Sunday, May 24, 2009
Montiglio tells us that Athenian orators of the fourth century, in contrast to Homeric public speakers, "want their voices to be made of a pure disembodied logos, and not of a powerfully resonant substance. . . .From being ligeia, their voice has become lampra (luminous)" (Silence, p. 148). She recapitulates and expands on ligus:
[I]n epic poetry ligus modifies not only the voice of good speakers, but also the song of the Sirens and the dirge of the Muses, thus associating different forms of expression on account of their clear and powerful resonance. As regards speakers, there is no incompatibility between the audible physicality of their voices and the clarity of their words. By contrast, in the classical age ligus is applied to specifically to kinds of music and utterances in which sounds prevail over words: the lovely melody of the aulos, but also, and more insistently, the voices of mourning.
(ibid.)
Ligus, Montiglio says, speaking still of the classical age, "describes voices that are cast at the margins of the city: that of the nightingale, a plaintive song reminiscent of barbarian rhythms; that of mourning women, like the Thebans who pour out their ritual cries over the dead, or like the Suppliants, barbarian women similar to nightingales, who cry out their lament with a barbarian voice"(pp. 148-149). The marginalization of voices ripples–no, the disturbance is deeper. Sundered from sound, wrenched from its body, the voice loses its capacity to legitimately express suffering in public spaces, paradoxically just as further suffering is imposed by force; subaltern dissent is stifled at the cost of a muted logos for everyone, and, consequently, a muted democracy. Passions, any passions, including the passions of the Muses, have become a threat to the web of orders: the political, the epistemic, the linguistic, the expressive, the noetic, all sustained now by not just a denial of vocal power but by a violent reification of speech and concomitant suppression of the real, a devaluing of the real in the economies of the recognized. Recognition. The irony of course is that the voice is the epitome of recognizable of personal expressions, gestures that tell who we are. If hearing consigns us the world and its contingency, as Cavarero says in echo of Jonas (For More than One Voice, p.37), then the deafness codified by excision of voices from the shared logos makes problematic any discussion of a shared world, except in the most rarified, least inclusive settings. I have to stop myself here. I don't want to rely on pre-established habits of thinking in order to assimilate what Montiglio has to say. The dematerialization of language means something to me personally, and I suspect the dematerialization of silence does as well. Silence feels.
Let's pick up again on Montiglio's discussion. Her interpretation of the conceptualizations of the vocal quality of ritual mourning is, naturally, informed by Nicole Loraux's study of ritual lament. She ties work to a conceptual dematerialization of the voice, and also, coincidentally, a dematerialization of the logos.
As Nicole Loraux has shown, the legal effort to reject the vocal expressions of mourning outside the public space is prompted by the political urgency to contain feminine lament, which supposedly upsets civic order by its unbridled affectivity. Accordingly, it is to be expected that the voice of the orator refuses to resemble these voices of lamentation: while the latter are all-sonorous, ligeiai, the former dematerializes by coinciding with the rational content that it conveys. In fact, lampros applies to the logos as well as to the speaker's voice; and persuasive speech, as Athena reminds us, is provided with eyes, with a gaze that emphasizes its rationality. This speech that wants to be manifest to the eye makes itself visible through an equally transparent medium: an immaterial voice, a pure "mirror of thought."
(pp. 149-150)
The nurturing of empathy leads to a realization that we not only acknowledge gaps in soulful encounters but that we feel our own impulse to respond to gaps. I speak now, to be critical of my own thoughts, from experience and from memory, which we may wish to regard in its physicality. Is luminosity an aspect of its physicality? Is it any less questionable for being embodied? Obviously I harbor doubts about the nature of my feelings, my impulses, my responses. Shall I cull the margins of the city for the secrets to my soul? How could that be empathy? Because it would represent a commitment to listening?
Labels: Cavarero, Greece, Jonas, Loraux, Montiglio, silence, voice
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Ong says, "Not only communication but thought itself relates in an altogether special way to sound" (Orality and Literacy, p. 7). Ong may be at odds with Cavarero in that he doesn't believe philosophy is possible except in the context of chirographic culture, and that condition may involve for him an acknowledgment and acceptance of some limitations on philosophical thought that Cavarero would rather lead us to revolt against. Broadly, we would be happier if we allowed ourselves to imagine a philosophical style of thinking that related in an altogether special way to sound, a philosophy whose departures from everyday thinking didn't do violence to this special relation to sound, which we have yet to explore, a rhythmosophy, a choreosophy, no stranger to love, in step with egalitarianism and the way things come and go. (Should philosophy make us happy?)
