasis, while representing temporal implications as movement.22 This bias expresses itself on the grammatical level, and thence on the mytho-religious and anagrammatical levels, as a concentration on the linguistic logic of nouns. Saussure's third assumption in the fragment on Agni derives from this. The process of deification is seen as a process of nomination, a movement from verbal paraphrase-that-over-there-which-sparkles-and-leaps-high-toward nominative substance-that fire-and finally to static, categorical universality: the spirit of fire, the idea anywhere and ev- erywhere of fire, Agni.

Saussure's conclusion in the fragment on Agni, based upon the three assumptions just considered, is as contradictory to the sym- bolist Naturmythologie of his day as his later linguistic theory was to historical linguistics: ". . . upon the fate of the name depends, . . . so to speak, from second to second, that of the god. . . .[There is a] fundamental influence of names and language on the creation of [mythic] figures.... The word here is simply determining. "23

Those who control names, then, control the "gods," or, as Francis Bacon put it in perhaps the most remarkable analysis of ideological work before that of Marx, the "idols of the tribe." One need not move very far from such a conclusion to decide that those who control names control the ideas of the tribe. Saussure never made that move. His exploration of the question of who weaves names


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into poetry as anagrams seems to force him toward this conclusion, and yet he avoids it completely.

IV The Ritual Task of The Vates

Two-thirds of the some ninety names which Saussure finds anagrammatized in the exercises thus far published are those of gods or heroes. They are, then, relatively "pure" names, names liberated from material contingencies, names with universal social power. Their circulation would be useful in obfuscating particular material conditions and in reinforcing general understanding of the world in terms of a status quo which poses itself as universal and eternal.

The other third of the anagrammatized names are less pure. They are names of authors, patrons, authors' writings, and persons or places figuring in the writings which Saussure studied (Pindar, Maecenas, the Eclogues, Falernus, etc.), and thus they seem to be declarations of personal rather than of social power relationships (power of the author over his or her work; power of a patron, a mistress, or a cherished locale over the author's ability to write, etc.). But this third of the names does share with the other two-thirds the

24Itiasi property of consisting nearly entirely of proper names. It is as if Saussure's attempt to discover the centering movement of anagrammatized texts could not stop until the text became the property, the appropriated appendage of a real or imagined, but always particu- larized, living being.

Saussure's tendency to see proper names holding together or centering this or that passage is a repetition on another level of his tendency to explain the origin of the text by referring to the psychology of the author. The signs which center these texts on names were, Saussure seems to have assumed, woven by particular persons, by the authors to whom the texts belonged. By thus turning his investigation toward a problematic of personal motivation, of conscious intentions, Saussure moved-as indeed a logocentric theory of signification ultimately must move, since the concepts which are matched with sound-images are always something some one has 'in mind'-Saussure moved from a theory of text to one of context. He elaborated this theory in a double way, corresponding to his idea that linguistic activity (langue) is psychological and yet in important respects beyond the individual will.25 Thus, he tried to work out theories both of inward psychic arrangements which


1120 SAMUEL KINSER

would motivate the making of anagrams and also of outward social and historical circumstances which would shape and regularize psychic work.

Saussure believed that the first persons to choose names and anagrammatize them were members of an Indo-European priestly elite like the vates of early Roman times:

Ever since Indo-European times a person composing acarmen thus had to occupy himself in a conscious manner with the syllables entering into the carmen and with the rhymes they formed among themselves or with a given name. Every yates was above all a specialist in phonemes.

The vates were Roman soothsayers and interpreters of oracles who delivered their discourses in versified form. They were in early times not only religious leaders but law-givers, and it is important to note that the carmina which they composed were versified formulas of religion and law in the "Saturnian" prosodic form which first attracted Saussure's attention to the possibility that Latin and other early poetry was anagrammatized. Vates was the earliest Latin word for poet, and after falling into disuse, was re- vived and cultivated by Vergil and by those admiring Vergilian poetry as the proper term for poets. Whatever Vergil's motivations were-and this was a problem which eventually caused much perplexity to Saussure-the early vates, Saussure thought, wove names into their poetry out of superstition:

One understands the superstitious idea which suggested that, in order for a prayer to be effective, it was necessary for the very syllables of the divine name to be indissolubly mixed in it: the god was, in a manner of speaking, rivetted to the text.26

In reducing the vates' motives to false belief, to a "superstitious idea," Saussure moves his psychological projection of the problem of anagrams in an individuating direction, obscuring thereby the social functioning of the vates' work. The repetitious exchange and distribution of certain names chosen by the priestly elite appears less as a social practice directing psychic activity and more as the superstition of individuals, the pre-scientific failure of the vates to comprehend the difference between words and things, names and divine beings. Consideration of the vates' beliefs makes it less easy to see the manipulation of names by the vates as ideological practice, as collectively developing control over what names, nouns, and significations receive privileged circulation in a society.27

