Fido the Yak

László Tengelyi's The Wild Region in Life-History teems with ideas. (Daniel Dahlstrom offers good review.) Here I will be reading the prelude to the book and honing in on the idea, recovered from Merleau-Ponty and rehabilitated by Tengelyi, of a "wild sense" (sens sauvage). I will examine Tengelyi's sens sauvage in relation to the problem of cadacualtez, a problem which Tengelyi understands though he lacks the word "cadacualtez." To begin with the latter, Tengelyi points to Heidegger's discussion of Jemeinigkeit and cautions against conflating self identity with life history. In his view the two are inseparable but not interchangable. Tengelyi defines life history as a "region where a spontaneous formation of sense takes place," whereas self identity is what is at stake "in every attempt at a retroactive fixation of a spontaneously emerged sense" (p. xxvii, Tengelyi's emphasis). The spontaneously emerged sense is a dispossesed sense, beyond the control of a subject (p. xxvi.) Tengelyi says, "experience shows that the process of sense formation repeatedly escapes from our grasp, challenging over and over again even our rectified stories and breaking up, from time to time, the supposedly hard core of our identity" (pp. xxvi-xvii).

Although Tengelyi departs from Husserlian phenomenology in attending to a Sinnbildung (development of sense) instead of a Sinngebung (bestowal of sense) by a subject (p. xxiii), he values phenomenology for its first-person access to concrete experience, and he proposes a method he calls "diacritical phenomenology." The field of investigation is not the self-identity of the subject, but a no-man's land of the "wild" sense (p. xxxiii). On the one hand this means Tengelyi will pursue a kind of phronesis that may be opposed to a dialectics; on the other hand, it means he will offer an interpretation of difference, a "diacritical difference" that is like the difference that is found in langue, "the system of differences on which the cohesion of meaningful expressions is based" (p. xxviii). Tengelyi means to employ this method, in the footsteps of Merleau-Ponty, without committing to a structuralism.

Tengelyi is not talking about a system of fixed differences, or differences between fixed values, but a "proliferating multiplicity. . . of heterogenous sense formations" (p. xxxii). He talks about the emergence of new sense thwarting expections and opening up new beginnings in life history (p. xxx), and he says that "sense in the making is always a multiple and fluctuant sense, containing, in itself, some refractory shreds, which are discarded by the retroactive fixation of sense without, however, being prevented thereby from exerting an underground influence" (p. xxxi). He makes a series of claims on this basis:

First, we may claim that a spontaneously emerging sense is accompanied by a continuous formation of a surplus. Second, it may be added that this process cannot be regarded as an accumulation of any well-defined and accomplished ingredients of sense, but it must be interpreted rather as a proliferation of some inchoate, fluctuant, and indeterminate shreds of sense [here Tengelyi cites Marc Richir]. Third, it may be asserted that, at every moment, these germs of sense are integrated into a diacritical system by their differential interrelations with each other, as well as with the already fixed sense. Finally, we may reply to Merleau-Ponty's question [about "my being set up on a universal diacritical system"] by pointing out that the reason we are not in a position to consider the totality of these differential interrelations from the outside (why, in other words, we find ourselves always already included in this diacritical system) is that we adhere, from the outset, to some meaningful sequences of life events, and whenever we see ourselves constrained to abandon or modify them, we single out, once again, some of the inchoate and fluctuant shreds of sense, discarding at the same time all others, in order to construct and fix another meaningful sequence of the same life events.

(p. xxxii, Tengelyi's emphases)

Tengelyi holds that "we are struck by the repeated occurence of an inchoate shred of sense" (p. xxxii). We are astonished. We should not see the return of the same as the source of our astonishment, as an unambiguous manifestation of self-identity–Tengelyi has already mapped out a notion of ipseity that "has sufficiently been separated from the identity and permanence of substantial entities" (p. xvii)–rather, our astonishment is related to the emergence of a dispossessed sense, and, he adds, "the supposition of a hidden unity in life-history is attached to this astonishment rather as a reassuring belief" (p. xxxiv). The retroactive fixation of sense is literally a fix, a response to something that is "broken." In Tengelyi's view the emergence of sense is most evident in experience at times of crisis, in "critical situations" or "stances of crisis" (p. xxii). It would seem that Tengelyi means a "crisis of identity," yet he doesn't mean to point to self identity by its lonesome, but to the critical rift between self identity and a life history devoid of closures (p. xxiii).

Returning now to the problem of cadacualtez, Tengelyi explains his commitment to the first person singular of phenomenology not as a commitment to the cogito or to any notion of ipseity, but rather as an expression of the difference between oneself and another. This difference, he claims, does not rest on any personal characteristics, and is therefore not substantive but merely positional (p. xxxiv). This is an interesting way of formulating the problem. It overcomes an impasse we face when we recognize that self-identity is mutable and to a large extent co-authored. Yet I wonder what kind of existential reality resides in the merely positional. Tengelyi leans on a Levinasian notion of singularity. He says that self identity "is neither the main source, nor an indispensable condition of our singularity, i.e., our irreplacable unicity. It is our singularity that finds its expression in the purely positional fact that we remain ourselves even if we do not remain the same as we were" (p. xxxv, Tengelyi's emphases).

To sum up, the theory of narrative identity may be charged with a certain confusion of self-identity and singularity. However, this confusion may be the result of an illusion one often falls victim to in one's quest of narrative identity. From time to time, we find ourselves compelled to reconsider and rectify the narratives by which we have fixed the identity of ourselves. In most cases, we cannot help thinking that it is our singularity, our irreplacable unicity, which is at stake in vital situations, in crisis-stricken moments. It is important to know that this is not the case; it is important to know this, lest we lose sight of the drama of life, which besides, or even, before narration, calls for acting as well.

(p. xxxvi, Tengelyi's emphases)

I have to point out the difference in language between Tengelyi's singularity and Crocco's cadacualtez. The latter is "circumstanced," the former is "positioned" within a "diacritical system of intersubjectivity" (p. xxxvi). Nevertheless I see both ideas as covering much the same territory, and I am intrigued by Tengelyi's designation of this territory as a wild region in life history, not the least for its accessibility to thought. I do have some questions though. As I read Tengelyi's account of this region, will I be allowed to be astonished at my irreplacable unicity? What thoughts can I have about my position? And if my position as a singularity is related to a diacritical system of coexistence, what relation is there between this system and the system that includes my fluctuant, indeterminate shreds of sense? Is the reality of these shreds of sense something other than positional?

Labels: cadacualtez, meaning, narrative, phenomenology, singularity, Tengelyi

posted by Fido the Yak at 2:35 PM.