| My hypothesis is that the aesthetic function of language is the paradoxical negation and deferral of indexical reference. Taking C. S. Peirce's semiotic categories of icon, index, and symbol, I show how these possess a wider evolutionary significance by referring to the important work of Terrence Deacon, who proposes that language---symbolic reference---can only be seen as an evolutionary anomaly when viewed from the perspective of indexical reference. Indexical reference is a more basic communicative mode than symbolic reference, and it structures all animal communication systems, including our own form of "body language" (e.g., crying, laughing, grimacing, etc.). The "anomaly" of language arises in understanding how, in our evolutionary history, symbolic reference could have emerged from indexical reference. Why, in the human case, did language originate? The question is not simply an empirical matter (for we know that language originated at some point). It is also a matter of our ontology, of how we understand the human. For example, in studying literature we imply that these texts have something important to say about being human. But if we are to make this argument in the strongest terms possible, then we need to show that fiction---aesthetic representation---is a fundamental element of language itself. I argue that this is indeed the case. Thus, I develop Deacon's own theoretical reflections on the origin of the symbolic by hypothesizing that it is the paradoxical negation of indexical relations that generates symbolic reference and that this paradoxical process is fundamentally an aesthetic process. Literature, on this model, becomes an "anthropological discovery procedure" (Eric Gans) that puts us in direct historical touch with the symbolic nature of human origin. The elaboration of particular historical aesthetics (e.g., the classical and the neoclassical) are literary models of this origin. As such, they offer progressively clearer articulations of the symbolic event of human origin. In the final two chapters of the argument, I explore the consequences of this model of the aesthetic by applying it to drama and, in particular, to Shakespeare. |