Labels: Cavarero, eudaimonia, noesis, Ong, sound
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Every question is the reverberation of a questioning. No question escapes a history of questioning–but is this really true? Are there no spontaneous questions? This is similar to the question of whether questions are creative. How would we ask a spontaneous question if we didn't already know how to ask questions? What is the distance between knowing how to do something and knowing what that something is, between a spontaneous question and spontaneous questioning? To think of a method of questioning is to travel the distance between a question as search and a questioning as research. Perhaps to search intently means also to step back from the search, to search with care. Could it be possible that people practice research without knowing what a search is? Carefully?
Is questioning really a mode of searching? I'm not sure that seeking is a good metaphor for asking. To ask is to ask someone, some person. More explicitly, to ask is to ask something of some person. When we speak of questioning things, or inquiring into things, are we speaking figuratively, are we completely eliding an addressee, or do we somehow have in mind some ideal person who would take our questions and possibly even provide answers? Do we project our future selves into or through the question? Conversely, is the question the opening of an encounter with another person? If you've read this far, how would you describe your coming to be involved in this question?
Does the question have its own voice? I doubt that the question truly owns its resonance. On the other hand, what if that's all it owns? Of course it might be said that resonance can't be owned at all. Can there be things that are truly given but never owned? Is a question given voice? For whom? Cavarero again: "Free from the presence of Narcissus and from Ovid's textual games, Echo comes to appear as the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality, still linked to infantile pleasure, in which uniqueness makes itself heard as voice."
Labels: Cavarero, echo, questions
Friday, June 20, 2008
Although we share vocabulary and interests, what I should want to say about language should not be confused with what Michel Henry says in "Material Phenomenology and Language (or, Pathos and Language)" (trans. Leonard Lawlor, Continental Philosophy Review 32:343-365, 1999).
There are no languages that we know of which are not languages of the world. This statement remains true under several different hypotheses about the world or different definitions of "world." The phenomenological epoché does not deny the existence of what is known in everyday speech as "the real world" or in some jargons as "the material world." The epoché merely suspends belief in "the real world," which is to say it delays answering a question of such a world's existence, a question of whether such a world might be the world, the world itself, or whether the things of and in this everyday world might possibly be the things themselves. This delay of the question about "the real world" does not mean that the epoché occurs in the absence of a world. The world that is given with phenomenality which appears through the epoché may be designated as the lifeworld–be warned: I am not reciting phenomenological doctrine here but rather offering an opinion. I have raised all kinds of questions about this phenomenal world and how it is given (for instance, might it be given as chaosmos), but, whatever its attributes or character, I am inclined to regard the world that is given with phenomenality as apodictic. Here today I might say "lifeworld" in contradistinction to Henry who radically opposes Life and world if only, perhaps, to radically unite them again. There should be no need for such gestures, and in fact if we agree to suspend the question of the existence/nonexistence of "the real world" then we can just say "world." Do we posit that this phenomenally given world is not given as dead? Apodicitity is in actuality tough to come by. Things (life, death) may be given meontically. There may or may not be such at thing as ontological difference, which may or may not matter phenomenologically. The agent of the epoché may be given as radically different from his or her phenomenal world, or the things given within this world, if or insofar as "things" are given as things. Notwithstanding these proliferating doubts, we can still talk about the worldliness of languages, and at the very least distinguish a meaningful sense of language from either Henry's dead language of the world or his autorevelatory language of Life.
Nominalization (or reference) hardly begins to describe what language does or is. Reference is petty. Unconcealing is petty. This judgment is the basis of my profound disagreement with Henry. The language of the world is not indifferent: not to the things it names, nor to the world, nor to speakers nor listeners, nor to itself, nor to the operations, feelings, entities, assemblages nor intertwinements it brushes up against. This is of course a crude way of phrasing things. There are languages and there are worlds, and before we can ever come to a question of whether a language is its own world, which may not be to say that it is enclosed or isolated, we stumble across the question of what a language is (or does). We should probably say "does" at this point to give speaking precedence over Speech or Language (*language) though it may raise a question of whether the epoché says anything, whether it is speaking or speech, the saying or the said or an altogether different sort of operation.