Saussure's turning of the question of the vates' expertise toward a


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problematic of motivation did not, however, preclude an ingenious reconstruction of the means by which the vates might have developed their technique of rivetting concept to sound-image. Saussure believed that the ancient Latin, Greek, and Hindu peoples all used anagrammatical techniques in their carmina, and that each of them possessed a priestly caste similar to the vates. The old Germans too, he thought, had cultivated this technique, and in musing upon how they could have done so, even before the inven- tion of writing, he conjures up a strange and emblemmatic scene. A group of Germanic vates, he imagines, sits in a clearing in a forest, chanting a prayer. Before each priest lie two heaps of twigs carved in ways resembling the runic characters found in early German inscriptions. From the pile to his left a priest-poet regularly picks up certain of these twigs and transfers them to the pile to his right as he chants. In this way, Saussure says, by allowing a given twig to represent a given phoneme (the German word Stab, 'stick' or 'wand,' is used in the compound, Buchstabe, to mean 'letter' or 'written character'), the exact number of times which each verbal sound had been used in the spell could be remembered, and thus the "poetic homophony," the balanced repetition of sounds, the anagrammatical repetition of names and themes, could be achieved "in the absence of writing."

For in asking myself how without writing, an individual with even an exceptional memory could count the exact number of T's, R's, etc., in a hymn, vedic or not, which he was composing, I said to myself that there was only one natural means, that of making an exterior sign for each phonic element, as for example blue, black, and white pebbles . .. But since pebbles with the desired differences would be difficult to find,... the simplest thing was to take some shapable material, some wood, some twigs, cut in a certain fashion or chosen in accordance with [differences of] thickness, form, angles, and so on.28

The action of the vates reconstructed here is not simply one of weaving in the name of a god or hero. It is also, as Saussure emphasizes, a mnemonic ritual, a method of impressing certain phonemic series on the memory. In thus depicting the means by which a priestly elite insured the preservation of ideologically central names, Saussure exemplified the specifically semiological manipulations of an ideological apparatus, in this case a religio- legal apparatus which eventually became an educational-cultural apparatus through the inertial power of Indo-European myth.29 But for Saussure the vates were not part of an ideological ap-


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paratus. The priests were proto-scientists, not proto-ideologists, and it was their knowledge, not their political power, which ele- vated them above others: "from the earliest Indo-European times this science of the vocal form of words . .. was probably the reason for the superiority, the particular [social] quality of the Hindu kavis, the Latin vates, etc."30

Before assessing the significance of this reference to the kavis and the vates as the founding fathers of an important part of that semiological science which Saussure saw himself as developing, we must consider the last element of the unnamed ideological mechanism which Saussure constructed. This element is developed in the Course rather than in the notebooks. It explains how the mnemonic rituals of the vates may be seen as a way not just of preserving names but of generating discourse.

V The Theater of Ideological Work

Differences between linguistic terms fall into two groups, syntagmatic and associational, according to Saussure's Course in General Linguistics. Saussure depicts the relation between the two groups as a linearly horizontal movement from left to right in the case of syntagmatic relations among terms, and as a star-like spraying-out of terms below the line of discourse in the case of associative relations among terms. The example of associative relations which he uses is enseignement ('teaching') diagrammed thus:

.enseignement v enseigner ,- of I d clment

enseignons j/ justement etc. ,- letc. ^

etc.' apprentissage changement etc. ,ducation armement

etc.' etc.1 etc.' etc.

In associative space linguistic terms move in mnemonic rather than in grammatical ways. 'Outside discourse' and 'in the memory,' this space is nonetheless indispensable to langue, to the linguistic behavior which displays itself as syntagmatic. It is field-like and open- ended, in contrast to the linearly coded space of syntagms. It is not, of course, unstructured; it contains paradigmatic series of various sorts, declensions of nouns, conjugations of verbs. But it contains


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such series in "indefinite order" and "indefinite number," unlike the perfectly ordered space of syntagmatic series.

The indefiniteness with which associated linguistic terms are arranged is itself variable. The pull of syntagmatic relations 'in discourse' upon the associated terms 'outside discourse' constantly moves the latter toward definite, constellar form, like that which Saussure portrays in his diagram of enseignement. But the associated terms never achieve perfect constellation because they float freely in memory, and are thus subject to every linguistically provoking wind which sweeps through the psyche. "A word can always evoke everything that can be associated with it in one way or another." What, then, orders these associative terms? ". . . The order in which terms are called depends on circumstances,"31 that is, on diachrony, on history. Since historical circumstances are themselves multiple and changing, their effect on associative relations is to threaten constant flux. Take the discourses called legends, for example. If one offers "five or six material elements" (words, phrases) to "five or six persons working separately," their "sense" (their associated order) "will change in the space of several minutes."32

With such an atomized conception of "circumstances" (five or six atom-individuals set to work in an anonymous time-space of several atom-minutes), Saussure could only think about the psyche as a place of little order and always threatening chaos. "Psychologically our thought-apart from its expression in words-is only a shapeless and indistinct mass....".. Between the potential chaos of associative relations "in memory" and the helter-skelter of "circumstances" surrounding the signifying individual stood only the rules and order of syntagmatic relations, calm and unalterable, the work of the community rather than of the individual; of the community as a "whole" rather than of any identifiable, socially structured groups within it.

