Reference, Self-Reference and the Power of Signs: The Cases of Hugh Blair and Percy B. Shelley

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 19세기영어권문학회
· 수록지 정보 : 19세기 영어권 문학 / 13권 / 1호 / 233 ~ 257페이지
· 저자명 : 이성범

초록

This paper aims to address the self-division of reference into outer reference and self-reference in order to eventually show how the self-referential arbitrariness of sign systems acts as a new device for social control in early nineteenth century Britain. The in-depth discussion of what Ferdinand de Saussure describes as the arbitrary relation between the signifer and the signified in reality goes back to the Enlightenment and the Romantic era. Enlightenment and Romantic linguists are alike in that both of them note the circumstantial relation of a sign to its referent. These two groups, however, differ from each other in that the former esteems the referentiality of language whereas the latter attempts to thematize the self-referencial recursion of it.
The Enlightenment theorist of rhetoric Hugh Blair, in spite of his argument for the arbitrariness of language, ultimately puts accent on the referential exactness of it. He prioritizes modern English over ancient languages since, as a simple example, the former eliminates, for the primacy of prepositions and auxiliary verbs, the qualitative marks of syntactic order (i.e., case declension and verb conjugation) that the latter, namely ancient Latin has. Blair's preference for English over Latin indicates that English develops the arbitrary ordering of words to set up purely intra-linguistic rules. Blair, however, finally contends that language should reinforce its referential clarity.
Romantic linguists, on the other hand, divide reference itself into outer reference and self-reference. They exert themselves to displace the former, that is, what is referred to with the latter, that is, how it is referred to. This dividing process can be called the “desynonymization” of reference. It causes the mismatch of sign and referent. Romantic poetics thus structuralizes the constant tension between reference and self-reference. Now, just as literature is desynomymized from other social institutions, self-reference is desynonymized from reference itself for the autotelic turn of signification.
Percy Bysshe Shelley observes that the structural inconsistency between sign and referent serves as a new device for social hegemony in politico-economic as well as literary systems. He questions the poetic, political, and economic web of a repressive rule by arbitrary signs. Although he cherishes the merit of language as “measured words,” he simultaneously worries about the instability of signification. He also notices that the ruling class, what he calls “a new aristocracy,” plays with the overrepresentation, underrepresentation, and misrepresentation of political representatives in the parliamentary assembly. They take advantage of the variations of representation. In the economy of currency, too, the contemporary Tory government encourages bad money, say, paper currency to misrepresent its real value, which results in the fluctuations of value. Shelley problematizes this ongoing inconsistency between the signifier and the signified that repeats itself in divergent social organizations.
Coming up against the political-economic-poetic network of repression by arbitrary signs, Shelley's subversive imagination ironizes a dominant logic itself. In “The Mask of Anarchy,” his poetic strategies for tackling the deceptive system of signs is to paradoxically appropriate it for resistance. The poem shows that the power of self-referential signs operates double-edgedly; although it can facilitate domination, it simultaneously helps defamiliarize contemporary authorities. When Shelley images Hope and Shape as surfing into contradictory entities, this on-going displacement is meant to parody the repressive power of sign systems.

참고자료

· 없음