"Language does many things" is the ordinary way of saying that *language is an assemblage of a multitude of operations. However, the latter phrasing is far from adequate. Language does not assemble by any additive process, but rather it operates algebraically and reflexively, that is, it enables its algebra to be turned on itself, which is never merely a question of an ability to refer. Language multiplies differences. I won't say that's all it does because I don't want the discussion to devolve into pettiness. The key argument here is that language does many things.
Pace Henry the mode of appearance of the language of the world is pathetic, or passionate. Pathos is not self-centered. Although passions involve the self, we cannot arbitrarily discount the other-orientations of passions. Passions are indeed, among other things, other-oriented. They are, to use a word that must be used, interipseitious. When I say the language of the world is passionate, I mean the logos, and I can be taken to mean that philosophy is felt. The interipseity of philosophy means this: that one delights in sharing the love of knowledge. (NB: I imagine myself as optimistic, not stupid.)
Taste an epiphany: I hear your birth as saying, saying something to me if you must have objects. Therefore I wouldn't speak of the "noise of birth" nor would I separate the cry from the real language of the world. It is not for nothing that I hear your existence. In following Adrianna Cavarero's recovery of the logos as phone semantike through to a conclusion that "[h]earing consigns us to the world and its contingency" (For More than One Voice, p. 37), and going one step further, I am consigned to our contingency, yours and mine together, which is given with the world. This is of course a crude way of phrasing things. There are many contingencies, many of us, many wes. The modalities of consignment are surely multitudinous and multifarious as well. For all of the multiplicities I am no less passionately consigned to our world, contingent as it is, and to our contingencies.
I have delayed the question of whether our contingent world corresponds to "the real world." It ceases to press upon me. I don't doubt that you exist, though I might be curious to know how you exist.
Does existence speak through us or do we speak through existence? In any case we speak to each other. If I wanted to speak of the materiality of language I would be speaking of voices and the interipseitious world in which they are heard, of the passionate consignment to our world and to our contingency. But no doubt I would be talking to you. Feel me?
Labels: Cavarero, Henry, intersubjectivity, language, passions
Friday, January 04, 2008
Cavarero provides some texture to the idea of plurality:
Biographies and autobiographies, before being textual sites of a refined and professional hemerneutics, are life-stories narrated as a written text. For as much as they are necessarily constructed according to diverse standards, or according to the epoch or the tastes of the times, they nonetheless tell the story of a narratable self whose identity–unique and unrepeatable–is what we seek in the pages of the text. It is this identity, which may be rendered as a fragmentary or multiple segmentation of the self, which would deny its unity. [Those commas don't seem right to me.] Our thesis, once more, is that the etymological root that the terms uniqueness [unicità] and unity [unità] share does not flatten them out into a homogeneous substance, but rather renders them signs of an existence whose life-story is different from all others precisely because it is constitutively interwoven with many others.
(Narratives, p. 71, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)
What should we make of this association of uniqueness with unrepeatability? What does it mean to say that only the what is subject to repetititon (if it exists), that the who is exempt? What else would the who be exempt from?
The ambiguity of these questions regarding the persistence of identity lies in fact in the confusion of the status of the who with the what. The what–that is, the qualities, the character, the roles, the outlooks of the self–changes and is inevitably multiple and may be judged or reinterpreted in many ways. The who, on the other hand–as the uniqueness of the self in her concrete and insubstitutable existence–persists in continual self-exhibition, consisting in nothing else but this exposure, which cannot be transcended
(pp. 72-73, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)
The space of appearance, which must mean in this context the space of co-appearance, is not then a space of transcendence. Does transcendence belong only to that which can repeat itself? How would that even be possible? If this is an anti-intellectual attitude, what's at stake? That is, whose intellects are exposed?
One could indeed maliciously suspect that the whole affair about the centrality of the text, which reduces the existence of the living to a status of extra-textuality, depends on the well-known tendency of intellectuals to represent the world in their likeness and image. This is, of course, an ancient vice. It originates, perhaps, with Parmenides–the first professional thinker–who declares that 'being and thinking are the same.' The 'I think, therefore I am' of Descartes, and the 'all that is real is rational' of Hegelian memory, echo h im through the millenia. After which, in more recent times, the subject fades away–but not the sacredness of the intellectual work, which, for centuries, has claimed to put it into the world. On the contrary, such intellectual work, tirelessly speculating upon itself, decides that the very same speculators are a fictitious product of the speculating game. With a rather democratic gesture, the text thus consumes everyone's existence–philosphers and housewives, heroes and poets, characters and authors–in a single mouthful.