The shapelessness of Saussure's theory of society (mass and individual: nothing in between) complements the shapelessness of his theory of mind (concepts pulled into order by langue, dropping into disorder with the end of discourse: nothing in between). What Saussure regards as true of the moving, changing world outside is converted into what is true of the individual's world inside by means of his concept of associative relations. But the two spaces remain separate, held apart from each other by the iron laws of langue. Why was Saussure unable to connect the mnemonic series of associative space with the space of social relations, the space where the vates weave phonemes into memorable strands? If the


1124 SAMUEL KINSER

idea of associative relations is so parallel to the idea of the vates' ritual, why are the two ideas disjoined, so that Saussure never ex- plicitly considered the priestly-poetic guardians of words as a group whose job it was to save ideologically central names from the accidents to which language's regularities are exposed every "several minutes"? Why did Saussure never consider associational space as the area of ideological work, where the memory, the "seat" of association "in the brain,"34 is filled with ideologically charged phonemes, arranging them not only according to their "radical," (enseignement, enseigner, etc.), according to the analogy of the concepts signified (enseignement, apprentissage, etc.), according to the "suffix" (enseignement, changement, etc.), according to the "sound- image" (enseignement, justement, etc.), but also according to the mannequin form of the sound-image, the diphonic form of the sound-image?35

Like the systems elaborated by the ideological apparatuses of present-day mass culture, the arrangements of society are kept apart by relating them in a theatrical way. On a stage, on a screen before our mind's eye we glimpse the phonic hovering of discourse around key signs, projected forward into this theater of our space and time from its dim beginnings in pre-history. Seated thus safely apart from the space-time depicted on stage, we the students of language can view with equanimity this astonishing chronicle of primitive superstition, this ancient vatic ritual "of another age." Behind us, out of sight, is situated the camera or the director projecting the spectacle. Behind us, in the opposite direction from what we analyze as paroles or discursive activity, is situated the mechanism governing this phonic play, with its mnemonic hovering around series of associated terms, terms inscribed more or less deeply in the nervous system by their repeated use in contiguity.

In Saussure's opinion we can describe this camera, located diametrically opposite the place where phenomena appear, only by observing the camera's effects and not by looking at it directly. The psyche is a black box, a camera obscura where "language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses...." Linguists, then, are not camera-makers, they are only projectors: "Linguistics ... works in the border-land where the elements of sound and thought combine."36

The consequence of this polarization of inner from outer and of this barring of penetration into the inner, is that a continuously interweaving idea of signifying activity is not possible within the terms of Saussure's system. As in most information theory today,


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signs for Saussure boomerang back and forth between two psyches, two poles which are mysterious amalgams of rule-bound langue and rule-less individual acts of volition and intellect.37 Verbal activity is classifiable only in the "borderland," where the effects of "pure" psychic activity can be arranged into associative and syntagmatic categories. The associative area, mediating as it does between inside and outside, is the theater of ideological work, but that theater is one of mystification because access to the projecting room of the psyche is barred. Saussure offers no entrance to that inside via the work of mediating groups of persons working together out of habit, tradition, or institutional coercion. He allows no contingent, temporally-spatially definable, diachronic interweaving of society and psyche.

The memory stores things at the internal end of the linguistic apparatus, offering them to the outside world in accordance with the laws of langue, which, however "social," are not and can not be sociohistorical. History is 'outside,' a question of events. The 'properly' historical-the diachronic-and the 'properly' linguistic-the synchronic-occupy different places. Signs sent from one person's inside to another's may be pushed and pulled, damaged or even cancelled by events en route, but they are not 'made' there in that outside area. Such modifications as take place are 'accidents' which are not controllable by and not describable as properly linguistic forces. Linguistic decisions are made only 'inside,' by the brain-not only the rules of langue but the rules of littirature.

