On Folk Logocentrism, Part 1

Attempting to offer the kind of historical and theoretical overview of the subject to which this blog is dedicated represents a unique and perhaps unsurpassable challenge in the case of the symbology.  Since symbology is, to adopt the felicitous phrase of Tom Martin, “older than its origin,” the kind of chronological survey that it would be possible to perform for most other important schools of thought encounters immediate difficulties in this instance. 

In light of the extraordinary persistence and pervasiveness of the modes of analysis we are investigating here, some commentators have gone so far as to identify symbology as nothing less than a transhistorical structure prior to and constitutive of the interpretive practices we generally associate with, for example, mythology, theology, art history, and the history of ideas.  In what is undoubtedly the most audacious formulation of this sort, Geoffrey Galt Harpham has gone so far as to declare symbology “the thoughtful component of thought” (see The Symbological Imperative in Culture and Criticism [Amsterdam: Institute for Global Esoteric Studies, 2006]).  In Harpham’s view, given the unparalleled prevalence of symbological presuppositions and methodologies in an astounding variety of supposedly independent cultural spheres and across a swath of historical epochs whose most representative symbologists evidently exercised no direct influence on one another, it behooves us to identify the type of thinking we tend to regard erroneously as one option among many in the contemporary marketplace of ideas as nothing less than the “deep structure” of thought as such.  “As we attempt to define ‘symbology,’” Harpham reflects, “we would obtain a more thorough sense of its broad shape and contours by attending to the deviations from it that mark its outer limits, deviations which I am confident we will ultimately come to view as ephemeral ripples on the surface of the ocean of human thought.”    

I would like to attempt to respond to Harpham’s injunction, albeit by posing what may appear to be a different question: Why symbology?  Why now?  The first answer is that the unprecedented prominence symbological thought and analysis has come to enjoy in the wake of the controversies provoked by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code has also generated the need for certain clarifications, since Brown largely avoids engaging in any systematic delineation of the field of study inhabited by his alter ego Robert Langdon.  But the problem is compounded if, like the bloggers associated with What is Symbology?, we do not regard Brown’s representation as particularly representative of symbological practice.  If the novelist has done symbologists a service by bringing their work to the attention of the wider public as no previous author had done, he has also disseminated a model of their work that many of them find highly problematic.  In particular, by giving the imaginary Langdon a post at Harvard, Brown simply elides what is undoubtedly a question absolutely central to the epistemological debates current in symbological circles: is the kind of knowledge sought by symbologists at all commensurate with the kinds of knowledge whose pursuit is authorized by academic institutions?  In short, is symbology, at least in relation to the fields of knowledge production that take place within the contemporary academy and its sanctioned disciplines, intrinsically and constitutively non- or even anti-academic?  Or does it aspire to displace and substitute itself for the academic disciplines which it is thought to resemble superficially?  These are open questions, and we hope to bring them to the attention of a public which, due to Brown’s unfortunate misrepresentations, may have been unaware of their centrality and urgency. 

A second, and closely related, answer to the question posed above emerges out of a larger discussion concerning what is widely agreed to be a “crisis in the humanities,” by which those who talk of such things generally mean the academic disciplines of literature, art history, history, philosophy, and a few smaller related subjects.  Pursuing the most radical implications of Harpham’s argument that “the deviations from it that mark [thought]’s outer limits” will ultimately come to be viewed as “ephemeral ripples on the surface of the ocean of human thought,” it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that the time of the “crisis of the humanities” cannot be anything other than the time of symbology.  That is, to follow Harpham’s metaphor, the time of the calming of the ocean of human thought, and the flattening out of the ripples on its surface.  If we think of the disturbances brought about by the dangerous and perverse trends that have briefly established themselves as academic orthodoxy in the modern research university as mere ripples, and fix our eyes on the depths, where, if we have the requisite boldness to take a deep breath and proceed to the solid ground beneath, we will find Lao Tzu, Plato, Manco Cápac, Hermes Trismegistus, long buried but unaltered in their adherence to truth, waiting to impart the knowledge which they have never ceased to offer to minds adventurous enough to seek it out in such an unlikely and distant place….

What is Symbology? will attempt to track major themes in the development of symbology from its inception (if such a term is meaningful here) to the present day.  While it is characterized by certain shared core epistemological and ontological concerns, symbology exhibits a diversity among its proponents that both contributes to its richness and poses substantial barriers to understanding its significance.  When pursuing the diverse elements that comprise symbological research, it is important not to lose sight of the shared set of assumptions, procedures, and goals that underlie all rigorously symbological thought.  To that end, I would like to conclude with the astute observations of an unlikely scholar of symbological thought and practice, the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, whose gnarled and nihilistic theoretical work has had an influence on the modern “humanities” which, although pernicious in the short term, may have helpfully precipitated a decline which was in any case inevitable given the emptiness of the premises from which “humanistic” inquiry has proceeded since its institutionalization at the outset of the modern period.   

“Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western [sic] culture,” Foucault accurately declares in the second chapter of his study The Order of Things (1966).  “It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.  The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man.  Painting imitated space, and representation was posited as a form of repetition: the theatre of life or the mirror of nature, that was the claim made by all language, its manner of declaring its existence and of formulating its right of speech.”  He proceeds to ask “What form constitutes a sign and endows it with its particular value as a sign?” and responds, remarkably given the diametrically opposed premises of his own methodology: “Resemblance does.  It signifies exactly in so far as it resembles what it is indicating (that is, a similitude).  But what indicates it is not the homology; for its distinct existence as a signature would then be indistinguishable from the face of which it is the sign; it is another resemblance, an adjacent similitude, one of another type which enables us to recognize the first, and which is revealed in turn by a third.  Every resemblance reveals a similitude, but this signature is no more than an intermediate form of the same resemblance . . . The signature and what it denotes are of exactly the same nature; it is merely that they obey a different law of distribution; the pattern from which they are cut is the same.”   

As Foucault so eloquently declares, “To search for a meaning is to bring to light a resemblance.” 

But while Foucault believed himself to be composing a belated epitaph for a “moment in time [when] resemblance was about to relinquish its relation with knowledge and disappear, in part at least, from the sphere of cognition,” we are confident that the utter exhaustion of the perverse dogmas of différance coincides with the reemergence of resemblance as the guiding structure of our thought and that the cataclysmic shifts Foucault believed himself to be describing will leave no traces in the fossil record. 

Vive l’indifférance!  To the referents themselves!