How do you read Jakobson as anti-humanist? That seems like a fundamental misreading of him. He was all about poetics, cognition, human experience, and expression. He just wanted to show that there was some structuring of it.
I’m more trying to characterize the broad strain of structuralist analysis he participated in and helped inaugurate than engage with the nuances of his thought per se. Structuralism scandalized traditional humanists because it treated culture as a sort of autonomous machine and made intention and meaning a secondary concern at most. I’d agree that you can find in Jakobson an attempt to reset humanism on a new footing but I’m not sure that’s how his approach was mostly taken by those who followed him.
I dunno. My advisor was a student of Jakobson. The people who Jakobson taught and influenced in the US centered the human experience and culture in their understanding of linguistics.
Yes there was a French structuralist school that also followed him. But that wasn't the production of the bulk of his students and influence on the American academy.
I meant “followed” more just in the sense of “came after.” Structuralism was deemed excessively humanist and insufficiently radical by the post-structuralists. It sounds like you’re describing a subset of people who stuck with the original structuralism program, whom I’d agree weren’t antihumanist in the way the enfants terribles of Theory were.
I think it's fair to say that the French structuralist school found things in Jakobson that it found useful and carried them forward down some weird paths. And I agree with you on this part!
I think it's also fair to say that the community around Jakobson in the US had a radically different take on this stuff. Indeed, for these people, linguistic structure was understood as a very limited way to understand semiotics and grounded their analysis of meaning in human experience. Indeed, his students are some of the biggest critics of structural linguistics and anthropology in the US.
When I read Levi-Strauss in classes taught by a student of Jakobson, we clearly made fun of it for being simplistic and spiritually empty in a similar the way that I think you think.
I just think that you are being way unfair to him and his ideas and influence. Not a big deal.
How do you read Jakobson as anti-humanist? That seems like a fundamental misreading of him. He was all about poetics, cognition, human experience, and expression. He just wanted to show that there was some structuring of it.
I’m more trying to characterize the broad strain of structuralist analysis he participated in and helped inaugurate than engage with the nuances of his thought per se. Structuralism scandalized traditional humanists because it treated culture as a sort of autonomous machine and made intention and meaning a secondary concern at most. I’d agree that you can find in Jakobson an attempt to reset humanism on a new footing but I’m not sure that’s how his approach was mostly taken by those who followed him.
I dunno. My advisor was a student of Jakobson. The people who Jakobson taught and influenced in the US centered the human experience and culture in their understanding of linguistics.
Yes there was a French structuralist school that also followed him. But that wasn't the production of the bulk of his students and influence on the American academy.
I meant “followed” more just in the sense of “came after.” Structuralism was deemed excessively humanist and insufficiently radical by the post-structuralists. It sounds like you’re describing a subset of people who stuck with the original structuralism program, whom I’d agree weren’t antihumanist in the way the enfants terribles of Theory were.
I think it's fair to say that the French structuralist school found things in Jakobson that it found useful and carried them forward down some weird paths. And I agree with you on this part!
I think it's also fair to say that the community around Jakobson in the US had a radically different take on this stuff. Indeed, for these people, linguistic structure was understood as a very limited way to understand semiotics and grounded their analysis of meaning in human experience. Indeed, his students are some of the biggest critics of structural linguistics and anthropology in the US.
When I read Levi-Strauss in classes taught by a student of Jakobson, we clearly made fun of it for being simplistic and spiritually empty in a similar the way that I think you think.
I just think that you are being way unfair to him and his ideas and influence. Not a big deal.