Anagrammatical practice, too, therefore, begins 'inside'; and if "every Latin who took up the pen found it the habitual accompa- niment of his thought, almost at the moment when it sprang from his brain and he thought of putting it into prose or verse,"38 Saus- sure must explain why this habit was so coercive in every instance where he discovers the practice. That is, Saussure was required by his logocentrically linear model of the making of signs (thought -* intention of putting it into prose or verse -* writing) to provide not only an explanation of the practice of anagrams in the other space of history, the pre-history of Europe where anagrammatical prac- titioners could be lumped together as primitive, superstitious, and in any case anonymous. He had also to explain Vergil "with his original poetry," Lucretius "with his intense preoccupation with ideas," Horace "with his solid good sense about everything": how could these great individuals subject themselves to "that incredible relic of another age?" "I recognize," Saussure says in another place,


1126 SAMUEL KINSER

"that the question is related very closely to a poetic intention, which I denied or presented under other aspects in the case of the cen- turies before that personal poetry."39

How did Saussure explain the necessarily intentional origin of anagrams in self-conscious poets? In the long run he did not, and it is amusing to observe how Saussure's inability to give up the princi- ple of elite self-consciousness, of individual control of literary signification, gradually undermined his scientism, his sense of the experimental impeccability and objective existence of anagrammatized names. Finally, when he wrote directly to a practicing neo-Latin poet whose works also revealed the presence of anagrams, a fellow academician-who would have to know the anagrammatical rules in a conscious way-when Giovanni Pascoli refused to acknowledge the rules, Saussure's project apparently col- lapsed not because the anagrams were disproved, but because the theory on the basis of which Saussure was able to see them had no place for collective unconscious ideological activity.40 Saussure could not wedge the anagram in between a polarized and undifferentiated "individual" and "society."

Saussure's impasse can be articulated in the form of three an- tinomies concerning the clarity of truth, the inwardness of impulse, and the individuation of development.

1. The clarity of truth: "there is not a single term in that science which has ever rested on a clear idea.... Saussure's theory of synchronic linguistics in the Course is "clear" to just the degree that it is general. Similarly, the problem of the origin of anagrams becomes clear to just the degree that it is remote. The practice of the vates is clear and that of Vergil is comprehensible when one gives enough weight to "tradition," but the practice of Giovanni Pascoli, so close at hand, is impossible to understand. As the phenomena retreat from the scientist in time, space, and social involvement, they become indistinct historically, socially, and psychologically, but how wonderfully clear they become in their general linguistic contours! As long as anagrammatical exercises take place thousands of years ago, their reality is incontestable. This "relic," this "curiosity," this "superstitious idea" becomes a reality to just the degree to which it has nothing to do with the investigator-with Saussure's own French language, for example (Starobinski points out that Saussure offered a course on French versification nearly every year and yet he never ventured an anagrammatical analysis of anything written in French), or with his own ideological status as a 'self-conscious' individual, choosing what he


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wishes to write about with 'freedom.' When the phenomena occur nearer home, when the question of intention becomes unavoidable, when the problem of anagrams presents itself in socio-historical and personally involving clarity-in the form of a letter to Pascoli, for example-then science becomes troubled, murky, unsafe, in- secure.

2. The inwardness of impulse: If 'in' is eternally in and 'out' is absolutely out, then what stimulates an 'in' to go 'out'? or what prompts people to make signs? Of course, 'in' speaks to 'in': one psyche stimulates another, but what stimulated the first psyche? and how did psyches become so marvellously, theatrically separate from the socio-material conditions of stimulation? A 'speech- circuit' which only boomerangs between two inwardly enclosed poles can only be explained by moving down a double tunnel of intentional and historical regress, both tunnels infinitely long and dark. Each speech-act has to be verified, individual volition by individual volition, and its inspiration carried back individual moment by individual moment all the way to the forests where perhaps, on the basis of a "superstitious idea," one could suppose a linguistic shaping which is neither the work of individuals nor that of an undifferentiated collectivity, but is rather the work of a specific group which in competition and consonance with other social groups has achieved control over the inculcation of words. But can one think out the interfiliation of that prehistoric breakdown of privacy in mental action with the historic polarity of out from in? One cannot, because

3. History is a process of individuation, of development toward the freedom of individuals, not of development toward a multi- plying variability of social interaction. "The question becomes more personal the more one advances in time.. "42 Time is progress; time is the progressive individuation of the person, and so of necessity everything traditional, as it hangs on, becomes oppressive and banal, even to the ruling minority and the cultural elites. In the future, some day, a poet will be free of all traditions, free to choose to anagrammatize or not-unlike Vergil-unlike Mallarme?

I don't say that Vergil took up the anagram because of the esthetic advantages which he saw in it, but I do want to make this point: first, that one can never measure the force of a tradition of that kind. There are many French nineteenth-century poets who would not have written their verses in the form prescribed by Malherbe if they had been free.43

With such a concept of history, one cannot think the continued existence, let alone the indispensability, of ideologized linguistic


1128 SAMUEL KINSER

action, of an inevitable associative inertia and at the same time a positive will to exert power over associativeness on the part of con- flicting social groups-on the part of all social groups, not in order to communicate 'what they have inside,' but simply in order to orient themselves to their daily realities.