(p. 76, Cavarero's emphasis)
Caverero is most brilliant when she is critical. I wouldn't idealize, and I wouldn't suspect her of idealizing, plurality. Here she is critical of a notion of the totality of an existent or a self:
Fragile and contingent–and already marked at birth by a unity that makes of herself first a promise, and then a desire–the narratable self is an exposed uniqueness that awaits her narration. The text of this narration, far from producing all the reality of the self, is nothing but the marginal consequence, or symptom, that follows that desire.
(p. 86, Cavarero's emphasis)
The existent, which is insubstitutable for the duration of his/her life-span, is never an all–although it is born into the promise of the one. Still less does he/she find in death 'an adequate base for establishing in what sense the totatilty of Being-there can be talked about.' Only a perspective that is obsessively focused on death can in fact read existence in terms of totality. Even the posthumous horizon that characterizes the motive of many autobiographical writings supports this obsession.
Precisely because of htis irremediable exposure to others, uniqueness–although it speaks the desiring language of the one–rejects, at the root, the synthesis of the all. The en kai pan, the One and All, belong to the doctrine of Parmenides, not to the design of a life traced by human footsteps on the terrain of unforeseeability and contingency. Fragile and exposed, the existent belongs to a world-scene where interaction with other existents is unforeseeable and potentially infinite. As in The Arabian Nights, the stories intersect with each other. Never isolated in the chimerical, total completion of its sense, one cannot be there without the other.
The narratable self thus re-enters into what we could call a relational ethic of contingency; or rather, an ethic founded on the altruistic ontology of the human existent as finite. Already exposed within the interactive scene that Arendt calls 'political,' there lies at the center of the narrative scene a who which–far from enclosing herself within the pride of a self-referential ego meant to last forever–gathers the in-born matrix of an expositive and relational existence. She wants and gives, receives and offers, here and now, an unrepeatable story in the form of a tale.
(p. 87, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)
(Snark: Cavarero has exposed herself as a pleonasmist; so much for unrepeatability.) The challenging thought here (for me, of course) is to not align the infinite with repetition. Can one repeat one's way to infinity? If infinity is a place, perhaps you are already there, at your relations, or your relationality. Far be it from me to contemplate your finitude. When I consider my own existence, and what finitude means for me, I am not confident that infinite relationality has it all sewn up. All sewn up. Well, is this really my problem, thinking that the who (my dear sweet who) can be a totality? Do you see where my thought veers, always at odds? Caverero won't let me get me comfortable with an estrangement from myself. She says:
The altruism of uniqueness has thus the additional merit of avoiding that 'rhetoric of alterity,' which the philosophical discourse of the twentieth century seems to adore. 'The Other' or 'the other,' capital or lower-case, often gets invoked by contemporary philosophers as a proof of their good intentions with respect to the individualistic spirit of the times. Whether it is the alterity that invades the self, rendering him nomadic and fragmented, or the alterity that lures the self more subtly with his embrace, these others never have the distinct and unrepeatable face of each human in so far as he is simply another. Intolerant, as usual, of many elementary givens of existence–a large part of contemporary philosophy disdains the ontological status that binds the reality of the self to the (well, yes, empirical) material presence of someone other.
As we never tire of repeating, the ontological status of reciprocal appearance [comparizione] belongs to the existents–distinct and plural, each one for and with another–of a living context like life [ahem]. Continuing to live as a unique existent, here and now, in flesh and bone, this and not another, the who therefore avoids both the usual language of ethics and of politics. Constitutively altruistic, rather than by choice, the ethics and politics of uniqueness indeed speak a language that does not know general names. They tend, moreover, to coincide in the relational character of the very same scene–where the other who interacts, watches and recounts is the inassimilable, the insubstitutable, the unrepeatable. She is a unique existence that no categorization or collective identity can fully contain. She is the you [tu] that comes before the we [noi], before the plural you [voi] and before the they [loro].
(p. 90, Cavarero's emphasis)
Perhaps we could talk about a revolutionary you. I don't know. I feel we're still at an awkward stage in our relationship where I don't know how to talk about your finitude–if you have one. If you asked me to tell you your story, I would put an ending on it. Can that be what you want? (At the risk of repeating myself, I should mention that Cavarero is about as different from Tengelyi as one could imagine; when I feel something other within my experience, as in the case of letting my imagination flow, which I don't regard as psychopathological, I don't know why I wouldn't want to talk about that using a rhetoric of alterity, though, naturally, I wouldn't confuse my imagination with you, gentle soul.)
