The Linguistic Turn in Contemporary Japanese Literary Studies: Politics, Language, Textuality by Michael K. Bourdaghs

Author:Michael K. Bourdaghs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

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On the other hand, Hiromatsu Wataru-whose writing is also “a string of extremely difficult Chinese words” and poorly written to boot-developed the idea of the “subject of langue” (rangu shutai) using his original concept of a “four-limbed structure”

The concept of the four-limbed structure is difficult to summarize, but I will do my best, citing his own explanation. For starters, he explains a concept best called a “two-limbed structure” as follows.

For example, something (etwas) called a “tree,” which we are aware of as a that visible outside our window, is not simply the sound “tree” but is an “objective” something in the same way as are a pine or a cypress and all other types of trees. However, when it comes to individual trees as actual objects, “tree” signifies all trees equally (universality); it does not signify each singular tree, does not distinguish this tree from any other tree. Further, the tree as an actual object grows and eventually dies (at that time the essence of the tree, the tree’s actual characteristics, vanish!), but the “tree” that is an etwas neither grows nor dies along with it. In place of the constant change of the actual object, the “tree” as etwas remains unchangeable (permanence).10

If we stop here, it may seem that he has indicated no more than the duality of the object before our eyes and our conceptual grasp of that object. Certainly he has done that, but Hiromatsu’s interest was in fact directed more toward our perceptual functions. When we perceive something with our eyes or ears, we not only sense that object as an object, but we are also simultaneously comprehending something else. For example, we say “the sound I heard just now I perceived intuitively as the horn of an automobile; what I see outside the window looks intuitively like a pine tree/7 Taking up these “intuitive perceptions” Hiromatsu directed his attention to the fact that they differ from the actually existing form of the object itself, in other words, that the two are mutually independent. The sound of a clock sounds like “kachi, kachi” to us Japanese, but it sounds to English speakers like “tick-tock.” Despite the fact that they are all taken from a field, we call watermelons and melons fruit but we call tomatoes vegetables. This difference did not arise from any difference between watermelons and tomatoes; it arose out of the historical difference in the way they entered our diets and from our sense of food. Focusing on such questions, Hiromatsu pointed to a fixed social framework inherent in our “intuition/7 This could be called a simple application of the phenomenological method, but Hiromatsu then used this kind of procedure to try to link this framework to Saussure’s langue.

To proceed further, Hiromatsu then indicated that the subject who calls the tree before his eyes “tree” undergoes a doubling through the process of understanding the utterances made by some other. For example, if a cow is for a child a “bow-wow,” the cow is a bow-wow to the child but not to me.

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