VI Moving in Our Chains

Ritualization is remembering. A ritual is a socio-physically describable way of performing a psycho-physical action. And vice- versa. In temporal-spatial terms, then, a socially signifying form of action like ritual behavior should be understood as interfiliated with a psychically signifying form of action like remembering. Un- derstood in this way, the problem of penetrating to intentions 'behind' signifying actions dissolves. What Saussure projected outside and behind 'our' history in a pre-history of European literature-a collective work ritually enforcing the remembering of names-can be admitted as a mode of ideological work going on at any time irrespective of intentions. Ritual action is repetition, so as to secure fixation of the kind of response behaviorally demanded in certain situations. Thus it is an ideological procedure. Remembering is a matter of repetition, so as to secure fixation of response, an availability of the signs demanded in certain situations. Thus, it is an ideological procedure. Syllabic repetitions and phonic outlines of ideologically important words will occur in any writing, Latin or French, old or new, insofar as the words have been ritually- collectively, unconsciously-fixed as memorable.

But fixity of signification is only relatively possible in a temporal and spatial world. We measure lack of fixity by temporal and spatial coordinates. The coordinates, since they cannot start 'from the beginning,' begin from a norm: Greenwich mean time; the rigid rod, metrically subdivided, on deposit at the Bureau of Standards; Jesus' birth; the zero meridian. The function of ideology in relation to the working of social systems could be described generally as that of obscuring the lack of fixity in reality-as-humanly-experienced by means of establishing norms.

The establishment of norms: a centering process. Just as time and space cannot be used as measures of fixity and its lack except by reference to norms which are themselves arbitrary centerings of changeability as humanly experienced, so the particulars of social life cannot be measured in terms of their fixity and its lack except by reference to arbitrary centerings of social structure: the


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patriarchal family, the capitalist factory, the kingship, the presi- dency. In the first section of this paper I suggested replacing the Marxian concept of illusion with the Saussurean concept of arbitrariness in order to avoid the dualism of reflection theories of ideology. Ensuing sections indicated how Saussure both in the Course and in the notebooks used the idea of the arbitrariness of signs with respect to referents and the idea of the centering work of signs with respect to discourse. In this concluding section let us consider the implications of this concept of ideology as arbitrary centering for a concept of nonideologized signification. What space and time is left for the nonideological in such a problematic?

Ideology, by its centering, works to make life meaningless except in terms of its norms, which are nevertheless merely arbitrary rather than reflective of reality. But the more successful an ideology is in making significance depend upon its arbitrarily fixed norms, the less meaningful the norms become. The oppressiveness of ideology lies in its emptying effect rather than in its falsehoods, but this oppressive zeal undoes itself. The more that signifying practices appear not simply normative but normal, the more that abnormal signifying practices appear not simply deviant but without any significance, the less the center can remain the center because it has fewer and fewer signifying items to integrate in its arbitrary way. Ideological work consists in showing how apparently diverse things signify the same thing, but if it were possible to show not only that all things signify the same thing but that insofar as they do not so signify, they are entirely without significance, then the center would disappear due to its reiterative sameness. Repetition, the ideological dinning of "sound images" into the memory, is impossible without differences.

Ideological work, then, thrives on differences, and in this it dis- tinguishes itself from the work of repression, which consists in censoring rather than in centering deviance from norms. A 're- pressive' state system does not try to eliminate its subjects, which remain resources for its accumulation of value; its aim is merely to eliminate resistant and deviant behaviors. The same is true of the individual who tries to repress thoughts or emotions; the effort is to prohibit certain appearances, not to annihilate the means of their appearance, thinking or feeling itself. Ideologization is less a pro- hibiting than an integrating process. Eagerly accepting as grist for their mill the variability of significations which occur due to differences in class position, historical traditions, or physical location, ideologists direct attention to those signs which promise social in-


1130 SAMUEL KINSER

clusion by their imitation. These signs can only be such as stabilize and perpetuate society as it is; they are signs which center attention on behavior which serves the interests of existing class hierarchies, rather than directing attention to their questionability. They identify the place where a member of a community will be at the center of things, where there is least chance of exclusion and most chance of being included in an intrinsically variable world. Whether the center thus identified is aristocratic (to be at the center is to be a person admired, a person of prowess, of ideal moral and physical powers), bourgeois (to be at the center is to be the average one, the normal one, the person who is like everyone else, who fits in), communal (to be at the center is to be adequate; it is to be a person whose functions are economically, morally, physically necessary, who cooperates with social goals), or other, the function of ideological work in this respect is to center signifying behavior around activities which support the social system.

