Jakobson’s Zeros

Chapter 6 treats the transformation to which the Russian structuralist linguist Roman Jakobson, following the deflationary tradition of Saussure, subjects the neo-Pythagorean acoustic poetics discussed in Chapter 5. The focus rests on a new reading of what Jakobson calls the “linguistic zero,” which he defines as the featureless half of a binary opposition between presence and absence. The chapter argues that this absolutely crucial and much-analyzed aspect of phonological theory can be shown to develop in rigorous, polemical conversation with the systems theories of 19th century language spirit. The zero operates, in essence, as a placeholder for the subtracted soul of structure. In the process, it manages to fulfill the seemingly impossible, because seemingly contradictory, condition of infusing by subtracting, grounding by evaporating, unifying by differing, inspiring by deflating.