At last I'd like to look at Cavarero's critique of individualism because she says something quite intriquing and I hope she means it. (I simply must say in passing a word about Cavarero's rhetorical strategy. She's attempting to preempt a criticism of her philosophy as being individualistic. Well, she provides a few good reasons why we shouldn't want to think individualistically. I must say, however, that I haven't yet read a genuine defense of individualism. I must sort of take it on faith then that people believe in such a reprehensible doctrine–in which case I'm sure they have their reasons.)
As the elementary lexicon of democracy demonstrates, individuality is indeed a repeatable, atomized, serial paradigm. Each individual, in an of himself, is as valid for one as he is for any other; he is equal because he is equivalent [ahem]. Uniqueness, on the other hand, ends up rendering useless both the concept of repetition and the principle of generalization that nourishes the individualist theory. Uniqueness is an absolute difference, which, as Arendt never tires of arguing, changes the very notion of politics.
(p. 89, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)
Let me be so bold as to ask you, Why should you want to repeat yourself? Why should you want to generalize? Maybe you would repeat yourself or generalize to make yourself understood? I doubt, if I may, that you would want to be repeated or generalized by me or anybody else. Anyway, that's a tricky proposition. Why is it tricky to repeat another and not to repeat oneself, to be repeated by another and not to be repeated by oneself? (Sometimes I feel that everything having to do with others is tricky.) I offer you the thought that you shouldn't want to repeat yourself because you really don't know yourself that well. See? You are trickier than you know.
Labels: Cavarero, ipseity, plurality, repetition, uniqueness, you
Sunday, December 30, 2007
I empathize with the potato. What cuts the potato cuts me. I don't believe the potato has a mind. Therefore empathy does not require that the empathic person has a theory of mind (or ToM, as some scientific types put it). The empathic person does not posit but simply feels. Were science to discover that minds do not exist and that everything currently attributed to mind represents some other phenomenon or set of phenomena, the problem of empathy would remain what it is: what does it mean that a person can intimately feel what happens to the body of another living entity? (The problem of the autistic person's purported lack of empathy might appear differently were science to disbelieve in minds, but that's another story.)
What does empathy for the potato mean? There's a russet potato with some other russet potatoes hanging in a basket in the kitchen. I'm going to peel off its skin, cut it into chunks, toss the chunks into a pan with some onion, pepper and garlic, rub oil on the lot of them, and put the pan into the oven. Once it's good and roasted I'm going to eat the potato. Should I feel nauseated? If I reflect upon it perhaps it is just a little bit nauseating.
I'm not going to liberate the potato. What would that mean? Growing more pototoes? Just throwing it away? Although I have thrown away food, some force within me rebels against throwing away food, and I can't help but think of the potato as food. It would be better to be just a little bit nauseated than to throw away food. Empathy with the potato is thus a delicate balance between throwing up and throwing away food.
Am I worthy of this potato? Is my life so wonderful that I can just assume that I'm worthy of any potato, including this potato? I suspect that living my life fully means that I must interrogate my eating of this very potato. How am I going to live that I should eat this potato?
Why this potato and not another? Is philosophy capable of talking about the accidentality of existence, or must it abolish or suppress the accidental? Adriana Cavarero says that the accidental needs care, and she says, "To tell the story that every existence leaves behind itself is perhaps the oldest act of such care" (Relating Narratives, p. 53). How would you like it if I roasted you for supper, told the story of how you came to end up on my plate, and called that caring? Let's be honest for a moment about the psychology of kitchen stories, about the nausea and the brutality they conceal.
Is it really proper for me to celebrate this potato? Would it be too poetic to call attention to its chthonic existence? What about the stickiness of its milky blood on the blade of the knife? In my dreams I'm drawing close to Proxima Centauri. Were I to tell you about the dreams of this potato, huddled up against the stars in the Idaho night, you would be right to suspect me of prevaricating, of covering over a great catastrophe of being. So I shouldn't live for my dreams?