Any centering is already a polarizing of significations. If ideological work aims at equipping people to fulfill their daily tasks by portraying a centered system of social roles, it always implies a system of polarities: center/margin, inclusion/exclusion, group/ individual. To use the term which plays the centering role in both Saussure's linguistic theory and in the "concrete description" of the theory in his manuscripts, ideological work polarizes by offering a set of denominations, of central, less central, and marginal names. There is no "place" in the work of ideologists for words which fall between the lines, for signs which direct attention to process, or to ambivalences, or to incoherences. To center linguistic efforts on the arrangement of nouns checks every dispersal of meaning, af- firming the ideological project of ruling out what cannot be arranged with respect to given social names. Deviance and resistance is not prohibited, for to prohibit such behavior would make it significant by acknowledging it. Ideology controls meaning posi- tively by integrating deviance and negatively by neglecting it. It achieves its goal insofar as all meaning is arrayed in due degree around its centering norms, while all resistance to it is not crushed but on its way either to insertion or oblivion.

The purpose of ideological work, then, is to naturalize the arbitrary: "The anagrammatical writer was first attentive to the equi- librium of sounds, because it seemed natural, since one had to repeat the same sounds, to choose especially those which alluded at the same time to a name that everyone had in mind."44 "Aphrodite," "Agamemnon": remember these names, listen to the vates recalling


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you to remembrance of these names. If you remember them, then they have placed you in relation to them, and not vice-versa. You have a place near or far from, but in any case located, integrated in relation to several central themes of our society. The themes of love, the themes of war: the socio-psycho-semio-structures which parse love as an ambrosial fragrance, a flowing of robes; which rouse the warrior to smite like a storm-blast, to resist death like a king.

The memory, which in Saussure's synchronic theory serves up associative items to be inserted into syntagmetic slots, can only "store," as Saussure says, what is packed into it. If it is filled up with some phonemes more than others, in certain orders rather than others, then the associative series which are selected by the linguistic "machine" for insertion in a syntagmatic series will tend to select the more frequently stored phonemes and phonemic orders rather than the less frequently stored ones. This machine works equally in and on the ideologized and the ideologizers: its semio-logic is universal and inexorable within the confines of the social group using a given language.45

If, then, the characteristic work of ideological institutions-above all the representatives of religion in Vergil's or Homer's time, and above all the representatives of science in Saussure's-is to center and polarize (categorize, denominate), and if this is characteristically achieved through the ritualization of sign behavior (not only or always verbal sign behavior), such that certain signs tend to be forgotten while others are ones which 'everyone has in mind,' then the linguistic function of priest-poets is simply that of centering associative series on social norms: on divine names, on the writer's patron, on one's 'self,' one's legitimate, which is to say one's ideologically definable existence as a writer. Saussure's anagrams, observed at a safe distance from his own culture (born in the pre- linguistic sphere of psychic intentions, carried on in an Indo- European pre-history before poets achieved full freedom from "apparatuses" for their poetry), could only bring to phonic clarity the presence of names known by the investigator to be already there. This field of ideological practices is only the first level of ideological work. Saussure never moved to a second level of ideological presences in language, a level often referred to as that of "belief-systems." It is this level to which we have referred in showing how Saussure's logocentric theory of sign works together with his polarization of 'in' from 'out' to stop his investigation of anagrams. Without a method capable of analyzing ideological work


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in discourse on this level, the larger ideologies at work in Homer, Seneca, Vergil, Lucretius, and the rest remained undiscovered by Saussure. There is no sense of aristocratic social system, no analysis of patron-client relations, no awareness of the ideological useful- ness of love and war. Finally, Saussure did not move from the sense of systems at work to the concept of apparatuses insuring the material production of the elements of those systems. The embedded- ness of "belief-systems" such as elite/mass, in/out, and center/periphery in religious, educational, and artistic-let alone scientific-institutions remains outside Saussure's discourse.

Saussure's system can be simply summarized. Anagrams repeat names, in order to induce memorization of names. The memorization of names produces an association of sounds inside the brain so that they achieve a regularized relation to each other. This regularized relation or associative series fixes words in relation to each other, though not in relation to the world, so that anagrammatical practices tend to perpetuate themselves. But there is always the chance that the series will be undone by "linguistic accidents" caused by the chaotic forces of diachrony.

Underpinning this system is the set of unspoken metaphysical equations to which, following Jacques Derrida, we have referred as logocentrism. Saussure's emphasis on naming in anagrammatical practice is equivalent to his emphasis on nouns and on the grammatical and semantic functions of the nominative in his general linguistic theory. Emphasis on the nominative and on naming are in turn equivalent to his emphasis on myth-making as a purifying of sensory impressions. The rising of fire/Agni from earth to heaven is a centering and abstracting process which separates the word from its source in a sensory impression, and allows it to float freely in the brain where it can be associated-arbitrarily-with other words. Thus Saussure mythologized his doctrine of the arbitrary 'nature' of the sign.

