Poiesis and Possible Worlds: A Study in Modality and Literary Theory 9781442678576

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Part One: Paradoxes
Chapter One. The Paradox of the Many: Post-Structuralism and Zeno
Chapter Two. The Paradox of the One: Language as Universal Medium
Part Two: Possible Worlds
Chapter Three. Talk of Possible Worlds; Language as Calculus
Chapter Four. The Poiesis of Possible Worlds; A Theory of Possibility for Literature
Part Three: Poiesis
Chapter Five. From Models to Metaphors; Possibility, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory
Notes
Works Cited
Author Index

Citation preview

POIESIS AND POSSIBLE WORLDS

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THOMAS L. MARTIN

Poiesis and Possible Worlds A Study in Modality and Literary Theory

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

www.utppublishing.com © University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2004 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-3641-4

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Martin, Thomas L., 1960Poiesis and possible worlds : a study in modality and literary theory / Thomas L. Martin. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8020-3641-4 1. Literature - Philosophy. 3. Possibility. I. Title.

2. Semantics (Philosophy)

PN54.M37 2004

C2003-903365-1

801

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

For Hannah and Ben

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7 dwell in possibility... - Emily Dickinson

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

PART ONE: PARADOXES 1 The Paradox of the Many: Post-Structuralism and Zeno 3 Zeno's Paradox of Plurality 10 Post-Structuralism and the Paradox of Plurality 12 Derrida and Multiplicity 15 Different Kinds of Differences? 20 There and Back 25 2 The Paradox of the One: Language as Universal Medium 27 The Matter of Analytical Philosophy 30 The Force of Continental Philosophy 40 Syntax in Structuralism and Post-Structuralism 43 New Historicism and Culture as Universal Medium 46 The Death of the Code 52 PART TWO: POSSIBLE WORLDS 3 Talk of Possible Worlds: Language as Calculus 57 One-World Semantics versus Possible-Worlds Semantics Words and Worlds 62 What Is Metalanguage? 65 Baudrillard's Virtual Reality 69

60

x Contents

Kinds of Language Theory 71 Language as Calculus 73 4 The Poiesis of Possible Worlds: A Theory of Possibility for Literature 81 Scepticism about Possible Worlds 82 The Logical Triviality of This World 84 Intellectual Models 90 Modelling Worlds 95 Possible Worlds a Philosophy? 97 Relation of Language to Possible Worlds 99 A Way of Meaning Functions 101 The Problem of Logical Omniscience 106 Related Theories of Possibility 111 A Qualified Theory of Possible Worlds for Literature 115 PART THREE: POIESIS 5 From Models to Metaphors: Possibility, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory 123 The Critical Heritage 124 What Do We Mean by Literature? 126 An Approach to Metaphor 133 Metaphor as Epistemology 142 The Varieties of Literary Theory 145 Articulating Possibility in Poetic History 148 Models of Literature, Modes of Reading 151 Notes 153 Works Cited 179 Author Index 193

Acknowledgments

Many people helped in the writing of this book. I would like to extend a special thanks to the students in my spring 2001 graduate seminar on possible worlds and literature. I would also like to thank the many scholars who took an interest in this work and provided their valuable input as it took shape: Anne Astell, Robert Collins, Jan Cover, Lubomir Dolezel, David Herman, Risto Hilpinen, Jaakko Hintikka, Vincent Leitch, Floyd Merrell, David Miller, Howard Pearce, Victor Raskin, and Marie-Laure Ryan. I would like to thank, too, Duke Pesta, Mike Price, and Charles Stuart for their judicious stylistic advice, without which this book would be far less readable. Finally, thanks go to Harold and Nancy Lucas for their special encouragement during the final days of writing. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint material in chapter 1 that originally appeared in the Journal of Literary Semantics 22 [1993]: 91-103.

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PART ONE Paradoxes

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CHAPTER ONE

The Paradox of the Many: Post-Structuralism and Zeno

Multiplication is vexation... - Anonymous He who does not know one thing knows another. - Kenyan proverb

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein said, 'If a lion could talk, we could not understand him/1 A generation later, literary and critical studies appear the happy heirs of Wittgenstein's linguistic revolution. If it is true, as he says, that 'the limits of my language mean the limits of my world'2 - that my language vitally constitutes all I know, can know, or need to know - then literary and critical theory stands in the privileged position of being queen of the sciences. Yet when literary and critical theory discharges the duties of the office, binding all the terms of logic, language, and culture to a single field of enquiry that operates according to a uniquely specified set of significatory principles, the results seem to be nothing short of selfdefeating. Once theorists attribute the meaning and genesis of language to nothing outside of language (which would make language servant of some higher discipline), but wholly to the particular sociohistorical relations that coincide with language, and then when they attempt to understand the literature or discourse of a socio-historical site different from their own, they are confronted only with their subject's 'radical and fascinating otherness.'3 Because the relations that produce the discourse of one place and time are different from another, no access is available between separate sites in linguistic

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space. The outcome is manifest in the way new historicism regards its object of study as 'alien culture/4 Now consider Schrodinger's cat, that eponymous feline of a universe fundamentally different from Wittgenstein's. I interpret it here simply as shorthand for a universe where the possible is important in its own right, where no one is in principle an alien, and where language is a matter more of exploration than confinement. Schrodinger describes a cat connected to a curious experimental device in which the very nature of possibility decides the cat's fate. Without entering its intricacies here,5 Schrodinger's thought experiment illustrates two different ways in which possibility acts upon the world - one at the level of classical reality and the other at the level of quantum reality. Strapped to a veritable electric chair, the cat is subject to the laws of Newton, Faraday, and even Kevorkian, but the subatomic executioner at the other end is moved by those of Heisenberg, Dirac, and, seemingly, Lewis Carroll. How does the common-sense world of cause and effect relate to the fantasy land of subatomic particles, the one clearly connected to the other? Whichever explanation of that famous puzzle we favour, we must derive at least one conclusion: theorizing in a postmodern era demands the kind of linguistic modelling that can account for richly various and non-commensurate possibles. Schrodinger's cat presents a challenge to postmodern cultural theory to broaden its understanding, moving beyond its characteristic extremes of alienation and reduction. While alienation may discharge critics from the obligation to 'understand lions/ reduction occupies them with allegorizing the difficult or foreign through the hermeneutic 'keys' provided by reigning psychological, social, or political orthodoxies. Schrodinger's cat, by contrast, stands as a metaphor for reckoning with widely divergent possibles outside our home language or hermeneutical predilections. Such a view takes seriously the epigraph to Abbott's Flatland: 'Be patient, for the world is broad and wide/ These two metaphors - Wittgenstein's lion and Schrodinger's cat offer suggestive parameters for this work. The present study examines why postmodern critical theory has embraced fundamentally alienating and reductive modes of enquiry while postmodern science has sought more encompassing and expansive ones. The conviction here is that literary studies, by and large, remain mired in the anomalies of a linguistic methodology derived from early-twentieth-century language philosophy. Whether we consider a wide range of theorists from Saussure to Derrida, Levi-Strauss to Foucault, Lacan to Irigaray, Geertz to Green-

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 5

blatt, or Barthes to Baudrillard, the standard earmarks of that methodology are manifest: language is both unique and universal; language's limits cannot be overcome; the resulting emphasis on language's immanent features leads to a fundamentally syntactical or rule-governed methodology that precludes semantical issues, thus making metalanguage and metaphysics impossible; language is radically public and radically instrumental; and, finally, the public nature of language leads to the insurmountability of, and therefore inaccessibility among, language communities. These more-or-less loosely associated principles, I argue, emanate from a linguistic methodology that assumes the linguistic ether to be unavoidable. And despite the variety of theoretical concerns and practical commitments the thinkers above represent, they remain fundamentally committed to this view of language or culture as inescapable medium of all human thought and interaction - language as prison-house - a view challenged not only by theoretical physics but also by compelling advances in philosophical semantics. This study explores what it might be like to reposition literary theory outside a linguistic-cultural determinism and inside a theory of possible worlds. While literary and critical studies have predominantly moved towards the view represented by Wittgenstein, a few literary theorists have followed the lead of Schrodinger and adopted a theory of possible worlds to explain literary phenomena - the most notable being Dolezel, Pavel, Ryan, and Eco. Of course, none of these tethers their theory too tightly to recent science (which would doubtless be imprudent). They find that the development of meaning in its various forms is logically more like the exploration of untold ways the world might be, and less like the consequence of a master interpretive code. The possible worlds described by a Schrodinger may differ from those of Everett, as Shakespeare's do from Borges's, but Schrodinger nevertheless illustrates for literary theorists and others the importance of a nonreductive and non-alienating conceptual outlook, one that provides richer means to model more worlds. Before I begin the specific argument of this book, I will complete the contrast between these two intellectual trends by considering briefly how a significant segment of the intellectual community has shifted in the direction represented by Schrodinger, leaving literary theory largely unaffected. I have already suggested that much of literary and critical theory has migrated steadily in the opposite direction, towards linguistic and cultural isolationism, by means of a commitment to linguistic and cultural relativism (the idea that nothing is significant outside what

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a language and culture mediate, and therefore nothing is available to mediate between language and culture groups that are different). Against this view, however, the latter half of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first has produced abundant evidence to the contrary. During this time we have communicated more about and to different cultures, and we have better understood them, than ever before. Anthropologists, linguists, and historians continue to map out for us the culturally distant in both time and place. The work of translators goes on apace: we possess more translations of more books than ever, with any one library shelf supporting any number of authors. Each book talks to the other, often sharing the same issues, sometimes agreeing and sometimes disagreeing, both in the same and in different languages. Another parallel is what we might call an increasing number of 'virtual worlds.' These are presented to us by the latest science (especially physics and astronomy) and by recent technology that permits us to generate everything from digitized world models in our engineering and science labs, to immersive alternative worlds in our rapidly changing arcades and classrooms. Besides these technologically spawned Virtual worlds/ the creative arts continue to astonish us with new and far-flung worlds of imagination. Postmodern and magic realist fiction, works of science fiction and fantasy, experimental drama and film, all continue to push the frontiers of what we consider possible. Simultaneously, we postmoderns are thronged by a plurality of parallel worlds; we apparently have little trouble accessing them, entering or exiting them at will. It is when we attempt to account for this parallelism that we run into problems. To make better sense of this particular intellectual and cultural scene, we must first untangle the association between postmodernism and post-structuralism, for some would contend that post-structuralism is not only the best theory, but is indeed the only theory that comes close to explaining the aforementioned array of virtual phenomena characteristic of late modern times. Is it not true that post-structuralism simply differentiates too many virtual worlds, the thicket of which frustrates any and all attempts at finding a real world underneath? I suggest, however, that virtual or possible worlds are not, and in principle never can be, amenable to a post-structuralist analysis. This rather popular misunderstanding of post-structuralism gains credence more from what the theory proposes to explain than from the explanation it proposes. Before I explore how post-structuralism is inadequate as a theory of

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 7

virtual or possible worlds, I first must distinguish post-structuralism and postmodernism. Before post-structuralism, few theoretical options were available that could account comprehensively for such phenomena as the discontinuities of the world, the dynamism of social interaction, the differences of culture and historical change, and the never-ending transmutations of language. In fact, post-structuralism's wide appeal stems largely from its ability to absorb a variety of philosophers and theorists of language and culture who have in one way or another worked on these issues. For example, philosophers as apparently diverse as the Sophists, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein all find their way into post-structuralist and postmodern theory. But this is where the distinction becomes most important. For not only do these philosophers have both their post-structuralist and prestructuralist incarnations, but many recent thinkers who specifically consider themselves (or are considered by others) as postmodern - certain semioticians, pragmatists, process philosophers, philosophers of science, Eastern philosophers, physicists, biologists, and others - have no commitment to post-structuralist principles whatsoever.6 Regrettably, many literary and critical theorists overlook the countermovement in postmodern thought that understands the discontinuities of postmodern life as part of some larger whole,7 not as constituting the elemental fabric of the way things are. An important current in postmodernism seeks its explanation in a direction expressly counter to post-structuralism. For these and other reasons, a definition of the term postmodern is not easy to settle. In Postmodern Theory, Best and Kellner orient the definition towards a particular kind of social and political theorizing, within which Derrida, Kristeva, Barthes, and Lacan play almost no role at all.8 Other theorists, placing these major figures at the forefront of their definition, associate the term postmodern with a general attitude toward discourse: Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition identifies the term with the loss of metanarratives; Newman in The Postmodern Aura relates the term to the 'inflation of discourse'; and Lodge in Working with Structuralism explains it as an 'alternative principle of composition ... Permutation, Discontinuity, Randomness.'9 Still others want to define it in terms of a certain set of aesthetic characteristics.10 Whichever explanation of postmodern phenomena we ultimately accept, we can nevertheless understand ourselves as living in this distinct historical and cultural epoch known as the postmodern era. In light of this, we should use postmodernism in the broader sense as

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encompassing these specific concerns without connecting it to their specific theories. The term thus denotes more the cultural moment particular to the age in which we live, characterized by the death of the modern, the fragmentation of language and world, and a corollary loss of unified subjectivity. Accelerated technological advances and rapid social changes also contribute to its ethos: humankind feels bewildered and even dwarfed by its own creations, not only in terms of industrialized-computerized urban megacentres and military machines of titanic proportions, but also in extraordinary developments in the media - through which communication flows between us and the surrounding world, and within which we are increasingly smothered in an immense nest of texts, signs, and sound bites. Certainly, we can associate attributes of this broader cultural environment with a post-structuralist account of the world. Nevertheless, as a theory of texts or signs that purports to explain social, linguistic, and cultural activity, post-structuralism stands as the distinct successor to Saussure's call for a general semiology. Although the varieties and applications of post-structuralism are numerous, post-structuralism typically indicates a move beyond Saussure's original structuralist enterprise, a move involving both the adoption and modification of Saussurean principles - making what Saussure called the diachronic aspect of semiosis both prior and fundamental to its synchronic aspect. The arbitrary nature of the sign is taken to a new level, as discontinuity plays out its well-known role in post-structuralism. We return to the question about post-structuralism and its appropriateness as an explanation of virtual phenomena. How does post-structuralism account for the variety of linguistic and cultural productions and the incommensurabilities within that unending variety? Are these virtual worlds similar to the highly dynamic ones of the digital revolution referred to above, or are they multiple texts of a highly arborescent semiosis? Or perhaps the two methods of construction are essentially the same? The question comes down to the difference between a text and a world. Post-structuralism does possess a theory about the virtual worlds associated with postmodern life, but I think the favourable press it receives in this regard may be based more on a misreading of its tenets than on their theoretical significance. Post-structuralism maintains that all signification is Virtual,' but only in the sense of betokening the lack of presence (a concept explored at length later in this chapter). Does this condition then issue forth in a number of possible worlds? To answer this, we must first recognize that

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 9

a post-structuralist explanation of virtual worlds issues from a commitment to a relational semiologic webwork operating in a specific manner.11 I maintain that this theoretical orientation furnishes us with little in the way of possible worlds. In the post-structuralist view, all signification operates invariably on the principles of semiologic differentiation; therefore we are left with one big heterogeneous textual 'world' or semiologic domain, full of differentiation and fury, but admitting no possible worlds. To add clarity and salience to the point, all one needs to do is consider the modal distinction between possible and actual, a logical and ontological distinction fundamental in any reckoning of possible worlds (and indeed fundamental to most philosophical thought throughout its history). In post-structuralist theory this distinction between possible and actual is not a modal one at all, but rather a mere semiologic one, representing just one more linguistic-epistemological binary, the halves of which dance and disseminate as two signs among many in an immense and permutable textual 'world.' We see that poststructuralism cannot, theoretically, give us this world or any other world, let alone any number of possible worlds. One may well wonder whether the starting points of post-structuralism, cultural studies, and new historicism are the inevitable 'truths' that should govern cultural and historical enquiry. Is there another way? Are the methodologies of these movements undermined by something unsound, something that should be re-examined in light of the adverse consequences they generate? Is there a signpost to help us - or perhaps just a post - somewhere beyond post-structuralism? Does Schrodinger's cat offer a clue? This book begins with the paradoxes of post-structuralism. I argue that post-structuralism appropriates two paradoxes it joins in unhappy union. On the one hand, I discern Zeno's paradox of plurality at the heart of post-structuralist argument strategies - in those of Lyotard, Barthes, and Deleuze and Guatarri, but particularly in Derrida. Curiously, on the other hand, I also locate a paradox of unity, what Hintikka calls language as universal medium/ which forms the basis of poststructuralist linguistic and cultural theory. In the second section of the book, I explore a theory of possible worlds as an alternative explanation of the perplexing theoretical complex we associate with the postmodern world, distributing complexity across possible worlds and discovering unity among wide-scale alternatives. Directing my investigations from Hintikka's view of language as calculus, I consider a possible-worlds semantics alongside other standard and non-standard theories of possi-

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bility. Towards the end of the second section, I outline a theory of possibility for the study of literature. In the final section, I apply that theory to aspects of the definition of literature, the nature of metaphor, and the ways in which we read literary texts. Zeno's Paradox of Plurality The study begins, then, with an examination of the logical engine that drives post-structuralism. I do not mean to be facetious when I say that the best way to understand the underlying logic of post-structuralism is to start with a paradox. Wilfully, I therefore commence with a problem. The mathematician Sylvester says that there is nothing like a paradox to 'free the human intelligence from the lethargic influence of latent and unsuspected assumptions.'12 And although there is nothing whatsoever lethargic about post-structuralist critical theory, poststructuralists' reliance on the notion of difference demands a closer analysis than it has received. I wonder: in their insistence on play over presence, on disruption over continuity, on difference over sameness, have they replaced what they call logocentrism with something like 'differocentrism'? What is the nature of difference in their writings? Why does it play such a key role? Is there a common thread to the arguments? Drawing out certain assumptions regarding the nature of language in post-structuralist theory, Zeno's paradox of plurality will help us to address such issues.13 For more than two thousand years Zeno's paradoxes have posed some of the great challenges to human thought. They have confounded and enriched Western philosophy, inspiring debate and shaping philosophies. The way one approaches Zeno's paradoxes fundamentally influences one's philosophical outlook. Not only did Zeno and the entire Eleatic school find them persuasive for their own brand of metaphysics, but many subsequent philosophers have also developed their systems with an eye to the problems that these paradoxes present.14 It has been suggested that the single paradox common to all of Zeno's paradoxes - the paradox of plurality - constitutes the basic problem of philosophy.15 The paradox of plurality serves both the logical and linguistic concerns of this analysis. In the case of post-structuralism, I contend that the paradox of plurality is the logical-linguistic primum mobile that sets post-structuralist theorizing on its course. Fundamentally reflective of his paradox of plurality, Zeno's four more widely known paradoxes of motion demonstrate in a unique way

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 11

the difficulties in maintaining a logically consistent understanding of motion. Of these, 'Achilles and the Tortoise' is probably the most famous, though the celebrated arrow that flies while standing still might rival it. The movement in the race between Achilles and the tortoise, for example, illustrates the problem of infinite divisibility: once Achilles gives the tortoise a head start, Achilles cannot overtake it because each time he catches up to where the tortoise was a moment ago, the tortoise moves ahead a little. No matter how many times Achilles repeats the process - no matter how close Achilles gets - the tortoise always gains a fraction of time to move farther ahead. Therefore, Achilles remains trapped in an infinite series, out of which the distance between him and the tortoise, as a unit, can never be traversed no matter how hard Achilles tries or how far that series, as an inexorable multiplicity, extends.16 Zeno's paradox of plurality makes that same point in a more direct, if less glamorous, way. Because Zeno's paradoxes are preserved in only a few text fragments (several written by other authors repeating Zeno's arguments - itself a fascinating case of unity and plurality, fragmentation and return), we will adopt Salmon's clear and concise formulation of the paradox of plurality. According to Salmon, Zeno's first premise is that if things exist, they must be composed of parts. In turn, these parts must be made up of parts. The process of subdivision proceeds, with no end, in indefinite repeatability. (The argument proceeds almost like a history of physics in which the search for sub-'atomic' building blocks of matter has led to an untold number of 'smallest' parts.) Zeno concludes that there is an infinity of parts. Salmon summarizes the difficulties Zeno confronts in this way: 'Ultimate parts must have no magnitude, for if they have magnitude they can be further subdivided. But an extended object cannot be composed of parts which have no magnitude, for no matter how many of them are put together, the result will have no magnitude ... Thus, the second difficulty arises. The parts must have magnitude. But the addition of an infinite number of magnitudes... will yield an infinite magnitude.'17 As Salmon indicates, the specific nature of matter has no bearing whatsoever on the argument. One does not controvert the argument by claiming that an atom (or some subatomic component thereof) is incapable of being cut into smaller parts. The parts' conceptual discreteness enables the argument to stand. Because the objects in question are spatially extended, parts of them will always be distinguishable. And on the basis that all distinguishable parts are capable of infinite division, Zeno concludes that plurality is a logical

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impossibility. Zeno's predicatment is not unlike that of Ireneo Funes, who in Borges's story 'resolved to reduce every one of his past days to some seventy thousand recollections/ So opposed is he to anything resembling unity and so consumed with linguistic division, Funes is 'irritated ... that the "dog" of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of threefifteen, seen frontally.'18 G.E.L. Owen further demonstrates that Zeno proceeds on the grounds of linguistic and logical, not physical, possibility. The problem with plurality, according to Zeno, is that it presupposes a unity by which things otherwise could never be reckoned as plural. Owen reminds us of Zeno's challenge: 'Show me what the one is and then I can tell you what things (in the plural) are/ Any notion of plurality, in other words, demands a notion of unity. Owen sums up the force of Zeno's argument thus: 'If you want to say that there are a number of things in existence, you have to specify what sort of thing counts as a unit in the plurality/19 Plato, one of the textual sources of Zeno's philosophy, characterizes the paradox in an instructive way for us in the Parmenides. There he relates Zeno's incommensurability of the one and the many to the incommensurability of sameness and difference: 'Consequently in so far as the one is different from the others and the others are different from the one, just in respect of having the character "different" the one and the others have precisely the same character, and to have the same character is to be alike/20 We will have reason to return to the relevant passages in Plato later when we discuss Derrida, but for the coming analysis it is important to notice that this close association can be made. The limits of what can be considered same and different are directly related to the thresholds of the one and the many. Plato's account seems to update the argument for us, bringing it close to terms often identified with post-structuralism. (Though we cannot address the matter directly until chapter 3, we should at least observe here the relationship between Baudrillard as the theorist of Simulations vis-a-vis Derrida as the theorist of 'Differance.') With this background on the paradox in place, we turn to post-structuralist theory. Post-Structuralism and the Paradox of Plurality A brief sampling of post-structuralist literature will show that some form of the paradox of plurality influences post-structuralist argument

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 13

strategies. Afterwards, I will examine Derrida directly and more carefully since he provides from this group of thinkers the clearest and most sustained theoretical elaborations. There the issues will be addressed in a more substantial way than of course will be done in this preliminary survey. And although post-structuralism is not a monolithic term, and although these theorists do not understand themselves as constituting a single school, what I do here is to uncover a common argument strategy at work in their dependence on a principle of difference. The first figure in the survey, Lyotard, states that 'there is no possibility that language games can be unified or totalized in any metadiscourse.'21 He argues against the possibility of a single metadiscourse on the basis of the generative multiplicity of discourses. The point is something like this (if the reader can excuse the Heideggerian syntax): multiplicitous moves of multiple language games multiply without limit. The ambient multiplicity that conditions language games - the manifold moves and shifting rules that govern language use - prevents the possibility of there being a single language that could speak the non-reflexive 'truth' of all language. No single rule could be found to govern all language games. Why? Because, first, it too would be just another rule and as such subject to the rules it is supposed to articulate (the Wittgensteinian point that what serves as a standard of linguisticality cannot itself be linguistic); and second, because it cannot make a fixed stand from which it might unalterably tell the story of language for all time (the post-structuralist claim that any single point in the system of language is always defined in relation to the points in flux surrounding it). Not only do grand narratives disappear on Lyotard's (hybrid) principle, but so does the notion of a unified social subject as the user of language: 'The social subject itself seems to dissolve in this dissemination of language games/22 In short, for Lyotard the multiple sites of language close off the possibility of either a unified metadiscourse or a fixed social subject. As Zeno demonstrates, to defend plurality on this fundamental level is to bar access to unity, which, in turn, creates a problem for reckoning what plurality is. The problem of the unity of the social subject finds a fuller treatment in the next figure. Roland Barthes, in his well-known essay "The Death of the Author/ reduces the supposed unity of the author and of the individual text to multiplicity. He says that 'a text is made of multiple writings.' Meaning in this multiplicity is 'a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.'23 Writing is the destruction of the individual voice in this sense: to write is to come to the

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point where only language speaks. Authors never speak with their own voice because, like all speakers of language, they can only speak what language enables them to say. Language authorizes them, not they the language. The author disappears in the matrix of language. And the matrix of language always fluctuates: it never fixes meaning, nor is ever fixed as a final meaning; rather, from innumerable loci of culture, language 'ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning/24 Barthes's point is clear: inexorable multiplicity subverts the unity of either author or text. For Barthes, the possibility of single, fixed points of meaning, whether by author or text, dissipates in the continuous/discontinuous currents of language conceived as infinite intertext. The last two figures in this brief survey, Deleuze and Guattari, seem to be the most forthright of all post-structuralists about their commitment to multiplicity. In 'Rhizome' they admit candidly, 'we speak of nothing but multiplicities/ For them, only a serious consideration of multiplicity solves the problems that have deadlocked philosophy since its beginning: 'it is only when the multiple is effectively treated as substantive, as multiplicity, that it loses all relationship to the One as subject or as object, as natural or spiritual reality, as image and world/ Anything purported to be a unity is actually a complete construct, a mere power play in the field of multiplicity: 'The notion of unit only ever appears when the signifier, or a corresponding process of subjectification, seizes power in a multiplicity/25 Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, which is based on his doctoral dissertation and forms the core of much of his later work, concentrates primarily on this issue of multiplicity. In it he proposes to 'think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same ../ Because 'Everywhere, the depth of difference is primary/ all our cherished notions based upon sameness, including all representations and even ideas themselves, are always false and misleading. However, if ideas can never fulfil their implicit promise to give us the world as it is - to faithfully depict what is there - then one wonders what consequences that has for cognition. Deleuze states that we late moderns have finally accepted that the world does not stand up to our many reckonings of it. We have inescapably realized that not only is 'Representation ... a site of transcendental illusion/ but that thought itself collapses under the same critique: '[a]n entire multiplicity rumbles underneath the "sameness" of the Idea/26 As is the case with Lyotard, Barthes, and Guattari, Deleuze manages the variety of prob-

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 15

lems and issues that confront him by recourse to a fundamental philosophy of difference. Let us now scrutinize the form of argument that he and others employ. A certain moment in the work of Deleuze and Guattari sounds so thoroughly Zenoean that it seems close to falling headlong into Zeno's infinite regress. They state that 'number has ceased to be a universal concept measuring elements according to their position in a given dimension, in order to become itself a multiplicity varying according to the dimensions considered ... We have no units of measure, only multiplicities or varieties of measure.'27 If we limit their statement to acknowledging the varieties of measure or the relativity of temporal or spatial location, then we need not object. But if they affirm that there are 'no units of measure' - that is, no units that retain some application in every situation, no minimally conceived units by which even multiplicity can be reckoned as multiple - then they may indeed be vulnerable to Zeno's critique. For if number is always in itself a multiplicity, a multiplicity that always varies in a multiplicity of ways across a multiplicity of situations, then it is logically pointless to look for even a conceptual unit that could persist through such radical change. Or, to continue with the mathematical example - indeed, to ply its Occamistic edge - the infinite makes impossible the finite. As they state their point in this passage, Deleuze and Guattari articulate the precise reverse of Zeno's argument against plurality. Zeno uses the argument to assert the logical impossibility of multiplicity; they use the same argument to assert the impossibility of unity. The ironies involved in the paradox of sameness and difference begin to accumulate. We turn our attention now to Derrida. Derrida and Multiplicity Derrida provides the most developed, comprehensive, and ultimately influential account of the philosophy of difference. Whereas in our quick survey Derrida was the signature figure for the notion of difference, a marker to sketch, with other prominent post-structuralists, an outline of the postmodern milieu, the primary concern in this section will be to explore whether the nature of the multiplicity Derrida posits is theoretically sustainable. I shall set up the background for Derrida in Saussure, for Derrida takes Saussure's linguistic revolution to what is, perhaps, its furthest extreme. Tracing that revolution from Derrida back to its inception, we

16 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

find that the uniqueness of Saussure's contribution lies in his decision to treat the sign as a scientific phenomenon in itself. He consequently examines the laws and properties pertaining to the sign independent of its supposed service to a world of objects and events. In his well-known call for a general semiology, Saussure envisions a comprehensive new project that would elucidate the structures of language as that matrix which regulates and perhaps constitutes our knowledge of the world. The cornerstone of his project is, of course, the arbitrary nature of the sign. Saussure states that the sign forges its linkages not according to a fixed order of word and world, but according to an arbitrary relationship of signifier and signified. Signifiers are sound patterns connected to signifieds, or concepts, where signifiers possess no necessary connection whatsoever with their signifieds. The two are connected, he says, only in the conventions of the human community. While the conventional nature of linguistic signs has been commonly acknowledged since the time of Aristotle and his medieval commentators, Saussure assigns the principle to what he considers its proper place, making it 'the organizing principle of the whole of linguistics.' For most of Saussure's readers, however, his commitment to the arbitrary nature of the sign means exclusively an interest in the differentiating structures that make up language. For Saussure at one point clearly says, 'in language there are only differences, and no positive terms.' In this light, the signified is never a self-sufficient or self-defined meaning, but a single node in an entire network of differences. Rather than reducing the importance of language, these assertions celebrate its importance: the structures of language delimit our world and always shape our understanding of what populates it. To state this starkly: language decides within itself how it is to be used according to its own logic of differentiation, without any direct reference to a self-present, external reality. Hence, for most of Saussure's heirs, the centrality of structure and the consequent trivialization of ontology. 28 Pushing Saussure's linguistic revolution to its furthest limit, Derrida adopts the Saussurean notion that there are no 'hooks' reaching in from some ontological or transcendent reality that connect directly to language, aligning language unalterably with 'the way the things are.' Derrida applies this analysis to all language, to supposedly philosophically pure language, and even to the language of Saussure's structural linguistics. The arbitrary nature of the sign, for Derrida, has greater implications than Saussure realized. In one sense, Derrida destroys structuralism as he celebrates its most profound implications. In his

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 17

familiar counter to structuralism, Derrida claims that every attempt to close any structure of meaning will eventually bring about a reversal.29 Seizing on Saussure's notion of difference, he points out that the very differentiating power of language that permits a structural interpretation also creates the possibility of its deconstruction. If a structural interpretation requires structures to be closed, with certain elements being privileged and others repressed, the repressed elements always stand ready to undermine the structure from the outside where they have been forced - what Derrida refers to it as the margin. All our concepts are constructed/deconstructed in this manner, however unwitting we may be of the process or however stable our concepts may appear. Deconstruction is inevitable and ubiquitous. The same deconstructive principles apply to metalanguage. Derrida's style of critique is not so much a new method of language analysis as it is the deconstruction of method itself in view of the disseminating forces of language. His notions of differance and dissemination are not new concepts of an alternative philosophy; they inhere in the very possibility of conceptuality.30 Even at this early stage of the analysis, Derrida's argument that the disseminating forces of language interminably fragment in the play of differance already seems to generate the same gravitational pull downwards as Zeno's arguments. I shall demonstrate that Derrida's argument strategy, like that of the other poststructuralists we considered, indeed follows a course similar to Zeno's, makes its descent into multiplicity, and is subject to Zeno's critique. Jonathan Culler, a well-known advocate and expositor of Derrida's deconstruction, actually agrees with the thesis I argue here, though he does so with no apparent awareness of its more dangerous implications. At one point in On Deconstruction, he attempts to explain Derrida's critique of 'the metaphysics of presence' by using Zeno's paradox of the flying arrow. Because the manner in which he handles the argument is so extraordinary, and because it conveys such a clear example of the present point, I relate the passage in full: [T]he metaphysics of presence is pervasive, familiar, and powerful. There is, however, a problem that it characteristically encounters: when arguments cite particular instances of presence as grounds for further development, these instances invariably prove to be already complex constructions. What is proposed as a given, an elementary constituent, proves to be a product, dependent or derived in ways that deprive it of the authority of simple or pure presence.

18 Poiesis and Possible Worlds Consider, for example, the flight of an arrow. If reality is what is present at any given instant, the arrow produces a paradox. At any given moment it is in a particular spot; it is always in a particular spot and never in motion. We want to insist, quite justifiably, that the arrow is in motion at every instant from the beginning to the end of its flight, yet its motion is never present at any moment of presence. The presence of motion is conceivable, it turns out, only insofar as every instant is already marked with the traces of the past and future. Motion can be present, that is to say, only if the present instant is not something given but a product of the relations between past and future. Something can be happening at a given instant only if the instant is already divided within itself, inhabited by the nonpresent. This is one of Zeno's paradoxes, purported to demonstrate the impossibility of motion, but what it illustrates more convincingly are the difficulties of a system based on presence.31

Culler seems unaware that the question of motion, for Zeno, is secondary to the more fundamental question of multiplicity and unity or sameness and difference. The impossibility of motion proves the difficulties in any system that embraces multiplicity, not the difficulties of a system based on presence. Culler shows his commitment to multiplicity when he argues that all 'elementary constituents]' always turn out to be 'already complex constructions.' While Zeno is employed here only as a foil, his rejoinder would be that it is senseless to speak of multiplicity without some notion of unity. By betraying a lack of understanding of the greater issue involved, Culler (in an apparently uncircumspect moment) reveals deconstruction's indebtedness to this form of argument, which he and others exploit maximally from the side of multiplicity while Zeno works from the side of unity. We turn to the statements of Derrida, starting with his notion of differance. According to Derrida, differance is the 'differentiating origin of differences.'32 It is the differentiating power of the signifier that creates the possibility of language and, at the same time, the deferral of presence that lies always beyond language's power to grasp it. Similarly, dissemination - Derrida calls it at one point 'seminal differance' - is 'an irreducible and generative multiplicity.'33 This origin of differences or generative multiplicity breaks down the Saussurean notion of the sign. For Derrida, the sign can never be understood as a unit, but rather as a continuum, since it always holds within it the traces of multiple past elements, and is already hollowed out by the multiple traces of future elements.

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 19

As a point within multiplicity, the concept of 'the trace' is crucial for Derrida. He insists that differance should never be understood as the divisions of some 'organic, original, and homogeneous unity/ apparently warding off the association with Zeno. Differance, he argues, is the 'origin' of both unity and multiplicity, sameness and difference. But, Derrida maintains, differance is not an origin in the traditional metaphysical sense of the word. Differance is the very possibility of conceptuality, the precondition of all signification and all difference. Differance inscribes itself in writing in the trace or 'archi-trace.' The trace is always marked by differance, and is never a thing present in itself. Derrida's argument for these characteristics of the trace is important: 'An interval must separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself, but this interval that constitutes it as present must by the same token, divide the present in and of itself, thereby also dividing, along with the present, everything that is thought on the basis of the present, that is, in our metaphysical language, every being, and singularly substance or the subject.'34 Derrida calls this remarkable process 'spacing' or, alternatively, 'temporization/ He considers spacing the 'becoming-space of time': the discontinuous constitution of the present.35 Similarly he envisions temporization as the 'becoming-time of space': the discontinuous constitution of presence. Presence, the present, must divide from what it is not in order to be itself, but is itself only by virtue of the spatial and temporal relations to what it is not. Presence, the present, is the 'irreducibly nonsimple ... synthesis of ... traces.' Traces are the marks of both, simultaneous operations. In this view, being as presence is deferred because there is no present. The conclusion may sound peculiar because we are more accustomed to the expositors of Derrida (especially Culler and Norris) discussing the linguistic reasons for the impossibility of being as presence. But the metaphysical point is not to be passed over lightly. If there is no present for being to be present in, then there can be little reason to pursue a language that speaks as if it were. Presence, in Derrida, has both its spatial and temporal metaphors. Here Derrida issues unmistakable warrant to Culler's adopting the paradox of the flying arrow. Recall that this paradox of Zeno demonstrates, at the least, that an arrow occupying spacei at timex is not in motion, and thus the explanation of motion can only be sought in the direction of a relentless multiplicity of infinitely added times and spaces. But, of course, this is impossible the very point Zeno makes. Derrida argues that in the same way presence as being deconstructs into spatial multiplicity and presence as time deconstructs into tempo-

20 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

ral multiplicity, so presence as meaning deconstructs into a linguistic multiplicity of traces by the operations of differance. And not only is the present in each case irreducibly non-simple, but especially in the case of language the traces must also be irreducibly non-simple. Derrida comes closest to metaphysical (or antimetaphysical) comprehensiveness in statements such as this: 'There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.'36 So it turns out that even traces are made up of traces. But if that is the case, then traces are the traces of traces. Formally, we are on the verge of an infinite regress, and across that unending series the term could well shade into vacuousness. The more he moves away from presence, the more Derrida faces an absence of explanatory power. The result is unfortunate because Derrida had held high hopes for the trace. Seeking to solve the question of how differance can be the 'differentiating origin of differences' such that 'the name "origin" no longer suits it,' Derrida announces, 'I have attempted to indicate a way out the closure of this framework via the "trace."'37 Thus both Culler's and Derrida's arguments turn out to be very much like Zeno's paradox of plurality, especially in their treatment of time and space. The breakdowns available in the one are as indefinite (i.e., infinite) as in the other. And even if Derrida refers to the space in which language occurs, the force of the argument remains the same. Derrida's argument is a mirror image of Zeno's paradox of plurality. It wields a deconstructive power over all the structures that stand in differance, but has trouble when it tries to reckon what that differance is, whether conceived as a metaphysical, cognitive, linguistic, or any other condition. Deconstruction is a sword without a handle.38 Zeno might agree that the argument necessarily leads in the direction Derrida takes it, but the conclusion is one he cannot embrace. Zeno turns in a different direction, to a philosophy in which unity will play a principal role. For Zeno, the notion of absolute multiplicity - multiplicity without any notion of unity whatsoever, without which even the multiple could be reckoned as multiple - is hopelessly meaningless. Different Kinds of Differences? Since difference is so important to Derrida - pervading all the activities and processes we call linguistic, mental, social, cultural - we now pose the question as to whether there might be different varieties of difference to account for them all. The question may seem odd at first, especially in light of the ground just covered. For, as Derrida has indi-

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 21

cated, differance is the seminal difference, that is, the complex of differences seminal to all other differences, wherever they are encountered. Any 'kinds' of anything will therefore already be marked by difference. Whether we speak the language of semiology or the language of metaphysics, we still find that the operations of differance utterly underlie and precede them, but, significantly, not in the sense of being a metaphysical ground or an origin. As Derrida says: 'Differance is the nonfull, non-simple, structured and differentiating origin of differences. Thus, the name "origin" no longer suits it.' Just as the operations of differance are wholly fundamental in Derrida's treatment of the trace, so he holds the same line for semiology and metaphysics: 'the Heraclitean play of the hen diapheron heautoi, of the one differing from itself, the one in difference with itself, already is lost like a trace in the determination of the diapherein as ontological difference.'39 When metaphysics addresses difference, it cannot escape its nature as a form of writing and is, consequently, always involved in an attempt to reify a trace. Even the trace that is supposed to be an account of difference is itself already marked by difference. Differance therefore must be - and Derrida assures us that it is - a precondition of all types of difference. Evidently, then, we should conclude that one kind of difference accounts for all the different varieties of things. Yet we need to be careful before we stand confidently on this side of the issue, as we may be led to do by many of Derrida's own statements. For, on the other side, he also maintains that it is impossible to say that there is one kind of anything. Even sameness, for Derrida, is not the same in the usual sense of the word: 'the same, which is not the identical. The same, precisely, is differance (with an a) as the displaced and equivocal passage of one different thing to another.'40 And yet is not differance in danger of becoming one concept or condition - not simply by virtue of the fact that we can talk about it, but by talking about it as we are here, making definite statements that convey distinctive information about it? What is it that we can talk about it? Can we say that it is the same thing now that it was back in 1966? Even if we say differance is prior to all distinctions of time and place, and even prior to being itself, then it must be the same. But in order to prevent the paradox from sweeping us away in utter confusion, we should recall Owen's point that the problem is a logical one, not principally a spatial one.41 The same difficulty also hamstrings the trace. We obviously would not want to understand the trace as a generalized form made up of all or some of its occurrences. Of course, the trace is never a self-present

22 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

entity sufficient to be determined in such a way, much less to be compared to other putatively same entities in order to serve some process of abstraction. But if, on the other hand, we say with Derrida that traces are always and everywhere marked by differance, then does the notion have a discernible meaning left to call its own, let alone one we can access in our communications about it? Traces, presumably, are what remain when we freed ourselves from the metaphysics of presence: get rid of those fraudulent colours, and one is left with traces. But do traces manifest any more certain status - in any logical or theoretical sense than the things they displaced? Events, objects, or other phenomena, what are traces that we can talk about them? By what criterion of identity are we going to know a trace from a non-trace? What might a non-trace look like? Or if there is no such thing as a non-trace - that it is absurd to even suggest such a thing - then how are we going to know what a trace is, since what we know is that which we know only as a result of difference ('terms must appear as the differance of the other'42)? If we introduce the 'archi-trace' to solve these problems, have we not simply moved the entire set of problems back one step to be faced all over again? The question is this: is the trace in danger of participating in a sameness beyond Derrida's attenuated definition of sameness, or is it also always marked by differance? This paradox can be played out in a variety of interesting ways. When we return from the trace to differance, we see the same problems arise. Is differance always the same 'thing/ or is it always a different 'thing'? This problem is part of what I was hinting at in the paradoxical title of this section. One might argue that there must be different kinds of difference since the more different it becomes, the more it stays the same - that is, stays itself, which is always different. But, of course, difference is only one thing; it is not something else, especially not the metaphysics of presence. In the article entitled simply 'Differance,' everything Derrida says, in one way or another, attaches to it, not to something else. But if it is one thing, namely different, then is it devoid of all sameness? Are we in the presence of a strange paradox or what? The matter becomes more interesting, if not more bewildering, when Derrida himself, in a moment of apparent exasperation, lets out this remark: 'Once again (and this probably makes a thousand times I have had to repeat this, but when will it finally be heard, and why this resistance?): ... the text is .../43 The claim he repeats is, of course, less significant than the startling insistence with which he repeats it. By repeating 'this' is he making the same claim - not, is he being under-