Labels: autism, Cavarero, empathy, potatoes
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
The narratable self that listens to her story, and is one because of the familiar, narrative structure of memory, transfers this irreflexive unity, even in the most manifest fragmentarity of the text. Moreover, it is above all the autobiographical impulse of memory that produces discontinuous and fragmentary texts, which, although untrustworthy and elusive, can nonetheless never be exchanged for someone else's story–as happens in the magnificent textual games of Jorge Luis Borges. This everyday certainty of the self, which comes from sensing oneself to be 'this and not another,' indeed continues to resist both the inimitable pleasure of Borges' inventions, and the more refined enticements of contemporary theory–which continue to impose upon the self the pleasure, if not the necessity, of the infinite dissolution of her internal and multiple alterity.
Signigicantly, with this spontaneous resistance–which seems, at first sight, to be based upon the banality of good sense–the narratable self ends up doing a good service for philosophy. Indeed, philosophy ought to be more cautious in playing around with the endless game of the other. By continuing to transport the category of alterity into the intimacy of the self, contemporary philosophy in fact produces the inevitable consequence of impeding every serious naming of the other in so far as he/she is an other.
As Arendt teaches us, a unique being is such only in the relation, and the context, of a plurality of others, which, likewise unique themselves, are distinguished reciprocally–the one from the other. The story of a unique being is obviously never the monotonous and monolithic story of an idem, but is always the unpredictable and multi-vocal story of an ipse. Although it changes in the course of its life and in the course of its story–even to the point of no longer seeming or feeling the same–this ipse, like Oedipus, is 'this and not another' from the beginning to the end of this life and this story.
(Relating Narratives, p. 43, Cavarero's emphasis, my bold)
Nancy's intrus has been haunting me. As I've been doing physical exercises the body I call mine has been changing. What makes this body a body, what gives it the consistency of a body? The heart–but Nancy's intrus haunts me, stands between me and the heart–and yet I feel the heart grow stronger. It doesn't feel disembodied, yet I can't precisely give it boundaries. I drink water prodigiously. It feels like water is also my body, woven in with my muscles. Pumped. A realization about my watery body came to me Monday night after forgetting to take my meds. I couldn't sleep. It was as if a demon possessed me, the mirror image of a beast that comes to me sometimes in nightmares. The beast is not exactly familiar, since it always frightens me, surprises me, it takes many forms, and still I am familiar with its force and its anger, its refusal to lie down. It feels like I'm repressing a tremendous rage, and also something more vital. Joy perhaps. Who is this person who refuses to sleep? How can I have an everyday certainty of the self in this situation? And is it really so unusual to be uncertain about the self? Whose thoughts are these? I don't imagine I'd want to give Nancy a big wet kiss, but I take his words (translated mostly) and put them in my mouth, allow them to circulate, allow them to go to my head. I read a description of psychasthenia and think oh yeah, this too describes a reality. Under the right set of circumstances it could be my reality. The psychasthenic self would be no less of a self than Cavarero's narratable self with its everyday certainty. In counterpoint to this certainty of self, Cavarero notes an unpredictability and a multivocality of the self. Could my familiarity with my unpredictable and polyvalent ipseity be anything but a desire? If I recognize the uniqueness of existents I wouldn't want to say that estrangement draws its boundaries in and around me exactly as it does in and around you. The boundaries of estrangement are negotiated in the context of a plurality of others. In our life together there is the remains to be seen. I have my doubts about the exposure of the existent, chief among them the sense that the existent is exposed in an instant, or already always exposed. If there is a desire for narration of one's life story, perhaps there is also desire for the remains to be seen. Oh yeah, and ghosts.
Labels: body, Cavarero, ipseity, Nancy, uniqueness
Friday, December 14, 2007
Adriana Cavarero speaks of a paradox of Ulysses, by which she means the situation that we recieve our own stories from the narrations of others (Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul Kottman, Routledge, 2000, p. 17). In other words, we are the protagonists but not the authors of our own life stories. Cavarero's perspective, suspicious of autobiography, contrasts with László Tengelyi's (The Wild Region in Life-History) emphasis on a life history that one tells oneself, although on the question of the irreplacable uniqueness of the existent there is perhaps some agreement. Where does the unicity of an identity come from? It is tempting for me to think that experience has a unicity, that all of my experiences seem to belong to me alone, and thus perhaps my consciosness could be a source of my identity. Cavarero (and in a different way Tengelyi) will have none of that. In her view the unicity that pertains to identity is given by others; identity is not substantial but rather relational and expositional. On the topic of the expositional character of identity, she is of course interpreting Hannah Arendt, which is her strong suit. When discussing the self-disclosure that pertains to action, she says that identity is expressive. It is not then consciousness which exercises an esemplastic power over experience; rather, relations between singular exposed existents constitute identity and, if I'm reading her correctly, give meaning to a course of life events.