In translating this theory into the terms of a possible problematic of ideology which moves beyond and against logocentric assumptions, only one intervention is necessary. Instead of locating the place of the dislocation of signs from their referents in the never-never land of the psyche ("heaven"), one may suggest that sensory impressions on the human neural system are integrated with the already signified needs, uses, and desires of a determinate social structure. In the case of the Indo-European peoples whose discourses Saussure studied, that social structure has at most epochs and in most places been a hierarchically oppressive one. As a result the naming has


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been neither purifying nor logical in its abstracting movement but a mystification of the diverse relations existing among materially existing things. Nomination of these relations has operated to pull together, to center and classify the world's diversity in such a way as to achieve the kind of stasis which would solidify the status quo.

The value of Saussure's work on anagrams remains that he suggested how this mystification is processed as a ritually mnemonic method of creating associations among linguistic forms. He thus offers in incipient form some of the semiological links missing from Marx's, Gramsci's and Althusser's theories of ideology. These links make it possible to avoid bipolar organizations of the ideological problematic. They encourage elaboration of a tim- ing, spacing, gapped, intermittently 'feedback' model of signifying activity. Such a linguistic mechanism works as often to dislocate and transform as to complete the circuits moving between the material, social, and signifying elements which affect and compose human activity. In developing this kind of model the concept of associative relations of language remains extremely useful both because of and in spite of Saussure's explicit aims, because they show how language characteristically operates in a gaping, dislocative way, even as it pursues centralizing goals.

Saussure, we remember, emphasized that most associative series are indefinite both in number and in the order in which they "occur" to the "memory."46 But that occurrence to memory is always ideologically offered: the order and the number of items in an associative series-that is, the items which may be substituted for each other, which are 'alternatives' in a given discourse-are pro- gressively, continuously, although never definitively organized by the socially, naturally, historically conditioned process of signification. If Saussure, therefore, places at the center of his diagram of associative relations the French noun enseignement ('teaching'), that is an ideological question: Saussure is a French professor teaching a course in linguistics to a group of students. Of course, he could have chosen some other word equally well. But he didn't choose another word, and his choice of this word, enseignement, is not ideologically 'free' either in its occurrence or in its implications.

But it is not 'determined' ideologically, either. The advantage of Saussure's associative space is its avoidance of determinism, linguistic or otherwise. Far from conceiving the associative space as a determined realm of specific levels and formal classes, Saussure says that "the mind"-let us substitute the phrase, 'the ideological process'-''creates as many associative series as there are diverse


1134 SAMUEL KINSER

relations." Thus in his diagram each series ends with the word "etc.," not from lack of diagrammatic space but because the ideological process is simultaneously centering and open-ended.

If we associate painful, delightful, frightful, etc., we are unable to predict the number of words that the memory will suggest or the order in which they will appear. A particular word is like the center of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite number of coordinated terms.47

An ideological process is centering and coordinating only in its connection to the work of specifiable social groups; it is not intrinsically centered, coordinated, and closed. It cannot be because the rituals which help and enforce remembering cannot be eternally fixed in the midst of changing spaces and times. Rather it is the interaction of associative series with the syntagmatic series of discourses-the contexts of an unfolding communication-which center and link items in an ideological process in a provisional way. Since associative series are thus openended, they can be recentered and linked together in "as many associative series as there are diverse relations." They can be systematically decentered and un- linked, although this process, the more it is systematically pursued, the more it too becomes an ideological undertaking.

The removal of mystery from the non-place of the psyche, its relocation as a route rather than a place, its exposure as a process of linkage and centering and of unlinking and decentering, destroys at the same time the occult power of the priestly, scientific, or other coteries who ritualize its forms. The structure of the psyche behind or below the line of discourse may be understood more easily, less secretly, as the set of provisional ideologies, obsessing-that is, with attention to that verb's Latin root, besieging, attempting to fix in his or her proper social place-a 'reader.'

In the measure in which readers fail to recognize that every signifying text, verbal or non-verbal, which they choose to read (never freely; never deterministically) was guided in its composi- tion by ideologically organized parameters; in the measure in which readers fail to recognize that their reading is also guided in its understanding by ideologically organized canons of interpretation-in these measures they capitulate to the Guardians of Truth, to the Makers of Right Names, to the vates, savant shapers of language, modern manipulators of mystic names.

The associative space of an ideologically ineluctable winding and rewinding of significations is not simply a physically controlled


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space, whose paths are effaced automatically by a hypostasized time. It is not simply a psycho-logically controlled space, where paths are traced by structures of desires and needs peculiar to the psychic development of the human infant in the triangulated structure of the family. It is not simply a socio-logically controlled space, where paths become deep ruts due to the tired repetitions of sovereign interests, institutionalized in ideological apparatuses. It is not simply a materially contingent space, where effects of nearness and distance, of this letter next to that, of attraction and repulsion, dissociation and hiatus, repetition and avoidance, dance along the way. It is at least the congeries of combinations suggested by these perspectives, these categories, these names. And it is also the deficit of objects blocked off by the tracing of these paths, objects which reappear when the paths are traced in other ways.