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 23

stood by his audience - but each time he 'repeats' 'this/ is 'this' the same? Despite the variety of changes that might take place with respect to a person's repeating a claim one thousand times, is there not something central within the repetition that enables us to say that it is the same claim? If the answer is no, then why the exasperation? But if yes, then what's the difference? Derrida tries to avoid these problems by claiming that differance is originary to all metaphysical difference, that it is, in fact, originary to all differences, so much so that one cannot strictly say it is originary any more. What he doesn't seem to realize is that he wrestles with a logical problem, not a metaphysical one, and not even a grammatological one. But if logic carries too many unfortunate connotations for some, we could equally say that the problem he faces results from his attempt both to appropriate and disappropriate the very same thing - all in the name of difference. And his status as the philosopher of indeterminacy helps us little in this regard, as we go about the business of determining what he is saying, whether he is describing some characteristic of 'the way things are' (whatever that may be), whether conceived logically or linguistically, or in any other way. To enter the final stage of the analysis, and to illustrate his dilemma further, we return to Plato's Parmenides. Parmenides, the mentor of Zeno and the interlocutor who carries most of Plato's dialogue for the second half of the work, reflects on the term different: 'Now "different" is a word that stands for something; so when you utter it, whether once or many times, you are using it to stand for, or naming, just that thing whose name it is. Hence when we say "the others are different from the one," and "the one is different from the others," we use the word "different" twice, but nevertheless we always use it to stand for just that character whose name it is.'44 This is an especially noteworthy passage when we realize that Parmenides makes the semiotics of the word dependent on the logic of identity. One would expect that Parmenides, the ultimate philosopher of unity, and Derrida, the ultimate philosopher of difference, would be in perfect disagreement on this point. However, Derrida also seems to suggest that there is a single kind of differentiation, to which all things, whatever they may be, are fundamentally related. Consider several sample passages (the first emphasis is Derrida's; the rest supplied by me): The play of differences supposes, in effect, syntheses and referrals which forbid at any moment, or in any sense, that a simple element be present in and of itself, referring only to itself. Whether in the order of spoken or

24 Poiesis and Possible Worlds written discourse, no element can function as a sign without referring to another element which itself is not simply present. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere ever simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces. ... their cause is not a subject, a substance, or a being somewhere present and outside the movement of differance. ... there is no presence before and outside semiological differance. Nothing - no present and in-different being - thus precedes differance and spacing.45

For Derrida, the operations of differance mark all things - without exception. But the inescapable and extraordinary consequence of his position is that in order for everything to be marked by differance, everything must be the same. The point is this: when Derrida asserts that everything is marked by differance, he has posited a way in which everything is the same - that is, a way in which all things bear a relation to it as an originary, or even non-originary, principle. The universality of his position cannot be escaped. That this is the case is readily proved in the question, and its obvious answer, of whether there could be any exception to the rule. The sameness of the position is further discernible in a generation of deconstructive readings that are highly predictable and surprisingly homogeneous - a cause for concern to any literary or cultural critic. A single exception to differance would certainly derail Derrida, and Shusterman may indeed provide it. If, as Derrida says, all language and every semiotic code are not caused by 'a subject, a substance, or a being somewhere present and outside the movement of differance' then, as Shusterman contends, this presupposes 'the idea of at least a provisional (and possibly ever-expanding) totality of interrelated terms/ But even if we go so far as to grant Derrida independence of a notion of totality - which is doubtful given the evidence above - he still faces unavoidable problems. Shusterman steps up the analysis: 'even forgoing the question of totality, the very presumption that all the elements or objects in our languaged world are essentially differentially interconnected and reciprocally constitutive of each other (however untotaled or untotalizable they may be) clearly seems in itself to constitute a metaphysical perspective predisposed to cosmic unity and coherence. To break the web of differance all we need is one independent entity, one positive term with its own intrinsic character, not a universe totally shot

Post-Structuralism and Zeno 25

through with such entities/46 Therefore, a single entity is sufficient to unravel difference. If any term in our language refers to some entity - as in the statements 'Good morning, Mr Chips/ or 'My tooth hurts/ or even 'I love you' - if any one of these words does indeed refer, such that the term is not entirely and reciprocally constituted by all the elements that surround it, then differance comes to an end. It should be clear by now that the argument against Derrida in this chapter is a reductio, enlisting Zeno for heuristic purposes, in order to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of Derrida's arguments and show that they mirror (inversely) Zeno's classic paradox. Hence, I am not suggesting any metaphysical or other principle of sameness and difference that I pit against Derrida's, but rather adopt Derrida's position to see whether it can be sustained consistently without lapsing into absurdity.47 With that argument concluded, we can see how the dizzying play of difference explored in the chapter - being always different and always the same - superimposes onto a broader problem: poststructuralism's notorious oscillation between atomization and totalization. Both halves of this problem, a classic in its own right, are illustrated in the first section of this book. The problematic of atomization is reflected in the paradox of plurality (the first chapter), and the problematic of totalization is the paradox of one world (explored in the second chapter). Derrida's notions of trace and differance are also counterpoised in exactly the same relationship. In his grammatology, the trace functions as the 'part' thing, and differance functions as the 'whole' thing, which, taken together, comprise Derrida's own version of the one-andmany paradox. There and Back Given the problematic nature of that paradox, one should wonder whether it is wise to follow the post-structuralists into Zeno's abyss. Despite my argument, some will still be inclined to say that, like it or not, the world is a hopelessly contradictory, constantly changing, and inexhaustibly fragmentary state (or non-state) of groundlessness. As we have begun to see above, indeed as the post-structuralists have come so far in demonstrating through their own prolific writings, the paradox of plurality can be played out interminably, with no shortage of tantalizingly evanescent results. Have we then, by means of its own peculiar logic, come any closer to understanding language or culture? We must acknowledge that post-

26 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

structuralism has gone a long way in describing an important aspect of language and culture, a specific linguistic and cultural dynamic, one in which the currents of language and social change can often obey no set laws and be unanswerable in any way to absolute substances. By means of post-structuralist terminology, we can now talk about certain things we were unable to before.48 But does the post-structuralist dynamic describe the nature of all language use, and is all meaning - without exception - subject to its principles? Is their 'unified' theory of meaning as dissemination the only framework for literary theory and criticism? Post-structuralism's flaws may outweigh its strengths. We might wonder whether it really teaches us something, or, might we legitimately ask, can it say something about anything? When we try to wag the entire world by the tail of linguistic multiplicity, what place is left for our theorizing, or for anything else? Can we really make do without the units to which Owen referred?49 In other words, if it is true that difference is interminable, then it follows by necessity that whatever we say about it must be false. And if with some shred of discernible meaning we can say that the claim of total falsity must in some significant way be false, then we thereby open a way for a return. This study charts a path for such a return, though not a return to anything like Parmenidean oneness, nor, on the other hand, an escape from the legitimate microstudies that characterize current research. What I shall argue in subsequent chapters is that by applying the logico-semantic theory of possible worlds, we can forge a more comprehensive and more productive way to seek a knowledge of the way language, especially its creative force and tendency toward complexity, operates. This framework ultimately offers a greater understanding not only of a larger diversity of other theoretical, artistic, and cultural phenomena, but perhaps of postmodern society as well.

CHAPTER TWO

The Paradox of the One: Language as Universal Medium

The world which credits what is done Is cold to all that might have been. - Tennyson TG> ao8ev. (To the wise, nothing is foreign.) - Antisthenes

Towards the end of the first chapter, I showed how post-structuralism's unique philosophy of difference, though it frees one from the metaphysics of absolutes, nevertheless confines one to a single world of interlocking differentiation. This phenomenon I called the one-world paradox. It is as if post-structuralists were playing Zeno's paradox in a single arena, relinquishing substantive differences of different kinds in favour of an (dare we say it?) undifferentiated difference. In this chapter we consider the underlying semantic model upon which poststructuralist theory and a significant amount of contemporary philosophy of language is based. The previous chapter examined the inner 'logic' of post-structuralism; the current chapter scrutinizes its underlying theory of meaning. Although all the issues at stake in post-structuralism are obviously broader than we can cover here, I contend that post-structuralism's underlying theory of meaning is only a part, albeit an important part, of a much more widespread attitude towards language today. This broad perspective has become in its most distilled form a truism: language alone fully and finally determines one's construction of the world. Post-

28 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

structuralist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak expresses the idea in this way: 'The problem of human discourse is generally seen as articulating itself in the play of, in terms of, three shifting "concepts": language, world, and consciousness. We know no world that is not organized as a language, we operate with no other consciousness but one structured as a language - languages that we cannot possess, for we are operated by those languages as well. The category of language, then, embraces the categories of world and consciousness even as it is determined by them/1 If we look at what precedes post-structuralism, the reasons for the triumph of the linguistic turn are not difficult to find. After Kant, Western thought principally sought the conditions of meaningfulness in the categories of the mind; and since the linguistic philosophy of Frege and Russell in the analytical tradition and the Saussurean linguistic revolution in the continental tradition, consensus shifted to understanding those categories as constituted by language. This orientation has left few disciplines unchanged; linguistic categories, categories of mind, and categories of meaningfulness are, if not identical, at least deeply implicated at root and, regardless of disciplinary subject, assumed to be universally paradigmatic. This linguistic turn2 - this general orientation towards language - so pervades contemporary thought that, for some, its methodological claims have graduated into incontrovertible truths. Despite the triumph of the linguistic turn, we are concerned with what proves to be a lingering ambiguity about the nature and function of language, what Jaakko Hintikka has called 'the most important and most neglected general feature of the philosophy of language and philosophy of logic in the twentieth century.'3 On this issue many other issues of language rise or fall. Hintikka posits two fundamental assumptions that might be held about the nature of language: one he calls 'language as the universal medium'; the other he calls 'language as calculus.' The first assumption that language is the universal medium (occasioned by the linguistic turn) prevails so widely throughout contemporary discussions of language that many theorists do not even entertain the possibility of an alternative. For this view, language is universal, not in the sense necessarily that everyone shares the same logical or linguistic structures, but that language is a medium of communication and thought entirely inescapable. There is no getting 'outside' the structures of language - there is no outside - and if there were, there would be no means of expressing what one would find 'out there/ if there were an 'out there' to be found.

Language as Universal Medium 29

Hintikka's alternative to language as universal medium is language as calculus. This view has steadily gained ground in recent decades, coalescing principally in the philosophical study known as possibleworlds semantics. Opposing the notion that language is bound to a single domain only, this view maintains that language is variable like a calculus. This sense of the word calculus is not precisely the same as what we think in terms of the differential calculus or the integral calculus, though they share a common origin. Language as calculus means that language can be treated as a kind of abstract symbolism something that can be, in this sense, calculated with, in a variety of interesting and instructive ways. Language is fixed neither in its interpretation nor in its domain of applicability. Language ranges beyond this world and can, in fact, apply equally to any number of universes of discourse. Because language can be freely reinterpreted and reapplied in this way, one important result is that talk about language can be mapped back into language. In other words, the view maintains that language can talk about itself in a significant manner. Whereas these preliminary remarks merely set the calculus view in contrast to language as universal medium, I devote the entirety of chapter 3 to the discussion of language as calculus. From there, the book will explore the general view of possibility it opens up, and after that, some applications to literary theory. While the philosophical history of the distinction between language as universal medium and as calculus is just beginning to be written - by Hintikka, Kusch, and others4 - no one has yet considered the ways it might impact on literary and critical studies. The importance of a project that undertakes to understand this issue is suggested by Hintikka's 1989 assertion that the history of the distinction between language as calculus and language as universal medium 'mostly remains to be written.'5 Such a study is needed in literary and critical theory because the distinction may call into question the very language theory that motivates much of the work carried out under these respective banners. Notwithstanding, many theorists accept an opaque, inevitable semantic model; ironically, they seem to lack an understanding of what that model is and what alternatives to it there may be. I shall sketch a brief history of how this view of language as universal medium achieved its momentum, focusing on several of its principal proponents and movements. From the tradition of analytical philosophy, I consider Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein; from the continental tradition, I consider Heidegger, structuralism, and post-structuralism.

30 Poiesis and Possible Worlds After this historical and technical survey of the issues involved in the view of language as universal medium, I analyse a well-known example from critical studies. I contend that within critical studies in the 1980s and 1990s, new historicism and cultural studies stand, if you will, as the principal power brokers of the idea of language as universal medium. Let me begin by emphasizing that the distinction between language as universal medium and language as calculus is not an exhaustive distinction.6 Neither Hintikka, Kusch, nor anyone else working with these matters (that I am aware of) would argue that all language philosophers and theorists fall neatly into this schema. Rather, the philosophers and theorists we will consider are quite diverse, each one employing different methodologies and arriving at different conclusions. But despite the diversity, these thinkers confront many of the same issues and questions. In this way, Kusch considers Hintikka's distinction between language as universal medium and as calculus to be a question-raising device that clarifies both the differences and the similarities among philosophers. As I trace the genesis of these two prevailing attitudes towards language, I aim to preserve the differences even as I identify the similarities among individual thinkers, and so ultimately to render a generalized schema of basic options likely to confront any theorist who adjudicates the issues. The goal is a clearer understanding of the semantic modelling in which any theory of language is likely to be involved. Ultimately, how we settle these issues will make all the difference to how we read literature. The Matter of Analytical Philosophy The division between language as calculus and language as universal medium was formulated at least before the turn of the twentieth century, commencing most notably with the German philosopher Gottlob Frege, the founder of linguistic philosophy, which was later to characterize the Anglo-American analytical tradition. In 1882, Frege called his logic a lingua characterica rather than a calculus ratiocinator.7 In 1967, Jean Van Heijenoort, in a seminal paper on the history of logic, uses the distinction between logic as language and logic as calculus to delineate two schools of logic that diverge because of Frege: one in the direction of Frege and Russell, and the other in the direction of the algebraists Boole and Hilbert. Hintikka alone, however, grasps the far-reaching application of this distinction. Starting in the 1970s, he generalizes Van

Language as Universal Medium 31

Heijenoort's distinction into two fundamental attitudes towards language, calling them 'language as the universal medium' and 'language as calculus/ In a number of books and articles, Hintikka applies these terms concretely and with careful detail to several principal figures in twentieth-century philosophy.8 Frege finds that the calculus ratiocinator - constituting the arena for the logic that had so far been accomplished up to and including the work of Boole - falls short of what logic as a theoretical enterprise in its own right should achieve. We must, he says, go beyond the conceptual limitations of this old approach if we are to make significant progress. This new project he calls lingua characterica, to be distinguished from the too-underdetermined calculus ratiocinator.9 Frege's new logic inaugurates a revolution concerning the understanding of the nature and role of logic. He departs dramatically from the conception of logic as found in contemporary logicians (like Boole and others).10 Frege objects to Boole's 'abstract logic,' in part, because Boole's logic leaves the proposition completely unanalysed. For Boole, the proposition operates only as a truth value. For Frege, on the other hand, the proposition displays a certain logical structure that deserves a logical analysis (hence the name 'analytical philosophy,' which was to dominate philosophy in England and America thereafter). Notice that Frege takes as his project not only the relations among propositions, some of which Boole's system can capture, but also the very elements that comprise those propositions. Frege's categories, lingua characterica and calculus ratiocinator, are not mutually exclusive. When Frege claims that his new logic is a lingua characterica, he does not state that his logic is not a calculus ratiocinator; rather, he affirms that it is not merely a calculus ratiocinator. In other words, as far as Frege is concerned, he can do everything that Boole can do and much more. Frege sees this step as the next major breakthrough in the history of logic. Van Heijenoort explains that in Frege's new logic, the proposition now 'becomes articulated and can express a meaning.'11 If we can articulate meaning within the formal system in this way, the new logic can provide the notation by which we can rewrite and better understand not simply the way we discourse about philosophy, but about all scientific knowledge as well. Frege affirms: 'My intention was not to represent an abstract logic in formulas, but to express a content through written signs in a more precise and clear way than it is possible to do through words.'12 Those 'written signs,' significantly, indicate the linguistic methodology inherent in his logic. Such 'signs,' it turns out, can

32 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

neither be substituted for by any other signs, nor can they be given an interpretation other than that assigned. Despite the gains Frege makes, we begin to sense some of the losses: because Frege's logic is a universal language intended to replace both formalized languages and natural languages alike, nothing can be said meaningfully outside it. The universality of his logic is particularly manifested in the way it fixes the interpretation of the quantifier 'all/ which goes directly to the question of the language's scope and the world to which it might apply. Frege subdivides the proposition into various elements: constants, variables, names, predicates, logical operators (like negation), and quantifiers ('all/ 'some'); a variety of logical connectives ('and/ 'or/ etc.) bind all these elements. Of these, the quantifier has been most debated because the logic of the quantifiers 'all' and 'some' exemplifies the clearest examples of the reach of logic - that is, the domain or universe of its applicability. Does our language countenance one world only or all sorts of worlds? The logical interpretation of 'all' and 'some' will vary depending on how large a group of individuals we consider at any given point; and as the interpretation varies, so will the conclusions of our arguments. Frege's interpretation of the quantifier 'all' is that the universe of 'all' is the universe. Frege is convinced that by choosing the universe - that is, literally everything there is - as his universe of discourse, he has seized on the logic of quantification as it applies to every area. If we choose only one domain, or only one at a time, he continues, we never can ascertain whether we have not simply selected some single property that applies only to that domain. Is that property applicable to another context or to the broadest context of all? We could never be certain, never speak unequivocally. Accordingly, Van Heijenoort encapsulates Frege's stance on logic and language: 'Frege's universe consists of all that there is, and it is fixed.'13 Because Frege's methodology unites language and logic together in a single science, it naturally aims to deliver the very logic of all language. However, in order to claim that 'all/ he finds it necessary to limit the 'all' to a single possibility, a single universe of discourse, a lingua characterica that forms those linguistic habits we are accustomed to call 'mind/ from which there is no escape. In a word, language and its logic are universal. The shortcoming of this view is similar to that of other totalizing claims about language, including especially those from the structuralist and, even as was argued in chapter 1, the post-structuralist traditions: there can be no alternative to the universe of discourse in

Language as Universal Medium 33

which one is situated. Whether that site is conceived on the grand scale (Frege) or on a more localized level (structuralists et al.), one cannot get outside of the language, and if one could, there would be neither a mind to apprehend nor a language to describe that strange other world. It would appear that Frege disqualifies himself from handling any questions outside the system, and Frege seems consistently quiet about such metasystematic questions.14 Hintikka, however, argues that Frege retains an implicit semantics that touches on these very issues: 'Even though it is formulated by Frege in syntactic (deductive and axiomatic) terms, its motivation is clearly semantical/15 For this reason, Hintikka playfully calls Frege a 'semanticist without semantics/ He means that although the methodology is syntactic, semantic assumptions, assumptions about how language relates to the world, underlie and guide the system. Hintikka believes Frege's basic semantic picture dominates most twentieth-century language philosophy, especially that of the first half: language as universal medium. Perhaps the reason why Frege's implicit view of language-world relations has not been more readily disputed or even discussed is that his system does not permit such discourse. Semantics for Frege is, strictly speaking, impossible. But if this is true, then what semantic intimations does Hintikka detect? Hintikka's analysis allows us to explore more closely what language as universal medium means for Frege. But before I broach the subject of Frege's 'hidden semantics/ it would be useful to consider in more practical terms what it might mean to say that all talk about semantics is impossible. In my reading and discussions with others, I have found that some simply assume that we cannot talk about semantics. Many who work closely with language and language-related issues tend to think of language as something that just cannot reflect on its own nature or on the way it relates to the world. Those who spend more time in media other than language, such as music and mathematics, are perhaps more open to thinking otherwise.16 (Of course, this is a crude generalization based on informal evidence, but there may be something to the fact that those most active in moving among several different media, like music and mathematics, for which the means of representation naturally vary, are less likely to think that language is the one and only medium of communication and thought.) Let us consider what the impossibility of semantics might look like for Frege. If, as Frege maintains, logic is the language of all our intellectual activities, then unquestionably it can either be spoken or not spo-

34 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

ken; no other options exist. Language cannot be employed to talk about itself because language is already implicated in a fixed relation of word and world. We cannot use this fixed semantic relation to express the ways in which language relates to the world because the expression we would be forced to use to express the semantic relation is already involved in its own semantic relations. The description stands as an instance of the very phenomenon it purports to describe. Victor Raskin once explained to me this position of the impossibility of metasystematic enquiry in this simple yet effective illustration: If you were immersed in an environment of milk, you could not determine the weight of milk. If milk is the ubiquitous medium in which you live, move, and from which you can never extract your being, then all possible measurements you attempt will be futile from the outset. Such a project would always be vitiated by, in the terms employed here, the one-world paradox - the idea of language as universal medium. This vivid example is of the kind Wittgenstein will later multiply and even raise to the level of an art form. It illustrates what we mean when we say for Frege, and for many other philosophers and theorists of language as well, that semantics is impossible. What about Frege's 'hidden semantics'? Hintikka argues that, Frege's methodological stance notwithstanding, Frege is not precluded from, at times, describing how language relates to the world. Adherents to the view of language as universal medium may hold definite views about semantics, Hintikka explains, though they may not be able to express them completely and clearly in language. As we will see in a moment, this quandary motivates Wittgenstein's all-important distinction between saying and showing in the Tractatus. Although Frege claims that semantic relationships can not be spelled out, certain 'hints' can suggest what those relationships might look like. The problem arises when we understand that only language can drop these 'hints.' Because 'we cannot come to an understanding with one another apart from language/ Frege says, we cannot clearly and strictly define what these relationships are.17 This limitation, according to Hintikka, explains the relative completeness of Frege's logic. However, this completeness accounts only for the logic of extension (roughly speaking, logic that can account chiefly for denotation), and will later be found deficient by Godel's theorems. When we speak of completeness, inevitably the question of the liminal comes up - for one who has best explored the world best knows its boundaries. Hintikka applauds Frege in this regard: Tt is the very completeness of Frege's work on such extensional logic that enabled

Language as Universal Medium 35

him to recognize what cannot be dealt with in extensional terms/ Frege's work on this extensional logic, however, carries with it important limitations. It is ultimately to blame, Hintikka explains, for the 'paucity of Frege's ontology.'18 Frege's methodology, furthermore, ultimately straightjackets his semantics by its heavy reliance on a syntactic methodology. In such a 'hidden semantics/ semantic relationships can neither be discussed nor varied because, for Frege, the system of meaning is also the medium of meaning. From that system, all logically permissible statements are derived. Statements of semantics, of that which reaches beyond language, are excluded. Among the variety of philosophers and theorists considered here, we find a spectrum of opinions on the impossibility of semantics: from the muted hints of an indirect semantics beginning with Frege and Russell to the later claim of total semantic ineffability in Wittgenstein and Heidegger. (It does seem, though, that the longer language as the universal medium has persisted as a viable option for language theorists, the more theorists have faced the ineffability of semantics as the logical outcome of their views.) To sum up, for Frege, language as the universal medium involves a reliance on syntactical methods, a rejection of semantics as a theoretical discipline, and a commitment to the universality of logic and language. The early Bertrand Russell,19 the Russell of Principia Mathematica, also subscribes to a view of language as the universal medium. Russell shares Frege's view of the nature of the quantifier, yet his view should be distinguished from Frege's. Principia Mathematica introduces into formal logic a theory of types, which makes certain adjustments to the way the quantifier operates. Quantifiers within Russell's system range over specific types - that is, over all the individuals of a certain order. Yet the modification does nothing to alter Russell's orientation towards the ubiquity of language. In his system, no domains are possible within a type, and no domains are possible outside of a type - except, of course, the universe itself. While Russell's theory of types perhaps improves on Frege by stratifying logical space, both the types and the space which comprise that universe are fixed in advance. For Russell, as Goldfarb spells out, '[t]he universe of discourse is always the universe, appropriately striated.'20 The universality of logic, and therefore the universality of language, is very much the same for Russell as it is for Frege. Russell's theory of types helps him to solve one set of theoretical problems, but it does nothing to alter his fundamental commitment to the universality of language. For Russell (as for Frege), the universality of logic and language

36 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

ultimately leads to the conclusion that metatheory is impossible. Because all reasoning comes from the inside of logic, we cannot, as it were, reason about logic from the outside. Hylton observes that 'Questions about the system are as absent from Principia Mathematica as they are from Frege's work. Semantic notions are unknown/21 Nor, according to Russell, can we set up various axiomatic systems to obtain any important results that would have universal application. We cannot vary language and its logic in any interesting way to discover how they function. Russell believes that since 'all our axioms are principles of deduction/ then 'if they are true, the consequences which appear to follow from the employment of an opposite principle will not really follow/22 In other words, we are quite stuck inside the system. And therefore matters of interpretation never present themselves. As Hylton explains, 'A universal quantification thus makes a claim about all objects, and the question of its truth or falsity for a given interpretation does not arise: either the claim is true of all objects that there are or it is not/23 Again, like Frege, Russell's emphasis on the syntactical or formalist method leads him to the problems of systematic completeness and incompleteness. Russell does admit of 'a respect in which formalism breaks down/24 which only a few years later Godel will formulate in his well-known incompleteness theorems. At this point in his writing, however, Russell does not seem to grasp the import of the breakdown. We conclude this treatment of Russell with little more than a glance at Godel's theorems. Godel's first theorem (undecidability) demonstrates that in a formalized system of first-order logic (like Frege's or Russell's) or in a formalized mathematics (again, like Frege's or Russell's) there will always be a formula within the system that is nonetheless underivable from the system. His second theorem (unprovability), a corollary to the first, demonstrates that the consistency of such a formalized system can never be proved within the system. Godel casts serious doubt upon the validity of any purely syntactical or formalist method of logic. His theorems cause problems not only in logic and mathematics, but also in any theory of language that relies solely on formalist or structuralist principles. (We will revisit this question of syntactic and formalist methods again when we return, later in this chapter, to structuralism and post-structuralism.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, our next figure, completes the section on analytical philosophy and forms a convenient bridge from analytical philoso-

Language as Universal Medium 37

phy to the language philosophy in the continental tradition. Like some of the language philosophers in the continental tradition, Wittgenstein deals with many of the same issues as Frege and Russell but in a sometimes aphoristic, and sometimes even lyrical, manner.25 Hintikka argues that Wittgenstein's view of language as the universal medium spans his entire philosophical career. I would say it becomes for Wittgenstein a kind of touchstone for his diverse and often fascinating reflections on language. Hintikka argues that Wittgenstein's famous picture theory of language in the Tractatus is directly grounded in an understanding of language as universal medium, as is his distinction between saying and showing. Facts, or propositions, depict the way things are - that is, they show it. They are pictures of states of affairs. One limitation of pictures, however, is that they can never depict their pictorial form. This fundamental insight resembles the structuralists' and post-structuralists' later insights on the problems of metalanguage. A literary theorist might think of Wittgenstein's point as the impossibility of the metapictorial, insofar as it applies to propositions. For in order for propositions to depict their pictorial form, they would have to move outside of their pictorial form, which is logically impossible. Pictorial form, then, can only be shown. Wittgenstein explains that 'Every picture is at the same time a logical one/ which means that when a proposition displays the logical nature of the way things are, it displays the very structure of the world; hence, movement outside of the structure is impossible.26 Although Wittgenstein does not share the structuralists' and poststructuralists' understanding of a binary semiology based solely on the differential relations immanent to the system of language, his own outlook does have some important implications for their enterprise, especially since Wittgenstein formulates the problems involved in any metalanguage in the most striking terms. Notice the amazing consequence of Wittgenstein's view of language as he applies it to aesthetics and ethics. For Wittgenstein, the sense of the world is beyond our ability to picture it (for that would necessarily take us outside the world); therefore, we can never speak of the meaning or value of the world. He states, 'In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists - and if it did exist, it would have no value.' His comment would implicate also any of the versions of New Criticism committed to a wholly formal account of literary meaning. Wittgenstein insists that if any aesthetic or moral value existed, it would lie somewhere outside of the sphere of

38 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

the world. As that condition is ab initio impossible, 'So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics' - or aesthetics, or any other value.27 If one adopts Wittgenstein's view of language, then one may indeed have to abdicate aesthetics, ethics, and value. Remarkably, Wittgenstein's conclusion results from his view of language as the universal medium. If only some of our own literary and critical theorists were as aware of the consequences of their views of language as Wittgenstein is. To some extent, of course, many structuralists' and post-structuralists' views correspond to Wittgenstein's own view.28 For them, valuative and aesthetic statements pertain only to a certain discourse or discourse community. As Kant restricted such judgments to non-cognitive acts of mind or feeling, so also many theorists limit such judgments to the structures of language. In this way, the discourse authorizes the value, both creating and prescribing, both proscribing and limiting, any and all bounds of what is and is not valued. Theorists argue that discourse (which they claim is never value-neutral) always transmits and enforces its own values, outside of which speakers have no choice. In a peculiar way, one could say they agree exactly with Wittgenstein's position: human value and aesthetics are never non-linguistic. Value and aesthetics not reducible to some particular aspect of language are therefore impossible. Such statements are either a misuse of language or an outright abuse. In the former case, language yields no meaning; in the latter, language becomes a tool for ideological control. We will return to these considerations in the sections on structuralism, poststructuralism, and new historicism. In the Tractatus the view of language as the universal medium leads Wittgenstein to posit not only a valueless, but also a solipsistic, world.29 Later, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein alters his position, rejecting private languages of solipsism in favour of public languages and their language games. What net gains result from such a substitution? Besides charting the trajectory continental philosophy will later take as it moves from existentialism to structuralism - from privately to publicly constructed meaning - Wittgenstein is able to contact something outside himself. But despite the gains, Wittgenstein's theory of language games in Philosophical Investigations leaves unbroached the problem of semantics; and so it leaves intact the problem of the ineffability of semantics from the Tractatus. Significantly, Philosophical Investigations shifts the problem from the individual language-user to the language community. Hintikka, in passing, calls this the move from

Language as Universal Medium 39

individual solipsism to 'linguistic solipsism' - although Wittgenstein prefers (as Hintikka does also) the term 'linguistic relativism.'30 So the spectre of linguistic relativism looming large over his philosophy is something of which Wittgenstein is quite aware. Semantic continuity exists between the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations because, despite the new emphasis on pragmatics in the Philosophical Investigations, the rules of language games remain just as inexpressible as the structures of logical form were in the Tractatus. In the Philosophical Investigations, language games are foundational to what we might call meaning, though we should not think that we have thereby come any closer to describing either the meaning of any statement or the way in which it relates to the world.31 Language games as such remain unanalysable, inexplicable, ineffable. It is now convenient to summarize the key features of the view of language as universal medium. Wittgenstein, the last figure we consider in the analytical tradition, advances Frege's and Russell's language philosophy to its next difficult step. (1) For Wittgenstein, the universality of logic and language clearly spells out not only the power but also the limits of logic and language. (2) Among the limitations is the impossibility of metalanguage. (3) Hence, a dead end: the way that language relates to the world can never be expressed in language. (4) Such inexpressibility of semantics becomes, in the words of Hintikka, a kind of semantic Kantianism - the bounds of one's language constitute the bounds of one's world, and no one can ever know what makes those bounds or what occurs outside them.32 (5) Finally, because these bounds are inviolable, either solipsism or linguistic relativism is the end result. This chain of conclusions provides a convenient schema of the options that confront a theorist who agrees that language is the universal medium. The interrelationships among these options are characterized more by loose association than by logical implication. They stand as part of a limited number of options available to this position. To this extent, one might say Wittgenstein culminates Frege and Russell's view of language as the universal medium. Although the Anglo-American tradition of logic and language has more recently moved to a position of logic as calculus (the specific contours of which will become clear in the next chapter), some remain committed to a view of language as the universal medium. Quine, for example, refuses to acknowledge the work of modal semantics; the resulting impoverishment of his ontology, as Shusterman points out in a piquant observation, parallels Quine's personal taste for desert landscapes. Likewise

40

Poiesis and Possible Worlds

Goodman, in his aesthetic reflections based on Quine's logic of the 'actual world' and of scientific certitude, retains strong prejudices against fictional beings and fictional worlds.33 So in this way, the view of language as the universal medium continues to trap many philosophers of language inside a one-world semantics. But rather than recoil from such a charge, these theorists would happily maintain that logic can admit nothing outside the realm of this world. Russell, for example, considered the advantage of his philosophy to be its 'robust sense of reality.' This robust realism, however, leads not only to the denial of all sorts of important possibilia, which theoretically are increasingly difficult to do without (things such as virtual particles), but also to certain standard features of our own language (such as counterfactual discourse). The view causes difficulty even when its proponents try to reckon with common modal issues such as necessity and possibility, as well as the range of prepositional attitudes ('to think/ 'to believe/ 'to dream/ etc.), all of which are essential to the logic of natural language. Finally, it should be no surprise that the view is disastrous to literary meaning, as will be seen below in the comments on AJ. Ayer. These limitations, inherent as they are within this orientation, cannot remain unchallenged. This philosophy of language is not nearly robust enough. The Force of Continental Philosophy Curiously, we find an analogous situation in the continental tradition. Because the terminology, the philosophical style, and many of the theoretical concerns are often vastly different from those of analytical philosophy, the gulf between the continental and analytical traditions has proven difficult to span. Perhaps one could argue that these two schools should retain their distance. Nevertheless, I suggest that at least with respect to this basic orientation towards language (which Hintikka calls language as universal medium), there are important underlying similarities. Heidegger speaks of language as the universal basis of being, Saussurean semiology can admit of nothing other, and the history of continental thought that is their legacy has placed itself squarely within this theoretical framework. Kusch supplements Hintikka's analyses of Frege and Anglo-American analytical philosophy with his own studies in continental philosophy. He examines the work of both Heidegger and Gadamer as examples of language as the universal medium. Heidegger, as he indicates, moves from a position of Being as the universal medium of meaning in Being

Language as Universal Medium 41

and Time to a more extreme position of language as the 'house of Being' in his later writings on art and poetry. Gadamer accepts a somewhat softer position on the issue, says Kusch, and even catches reproof from Heidegger for doing so. Others in this tradition deal with these issues as well. Not only Gadamer, but also Habermas, and even Derrida, can be seen as successors to Heidegger. But because Heidegger's is still the most pervasive presence in contemporary continental philosophy, we can safely treat him alone in this survey. Just as many have followed the work of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, so also have many thinkers in the continental tradition followed Heidegger's ground-breaking work. A practical advantage for looking at Heidegger alone is that he takes such a clear and unequivocal stance on this subject. When we finish with Heidegger, we will briefly reconsider structuralism and poststructuralism in light of these issues. We start, then, with Heidegger's view of language in Being and Time. Heidegger maintains that all questions of existence (the 'ontic') and its interpretation (the ontological) always take place within Being as a whole (the 'ontico-ontological'). No way exists for abstracting such questions (nor oneself) from a situatedness within the whole of Being. '"Being" is the most universal concept,' argues Heidegger, yet it is neither a concept nor an entity.34 Rather, all our concepts and all entities proceed from it. As the most fundamental ground of all things, the general sitedness of Being's universality is brought to a sharper focus in a consideration of the human being. Heidegger calls the human being 'there being,' or Dasein. Dasein knows no boundaries of its experience within Being as its larger context: 'For Dasein there is no outside, for which reason it is also absurd to talk about an inside.'35 When we talk about Dasein, we can no longer uphold the distinction between subject and object. And having removed that distinction, we can more readily rid ourselves of all the artificial results created by the history of metaphysics. The entire history of metaphysics is fundamentally mistaken, Heidegger continues, because it thinks it finds a key to understanding Being by looking at individual beings. Being is a whole and cannot be so easily cut into tidy categories. Since categories can occur only in language, categories themselves are merely the after-effects of Being. With the mention of language, concepts, and meaning, we raise again the issue of language as universal medium. In the context of language as after-effect of Being, Kusch applies language as universal medium to early Heidegger: meaning only occurs within Being, and only as a kind of result of Being, upheld all the while by Being as ground. As Heidegger

42 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

insists, 'we always conduct our activities in an understanding of Being.' Being, in this sense, stands as the universal medium of meaning. What Kusch calls Heidegger's circularity in our knowledge-seeking activities, and what Heidegger calls the 'relatedness backward or forward,' is the hermeneutical movement to and from this ground. All understanding, truth, and interpretation are always already rooted in Being because Dasein (being there/there being) is always already a 'thrown projection' in the world. Its understanding is that projection, which always takes place within a totality of involvements; or, as Heidegger rephrases the idea, Dasein's understanding is the disclosedness of its Being-in-the-World. Meaning is therefore always specifically sited within Being. So situated, Dasein stands merely as a 'context of references/36 It is interesting to note at this juncture an implicit feature in Heidegger's early thought that he later draws out and develops more fully in his work on language and art (whereas in Being and Time we have the mere outline for it). This feature of his thought has affinities not only with the formalism of Wittgenstein and the structuralism of Saussure, but also with certain post-structuralist themes. In fact, many post-structuralists make considerable use of Heidegger. In a particularly telling passage in Being and Time, Heidegger states: 'The question about the meaning of Being is to be formulated. We must therefore discuss it with an eye to these structural forms.' So as meaning presents itself, Heidegger says, it comes to us already structured beforehand. We can as little escape those structures as we can the meaning into which Dasein is always already situated. In his later discussion of discourse and language from the same work, he affirms, 'As an existential state in which Dasein is disclosed, discourse is constitutive for Dasein's existence.'37 From this observation on structure in the early work, we turn to Heidegger's later writings on language and art. In his famous 'Letter on Humanism' we find one of the most quoted of all Heidegger's statements: 'Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells/ Or, similarly, in Poetry, Language, Thought he declares, 'Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man/38 Add to these principles another: language is temporally - both historically and culturally - specific. Recall from Being and Time his reference to 'temporality as the meaning of the Being of that entity which we call "Dasein/" Time is what, for example, throws Kant's metaphysical schematism into serious doubt.39 Language, then, as both historically and culturally specific, forms the bounds of Dasein's understanding.

