About Project Infrastructuralism

Purpose

At the Royal Library in Copenhagen, there is a wealth of letters and documents from the leading figures in the linguistic environment in Denmark in the first half of the last century. The two most important are comrades in arms Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) and Hans Jørgen Uldall (1907-1957). Together, in constant dialogue, the two created the linguistic theory they named glossematics. It constitutes an original Danish contribution to European and international structural linguistics.In addition to Uldall, Hjelmslev corresponded with Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010), Paul Diderichsen (1905-1964), Jens Holt (1904-1973), Henning Spang-Hanssen (1920-2002) and Francis J. Whitfield (1916- 1996) and Diderichsen and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen corresponded between themselves. The archives also contain letters and documents from Hjelmslev's student Harry Wett Frederiksen (1916-1974), who played a decisive role by his stenography of the lectures he attended. Finally, there are letters from luminaries such as Roman Jakobson and Emile Benveniste to both Hjelmslev and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen. All this can now be found and read in your armchair at home.The overall purpose of the Infrastructuralism project is to digitize the letter collections as a research infrastructure between the greatest Danish structuralists of the 20th century and their international connections. Both correspondence and unpublished works are available to researchers from around the world (through WAYF) with the aim of better understanding this period in the history of linguistics. Read more in the infrastructure at glossematics.dk.

How

In the infrastructure at glossematics.dk, the letters are available as image files and as text files. The most important correspondences are printed so that you can read both the original and our reproduction of it. But in all cases, you will be able to see a number of metadata about letters and documents in the pane on the right, while the pane on the left reproduces the image of the original. The different letters have been sent for different reasons; there is everything from academically sharp discussions to Christmas greetings and congratulations as well as agreements on less practical topics. However, we have only selected that from the archives that is significant for the history of science. If you want the complete picture of the archives, you have to go to the Royal Library yourself.The letters that were exchanged between the Danish structuralists are important for several reasons. Firstly, they contain elaborations, descriptions and extensions as well as clarifications of the glossematic theory. Secondly, we also find opportunities and discussions – perhaps even thoughts that were initially dismissed – but are nevertheless still worth pursuing. Both reasons help to focus on an empirical ontology, which helps to revive and put the humanities into play.

Why

We would like to start the theoretical discussions around language, social interaction and meaning within the humanities field. The discussion about the structuralist approach to language description and language analysis is still current and important, because it does not only belong to the linguistic discussion; the importance of the discussion extends to several humanistic studies, where the structural approach is an essential tool to be able to process meaning and interaction. Fundamentally, structuralism is a view of science where work is focused on the internal structure of a system and not the external conditions. Within the linguistic area, this means that if language is grounded in something social or psychological, then linguistics is not autonomous, but actually a subdivision of sociology or psychology. Project Infrastructuralism will be able to contribute new perspectives to the humanistic field with a view to creating more validity within a given science - and not least, to bring structuralism into the 21st century.