The psyche, then, is not a black box, a receptable of thoughts and motives where the things of this world are arranged in locked, categorical drawers. It is rather like the spacing out of associative relations along materially traceable physico-chemical neural trails, such that the different aspects of words-or more generally, of significations-have relative but not definite order and number. These signifying streams are not structures, but rather structures-to-be, structurings called out by the syntagmatic exigen- cies of a given language, and thereby given-but again provisionally-a name as part of a specific discourse. Naming, then, is definite, inevitable, useful, from the point of view of the specific discourse, but it is indefinite, avoidable, and sooner or later useless from the point of view of the associative nets from which and to which particular terms pass.

Associative work is not clarifying, moving fire to the heaven of pure names, but distributive, like the vates moving their twigs. It moves things around, defeating at the same time as it tends to capitulate to the pressure, the rhythm, the comforting repetition of anagrammatic rituals of understanding.

Northern Illinois University

NOTES

1 Aeneid, I, 403-04. Saussure's analysis of these lines is reproduced in facsimile by Semiotext(e) II, no. 1 (Spring, 1975: an issue entitled "Les anagrammes de Saus- sure"), on unnumbered pages at the end of the issue. The analysis is on a page


1136 SAMUEL KINSER

marked by Saussure as 2 recto and verso and is the first of the several analyses reproduced in facsimile. Henceforth cited as Sem.

2 Quoted in Jean Starobinski, Les mots sous les mots (Paris, 1971), p. 61. Henceforth cited as S.

3. This quotation is from a letter by Saussure published in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 21 (1964), 114. The letter is translated into English in Semiotext(e), I, no. 2 (Fall, 1974), 65-71. I have found it necessary to revise the translation slightly here and elsewhere and therefore cite the French text as CFS.

4 Between 1964 and 1970 Jean Starobinski published with commentaries excerpts from the more than one hundred anagrammatical notebooks. In 1971 the book cited in note 2 was published, which incorporates these commentaries and in- cludes new materials. His book emphasizes the problems for criticism of poetry posed by Saussure's anagrams. Julia Kristeva used the "principles" of "poetic language" allegedly demonstrated in the notebooks to elaborate a "paragram- matic" theory of poetry in an article published in 1966 and republished in her Semiotiki (Paris, 1969). Roman Jakobson wrote an enthusiastic article about Starobinski's work on Saussure and published Saussure's earliest letter on the anagrams in L'homme, 11 (1971), 15-24. Among others who have concerned themselves with anagrammatical writing in ways similar to these, Jacqueline Risset has employed the Saussurean theory as a method of explaining Maurice Sceve's D61ie in L'anagramme du desir (Rome, 1971), and Paul Zumthor has tried to find anagrams in the courtly-love poetry of medieval France in his Langue, texte, enigme (Paris, 1975), pp. 55-67.

5 The issues of Semiotext(e) which published the proceedings of the Columbia conference are cited in notes 1 and 3.

6 "Le 'complexe' de Saussure," in Sem., II, 92ff.. 7 Lotringer emphasizes the affinity between Saussure's investigation and Bataille's

concern with poetic (and other) excess (op. cit., 94 and 110-12). 8 Francoise Rastier's "A propos du Saturnien. Notes sur 'Le texte dans le texte,'

... par Jean Starobinski," Latomus 29 (1970), indicates how the difficulty of identifying what Latin authors referred to as "Saturnian" verse makes it almost impossible to test whether Saussure's alleged anagrammatical "laws" are either true or false.

9 Versus, Latin noun: a furrow made by the plough; hence transferred, a line of writing, a verse of poetry.

10 Course in General Linguistics, tr. W. Baskin (New York: paperback edition, 1966), p. 16. Henceforth cited as C. I have sometimes, as here, corrected a word or two of Baskin's translation without specific indication in the notes, on the basis of R. Engler's critical edition of the Course, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1967-68).

11 CFS, 110, 109. 12 Ibid., 118. The reference here is to the poet Claudian (ca. 370-ca. 406), but

Saussure later extended the prevalence of the anagram in Latin to as late as the eighteenth century in neo-Latin writing.

13 Saussure's quotation of Homer occurs in passing, and that is perhaps why it is faulty. Homer's line (Book, 11, 1.400) reads "Orsas argoleon anemon amegarton autmen." The correction does not destroy Saussure's phonic point.

14 The two exceptions are message-like statements: "Beware Cicero" in a letter from Caesar to Cicero, and a message beginning "Ave Camillus," in an oracle recorded by Livy. See S, 116 and 78.

15 Cl

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Saussure Anagrams Ideological Work