Language as Universal Medium 43

In a later passage that ostensibly sets out to correct his perhaps oversuggestive 'house of Being' metaphor, Heidegger takes his position to a more extreme form: 'Some time ago I called language, clumsily enough, the house of Being. If man by virtue of his language dwells within the claim and call of Being, then we Europeans presumably dwell in an entirely different house then Eastasian man ... And so, a dialogue from house to house remains nearly impossible/40 Ironically, by attempting to soften his metaphor, Heidegger hardens his position. In this passage, he unequivocally embraces cultural relativism. And when it comes to the nature of art, Heidegger creates another metaphor: the house of Being is a temple. He envisions not a single temple only, but many temples - one for each historical people. Heidegger is explicit about the confines of these temples. He explains that any particular historical temple establishes 'the shape of destiny for human being,' which means that "The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people.'41 This destiny is a telling one, and it resonates in Heidegger's use of the word Geschick, which, as Kusch reminds us, is '"fate" or "destiny," yet taken literally, as "Ge-schick," ... means "that which has been sent."'42 Heidegger alludes to both meanings when he speaks of our understanding of Being as a 'Geschick.' There seems to me to be another Heidegger who sees language not as offspring of being, but as inseparable twin of being, and, to complete the trinity, its unrivalled master. Heidegger thus appears to take the view of language as universal or inescapable medium to its most extreme form.43 His fateful house of language seems to solidify this view for a succeeding generation of philosophical reflection on language, history, and culture. And though the methodology is different, Heidegger's attitude towards language surprisingly resembles Wittgenstein's, with both philosophers late in their philosophical careers committing themselves to thoroughgoing linguistic relativism. (Kusch even provides the historical and textual evidence that suggests Wittgenstein's influence on Heidegger.)44 Clearly, both philosophers pushed this position to its logical, and in some ways its bitter, conclusion. Syntax in Structuralism and Post-Structuralism Observers have long recognized that structuralism treats language as the universal medium - albeit in a somewhat different form. Jameson's The Prison-House of Language, most notably, has canonized this concept

44 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

as one of structuralism's most salient and well-known tenets. And in much the same way that Hintikka calls Wittgenstein's position a 'semantical Kantianism/ Ricoeur calls structuralism 'A Kantianism without a transcendental subject' - in either case the system cannot be surmounted. In chapter 1 we saw how Saussure developed his structural linguistics by postulating the meaning conditions of a language to be inherent within the language; consequently, both the position and nature of any single part of the language depends entirely on the system as a whole. And, conversely, the movement of a single part of the system changes the entire system. All meaning at all times, then, derives from this dynamic and interconnected system of relations. We also saw that although Derrida seriously altered what it means for language to be a system of difference, he nevertheless retained the immanentism of Saussure's semiology ('nothing outside the text'). We need not cover ground already covered in the first chapter. What we need to see at this point is that for both structuralism and post-structuralism, language is clearly the universal medium of meaning. We could easily run down the list of all the standard earmarks cited in the section on Wittgenstein: language is both unique and universal; language's limits cannot be overcome; the emphasis on language's immanent features leads to a fundamentally syntactical or rule-governed methodology that precludes semantical issues; thus metalanguage and metaphysics are both impossible; language is radically public; and the public nature of language leads to the incommensurability, and therefore inaccessibility, between language communities. Because we covered structuralism and post-structuralism in the first chapter, we will limit the present discussion to this single outstanding issue of syntax. Afterwards, we proceed to a more sustained analysis of new historicism since it represents perhaps the most important next step in literary theory's commitment to language as universal medium. At various points in this critical history, I have indicated that a heavy reliance on a syntactical or formalist understanding of logic and language is closely associated with language as the universal medium. Because structuralism seems the purest possible example of the syntactical method - explaining as it does all language effects in terms of the combinations of the elements that make up the system - it invites us to reconsider what exactly we mean when we refer to a syntactic methodology. As Marciszewski indicates, the terms formalism and syntax are often used interchangeably in the philosophy of language.45 Roth formalism and syntax imply a study of the signs - or symbols, depending

Language as Universal Medium 45

upon one's viewpoint - of language irrespective of the meaning of language. The word formalism emphasizes the form or structure as opposed to the meaning; syntax underscores the rules that govern those formal features. The two terms are thus closely related for both logic and linguistics. Although in logic the method may be axiomatic and deductive whereas in linguistics it may be rule-descriptive or -prescriptive, both methods still treat language as a system of signs. When it comes to literary theory, the terms have been used with some difference. Formalism has been applied to both Russian formalism and New Criticism: the former because it concerns itself primarily with literary form as opposed to literary content as it functions across a variety of literary works; the latter because it sets its sights on the formal features of literary works considered individually. Structuralism has inherited certain features from Russian formalism, especially its concern for language in general (linguistic competence) and for the laws immanent within the language (syntax); however, unlike Russian formalism, it avoids the form/content distinction altogether. For these positions, literary meaning cannot be disembodied and is otherwise inexpressible (the heresy of paraphrase), or is secondary to and an effect of the structures of the language (Greimas's structurally conceived meaning-effects).46 As I have argued in this study so far, a formalist or syntactical methodology generally indicates a view of language as universal medium. For if language is an interdependent system of either logical or semiologic relations, then the extra-systemic issues, including the semantic ones, will typically remain unaddressable. Many philosophers and theorists have been restricted to a view of language as the universal medium by formalism alone. It therefore seems a relatively unappreciated fact that formalism can also be motivated by the view of language as calculus. Since the 1970s, Hintikka has argued that the formalist method can equally be employed by one holding to this alternative conception of language. He maintains that if one is interested in the view of language as calculus - for which the sign system of language and the way in which it relates to the world can be varied - one will naturally be interested in formalism as a means of keeping track of the various ways we interpret language and the rules by which we implement those interpretations. For someone with this understanding of language, as Hintikka says, "The rules governing such formulas must then be formulated in purely formal terms.'47 On the other hand, someone with an understanding of language as

46 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

the universal medium will, of course, be committed to formalism for quite a different reason. If the relations of the language establish both the criteria and bounds of meaningfulness, then the best one can hope for by way of language theory is a formulation of the structure that the language exhibits.48 Saussure, for example, states that: '[W]hether we examine the signified or the signifier, language involves neither ideas nor sounds which would preexist the linguistic system, but only conceptual or phonic differences which have resulted from that system.'49 As we have seen already and see here again, language can never get outside itself to comment on itself because it is the sole medium through which expression occurs. At best, language can only manifest its relations within its own system of difference. Wittgenstein's emphasis on language showing its structure also applies: 'In logical syntax the meaning of a sign should never play a role. It must be possible to establish logical syntax without mentioning the meaning of a sign: only the description of expressions may be presupposed.'50 According to Wittgenstein, Russell's whole theory of types is flawed on this very point. For in articulating one of the rules of the syntax, Russell has to refer to the meaning of the signs that appear in that syntax. Wittgenstein's comments demonstrate that for many theorists and philosophers, the conflict between syntax and semantics is fundamental, only resolved by opting for the former over the latter. We might also recall here the linguist Bloomfield's disregard of meaning: 'meaning cannot be analysed within the scope of our science.'51 And the Vienna Circle, too, considered syntax as the only possible science of language. We conclude this section by observing that Wittgenstein influenced both the early Carnap and the entire Vienna Circle, which in turn later influenced many other formalists and structuralists alike.52 New Historicism and Culture as Universal Medium For critical theory in the 1980s and 1990s and into the 2000s, new historicism and cultural studies best embody the idea of language as the universal medium. Employing a widely practised method of critical inquiry, new historicism and cultural studies have gained quite a broad base of acceptance, perhaps succeeding post-structuralism because the latter was interpreted as a concern for textual play only. (This is not to say that post-structuralists did not develop their own theory of history.53) I foreground new historicism and cultural studies as the successors to postmodernist pantextual preoccupations because they apply

Language as Universal Medium 47

post-structuralist language theory to an understanding of culture in which the nexus of ideology, language, and aesthetics becomes the single medium of cultural exchange. As Hutcheon acknowledges, 'Postmodernism teaches that all cultural practices have an ideological subtext which determines the conditions of their production of meaning' and is therefore 'fundamentally contradictory, resolutely historical, and inescapably political/54 Those involved in new historicism and cultural studies have gone the furthest in employing the concept of language as universal or inescapable medium. If we may be allowed to borrow a bit of their own terminology, circulating within new historicism and cultural studies are many of the recent assumptions about the nature of language as they appear in several related disciplines - not only in language and history, but also in much current theorizing about politics, aesthetics, ideology, and the social sciences. While the two critical schools share much the same approach, we will focus here on new historicism. Louis Montrose, the best theorist of new historicism, writes in a recent volume co-edited by Stephen Greenblatt (the best practitioner) what to this point has to be the definitive piece on 'New Historicisms.' Even in this title he preserves the diversity, the multiple commitments and practices, bound in this one appellation. He tells us that new historicists include those who mimic Greenblatt's work, as well as practitioners of cultural studies, gender studies, and Marxist criticism. Montrose not only gathers this diversity under a carefully defined and highly qualified statement of purpose and practice, but he also dispels a number of misconceptions about new historicism - including correcting and clarifying his own earlier writings on the subject. He hesitates to identify new historicism as an absolutely demarcated school of thought, considering it instead as 'an emergent historical orientation.'55 Yet amidst the variety, a number of themes and attitudes about language, culture, and history recur. It is these recurrent attitudes towards language with which we will be most concerned. In the material on structuralism and post-structuralism we saw how Derrida reverses the synchronic and diachronic polarities of language. As a part of that overall process, the langue and parole distinction is reversed as well.56 In both cases, the second term is subsequently seen as primary, and the first term derivative. Derrida's own arguments against structuralism best illustrate the vulnerability of the synchronic to the diachronic. When he affirms that 'there is everywhere only differences and traces of traces,' he stresses the ultimate power of language's

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diachronic forces. Consequently structuration, logos, or systematic unity cannot stand against a diachronic critique. As we saw in the first chapter, Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence by way of the deconstruction of the present reinforces this result. Time has more of a disruptive effect upon structure than Saussure ever imagined. Although indeed Saussure coins the term diachrony, he (unlike Derrida) does not grapple with its deeper implications. This important move beyond Saussure is of course one of the hallmarks of post-structuralism. But not all post-structuralists have treated diachrony in the same way. For Derrida, diachrony manifests itself in the movements of textual play; for Foucault, on the other hand, diachrony coincides with the power relations that constitute history.57 Although attempts have been made to apply Derrida and his set of concerns to historical analysis, Foucault and his set of concerns have, for many literary critics at this point in critical history, succeeded Derrida and his. In J. Hillis Miller's now famous Presidential Address to the Modern Language Association in 1986, Miller reports that 'literary study in the past few years has undergone a sudden, almost universal turn away from theory in the sense of an orientation toward language as such and has made a corresponding turn toward history, culture, society, politics, institutions, class and gender conditions, the social context, the material base.'58 Even though this new methodology or set of concerns has gained greater currency, the underlying model of meaning retains many of the fundamental features of its predecessor. In fact, new historicism not only inherits the view of language as the universal medium from both the structuralists and post-structuralists (Montrose's and Greenblatt's indebtedness to Foucault and Geertz is well known), but despite applying this view to new areas in interesting new ways, it suffers from many of the same limitations. The first way one might encounter the view of language as the universal medium in new historicist studies is through practitioners' understanding of historical phenomena. New historicism deploys a powerful and far-reaching interpretive method that allows its practitioners to examine history, the movement of political and cultural forces, and the associated development of the identities of individuals and societies. This critical method is so promising because by means of its categories a practitioner can come to an understanding of all cultural phenomena. This naturally raises the question: how universal is the method of new historicism? Do its practitioners not attempt to distinguish it by

Language as Universal Medium 49

eschewing the grand narratives of traditional historicism in favour of the petit narratives of localized histories? Montrose himself insists upon the non-universal nature of the new historicism: 'Like anyone else's, my readings of cultural texts cannot but be partial - by which I mean incapable of offering an exhaustive description, a complete explanation.'59 The new historicism rejects all claims to knowledge of a universal human nature or of universal historical themes because it thinks none exist. The limitation is in this case not an agnostic one. Soon I will address still other limitations of new historicist methodologies. For the moment, though, let us pursue new historicism's universal claims, or alternatively, the claims to universal application of its methods. Although new historicists indeed deny the universals just described, they would also deny that historical data can deviate from their unique account of historical causation. Curiously, they have replaced what they consider a universal metaphysical scheme of the older historical scholarship with an apparently universal methodological scheme. Rather than supplement other historical methods, new historicists aim to revise the entire historical project - the first indication of their universalism. They also claim that the more traditional historians - Tillyard and Bush are a couple of favourite examples60 were mistaken in their histories because they relied upon grand historical schemes. (Without deciding the ultimate value of these two historians, or their level of compatibility with the microhistorians, one might legitimately wonder how medieval or Renaissance literature can be understood without some grasp of the analogy of being, in the same way that Greenblatt or Montrose might not be understood without some grasp of Geertzian structural anthropology or the Foucauldian nexus of power and knowledge.) What is the nature of the new historicists' complaint against Tillyard and Bush? What provides the basis for their disagreement? The answer: the axiom that all language, politics, and culture are always mutually implicated in a single process of discursive practice. No other principles obtain on the stage of history. Such a method allows Foucault, for example, to trace the themes of a ubiquitous power which, through various historical moments, works to shape societies. In its worse form, the new historicisms reject the grand historical schemes of traditional historians in favour of their own universal schematization: everything becomes an 'allegory' of power relations - racial, sexual, economic, or otherwise. While this approach yields many interesting results, its underlying methodology bears a remarkable resemblance to the methodology of

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Frege and Russell, with whom we began this chapter. Perhaps the two arenas are so remotely positioned that to see the similarity is at first difficult. But I contend that especially Russell's project in the Principia, as it promises to bring logic, mathematics, and language all into a single science, seems to me in a fundamental way like their own project. While the results of the new historicisms will never be universal entities, abstract or real, the common methodology of the new historicisms does specify the way in which all meaning is produced in the discursive practices specifically at work in various forms of linguistic, social, and cultural behaviour. This claim appears even in Montrose's most guarded of formulations: The post-structuralist orientation to history now emerging in literary studies I characterize chiastically, as a reciprocal concern with the historicity of texts and the textuality of histories. By the historicity of texts, I mean to suggest the historical specificity, the social and material embedding, of all modes of writing - including not only the texts that critics study but also the texts in which we study them; thus, I also mean to suggest the historical, social, and material embedding of all modes of reading. By the textuality of histories, I mean to suggest, in the first place, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, to a material existence that is unmediated by the textual traces of the society in question.61

Notice that all modes of writing and all modes of reading are involved in this embedding of the social and the material; we have no exceptions to this rule and no possibility of access to anything outside of its purview. Montrose affirms that to understand linguistic and cultural phenomena in this manner is to reject the very possibility that they can be transcended.62 Notice the self-serving standards he erects for those who would disagree: access to the past requires that it be 'full and authentic.' Never mind the time machine required for traditional historians: by ridding historiography of its totalizing schemes, the new historicisms make recourse to a totalizing method. Recall Shusterman's reminder at the conclusion of chapter 1, that only one positive term is sufficient to unravel differance. The principle applies with equal force to the methodology of the new historicisms: a single event not caused in the interlocking grid of power, language, and culture is sufficient to undermine that grid. Let us consider the precise manner in which new historicists claim that meaning is embedded in the social and the material. They believe

Language as Universal Medium 51

that language, power, and culture interrelate, forming a network that pervades all levels of social interaction. This insight has been extolled as new historicism's 'leg up' over traditional literary history, offering a much more diffuse and complex reality. Camera angles were much too wide in the traditional historicism, they claim, and consequently oblivious to the details of socio-historical context.63 Yet this context serves new historicists as no mere supplement or gloss to the understanding of literary phenomena; the contextual webwork radically constitutes all phenomena that come under the heading of meaning. Meaning is always, and without exception, located in the temporal, cultural webwork. It is created there - caused there - and cannot arise in any other way.64 This assumption resembles Jameson's now-famous declaration from The Prison-House of Language: 'Context is everything.'65 Understood as such, the pursuit of meaning embarks on a course analogous to Heidegger's circular hermeneutic: for how can we say anything about Being if we are already a thrown projection, already committed to a single position or site, within Being? We remember in this connection, too, that Heidegger said that Dasein is a 'context of references.' For Heidegger and the new historicists, context is never a structurally tidy thing, with which someone like Saussure might have been satisfied; instead, it is always discontinuous, fragmented, and contradictory, thereby inevitably frustrating our attempts to understand it. This is the sense in which new historicists regard a historical period such as the Renaissance as an 'alien culture.' In other words, because every historical situation radically differs from every other, and because the power relations that operate at one time differ from those of another, contemporary observers remain distanced from their subject and have little hope of bridging that gap. The view of language as the universal medium has therefore led new historicism to a rigorous linguistic and cultural relativism. But that is not the end of the story. The bizarre consequence of this for the history of critical theory is that it would return to mimesis with such a vengeance. In a very real sense, new historicists believe language does nothing more (or less) than reflect social praxis. No literary work or discourse can circulate outside of the circulations of the social: the social authorizes all discourse, and, in turn, all discourse mirrors the social. Nor can language ever change, or extract itself from, that unique situation. This extreme mimesis is the guiding principle for textual interpretation placed under the new historicist banner. It is, for example, the central tenet behind the journal Representations, that some-

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how by making sense of the forms of representation at work in a period of literature we can come to understand the power relations in the social and political settings that authorized those forms. Language is merely a social tool, created by and bearing the marks of social interaction. Petrey submits: 'If words are to do things, they can't be the passive label of things already done.'66 These restrictions on language seem to present the view of language as universal medium in its most unrelenting form. Because the relational mesh of discursive practices in a culture constitutes all the meaning for that culture, that culture's language is both unique and bounded. And because the movements within this system are the movements of power - power and knowledge both originating together - language takes on a dark hue. If post-structuralists or new historicists adopt a mode of analysis that explains how all meaning and value are controlled inside the social loop, then their task will be little more than to discover how discourse controls people. In this case language as the universal medium seems to devolve to 'sledgehammer semantics' - the elegant affirmation that meaning resides in our collective will to cudgel one another. But if language can be more than merely instrumental, if persons more than fodder for the 'canon/ and if all meaning is not always 'caused' in such restrictive ways as they say it is,67 then maybe literary and critical theory can be something more. The Death of the Code When we discuss the linguistic or social code as the restrictive medium of all thought and interaction, we talk about what Montrose names the 'implacable code.' While it is important to understand the nature of rule formation and how it affects language and art, convention cannot by itself account for all the variations of linguistic and artistic change. As Pavel argues, 'the mobility of artistic conventions suggests their weak obligatoriness.'68 And weak obligatoriness entails a strong choice. Codes and conventions can always be adapted, parodied, and changed; but they can also be obviated. New forms can always be created. New forms may be especially appropriate when we talk about new possibilities - changes of all sorts - new worlds. Moreover, we have seen that a post-structuralist approach to texts and a new historicist approach to history depend heavily on a theory of meaning rooted in a relational network (present chapter). From this inescapable web work meaning arises, and no meaning originates anywhere else, implicated as it is in a

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radical logic of inclusion (previous chapter). A single exception - let alone the strong choices just mentioned - breaks the code. With that stranglehold loosened, language studies can take a distinctly different direction than they have over the past few decades. Possible-worlds semantics offers an alternative understanding of linguistic and literary phenomena: it not only finds a place for unity in the midst of linguistic and cultural multiplicity, but it also finds diversity outside of a universal linguistic medium. It suggests that codes, or conventions, are part of the more complex meaning games played between authors and readers. As we shall see in the upcoming chapters, a careful application of possible-worlds principles to literature can retain an appreciation for linguistic and literary convention while reintroducing the notion of literary invention.

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PART TWO Possible Worlds

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CHAPTER THREE

Talk of Possible Worlds; Language as Calculus

... a crooked figure may Attest in little place a million. - Shakespeare When cutting an axehandle with an axe, surely the model is at hand. - Lu Chi

The next two chapters move beyond the constraints of a one-world semantics, formulating a theory of possible worlds that is justifiable logically and linguistically, and is compatible with the way we read literary texts. Developing the linguistic half of that theory in the present chapter, I shall discuss features of the following: the nature of semantic enquiry, metalanguage, and language as calculus. I contrast, first, a one-world semantics with a possible-worlds semantics, arguing that the latter affords the only way out of the paradoxes presented in the first section of the book. Then sorting out certain basic options in semantic enquiry, I next explore some of the differences between a lexical and logical semantics. The following section is devoted to metalanguage: if semantics is (in a general sense) language about language, then in what does that self-reflexivity consist, if it is possible at all? Metalanguage is something theorists tend to either value or vilify, but seldom do they discuss precisely what they mean by it. I distinguish seven different senses of the word, positioning the present study in the midst of those differences. These preliminary investigations into the nature of semantic enquiry and metalanguage then lead to the

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sustained discussion of language as calculus. I argue that language as calculus breaks through the impasse of language as universal medium, opening up important theoretical vistas for the study of literature. In order to contextualize the upcoming discussions, a brief review might be helpful. In the previous chapter I examined the one-world semantics (creating a 'one-world paradox') inherent in a view of language as universal medium. A proponent of this view, I argue, need not be universalist or essentialist to hold to it. Assuming language as universal medium can as easily lead one to a linguistic and cultural relativism as to a universal conception of logic and language. However, because this assumption undergirds equally these two well-known rivals, it often passes unnoticed, even obtaining tacit approval.1 And what Hylton observes about Russell - that logic as the universal medium 'is a conception which Russell everywhere presupposes, but nowhere articulates; he does not seem to have been aware of it as an assumption, to which there might be alternatives'2 - could be said of many language theorists today, especially those working with literary and critical theory. The curious aptness of the situation is that those who speak in the most impassioned manner about the uniqueness and universal pervasiveness of language nevertheless reflect least upon either its semantic base or the possibility of an alternative. In this connection, the water imagery associated with language as universal medium (post-structuralism's free-floating signifiers, Quine's free-floating references, and Neurath's famous metaphor of language as a ship floating at sea - precarious and not easily replaceable) achieves an unexpected and ironic significance. This pattern of imagery might be circumscribed in the figure of a fishbowl: a place where ambient fluidity combines with environmental pervasiveness and unbreachability. Given the assumption of language as universal medium, can we really expect these theorists to know what lies outside that sphere? How does a one-world semantics create a limiting perspective? Consider: the sole alternative that critical theorists seem to offer to a poststructuralist vision of free-floating semiosis is a straightforward, univalent language based on absolute and invariable correspondence between word and thing. This conception of language accommodates, they say, neither poetry nor any other kind of linguistic play or creativity, rendering language static, lifeless, dull. But because language is dynamic, poetic, and radically metaphoric, the alternative must be false. Jameson, for example, states that one who holds to a relationship

Language as Calculus 59

between word and thing must be committed to the position for which 'the most basic task of linguistic investigation consists in a one-to-one, sentence-by-sentence search for referents, and in the purification from language of non-referential terms and purely verbal constructs/3 A correspondence principle, it is commonly argued, chases the poetry out of language; conversely, any view of language that assimilates the poetic must also eliminate correspondence. The argument has compelled some not only to distort both sides of the issue, but entirely overlook another way, as we shall see below. The argument appears especially anomalous in historical and literary criticism. In the sphere of historical criticism, Petrey maintains, 'Societies couldn't enact and perform what they say if their language did in fact come attached to an unmistakable referent or an all-determining presence.'4 In his historicist treatment of Balzac's Adieu, Petrey disposes of linguistic reference because he finds it incompatible with the fact that when societies speak, they add to their language both belief and action. Belief and action, in other words, defy reference. They are incapable of either referring or being referred to. This position seems one more example of post-structuralists referring to reference in overblown terms. Sometimes they portray it as a pie-in-the-sky absolutism known as logocentrism - a throwback to a supposed medieval theology where 'the intelligible face of the sign remains turned toward the work and the face of God.'5 Others caricature it as an in-the-gutter chauvinism phallogocentrism - that elicits strange images of self-absorption and cruel domination.6 Applying this radical binary between reference and free-floating semiosis to historical and textual analysis exemplifies poststructuralist totalizing in its extreme. Now consider a manifestation of this binary and its limiting perspective in the field of literary criticism. Healy reveals his commitment to the binary in his comments on Shakespeare's sonnet 54: The creation of poetic truth is achieved only through the destruction of what it seeks to represent. Rather than creating a permanent signifier of the youth's beauty, the sonnet seeks the destruction of the beauty and its replacement by a beauty supplied by verse ... Within the terms the sonnet has constructed, any claim to truth, even poetic truth, is necessarily compromised and made self-contradictory.7

For Healy, neither poetry and permanence, nor poetry and reference, can coexist. Poetic truth is born only when its representation dies. By

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implication, poetic truth can never signify permanent value, nor can it ever stand as a 'permanent signifier.' According to this rationale, we learn that the poem, ostensibly about a 'lovely youth/ cannot be about a 'lovely youth/ because poetry can never be about anything, especially a lovely youth who, we learn, won't be lovely forever. Hence, all claims of 'poetic truth' are spurious. How a sonnet can 'seek the destruction' of a young person's beauty Healy never explains. More conspicuously absent from Healy's treatment is the idea found in the last couplet: 'And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, / When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.' In these lines, 'poetic truth' clearly upholds an anterior truth about the subject's life, a truth we still access some four hundred years later. Healy provides a convenient, if extreme, example of the purported incompatibility between poetry and truth: this incompatibility is tacitly assumed in far too much literary criticism and presents arguments that may even be answered in the very context which it claims to explain. The only alternative to free-floating signifiers for these critics seems to be something like the Enlightenment's idealized notion of a universal characteristic (characteristica universalis): the universal language in which all words apply univocally and undisputedly to the order of the world. As theorist of this assumption, Derrida pits play against presence in a perpetual and irreconcilable war. Perhaps the two comprise the ultimate binary that deconstruction cannot live without.8 So we might say that the choice of the term 'language as universal medium' is in precept a happy one after all; even Derrida, who is as anti-universalist as one could be, accomplishes his best work in the shadow of a universal characteristic. As we move into the next section, we begin to see that the binary between a universal characteristic and post-structuralism, between a univocal language of universal scope and a free-floating semiosis, does not preclude the possibility of a systematic account of language. But we have to step outside the fishbowl to see it. One-World Semantics versus Possible-Worlds Semantics As we have seen, the analytical, continental, structuralist, and poststructuralist traditions err by relying on a more or less implicit oneworld semantics that conflates modal distinctions, assigning them all to the realm of language. Barthes, exemplifying the structuralist and poststructuralist traditions, affirms that the discourse of history possesses

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no structural difference to set it apart from the discourse of fiction. In the analytical tradition, A.J. Ayer claims that because they lack realist reference all statements of poetry and fiction are utterly meaningless with respect to the ordinary language we use. These statements, Ayer continues, do not even rise to the dignity of being true or false, but remain entirely meaningless. For Barthes, fiction is all; for Ayer, only history. In both cases, a one-world semantics has compressed modal distinctions in a kind of 'flat-earth' theory. Are we to interpret these limitations as inherent in the study of language itself or as the outgrowth of prior methodological commitments? Once modern semantics - particularly philosophical logic and linguistics - moved from a semantics that countenances only a single universe of discourse to a possible-worlds semantics, it overcame these and other limitations. Russell's statement that 'Logic ... must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can' just will not do.9 We can no longer restrict so narrowly the bounds of meaning. A key question is at stake here: does language apply to this world, as being the only world we have, or to any number of other possible worlds? Russell, who was firmly convinced of the former, asserts that 'Logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology, though with its more abstract and general features.'10 Although (as we have seen) Russell thinks of this position as a 'robust sense of reality,' this 'sense,' paradoxically, prevents him from speaking of the 'reality' of language. Furthermore, the real world itself has undergone such changes in recent years that Russell's language might no longer refer to it: zoologists will soon be able to create their own fantasy creatures! Two questions arise: can language talk about a variety of states of affairs, and, furthermore, can language talk meaningfully about language itself? Metadiscourse is not only absent from Russell's system,11 but it is also problematic for the continental, structuralist, and post-structuralist traditions. Recall Lyotard's conclusion that there is 'no possibility that language games can be unified or totalized in any metadiscourse.'12 He bases his misgivings about metanarratives not only on post-structuralist arguments against unity and recursivity, but also on Wittgenstein's contention that what serves as a standard of linguisticality cannot itself be linguistic. Before I address the issues of metalanguage, language as calculus, and possible-worlds semantics, I should distinguish between a oneworld semantics and a one-world ontology, briefly examining the question of philosophical realism in relation to each. Just as one could

62 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

acknowledge the way meaning relations vary within a single world, so one could alternatively entertain a view of many possible worlds governed by language in one and only one way. The alternative visual languages of cubist art might exemplify the former,13 Leibniz's chamcteristica universalis the latter. A one-world semantics may be motivated by a realism about the actual world, as in the case of Russell, or it may be bound up with the wholesale rejection of realism about the world - an irrealism and anti-ontological stance - as in the case of Barthes and Baudrillard. A one-world ontology, then, is a theory of being that includes an actual world of existing objects (and excludes possible objects). A one-world semantics, however, is a theory of meaning in which language-world relations apply to objects (whatever they might be) in one way and one way only, to the point even of placing modal constraints on those objects. (Whether the single modus comes logically before or after the invariable semantics is unimportant here.) In a one-world semantics, a single modality constrains the language to the extent that one is left with a single domain only (however that single domain may be construed). Russell's more extreme counterparts, the logical positivists, will deny the fictional because of its unintelligibility in light of the factual, while Lyotard and his counterparts will deny the factual because of its unintelligibility in light of the fictional. Yet we really cannot undertake a comprehensive philosophy without a strong accounting of both notions, for admittedly one term has little meaning without the other. Nor does that project commit us to a language-generated binary, which would redirect us again to a modal flatland. In the same way that the logical positivists' declarations of the death of poetry appear confining, so also do the post-structuralists' claims of the death of reality. A possible-worlds semantics will preserve both. Words and Worlds A reconsideration of the field of semantics helps to contextualize the project of a possible-worlds semantics. Generally speaking, semantics may denote either the more informal studies of meaning carried out by philologists and lexicographers, or the more theoretical studies of linguists and philosophers. In the theoretical treatments (since the work of Charles Morris in the 1930s), semantics is usually distinguished from both syntax and pragmatics. Whereas the discipline of semantics studies the meaning of linguistic signs, syntax studies the rules by which

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those signs are combined into well-formed strings. Pragmatics, meanwhile, studies the contexts and practices of language users. Semantics generally concerns itself with two overarching questions: what is it we are talking about in our language, and how does it all relate? Semantic theorists approach the study of meaning from one of two basic directions. One is a compositional semantics, or a 'semantics of the word/14 a discipline in which semantic features are assigned to the elements of the language (at the level of the word or of some other basic element, the 'lexeme/ the 'seme/ etc.). As those elements are combined, larger structures of meaning are formed. The complex meaning of a discourse is thus constructed out of more elemental semantic building blocks. The challenge of the compositional approach is to endow words at the elemental level with enough features that the theory will account for all the meaning a language is likely to create. Transformational grammarians Katz and Fodor have developed such a theory of meaning, distinguishing semantic and syntactic markers for each word so that, in combination, they constitute the meaning of sentences. Their method links semantics with syntax in order to distinguish strings of words that are syntactically, but not semantically, acceptable (e.g., 'Pizzas grow in July'). Greimas also takes a compositional approach to semantics, but he does so without a transformational-grammatical methodology, utilizing a more malleable structuralist methodology to describe the way in which meaning functions in a language. His structuralist semantics is perhaps more developed than Katz and Fodor's, accounting not only for the way elements combine to make the meaning of sentences, but also the way sentences combine to make the meaning of a discourse. In the heritage of Katz and Fodor and Greimas, literary semantics as it is pursued today is committed predominantly to a compositional semantics, a semantics of the word. The limitations of this approach may partially explain the prominence of deconstructive and ironic readings in the aftermath of literary formalism. J. Hillis Miller's pulverizing the single word host in his famous essay The Critic as Host' stands as a signal example. What shortcomings attend a compositional semantics? The first is that words are never given in isolation, nor one at a time, as if each contained a simultaneously separable and stable packet of information. Are semantic elements of a language determinable in this way? Miller's deconstuction of the word host is misguided on this very point: the pragmatics of context help us decide which of a word's many incompatible meanings are meant and which are not. In some contexts

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the word cleave means to divide; in others it means to join. As convincing as such observations may be, however, a compositional analysis will generally disregard pragmatics as indeterminate and opt to define a language's semantic properties in terms of its syntactic properties. Besides conveniently sidestepping the 'unruliness' of pragmatics, this move also results in a semantics where the syntax cannot subsequently be disengaged from the meaning. As argued in chapter 2, even the structuralist and post-structuralist approaches cannot escape the tyranny of syntax, their willing subjection precluding talk about anything else. Thus the second and most significant shortcoming of a pure semantics of the word is that it cannot handle the linguistic one and the many: a single word-string can communicate many different meanings while many different word-strings can communicate one and the same meaning. When a compositional approach weds syntax forever to the study of semantics, it cannot avoid these ensuing problems. In contrast to a 'semantics of the word/ many recent theorists come to these issues from the opposite direction. Known as logical semantics, this alternative perspective on the nature of meaning might be distinguished from a compositional semantics in the convenient designation 'semantics of the world.' Rather than assigning semantic features to individual linguistic elements that ultimately add up in a discourse, this approach regards meaning as a function of the various ways the world might be. In other words, it construes the meaning of a sentence not merely as the sum of its semantic parts, but as the function of the various situations in which the sentence would be true. According to this view, meaning operates on a broader level than can be fully reckoned with at the level of the word. Let us consider modern logic, a discipline that has moved beyond the difficulties presented by a compositional approach. In the early days of modern logic (the days of proof theory), validity was determined by means of axioms and theorems, interpreting logical relations as a function of the system's syntax. Seeing the limitations of the approach, logicians eventually replaced proof theory with model theory, a new approach they termed 'logical semantics.' Logical semantics seeks to understand the way in which language relates to the way things are - in other words, to see the various ways in which the language models the world. For logical semantics, models are the counterparts to the sentences of our language; such models are descriptions of possible states of affairs. A model set Hintikka defines as 'a set of formulas that intuitively speaking can be interpreted as a partial description of a model in which all its formulas are true.' Hintikka's definition reveals

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the way the axioms and theorems of proof theory can be subsumed under the larger interpretive scheme of model theory. Not only can 'model sets ... be used to prove the ... basic metatheorems of first-order logic/ but they can also provide insight into 'the relation of language to the reality it can be used to describe.'15 I treat model theory in more detail in chapter 4; for now I simply wish to indicate some of its advantages over a purely syntactic approach to the study of meaning. Towards the end of last chapter, I outlined certain limitations of a syntactic approach in the way it leads to a view of language as universal medium. I mentioned that a view of language as calculus may employ formalist methods for a very different reason than would a fundamentally syntactic approach. Correspondingly, one need not be a New Critic to attend to matters of literary form. If language as calculus regards the language-world relations to be variable at all levels, then formalism provides a means of keeping track of the various ways we interpret the language as well as the rules by which we implement those interpretations. What is important is not the syntax, but the various semantical games we play with the syntax. Hintikka explains that, 'what in effect is the logical form of a sentence S is not determined by its surface form directly, but by the entire structure of the semantical game G(S) associated with S. In the course of such a game, the surface form of S will change drastically in a way which is ultimately based on the structure of S but whose regularities are in practice hopelessly difficult to anticipate on the basis of the surface structure.'16 Besides freeing theorists in this way from the dictates of syntax - what de Man calls 'the persistent symbiosis between grammar and logic'17 - language as calculus also integrates naturally with a pragmatics of the language. Hintikka, having spent a large part of his career developing possible-worlds semantics and integrating it with game-theoretical semantics, finds no deep distinction between semantics and pragmatics. He explains that 'we don't really understand a system of semantical relations between a language and the world before we understand the language-games in which these semantical relations consist and which link our language with our actual experience.'18 As we shall see, Hintikka's unique combination of semantics, pragmatics, and formal analysis holds some fascinating prospects for literary study. What Is Metalanguage? Is logical semantics a metalanguage? Discussions of language and of possible worlds presuppose a clear sense of what metalanguage is. As I

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traced the various arguments and developments of the view of language as universal medium, I showed that it claims metalanguage is impossible. Have I thereby implied that metalanguage is possible within the view of language as calculus? If so, would language as calculus then call for something like the characteristica universalis, the purified language envisaged by the Enlightenment? Or perhaps metalanguage is to be conceived only in terms of the logical formalism of Russell's Principia Mathematical What is metalanguage? Is Esperanto an example of metalanguage? Perhaps metalanguage is simply the science of language? But then is it a science in merely a systematic or formal sense, or is it a science in an empirical sense? Or > maybe metalanguage can operate on a less grand scale than all of these? In order to set up the subsequent discussion on language as calculus and the type of metalanguage it posits, I shall delineate the various uses of this sometimes hazy term for a more careful analysis. The word metalanguage apparently first appears in a 1931 paper by Tarski. Unaware he is coining a new term, he uses it in the broad sense of denoting any technical language that describes a natural language.19 After Tarski's functional and intuitive distinction between a metalanguage and the object-language it describes, the term becomes suggestive for different theorists in different ways, creating some confusion. Both Koerner and Opitz, who attempt to trace some of the meanings, complain about the diversity of usages to which the term has been put. In the absence of scholarship that adequately maps the different usages among various disciplines and individual theorists, I will build on certain suggestions that have been made on the subject,20 offering the following inventory of meanings: 1 Any part of a language that in any way talks about some other part of the language. This metalinguistic act occurs within the parameters of a single language. Examples would include Jakobson's use of the term in reference to language users explaining themselves to each other: '"Do you follow? Do you see what I mean?," the speaker asks, or the listener himself breaks in with "What do you mean?"'21 2 Any act of translation. This metalinguistic act, like (1), uses a portion of language to explain the meaning of some other portion of language, but, unlike (1), takes place between two different languages. 3 Any universal natural language (like Esperanto). This kind of

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4

5 6

7

metalanguage could be used by all persons irrespective of nation, culture, or social setting. It could also serve as a valuable instrument to aid in the translation of natural languages. Any conceptualization of language that theorizes about the nature of language in a meaningful way. This is the kind of metalanguage that concerns many recent philosophers of language, linguists, classical structuralists, and narratologists. The science of any natural language, either formally or empirically construed. This kind of metalanguage (e.g., descriptive linguistics) studies a single language in time. Any universal formal language into which all theoretic and scientific inquiries could be translated (e.g., Leibniz's chamcteristica universalis, Frege's lingua characterica, or the logic of Russell's Principia). The science of language in the most universal sense. This systematic account of language would explain all linguistic practice for all time - 'the structure of structures/ as Rorty calls it. Insofar as the examples of metalanguage in (6) seek to describe the universal structure of language, they would also fit this definition. This category would include Chomskian generative grammar.

Attitudes of course vary toward metalanguage depending on the definition one adopts - something not every author specifies. Literary theorists often use the term metalanguage to mean (6), a characteristica universalis. In this sense, metalanguage is something to be opposed: just as the Enlightenment call for a characteristica universalis failed, despite some valiant attempts, so too would our own. The idea is that language is much too protean - by the time you say language is thus and so, it changes just enough to prove you wrong. (Postmodern novelists and poets particularly enjoy confounding conventional language theory and narratology in this way.) However, from the above list we observe that metalanguage need not take the form of a characteristica universalis, though a characteristica universalis would indeed be a metalanguage. Rather, the aforementioned definitions suggest that the distinction between a metalanguage and an object-language can be applied on a number of levels, from the most local level within the bounds of a single language, to the most broad level possible. In the discussion of language as calculus that follows this section, I pursue metalanguage in the sense of (4) above; that is, as a conceptualization of language that theorizes about the nature of language in a meaningful way, but not

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necessarily with the completeness of (6) or (7). Before pursuing language as calculus and metalanguage, consider the relationship of post-structuralist critical theory to metalanguage. The Harmon and Holman Handbook to Literature identifies the denial of metalanguage as the most distinctive feature of post-structuralism: Perhaps the most definitive quality of poststructuralism is the questioning of the distinction between language and metalanguage, which renders problematic the idea of a science of literature or of culture. For poststructuralists, the language in which analysis is conducted is to be regarded as continuous with, rather than distinct from, the phenomena being analyzed ... Lacan's assertion that 'there is no metalanguage' (paralleled by Derrida) means that any metalanguage is more language, inextricably entangled with the forces and structures it seeks to analyze.22

Since no 'science' of language could divest itself of the metaphoricity of its explanations, any so-called science of language succeeds only in creating more language. In its simplest form, science is just another kind of creative writing. Recall Lyotard's analysis, which is closely related: language games can never be 'about' language games because they are just more language games, already governed by prior rules, in need of explanation as much as what they purport to explain. I contend that such an attitude toward metalanguage necessarily rules out all the above senses of the word (1-7). Not even a general sense of metalanguage as found in (1) would be possible: a speaker who attempts to explain the meaning of a sentence really says nothing about the sentence, but instead creates another sentence with its own new meaning. The operations of differance or dissemination ensure that the two differ. Language, according to this view, is always discursive, never recursive. Any sense of metalanguage, however, requires at least one point of identity - sans differance - where the description coincides with the object-language. But if it is true, according to post-structuralist principles, that language can literally never talk about itself meaningfully, then what happens to our activities of reading and interpretation? Post-structuralists such as deMan and Culler have told us that all reading is misreading and all interpretation is misinterpretation. Jameson metaphorizes the claim in his statement: 'all reading is a rape/ But how far can we maintain that consistency? If 'all reading is a rape/ how can I agree with Jameson (and the others) without violating the very hermeneutic they espouse?

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Baudrillard's Virtual Reality This, then, becomes the ideal place to address the question of Baudrillard and his treatment of language and simulacra. I believe that Baudrillard's convictions regarding metalanguage distinguish him from other poststructuralists, but not in any straightforward or orthodox way. Whereas for Lacan and Derrida, we can say that properly speaking there is no metalanguage, for Baudrillard it seems that there is nothing but metalanguage. If anyone comes close to suggesting a postmodern world of virtuality - a world of signs, of signs signifying other signs - it is Baudrillard. Baudrillard clearly sees his theories as eclipsing both Derrida's and Foucault's. Baudrillard's third stage of the history of the sign, in fact, is devoted to Derrida: the third age, he affirms, 'marks the absence of a basic reality.' Baudrillard sees postmodern culture as moving beyond this Derridean age and entering a new age of the sign in which we no longer talk about absence, but rather of the 'hyperreal,' a time when simulation dominates all significatory activity. Baudrillard summarizes the difference between one age and the other in this way: To dissimulate is to feign not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't.' For a Baudrillardian vision of pure simulation, truth and reference and reality altogether have altogether 'ceased to exist.'23 Baudrillard also claims to have surpassed Foucault. In a section entitled "The End of the Panopticon,' Baudrillard asserts: '[w]e are witnessing the end of panoptic space... and hence the very abolition of the spectacular.' We are no longer 'watched' by the lurking forces of power, he continues; rather, the spectral is dissolved into life as much as life is dissolved into the spectral. The complex mirroring produced as television watches us, as we watch it, as it watches us, and so on, continues to the point where all becomes 'intangible, diffuse and diffracted in the real.'24 In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard asserts that Foucault was mistaken when he thought that 'power ... is the last term, the irreducible web, the last tale that can be told.'25 Baudrillard sees power and history replaced by a 'hyperrealist sociality/ that interminable predicament for which 'the real is confused with the model.'26 One can readily see how Baudrillard's position pertains to metalanguage: language is no longer about things, no longer suggesting either a presence or an absence. Neither is it about chasing the appari-

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tion of reference over an infinitely receding trail, nor about power as the final stop on a narratological Main Street. Language is now only, and in the purest sense, about itself. A sign simulates not reality, but only another sign. For Baudrillard an important exemplar of simulation is found at the caves of Lascaux: they are 'forbidden to visitors and an exact replica constructed 500 metres away, so that everyone can see them.' Baudrillard argues that to fashion a duplicate 'is sufficient to render both artificial.' In this same way, signs are for Baudrillard only signs of other signs: 'We too live in a universe everywhere strangely similar to the original - here things are duplicated by their own scenario.'27 Baudrillard speaks of signs as simulating, modelling, duplicating, reduplicating, recurring. How compatible is this with a Saussurean semiology based on 'only differences, and no positive terms'? The question is important because for Saussure and his followers, relational language replaces referential language. For Baudrillard, even difference - a notion indispensable to Derrida - results from simulation, which is 'A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and the simulated generation of difference.'28 While Derrida's position depends on discursive processes, Baudrillard's depends on recursive ones. Hence, Baudrillard's theory of the sign does not manifest Saussurean relational 'aboutness/ a binary aboutness based on differences alone, but an analogical 'aboutness,' an aboutness of models, of reduplication, and of simulation. The case of digital computers provides an interesting comparison: in a binary system such as a digital computer language, no 'meaning' exists except the values 'on' and 'off/ At no place in the system is anything like meaning introduced, but only mere differentiation. In the same way that a binary code underlies what I am typing right now but does not understand it, the value of a computer language's binarygenerated symbolism derives only from the interpretations we affix to it, requiring retranslation into a natural language. Baudrillard's analogical 'aboutness' will require much more than a Saussurean system of differences can supply. In light of these considerations, we might ask, how can Baudrillard so confidently trace his history of the sign? And how can he make so many suggestive comments about the prismatic character of mass media and modern technologies? The answer: he has smuggled back into his theory a rich philosophical hermeneutics that can accommodate

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similarity, duplication, modelling, analogy, and recursion. Hermeneutically, he is at play in the open fields, but logically he is mired in a commitment to language as inescapable medium. This misbegotten union must be rent in two: once we throw away the worser part, as Hamlet suggests, we should 'live the purer with the other half.' A better, more consistent explanation of postmodern phenomena exists elsewhere. Kinds of Language Theory Before I launch into a theory of possible worlds that is compatible with the rigours of language philosophy, I should distinguish between the generally different aims or concerns of language philosophy. Such questions as these elucidate those differences: Would a view of language as calculus account for all apparent meaning that language creates, or could it formulate a system into which all apparent meaning can be translated, decoded, disambiguated? What objectives does a possibleworlds semantics seek to fulfil? Fashioning a simple heuristic from which to begin, I contrast theories of language that are prescriptive in intent with those that are descriptive.29 The distinction, of course, is common in linguistics, but in other discussions it is not always so apparent. Because language has become fundamental to virtually all intellectual disciplines, it is important to distinguish not only differences of method, but also differences of aim. Often the former appears to result from the latter: semioticians may, for example, complain that a logical analysis of language misses the fine interstices of language, and, similarly, logicians may complain that those theorists too accommodating of natural language are misled by grammar. Apparently, they reach an impasse. But perhaps such disagreements are not incompatible, i.e., at the level of method, but may occur only as a result of the different aims they serve. Prescriptive accounts of language, for example, seek to establish a formalized, though thoroughly disambiguated, language. This language would be informed by all we know to be the case about the world and would, in turn, compensate for all the shortcomings and confusions of natural language. Theorists offer it either as an explanation of the natural language or as a complete replacement. In a prescriptive language, theorists specify beforehand what is metaphysically and logically possible: those possibilities thoroughly inform both the language's syntax and semantics.

