Jack Yeats, "Seek No Further"

In “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” Roman Jakobson famously grouped the varieties of aphasia around two poles: selection/substitution (“the similarity disorder”) and combination/contexture (“the contiguity disorder”) (1152).  According to Jakobson, the similarity disorder makes metaphor “alien,” and the contiguity disorder has a parallel effect on metonymy.  “In a well-known psychological test,” Jakobson writes,

children are confronted with some noun and told to utter the first verbal response that comes into their heads.  In this experiment two opposite linguistic predilections are invariably exhibited: the response is intended either as a substitute for or as a complement to the stimulus (1153).

The children’s substitutive or complementary (predicative) responses were then also distinguished by different aspects, either positional or semantic.  By “manipulating” such connections and aspects “an individual exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences” (1153).  Jakobson’s highly suggestive account of the emergence of a “personal style” offers a striking contrast with contemporaneous accounts like Kenneth Burke’s essays in the 1950s and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Everyday Life (1959), which stressed the scene of style, or Theodor Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), which meditated on the nonidentity of language and experience.

Against both the tactically delimited scene (Goffman) and the negated social totality (Adorno), Jakobson’s work afforded many readers, including Jacques Lacan, a picture of “personal style”—psychic, social, cultural—caused by the operation and differentiation of innate linguistic functions.  Whereas Adorno sneered at those “who will not see [the particular experience of lyric poetry] but merely label it” and Burke’s ratios promised to map the experiential possibilities of an utterance in given social conditions, Jakobson offered a system in which Russian storytellers, surrealists, Cubists, and Charlie Chaplin (to cite a few of Jakobson’s examples) could be labeled and organized within “the bipolar structure of language (or other semiotic systems)” (The Adorno Reader 212; 1154).  The parenthetical status Jakobson assigns to “sign systems other than language”—painting, theater, cinema—within the “general science of signs” is itself a sign of the way Jakobson privileges linguistic deviance in artistic forms over innovation in expressive, performing, and multi-medial arts.  Phenomena from “personal habits, current fashions, etc.” to the ranges of “human behavior in general” turn on the “primal” dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy (1154).

For Jakobson, the “decisive question” at the heart of all symbolic processes is asked by the conflict between metonymic and metaphoric devices (1155).  Stunningly, persuasively, Jakobson rewrites Freud’s interpretation of dreams as the linguistic analysis of, on the one hand, displaced or condensed contiguities and, on the other, identified or symbolized similarities; Frazer’s comparative mythologies are likewise transcoded into imitative and contagious forms of sympathetic magic (1555-56).  From an intrapersonal core split by a crease in language itself, all the energies that Jakobson incidentally describes as disturbed, disordered, broken, and “bent” flow out into patterns of personal style, literary genre, and collective fashion.  Furthermore, Jakobson speculates that critical interpretation often takes “the line of least resistance” by commenting on only the one, preponderant side of these forms: “The actual bipolarity has been artificially replaced in these studies by an amputated, unipolar scheme which, strikingly enough, coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns, namely with the contiguity disorder” (1156).  Critical language is thus also opened to commentary, even if, following Burke or Adorno, we would question the rhetoric of coincidence (i.e. “strikingly enough”), which can itself be a figure for a geometrical relation between vectors sharing a direction but not a magnitude.  Normalizing the aphasic pattern of contiguity disorders with the critical pattern of metaphor-myopia would force us to confront exactly the questions of intentionality and biological inheritance that Jakobson’s opening gambit—the children confronted with a noun—had resolved by appeal to the “invariable” exhibition of the experimental space.

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