Part of adopting a literary perspective to the practice of philosophizing, involves some new concepts. Personally, I’m attracted to the Russian-American linguist Roman Jacobson’s (somewhat out of fashion) conception of ‘literariness’ in place of the more absolute designation ‘literature’.

The object of a science of literature is not literature, but literariness — that is, that which makes a given work a work of literature. Until now literary historians have preferred to act like the policeman who, intending to arrest a certain person, would, at any opportunity, seize any and all persons who chanced into the apartment, as well as those who passed along the street. The literary historians used everything — anthropology, psychology, politics, philosophy. Instead of a science of literature, they created a conglomeration of homespun disciplines. (Jacobson as cited in Ejxenbaum, 1971, p. 8)

The advantages I see in this concept is in the turning away from literature as being tethered to a concrete work or text. It is an appropriation of literature as a philosophical value to be found in anything.

Jacobson sees the literary message’s defining feature and difference as residing in its “emphasis on its own formal structure” (Scholes, 1982, p. 20). That is, it turns attention away from the referential meaning of the communicative act and calls attention instead to its own expression, the play of words, sounds and possibilities within the message itself. This ambiguity according to Jacobson, defines the poetic function.

Ambiguity is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary feature of poetry […]. The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous. The double-sensed message finds correspondence in a split addresser, in a split addressee, and besides in a split reference, as it is cogently exposed in the preambles to fairy tales of various peoples, for instance, in the usual exordium of the Majorca storytellers: ‘Axio era y no era’ (‘It was and it was not’). (Jacobson, 1960, p. 370–371)

In Jacobson’s work the poetic function is, in a certain sense, always in conflict (despite the inter-connectedness of the two) with the referential function. When one is winning the other is losing: it is a relation of ‘supremacy’ as he says. The literary theorist and semiotician Robert Schole believes that by adhering too stringently to Jacobson’s formulation we lose touch with the centrality that the ‘literary’ has in our lives. In short we run the risk of relegating ‘literariness’ to that Kantian realm of the purposeless aesthetic object. Since what I am imagining here is a conception of literariness that is pragmatic and applicable to many diverse aspects of human life this formulation will not do for my purposes either.

Using Jacobson’s popular model of communication, Scholes asserts that we sense ‘literariness in an utterance when any one of the six features of communication loses its simplicity and becomes multiple or duplicitous” (1982, p. 21). Scholes provides an excellent analysis of these forms of literariness that are just one strike removed from ordinary discourse. I will not go into this here but a quick glance at the following examples can perhaps shed light on this re-thinking of these ‘ordinary’ forms of literariness:

duplicity of sender — — role-playing, acting duplicity of receiver — — eavesdropping, voyeurism duplicity of message — — opacity, ambiguity duplicity of context — — allusion, fiction duplicity of contact — — translation, fiction duplicity of code — — involved in all the above (1982, p. 31)

I find this explication more useful than Jacobson’s “double-sensed message”, as it presents literariness not as some deep-rooted aesthetic potential contained within the self-focused message, but rather as a normal communicative act, specifically one that “functions to create a tension between the utterance as communicative and externally referential on the one hand, and as incommunicative and internally referential on the other” (Scholes, 1982, p. 23).

As Umberto Eco has shown in his essay On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language (1979, p. 90–104), the ambiguity contained in the aesthetic message — the calling into question of the legitimacy of the code — is indispensable for language to transform and develop. Through hilariously fictionalizing Adam and Eve’s linguistic development in the garden of Eden, Eco shows us that the aesthetic message is a necessary component of any language system and not at all necessarily unique to (or tethered to) formal artistic practices such as poetry or literature.

Adam and Eve are perfectly and completely taken care of.The language delivered to them replicates the garden of Eden itself. It is all providing, and (that word again) univocal, and in this sense seeks to reduce or eliminate ambiguity. Adam and Eve possess a rudimentary language (made of only A and B’s) of six binary pairs (yes/no, edible/inedible, good/ bad, beautiful/ugly, red/blue, and serpent/apple). Holding the whole structure together is how the middle four pairs are linked in “a series of connotative chains”, connections that in themselves assert a certain aesthetic orientation:

“Red = Edible = Good = Beautiful Blue = Inedible = Bad = Ugly” (Eco 1979: 92)

In Eco’s thought experiment the aesthetic emerges from out of a motivated political event, where an aesthetic regime or worldview is called into question and dissolved. David Perry (2015, p. 24) explains:

Eco posits that this connotative chain of straightforward binaries is disrupted by God’s prohibition of the forbidden fruit, which fatally breaks the semiotic chain by asserting that the “beautiful” fruit is to be placed in the “inedible” category, and thus pushes Adam and Eve into linguistic innovations in which, for instance, the apple becomes “redblue”. It is in these disjunctions between appearance and meaning that Eco posits the origins of the “aesthetic” use of language, the discovery of “the arbitrariness of signs”, and the seeds of the Fall… Yet Eco’s hypothetical Fall appears to be a fortunate fall, freeing humans from an arbitrary system of binary absolutes, and allowing the aesthetic pleasure of linguistic play.

Eco reminds us that in order “to create an aesthetic message, there must also be alterations in the form in which it is expressed, and these alterations must be significant enough to require the addressee of the message, though aware of a change in the content-form, to refer back to the message itself as a physical entity” (1979, p. 90). Adam and Eve’s learning of the aesthetic, in a sense, frees them from a world of absolutes and universality (the very possibility of univocal truth, identification, and reference) and it is in this uncertainty that aesthetic pleasure and literariness are to be located.