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By contrast, descriptive accounts of language begin with the fact of language and other language-like events. Descriptive accounts assume that meaningful communication takes place at various levels of human interaction, not all of which can be readily explained by standard logic or linguistics. For some semioticians,30 communication also occurs at certain levels of the natural world, in things like the DNA code and quantum-particle signatures. Descriptive accounts of language are guided by the principle that philosophy should keep up with the changing manifestations of language, not the other way around. Although I have certainly oversimplified the distinction, my sketch suffices to ground a sometimes underappreciated fact: not all theorists of language pursue the same goals, and those goals, along with the underlying semantic assumptions, are not always obvious. Russell, for example, claimed Meinong's fixation on grammar caused Meinong to bloat his ontology, filling it with objects for every blip that comes across the linguistic wire. Frege, similarly, accused Husserl of confusing the foundations of arithmetic with the psychology of arithmetic. On the other hand, Meinong and Husserl would likely rejoin that Russell's and Frege's focus on logic unnecessarily restricted their philosophies of language. (I argued for much the same point in chapter 2, although the grounds there were different.) One's fundamental orientation towards language, then, can obviously account for a variety of other theoretical preferences. And when we move beyond the bounds of philosophy into the wider realm of the humanities, we see that literary theorists, cultural anthropologists, political scientists, and historians (among a host of others) have their own sets of linguistic preoccupations as well. Although differences abound among those who talk about language, those differences are often tied to more fundamental differences in aim. Those aims need to be made more apparent than they typically are. Possible-worlds semantics adopts an interesting perspective on the descriptive-versus-prescriptive question. It, too, seeks a description of natural language. However, it does not accept unreflectively all that natural language expresses apart from its underlying logic; rather, it employs formal tools to delineate the way natural language projects its manifold configurations of the world. Hintikka explains that possibleworlds semantics brings out the '"depth" logic which underlies the complex realities of our ordinary use of ... words ... and in terms of which these complexities can be accounted for.'31 Possible-worlds semantics mediates between the formal language and the natural discourse. As a philosophical orientation, possible-worlds semantics has

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been able to bridge both formal logic and linguistics, as well as a number of other disciplines, including natural science, historiography, aesthetics, narratology, and literary theory. Though obviously not without its limitations (as we shall see in the next chapter), possibleworlds semantics has nevertheless proven to be a productive and truly interdisciplinary methodology, as witnessed by the recent Nobel Symposium 65 on Possible Worlds in Humanities, Arts and Sciences.32 Possibleworlds semantics has also served to open a dialogue between the analytical and continental traditions in philosophy.33 In light of these considerations, I will survey the theorists who gave us the theory in the early days of language as calculus and then the theorists who extended and refined the theory in what today we call possible-worlds semantics. From that survey, I stake out a semantics consonant with the way we read literary texts. In order to better understand this theory, however, we must first understand the linguistic orientation Hintikka calls 'language as calculus/ upon which possibleworlds semantics rests. Language as Calculus The above observations on metalanguage and types of language theory now propel us into the discussion of language as calculus. After considering several features of its historical emergence, I present in a more systematic form the key features of language as calculus. Before beginning this discussion, however, I should stipulate that language as calculus does not designate a definitively demarcated philosophical position, but more properly an attitude towards a whole range of issues. As Hintikka explains, language as calculus 'has manifested itself less in the form of a consciously chosen position ... than in the form of actual studies of the kind which are declared to be impossible (or unimportant) by the thesis of the universality of language or by its implications.'34 Language as calculus manifests itself in a variety of ways and places, for example, in the logic of Boole and Godel, in Peirce,35 in those working with possible-worlds semantics, as well as in cubist art and postmodern metafiction. If we avoid being literal minded, perhaps etymology is not out of place by way of introduction: the Latin calculus means 'small stone' the kind typically used in calculating, as in an abacus. In this entirely unobjectionable sense, a calculus is a way of simplifying more complex arithmetical operations by translating them into a more streamlined

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symbolism. Notice, though, that in order to make gains in efficiency some of the rules from the original context will change in the symbolism.36 Notice also that the symbolism is not necessarily verbal in nature (which would open it up to a more fundamental linguistic analysis). Nonetheless, the non-verbal nature of the symbolism elicits both objections and further questions. Proponents of language as universal medium maintain that any calculus always takes the form of language. Conversely, proponents of language as calculus insist that the entailment relation runs in the opposite direction. Supporting this latter thesis - that languages are forms of calculi - Hintikka extends the example of a calculus for counting to the meaning games that accompany counting: 'All I need to do, when someone alleges that games of counting are played by means of linguistic markers like digits, is to point to non-verbal games in which counters are used, or to point to the etymology of the word "digit," which originally meant "finger" or "toe." Surely counting with one's fingers is not any less primitive than counting with numbers ... counting in base eight is just like counting in base ten, if you are missing two fingers.'37 Hintikka argues that counting games are among the most non-verbally specific meaning games in which we participate. The non-verbal nature of the symbolism, in fact, explains the ease with which we learn number words in foreign languages, even in the extreme cases of radical translation of entirely unknown languages.38 Non-verbal symbolism is important also for a theory of literature.39 Calculus, in this sense, denotes an abstract symbolism without fixed rules of interpretation. When Hintikka says that language is a calculus, he means that language is capable of varying both its interpretations and its domains of applicability. He does not mean calculus in the sense ofajeu de caracteres, a mere manipulation of symbols or an intralingual game.40 The variability of language may operate either in the small or large scale, and language may apply to any number of universes of discourse. Language therefore is not unalterably tied to its semantic relations, whether one construes those unalterable semantic relations in terms of either the traditional notion of reference or the more recent notion of language as relation. Consequently, if a semantics provides the rules of interpretation for a system of language, then a calculus is a system without a fixed semantics. In other words, a calculus is not bound to operate under any one specific interpretation or within the limits of any one domain. This idea of language as a reinterpretable calculus departs radically from the way literary theorists are accustomed to think about language

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in general, and literary language in particular. The reason for this departure stems from the way literary theorists have come to think of semantic relations, deriving their positions from both formalism and New Criticism, as well as from Saussurean semiology and poststructuralism. In the previous chapter, I elaborated the way literary theory is indebted to the tradition of language as universal medium; now I augment that discussion by glancing at the way specific meanings might be formed within a view of language as universal medium. I restrict my comments to Saussure as progenitor of the structuralist and post-structuralist traditions, and to Kant as progenitor of the analytical and continental philosophical traditions. How are specific meanings formed within a view of language as universal medium, and how does that contrast to the ways they are formed in language as calculus? For Saussure, the answer originates in langue - the system in which those linguistic connections are forged. Those connections arise neither from various strategies of mind, nor from various objects and events of a world. This proposition raises a question: if the connections are thus set within langue alone, then within langue, how exactly do they come about? For structuralists and poststructuralists alike, the question Whence langue? is of utmost importance. For by assigning a structural shape to human thought and communication, these theorists do not sidestep the need for an aetiology to explain how structures come to be and how they change. On the contrary, structuralists and post-structuralists generally concern themselves with whether langue is a pure construction that emerges from the context of social interaction, or a form of linguistic competence rooted somehow in physiology, or perhaps something grander still, such as Jungian archetypes traduced through communal ceremony, Foucauldian power themes, or Jamesonian History standing as that absent yet ubiquitous cause of all socio-temporal life. The step from language as universal medium to culture or history as universal medium is a short one. And as this truncated list of options suggests, to declare the source and formation of structures is to strike a stance on a host of metaphysical and metatheoretical issues. A version of this question has concerned not only structuralism and post-structuralism, but also Anglo-American analytical philosophy and continental philosophy. Kant answers the question in his well-known and revolutionary declaration that our knowledge of the world is not, as it were, Ptolemaic, with reason orbiting that world. Instead reason stands at the centre, structuring the world for us by the forms of

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sensibility and the categories of thought. This proposition, too, raises questions: do these forms and categories, then, originate in the mind or in some realm outside the mind? In the former case, Kant's transcendental philosophy would amount to nothing more than transcendental psychology (a direction in which some neo-Kantians indeed extended his thought). As for the second choice, Haaparanta explains, 'Kant asked how pure mathematics is possible, how pure natural science is possible, and how metaphysics as natural disposition and as science is possible, but he did not ask how logic as science is possible/ If Kant had, he would have been obliged to answer this fundamental question: do the structures of thought have a basis in the world outside our psychological processes? If he answers yes, then yet another significant problem arises: how could we have access to these structures (i.e., how could we come to understand or even mention them)? In this respect, Haaparanta argues that Kant's 'transcendental logic represents ... the formal a priori machinery which is a presupposition and an inescapable conceptual element of our experience/41 For Saussure, langue is a hypothetical construct that must be the case if there is such a thing as parole. Not necessarily a post hoc ergo propter hoc, Kant's attempt to find the transcendental conditions of language and thought nevertheless returns us to the problems of access, which entails the problems of metalanguage all over again. Kant and Frege both discover the structure of thought in the method of philosophical analysis (i.e., applied to thoughts and judgments in experience) in much the same way the structuralist discovers langue through a structural analysis (i.e., applied to and inferred from parole). Against this philosophical background, Hintikka and other possibleworlds theorists assert that instead of an inviolable medium, language is a reinterpretable calculus that functions naturally as a metalanguage. Before we move into more of the recent history of this view, however, let us pause to reconsider Hintikka's point that a view of language as universal medium becomes a kind of 'semantical Kantianism/ Hintikka means that if language constitutes the bounds of our world, then we possess no intellectual equipment that would allow us to speak of anything outside that realm. When faced with the pervasiveness of language as the medium of thought and the resulting ineffability of anything outside its purview, even Wittgenstein agrees with this assessment: 'What we are dealing with here is the Kantian solution to the problem of philosophy/42 What, then, is the answer to Kant's paradox of transcendental knowledge? Hintikka sees 'an intrinsic link, virtually

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a mutual implication, between the unknowability of things considered in themselves, independently of our knowledge-seeking activities and the conceptual framework that they [the activities] utilize, and the unknowability of these activities and of this framework/43 Hintikka explains that things will always be inexpressible apart from some particular language; and given this premise, those things will remain hopelessly unknowable in themselves. (Recall that for Kant the unknowability of the Ding-an-sich correlates with the unknowability of the noumenal.) Kant's transcendental paradox relates closely to the linguistic paradox of language as universal medium, which Hintikka similarly characterizes as a 'mutual dependence between the ineffability of things considered in abstraction from language (and of the conceptual system it embodies) and the inexpressibility of those semantic links which are supposed to mediate between language and reality.'44 However, the problem is redressed if some means exist by which we can represent those semantic links. In a sense, then, the history of modern logic has been the search for the conceptual tools by which semantics can be expressed. While the study of logic went largely unchanged from the time of antiquity to the nineteenth century, in the middle of the nineteenth century logicians applied advances in mathematical theory to logic, thereby opening up new directions for its study and application while deepening its analyses. At this point, logic bifurcated into two major schools - in Van Heijenoort's terminology, logic as language and logic as calculus. As explained earlier, Frege and Russell exemplified the logic-as-language movement, maintaining that logic is a language, and that as a language it can either be spoken or not spoken. All reasoning therefore takes place inside the language. In contrast to this view, Hintikka observes that around the early days of Frege (and shortly thereafter) momentum mounted for an alternative understanding of logic as calculus. The principal philosophers at the early stages of this line are, according to Hintikka, 'Boole, Schroder, Lowenheim, Godel, later Carnap, and (in a certain sense) Tarski.'45 Early attempts to understand language and logic as a calculus were begun by those who combined logic and algebra, principally Boole and Hilbert. A distinction of the algebra is that it specifies no single universe of discourse, or Denkbereich. The algebra specifies a class of structures, but not what those structures must be: among an unending variety of things, those structures could possibly be the 'elements of some abstract platonic structure ... reinterpreted elements of another kind of

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geometry ... or ... suitable physical objects.' Hintikka explains that the view of language as calculus, however, should not be simply equated with the work of these algebrasts. For one thing, a later development in model theory (used by Hintikka in the same sense as language as calculus) provided a metatheory for algebraic systems. Non-axiomatic, model-theoretic work in abstract algebra, Hintikka observes, has been the most theoretically productive. The common concern of abstract algebra and model theory (i.e., language as calculus) is in the relation of a sentence to its models, what Hintikka identifies as 'the cornerstone of all semantics.'46 The geometrician David Hilbert is the other major figure Hintikka discusses in his developmental history of language as calculus. Although Hilbert deals with a formal theory of geometry (an axiomatization of its principles), his interpretation of that geometry operates in terms of model theory. Hintikka explains that Hilbert 'makes it clear that any structure of objects which satisfies the axioms will qualify as a geometry, regardless of whether or not they bear any resemblances to what in ordinary discourse would be called "point," "line" or "between," "congruent," etc.'47 A set of axioms, if consistent, will specify a class of models. Those models, in turn, can be used to study the axioms. Hintikka shows that Hilbert's work in geometry operates from model theory in a direct way. Another relevant figure is Leopold Lowenheim, who breaks with the Frege-Russell tradition in logic. Van Heijenoort suggests that even the title of Lowenheim's innovative 1915 paper 'Uber Moglichkeiten im Relativkalkul' (On the possibilities of a relative calculus) gives us an idea of the nature of Lowenheim's new direction: 'if a formula is valid in a domain, it may or may not be valid in some other domain.'48 Lowenheim addresses the possibility of quantification both within and across a variety of domains, establishing the possibility of varying the semantics of the quantifier over a variety of domains. In order to institute such an approach, Lowenheim substitutes a set-theoretic approach for the axiomatic method of Frege and Russell. (Remember here the limitations that Godel soon found in the Frege-Russell axiomatization of first-order logic.) With this shift, Lowenheim's calculus is able to handle a variety of different domains. Although Lowenheim was ignored for some time, in the recent ascendancy of model theory and possible-worlds semantics, logicians now generally take quantification theory 'as a general schematism or underlying logic.' This idea, Goldfarb says, is 'the notion that logical

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truths are completely general, not in the sense of being the most general truths about logical furniture/49 but that they apply no matter what we choose to consider at any given point. In keeping with model-theoretic principles, language and logic are seen as applicable to any number of universes of discourse. Let us conclude this section on language as calculus with a glance toward the theory's future. Perhaps the logician and semanticist Richard Montague has best envisioned its prospects: 'philosophy is always capable of enlarging itself; that is, by metamathematical or modeltheoretic means - means available within set theory - one can "justify" a language or theory that transcends set theory, and then proceed to transact a new branch of philosophy within the new language. It is now time to take such a step.'50 Recent work in logical semantics aside, my conviction here is that this activity - the enlargement of language, selfreflexivity, representational variability, and creation of new languages out of old - is what literature has been up to all along. It is perhaps literature's most distinguishing characteristic.51 After the summary in the next couple of pages, and with the language theory now in place, that concern will be the focus of the remainder of this book. To complete the discussion of language as universal medium versus language as calculus, I summarize the characteristics of each view by playing the distinctions of one off the other: 1. The Scope of Language. Language as universal medium is committed to the universality of logic and language, thereby setting the limits of both. Language as calculus, by contrast, assumes language is not the inescapable medium - not the inevitable ether in which all human communication transpires. Language and its logic operate as an abstract calculus, whose content and domain of application can be varied. Language can talk not only about this world, but also about any number of possible worlds (the nature of which are discussed in the next chapter). 2. The Status of Metalanguage. For language as universal medium, the limits of language preclude the possibility of metalanguage. For language as calculus, metalanguage is not only possible, but, by means of model theory, language can reflect on both language and language-world relations. 3. The Status of Semantics. For language as universal medium, the

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manner in which language relates to the world can never be expressed in language. This inexpressibility of semantics becomes, in the words of Hintikka, a kind of semantic Kantianism. Specifically, the bounds of one's language constitute the bounds of one's world, and what makes those bounds or happens outside them can never be known. For language as calculus, on the other hand, languageworld relations can be expressed and even varied in a number of interesting and broad-ranging ways. 4. The Accessibility Issue. For language as universal medium, the inviolable bounds of language result in either a kind of romantic solipsism or 'cultural solipsism,' i.e., linguistic relativism. For language as calculus, access is available among individuals and speakers of diverse language groups; communication, translation, and bilingualism are possible practically and theoretically. Speakers can move outside their home language, even theorizing about it from the outside. Extra-linguistic and iconic references are possible. The limits of one's language are not the limits of one's world. In the following chapter, I apply this theory of language as calculus to a theory of possibility. Consequently, I move from this chapter's theory of language to consider the kinds of possible worlds that language presupposes. If language does indeed talk about, and even rely upon, possible worlds, then how does it refer to those possible worlds and individuals that do not exist? Also, what constraints does language as calculus place upon possible worlds, or do possible worlds place on language as calculus? There I progress toward the question of the ontological status of literary worlds. Proponents of language as universal medium may not share the joy of such an enquiry, however. In Goethe's sentiment, "This question seems minute / For one who thinks the word so beggarly.'52

CHAPTER FOUR

The Poiesis of Possible Worlds; A Theory of Possibility for Literature

All fairy stories open, if not explicitly, then implicitly, with the magic formula, 'Once upon a time'...; scientific hypotheses introduce themselves with an 'if.' These are the thresholds of the many mansions of the otherworld. - Scott Buchanan

But in another Country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil... - Milton

I argue in this chapter that possible worlds are important to logical and linguistic analyses without committing us to an extravagant metaphysics. Indeed, I argue that possible worlds are indispensable to such analyses, and that to live in this world is nearly impossible without referring to possible worlds. My purpose in this chapter is not to enter into a full-scale technical analysis of possible-worlds semantics, for such analyses have been ably written by others.1 Rather, I wish to introduce its main features to literary theorists and critics, suggesting specifically how it illuminates not only the topics of fiction and narrative,2 but also certain persistent problems in literary meaning itself. I will examine objections to possible-worlds semantics and then extend the analysis of model theory from the last chapter to consider the nature of possible worlds. I will explore the relationship of possible worlds to language and metaphysics, the particular theoretical problems possible-worlds theory has to overcome, and other theories of possibility. The chapter concludes with the outline of a qualified possible-worlds semantics for literary theory.

82 Poiesis and Possible Worlds Scepticism about Possible Worlds If, as I argued in the last chapter, possible worlds are such an important part of the conceptual apparatus presupposed by our language - if we can hardly talk without talking about possible worlds - then why would anyone resist introducing them into our semantics? Part of the problem arises from the apparent metaphysical import of the term. Are we really talking about possible worlds as if they were different planets, so that a sufficiently advanced technology could either take us there, or, as Kripke asks, a sufficiently powerful telescope could help us see them across space? Are they really out there, as one critic asks, like 'raisins in a pudding'? Are they part of the actual world, if perhaps only on the extreme fringe? Or are possible worlds nothing more than a fancy metaphor that no proponent really satisfactorily explains? What are possible worlds? Quine and Goodman are examples of philosophers who think that possible worlds are highly suspect notions for a philosophical theory and therefore require explanation in some other terms. Quine, for one, argues that possible worlds are not necessary to describe language speakers' 'belief worlds' (propositional attitudes) insofar as they might differ from the actual world: 'Each belief world will include countless bodies that are not separately recognizable objects of the believer's beliefs at all, for the believer does believe still that there are countless such bodies. Questions of identity of these, from world to world, remain ... devoid of sense.'3 We simply cannot talk about the identity of such objects in worlds other than our own. For Quine, it is sheer nonsense to wonder if in Dickens's novel a mysterious Australian livestock merchant might, in reality, be the convict Abel Magwitch. Identity statements, he says, just do not work for anything other than real things in the real world. It would equally be nonsense by Quine's principle to wonder whether the Tom Sawyer of Tom Sawyer is the same character as the Tom Sawyer of Huckleberry Finn. In addition to prohibiting statements of identity in fictional worlds, Quine's principle also prohibits statements about the real world that are contrary to fact. For example, we cannot meaningfully ask 'What if Nixon had lost the 1968 election?' for that would require us to say that the Nixon in the real world is the same person in the scenario of our political speculations. All such counterfactuals - from the grandiose 'What if the Greeks had lost the Persian Wars?' to the mundane 'What if I missed the subway?' - are, by Quine's principle, devoid of sense. All

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of these statements require at least one object in a 'belief world' to be identical with an object in the world of fact, which is impossible. For Quine, the only world we have is the one actual world we experience. Rather than talk of any kind of possible worlds, Quine favours 'austere scientific language.'4 Goodman, who directly faces the question of fiction, advances the thesis that fictional discourse need not be about possible individuals or possible worlds, but may be only a different way of. speaking about the actual world: 'My main purpose here, then, has been to suggest that discourse, even about possibles, need not transgress the boundaries of the actual world. What we often mistake for the actual world is one particular description of it. And what we mistake for possible worlds are just equally true descriptions in other terms/5 His approach excludes the counterfactuals mentioned above, which, because they expressly transgress the boundaries of the actual world, would have to be (in Goodman's jargon) equally false descriptions in the same terms. Counterfactual worlds cannot be 'true' descriptions or otherwise taken seriously in our theorizing because, according to his principles, they lack points of correspondence with the actual world. Goodman becomes the proponent of fictional worlds as merely the many faces of the one actual world. In this roman-a-clef treatment of possible worlds, the points of exact correspondence serve as alignment stops so that the translation into 'actual' world terms will be sited. And as we saw in chapter 2, Goodman's one-world semantics leads him to treat such fictional characters as Don Quixote not as possible individuals in their own right, but as mere projections of real-world qualities. From a literary standpoint, this approach shoehorns every form of fiction into the genre of allegory (i.e., that all fiction is radically romana-clef). Don Quixote's 'quixoticism' may provide Goodman a convenient example - the abstraction is perhaps better known than the fictional character. Nevertheless, many fiction writers hold roman-a-clef to be an inferior form, and by no means obligatory. Here again, modality points us to kinds - kinds of literary worlds. If the Don teaches us anything, it is that certain fictions can become more 'real' to us than the real world of our experience. In the act of reading, we effortlessly treat fictional characters as if they were real, as z/they were real persons. What Ryan calls a 'fictional recentering' takes place.6 Because we understand the fictional world as the centre of the system of reality as we read, to intrude our own world upon the text may cause us to misread the fiction. Bunyan's characters may conform to Goodman's prescription,

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but Tolkien's clearly do not. We may read some literary works like Banyan's in light of our own world, but other fictions demand we read them on their own - and, if anything, we read our own world in light of them. Apart from roman-a-clef, the fictional takes the logical form of the conditional: we understand it as if it were true. A problem arises when we banish or otherwise reduce the modal distinction, assimilating the real to the fictional or the fictional to the real. Outside of a modal semantics, for example, proper names shared by both historical and fictional characters are problematic. However, in the modalism of possible-worlds semantics, as Dolezel says, 'The identity of fictional [and historical] individuals is protected by the boundary between the actual and the possible worlds.'7 So Dolezel explains that we can talk meaningfully about a difference between the historical Napoleon and Tolstoy's Napoleon. The semantic theory makes no special claims of epistemic access between the two, only that there is a meaningful difference to be preserved. Kripke argues that to deny the intelligibility of the former on the basis of the latter is very much to have 'reversed the cart and the horse.'8 Between the cart and the horse there is always at least a prepositional relationship. And, interestingly enough, the very figure Kripke employs to defend the modal distinction between possible and actual creates its own fictional scenario from actual materials. As we shall see in this chapter and the next, our figures and fictions - indeed, ordinary discourse itself - all presuppose the modal distinction. And while Goodman comes up short in this regard, a possible-worlds semantics can convincingly preserve a meaningful distinction between fiction and fact. So while Quixote may be guilty of assimilating the real to the fictional, Goodman is certainly guilty of the reverse. Goodman claims that in his analysis (rightly, I think), 'Possible processes and possible entities vanish.'9 But can we so easily do without them, and have we not created more problems than we have solved? The Logical Triviality of This World I begin by taking up the challenge of Quine, Goodman, and other sceptics. What is it we are talking about when we speak of possible worlds? And what good reasons do we have for believing in them? David Lewis, one of the first philosophers to work with possible-worlds semantics in the 1960s, makes the following common-sense case: T believe there are possible worlds other than the one we happen to

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inhabit. If an argument is wanted, it is this: It is uncontroversially true that things might have been otherwise than they are. I believe, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways/10 These countless ways things could have been different Lewis calls 'possible worlds.' As Stalnaker observes, Lewis does not mean for this to be a 'knockdown argument/ but it does have a plausibility we will pursue. In all kinds of technical disciplines as well as in ordinary discourse, we often refer to ways the world could be different. We often talk about what might have happened (in alternative pasts) and what might be (in alternative presents and futures). Historians discuss what might have happened had Hitler concentrated his forces instead of fighting on two fronts at the same time. Scientists conceive what might happen if they were to accelerate a beam of high-energy particles and make it collide with certain other particles. Although the former scenario is closed to verification in the real world of scientific experimentation and the latter open, nevertheless, both are entirely available to discussion and thoughtful reflection as we imagine the various outcomes of each scenario. In fact, to be in any state of information at all, to make any representation of the world, is to 'distinguish, in some way or other, between alternative possible states of the world/11 To discuss alternative possible states need not commit us to understand them as metaphysical worlds necessarily. Although someone like Lewis will assign them a metaphysical status, arguing that possible worlds differ from the real world 'not in kind but only in what goes on in them/12 he is in a very small minority. To claim that two historians can meaningfully discuss the 'what if of Alexander taking a different route to world conquest does not require us to conclude that somewhere out in space Alexander is indeed traversing that path, and that what the historians are talking about is that one particular section of space. I argued in the last chapter that possible-worlds semantics moves us beyond the positivist biases and logico-linguistic restrictions of a one-world semantics. Here I argue that not only fictional and literary discourse, but also much of our ordinary language use, presupposes possible worlds. Moreover, particle physicists and other scientists could do little without abstracting states of affairs, variously theorizing about them and manipulating them before (or even in lieu of) their 'realworld' tests.13 Possible worlds are integral both to the real world and to the world of cyberspace precisely insofar as our understanding of the first and our immersion in the second requires the various activities that can be loosely called 'abstracting/ Integrated within but not re-

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duced to the activities of mind, language, and imagination, these abstract states of affairs should be taken seriously in our semantics. What place in our semantics, then, should we reserve for fictional characters and fictional worlds? Is there something unintelligible about the concept of a unicorn that would cause Russell to exclude it from the realm of logic? Is a unicorn to be placed in the same category as a foursided triangle? Would it not rather be preferable to say the concept can be logically conveyed - can be made intelligible in a meaningful way without committing ourselves to its existence in the actual world? Surely we don't want to assign all stories about unicorns to the same logical exile as our four-sided triangle. But if not in exile, where are they? Until genetics decides otherwise, the 'other ways the world might be' Lewis mentions above may have nothing to do with the nature of the constitution of the real world.14 This 'otherwise' may be an entirely fictional birth, neither an inflation nor an erasure of reality. Hintikka explores the questions of logic and existence in the example of a particular fictional world: 'In the possible world of Verdi's Tosca, the riveting question is whether there really are bullets in the soldiers' muskets in the execution scene ... Hence a question as to whether there are certain specific nonexistent objects can be very burning indeed.'15 Fictional worlds, worlds not part of the actual world, can run into this and all sorts of interesting logical and existential dilemmas. Reading Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, we wonder with the narrator (and soon discover with him, too) whether the seeming ghost in the graveyard and the writer of a mysterious letter might be the same person. Reading Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, on the other hand, we never know whether the protagonist has killed his wife; the author himself professes not to know. Or consider the logical puzzles presented in another work, when Oedipus in a particularly syllogistic moment tries to reason out his fate based on the evidence he has at hand: You said thieves he told you a whole band of them murdered Laius. So, if he still holds to the same number, I cannot be the killer. One can't equal many. But if he refers to one man, one alone, clearly the scales come down on me: I am guilty.16

We have exemplified in these lines the logic of implication, identity, and contradiction - all here in this possible world. Moreover, we have a

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fictional character entertaining at least two possible worlds: one in which he is innocent and one in which he is guilty. To enrich the dramatic irony, Oedipus is renowned as a riddle solver; but the binary he considers here may not be complete nor his inferences valid, as the spectators see other scenarios to which he is utterly blind. Logic can handle the structure of possible worlds, their denizens, and also the further possibilities (recursively and discursively) arising from them.17 Fictional entities are not the only concern of possible-worlds semantics. Possible-worlds semantics contends that the very conceptual framework of our language presupposes possible worlds. An empirical understanding of the actual world by no means exhausts the conceptual framework implicit in language. Hintikka suggests a familiar scenario: 'If the sole purpose of our linguistic methods were to refer to the world as it actually is, there would be nothing we could do but wait for opportunities to widen the sphere of our actual experience. As it happens, however, there are a number of things we can do in anticipation of future experience. For instance, we often find it extremely useful to try to chart the different courses the events may take even if we don't know which one of the different charts we are ultimately going to make use of.'18 We commonly talk of ways the world can be when we talk about what might happen (in the future) and what might have happened (in the past). We also talk about the ways the world can be when (in the present) we sort through the contending interpretations, beliefs, fears, etc., of what the world is. Clearly, in our language we talk not only about a single course of events, the ones that happen to make up the real world, but many possible courses of events, some imaginary and some actual. To thus represent the world, says Stalnaker, 'is to locate the world in a space of alternative possible states of the world.' Possible-worlds semantics recognizes this feature in its fundamental notion that our statements are about some way the world might be. In this light, we cannot get through the day without at least a few possible worlds. Stalnaker comments: 'Believing in possible worlds is like speaking in prose. We have been doing it all our lives.'19 As we sort through the various meanings that vie for our attention daily through diverse forms of communication and reflection, we consider the various ways the world would be if these meanings were true. What difference would they make if they were? What effect would they have on other events? We regularly perform amazing intellectual gymnastics whenever we entertain multiple possibilities simultaneously: in these semantic games we sort through, compare, and adjudicate among alternative possibilities. More about the precise nature of these seman-

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tic games in a moment, but for now we should appreciate that semantic games are typically played across the space of many models. Cognitively and linguistically, we consider meanings neither in isolation nor in the context of only one interpretation of the world, but typically against the background of various other possible meanings and their scenarios. Everyday decisions and actions employ such semantical games; they are carried out with a view to practical results of actions; multiple consequences diverge at each point and with each subsequent decision and action. Will it rain today, how can my insurance agent decrease my exposure to loss, and what will I be doing this time next year - such questions are the stuff of our everyday experience. With a view to such possibilities Hintikka explains, 'If this kind of planning is carried out linguistically, the terms of our discourse are not likely to occur referentially pure and simple.'20 Since an appeal to a single domain cannot answer these questions, a fortiori a single interpretation of that world cannot produce a semantics for our language. Hintikka develops his point with an analogy to wartime maps and war-related iconography: 'Most of the maps prepared by the general staff represent situations that will never take place. But this does not mean that they are futile or irrealistic/ We assign such representations neither to objects in the actual world nor to senses in a separate sphere of meaning (signifie in Saussure's sense and perhaps Sinn in Frege's).21 Much less should we concede the entire contest to linguistic indeterminacy. Rather, we construe such situations through series of possible courses of events so that we can devise chess-like strategies to handle them. That is the purpose of battle iconography; its goal is not to create confusion. When we have too little foresight and fail to anticipate the possibility that indeed comes to pass, then the real world teaches us that to be provident we should add to our understanding at least one possible outcome. Such counterfactual consequences and future contingencies interact in rich complexity. However events are related, they are surrounded by other possible events, whose ultimate pattern, or lack thereof, may or may not be understandable. To take a literary example, Euripedes' Jason may rue his callous mishandling of Medea and even attribute his downfall to it, while Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths may have no sense of the connection between his past actions and his present circumstances. The relations among alternative possible courses of events may vary across different sets of possible worlds. In a logic of prepositional attitudes the logical characteristics behind such verbs as 'believes that/ 'knows

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that/ 'dreams that/ etc. - the objective is to define the alternativeness relation of the prepositional attitude in question. (More on the alternativeness relation below.) Because the alternativeness relation may be defined in widely varying ways (in this case, along the lines of the prepositional attitude in question), and not just in terms of logical possibility, the concept of possibility can be both expansive and trackable. We shall see shortly that even 'impossible worlds' can find their way into our semantics. Besides employing a possible-worlds approach in our thinking strategies, we also do the same at a more basic level in the interpretation of our language. Confronted with the fact of language, we constantly sort through the possible meanings of certain sounds and ink blots, forming increasingly complex patterns of meaning: we move from the 'top down/ considering what we take to be the relevant, in this case phonological or graphological, possibilities. Is the downstroke an T or T? Is it joined to the diagonals next to it, forming an 'M' or 'N'? Or if we process the first word in its entirety as 'Now/ then how might subsequent words establish that context? We continue reading: 'Now is the winter ...' Is the speaker observing a straightforward meteorological fact ('it is now wintertime') or perhaps emphasizing one particular winter out of the many others ('this is the winter')? Then we read 'Now is the winter of our discontent/ and we discard those readings to seek another set of possible meanings. We understand the metaphorical nature of the phrase, that 'our discontent' is in some way 'wintery/ cold, isolated, dead. But this, of course, is immediately followed by the phrase 'made glorious summer/ We now realize we are dealing with an emotional state, predicated upon events that remain as yet unknown to us. The conclusion of the idea, 'by this son of York/ next conveys the identity of the agent behind this metaphorical change from winter to summer. An astute reader will not fail to notice the pun on 'son' and 'sun/ and the introduction of the house of York begins to identify the setting of the story, namely, pre-Tudor England and the War of Roses, a discrete and identifiable historical time. So from this statement can we safely conclude that the speaker is happy? By no means, for by the time we complete the forty-one-line soliloquy that opens Richard III, we understand that the speaker Richard's jubilation is really only sarcasm. So complex are the semantic revisions this speech demands that, once we settle upon the meaning of his words, we know enough to take little of what he says at face value. In one sense, we can see that these strategies are semantic games we perform in order to see how the

90 Poiesis and Possible Worlds words cohere (if at all), what they say about the world (if anything), what they say about the speaker (if so), and how they compare to, or diverge from, other linguistic phenomena and alternative models of the world. The strategies for coming to understand language therefore need to take into account not just systematic variations within a system of language or syntax, but also the various possible meanings that that language may project as those meanings clash, converge, diverge, dissolve, and aggregate far beyond the borders of the lexical features of their linguistic expressions. A possible-worlds analysis will be interested in plotting the interaction of all sorts of alternatives, from the small to the grand. The extension to the complexities of narrative, fictional space, and poetic language is a natural one. Intellectual Models One conclusion of the prior section is that logic is not only about the world of existing objects. In fact, possible-worlds semantics starts with Hintikka's reversal of Russell's statement that logic is concerned with the real world alone. Hintikka states that logic is not concerned exclusively with the real world, but with all possible worlds. The real world is only one possible world, one way among many ways the world could have been. Similar to Whitman's 'I... am not contained between my boots and hat/ the applicability of logic and language is not restricted to the one world that happens to come to pass, but ranges far beyond its ken to comprehend all manner of possibilities. Towards the end of the last chapter, I concluded the history of language as calculus with the introduction of model theory. In this section, I continue the exposition of modeltheoretic semantics as a means of keeping track of these manifold possibilities and, after that, I examine more details of possible-worlds semantics proper. The terms 'possible-worlds semantics/ 'model theory/ and 'logical semantics' are all related. Although they generally denote the same field of theoretical enquiry, theorists use 'logical semantics' in some contexts to distinguish the study from lexical semantics; 'model theory' in other contexts to highlight the interest in abstract mathematical models; and 'possible-worlds semantics' in certain other contexts to emphasize that those models are specific configurations of a world (world scenarios or courses of events). Logical semantics is interested in the meanings of words, as lexical

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semantics is, and also in the way the meanings of words and their expressions relate to the world, i.e., what would the world have to be like were they true or false? Model theory is a mathematical means of tracing relations, often elaborate, that connect expressions to the objects they are about, whether abstract or real. Hintikka indicates that model theory 'is not another mathematical theory on a par with group theory or number theory/22 Model theories have been constructed for both of these and other mathematical theories. Model theory operates more broadly and is thus closely associated with the fundamental semantic convictions regarding metalanguage and reinterpretability in the view of language as calculus. Hintikka, in fact, identifies model theory with the view of language as calculus. Finally, possible-worlds semantics construes those models as abstract scenarios in which the individual elements stand in a logical relation with other elements and the scenario as a whole. In logical semantics, model theory is the idea that for a sentence to be understandable - in order for any interpretation to be placed on it at all - it must be true of some such possible state of affairs. No matter how personal an expression is or what aesthetic or linguistic practice it derives from, any meaning the expression conveys says something about the way the world is or might be. More specifically, model theory considers 'the possible correspondences between expressions and semantic values, that each pairing represents a possible interpretation of the language in question/23 Each interpretation, then, specifies how objects and their relations must be construed; the interpretation is the model; again, these objects of the model may be either real or abstract. And depending on their attributes, these objects and their relations may have either a widespread or a limited bearing on the makeup of the model in question. By entertaining possible objects in this way, model theory runs counter to extreme positivism.24 Recall, too, that when model theory is used to describe the semantics of natural language and the pragmatics of language games, it generally operates not with a single model, but on a space of many models. Thus, a fundamental feature of model theory is that it distinguishes between an expression in a language and the statement that expression makes about the world. It is a mistake to collapse or otherwise confuse the two. Different expressions may convey the same meaning, and a single expression may also convey different meanings. Kratzer provides a handy instance of the first, the case of simple translation:

92 Poiesis and Possible Worlds There is an orange tart on the table. (English) As schtoht an Orangscheturte ufa'm Disch. (Swiss German of the Solothurn Variety) He keke aarani kei runga i te teepu. (Maori)25

The point of her example and others like it is that meanings or propositions cannot be limited to language, for certainly we could indicate this same proposition in ways other than through natural language. Therefore in our linguistic and literary studies we should not be concerned with linguistic signs only, as a pure science configured within a syntactic paradigm alone. Also, this sameness of meaning that perdures from one communicative medium to another, from one natural language to another, from one speaker to another, even from one instance of its utterance to another, is strong proof against the linguistic or mental nominalism we encountered earlier. A meaning can sometimes be shared across divergent calculi and across boundaries of time and space, history and culture. Moreover, because meanings need not be construed in terms of a unique language of thought or nominalistic mental experiences, this principle of the perdurance of meaning may have a counterpart in literary theory. Perhaps in the same way that meanings are shareable across a variety of media, it is just possible that the same fictional world may be evoked across a variety of readings, or the same dramatic world evoked across a variety of different performances. However, we will first need something like the meaning functions of possible-worlds semantics to substantiate such a conclusion. On the other side of the issue, we are faced with the fact that the same sentence may express many different meanings or propositions. Context-sensitive statements, in particular, may express different meanings. Matthews provides a simple example. He says the sentence T am hungry/ can express the proposition 'Robert Matthews is hungry,' or, when uttered by another speaker, refer to another proposition about another person. More complex examples are readily available. In Paradise Lost, Satan's rhetorical borrowings often capitalize on such contextual ambiguities, the apex of which is reflected in his infernal incarnation, his assumed ambiguity of essence: 'I as Man, / Internal Man, is but proportion meet, / I of brute human, yee of human Gods.'26 Whether a mere beast is speaking or Satan himself makes all the difference to the deception that will follow. Not only these context-dependent utterances, but also literary utterances in general express multiple propositions. Call it palimpsest or

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polysemia, a fundamental characteristic of literary language is its ability to express multiple propositions in a single statement. When Racine's Phedre, for example, exclaims in her desperate seduction speech to Hippolyte 'Voila mon coeur. C'est la que ta main doit frapper,'27 multiple propositions are expressed and held in dramatic tension. The sense of 'strike my heart' multiplies into a fascinating and elaborate set of propositions about the emotional anguish Hippolyte will cause her; about the sexual union she desires with him;28 about the judicial responsibilities he has as Prince to punish her treasonous behaviour; and about Phedre's suggested identity as incestuous monster in the face of Hippolyte's unproven identity as son of Thesee, renowned monster slayer. This plurisignification we most often associate with literature. Like lightning, it branches as it spreads its illumination. Literary utterance carefully selects and counterposes multiple propositions in a sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant, but always suggestive, relationship. In order to produce these semantic effects, literary utterance typically transgresses the boundaries of standard language use, of the commonly associated expressions of the language and the statements they make about the world. It is the creative working of the language and the imaginative models with which those standard models interact that distinguishes literary language - not on a formalist reckoning, but a semantic one. My contention all along has been that literary language deals with varying and multiple means of representation. Certainly there may be culturally wide metaphors, near-universal symbols, but they are not unavoidable; poets, prophets, and scientists constantly prove to us otherwise. The importance of model theory for literary semantics, in the words of Dowty, Wall, and Peters, is that it 'allows us to systematically vary the meaning assigned to ... expressions, and observe the effect on the meaning of related expressions. By such means we may learn various things about the appropriate assignment of meaning to make to expressions of the language.'29 This variability of the language and its meaning relations is language as calculus at its clearest. This is why I have argued so insistently that a theory of literature must operate with this understanding of language, and not an understanding of language as universal medium. Model theory enables us to handle both sameness and difference, both meaning structures and meaning conflicts. Model theory allows us to move out from an expression to the many models in which it may be true, the multiplicity of models preserving the original ambiguity set

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by the expression, as each precipitates one or more of those potentials. Because the meaning of the expression is understood as a function of possible worlds, the assignment of semantic values in model theory preserves both the specificity and the ambiguity of the expression simultaneously. We can variously designate any set of different worlds, variously define the alternativeness relation among them, and variously determine how large and fully realized they are; correspondingly, we can enrich and vary the relations at work in our lexical semantics. Interpretation is thereby greatly expanded. Within model theory we can talk about meaning as a function of possible worlds and meaning relations as variable; thus we are no longer forced to choose between either a simply univocal language or a completely free-floating semiosis. Matthews provides a literary example of how, in this account of meaning, a literary interpretation can operate at both a broad and a specific level, and be both specific and ambiguous, at the same time: 'Wordsworth's "A Slumber did my spirit seal" is for Cleanth Brooks a poem about the dramatic speaker's lost love, for F.W. Bateson a poem about Lucy, for Coleridge a poem about Dorothy Wordsworth; while for others it is a poem, not about some female persona, but about creative spirit or mind. Yet none of these interpretations is dictated by the text itself; it is not part of the meaning of the poem that the pronoun "she" take any of these objects as its referent.'30 The meaning of the poem is therefore not indeterminate, but rather semiotically and semantically under determined. If the text may take any of these referents, then (in possible-worlds idiom) the poem designates this range of possible worlds. On the other hand, the more semiotically determined a text is, the smaller the set of possible worlds it designates, and the more precise the designation. Even if we wish to disagree with Matthews on this particular example, we still can endorse his principle. Matthews's argument is that Wordsworth's critics, with or without warrant, place the poem in some specific context, thereby constraining the range of worlds it evokes. To that extent each interpretation is a limiting of possible worlds. Nor is there anything restricting the literary artist to such limitations; literary statements can and often do gesture toward many referents. Such limitations in the practice of criticism, however, may open up more clearly realizable or entirely unenvisioned possibilities for readers. Beyond these observations of a model-theoretic nature, Ingarden and Iser have theorized how semiotic underdetermination is a necessary and strategic feature of literature, involving the cooperation of readers in the creative process as they 'concretize' the possible worlds

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of a text, completing the incomplete and making real the abstract in their imaginative engagements.31 What is the upshot of all this in the intense debate over the ways we read literature? Briefly, we can see that tastes in reading change, as does tolerance for the levels of semiotic-semantic determination and underdetermination. Given this dynamic condition, we need not conclude that literary interpretation is simply a receding ground in the ever-complicating deferral of meaning (chapter 1), nor a linguistic and cultural wall closing off the reader (chapter 2). Rather, literary interpretation is a highly complex semantic game, one in which the rules are not merely aesthetic, nor merely social. Critics are those who should be most adept at these semantic games. The games are played differently in different cultural periods and social settings, and they are also played differently by different authors. Hawthorne plays the game quite differently than does Melville, and Milton differently than Shakespeare.32 Modelling Worlds Having distinguished between an expression in a language and the statement that expression makes about the world, we can now explore more closely the nature of each. One of the primary interests of Hintikka and others working in this area is identifying the linguistic counterparts to the models of model theory. As indicated toward the end of chapter 3, Carnap is important to the development of a possible-worlds semantics. Although one of his early concerns was with the study of language as syntax (see his The Logical Syntax of Language), he later became interested in linguistic models, which he called 'state-descriptions/ The system in which he places those state-descriptions resembles many of the fundamental ideas of possible-worlds semantics. For one thing, Carnap explains the identity of intensions (i.e., the meanings of sentences) in terms of the range of state-descriptions in which they are true. Carnap in this way brings us close to the principles of a possibleworlds semantics - the view that intensions are functions from possible worlds to extensions, and its corollaries (explained below) - but he does not quite interpret the models of his state-descriptions to be, in Hintikka's words, 'genuine possible worlds, i.e., real-life alternatives to our actual world.' As Carnap himself explains, 'A class of sentences in Si which contains for every atomic sentence either this sentence or its negation, but not both, and no other sentences, is called a statedescription in Si/ For Carnap, these classes of sentences describe pos-

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sible worlds; possible worlds do not describe such classes of sentences. In a word, state-descriptions may be nothing more than linguistic objects. But if we posit state-descriptions to describe our possible worlds, we move back in the direction of a unique language of thought, i.e., language as universal medium and its associated problems.33 So what are possible worlds? Although they may be the linguistic counterparts to the models of model theory, they are not limited to language. Rather, as we shall see shortly, language tries to overcome its limitations in order to keep pace with them. On the other hand, while we may indeed refer to them as 'genuine possible worlds/ they need not be understood in terms of a full-scale metaphysical system. They need not be, in Adams's terms, 'world stories/ nor, in Plantinga's terms, 'maximal sets.' They may be either of these, of course, with qualifications. However, possible worlds need not carry so much metaphysical baggage, nor be set on such a broad scale. They can simply refer to a relevant sequence of events in some corner of a world. Hintikka suggests that possible worlds may simply be the kinds of worlds or scenarios envisioned in theoretical statistics - 'what a theoretical statistician a la Savage might call "small worlds."'34 These small worlds may include only a short course of events over a brief period of time or 'the alternative courses that a single experiment might take' - not just the novel, but the lyric, too. Rantala argues that this ability to work with partial worlds allows logical semantics to turn in one direction to deal with global interpretive issues, and also to turn in the other direction to apply the same model theory in a 'stepwise affair' to other issues, thereby yielding 'finer distinctions' and explanations that traditionally only the compositional features of a syntactic approach have been able to cope with. In two companion articles,35 Rantala and Hintikka illustrate how possibleworlds semantics can effectively cover much of the territory traditionally assigned to a syntactic approach to logic without falling into its methodological pitfalls. In contrast to those compositional methods that 'work their way from inside out' and are ultimately unable to go far enough 'out' to handle semantic context dependencies, their approach, like a well-designed web search or an airplane circling to land, works its way 'from the outside in.'36 The 'inside out' approach fails, they explain, 'If the meaning of a simpler formula is not constant but depends on the context in which it occurs.' Often we think of these context dependencies in terms of the pragmatics of a language. Moving from the 'outside in/ model theory

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has developed in the direction of game theory to account for these context dependencies that operate in our semantical games. We have been talking about semantic games since chapter 3. Game theory, in this connection, is simply the functional means of making explicit the world or context dependencies of our statements in natural languages. So while a compositional approach fundamentally requires atomic units upon which to build, 'In contrast, game-theoretical semantics does not need atomic sentences as its sole foundation. What it needs instead is a rule for winning and losing for infinite plays of a semantical game. Thus the difference in the direction of proceeding, which might at first sight seem a rather insignificant difference, turns out to have quite important consequences... [T]he road up and the road down are not the same.'37 Relying on such problematic atoms is reminiscent not only of Derrida's critique of structuralism, but also, in turn, of his own notion of the 'trace.' Tellingly, an 'inside out' approach can go on infinitely. By contrast, the 'outside in' approach achieved by this game-theoretic extension of model theory establishes the logic of seeking and finding for language users. The approach provides what Hintikka labels an 'abstract theory of possible-world exploration,' mapping the discovery strategies of language users as they come to terms with the possible worlds presupposed by their acts of discourse.38 Not all theories of language games are alike. In the model-theoretic account, the strategies of seeking and finding can begin at the broadest level and remain there, or reduce its scope until it deals with some smaller set of relations or narrower aspects of a world. When we speak of game theory in this way, inevitably we think of the literary detective Sherlock Holmes, with his 'deductive' method of narrowing possibilities as he draws near to solving a crime. The discussion also calls to mind the method of Umberto Eco's metatheoretic novels, his self-described detective stories, where both his protagonists and his 'ideal readers' become detectives who encounter manifold signs and entertain multiple scenarios as they move towards a conclusion. Possible Worlds a Philosophy? I have already pointed out that a view of language as calculus is not per se a specific philosophy or body of doctrine, that its attitude toward language can, in fact, designate a range of studies. This becomes evident in the metaphysical neutrality of the 'worlds' of possible-worlds semantics. Notice how from a linguist's point of view

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metaphysical issues are handled. Partee explains the matter at length: [T]he value of possible worlds for linguistic semantics is largely independent of metaphysical issues. Linguists, qua linguists, tend to be instrumentalists about metaphysics, in the sense that they will tend to judge competing foundational theories more by their fruitfulness in helping to lead to insightful explanations of linguistic phenomena than by other kinds of arguments ... for example, in the case of questions about the nature of time - whether it is discrete or continuous, whether there is a first or a last moment, whether it is linearly ordered across possible worlds or whether one should rather posit a system with, say, 'branching futures' but 'linear pasts.'39

So possible-worlds semantics is not committed to a particular interpretation of time, world, or other metaphysical issues. As in the case of arithmetic or geometric entities - numbers, points, lines, etc. - we need not know their precise nature or origin to take them seriously in our theories.40 What possible-worlds semantics provides is the low-level system the semantics, really - for managing the interpretations underlying our conceptual and linguistic activities. The word world can be given either a metaphysical interpretation or an entirely non-metaphysical one. We can assign possible worlds to the edge of the universe, to the divine mind, to the human mind, or perhaps somewhere else. As Stalnaker argues from a philosopher's point of view, 'one may choose to put a metaphysical interpretation on the concept of a possible world, assuming that there is one domain of all metaphysically possible worlds from which the restricted domains relevant to interpreting different kinds of possibility and necessity are drawn. But one may also reject that interpretation, and the coherence of the metaphysical questions which it raises.' He explains that either attitude towards possible worlds - the metaphysical or non-metaphysical - is compatible with possible-worlds semantics. One may maintain an entirely realist attitude towards possible worlds even if one does not believe, with Leibniz and Lewis, that there is some ontological domain properly denominable as 'possible worlds.' Although individuals may distinguish between alternative possibilities in their belief states or language acts, Stalnaker argues, 'It does not follow from this that there is a domain from which all participants ... must take the alternative possibilities that they distinguish between.'41

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A realist attitude towards possible worlds, therefore, is compatible with a range of metaphysical and non-metaphysical beliefs. Possible worlds as employed in a theory of meaning will accommodate that full range, whereas in a particular metaphysical theory philosophers will limit it. In a theory of meaning, as David Kaplan explains, 'one does not want to impose metaphysical constraints on which possible worlds there are since one wants to be able to distinguish any two sentences that are not logically equivalent to each other (by having some world in which one is true and the other false)/42 This semantic versatility is what makes a possible-worlds perspective so appropriate to literary theory. Unlike so much modern literary theory, which has already narrowly decided what kind of world a text will represent, a possibleworlds approach will remain open to all available meanings. Interestingly, the same semantic versatility that generates interpretive openness is also the semantic versatility that yields interpretive discrimination. Stalnaker, for example, uses the possible-worlds framework to explain the differences between his view and Lewis's: 'Because possible worlds semantics is neutral on the nature of possible worlds, and on other substantive metaphysical questions, the two theories can be formulated in a common framework and the differences between them, both technical and philosophical, can be made clear and precise/ In light of such considerations, Stalnaker summarizes the nature of possible worlds for a semantic theory: "They obviously are not concrete objects or situations, but abstract objects whose existence is inferred or abstracted from the activities of rational agents/43 We thus move closer to a theory of literature. Relation of Language to Possible Worlds Thomas Kuhn argues for the close relationship of possible worlds to lexicons, that the number of worlds possible to us at any given time is directly related to the reach of our lexicon. Although I agree with Kuhn's suggestion that different lexicons yield different possible worlds, I disagree that one's lexicon limits the full range of one's possible worlds. A well-known theorist of change, Kuhn mislocates the source of change and thereby limits its range.44 My disagreement is supported, at some informal level, by the fact that lexicons change all the time to keep up with a changing world around us, let alone the changing ways we represent that world to ourselves. Indeed, according to Pope, the 'soul of true wit' is to put into language what may be thought but never

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so well expressed. Because the changes of the world and its representations are, in principle, infinite, a cardinality argument can also be advanced: 'there are more possible worlds than there are linguistic entities/ In his formal version of this argument, Bricker describes an unending set of 'cube worlds' to prove his thesis that there are far more possible worlds than there are descriptive resources of actual languages to account for them.45 He maintains that while we may lack the descriptive means to handle such strange and remote worlds, we do not lack the logical means, which allow us to specify them as a set. Of course, we can also talk informally about non-verbal and literary fantasy worlds, the poetic groping to express the plenitude of its own creative sensibilities. Wallace Stevens writes of the difficulty to find just the right 'syllables' when confronted with The way the earliest single light in the evening sky, in spring, Creates a fresh universe out of nothingness by adding itself, The way a look or a touch reveals its unexpected magnitudes.46

So how do we talk about possible worlds that are so remote from the world of our language that they lack counterparts there? How do we represent these various representations of the world; how can our language keep up with what Bricker calls 'all the ways things might have been' and might yet be? While we have to defer the full brunt of this question until the next chapter, where we discuss the role of literature in the creation of non-standard meaning, and consider how poets indeed express 'unexpected magnitudes' and 'fresh universes,' for now we can see from Bricker's cardinality and infinitary arguments that possible worlds may be conceptually accessible and linguistically inaccessible at the same time. Among possible worlds are representations of the world as it might be; those representations are both changing and limitless, and they may need to be approached through something other than standard linguistic means. For the view of language as calculus I have maintained in this book, language can change itself either to express these varying representations or even to create them. Meaning, according to this view, is a function of possible worlds, not of language only. Natural language, in other words, is a complex syntactico-semantic game for expressing meaning functions across possible worlds, but it is not the sole means for doing so. To be sure, natural language is the most highly developed and agreed-upon means, but others are certainly available. The arts

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may convey meanings through a variety of non-linguistic means, and even philosophers may at times consent to the arbitrary nature of their idiolect. As they discuss the choice of a proper metalanguage with which to express the meanings of language itself, Dowty, Wall, and Peters offer this comment: 'we must have some system within which to construct theories, whether they be theories of atoms, or rocks, or meanings, but there is nothing in principle which limits this system to natural languages. A meta-language of pictures, gestures, or whatever, would do as well, provided that it had the resources to specify states-ofaffairs and pair them with object-language sentences/47 Language users parallel both the philosophers and the artists when they play their signifying games. One of language's great accomplishments is keeping up with those endless transformations we call meaning functions. A Way of Meaning Functions In this section we further discuss the relation of language to possible worlds by examining the nature of these 'meaning functions/ Before we proceed to this possible-worlds account of meaning, however, it is important to note that at this point a theory of possibility for literature is, in a sense, already in place. It accompanies the view of language as calculus. Hintikka remarks of Terence Parsons's theory of non-existent objects that the best way to defend such objects (of thought experiments, of fiction, etc.) is through a systematic repudiation of language as universal medium.48 With the one-world bias of language as universal medium to the side, language is set free to talk about objects, persons, and events in worlds other than the one of our personal or cultural experience. We proceed, nonetheless, further to possible-worlds semantics and the kinds of theoretical issues it helps us to address. At its core, possible-worlds semantics is the view that meaning is a function of possible worlds. This is to say that sentences assign truth values to possible worlds, i.e., they identify from possible worlds or scenarios the ones in which they are true. Stated a little differently, to know the meaning of a sentence is to know the various scenarios in which it is true, that it corresponds to one set of scenarios and not to others. When we say that to know the meaning of a sentence is to know how to apply it in the right kinds of situations, we are grounding the notion of linguistic competence in semantic competence. Kratzer calls semantic competence a 'matching device' that theoretically allows the speaker of a

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language to match the statement against an infinite number of situations, though only a finite number will be encountered.49 Cresswell makes an interesting conjecture in this regard, combining the notions of semantic competence with the possible worlds envisioned by our linguistic representations: But perhaps after all linguistic ability and the idea of a possible world are intimately connected ... Since [in language] man can represent to himself the way the world is he can represent to himself the way the world might be but isn't. So a formal theory of what is going on leads naturally to the postulation of entities which are these 'ways the world might be'; these are the possible worlds. Language then becomes a rule-governed device for putting into the mind of another a representation of the same set of possible worlds which is in the mind of the speaker. If this is so then the notion of a possible world is at the heart of semantics, and is even more basic than the notion of truth. For when we identify a proposition as a set of possible worlds then we can define a proposition as true in a world [if and only if] it contains that world as a member.50

As Cresswell suggests, semantic competence and intentional and linguistic representation can all be traced back to possible worlds. Possible worlds cannot be limited to language or language competence. Similarly, they cannot be limited to intentional states. Rather, possible worlds are integrally bound up in both, as we relate our language use to the various possible scenarios of the world we consider in our thinking and communicating. A misconception lingers regarding the nature and uses of possibleworlds semantics, that it is a semantics of extensions only. As I have already begun to suggest, possible-worlds semantics can just as easily be applied to intensions and intentions. In fact, as Hintikka states: 'possible-worlds semantics relies heavily on intensions or senses (meaning functions), but, unlike shallower treatments of intensions, it does not treat them as unanalyzable atoms but strives to establish their logical form/51 First of all, we must keep in mind that intensions are different sorts of things from intentions. Intensions are the meaning functions we have been talking about all along; they are the rules for selecting extensions from among possible worlds. Intensions determine extensions. Intentions, on the other hand, are acts of mind as they are directed towards objects. The study of intentionality is not concerned necessarily with the objects themselves, whatever they may be.

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Literary theorists are probably most familiar with the term intentionality through the New Critics' 'intentional fallacy/ which states that the meaning of a literary work cannot be limited to or equated with the author's intentions, i.e., the author's thoughts about the work, purposes for the work, and so on. Intentions stand as a subject of enquiry on their own (discussed by philosophers and psychologists). As mental processes, intentions are separate from the logical and linguistic semantics I am pursuing here. Although the intensions of possible-worlds semantics can be developed into a theory of intentions,52 I shall focus primarily on the nature of intensions and related semantic concepts. I have said that intensions are the 'meaning functions' that designate possible worlds. More specifically, intensions as meaning functions are 'the family of a term's possible extensions or, to make the matter clearer,... the set of its extensions in every possible state of things. The "possible states of things" each constitutes an extensional domain.' From this straightforward semantic definition of intensions, we can correlate definitions for grammatico-syntactic categories. Volli explains: The possible intensions of proper nouns are all the possible functions from possible worlds to individuals, those of common nouns all the possible functions from possible worlds to sets of individuals (which is to say all the possible collections of possible extensions), those of sentences all the functions from possible worlds to truth values. As for the other categories, it may be considered that their syntactic and semantic function limits itself to that of concatenating themselves to expressions of a given category in order to obtain from them other expressions of a given category, and that therefore their intension will be a function from intensions to intensions.

This ability to explain a wide range of grammatical phenomena is a reason why, as Partee reports, possible-worlds semantics has served as an effective conceptual tool for linguists, who, you will recall, generally take an instrumentalist approach to the nature of possible worlds.53 Returning from syntax to semantics, then, we can see that intensions as meaning functions also determine the objects of our statements. Philosophers, logicians, and linguists have traditionally referred to these objects of our statements as 'propositions.' Propositions, they have said, are the kinds of abstract entities our sentences are about. Matthews argues that literary theorists have often looked in the wrong place to find the meanings of literary works.54 Meanings, he continues, do not necessarily mirror sentence structure. If we espouse a theory in which

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they do, then at some point when the exceptions accumulate we react by turning towards linguistic indeterminacy. Post-structuralism is borne only out of a structuralist parentage. Matthews takes exception to this line of thought. Meaning, he contends, is not an inherent property in the linguistic tokens that constitute literary texts. Rather, it is of a more abstract nature. His argument is much the same as my point that a syntactic approach to logical or linguistic form cannot sufficiently account for meaning, which is not to discount the importance of either the syntax or the lexicon. However, we must reach beyond the surface structure of a sentence or discourse, beyond the lexical content of its words and the application of syntactic rules and text grammars. If entirely different sentences can express the same meaning, if the same sentence can express entirely different meanings, and if we can express meanings in ways entirely different from natural language, then surface structure is an inadequate resource for a comprehensive account of meaning. Again, as readers and critics we must look to the semantic games associated with the structure. As we have seen, the shortcoming of the syntactic approach to linguistic meaning is its one-to-one correspondence between sentential elements and the meanings that whole sentences express. If sentences and meanings are not identical, then what form do meanings take? Traditional logic, commencing with Aristotle, maintains that those meanings common to the wide variety of expressions in language are propositions. Those propositions exhibit an underlying predicative structure, i.e., of the form subject-copula-predicate. Other, later improvements on the method (including Frege's) are nevertheless unable to obviate the central problem of this analysis of propositions: the proposition may refer to some entities or properties absent from the structure of the sentence. Partee shows that the simple sentence 'Jones is over forty' is about, among other things, Jones's age, a concept that has no counterpart in the sentence. The syntactic account of propositions lacks the adequate building blocks to carry out its project. This, Partee explains, is the difference between the more traditional treatment of propositions and the possible-worlds account: 'on the pure classical possible-worlds approach where a proposition is analyzed as a set of worlds, propositions do not have constituents at all.'55 According to possible-worlds semantics, propositions are neither linguistic nor comprised of constituents, but rather are properly understood as functions. What, then, are these functions and how precisely do they relate to the possible-worlds account of meaning? I have mentioned already that

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propositions are the objects of our linguistic expressions; they are not the objects of our linguistic expressions only, but also of our beliefs, desires, imaginations, and other prepositional attitudes. Propositions are not solely the province of language. (Precisely because in a possibleworlds reckoning propositions are non-linguistic, not constituting a unique language of thought, we can say that different art forms may sometimes express the same meanings.)56 As functions of possible worlds, then, propositions are designated subsets from among possible worlds. Stalnaker defines the nature of functions in this way: 'A function may be thought of intuitively as a rule for determining a value relative to any member of a specified domain of arguments. But the identity conditions for functions are purely extensional: if functions / and g are defined for the same arguments, and have the same values for each argument, then they are the same function. So a proposition is fully determined relative to a domain of possible worlds by the subset of that domain for which the proposition takes the value true/57 Hence, the proposition expressed by the sentence 'there is an orange tart on the table' is the function that selects the varied set of possible scenarios in which the sentence is true. And functions holding the same values in the same arguments are identical. Yet, those 'arguments' do not necessarily have to be calculated to the last degree. To take a simple mathematical example, the squaring function («2) can be shared by two persons even though they have not applied that function to the entire set of whole numbers. Functions, then, are the rules that determine truth values across a domain; because the identity conditions for these rules are extensional, they are shareable by different language users. Possible worlds can be shared because the rules for designating them can be shared. How large typically is the range of possible worlds relative to a proposition? The answer: large enough to contain only those worlds relevant to the proposition in question. Here we must consider more than the simply logically relevant (or logically possible) worlds. We also must abandon the Leibniz and Carnap thesis of the parity of all possible worlds.58 Certainly, when we apply the possible-worlds analysis to modal contexts (to possibility, knowledge, and linguistic competence), not all possible worlds are equally relevant. In the case of the proposition about the orange tart, only a slight fraction of possible worlds (scenarios) pertains to the conditions involved. In itself, this is a compelling reason against the parity thesis of possible worlds. But a more significant reason can be given. The question of which possible

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worlds are alternatives to which raises the issue of the alternativeness relation. The alternativeness relation is simply a two-place relation between sets of possible worlds (or models). In so-called alethic contexts (i.e., cases of necessary truth), the alternativeness relation is a logical one; in epistemic contexts (i.e., knowledge and belief), the alternativeness relation is defined in terms only of the possible worlds compatible with what the person in question knows (or believes, etc.). The benefits of seeing this alternativeness relation as varying across different contexts are notable. As Hintikka says, '[B]y imposing simple restrictions on the alternativeness relation we obtain the semantic counterparts to all of the most important axiomatic systems of modal logic.' Besides this advantage, we can also provide a logic of prepositional attitudes.59 Especially when we are talking about the models and their alternatives in epistemic contexts, we need to see that not all the possible worlds we have to consider at one time are always logical alternatives. If the propositions we need in our semantics are sets of possible worlds (or scenarios), then the individuals we refer to in our sentences will be more like the individuals of several possible worlds than the individuals bound to a single world. To take a familiar example, we can talk about Aristotle even though we stipulate - or, perchance, historians discover - that he never founded the Lyceum. We can talk about him as this same person across differing scenarios. The notional lines connecting individuals in several possible worlds are called 'world lines.' Hintikka explains that the individuals we talk about in our modal sentences are more the functions tying these individuals together (or, more properly speaking, their various roles) than what we may conceive of as the individuals themselves. The introduction of world lines leads naturally to their further discussion in the next section. The Problem of Logical Omniscience Mark Twain perhaps sensed the problem of logical omniscience when he said, 'Bret Harte knows everything that can be known. I know the rest.' Besides the general objections to possible-worlds semantics addressed at the beginning of this chapter, two other problems are often discussed. Perhaps they can be seen as two sides of the same problem: when a person knows a proposition, the same person also knows all the information that can be logically inferred from that proposition. The

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two sides of this problem are typically handled under the headings of logical equivalence and logical deduction. The form of the logical-equivalence problem is this: if two terms are logically equivalent, then any true statement made about one term will be equally true in the substitution of the other term in the statement. Quine argues that in order for our discourse to be referential - in order for us to really know what we are talking about - the terms that our discourse refers to must remain identical across different statements.60 In Quine's famous example, since Cicero = Tully, then the statement 'Cicero denounced Catiline' is logically equivalent to 'Tully denounced Catiline.' So far, so good. The problem arises when we try to carry this principle over into modal contexts, particularly those pertaining to knowledge and belief. Let us look at the logical form of the problem: person a believes proposition P; proposition P is logically equivalent to proposition Q; therefore, person a (should) also believe proposition Q. But this is obviously not the case in belief contexts. To pursue Quine's example further, we can say that a person named Al may know that Cicero denounced Catiline, but he may not equally know that Tully denounced Catiline. Certain that it was Cicero who denounced Catiline, Al may fume and fuss that it was not Tully. Thus, another way we could formulate the problem is to say this: a believes P is true, and at the same time a believes Q is false; but since P is logically equivalent to Q, we encounter problems because the person would therefore believe the proposition to be both true and false at the same time and in the same way. So what do we do with the problem of logical equivalence in modal contexts? The problem of logical equivalence (called so by Stalnaker and others) is labelled by Hintikka the problem of the substitutivity of identity (the two terms are equivalent). Hintikka provides an interesting and illuminating answer to the question in possible-worlds terms. He borrows an example from a literary world: 'Why does it not follow from "a knows that Mr. Hyde is a murderer" and "Dr. Jekyll is the same man as Mr. Hyde" that the person referred to by a knows that Dr. Jekyll is a murderer? The obvious, and trivial, answer is that he may not know that the two are identical... In so far as the person referred to by a does not know everything there is to be known about the world he has to keep an eye on more than one "possible world," that is, he has to take into account more than one way things might actually be, as far as he knows.'61 What would we need in this context for the substitutivity of

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identity to be valid? We would need to know that the names 'Jekyll' and 'Hyde' identify the same individual in all states of affairs compatible with what a knows. But, in the above scenario, the person referred to by a lacks that information. In possible-worlds idiom, if a does not know that 'Jekyll' and 'Hyde' are the same person, then a is focusing on a state of affairs (at least one) in which Jekyll and Hyde are different men. The world lines connecting the two terms across various scenarios are not identical in this epistemic context. Hintikka calls such instances not a failure of referentiality, but a kind of multiple referentiality, extending over the various states of affairs considered by a and comprising the range of a's knowledge.62 This notion of multiple referentiality is an important one for possible-worlds theory. Because individuals do not keep track of their own identity conditions,63 Hintikka explains that we have to keep our eyes on the possible ways their names may or may not refer. Far from creating referential problems in the case of the substitutivity of identity, possible-worlds semantics offers not only a natural explanation, but also a means of keeping track of the referential and identity conditions across modal contexts. We face a similar problem in the case of logical deduction, called by Hintikka 'the problem of logical omniscience.' The problem is similar to the one treated above, but is specifically directed towards logical deduction in epistemic contexts: if to know a proposition is to know all the states of affairs in which it is true, then why would we not also know all the logical information that could be deduced from the proposition? The answer is much the same as in the version of the problem above: not every epistemically possible world is a logically possible one. Here we deal not only with the identity of individuals across scenarios, but also with the very types of worlds that arise in epistemic contexts. Here we must consider the question of 'impossible possible worlds.' The mention of impossible possible worlds moves model theory in the direction of non-standard possible worlds and so-called paraconsistent logic. But, in this case, it does so without voiding the explanatory power that has advanced it to this point in the exposition, as I will demonstrate. Before we examine the structure of these impossible possible worlds, let us consider first the variance that may exist between epistemically possible worlds and logically possible worlds. Hintikka explains that for our hypothetical person a, certain contingencies can of course be merely apparent ones which a has to be prepared for solely because of the limitations of his powers of logical and

A Theory of Possibility for Literature 109 conceptual insight. To require as (4) does [i.e., that the range of epistemic worlds is identical to the range of logically possible worlds], that these include only situations ('worlds') which are objectively (logically) possible therefore prejudges the case in favour of logical omniscience. It presupposes that a can eliminate all the merely apparent possibilities. This is blatantly circular, however. Just because people (like our friend a) may fail to follow the logical consequences of what they know ad infinitum, they may have to keep a logical eye on options which only look possible but which contain hidden contradictions.'64

So how can we give a model-theoretic interpretation of these merely apparent possibilities that contain hidden contradictions? While retaining all the essential features of model theory and possible-worlds semantics, Rantala and Hintikka formulate an explanation for the variance of these epistemic worlds. They have construed the models of model theory not to be constant only (as they are in classical model theory), but to change even as we investigate them. Rantala describes certain 'urn models' as examples of such changing models. He borrows the notion of urns from elementary probability theory: 'the world is conceived of as a big box or urn from which we may draw balls (individuals) one by one/ Briefly, the balls or individuals constitute the domain of the model in question. Probability theory sometimes considers the domain to be a changing one. And the domain may not only change its constitution, but change it even as we make successive draws from the box. Hintikka calls these 'invidiously changing worlds/ worlds that change between the steps of our interaction with them. Rantala's urn models allow us to distinguish between two different kinds of inconsistency, two different kinds of impossibility. Rantala explains that, first, 'the inconsistency of a constituent... can be found out by comparing its different parts with each other according to syntactic rules/ Rantala calls this case 'trivial inconsistency/ the inconsistency seen in the structure of the constituent sentence (or set) whose parts dearly contradict one another. Second, we have an inconsistency that cannot be seen from a sentence's structure alone; this case Rantala calls 'non-trivial inconsistency/ This is the kind of inconsistency in which a sentence's 'inconsistency is "hidden" in it and can be brought out only by expanding it into deeper normal forms/ The model looks possible, and therefore must be admitted as an epistemically possible world. As suggested, this kind of inconsistency may arise from either a changing domain or the changing (or partial) state of the language

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user's knowledge. As Hintikka explains about these impossible possible worlds, they 'were calculated to be the ones which a certain person a envisages as being compatible with everything he knows. Their totality depends naturally on his acumen - and on the level of analysis he is practicing.'65 In this model-theoretic explanation, logically impossible worlds find their way into the possible worlds we need to consider in our semantics. Of course, certain figures of speech and types of literature do their best work at the edge of possibility, border-raiding the realm of the impossible. These literary forms thwart readers' expectations and intellectual assumptions again and again, invidiously changing linguistic rules to great effect. Paradox and catachresis, for example, are preferred devices of the religious poet. Antiphrasis and malapropism are well utilized by satirists and humorists. And fantasy and science-fiction writers are particularly adept at creating from 'impossible' plot lines stories that are entirely plausible. A literary artist may speak significantly of 'Darkness visible,' call a murderer 'an honourable man/ or turn the 'nonsense' of Carroll's 'All Mimsy Were the Borogoves' into a highly compelling science-fiction narrative. Stalnaker further expands the way impossible worlds may appear in our semantic theory by treating the kinds of belief states associated with these epistemic worlds. Whereas in the Rantala-Hintikka analysis 'impossible possible worlds' are epistemically possible in accordance with what a person genuinely knows or believes, Stalnaker defines a broader prepositional attitude he calls 'acceptance.' Acceptance may simply treat something as if it were true in one context - 'to ignore for the moment, at least, the possibility that it is false' - which we might think false, or suspend judgment on, in another context. Stalnaker explains that we adopt this kind of outlook all the time in our acts of assuming, supposing, postulating, etc. Talk of acceptance, suspended judgments, and the shifting cognitive contexts of supposing, of course, adds suppleness to Coleridge's familiar notion of a willing suspension of disbelief. Weaker than either knowledge or belief, acceptance particularly accompanies acts of communication for which we accept certain information as true merely to aid our understanding or pursue a discussion. Stalnaker furthermore posits for acceptance any number of compartmentalizable belief states. Our thoughts, he continues, need not be capable of synthesis into one grand and coherent system. While such an ideal may be preferred, agents in this account of prepositional attitudes may hold a number of concurrent yet incompatible belief states. Not only because time, context, and the information available to

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us may change, but also because our very knowledge-seeking strategies will usually splinter in a number of divergent directions (running up blind alleys and following false leads), these epistemic activities are best 'represented by separate spaces of possibilities.'66 Moreover, such separate spaces of possibility in epistemic contexts may also be opened up by the relationship between propositions and their expressions in a language. Stalnaker addresses the dynamic possible worlds in the fluctuating common ground between language users. Working in the traditions of Peirce and Ingarden, Eco treats essentially the same principle in the act of reading literary texts. Readers, Eco says, encounter such texts as 'linear manifestations/ They come to an understanding of the whole only after working with, and comparing back and forth, smaller parts: 'in a verbal text, the linear and temporally ordered (step by step) scanning makes a global analysis of the whole text more difficult - as it requires the interplay of long and short-term memory.' Readers may complete such a global analysis only in later stages of reading, but only then would grasp the impossibility of seemingly possible literary worlds. Eco concludes his discussion of this principle by contrasting two different literary examples of impossible possible worlds: 'Self-disclosing metafiction shows how impossible worlds are impossible. SF, on the contrary, sets up impossible worlds that give the illusion of being conceivable.'67 Related Theories of Possibility There are other theories of possibility besides possible-worlds semantics. As I move towards the end of the chapter, I wish to show briefly how as a theory of meaning possible-worlds semantics captures important aspects of these other theories, providing a comprehensive semantic framework for possibility. Alternative theories of possibility tend to fall into three categories: object theories, situation theories, and event theories. One of the most prominent philosophers of possible objects is Alexius Meinong,68 nineteen years Russell's elder. According to Meinong, everything, without exception, is a potential object. He states that any combination of properties can be affirmed of objects. All sorts of objects may not exist but yet are entirely conceivable. We can talk of, for example, a golden mountain, though none is found in the world. While the principle sounds innocuous, Meinong states that even contradictory properties may be affirmed of these objects. For example, in his

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group of conceivable objects he expressly includes the round square. The underlying reason for such conceivable-cum-contradictory objects: every mental phenomenon is directed towards an object. Like his teacher Brentano before him, Meinong maintains that all mental phenomena are explained by these objects - not, interestingly, the objects by those mental phenomena. Whatever we think, any process we call mental, even the contradictory, is directed towards and bound up in these objects - even if the objects make no sense. Meinong's theory of objects, this unwieldy growth overrunning his ontology, has been aptly named 'Meinong's Jungle.' An object in our ontological inventory for every absurd intimation from our language? Therein lies the problem for Russell. Russell responds to Meinong's Jungle in this manner: 'It is contended, for example, that the existent present King of France exists, and also does not exist: that the round square is round, and also not round, etc. But this is intolerable/69 Russell argues we cannot possibly fill the world with objects - existent or non-existent - for every act of mind or language. Any theory that can avoid these consequences, he insists, is to be preferred. Russell unfortunately reacts against Meinong's extreme possibilism by preferring a realism of the actual world alone. In relation to both figures, possible-worlds semantics, like Meinong, admits all types of non-existent objects into its theory of meaning, not just those that happen to exist. But, unlike Meinong, possible-worlds semantics recognizes the relations those objects bear to one another, with objects quantified in their respective possible worlds. These relations constitute restrictions on possible worlds and their objects, though in epistemic contexts those restrictions are violable in the cases of nontrivial contradictions and broadly defined acceptance conditions, including literary paradox and science fiction, as we saw above. Carefully preserved in logical positivism, Russell's reaction to Meinong dominated philosophy till around the 1960s, when possible-worlds semantics was introduced. Since that time theories of possibility other than possible-worlds semantics have also been advanced. Here we find the 'situation semantics' of Barwise and Perry, the non-standard event theories of Rescher and Brandom, and the 'possible individuals' of Parsons's update to Meinongian possibilism.70 While the exposition of these is far beyond the bounds of this study, we can see how a possibleworlds semantics - again, as a theory of meaning - captures aspects of each. Barwise and Perry claim to pursue a more dynamic semantics of

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situations that can handle increments, discontinuity, motion, time, and causation. While their entrance into the discussion has proven stimulating, at best their contention that situations are distinct from possible worlds is spurious.71 As Partee argues, 'I think the broad notion of possible worlds, as alternative ways things might have been, is as fundamental in thinking about alternative possible courses of "local" events as in thinking about alternative possible global histories.'72 She thus considers situations to be analogous to the individuals or events of model-theoretic semantics rather than to possible worlds. At its worst, situation semantics insists on situations not only as primitives of its theory, but takes them as real constituents of the world (not as abstract entities). Because of this fixed ontological stance, situation semantics has difficulty accounting for the individuals that comprise situations, fantasy variations of actual things, relations that connect individuals with larger patterns, and worlds that appear on a larger scale.73 Interpreted as real things in the world, the situations of Barwise and Perry are not ultimately amenable to a metatheoretic framework. A common criticism against Barwise and Perry is that they conceive of possible-worlds semantics only as a theory of grand metaphysical worlds as one might find in Leibniz. So their point of departure - as well as their sense of the project's distinctiveness - is flawed. As we have seen in Hintikka, Stalnaker, and Partee, possible worlds may be nothing more than 'small worlds.' In fact, based on Hintikka's idea of possible worlds as small worlds, Eco has developed a theory of worldmatrices that provides a means of handling multiple states of affairs in literary contexts. World-matrices, according to Eco, 'provide the possibility to compare different states of affairs under a certain description and make clear whether they can be mutually accessible or not and in which way they differ.'74 This handling different states of affairs and the statements in which they are expressed simply spells out the implications of model theory for literature. In this same manner, we have Ryan's typology of literature based on the accessibility relations among worlds.75 What about events? Rescher and Brandom have developed nonstandard possible-worlds treatments of events. While a detailed analysis of their arguments cannot be pursued here, I point out only two key features: their theory of possibility is directed towards ontological possibility and ontological inconsistency. Rescher and Brandom straightforwardly claim, 'our concern is with hard, existential inconsistency.'761 have discussed non-standard models in the above section on logical

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omniscience. I see no way to exceed the kind of non-standard models discussed there - despite Rescher and Brandom's best efforts - introducing inconsistency any further without losing the entire game to absurdity. Nevertheless, I have at present no wish to short-circuit the ongoing discussion of non-standard possible worlds. Theorists are yet a long way from settling the issues.77 As possible-worlds semantics stands in the 2000s, I think that events, individuals, and changes are sufficiently accounted for without taking such a step. Stalnaker argues that possible worlds is the primary framework for making sense of any linguistic or mental phenomena no matter how they divide the space of possibility: 'when possible worlds semantics is used to explain predication and quantification, possible worlds will be assumed to have domains of individuals. Where tenses and temporal modifiers are in the language being interpreted, the possible worlds will be assumed to have a temporal structure. For other purposes, possible worlds might be assumed to be populated by events, facts, or processes, to be related by relations of similarity, or characterized by property spaces/78 Parsons's theory of possible individuals therefore seems to make the same mistake as situation semantics, taking as the primitives of its theory something other than possible worlds. Because individuals in his theory are not quantified in their various possible worlds, larger connections are not readily analysable. A corollary problem is the difficulty of designating individuals without a host of context-related criteria on this larger scale. So instead of talking about individuals in themselves, possible-worlds semantics is concerned with individuating functions. From this higher level of abstraction, we attain the semantic viewpoint from which to derive a variety of conceptual and ontological differences. Hintikka treats possible-worlds semantics as a theoretic means to account for the principles of individuation (individuating functions) among those differences. A subclass of all individual concepts, individuating functions determine what constitutes the individuals of our semantics. Individuating functions can even account for the differences between a discrete and a relational ontology.79 Neither individuals, individual concepts, nor situations will suffice to produce an adequate semantics to account for such fundamental differences. For all of the above reasons, possible-worlds semantics is, in the words of Stalnaker, 'a framework which provides for substantive semantic analysis, but which remains neutral on questions about the nature of possible worlds, and on general questions about the nature of the relation between

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language and the world/80 It operates at a level abstract enough to handle the differences subsumable under each of these concerns. A Qualified Theory of Possible Worlds for Literature In light of the above arguments, I move towards a conclusion about the nature of possible worlds required for a robust theory of meaning - the kind of theory we need to read all manner of literary texts - summarizing my position as follows. While I take certain liberties in this outline, I would identify the following three attitudes as central to my presentation and, accordingly, to my practice of reading literature: 1. Linguistic Meinongianism. By this label I mean not that all mental processes are directed towards objects, as Meinong believes, nor quite that all linguistic phenomena are directed towards objects. I dismiss Meinong's principle of simple reference (as I did Russell's). Instead, I am concerned here with how meaning functions interact between lexical semantics and model-theoretic semantics. I treat lexical semantics in more detail in the next chapter, but for now let me introduce the idea by saying simply that linguistic possibility is greater than logical possibility. As a medium, language can 'talk' about all sorts of objects, even impossible objects ('round squares'), even though we may lack the semantic means to model them. (When I say 'medium/ I mean one of many media, not a sole and inescapable linguistic medium.) The tritest example of linguistic impossibility, of course, is that we can use language to express contradictions (p & ~p). Other media, especially artistic media, manifest this same ability. Magritte is notorious for creating such conundrums in his paintings. The ability to create contradictions or conflicting expressions in a medium does not necessarily overpopulate our ontology with such entities. These expressions - and why they are sometimes logical dead ends and sometimes imaginative beginnings - can be explained as follows: if possible-worlds semantics can account for lexical semantics by, among other things, explaining the meanings of noun phrases in terms of the individuals they name across separate scenarios, then there is no reason why contradictions cannot be given a similarly linguistic/lexical analysis, as in the case of metaphors (next chapter) and even paradoxes. Noun phrases may be connected with other noun phrases by virtue of these meaning

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lines - let's call them in this case '"dotted" meaning lines' connecting the meanings of separate grammatical items - even though no world lines (in the model-theoretic sense) can be drawn. Such 'dotted' meaning lines may be instances of language confused, or they may be instances of language set free to play. As readers we ask ourselves what semantic games are being played with them. Lexical expressions, in this way, reach towards the models in which they may be true. Sometimes by means of conflicting expressions creating what Ricoeur calls 'semantical impertinences' - language is able to transform itself to surpass its limitations. This is one way language keeps up with possible worlds. So Meinong's Jungle, in this analysis, turns out to be more the linguistic wildwood. The density of that wood nevertheless suggests worlds, places, and meanings that language ordinarily cannot begin to express, as we shall see in the next chapter on metaphor. 2. Semantic Relativism. This next principle should not be construed as relativism simpliciter nor as cultural or linguistic relativism. By this I simply mean roughly what logicians mean by the term satisfiability. As Hintikka comments on truth and relativity in semantics: 'The basic notion of a semantical theory is normally the notion of truth. In so far as we are not interested in truth under some particular interpretation of logical formulae but rather in the question whether there are any interpretations which make a given set of formulae true (in short, if we are not interested in any one interpretation more than in the others), the basic concept of a semantical theory may also be chosen to be that of satisfiability.'81 According to this semantic principle, Greek mythology is satisfiable, Asimov's Ifnia is satisfiable, and tales of Middle Earth are satisfiable. Myths, fictions, and fantasies may all be satisfiable from the semanticist's viewpoint. Indeed, at the level of story, readers readily access the dominant ontological features of these worlds - who the characters are, what motivations drive them, and in which conflicts they are embroiled. The relationship of mythology to fiction is an interesting one in this regard. As Pavel explains, 'From the internal point of view of fifth-century Athenians, names like Zeus, Aphrodite, or Pallas Athena referred to well-individuated beings, full of interesting properties, beings who intervened in daily lives, who had to be addressed and appeased.'82 What one culture takes as fiction another takes as fact. Really, our statements migrate from one to the

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other all the time. Complicating this modal switch-over further, our acts of reading fiction require us to treat works of fiction as if they were true, though we know them to be fictions. So while today we may not believe in the reality of Zeus, when we read the Iliad we understand him as if he were real, a living participant who thinks, talks, and participates in the story. It thus takes a model structure of many worlds to carry out the work of our semantics. So how does this semantics handle sentences like the following: Hamlet is a prince. Hamlet reads books and watches plays. Hamlet has a mother and father. Hamlet lives in Denmark. Hamlet is irresolute. Hamlet bleeds if you cut him. Hamlet exists.

Theorists committed to a realist one-world semantics would maintain that these statements are false or, at best, the roman-a-clef faces of one real world. The above statements would be false in their reckoning because they fail to refer to any objects in the real world - Hamlet does not live in Denmark. The most these theorists could affirm is that Hamlet is an icon of self-doubt, of the harrowing effects of loss, of the thoughtful person alone in a world out of joint. But we want to insist that Hamlet does live in Denmark, not in France or Italy, but in Denmark. How, then, do we solve this dilemma? I think we solve it in the same way we solve the tense ambiguities in the above and similar sentences, through the semantic assignments of time and place. The truth of the sentence 'Nixon is alive' is, of course, dependent on the time frame it is uttered in. The sentence is false at one time and true at another. The sentence 'Hamlet lives in Denmark' or 'Hamlet bleeds if you cut him' is similarly false in one world frame and true in another: it is false in the world we inhabit and true in the world of Shakespeare's story. Taking into account the specific conventions and semantic frameworks of each literary work, then, a possible-worlds approach allows us to read the texts of literature as if they were true. This interpretation of literature does not end with the formalist readings of texts; it merely starts there. As reader, I ask myself what kinds of beings does the text posit, and in what kind of world. I ask not

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what problem did Shakespeare have with his father to create a father-ghost and uncle-usurper in Hamlet, nor how the power struggles represented in that play reflect the power struggles surrounding the English monarchy. As interesting as answers to these might be - were I able to find them somewhere -1 leave them aside. Opposing the polarization of either a centripetal or centrifugal criticism, a possible-worlds analysis provides the critic with the theoretical basis for examining linguistic form as well as the semantic and pragmatic games associated with it. I therefore can in good philosophical conscience treat each work not merely as text nor as mask on the same old world - the Marxist, Freudian, and so on. Rather, I can treat the work as if it posits an ontological realm. (More on models of reading in the next chapter.) Because there will be many such realms, logical semantics acknowledges a certain pluralism. Thus, this kind of semantics can do only so much for us. It can show the ways our statements place various interpretations on the world. It can help us understand which are satisfiable and which are not. But it cannot show us which are correct. That must come from somewhere else. 3. Hermeneutical Realism. I mean by this that semantic games which move from the 'top down' hold sufficient resources to identify models among language users. Because meaning possibilities are the broadest in the case of unknown languages (with very few, if any, constraints placed on possible worlds), the semantic games determining their meaning functions will be more highly involved. When we talk to intimates, those games are remarkably streamlined (anecdotally, we speak of private 'languages of love' and even cases where severely neglected siblings create their own language). So how in the process of language acquisition do we come to know meaning functions? Because possibilities are related across possible worlds, our activities of seeking and finding may issue in what Hintikka calls a 'model-theoretic deduction.'83 The meaning functions across different languages will, of course, be different, so the process of language learning is not simply that of finding Augustinian correspondences - different clothing for the same clear and distinct ideas. The process of seeking and finding is more a matter of eliminating alternative possibilities, the process of language acquisition a matter of sharing the rules by which we determine them. In both cases, the deduction moves from the top down,

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shaping the space of possibilities through a process of elimination. The underlying idea is that to possess information is to eliminate uncertainty. As we saw in the model-theoretic analysis of propositions, to know a proposition is to know what scenarios it designates, that it designates certain sets and not others. Hintikka makes a compelling case that these semantic games can be sustained even in the case of radical translation.84 However, most of us will never find ourselves in the position of the jungle linguist. As ongoing participants in all manner of semantic games we may occasionally find ourselves in Champollion's position, though, with only a fragment of insight, a Rosetta stone, from which we must derive the meaning of a language. Apart from the jungle linguist and the famed Egyptologist, we are more often than not in a superior position as advanced users of developed languages. Although the world is an open-ended place and the ways it might be are many, language is indeed our adopted means of representing these ways to others. Such has been the argument of the last two chapters. Of course, more needs to be done to develop a semiotics that meticulously details the relations between possible-worlds semantics and lexical semantics. In the 1990s, Eco made significant advances.85 More work remains to be done. In the next chapter, I examine one aspect of that complex relation in the case of metaphor.

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PART THREE Poiesis

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CHAPTER FIVE

From Models to Metaphors; Possibility, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which would otherwise have remained unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists. - Proust All the really good stories are about the difference between what is and what might be. - David Miller

This chapter applies the theory of possibility developed in the preceding chapters specifically to the theory of literature. I shall first examine what a model-theoretic approach has to suggest to the definition of literature, exploring the distinctiveness of literary (as opposed to ordinary) language. Extending the definition of literature, I explore, secondly, the ways a possible-worlds semantics can enhance our understanding of metaphor. I wonder: with all the theorizing in the last few decades concerning the nature of metaphor, can a possible-worlds approach still contribute to the discussion? In response, I argue that advantages accrue from considering metaphor from a possible-worlds perspective. Among these advantages is a theoretical continuity that can be drawn back to the definition of literature, through metaphor, and also forward to the ways in which we read literary texts. Near the end of the chapter, I briefly compare this possible-worlds approach to several precursors in critical history, concluding with some final thoughts on models of reading.

124 Poiesis and Possible Worlds The Critical Heritage

While we have seen that a possible-worlds semantics can enrich literary semantics, literary theorists have scarcely recognized, much less seized upon, the opportunity. Pavel points out that Kripke's paper 'Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic' - the very paper that founds modern modal semantics - refers to a fictional being: 'Sherlock Holmes... doesn't exist, but in other states of affairs he would have existed.'1 If logical semantics develops, in this sense, out of literary semantics, then literary semantics could perhaps profit from the theoretical gains made by logical semantics. Dolezel, Pavel, Ryan, and Eco, among the first major figures to adopt a possible-worlds approach, have each made a genuine contribution to the theory of literature. Most of their work pertains to the issues surrounding fiction and has resulted in an impressive and well-developed theory of fiction and narrative. While progress is certain to continue in this direction, I pursue a different area of application, coming at it with a slightly different set of concerns. But before I enumerate those concerns, let me first stipulate that what I propose does not controvert the work that has been accomplished, even if at times I find reason for disagreement. My effort is to enlarge the range of possible-worlds aesthetics, not quarrel with its practitioners. However, one significant objection I have is to the too close identification of the category 'fiction' with the category 'literature.' MartinezBonati is a case in point. He adopts as 'one of the basic theses' of his book 'that literary discourse is fictive discourse.' He is quite clear about the equation of the two: 'Poetic or (sensu stricto) literary discourse is ... a merely imaginary discourse represented by a conventionally designed pseudo-verbal icon.'2 But in light of other considerations, surely such an understanding goes too far. While one can appreciate the benefits of aligning literature with fiction, too many exceptions come to mind. As Wellek asks, 'Shall one exclude Montaigne, Pascal, Burke, Gibbon, Berkeley, etc., from literature because they do not even pretend to write fiction?'3 Besides this problem of definitional exclusiveness, we still confront the problem of distinguishing fiction from non-fiction - surely a perplexing task for librarians, philosophers, and, indeed, all of us. Is fiction to be understood merely as what is false as opposed to what is true? The problem of pursuing the nature of fiction in this manner has a long and thorny history, to which figures no less distinguished than

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Plato and Sidney have contributed. Nevertheless, leaving the issue aside, we ask whether Wellek offers a definition of literature that avoids the problem of fiction versus fact and that better fits his list of putatively non-fictional works. He advances his own definition in this way: 'these cases do not refute the basic distinction between literature as an art, as fiction, as making/4 But if too many problems accompany the identification of fiction with falsehood, then what improvements follow from Wellek's suggestion that literature is what is created rather than uncreated? Should all art and 'making' be lumped together with fiction? If adopted, one obvious advantage of such a strategy is that any progress made towards the theory of fiction contributes not just to a subcategory of literature, but to its overall understanding. Nevertheless, when we pursue any definition of literature that bases the distinction in something created rather than something received, or in imagination as opposed to historical fact, we inevitably face the next question: how do we distinguish the two? In the same way that Wellek generates a list of exceptions to literature understood as fiction, one could readily generate a list of exceptions to Wellek's definition of literature as making. We are surrounded by things created or even imagined that are non-literary, non-artistic. (Perhaps, too, there may even be things uncreated that could be considered art.) Wellek's solution simply recreates in another form the problem he attempts to solve. How do literary theorists working with possible worlds avoid these problems? I have already suggested that if they identify fiction with literature, they cannot. Once they disentangle the two, how do they then handle the problem of fact versus fiction, for fiction will remain a central concern? Would Ryan, Dolezel, Pavel, or other proponents of a possible-worlds approach subscribe to a naive view of the actual world from which the worlds of fiction are differentiated? Ronen, as she 'deconstructs' the possible-worlds approach to literature, accuses Ryan of having a view in which 'the actual world is an unproblematic and stable reference world.'5 Her charge is easily dispelled by even a cursory reading of Ryan's book: 'For the duration of our immersion in a work of fiction, the realm of possibilities is thus recentred around the sphere which the narrator presents as the actual world. This recentering pushes the reader into a new system of actuality and possibility.' One who clearly states that 'Still greater is our disagreement concerning the inventory of the real world, and the properties of its members' cannot be said to have an unproblematic view of the actual world. Ryan does not relinquish the distinction between possible and actual (as character-

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istic of the post-structuralist turn in literary theory). Ryan rather argues for the 'plurality of systems of reality' idea - each one with its own version of possibility and actuality - as that which grants fiction its space in which to operate. The main point of Ryan's chapter entitled 'Fictional Recentering' is that in the act of reading we freely move among these systems.6 So the simple charge of naive realism is unfounded. Ryan and other possible-worlds theorists have made significant advances in clarifying the nature of fictional worlds. Here, then, are several 'groundings' they have established for fictional worlds: fictional worlds are autonomous in the sense that they display a modal structure parallel to that of the actual world, but fictional worlds are not necessarily completely autonomous because, despite a specific set of formal features that might identify them as 'fiction,' they share, either overtly or through the model directedness of language, many shadow worlds of words. These theorists explain that we have access to the worlds of fic-tion and can variously talk about them, subject them to a variety of interpretations, and even accept them as actual. Fictional worlds seem to be more than metaphorical projections of 'real world' qualities a la Goodman;7 they are not merely psycho-textual bricolage a la Lacan (though Lacan's slippery totalizing makes such an assertion problematic). The main point is that rather than being reductions, possible worlds are expansions. They represent the ways the world might be (or even may be). As such they not only appear in our literature, but are always present in our cognitive mapping and ordinary language, finding their way into our time-related discourse, ethical discourse, scientific discourse, and counterfactual discourse, to name a few. What Do We Mean by Literature? So what is literature, and how does it relate to these fictional worlds? Enlarging upon the work of these possible-worlds theorists, then, I pursue a definition of literature using a model-theoretic, or possibleworlds, semantics. In Hernadi's What Is Literature?, to begin with, a number of contributors explore various prospects for a viable definition. Perhaps the term should be defined by recourse to certain content, or to a distinct aesthetic quality, or to a set of social practices; or perhaps the term should not be connected with an absolute definition at all. We have seen in Martinez-Bonati's work the inherent problems that arise when literature is identified by its specifically fictional content. Similar

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problems beset definitions of literature that locate its essence in distinguishable formal or structural features, shared by every work of literature. Consequently, it is probably prudent to avoid asking whether literature exhibits a certain set of formal characteristics, or whether its content is something that is fabricated as opposed to what is not. For one set of formal features may be succeeded by another, just as one style is succeeded by another - neoclassicism by romanticism, romanticism by realism, and so on. And because the distinction between fiction and fact slides with ontological and epistemological assumptions, any definition of literature that relies solely on such a distinction is fatally vexed. If neither 'form' nor 'content' can distinguish literature, it might seem that literature is too slippery to discuss. One response, of course, is to abandon the category entirely. Another alternative is to look at the social processes of art reception involved in the 'christening' of certain artefacts as literature. An investigation of the institutions that build up around literature not only promises to tell us more about literature than essentialist definitions, but it also causes us to reflect on ourselves as the producers and consumers of literature. However, such an effort presumes that the category of the 'social' is not only better understood than literature; it also assumes that the social is determinate, untinged in any substantial way by the aesthetic. Such analyses would seem doomed to reduce literature to an effect of their own laws and principles, thereby - to borrow a phrase from Sande Cohen - forfeiting the categorical distinctness of literature 'on the blotter of the social/ Furthermore, the absence of absolute logical or scientific evidence makes the choice between the social theories of Durkheim and Marx necessarily rest on aesthetic criteria, as will the choice among the available Marxisms. It appears we have come to need an aesthetic analysis of social theories as much as we need a social theory of aesthetics.8 Yet another option for the definition of literature is to take a cue from Wittgenstein and concentrate on genre, on the family resemblances of the artefacts we have historically called literature. While this pragmatic, almost passive, approach has its own attractions, I think it should probably be reserved as a last resort. The cost of its self-validating component is too high. Literature is defined by dilution into 'a kind of weighted average of the presence of other properties.'9 Having constructed, stuffed, and burned a number of straw men, I shall now argue that a viable candidate for a definition is available. I begin with an observation: in my reading and discussions on this

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subject, I have come to see that the term literature is no more or less slippery than the term art. What I mean is not something circular, i.e., that all literature is an instance of literary art. Krieger has addressed this problem, noting that 'Many theorists of late would argue that it ['What is literature?'] is a question-begging question in that it assumes what must be demonstrated: the existence of an entity which must be established.'10 When I suggest that literature is a kind of art, I take nothing for granted or as self-evident. I shall argue that sufficient evidence is available to show that literature as a phenomenon is readily distinguishable from other linguistic and artistic phenomena. The distinction, I maintain, is not the sole province of literary critics, but the common manner by which most of us separate the literary from the non-literary. From this broad aesthetic starting point - the observation of the close correlation between the terms literature and art - I shall in the next several pages develop a definition wide enough to include a variety of fringe literary forms and yet narrow enough to exclude other art forms as well as other uses of language. The history of the term literature displays certain interesting characteristics that are useful to note at this stage of enquiry. Perceiving its unwieldiness, many theorists have concluded that literature cannot be confined to the category of art. They would disagree with my assessment of the close affinity between the two terms. Wellek, for example, says in his study of the genesis of the term literature that, historically, 'It refers to all kinds of writing, including those of erudite nature, history, theology, philosophy, and even natural science/ As Wellek rightly points out, the notion of literature that 'excludes information or even rhetorical persuasion, didactic argumentation or historical narration, emerged only slowly in the eighteenth century,' that is, only with the rise of what we now call aesthetics. And Williams claims that 'the major shift represented by the modern complex of literature, art, aesthetic, creative and imaginative is a matter of social and cultural history' occurring around that same time. Nevertheless, as Wellek remarks, at least since the time of Cicero, the term literature denotes the idea of 'erudition, literary culture.' And although the term is traditionally identified with literary culture (i.e., paideia or humanitas as well as belles-lettres), Wellek admits that the foremost criterion for a work's inclusion in this group is a certain 'writing of quality.'11 Now, what is at the heart of this criterion: is it that the work displays erudition or is a 'writing of quality'? To sharpen the question we might ask, does the quality of its information or the quality of its expression

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mark it for inclusion in the group? What distinguished those literary' works from their 'low quality' counterparts, works that were presumably equally informative? Dare we say that in the disciplines to which Wellek refers, certain practitioners lifted (and sustained) their language to the level of an art form, so much so that centuries later, when the information they conveyed through their writing no longer has the same consequence it once had, we still study the art of their language? Conversely, where the art of their language is lacking, little chance remains that their works will be called literature. We might consider Hume's writings to be literature, for example, but I doubt we will do the same with Kant's. In other words, even though eighteenth-century poetics typically distinguishes what it calls the 'aesthetic experience' from other experiences, art in the medium of language obviously predates that description. Were it not for Wellek's, Williams's, and others' resistance to identifying literature as a form of art, we should not be surprised by this outcome. Perhaps the eighteenth century is better known for relegating aesthetic experience to its own unique psychological faculty or mental process. Perhaps, too, this is a source of the confusion about the nature of literature. Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Burke, for example, all consign the aesthetic to a certain feeling. Kant also removes aesthetics from the realm of the scientific and theoretical, but does not quite concur that it is a matter of feeling only. He sees the aesthetic response as residing in 'nothing else than the mental state present in the free play of imagination and understanding.'12 In this free interplay, the mind strives to contemplate an object - any object - in an entirely disinterested fashion - unconnected with any ideas of truth or morality. Thus, for Kant, art is a non-cognitive state of mind or feeling, a distinct kind of mental or psychological response. In the case of both the Enlightenment critics and philosophers, aesthetics is subjective rather than objective; its utile is firmly separated from its dulce. My argument is that literature transcends the Enlightenment dichotomy between cognition and aesthetics (Eliot's 'dissociation of thought and sensibility'), both predating and surviving it as the art of language. That literature is the art of language links this with similar discussions. In short, it is the art of language from antiquity to the Renaissance that persists through the Enlightenment and Romantic period to the present. The art of language also places in this category 'literature' the certain works of other cultures. To this extent, it lends support to my earlier thesis that literature shadows the shifty term art.

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As broad as this definition is, the principle it establishes does not make 'literature' a denotational catch-all. We have, at this point, developed only one aspect of the definition. We consider now the definition's constraints. The virtue of a good definition is its power of distinction: the art of language should therefore be distinguishable from other art forms and from ordinary language. If various art forms - painting, sculpture, music, etc. - are distinguished primarily by their media, then what prevents us from doing the same for literature?13 Such a hypothesis would be: 'literature is verbal art' means specifically that any time words can be considered art, there you have an instance of literature. Notice, first of all, that the hypothesis excludes difficult fringe cases such as the performances of a mime or ballet, which are both nonverbal art forms. Let me emphasize the non-verbal nature of these art forms: although they may lend themselves to what Jakobson calls 'intersemiotic translation' (as do many other cultural artefacts, including paintings, cave drawings, codes of dressing, and television commercials), the fact that they can be fruitfully understood as signs and as part of sign systems in general does not make them verbal, that is, a 'language' of words. Words themselves may also be understood by means of a semiotic analysis, but that proves neither that the movements of the dancer nor the brush strokes of the painter are verbal. In these cases, the medium of the art is different. What is unique about the medium of literature is that, informally speaking, it is never unique: unlike the irreplaceable brush stroke of the painter, the words of literature may be widely written, uttered, or otherwise indicated.14 More formally speaking, words operate at a level of abstraction independent of a precise physical incarnation. Unlike many other artistic media, which hold restrictive criteria of what may be considered a valid copy (if there can be one at all), words retain no such restrictions. Although various art forms, such as ballet or mime, may be transliterated into a language of words, they are not principally verbal. The artist in these cases plies a different medium from the verbal artist. Insofar as art signifies, to that extent art is semiotic, or, alternatively, amenable to being understood in that manner. Yet to the literary artist, all media are irrelevant except the words themselves.15 Some theory may emerge that attempts to discover beneath words and other artistic media a central form of expression, but for the present thesis, that does nothing to change the media. While other art forms may shape the space of possibility in their own way, what is unique about literature is

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that it does so through a medium of words. For without words, there is no literature. While words may, in this manner, serves as a primary differentia of literature - distinguishing it from other art forms - they do not exhaustively characterize it as an art form. Obviously, everything that appears in every distinguishable medium is not an art form. Simply stated, not all language is art. But before we explore when distinct media become art, another issue requires attention. Understandably, objections may arise: what do we do with cases in which words appear on the canvas of a painter? I recall a painting where the word RAT appears three times in capital red letters. Is that verbal art? It unquestionably includes words. However, in this case, we see that the words are not the medium of the art; they are the art. Literature differs from all such instances by its repeatability. Literature can be reprinted and otherwise distributed in any number of different typeface styles, colours, and sizes, on any sort of paper; it can be delivered orally or through a variety of electronic means. Such considerations, while they are normally crucial to painting, are irrelevant to literature. This significant feature of literature gives it its performability and distinctiveness. It can be read aloud or acted out: it can be repeated by any language user. The point of this simple illustration, then, is that the abstract verbal character of literature is what distinguishes it from other art forms. Nothing in this principle, however, precludes the fusion of one or more media with the literary medium to create hybrid art forms, things such as collage, opera, film, or multimedia art. So if literature is verbal art, and I have addressed the verbal side of the definition, then how do we handle the other side? In other words, to modify Goodman's familiar question, When do words become art? And what boundaries or criteria do we need to establish in order to answer such a question? First of all, we must desynonymize the word art. Art sometimes refers simply to techne, a skill or characteristic way of carrying out some activity. So, under this definition, we might talk about 'the art of fishing.' The point I wish to make is that art is not techne, though techne may rise to the level of art. Not all skilful writing is art, but some certainly may be. Izaac Walton's book on fishing is art, as an example, raising both the activity and the writing to an art form. A similar case is rhetoric - 'the art of persuasion' - which is also a techne. Rhetoric is primarily a skill, not exclusively an art, and not exclusively verbal. Under its heading we include the rhetoric of magazine advertisements, of political speeches, and of door-to-door sellers. There is

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also a rhetoric of a speaker's non-verbal communications. Beyond these instances, we have the rhetoric of Demosthenes or Churchill - that persuasive skill raised to the level of an art. Although we can establish from these examples that art is not merely a skill, it still remains to define precisely what art is. Before we do that, we must pursue yet one more issue. When we investigate the question 'When do objects become art?' we must give some accounting of hybrid art objects. Hybrid art objects do make the question more difficult to answer. To the extent that we have neither absolute boundaries between media nor undeviating purposes to which objects are put, to that extent no clear-cut criteria will determine what is art and what is not. All sorts of artistic hybrids are not only possible, but also familiar. One might find sculpted paintings, painted statues, musical plays, 'pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,' and so on. The fact is that artistic media display a modal character in the way they manifest themselves. Up to this point in the book, I have discussed modality at the ontological level of literary worlds. Since modality is simply 'the way a thing may be,' in the case of ontology we explored some of the differences between possible and actual. Here we see a modality at the level of the medium of expression, i.e., the 'ways a thing may be expressed.' Although all such modal differences are not difficult to distinguish, they are not always witnessed in a state of purity. They can combine and even play off of each other in a variety of interesting ways.16 Unlike the scientific quest for properly discrete units and their inviolate rules of combination, a modal analysis is more generally concerned with the various ways literary works manifest themselves. The modes of literature, of course, would all be verbal. The question of when language becomes art does not yield itself easily to positivistic enquiry, for much the same reason that a pure syntax of literature has proven next to impossible (the narrowness of Propp's Morphology of the Russian Folktale comes to mind). The question is intertwined with the question of when anything becomes art. Not only do the various artistic media we have discussed become art in a kind of transformational twinkling - at one moment it is paint on a palette, and the next it is art. But in the same way, ordinary objects also may be easily transformed into art - a bicycle seat one moment, Picasso's Bull's Head the next. We have all heard anecdotes like the one about the repairman who leaves his ladder in the art gallery only to return later to find patrons admiring it as a work of art. Likewise, there is conceivably

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no verbal string that could not, somewhere and in some way, be considered art. Such considerations contextualize Danto's definition of art as 'the transfiguration of the commonplace/17 Understood in this way, art is not primarily formal, nor primarily emotive, nor primarily nonfunctional (though it certainly may be each of these to varying degrees). In this transfiguration we shift from the commonplace to its greater representational possibilities. So if literature is verbal art, and if art occurs when a modal transfiguration touches the commonplace, then how does verbal art produce such a transfiguration? A possible-worlds semantics provides some of its most important assistance to us in this regard. The uniqueness of the thesis here is to apply the insights of a possible-worlds semantics to literary language, not as the creation of fictions that stand over and against the 'real world/ but as verbal art characterized by the operation of variable representations across one or more domains. First of all, verbal art is not to be equated with these operations. The mode we call art may be occasioned by any number of things, and its thresholds may shift. But these considerations do nothing to reduce the term to a mere 'honorific/ as some theorists suggest.18 To say about a thing T like it, I like it' is to come nowhere close to describing the phenomena of art as treated here. It is not as if beauty, majesty, terror, and pity could be positivistically stuffed in a single tin called approbation. So, first, verbal art is characterized by the aforementioned operations. Next, how do words become art? The answer: when they move outside of the operations of their commonplace uses. How do they effect such a move? Typically when they vary their means of representation or retain their common means of representation but apply them to alternate domains, or both. Language as calculus applied in this way therefore reconciles two common conceptions of verbal art: the power to expand the expressive power of language and the power to create worlds. We pursue the workings of these representational variations in the next section. An Approach to Metaphor The definition of literature I defend here depends on a certain view of figurative language in general. Even critics as sceptical as de Man see little problem in equating the 'figural potentiality of language with literature itself/19 So what does possible-worlds semantics have to say to the phenomenon we call figurative language? Eco, for one, does not believe that a simple connection can be made: T do not think that

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metaphors outline possible worlds.'20 At the time he wrote that declaration, no article had yet appeared on the subject, this absence apparently confirming his assessment. Since then, however, Hintikka and Sandu have written a suggestive paper on possible worlds and metaphor, and a couple of books have subsequently appeared.21 This section will be concerned with examining the Hintikka-Sandu theory of metaphor in relation to the immediate context of the present theory of literature. Some critical theorists envision all language and all thought as metaphorical (metaphorical in the sense of deviating from alleged truth). Many of these thinkers consider the idea not as a step backwards in our understanding of things, but as a step forwards, towards the acknowledged creativity of language. The first and foremost example is Nietzsche's famous statement: 'What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors ... Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out/22 Strong's commentary on Nietzsche's theory of metaphor speaks of the 'metaphorical basis of life' that links the viewpoints of Nietzsche to those of both Freud and Marx. Each of these thinkers, she observes, conceives in metaphorical activity a 'fetishism/ a kind of high-stakes image-making where images take on a life of their own, far beyond the control of their makers. (The latter two figures especially deploy a superior hermeneutic to manage unruly metaphors, ultimately reading the 'real' or true meanings behind them.) Beyond these theorists, de Man advances perhaps the most insistent literary theory regarding the pervasiveness of metaphor. In his article 'The Epistemology of Metaphor/ he concludes that figurative language exerts both a 'proliferating and disruptive power/ labelling this power 'the disfiguring power of figuration/ Against his assertion of the pervasiveness and disruptiveness of metaphor, however, I shall argue here that all figuration is not disfiguration. Todorov remarks, 'if everything is metaphor, then nothing is/23 Scholars have generated an immense body of material on the subject of metaphor, as Eco surmises: metaphor 'has been the object of philosophical, linguistic, aesthetic, and psychological reflection since the beginning of time/24 And likewise Wayne Booth once quipped that by the year 2000 we would have as many articles on metaphor as we have persons on the planet. Space and time constraints limit the present discussion primarily to Hintikka and Sandu's construction, with a few extensions to specific literary issues. Hintikka and Sandu argue that we should understand metaphor neither in the surface meaning of an utterance, nor in the special uses

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communicators may invent for the meaning of that utterance. Scholars sometimes refer to the first case as a comparison theory of metaphor, in which metaphor is regarded as a 'compressed simile/ In the comparison between two words, one is likened to another. The following sentences reveal the problem with this view: Encyclopedias are like dictionaries. Encyclopedias are like gold mines.25

Both of these sentences state comparisons, but the first is neither a metaphor nor a simile. The first is literally true - as is 'John is like his father" and 'His father is like my father' - while the latter is figuratively true. Because the surface structure of these sentences is the same, theorists cannot base a theory of metaphor on surface structure alone. The second sentence is figurative, unlike the first, because it relies on 'nonstandard meaning.' I will specify the nature of standard and non-standard meaning in a moment. For now I point out that this approach depends on an agreement that standard meaning is being departed from; it does not demand that readers agree as to what that standard meaning is. Like the 'compressed simile' theory, a speech-act theory of metaphor is equally unpromising. In speech-act theory, metaphor becomes a speaker's special use of a sentence in contrast to the sentence's meaning. The speech-act theory fails because a single metaphor can be put to any number of uses, and no discernible pattern arises to serve as a useful definition. A sentence like Today our Dorian Gray is in a brooding mood/ say Hintikka and Sandu, expresses one thing, namely attributing a mood to the person in question, but that attribution is not what the sentence is used for, which is entirely open-ended and may range from the sarcastic or malicious to the entirely benevolent. The meaning of expressions and the uses they serve may have very little in common. Metaphors are neither surface structures nor a special kind of language use, maintain Hintikka and Sandu. Rather, they 'instantiate a special kind of meaning/26 Hintikka and Sandu claim that possible-worlds semantics has long held promise for the development of a lexical semantics (though those promises have yet to be fulfilled). The application is a natural one, they say: 'Consider, for instance, the meaning of a singular noun phrase. According to possible-worlds semantics, its meaning is a function from possible worlds into individuals/27 In other words, noun phrases do

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not signify objects simply by naming or applying descriptive attributes alone, but by designating those objects in the various scenarios in which they may occur. Names, similarly, do not designate the same person in all possible scenarios, and across those scenarios descriptive attributes may vary. How do we discuss whether the names 'Jekyll' and 'Hyde' refer to the same man? And what if the person we call 'Aristotle' is not the one who tutored Alexander? We saw in earlier chapters that in order to answer these types of questions we have to entertain different scenarios. The connections in our language between these individuals in various scenarios or possible worlds can be visualized, Hintikka and Sandu say, as 'meaning lines.' A meaning line occurs in language when 'the world line of a common noun links with each other the classes of individuals to which this common noun is correctly applicable in different possible worlds.' Recall from the last chapter that world lines identify the specific individuals in different worlds or scenarios who are to be regarded as the same. '[M]ore basic than meaning lines/ world lines are independent of the way we draw meaning lines in our language. On that account, meaning lines are a feature of language distinct from, but dependent upon, world lines. Hintikka and Sandu explain further: 'Meaning lines are relative to some particular singular noun phrase. They define which individual the NP [noun phrase] is correctly applied to in the different relevant scenarios ("worlds").'28 In short, meaning lines are linguistic, while world lines are not. This distinction between meaning lines and world lines allows a semantics for literature that can treat both words and worlds. I have argued throughout that some such version of this semantics is necessary for literature, since literature does not refer only to itself or to some absolute realm of ideas or things. This simple either/or should be discredited by this point in the analysis. A full theory of metaphor requires a semantics that can account for the interrelations of words and worlds. So how do we draw meaning lines? Hintikka and Sandu reinvigorate the critical discussion of image formation in language: The republic of language is a free country; there are no restrictions as to how meaning lines might be drawn.'29 This statement defies the new historicists' claim that a causal chain binds language and social phenomena, as well as the Marxist critics' belief that a linguistic superstructure arises only out of material conditions or 'political unconscious/ And while there is nothing here to preclude a social analysis of the dynamics of reception surrounding the text (see chapter 4 on the dynamics of common ground),

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that analysis would not reduce the meaning of texts to those social dynamics, but would naturally complement the semantic analysis as a means of reckoning the conventions and semantic games that establish meaning lines. Therefore, the distinction between a view of language as calculus and language as universal medium shows its importance well beyond the bounds of semantic prolegomena; which side of the distinction we stand on will make all the difference in our understanding of metaphor. Are our metaphors inescapable? Do they serve as a controlling medium of cultural exchange, erected by power structures as a means of domination, projecting and constituting the inevitable verbal text we all inhabit? A view of language as calculus resists the limitations implied by such questions. We have already seen how Pavel argues that the mobility of conventions implies strong choice. Language as calculus is about a wide range of choices open to the users of language, and especially to the artists of language. In his exposition of Hintikka's treatment of the cubists, Kusch states: 'where the cubist insists on being free to choose his own system of signs and the ways they represent[,]... possible-worlds semantics ... is built upon, or includes, model theoretical ideas, i.e., ideas allowing for the systematic variation of meaning relations.'30 This variation of meaning relations is nowhere more evident than in the case of metaphor. Hintikka and Sandu's first treatment of metaphor derives from the ways philosophers draw world lines. World lines, as we saw in the previous chapter, are drawn on the basis of continuity and similarity. Although meaning lines may be of other types than these two kinds of world lines, Hintikka and Sandu utilize this distinction to introduce their thesis regarding the nature of metaphor: 'Metaphoric meaning is nonliteral meaning which utilizes meaning lines drawn by similarity in contradistinction to meaning lines based on other considerations, such as continuity.'31 The simple sentence 'John is a lion' is a case where the meaning line is drawn on the basis of a similarity of fearlessness or other lion-like qualities (obviously not because of any contiguity of nature). Various objections - that meaning lines may point in a number of directions simultaneously, that context may or may not place restraints on that number, and that reader or author may not be fully aware of either - fail to controvert this theory of metaphor. A more complex example is seen when Margaret Widdemer calls death 'The Dark Cavalier/ which invokes a similarity between death and the registers of meaning surrounding the tradition of chivalrous love. Down the course of that meaning line flows enough information

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to, in a sense, bring death to life, i.e., to 'personify' an otherwise abstract idea as a mysterious Cavalier. Obviously the richness of the metaphor will depend upon one's familiarity with chivalrous love, but the meaning line is what establishes that charged connection. The metaphor, in this case, also establishes an ambivalence between the Cavalier's potential for evil and his potential for good, a source of both excitement and action. The meaning-lines analysis can account for the similarity conditions in the case of both metaphors, the simpler and the more complex. These two examples of meaning lines are drawn on the basis of similarity conditions, but meaning lines are not always clearly of one sort or another, as Hintikka and Sandu explain: "This reliance of metaphoric meaning on similarity considerations need not be absolute, but only relative ... What also happens typically is that out of the multitude of interrelated criteria for the applicability of a word, a small number is chosen, which are then used as the basis of similarity considerations.'32 In the metaphor 'John is a lion' there is obviously no continuity - no metonymic connection - between 'John' and 'lion.' The similarity considerations might include such things as courage, undauntability, even aggression, depending on the restraints, if any, that context places on the similarity. There is no reason why, in the proper context, 'John is a lion' could not merely refer to John's appearance, perhaps to a thick mane of hair and a broad neck and shoulders. While such meaning lines are based in similarity considerations, not all meaning lines are. In fact, how they are drawn may not be apparent from the metaphor at all. This theory of metaphor allows Hintikka and Sandu to distinguish between metaphor and metonymy. While metaphor is comprised of meaning lines based on similarity, metonymy is comprised of meaning lines drawn on the basis of contiguity. They observe that 'metonymy will normally be a more matter-of-fact linguistic device than metaphor,' as illustrated by 'The Golden State.'33 Many believe the epithet refers to California's famous Gold Rush. Were the epithet connected with the state's history in this way (i.e., by contiguity), it would clearly be a case of metonymy. However, suppose the name 'Golden State' refers to the state's vegetation, which is golden-brown in the summer because of the lack of rain. In that case, the term is a metaphor and not a metonymy. Be that as it may, Hintikka and Sandu do not overcommit their theory to Jakobson's metonymic/metaphoric distinction; they see the distinction as one of the many ways in which meaning lines can be applied to understand non-standard language. The example also illus-

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trates that for any one instance of figuration, the distinction between metaphor and metonymy need not be absolute, but may be conditioned by expanding rings of context (personal, linguistic, literary, and cultural). Sometimes meaning lines mark similarity, sometimes contiguity, and at other times identification and reidentification. These latter cases 'extend the applicability of a word or phrase to new entities in a new part of one of the same world (possibly to a new "situation" in that world rather than to an entity in an altogether different world).'34 To remark of a person 'He is a real Einstein' is to indicate something of the person's mathematical or scientific talents. Because these lines identify objects or descriptive predicates across different scenarios, they are more properly called world lines, or better still, metaphorical world lines. Within a sentence these metaphorical world lines can be used to identify the individual in question; then the sentence may proceed to relate something literal about that individual: "That Einstein is going to be the last one picked when it comes time for afternoon basketball.' Outside of the sentence, at the broader levels of discourse, metaphorical world lines may even suggest a typology of fictional worlds.35 Metaphorical world lines and meaning lines correlate with Lakoff and Johnson's classic formulation: "The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another.'36 What is known need not be absolute Platonic truth - often the foil for those who contend that all language is metaphor. Hintikka and Sandu observe: To call someone, metaphorically, "a veritable Einstein," is not necessarily to compare him or her faithfully with the actual Albert Einstein, but more likely to assimilate him or her to people's image of the absentminded mathematician.'37 Notice, too, that even though metaphorical image-making can sometimes take on a life of its own and even influence the way people think, it does not necessarily trap all human thought within its confines. Otherwise, how could anyone change those images, and how can we so easily sort through competing images? A brief example proves this point. Louis Montrose speaks of the 'implacable code,' and Derrida argues that a sign holds within it all the traces of past elements and is hollowed out by all its future elements. Nevertheless, examples abound where we distinguish between different meanings of signs without going in the direction of either Montrose or Derrida. To take one, the sign 'Arthur' subsumes a great variety of legends and tales, but they need not coalesce into one big heterogeneous image, nor deconstruct in the disseminating forces of language. What we usually do in a case like

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this is apply these various deeds and traits to different persons. Otherwise, we would generate all sorts of anomalous results. Johnson characterizes a similar semantic problem in Rasselas: '"Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right, but, imputed to man, they may both be true/"38 Impute conflicting properties either to propositional attitudes or separate objects, and the problems disappear. Assign all these properties to language, and the result is full of contradictions - if language speaks man, and not man language, then that monstrous entity doing all the talking is making quite a mess of it. Rather, instead of speaking of a single signif ier hollowed out by all of its possible traces, we typically sort out the various persons, historical and fictional, of which these things might be true. In this case, we can distinguish between the historical Arthur and the Arthur of the legends, and we can distinguish further between the different Arthurs of the different legends, or alternately we can see any of these various combinations applying to one and the same person. Is Malory's Arthur an extension of Geoffrey's Arthur? And how about White's Arthur? We are clearly, in this case, not beholden to a single signifier or image, nor are we devoid of a meaningful signifier. From our possible-worlds theory, we recognize that while language simultaneously abstracts and particularizes, it does so across a space of models. Moreover, the partial (or flawed) state of the evidence pertaining to which is the 'true' historical person does not overthrow the rneaningfulness of those models, nor the modal difference between historical and fictional, nor yet the semiotic differences among many signifiers. Rather, we sort out the signifier and its various attributes in accordance with the objects, whether historical or fictional, they apply to. Then we test to see if we are right. The same holds true for the image of Einstein. We easily distinguish between the pop image of the Einstein in poster and cartoon lore, and the image of Einstein as the serious physicist who also wrote on ethics and world affairs. If we are wrong about him, we will amend our views; but we won't discard the distinction between reality and fiction as problematic. Hintikka and Sandu fundamentally disagree with those who claim that all language is metaphorical: 'there cannot be metaphoric meaning alone, independently of the literal use of language.' Metaphor, they contend, is always moored to literal meaning. In other words, the meaning lines we draw in language are anchored either to the speaker's own world or to non-actual worlds. The latter may, paradoxically, offer a surer semantic footing than the speaker's world: 'Whenever some

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other world, for instance, the imaginary world of a famous work of fiction, is known well to the reader or hearer it can serve as the mooring-post of metaphorical meaning quite as well as the real one.'39 We might instructively say of some person that he is 'a prepossessed Hamlet/ 'a reckless Mr. Toad/ or 'a punctilious Bartelby.' The firmness of fictional/figural moorings is, I think, a point often made in modern and postmodern literature - not that literary creations are utterly unknowable, but that they are eminently more knowable than our own enigmatic lives. In Pirandello's Six Characters, the character 'Father' in a mise en abime lectures to his audience: 'Can't you see this is a miracle of reality, that is born, brought to life, lured here, reproduced, just for the sake of this scene, with more right to be alive here than you have? Perhaps it has more truth than you have yourselves.'40 Hintikka and Sandu's possible-worlds account of metaphor provides the theoretical framework for the way mooring posts may be more firmly placed in literary or non-actual worlds than in the actual. They even admit, 'one might go so far as to claim that a typical metaphor is moored to a "world" different from the actual one.'41 To confirm that literary worlds may become more real than the primary world of one's experience, we need not look only to Don Quixote, but also to our own world where a few Trekkies and Tolkienites walk among us dressed as Star Fleet officers and cloaked magicians. Reading metaphor thus requires a certain power of distinction and creativity. Hintikka and Sandu discuss the nature of this creativity: 'the hearer or reader must be able to imagine a variety of possible nonstandard ways of drawing meaning lines from which the metaphoric one is chosen. This presupposes greater sensitivity to different possible uses of language.'42 The reader must therefore participate in the creative process: a form of poiesis attends reading as well as writing. Reading figurative language enriches our sense of the possible uses of language and the world. Consider Updike's meditative description of rain on a window: 'Its panes were strewn with drops that as if by amoebic decision would abruptly merge and break and jerkily run downward, and the window screen, like a sampler half-stitched, or a crossword puzzle invisibly solved, was inlaid erratically with minute, translucent tesserae of rain.'43 With uncommon perception, Updike offers the beauty of these several figures which, lined up, converge in a significatory pattern as do those drops - in a single, figurative mosaic. Sampler, crossword, tesserae, all superimposed set in relief the verbal picture; as they come together in the extended figurative expression, they create a

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single pattern, something new, something not before there. We read poets and story tellers again and again because they offer this same kind of insight that emerges from their verbal creations. These are the insights not readily available to ordinary language. As Aristotle says, 'from metaphor ... we can best get hold of something fresh.'44 Ted Cohen similarly characterizes metaphor's creative ability to go beyond standard meanings and into the new and unexpressed when he speaks of 'language's intrinsic capacity to surpass its own (putative) limits. It is the abiding device for saying something truly new - but something curiously new of it is made out of already existent meanings.'45 Metaphor serves both heuristic and aesthetic functions, and therefore possible-worlds theory vindicates a very old understanding of figurative language. Metaphor simultaneously reinforces our literal sense of language by consciously deviating from it: metaphor forces a fresh look at the world by casting a new form of expression through a semantic impertinence. Recasting metaphor in the model-theoretic framework, possible-worlds theory can account for accepted views on the phenomenon of metaphor and its epistemological value. Metaphor as Epistemology How does metaphor surpass its limits to talk about old things in a new way or entirely new things and places altogether? It is a common experience to finish reading a literary work and feel as though we have actually experienced the story and know the characters. Is this observation itself metaphorical, something we put on posters in public libraries to gull our children into reading, or is there something theoretically significant to it? I think the answer is already implicit in what we have discussed. Literature works by managing fields of possibility, creatively drawing world lines and meaning lines. Literature calls on a base set of readers' linguistic practices and known assumptions, and it conveys information about things unknown. What these readers know at the outset may not be information about the 'actual' world, but more often than not it is textual, cultural, and fictional. These serve as moorings and provide the work of literature with the materials of creation. Literature in this way goes beyond the familiar to tell us about things we have not known. It surprises and, in turn, causes us to delight or despair, moving just beyond what we know or expect. Literature does not merely reflect social practice or an author's pathology. As has been the argument all along, literature stands as an alternative world, with

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varying degrees of proximity or remoteness from the reader, varing degrees of familiarity or unexpectedness. That such alternative worlds become accessible through language is demonstrated by the fact that critics and readers of all stripes can be found talking about Hamlet's motivation, about whether Claudius thinks Hamlet knows about his fratricide, whether the father's ghost really appears in Gertrude's bedroom, or whether Hamlet has really gone mad. Critics and readers may have no available information to determine how many children Lady Macbeth had, but they do acknowledge that she is a mother, a wife, and a queen; they talk about her ambition, her influence over Macbeth, and her demise. All such talk is to treat the literary work as an alternative world. By what mechanism can literature do this? First of all, we must step out of any view of language that says language refers to this world alone or to itself alone. How can language talk about other possible states of affairs? In much the same way we describe the unknown parts of the actual world and the innumerable futures into which it continuously flows. In our ordinary discourse, we meaningfully talk about counterfactual conditionals and future contingencies through available materials from the present or past. When we read a geography book, travel book, or novel, we find that they also describe the unknown in terms of the known. Shakespeare suggests how this feat is accomplished: by giving 'to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name.' In other words, we name a fictional character - 'Call me Ishmael' - and then we place him or her in a well-rendered setting. We attribute character qualities to this person as well as actions and motivations. The person becomes part of a course of events, typically involving other persons. We encounter him or her in much the same way we encounter historical personages in the writings of Plato, de Tocqueville, or Toynbee. Metaphor thus serves an important analogical function. All metaphor - perhaps, all figurative language - is analogical, that is, it allows us to build up a knowledge of a similar thing or situation, either less well known or even unknown. It posits the separate existence of this thing or situation, understanding it as an object or event (i.e., objectifying it), and then with that object or event opens up a concourse of possible attributes that are carefully chosen from successive figurative and literal statements and that ultimately fill out the object or event. Shakespeare provides some fascinating examples of metaphor that creates new characters and shapes fictional worlds. In The Tempest,

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Trinculo and Caliban are thrown together under a gaberdine during a storm, their legs protruding on both sides. Inebriated, Stephano later stumbles on this strange sight and thinks it a horrible monster. A new creature comes into being - from the metaphoric parentage of a jester and a 'real' monster (itself a metaphoric creation) - until both characters re-emerge from under the cover and assume their original identities. Besides creating new characters, Shakespeare also uses a kind of metaphor to signal and shape events in his fictional worlds. Often he does this by taking an ordinary bit of action and conferring upon it some greater meaning, providing his audiences access to a play's wider issues. These smaller pictures of the play frequently appear at the beginning of the play, providing not only a key for the audience to understand the wider dimensions of the play, but also showing that the characters themselves are capable of understanding what is happening in their world - if they could just learn to read aright. At the beginning of King Lear, Kent comes back from Lear's throne room, befuddled as to how a ruler can blindly make bad choices when it comes to his own children, even in the face of the strongest advice from the most trusted of sources. Then Kent proceeds to make the very same mistake - all the while he blindly denounces the king for doing the same thing. The scene becomes metaphorical in the sense that it creates these greater representational possibilities. Similarly, at the outset of Othello, the Moor resolves an unfounded charge against his own good name in a public trial that impartially looks at all the pertinent evidence. He later neglects to do the same for Desdemona when he accepts a mere handkerchief as sufficient proof of her guilt, depriving her not only of her good name, but also her life. Such examples of metaphoric creation could be compounded without end. In the process of showing us one thing in terms of another, and by creating some new thing along the way, metaphor teaches. The information it begins with need not be some part of the real world to be instructive (as we leave the theatre and face our own personal dramas). With conviction, then, of the cognitive value of metaphor, I conclude this section with a metaphor. If metaphor is an instance of drawing non-standard meaning lines, then metaphors can be usefully pictured as semantic lightning rods: the linguistic convergences at which unexpected meaning flashes from more than one direction. For example, when Shakespeare's Richard II says, in an existentially disruptive moment, 'Ay, no, no ay,' the meanings of affirmation and negation, of despair, of madness, of non-existence, of self-knowledge, and the bitter

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impossibility of self-knowledge, all come crashing into the single utterance. Shakespeare's chiastic formation only adds salience to this idea that non-standard meaning lines converge, bringing together divergent meanings, creating new ones. The Varieties of Literary Theory My all-too-cursory treatment of literature and metaphor is perhaps sufficient to dispute those theories that root literature in fundamentally non-literary principles: psychological experience, social practice, power relations, and other similarly reductive analyses. These different frameworks may be used to examine the work of art with productive results, but the work of art need not be (and cannot be) ultimately reduced to their categories. From these principles, we can assign places to both a descriptive and an evaluative criticism. First of all, does not the literary work, like literary theory itself, relate to its readers the way things either are or might be? Can it not therefore articulate its own categories of meaningfulness, its own terms for a proper understanding? I suspect that a modernist earnestness to distance literature from the history of ideas has caused us to discard the ideas altogether.46 Rantala and Wiesenthal are certainly not alone when they suggest that literature is its own kind of experiment, with a semantic framework not unlike that of science. And if literary theory is to function as a technical metalanguage at all, then it must display more categorical sensitivity, for undoubtedly any reading that confuses a text's preoccupations with its own is guilty of reading against world boundaries, confusing both categorical distinctions and the kinds of worlds associated with them. What happens when critics impose their own categories of meaningfulness? Are some critics guilty of ontological imperialism? Should literary criticism opine only from the Olympian heights of purported certainty, enforcing pre-established ontological commitments and reducing all of literature's statements about love, about transcendence, about 'more things, Horatio,' simply to the play of language, to mere power struggles, or to some other interpretive scheme? New historicists who stipulate the radical otherness of a literary text do not thereby gain licence to translate that text into their own idiom, for example, in those moments when Greenblatt thinks 'Shakespeare is the discourse of power/ or when Schoenfeldt claims that Herbert's praises to God are masturbatory.47 If a text is alien to the new historicists, then

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let the new historicists remain bound to their own world. Or as Wittgenstein admonishes, 'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.'48 Other arts require this same observation of categorical boundaries, and to this extent warrant a descriptive criticism. Can a Polyclitus or Praxiteles be understood by the principles of impressionist art? Or a Braque or Matisse understood by the principles of Renaissance art? In the same way, particular theories of art may be entirely foreign when applied to subjects outside their normal range of applicability. The film director Eisenstein may be best understood through Marxist criticism and Lucas best understood through myth criticism, but it is not so easy to transpose the two. Obviously, we could force a translation of Eisenstein into the vocabulary of myth criticism, as we could also translate Lucas into the terms and issues of a Marxist criticism. As David Miller states, 'What Foucault has to say about nineteenth century French prisons works for Elizabethan prisons, right? Only within the genre "prison."'49 Let us not forget the playful lessons of Crews's The Pooh Perplex and Postmodern Pooh, where the improbabilities of divergent readings are imaginatively and actively illustrated. All such examples confirm that art, as expression, verbal or otherwise, has a right to set the terms of how it will be understood. To this extent, and only to this extent, literature and theory can make assertions not only about the way things are, but also about each other. The importance of a descriptive criticism should not be underestimated. When theoretical and interpretive procrusteanism is exposed for what it is, literature is set free to be what it wants to be. And if the history of literature is any guide, then we do not know what literature yet shall be. Eisenstein can treat class struggle; Lucas can treat fathers, forces, and quests; and a postmodern author can place his loose-leaf pages in a box, sell them as a novel, and explode more than half of everything that has ever been written on the theory of the novel. After tomorrow, who knows what? Literary art can both be about whatever it wants to be about and take whatever form it wants to take. It is for this reason that I see an inverse relationship between the possibility of literary theory and the possibility of literature. At the same time, I am at odds with the 'Against Theory' movement sparked by the pragmatic assertions of Knapp and Michaels, and also in disagreement with de Man's sceptical statements about the status of theory, claiming that 'resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language.'50 The open approach I am suggesting here is neither

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pragmatic nor deconstructive. Nor is it a universal metalanguage in the sense of (6) and (7) in chapter 3 (see page 67). I suggested there that a one-world semantics will construe anything other than an invariable correspondence between word and thing as constituting linguistic indeterminacy. Michaels, Knapp, and de Man replicate this move as they escape from a supposedly prescriptive, rigid, and referential poetics. A remaining option is to develop a plurality of localized theories that cover different kinds of literatures in the same way that petit narratives replace grand narratives in historical studies. Disenchanted either with the other options or by default, literary theory seems to be gravitating in this direction, as we hear more and more denunciations of so-called 'high theory.' Not a few practising critics today identify their approach as 'eclectic.' We may see some sense in moving away from centralized theoretical categories for which certain individual literary works pose too many exceptions. I suggest that the shift towards the more localized theories that are sensitive to the categories and uniqueness of individual works is a positive development. To take a step in this direction is to acknowledge one of the most important ideas of a possible-worlds approach to literature: the individual work of literature demands individual attention if it is to be understood, and therefore not all texts should be read alike. At the same time, the literary work is not sui generis, devoid of intertextual connections. Nor should those connections void the distinctiveness of the work itself; much less should those connections be understood in any programmatic fashion. These basic convictions should ground the project of a descriptive literary theory. The approach here equally disputes, on the one hand, any theoretical predisposition that would treat the larger connections of language or literary history as irrelevant, and, on the other hand, the view that literature is fundamentally implicated in a rigid set of social or political relations. In the first two chapters, I refute those who would fall back in the direction of asserting that all signification is hopelessly problematic, or is so thoroughly caught up in ideological processes that it can speak of nothing else. Both internal and external connections are preserved here on the basis of the individuating world lines and meaning lines covered in the previous chapter (and this chapter's sections on metaphor). Those lines specifically provide a theoretical basis for understanding the literary work's accessibility and separability. Literature therefore need not be understood as dependent upon and reducible to external considerations (as in cultural poetics), nor as entirely independent of them, either (as in aesthetic formalism). Because possible-worlds

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semantics fosters a concern for individuating principles and relations of accessibility, theorists can employ these conceptual tools to help analyse separate literary worlds and the connections among them, as well as to pursue their full-scale typology.51 Articulating Possibility in Poetic History How does this possible-worlds-semantics approach to literature square with certain predominant ideas in the history of poetics? The concept of possible worlds can be traced back to Leibniz, at the junction of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Traditional poetics based on mimetic principles declined as the nature it was supposed to reflect became increasingly problematic in the light of scientific advances. As Dolezel shows, one of the first distinct alternatives to traditional poetics came in the time of Leibniz, when Bodmer and Breitinger developed a poetics generally based on Leibniz's notion of possible worlds. These two theorists suggested that the literary work of art, instead of reflecting the way the world is, stands as a way the world might be - in a position of epistemic and ontological alternativeness. Bodmer declares, 'The author in his inflamed fantasy builds new worlds and furnishes them with new inhabitants who are of another nature and follow their own laws.' Breitinger further develops a poetics along these lines, even sketching a semiotics to integrate with it: 'The art of poetry, insofar as it is distinguished from history, almost never borrows its originals and the material of its imitation from the actual world but rather from the world of possible things.'52 Perhaps a strand of this thought could be traced further back, to Aristotle, who says that 'it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity.'53 Aristotle's statement is sufficient to correct Plato's understanding of mimesis as a mere copy of things, 'thrice removed' from the real, but it does little more. Plotinus takes one small step closer to a possible-worlds interpretation of works of art in his statements about how such works correct and even rival nature as expressions of a higher beauty. But it is not really until we reach the Renaissance that the notion of literary works as alternative worlds receives its due. Here we recognize not only the work of Mazzoni, Scaliger, and Spenser, but most notably Sidney, who states that the poet 'lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth

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forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature/54 As I say, that possible-worlds understanding of literature reaches its systematic apex in the work of Bodmer and Breitinger. Bodmer and Breitinger's ideas did not flourish, Dolezel explains, because Western poetics turned towards expressionism in the Romantic period. He continues: 'The concepts of imaginary and possible worlds reemerge only in contemporary poetics, at the moment when the idea of "self-referentiality" revealed its limits/ Dolezel comments on the timeliness of that re-emergence: 'It is no coincidence that at the same time logic and the philosophy of language, transcending the neopositivist restrictions on modal semantics, rediscover the concept of possible worlds/55 We have explored in these pages just how limiting those restrictions can be and how important it is that poetic theory transcend them. Besides the specific role it plays in the history of poetics, this possibleworlds orientation has the unique and unparalleled potential to model a variety of literary productions. A quick trip around Abrams's triangle in The Mirror and the Lamp reveals the scope of its explanatory power. Admittedly, the triangle captures only the dominant trends in poetic theory, but its heuristic value is unquestionable. With these qualifications in mind, let us consider from a possible-worlds perspective the coordinates Abrams posits. On the 'universe' side of the poetic triangle, the literary work is not about this world, but about the way the world might be, that is, any world. The possible-worlds approach therefore circumvents the kinds of problems traditionally associated with mimesis, especially the unproblematic and univocal view of one world or 'nature' (which we saw only a moment ago in the shift to Renaissance poetics). At the same time, a possible-worlds approach retains the largest benefit of a mimetic poetics, namely, an extensional account of literary meaning. At a more formal level, we say that the intensions of literary meaning designate extensions, that they are functions of possible worlds, which would of course not preclude the real world. On the 'author' side we can see that literary artists construct possible worlds, which the audience, in turn, recreates. Here the advantage of a Hintikka-type possible-worlds semantics is most evident in the way it integrates an extensional and an intensional semantics. As we already discussed, the treatment of meaning in terms of possible worlds deals not only with extensions as designated sets among possible worlds, but

150 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

also with intensions as meaning functions that select those extensions. Hintikka's semantics provides a productive theory of intentionality based on the theory of intensions,56 dispelling some of the fog that surrounds discussions of literature and intentionality. Some argue that as a determination of meaning, authorial intentionality fails in cases of multiple and anonymous authorship (this is, for example, one of the famous charges Derrida levels against Searle in Limited, Inc.). How did the Inklings collaborate, or the Bloomsbury group, and how could any of their works have a determinate meaning based on an author's intentions? The technological extreme of authorial collaboration is found in hypertextual, multi-author environments. Are we in danger once again of being lost in the hinterlands of linguistic indeterminacy? For a possible-worlds approach, multiple authorship poses no insurmountable problems because, to simplify the matter, possible events may be designated by more than one person. The thesis bears itself out anecdotally in the above examples, and even more clearly in the case of team-based screenplay writing. On a more theoretical level, this type of possibleworlds semantics provides a basis for such shared and collaboratively determined meaning in its context-dependent language games and the identity of functions. Intentions, including multiply formulated ones, are capable of being deciphered and shared in our language games. On the 'audience' side of the triangle, we see readers recreating the world of the text. As Eco explains, 'Semantic interpretation is the result of the process by which the reader, facing a textual linear manifestation, fills it in with a given meaning.'57 In the process of determining the text's meaning, the reader will orchestrate many models. In fact, the reader may face many of the same possibilities - but perhaps not so many - that the author encountered in writing the text. Moreover, the discussion of collaboration in relation to authors extends most naturally to authors in relation to their readers. Besides what has been said already about that collaborative determination of meaning, we could also look at the ways in which readers engage in this act of recreation. Those ways, which require further comment, are discussed in the section to follow. Overcoming a number of limitations that polarize theories of literature, a possible-worlds approach offers a modelling device that encompasses text, world, author, and reader. And besides the application to the nature of literature and metaphor here, the theory has also been productively applied to fiction, narrative, poetry, and drama.58 Its value has been proven on the theoretical and metatheoretical levels. (I remain

Possibility, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory 15 151

undecided on the merits of a thematic criticism based on possible worlds.) When combined with a robust theory of possibility, this approach captures more of what literature does. Models of Literature, Modes of Reading Far from announcing the reader's death, or the end of all interpretation, this approach offers a way to sort out different kinds of reading and the varieties of meaning. Here may reside its greatest metatheoretic promise. As de Beaugrande suggests: 'In art, having several competing paradigms is not typically judged disturbing and anomalous. The consensus seems rather to be that all manner of paradigms are needed to encompass the concerns of art.'59 Taken in this light, it is best that we not cease generating a variety of readings, including the social, political, historical, psychoanalytical, gender-related, and other strong readings. This is the important role evaluative criticism must play. We should understand such readings properly as alternative frameworks by which we can productively assess a literary work, from which we can place pressure on the work, to see what they illuminate about the text and its wider contexts. All the while, we should realize that our own reading strategies may also be subject to a variety of readings, including a reading from the vantage point of the world of the literary work in question. McColley's reading of postmodern theory from the perspective of Milton's Eve is a fascinating example of such a counterreading. Other readings wait to be written. Why do we value literature and return to it again and again? Often it is that through the work, we can look at another world, another time, place, or culture: in the process we can understand both it and ourselves better. Almost effortlessly, we find ourselves reading literature from both directions. As readers, then, we need to be more aware of where we stand in our acts of reading. If the critical attitude known as 'standpoint theory' does not usually allow one to escape the determinations of race, class, and gender positionings, then how have we escaped here? The answer is in the view of language as calculus. With its theoretical undergirding in place, we can ask ourselves as we read literary texts: What world lines have we observed, and what lines have we drawn as we approach the work? In other words, in what semantic framework do we place it? If we direct our attention to the piece's context itself, we might study the conditions surrounding the work's production; and reception. On the other hand, if we place the work on the psychoanalyst's couch, or

152 Poiesis and Possible Worlds

hunt for conspiracies or other phenomena fixed by our own interests, our findings will be different. As literary theory moves into the future, it must seek broader models of meaning that can characterize the various kinds of literature and reading. Being circumspect readers means having the ability to distinguish the one from the other, without necessarily losing either. Hazlitt says, 'Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be/60

Notes

1. The Paradox of the Many: Post-Structuralism and Zeno 1 2 3 4 5

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 223. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.6. Louis Montrose, 'New Historicisms' 407. Robert N. Watson, 'Teaching "Shakespeare": Theory versus Practice' 141. The two paragraphs in which Schrodinger discusses the cat are as follows: One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts. It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naively accepting as valid a 'blurred model' for representing reality. In itself it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks. (Schrodinger 328) At the level of 'classical reality/ the cat either lives or die& At the level of 'quantum reality/ on the other hand, the atom exists in both possible states

154 Notes to Pages 4-10 at the same time, simultaneously in the decayed and the undecayed states. (For further discussion, see Gribbin's two books In Search of Schrodinger's Cat and his follow-up Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality.) Quantum objects, such as photons, expand in the direction of all their possibilities simultaneously; larger objects of our world, such as the cat, will inhabit their possibilities one at a time. In this example, the cat will live or die, but not both. Schrodinger created this example to demonstrate a rather narrow point, namely, that so-called fuzzy attributes do not apply to objects on the macro level. The example as metaphor should be taken in light of such qualifications. 6 A good place to start into this literature is with Merrell's Semiosis in the Postmodern Age, Dasenbrock's Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, Toulmin's The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and The Theology of Nature, and Griffin's Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Pierce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, and their bibliographies. 7 See references in the previous note. 8 I must confess that I find their ultimate definition of postmodernism and its relationship to post-structuralism something of a puzzle. At one point they classify post-structuralism as 'a subset of a broader range of theoretical, cultural, and social tendencies which constitute postmodern discourse' (25). Several pages later they claim that 'the main focus of post-structuralist theory is on philosophy, cultural theory, or psychoanalysis, and poststructuralist theory does not provide an account of postmodernity or intervene in the postmodern debates' (31). For other political treatments of the term see also Huyssen's 'Critical Theory and Modernity,' Eagleton's 'Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism,' and Jameson's 'Postmodernism and the Consumer Society.' 9 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 37, 81. Charles Newman, The Postmodern Aura. David Lodge, Working with Structuralism 13. For another discourse-related treatment see Macdonell. 10 For aesthetic treatments see Klinkowitz and Trachtenberg. 11 I choose the word semiologic over semiotic principally to distinguish the Saussurean tradition's dyadic (two-place) interpretation of the sign, in which the object plays no role, from the Peircean tradition's triadic (threeplace) interpretation of the sign, in which the object of course does. 121 owe this playful quotation to Mark Wilson. 13 For this strategy of approaching post-structuralism through the one-andmany problem, I am indebted mostly to Spikes. As he says, he follows through on the suggestion from Taylor. The article by Shusterman is also

Notes to Pages 10-11 155 an excellent treatment of these same issues. My purpose in this chapter is to use the paradox as a starting point, then work towards a specific argument against Derrida's notion of the trace, and finally see its alternative in an emerging theory of literature developed from insights in possibleworlds semantics. 14 To get a greater sense of appreciation for this paradox, and to dispel any prejudices about its antiquarian (and hence irrelevant) nature, we may briefly inventory our own century. In his book on Zeno's paradoxes, Salmon points out four twentieth-century philosophers whose ideas directly result from confronting the paradoxes. On the basis of the paradoxes, F.H. Bradley views space and time as hopelessly contradictory, relegating them only to the level of appearance and denying them any status as real. Henri Bergson develops his own unique philosophy in response to them, considering our understanding of time and motion to be merely 'cinematographic,' and representing nothing more than a series of static images in succession. Coming at the paradoxes from the opposite side, favoring dynamism over static existence, Alfred North Whitehead and William James thought that what philosophers consider the stable entities of existence really comprise a more fundamental discontinuity in the temporal processes of becoming. Besides these four thinkers, recent philosophers of mathematics, philosophers of science, and specialists in a surprising number of other areas of enquiry have also added much sophisticated material to the ongoing debate, which seems unlikely to come to an end anytime soon. Zeno's paradox of plurality, then, is no mere mind puzzle, no amusing parlour game contrived by professional philosophers for the sake of professional philosophers. Rather, the paradox thrives and underlies many other philosophical issues as well. Zeno's paradox of plurality is a problem that has always concerned serious thinkers. 15 This statement is a philosophical commonplace, but Taylor specifically makes it in relation to deconstruction (4). 16 For those unfamiliar with the paradox, Achilles and the tortoise compete in a foot race. Achilles, in an obvious gesture of self-confidence, gives the tortoise a head start. After his calculated delay, Achilles begins the race, quickly reaching his superhuman speed. But then as he attempts to overtake the tortoise, he faces a problem. He finds that no matter how hard he tries, he cannot pass the tortoise. Here is the nature of his problem: in order to surpass the tortoise, he must first reach the place where the tortoise was when Achilles started the race. When Achilles reaches this first spot, he has not yet overtaken the tortoise; for during the time that it takes

156 Notes to Pages 11-16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

Achilles to run to this point, the tortoise of course moves ahead a short distance. Since the tortoise still outstrips him, Achilles must traverse the distance between his present location and the tortoise's present location before he can overtake the tortoise. Yet in the time it takes him to go this extra distance, the tortoise has moved ahead a bit more. On and on this process goes: every time Achilles tries to catch up to the tortoise, the tortoise always moves ahead a little more. Even though the distance between them narrows each time Achilles races forward, Achilles can never pass the tortoise. Achilles - the fleet-footed, fastest of mortals - loses the race to the tortoise. Wesley C. Salmon, ed., Zeno's Paradoxes 14. Jorge Luis Borges, Tunes, His Memory' 136. G.E.L. Owen, 'Zeno and the Mathematicians' 140. Plato, Parmenides 148a. Lyotard36. Lyotard40. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author' 146,148. Barthes 147. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 'Rhizome' 50,53. Interestingly enough, the notion that everything is political - as we hear so often from critics who follow the path of Marx, Althusser, Eagleton, and others - takes on new significance in light of this orientation and its subsequent critique. Though we have neither time nor space to pursue a tangent on poststructuralist political theory, it is interesting to see the basis for this observation, not only in the theoretical musings of Deleuze and Guattari, but also those of Derrida. In 'Structure, Sign and Play' he makes a suggestive comment for the politics at work in both the social and psychological realms: "The concept of centered structure - although it represents coherence itself, the condition of the episteme as philosophy or science - is contradictorily coherent. And as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of a desire' (109). Deleuze, Difference and Repetition ixx, 265, 274. Deleuze and Guattari, 'Rhizome' 54. Ferdinand de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics 100,166 (emphasis his). As for reading and misreading Saussure, Dolezel shows that 'Saussure's mereology posits the linguistic sign in two different relationships: "opposition" - the relationship between "positive terms," that is, between signs in their totality, and "difference" - the relationship between 'negative (empty) terms,' that is, between signifiers per se and signifieds

Notes to Pages 17-18

157

per se ... It is ... unfair to Saussure if the ambiguity is resolved by positing only "negative terms" and "difference" and ignoring the existence of "positive terms" and "opposition" in his conceptual system' (Occidental Poetics 115). Dolezel argues that when those who come after Saussure focus their attention on difference alone, they misread him. If Dolezel is right, it is more than a little ironic to see the post-structuralist fascination with misreading as having been spawned from an original act of misreading. 29 So that this exposition of Derrida does not become interminably long, and partly because much of this material is already familiar to an audience of literary theorists and critics, I cite some of his theoretical groundwork in several footnotes. In 'Structure, Sign and Play/ Derrida says this about the dynamics of the center and its surrounding elements: It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the word 'structure' itself are as old as the episteme - that is to say, as old as Western science and Western philosophy - and that their roots thrust deep into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the episteme plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of itself in a metaphorical displacement. ... the entire history of the concept of the structure, before the rupture of which we are speaking, must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center ... The event I called a rupture, the disruption I alluded to at the beginning of this paper, presumably would have come about when the structurality of structure had to begin to be thought, that is to say, repeated, and this is why I said that this disruption was repetition in every sense of the word. Henceforth, it was necessary to think both the law which somehow governed the desire for a center in the constitution of structure, and the process of signification which orders the displacements and substitutions for this law of central presence - but a central presence which has never been itself, has always already been exiled from itself into its own substitute. The substitute does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow existed before it. Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. (109-10) 30 Again, for the sake of economy in the present argument, Derrida's further development of these points is assigned to a note:

158 Notes to Pages 18-21

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

Such a play, differance, is thus no longer simply a concept, but rather the possibility of conceptuality, of a conceptual process and system in general. ('Differance' 11) ... the passage beyond philosophy does not consist in turning the page of philosophy (which usually amounts to philosophizing badly), but in continuing to read philosophers in a certain way. ('Structure, Sign and Play' 117) To 'deconstruct' philosophy, thus, would be to think - in the most faithful, interior way - the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine - from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy - what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid, making itself into a history by means of this somewhere motivated repression. By means of this simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between the inside and the outside of philosophy - that is of the West - there is produced a certain textual work that gives great pleasure. That is, a writing interested in itself which also enables us to read philosophemes - and consequently all the texts of our culture - as kinds of symptoms ... of something that could not be presented in the history of philosophy, and which, moreover, is nowhere present, since all of this concerns putting into question the major determination of the meaning of Being as presence, the determination in which Heidegger recognized the destiny of philosophy. (Positions 6-7) Derrida insists that deconstruction is not just one more philosophy or conceptual system alongside the others. In such passages, Derrida clearly seems the post-Kantian who sees differance as the very precondition of philosophy. (Cf. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason A727ff, where among other things he contends that the 'limits of the concept are never assured' and that 'the completeness of the analysis of my concept is always in doubt.') Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction 94. Derrida, 'Differance' 11. Derrida, Positions 45. Derrida, 'Differance' 13. Cf. Husserl's 'present' as an idealization within 'a continuous succession of intentional relationships - a continuous series of retentions of retentions' (Ideas 78,81. See also his On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time). Derrida, Positions 38. Derrida, 'Differance' 11,12. The apt metaphor is my former professor's, David Miller. Derrida, 'Differance' 11,22.

Notes to Pages 21-30 159 40 Derrida, 'Difference' 17. 41 The upshot is that whether we talk of the spacing between two contestants in a foot race or of the spacing and temporalization of language, the logical problem remains the same. (Refer back to page 12 for Owen's argument along these lines.) 42 Derrida, 'Difference' 17. 43 Derrida, Limited Inc. 137. 44 Plato, Parmenides, 147e. 45 Derrida, Positions 26,26,28,28. 46 Richard Shusterman, 'Organic Unity: Analysis and Deconstruction' 109,110. 47 Whether some strand can be teased out of his writings that would ultimately rescue Derrida - an Ariadnean thread from among his post-Kantian, Nietzschean, Heideggerian, and Saussurean principles (indeed, how those strands can coexist and perhaps be consistently woven together) - is entirely beyond the bounds of this study. On the other hand, one might see the statements of Tony Jackson, who considers the paradoxical arguments of post-structuralists a sign of profundity, not of weakness. 48 It has been especially productive in its application to the dynamics of canon formation, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and the idea of culture as hegemony. 49 Again, refer to page 12. 2. The Paradox of the One: Language as Universal Medium 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Feminism and Critical Theory' 77-8. While the point is only implicit in the quoted passage, later in the essay she explicitly links discourse with the material, which in her view becomes part of a pervasive social text. 2 See, for example, Richard Rorty's 1967 anthology The Linguistic Turn: Recent Essays in Philosophical Method. 3 Jaakko Hintikka, 'Exploring' 53. 4 See Jean Van Heijenoort, Kusch, Hylton, Goldfarb, Cocchiarella, and Haaparanta, as well as Hintikka's 'On the Development of the ModelTheoretic Viewpoint in Logical Theory' and chapter 1 of Investigating Wittgenstein. 5 Hintikka, 'Exploring' 53. 6 See also Martin Kusch's qualifications on the nature of the contrast between these two attitudes towards language (Language as Calculus 8-10). 7 See Van Heijenoort 'Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language,' note 1, for the lineage of Frege's comments as well as of the term lingua characterica.

160 Notes to Pages 31-3 8 See particularly Trege's Hidden Semantics' (1979), 'Semantics: A Revolt Against Frege' (1981), 'Wittgenstein's Semantical Kantianism' (1981), Investigating Wittgenstein (1986), 'On the Development of the ModelTheoretic Viewpoint' (1988), and 'Quine as a Member of the Tradition of the Universality of Language' (1990). 9 Frege seems to take up Trendelenburg's call for a universal language, a 'universal characteristic.' This project Trendelenburg resurrects from Leibniz, who also called for a universal language, but Trendelenburg reinvigorates the project with newer Kantian ideas. What Leibniz and his followers would never succeed in doing is what Trendelenburg suggests could be done if the Kantian distinction between formal and empirical concepts were applied to the project. The universal language would codify the formal concepts and leave aside the empirical. Kant's philosophical analysis gives Trendelenburg and, in turn, Frege a potent new way to complete the project. (See Sluga and Haaparanta.) 10 De Morgan and Schroder are two prominent examples. 11 Van Heijenoort, 'Logic as Calculus' 325. 12 Gottlob Frege, 'Begriffsschrift' 1. 13 Van Heijenoort, 'Logic as Calculus' 325. 14 Some such admissions come from Sluga, who nevertheless defends Frege in this regard: 'Of more significance are Frege's apparent doubts about the possibility of a semantic theory. His conviction that the difference between functions and objects cannot be described in fully legitimate language ([10], p. 54), that terms like "concept," "relation," "function," "object," and even at times the phrase "the reference" are strictly speaking illegitimate ([11], p. 255), that in a perfect language we would not need the word 'true' ([11], p. 252) - all these convictions seem inevitably to lead us to the conclusion that there can never be a semantic theory' (94). Sluga explains that Frege will correct himself later, partly due to the influence of Lowenheim. 15 Hintikka, 'Semantics' 59. 16 George Steiner makes this claim: 'In short, the musical sound, and to a lesser degree the work of art and its reproduction, are beginning to hold a place in literate society once firmly held by the word' ('The Retreat from the Word' 300). Quoting the mathematician Speiser, Steiner argues that while our theorizing about language has led to its calcification, other forms of expression have managed to maintain a freedom: '"By its geometric and later by its purely symbolic construction," says Andreas Speiser, "mathematics shook off the fetters of language ... and mathematics today is more efficient in its sphere of the intellectual world, than the modern languages in their deplorable state or even music are on their respective

Notes to Pages 34-40 161 fronts'" (288). Among other examples that might be adduced, one might also see Hintikka's article on the cubists and phenomenology, 'Concept as Vision.' 17 Frege, 'On Concept and Object' 45. 18 Hintikka, Trege's Hidden Semantics' 721, 722. Hintikka argues that Frege's work on sense and reference, which attracts all the attention of philosophers, is only derivative of his more fundamental work on extensional logic. 19 Russell changed his views later. One of the first indications of the change is seen in his preface to Wittgenstein's Tractatus. 20 Warren D. Goldfarb, 'Logic in the Twenties' 352. 21 Peter Hylton, 'Russell's Substitutionary Theory' 3. 22 Bertrand Russell, Principles of Mathematics 15. 23 Hylton 3. 24 Russell, Principles of Mathematics 41. 25 Here is one example: 'But is language: the only language? Why should there not be a mode of expression through which I can talk about language in such a way that it can appear to me in co-ordination with something else? Suppose that music were such a mode of expression: then it is at any rate characteristic of science that no musical themes can occur in it. I myself write only sentences down here? And why? How is language unique?' (Notebooks 1914-1916, entry for 29 May 1915). 26 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 4.12, 2.182. Cf. 'The limit of language is shown by its being impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to ... a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence' (Culture and Value lOe). 27 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.41, 6.42, 6.421 (emphasis supplied). 28 See Staten and Law for extended comparative analyses of Wittgenstein and Derrida. 29 Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 5.62. 30 Jaakko Hintikka and Merrill B. Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein 21. 31 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 1,125,136. 32 Towards the end of the next chapter, I address this issue with more specificity. For the full development of the idea, see Hintikka's article 'Wittgenstein's Semantical Kantianism.' 33 For Quine, see Richard Shusterman, 'Organic Unity' 108. An example Goodman cites is Don Quixote, who he says exhibits no other logical or linguistic status than being a projection of various qualities that have centralized around that name (Ways 103-5).

162 Notes to Pages 41-6 34 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time Int. 1.1.3. 35 Heidegger, Basic Problems 64. 36 Heidegger, Being and Time Int.I.2.5; Int.I.2.8; 1.4.26.123. 37 Heidegger, Being and Time Int.I.2.5; 1.5.34 (emphasis supplied). 38 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 215. 39 Heidegger, Being and Time Int.II.5.17; Int.II.6.24. 40 Heidegger, 'A Dialogue on Language' 5. 41 Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought 42 (emphasis supplied). 42 Kusch, Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium 207. 43 Howard Pearce reminds me of Heidegger's principle of dimensionality, which may provide a way out of the problems sketched here (see Being and Time 103 and HOff, as well as Pearce's essay 'A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor/ where he highlights and utilizes Heidegger's dimensionality in a specifically literary context). In this connection, I cannot help but recall an anecdote related to me by W.H. Werkmeister. He said that Heidegger slapped his desk and told him (words to the effect that) 'Here is the next book. Sein und Zeit only raised questions about Being. This book answers those questions.' For whatever reason, that book never saw the light of day. 44 See section 4.3 of Kusch's Language as Calculus. 45 Marciszewski, Dictionary of Logic 360. 46 For Greimas, 'Signification is thus nothing but such transposition from one level of language to another, from one language to a different language, and meaning is nothing but the possibility of such transcoding' (Du Sens 13). Consequently, Greimas's structuralist treatment of modality is entirely linguistic. To grossly oversimplify, he analyses modality on the semiotic square - in accordance with its unique syntax - as so many modifications of the semiotically conceived subject. In Greimas's own words, 'the modalizations of being will be considered to be modifications of the status of the object of value. The modalities affecting the object (or rather the value invested therein) will be said to be constituents of the subject of state's modal existence' (On Meaning 143). These modifications merely exemplify further acts of linguistic transcoding. (Besides Du Sens, see also chapters 7, 8, and 10 in the English anthology On Meaning.) 47 Hintikka, Investigating Wittgenstein 10. 48 For someone with an understanding of language as the universal medium, the commitment to formalism may be for an entirely different reason. If the relations of the language establish both the criteria and bounds of meaningfulness, as Hintikka says, 'The rules governing such formulas must then be formulated in purely formal terms' (Hintikka, Investigating 10).

Notes to Pages 46-9 163 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60

As quoted in Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language 149. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 3.33. Leonard Bloomfield, Language 161 (cf. 167). For an extended treatment of Wittgenstein's influence see French, Uehling, and Wettstein. See Attridge, Bennington, and Young's book for a treatment of poststructuralism and the theory of history. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism xii-xiii, 4. Louis Montrose, 'New Historicisms' 406. What Derrida does to Saussure's structuralist linguistics, in effect, is to deconstruct the major binaries of his system, including the distinction between langue and parole. This is of pivotal importance for an understanding of Derrida. I find a precedent for this understanding of linguistic phenomena in Heidegger when he says: 'The existential-ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk' (Being and Time 1.5.34, emphasis in original). For both Heidegger and Derrida, parole is the primary category, of which langue is a kind of fluctuating epiphenomenon. Again, see Attridge, Bennington, and Young in this connection. J. Hillis Miller, 'Presidential Address 1986' 283. Montrose 397. Here is a sample of the kinds of objections made against Tillyard and Bush: Whereas old historicism assumed that 'history' could be recognized and summarized in a stable coherent, collective, and monolithic 'world picture' - Elizabethan patriarchy, Tudor-Stuart ideology, reformed Protestantism - the New Historicism follows Frank Lentricchia in positing any number of histories, each of which is characterized by 'forces of heterogeneity, contradiction, fragmentation, and difference.' (Deneef, Traherne in Dialogue 7) The Elizabethan World Picture appeared in 1943 during a period when many feared for the collapse of western civilisation. The values and ideals believed to underlie Anglo-Saxon institutions appeared threatened and unstable. A rallying point was needed and, for Tillyard, one was found in the golden age of the Elizabethan world. Here was a period when a universally accepted order could be discovered with a resulting social and political stability. (Healy, New Latitudes 7) We need a way of teaching Shakespeare that can connect some plausible version of the original sentiments of the work... with the experiences of most modern students. That need is not answered by making the plays conform to a leveling ideology any more than it was by making them

164 Notes to Pages 49-51

61 62 63 64

conform to a hierarchical chain-of-being ideology. (Watson, Teaching "Shakespeare"' 142) Montrose 410. Montrose 415. Deneef speaks of, for example, 'A rather obvious blind spot [of traditional literary criticism] - the historical situation of Thomas Traherne himself (5). This question of causation creates interesting problems for new historicism. It seems for Montrose that meaning originates both genetically and structurally out of and with these forces. This may seem to be little more than Foucault's notion of the knowledge-power nexus, the equilibrium of which Montrose is eager to preserve. But the way in which Montrose develops his position on this matter may lead to difficulties. He seems to endorse two kinds of causation that new historicists are interested in studying. The first is, of course, the structural kind that, according to Geertz and Greenblatt, is one that produces meaning by providing the very forms and conditions of expression. As Montrose rightly acknowledges, this kind of causation is a synchronic one. As he also realizes, it leads one right into the classic problem of structuralism how can this principle account for change? Since new historicism is a rejection of history in favour of histories, and because history is nothing if it is not change and process, Montrose spends much of the rest of the article attempting to establish this other kind of causation, the diachronic one. He states that 'my own position has been that a closed and static, monolithic and homogeneous notion of ideology must be replaced by one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual' (404). But if we are to formulate a kind of causation that is diachronic, we would have to remove its synchronic qualities; otherwise it would stand as just another form of synchronic causation. A diachronic causative principle would have to be non-synchronic in nature, or, in other words, non-structural. What would serve as possible candidates for this non-structural causative principle? Certainly Jameson's history as 'absent cause' would not, for that absent cause is clearly structural with its set oppositions; indeed, it forms the course of history in much the same way that langue is the absent, yet structural, cause of parole. Apart from Jameson's thesis, other possible candidates for the diachronic causative principle are difficult to envision. Although Montrose wants to open 'cultural poetics to history,' seeing the obvious theoretical perils of refusing to do so, he does not know what form historical causation will take (405). I find that this is most embarrassingly the case when he treats the question of agency. One needs some form

Notes to Pages 51-60 165

65 66 67 68

of historical agency if the synchronic structures are to be dislodged from their carefully coordinated stasis. He locates that agency in the 'multiple, heterogeneous, and even contradictory' imperatives of collective structures (414). These, he says, open up the possibility for the individual to read one structure against the other. Yet conflicting structures cannot constitute agency. Therefore Montrose provides an account of neither agency nor non-synchronic change. Is there perhaps another kind of agency beneath the surface of his essay, one that would confute his commitment to structural causation? Once that problem is overcome, then the old Humean critique of causation must also be answered. (See also Cantor's critique of new historicists' commitment to determinism in 'Stephen Greenblatt's New Historicist Vision.') Jameson, The Prison-House of Language 17. Sandy Petrey, 'Balzac's Empire' 40. Refer to note 65 on the problems of new historicism and a theory of causation. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds 122.

3. Talk of Possible Worlds: Language as Calculus 1 Hintikka observes that 'few members of this tradition even seem to have been aware of having a choice between two contrasting assumptions,' between language as universal medium and an alternative language as calculus ('Quine' 160). 2 Peter Hylton, 'Russell's Substitutionary Theory' 4. 3 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language 32. Cf. Jameson's statements with those of Stanley Fish, who goes so far as to associate the notion of determinate meaning in literature with 'the police state' (7s There a Text in this Class? 337). 4 Sandy Petrey, 'Balzac's Empire' 40. 5 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology 13. 6 See, for example, Helene Cixous, 'Sorties,' and Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One. 7 Thomas Healy, New Latitudes 34.1 choose this passage from Healy only because it exemplifies so clearly what I take to be this widespread understanding, i.e., in terms of the simple binary I am discussing. 8 Neither can language at play ever refer to any real presence, nor can language referring to any real presence ever be at play. Derrida argues: To risk meaning nothing is to start to play, and first to enter into the play of differance which prevents any word, any concept, any major enunciation

166 Notes to Pages 60-73 from coming to summarize and to govern from the theological presence of a center the movement and textual spacing of differences' (Positions 14). 9 Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy 168. 10 Russell, Introduction 168. 11 HyltonS. 12 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition 36. 13 In this connection, see Hintikka's treatment of cubist art in 'Concept as Vision.' 14 The phrase 'semantics of the word' is Ricoeur's (The Rule of Metaphor lOlff.). 15 Hintikka, 'Self-Profile' 12. 16 Hintikka, 'Logical Form in Linguistic Theory' 43. 17 Paul de Man, 'The Resistance to Theory' 365. 18 Hintikka, 'Self-Profile' 340. 19 E.F. Konrad Koerner, 'The Problem of Metalanguage in Linguistic Historiography' 113. 20 Specifically Koerner, Opitz, Monnich, as well as Dolezel's 'Aliens.' 21 Roman Jakobson, 'Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances' 67. 22 William Harmon and C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature 404-5. 23 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations 11,5,6. 24 Baudrillard, Simulations 54. 25 Baudrillard, Forget Foucault 40. 26 Baudrillard, Simulations 53. For a positive treatment of Baudrillard's account of the dissolution of history, see Sande Cohen, Toward Events without History.' 27 Baudrillard, Simulations 18, 23. 28 Baudrillard, Simulations 4. 29 The distinction between prescriptive and descriptive presupposes the difference between natural languages and formal languages. Natural languages are typically a posteriori, the structures of which may be understood as a branch of either mathematics or psychology (e.g., Frege vs. Chomsky - see Partee, 'Semantics'); natural languages are amenable to either prescriptive or descriptive analyses. By contrast, formal languages are artificially constructed, a priori, and mathematical in methodology; they are sometimes utilized as a tool in the analysis of natural languages and sometimes intended to replace natural languages altogether. 30 See Koch and Sebeok. 31 Hintikka, Models for Modalities 5. 32 See Allen.

Notes to Pages 73-8 167 33 In 'Concept as Vision' Hintikka provides a possible-worlds analysis of meaning functions as the connection between the Sinn of Frege and the noema of Husserl. 34 Hintikka, 'Quine as a Member of the Tradition of the Universality of Language' 160. 35 See Hilpinen's article on Peirce. 36 The speed and efficiency of the abacus is well known. It has been proven to outstrip the quickness of mental calculations, calculations carried out on paper, and even calculations carried out with electric calculating machines. In 1946, for example, an abacus and an electric calculator squared off in a competition involving a variety of mathematical computations, from the simple to the complex. The competition was sponsored by the U.S. Army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, which reported: 'The machine age tool took a step backward yesterday at the Ernie Pyle Theater as the abacus, centuries old, dealt defeat to the most up-to-date electric machine now being used by the United States Government... The abacus victory was decisive.' (See Kojima for more information on the theory and history of the abacus.) 37 Hintikka, 'Quine' 169. 38 Hintikka makes a case against Quine's view of the impossibility of radical translation, which is rooted in the impossibility of a semantics that could carry out such a task. Hintikka remarks that in Kenneth Pike's demonstrations on radical translation, it is the counting methods that are the most easily translated. For further discussion see Hintikka's 'Quine.' 39 For a different approach to literary theory based in non-verbal symbolism, see Ruthrof's Semantics and the Body. 40 Hintikka, 'Exploring Possible Worlds' 54. In this sense, Hintikka argues that Wittgenstein's language games are not linguistic calculi. It is therefore essential to distinguish exactly what one means by the terms game and calculus. For Wittgenstein, language games are intralinguistic, and calculi have definite and fixed rules. For Hintikka, on the other hand, games are interlinguistic as well as intralinguistic; the rules of calculi may always be varied or reinterpreted. For the specific arguments, see Jaakko and Merrill B. Hintikka, 'Wittgenstein and Language/ especially pages 13-17. 41 Leila Haaparanta, 'Analysis as the Method of Logical Discovery' 75, 78. 42 Translated in Hintikka, 'Wittgenstein and Language' 4. 43 Hintikka, 'Wittgenstein and Language' 5. 44 Hintikka, 'Wittgenstein and Language' 5. 45 Hintikka, 'On the Development of the Model-Theoretic Viewpoint' 2. 46 Hintikka, 'Development' 4,3,4; see also Robinson. 47 Hintikka, 'Development' 6.

168 Notes to Pages 78-87 48 49 50 51 52

Jean Van Heijenoort, 'Logic as Calculus and Logic as Language' 327. Warren D. Goldfarb, 'Logic in the Twenties' 352-3. Richard Montague, 'Philosophical Entities' 155. Umberto Eco, 'Small Worlds' 218. Goethe, Faust, I Study (154).

4. The Poiesis of Possible Worlds: A Theory of Possibility for Literature 1 For a technical overview of possible-worlds semantics, see Partee's 'Possible-Worlds in Model-Theoretical Semantics.' For more developed discussions see Hintikka's Models for Modalities and The Intentions oflntentionality, and Stalnaker's Inquiry. 2 As mentioned earlier, for carefully developed possible-worlds treatments of these topics see Dolezel, Pavel, Ryan, and Eco. 3 Willard Van Orman Quine, 'Worlds Away' 863. 4 Besides the ongoing critique of the assumptions Quine is operating with particularly language as universal medium - see the critique of his 'Worlds Away' in Kraut's 'Worlds Regained.' 5 Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast 56. 6 See especially chapter 3 of her Possible Worlds. 7 Lubomir Dolezel, 'Mimesis' 483. 8 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity 49. 9 Goodman, Fact 57. 10 David K. Lewis, Counter/actuals 84. 11 Robert C. Stalnaker, 'Possible Worlds and Situations' 115. 12 Stalnaker, Counter/actuals 85. 13 This is where the technology of 'virtual reality' is most helpful: engineers create 'virtual scenarios' ('a virtual wind tunnel' is a simple example) on computers to test their ideas, pursuing various 'what-ifs' on those ideas, before they perform real-world tests. 14 Contrary to his own position on the status and location of possible worlds. 15 Jaakko Hintikka, 'Are There Nonexistent Objects?' 452. 16 Sophocles, Oedipus the King 931-7. 171 disagree with David Lewis, who says that 'truth in a given fiction is closed under implication' (Truth in Fiction' 39). His example is that Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street. But, we discover, the only building that has ever been at that address is a bank. Lewis's point: 'It does not follow, and certainly is not true, that Holmes lived in a bank' (37). What is the problem here? Do we suspend implication in fiction, or is the

Notes to Pages 87-8 169 implication Lewis draws from this example fallacious? It seems obvious that the London where there is only a bank and the London where there is only Sherlock Holmes are not identical. Were they identical, Lewis would be right and fiction would indeed be closed under implication. But as in the difference between the historical Napoleon and the fictional Napoleon we discussed above, the same difference is to be preserved here. This is merely to say that we must distinguish between individuals in their respective possible worlds. Otherwise, were Lewis's arguments valid, we would not be able to participate in Oedipus's logical dilemmas as we do. The game of fiction has its rules; they simply are not the same, nor is their domain of applicability, as those we hold for the real world. 18 Hintikka, 'Modality as Referential Multiplicity' 62. 19 Stalnaker 'Possible Worlds and Situations' 115; Inquiry 44. 20 Hintikka, 'Referential Multiplicity' 63. 21 The proper translation of Sinn and Bedeutung is not uncontroversial; this, however, is not the place to rehearse that controversy. The view of language as universal medium that underlies Frege's distinction has been discussed already. I might point out that logicians today tend to think of sense and reference, intension and extension, in model-theoretic terms. We will explore what that means in the section devoted to model theory below. For now, I should point out that an assumption behind Frege's treatment of sense and reference is that language should refer to objects in the one and only world that exists. Hintikka discusses the nature of this attitude, saying it is an assumption to the effect that the sole purpose of a philosophically sound language is to refer to some domain of actually existing entities, be these physical bodies, sense-data, or immaterial Platonic objects. This is, it seems to me, why the failure of pure referentiality has been thought to require the construction of some new kind of entities - the 'senses of terms' or 'individual concepts' - to serve as the values of bound variables in modal contexts. They were to serve the purpose ordinary individuals failed to achieve, viz. to provide references pure and simple for our terms. This underlying basic assumption, however, seems to constitute an unjustified restriction of the ways in which we can make use of our language. ('Referential Multiplicity' 62) See also Hintikka's 'Frege's Hidden Semantics,' 'Frege's Semantical Kantianism/ and 'Semantics: A Revolt against Frege.' Cf. Ruthrof's interpretation of Frege's Sinn in 'Frege's Error.'

170 Notes to Pages 91-7 22 Hintikka, 'On the Development of the Model-Theoretic Viewpoint' 13. 23 David R. Dowty, Robert E. Wall, and Stanley Peters, Introduction to Montague Semantics 11. 24 Logical positivism's well-known verifiability principle - all statements are meaningless unless they can be verified by experience - would certainly exclude possible objects and possible worlds. But the familiar outcome of the verifiability principle is that, by its own standards, it is meaningless. Therefore, its corollary arguments against metaphysics, poetry, fiction, etc. expire along with it. For further discussion, see Copleston. 25 Angelika Kratzer, 'Possible-Worlds Semantics and Psychological Reality' 1. 26 Milton, Paradise Lost IX, 710-12. 27 Racine, Phedre II, 5,704. 28 The highly charged double entendres of her speech clearly culminate in this statement at the end of the scene. 29 Dowty, Wall, and Peters 11. 30 Robert J. Matthews, 'Literary Works Express Propositions' 109. 31 See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader and The Act of Reading. 32 While much could be said about the difference between these authors, Kerrigan captures one key aspect of Milton's distinctive literary games in his article 'Milton's Place in Intellectual History.' Unlike Shakespeare, for example, Milton simultaneously moors his meaning in intellectual history while he sets it into poetic motion. The result is a carefully focused yet fully productive 'semantic overspill,' a philosophical argument, but equally a 'not yet philosophy/ approximating a higher, even divine, understanding (272, 273). 33 Hintikka, 'Carnap's Heritage' 84; Rudolf Carnap, Meaning and Necessity 9 (emphasis in original). Hintikka argues that Carnap is closer to the fundamental ideas of possible-worlds semantics than I have indicated here, but the details of that discussion are far beyond our present concerns. For more information, see Hintikka's essay. 34 Hintikka, 'The Intentions of Intentionality' 195. 35 Veikko Rantala, 'Urn Models: A New Kind of Non-standard Model for First-Order Logic' 455; and Hintikka's 'Impossible Possible Worlds Vindicated.' 36 Hintikka, 'Development' 19-20. 37 Hintikka, 'Development' 20; 19-20; 'Exploring Possible Worlds' 56. Hintikka explains the relationship of game-theoretic semantics to modeltheoretic semantics: Game-theoretical semantics is nothing but a systematic way of spelling out the

Notes to Pages 97-100 171

38

39 40

41 42 43 44 45

model-theoretical meaning of quantifiers and, of course, of generalizing the same idea to other ingredients of formal and natural languages. Hence game-theoretical semantics is an integral part of the development of model-theoretical viewpoint and, in fact, a systematization of some of the leading ideas of this development. Far from being an idiosyncratic way of looking at semantics, it is the culmination of one major tradition, perhaps the main tradition, in twentieth-century logical theory. ('Development' 17, emphasis in original) Besides this article, see also Saarinen's Game-Theoretical Semantics and Hintikka's The Game of Language. For further treatment of this issue, see Hintikka's 'Questioning as a Philosophical Method' and The Semantics of Questions. The kinds of research avenues this approach has opened can be found in Hintikka and Vaina's Cognitive Constraints on Cognition. Barbara Partee, 'Possible-Worlds in Model-Theoretical Semantics' 109. For further discussion of the mathematical examples, see Stalnaker's Inquiry (especially the end of chapter 4 and most of chapter 5). Beyond the mathematical examples, Partee offers another interesting 'topos of similarity': '[E]arly geneticists were not in any position to know what genes were, but some basic structural assumptions about their distribution and behavior were sufficient for a lot of fruitful development of genetic theories. Linguists' theories of semantics can indeed help to determine what possible worlds are, or at least what the possible worlds of possible-worlds semantics are' ('Reply' 158). Stalnaker, Inquiry 58. Kaplan's comments come from the Nobel Symposium 65 on possible worlds, and are reported here in their only published form by Partee ('Reply' 159). Stalnaker, 'Possible' 113; Inquiry 50-1. See Kuhn's 'Possible Worlds in the History of Science.' For a critique, one might see Hintikka's 'Theory-Ladenness.' Phillip Bricker, 'Reducing Possible Worlds to Language' 331. '[T]he world might have contained nothing but a single solid cube of... matter, persisting without change throughout all eternity ... Let the worlds that result from the elimination of some of the matter of the original cube be called the cube worlds' (340). Bricker argues that possible worlds that are not mere rearrangements of the actual world - like his cube worlds - are unconstructable from the expressions of an actual language. He explains: '[Providing names for non-actual points of matter of a non-actual cube is beyond the reach of the descriptive apparatus of an actual language. Such

172 Notes to Pages 100-8

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

points cannot be named by ostension; nor can they be distinguished one from the other by their qualitative properties, or by their qualitative relations to actual existents. It follows that there will be cube worlds that are discernible ... but not linguistically discernible with respect to any infinitary logical expansion of L, for any reasonable language L' (350). For the details of Bricker's argument, see his 'Reducing Possible Worlds.' Wallace Stevens, 'Prologues to What Is Possible' II. 16-18. Dowty, Wall, and Peters 6. See Hintikka's 'Nonexistent Objects?' Kratzer2. M.J. Cresswell, 'Semantic Competence' 26. Hintikka, 'Self-Profile' 18. For details of these, see especially Hintikka's The Intentions of Intentionality and The Logic ofEpistemology. Ugo Volli, 'Referential Semantics and Pragmatics of Natural Language' 27, 29. Partee, 'Possible Worlds' 116. Matthews 107. Partee, 'Reply' 154. For example, one could see the propositions at the heart of the Samson and Delilah story not only in the biblical narrative, but also in Milton's play, in Renaissance emblem art, in Rembrandt's and other paintings, in SaintSaens's opera, and in many other artistic treatments. The point is not that the final meaning of these works is the same, but that even as they differ they may express some of the same propositions, despite the difference in expressive media. Stalnaker, Inquiry 2-3. Motivated in the case of Leibniz by a metaphysical thesis, and in the case of Carnap by a linguistic thesis. Hintikka, 'Carnap's Heritage' 83. For details of a semantics of prepositional attitudes, see Hintikka's Knowledge and Belief. See Quine's essay 'Reference and Modality.' Hintikka, Knowledge and Belief 138-9. Hintikka further explains the multiple referentiality at work in these modal contexts: [T]he failure of referential transparency in epistemic contexts is due to the possibility that two names or other singular terms which de facto refer to one and the same object (or person) are not known (or believed) by someone to do so and that they will therefore refer to different objects (or persons) in some of the 'possible worlds' we have to discuss (explic-

Notes to Pages 108-13 173 itly or implicitly) in order to discuss what he knows or believes and what he does not. The referential opacity is not due here to anything strange happening to the ways in which our singular terms refer to objects nor to anything unusual about the objects to which they purport to refer. It is simply and solely due to the fact that we have to consider more than one way in which they could refer (or fail to refer) to objects. What we have to deal with here is therefore not so much a failure of referentiality as a kind of multiple referentiality. ('Referential Multiplicity' 139^0) 63 Hintikka explains this condition further: 'Sometimes this principle [substitutivity of identity] seems to have been thought of as being beyond any reasonable doubt. What we have seen shows that, on the contrary, it is in epistemic contexts obviously invalid, for it is equivalent to an assumption which is clearly false [that everybody knows the answers (right answers) to all questions of identity]' ('Referential Multiplicity' 136). While logical equivalence may work transparently in alethic contexts (pertaining to necessary truth), it does not work in epistemic contexts (where we are dealing with belief states and linguistic competence). 64 Hintikka, 'Impossible' 476. 65 Rantala, 'Urn Models' 455; Hintikka, 'Impossible' 478; Rantala, 'Urn Models' 458; 458-9; Hintikka, 'Impossible' 481. 66 Stalnaker, Inquiry 79; 98. For the full details of his argument, see Inquiry, chapter 5. 67 Umberto Eco, 'Small Worlds' 64, 66,67. 68 A standard exposition of Meinong's philosophy is Findlay's. See also the updates to Meinongian metaphysics by Parsons. 69 Russell may be overstating the case here, misrepresenting Meinong by confusing existence and non-existence as predicates, which Meinong distinguishes. Be that as it may, I think Russell's point about the logical problems with Meinong's principle stands well enough on its own. (Although I have lost the original reference to Russell's words, its near equivalent can be found in his Introduction, 176.) 70 See Barwise and Perry's Situations and Attitudes, Rescher's A Theory of Possibility, Rescher and Brandom's The Logic of Inconsistency, Parsons' Nonexistent Objects and Events in the Semantics of English. 71 See Barwise and Perry's Situations and Attitudes. For a critique from a possible-worlds perspective, see Partee's 'Situations, Worlds and Contexts,' Stalnaker's 'Possible Worlds and Situations,' and Hintikka's 'Situations, Possible Worlds and Attitudes.'

174 Notes to Pages 113-19 72 Partee, 'Possible Worlds' 105. 73 See references for Partee, Stalnaker, and Hintikka in the above note for a detailed critique of situation semantics. 74 Eco, 'Small Worlds' 54-5. Cf. his Role of the Reader, especially the last three chapters. 75 See Marie Laure-Ryan's Possible Worlds chapter 2. 76 Nicholas Rescher and Robert Brandom, The Logic of Inconsistency 2. 77 In any reckoning of non-standard possible worlds, the work of de Beaugrande should be consulted. He undertakes to 'work on non-classical models that encompass determinacy and indeterminacy within consistent and widespread complementarities' (46). He develops a fascinating account of possibility based on quantum theory. According to that theory, multiple possibilities exist simultaneously until an observer 'collapses' that wave-like state into a single reading. If anything, this section of the chapter has shown the need for a comprehensive book-length study that compares these various theories from the 1960s to the present. 78 Stalnaker, 'Possible Worlds' 115. 79 See Hintikka and Hintikka, 'How Can Language Be Sexist?' 80 Stalnaker, 'Possible Worlds' 113. 81 Hintikka, 'Modality and Quantification' 117. 82 Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds 39. 83 See Hintikka's 'Questioning.' 84 Hintikka's central argument against the impossibility of radical translation is notable. Specifically, he argues against Quine's form of the argument in Word and Object. In the following long quote appear its general features, which locate the problem in Quine's commitment to the ineffability of semantics in his view of language as universal medium: Notice that Quine's belief in a single domain of quantification, a simple ontology, colors his problems of ontological relativity and radical translation. According to Quine, we somehow have to tease out of a jungle tribe's linguistic behavior what the one ontology is that their expressions are relying on, e.g., whether their ontology includes rabbits, rabbit parts, instantiations of rabbithood or whatnot. This task would be significantly easier if the jungle linguist had available the categorial vocabulary by means of which we normally distinguish physical objects from their parts, both from their momentary stages, normal referential terms from mass terms, particulars from universals, etc. (In general, this is the vocabulary by means of which we structure our world into several conceptually different ranges of quantifiers instead of one absolute universe of discourse.) For then we could hope to teach the native these

Notes to Pages 119-27 175 terms and then simply ask which kind of entity he or she is talking about. Quine would undoubtedly consider the unavailability and/or unteachability of such categorial vocabulary a consequence of its nonempirical character. But it is not clear that it is harder to find behavioral criteria for telling apart persisting physical objects from their temporal stages than to find ways of translating any old part of the native's vocabulary. Hence I suspect that the real culprit here is again the unavailability of semantical vocabulary to Quine rather than the absence of behavioral criteria for locating and translating the key terms, which in this case refer to the categorial division of the world into several incommensurable categories.' ('Quine' 165) Hintikka explains that if semantic concepts are expressible in a language, then in principle they could be taught to a member of the jungle tribe. We could teach it to such a one, Hintikka says, 'as fully as we can teach it to our children' (166). (See also his 'Behavioral Criteria of Radical Translation.') 85 See particularly his The Limits of Interpretation and his contributions to Collini, ed., Interpretation and Overinterpretation. See also his The Role of the Reader. 5. From Models to Metaphors: Possibility, Aesthetics, and Literary Theory 1 Thomas Pavel, Fictional Worlds 45. 2 Felix Martinez-Bonati, Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature 153; 157. 3 Rene Wellek, 'What is Literature?' 21. 4 Wellek, 21.. 5 Ruth Ronen, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory 230, 69. 6 Marie-Laure Ryan, Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory 22; 46. 7 Fictional worlds, of course, can be metaphorical projections as in the case of allegory or roman-a-clef. But they are not merely or inevitably so. Such a constraint might spell the death of genre, or the reduction of all genre to one, which amounts to the same thing. Consider Goodman's firm stance on this matter: T am by no means here letting down the bars to admit merely possible worlds, but only suggesting that some talk that is ostensibly "about possible things" can be usefully reinterpreted as talk about actual things.' For the fuller discussion, see Ways 103-4. 8 For social theories of aesthetics, see particularly Eagleton's The Ideology of

176 Notes to Pages 127-33 the Aesthetic and chapter 1 of Norris's What's Wrong with Postmodernism? To my knowledge, a true aesthetic analysis of social theories has yet to be written. 9 Charles L. Stevenson, 'On "What Is a Poem?'" 360. 10 Murray Krieger, 'Literature as Illusion, as Metaphor, as Vision' 178. 11 Wellek 19,20,19; Raymond Williams, Keywords 186; Wellek 17,20. 12 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement §9. 13 As surprising as it may seem, literary theorists do not unanimously agree that literature is verbal in nature. Stevenson, for example, accuses Wellek and Warren's definition of poetry as a 'structure of norms' to have 'dismissed the verbal nature of poetry prematurely' (333). 14 These, of course, may include the written, the spoken, the performed, the textured bumps of braille, the hand signals of the American Sign Institute, semaphore, Morse code, and other such examples. And even though ultimately the brush strokes of the painter may be - to borrow a word from Walter Benjamin - 'reproduced,' nevertheless the criteria for what constitutes an authentic copy (howsoever defined) are far more restrictive than in the case of the abstract verbal medium we encounter in literature, as evidenced in the wide range of forms above. (For a different view of reproducibility, a Marxist treatment, see Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.') 15 In a dramatic performance, the fusion of media suggests a constellation of valid, sometimes enlightening and sometimes provocative, interpretations of a dramatic text. While to this extent dramatic texts remain underdetermined, and completed by the artistry of director and actors alike, the film series by director John Barton and the Royal Shakespeare Company (Performing Shakespeare) reminds us that some authors provide copious clues on how they are to be both interpreted and acted out on stage. 16 Frye, who presents a more specific theory of literary (fictional) modes than appears here, suggests that the richness of literature resides in its 'modal counterpoint' (Anatomy of Criticism 50). 17 He states that the transfiguration of commonplace objects evokes/ invokes the art world. (See his The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.) Here I explain that transfiguration only in terms of the modal shift in literature: from standard language use to non-standard language use, the nature of which I explore in more depth in the following sections on metaphor. 18 Lyas explains his position in simple terms: 'to call something "literature" is, in the primary sense of the term, to praise it' (83). See also the first chapter of Robson's The Definition of Literature.

Notes to Pages 133-42 177 19 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading 10. 20 Umberto Eco, 'Small Worlds' 57. 21 See Hintikka, ed., Aspects of Metaphor. The second work, Steinhart's The Logic of Metaphor, came to my attention after the present book had already gone to print. The reader interested in this topic is advised to see Steinhart's work for what appears to be a comprehensive and significant study. 22 Nietzsche, 'On Truth and Lies.' 23 Tracy B. Strong, 'Language and Nihilism' 99; de Man, 'The Epistemology of Metaphor'214, 212. 24 Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language 87. 25 Andrew Ortony, 'The Role of Similarity in Similes and Metaphors' 350. 26 Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu, 'Metaphor and the Varieties of Lexical Meaning' 65. 27 Hintikka and Sandu 58-9. 28 Hintikka and Sandu 59. 29 Hintikka and Sandu 59. 30 Martin Kusch, 'Husserl and Heidegger on Meaning' 123. 31 Hintikka and Sandu 60. 32 Hintikka and Sandu 61. 33 Hintikka and Sandu 74. 34 Hintikka and Sandu 68. 35 Although we have time only to glance in this direction, David Miller has suggested (in conversation) a possible outline for different types of literary worlds: side-branching or alternative worlds, backwards-branching etiological worlds, and forward-branching teleological worlds (utopias/ dystopias). These types are not mutually exclusive, nor should they be thought of only in terms of their spatial figures. A Utopia, for example, may be either Edenic or eschatologic, or both. For a typology of fictional worlds fully developed along the lines of accessibility relations, see Ryan's Possible Worlds, especially the second chapter. 36 Lakoff and Johnson 5. 37 Hintikka and Sandu 67. 38 Samuel Johnson, Rasselas chapter 8. 39 Hintikka and Sandu 66. 40 Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author Act II. 41 Hintikka and Sandu 67. 42 Hintikka and Sandu 73. 43 John Updike, Of the Farm 80. 44 Aristotle, Rhetoric III, 10. 45 Ted Cohen 671.

178 Notes to Pages 145-52 46 See Wellek and Warren (chapter 10) for an example of this view, which seems to have persisted to the present day. 47 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations 163, emphasis his; Michael C. Schoenfeldt, 'That Ancient Heat.' 48 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 7. 49 David M. Miller 12. 50 de Man, 'Resistance to Theory' 364. 51 See note 37 above. 52 Passages translated in Lubomir Dolezel, Occidental Poetics 41,42. 53 Aristotle, Poetics IX. 54 Sidney, Defence of Poetry. 55 Dolezel, Occidental Poetics 52. 56 See Hintikka's The Intentions of Intentionality, especially the chapter of the same name. 57 Eco, 'Small Worlds' 64. 58 Besides the works of Dolezel, Pavel, Ryan, and Eco mentioned here, see also Lucia Vaina's 'Introduction: les "mondes possibles" du texte'; David Herman's Universal Grammar and Narrative Form; Elena Semino's Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts; and Howard Pearce's Human Shadows Bright as Glass. 59 Robert de Beaugrande, 'Quantum Aspects of Perceived Reality' 29. 60 William Hazlitt, 'Project for a New Theory of Civil and Criminal Legislation.'

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Author Index

Abbott, Edwin 4 Abrams, M.H. 149 Adams, Robert Merrihew 96 Antisthenes 27 Aristotle 104,142,148 Asimov, Isaac 116 Augustine 118 Ayer, A.J. 61 Barthes, Roland 7,13-14, 60-1, 62 Barwise, Jon, and John Perry 112-13 Baudrillard, Jean 12, 62, 69-71 Beaugrande, Robert de 151,174n. 84 Benjamin, Walter 176n. 14 Berkeley, George 124 Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner 7 Bloomfield, Leonard 46 Bodmer, Johann 148,149 Boole, George 30,31, 73, 77-8 Booth, Wayne 134 Borges, Jorge Luis 12 Brandom, Robert. See Rescher, Nicholas Breitinger, Johann 148,149 Brentano, Franz 112 Bricker, Phillip 100,171n. 45

Buchanan, Scott 81 Bunyan, John 83 Burke, Edmund 124,129 Bush, Douglas 49,163n. 60 Carnap, Rudolf 46, 77, 95-6,105, 170n. 33 Champollion, Jean-Francois 119 Chomsky, Noam 67,166n. 29 Churchill, Winston 132 Cohen, Sande 127 Cohen, Ted 142 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 110 Collins, Wilkie 86 Cresswell, M.J. 102 Crews, Frederick 146 Culler, Jonathan 17-18,19,20, 68 Danto, Arthur 133,176n. 17 Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari 14-15 Demosthenes 132 Derrida, Jacques 7,12,13,15-25,41, 44,47-8, 60,68, 69, 70,97,139, 150,157n. 29,157-8n. 30,163n. 56, 165n. 8 Dickens, Charles 82

194 Author Index Dolezel, Lubomir 5, 84,124,125,148, 149,156-7n. 28 Dreiser, Theodore 88 Durkheim, Emile 127 Eco, Umberto 5,97, 111, 113,119, 124,133-4,150 Eisenstein, Sergei M. 146 Eliot, T.S. 129 Euripedes 88 Fodor, Jerry A. See Katz, Jerrold J. Foucault, Michel 48, 69, 75,146, 164n. 64 Frege, Gottlob 28,30-5, 36, 37, 39, 50, 67, 72, 76, 77, 78,104,160n. 9,160n. 14,166n. 29,167n. 33, 169n. 21 Freud, Sigmund 7,134 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 40,41 Geertz, Clifford 48,164n. 64 Gibbon, Edward 124 Godel, Kurt 34, 36, 73, 77, 78 Goldfarb, Warren D. 35, 78-9 Goodman, Nelson 40, 82-4,126,131, 161n. 33,175n. 7 Greenblatt, Stephen 47,48,145, 164n. 64 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 63,162n. 46 Guattari, Felix. See Deleuze, Gilles Haaparanta, Leila 76 Habermas, Jiirgen 41 Hazlirt, William 152 Healy, Thomas 59-60 Heidegger, Martin 7,35,40-3,51, 162n. 43,163n. 56 Herman, David 178n. 58 Hernadi, Paul 126

Hilbert, David 30, 77-8 Hintikka, Jaakko 30-1: and Formalism 65; on Frege 33,34-5,167n. 33, 169n. 21; and game theory 65,97, 119,170n. 37; and intensions and intentions 102-6,107-9,150, 172n. 62,173n. 63; and language as calculus 28-9,45, 73-80; and language as universal medium 28-9,101,162n. 48,165n. 1; on metaphor 134-42; model theory of 64-5,90-7,106,109,170n. 37; and non-existent objects 86; and possible worlds 65, 72-3,87-8,90101,107-10,113,114-15,149; and radical translation 74,167n. 38, 174n. 84; on Wittgenstein 37-9, 44, 167n. 40 Homer 117 Hume, David 129,164n. 64 Husserl, Edmund 72,158n. 35, 167n. 33 Hutcheon, Linda 47 Hutcheson, Francis 129 Hylton, Peter 36, 58 Ingarden, Roman 111 Jakobson, Roman 66,130,138 Jameson, Fredric 43, 51, 58-9, 68, 75, 164n. 64 Johnson, Mark. See Lakoff, George Johnson, Samuel 140 Jung, Carl Gustav 75 Kant, Immanuel 28,38,42, 75-7,129, 158n. 30,160n. 9 Kaplan, David 99 Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor 63 Kellner, Douglas. See Best, Steven

Author Index 195 Kerrigan, William 170n. 32 Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels 146,147 Koerner, E.F. Konrad, and Kurt Opitz 66 Kratzer, Angelika 101-2 Krieger, Murray 128 Kripke, Saul A. 82,84,124 Kristeva, Julia 7 Kuhn, Thomas S. 99 Kusch, Martin 29, 30, 40-3,137, 159n. 7 Lacan, Jacques 7, 68, 69,126 Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson 139 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 62, 67, 98,105,113,148 Lewis, David K. 84-6, 98, 99, 168n. 17 Lodge, David 7 Lowenheim, Leopold 77, 78-9 Lucas, George 146 Lu Chi 57 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 7,13, 61, 68 Man, Paul de 65, 68,133,134,146,147 Martinez-Bonati, Felix 124,126 Marx, Karl 7,127,134,136 Matthews, Robert J. 92, 94,103-4 Mazzoni, Jacopo 148 McColley, Diane Kelsey 151 Meinong, Alexius 72,111-12,115, 116,173n. 69 Michaels, Walter Benn. See Knapp, Steven Miller, David 123,146,158n. 38, 177n. 35 Miller, J. Hillis 48, 63 Milton, John 81,92,170n. 32

Montague, Richard 79 Montaigne, Michel de 124 Montrose, Louis 3,47-52,139, 164n. 64 Morris, Charles 62 Neurath, Otto 58 Newman, Charles 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7,134 Norris, Christopher 19 O'Brien, Tim 86 Opitz, Kurt. See Koerner, E.F. Konrad Owen, G.E.L. 12, 21,26 Parmenides 23,26 Parsons, Terence 101,112,114 Partee, Barbara 98,103,104,113, 166n. 29,171n. 40 Pascal, Blaise 124 Pavel, Thomas G. 5,52,116,124,125, 137 Pearce, Howard D. 162n. 43,178n. 58 Peirce, Charles Sanders 73, 111, 154n. 11 Perry, John. See Barwise, Jon Petrey, Sandy 52, 59 Pike, Kenneth 167n. 38 Pirandello, Luigi 141 Plantinga, Alvin 96 Plato 12, 23,125,139,148,169n. 21 Plotinus 148 Pope, Alexander 99 Propp, V. 132 Proust, Marcel 123 Quine, Willard Van Orman 39-40, 58,82-3, 84,107,167n. 38,168n. 4, 174n. 84

196 Author Index Racine, Jean 93 Rantala, Veikko 96,109 Rantala, Veikko, and Liselotte Wiesenthal 145 Raskin, Victor 34 Rescher, Nicholas and Robert Brandom 112,113-14 Ricoeur, Paul 44,116 Ronen, Ruth 125-6 Russell, Bertrand 28,30,35-6,37, 39, 40,46,50,58,61, 62, 66, 67, 72,78, 86, 90,112,115,173n. 69 Ruthrof, Horst 169n. 21 Ryan, Marie-Laure 5, 83,113,124, 125-6 Salmon, Wesley C. 11 Saussure, Ferdinand de 4, 8,15-16, 28,40,44,46,48, 51, 70, 75, 76, 154n. 11,156-7n. 28,163n. 56 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 148 Schoenfeldt, Michael C. 145 Schroder, Ernst 77 Schrodinger, Erwin 4, 5,153-4n. 5 Semino, Elena 178n. 58 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper 129 Shakespeare, William 57, 59-60, 71, 89,117,132,143-5,170n. 32 Shusterman, Richard 24-5, 39, 50 Sidney, Philip 125,148-9 Sluga, Hans 160n. 14 Sophists, The 7 Sophocles 86 Spenser, Edmund 148 Spikes, Michael P. 154n. 13 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 28 Stalnaker, Robert C. 85, 87,98,99, 105,107,110-11,113,114

Steiner, George 160n. 16 Strong, Tracy B. 134 Tarski, Alfred 66, 77 Tennyson, Alfred 27 Tillyard, E.M.W. 49,163n. 60 Todorov, Tzvetan 134 Tolkien, J.R.R. 84,116 Tolstoy, Leo 84 Trendelenburg, Adolf 160n. 9 Twain, Mark 82,106 Updike, John 141 Vaina, Lucia 178n. 58 Van Heijenoort, Jean 30-1, 32, 77 Van Inwagen, Peter Volli, Ugo 103 Walton, Izaac 131 Watson, Robert N. 4 Wellek, Rene 124-5,128,129, 176n. 13 Widdemer, Margaret 137 Wiesenthal, Liselotte. See Rantala, Veikko Williams, Raymond 128,129 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 7,13,34,35, 36-9, 44, 46, 61, 76,127,146; Culture and Value 161n. 26; Notebooks, 1914-1916 161n. 25; Philosophical Investigations 3, 38-9; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 3,34, 37,38, 39 Wordsworth, William 94 Zeno 10-15,17-18,19, 20,25, 27, 155-6n. 16