When Jean-Luc Nancy says "birth" I'm not sure if he literally means birth from a womb. Cavarero, who reads Nancy affectionately, leaves no doubt that natality is about birth from the womb. The mother, she says, "embodies the ex- of existent" (p. 19). She says appearance is "rooted in the materiality of the context" (p. 21). I think maybe she means "the context of exhibition," which doesn't really say much, but the mere acknowledgement of a context is perhaps important, and of course there's the question of its materiality, which primarily interests me. Cavarero's thoughts on materiality are fleshed out in For More than One Voice which argues against the primacy of the visual that she posits in Relating Narratives. In any case, she appears to be committed to a kind of materialism. We might call it an expositional materialism, though it is also a materialism of natality. Here is a display:
The expositive and the relational character of identity are thus indistinguishable. One always appears to someone. One cannot appear if there is no one else there. It follows, to say it again with Nancy, that 'the un-exposable is the nonexistent'; that is, existing consits in disclosing oneself within a scene of plurality where everyone, by appearing to one another, is shown to be unique. They appear to each other reciprocally–first of all in their corporeal materiality and as creatures endowed with sensory organs. Put another way, the language of the existent assumes the bodily condition of 'this and not another' in all of its perceptible concreteness. Starting from birth, from the 'naked reality of our originary physical appearance,' [Arendt, The Human Condition] each of us is who appears to others uniquely and distinctly.
(pp. 20-21)
"[T]he language of the existent assumes the bodily condition of 'this and not another' in all of its perceptible concreteness." I find this intriguing, but I wonder about the distance between language and the existent that has been opened up in the paradox of Ulysses. Whose story is the Odyssey, or the story told at the court of the Phaecians? I'll quote another paragraph at length which shows, I hope, why the paradox of Ulysses is a paradox, or at least an irony.
To be sure, by emphasizing heroic action, the constitutive unmasterability [impadroneggiabilità] of the 'who' is made hugely evident. No one can know, master or decide upon identity. Each one of us is only capable of exhibiting it, of exhibiting that unrepeatable uniqueness which he is, as he appears to others in the actual context of his exhibition. Our Ulysses, who interacts with his peers on the Trojan plane, is thus not an extraordinary case at all. As happens not only with heroes, but also with all of the other actors, he does not know who he is because he could in no way know it. The one who is revealed never knows whom he reveals. Given that everyone's identity lies completely in the exhibitive character of this who–who the agent reveals is, by definition, unknown to the agent himself.
(p. 23)
Is the narrator a master of identities in any way? A master of anybody's language? When Cavarero goes on to speak of a desire for one's life to be narrated, I rather doubt she will be thinking of a desire to be mastered. What exactly is the power that the narrator holds? Who speaks the language of the existent?
Labels: Arendt, Cavarero, Nancy, narrative, uniqueness
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
He, Odif of the Far North, drove out to the cut down your own Christmas tree farm. A man in overalls handed him a saw and pointed out a row of pine trees. Odif tromped over to the trees, inspected a few of them, and then chose one to cut down. He sawed into the trunk and after a few moments of sawing the tree jumped up in Odif's hand. The flesh of the stump stared up at him. He smelled it. A sudden horror gripped him. It was he who went into the light. It was he who flew away. And then just as suddenly he was standing there, brutally standing there in a field of pine and fir stumps, a dying tree in one hand, a saw in the other. As he tromped through the snow on his way back to the parking lot the smell of his own flesh rose in his nostrils, a smell he associated with the snow. And he couldn't tell the tree's juices from his own. Paul Kottman, one of Adriana Cavarero's translators, says she uses a word that means "to have a taste of oneself" or "to recognize one's own scent or flavor." The word is assoporarsi. Maybe it's related to assporarmi. A word like it should exist in English. There should also be a word for the sudden awareness of a chiasmus of self and pine tree, a short brutal word like "life" or "pain."
Labels: Cavarero, chiasmus, incredibly silly, Kottman, ritual sacrifice
Sunday, October 07, 2007
I want to follow up on one of Nancy's ideas in a sober voice. He says that in the experience of freedom that is thinking as freedom, we know that in every thought there is an other thought, which is the burst of freedom (The Experience of Freedom, p. 59). This reminds me of Tengelyi's discussion of the wild sense, the spontaneously emerging shard of sense that appears as other than belonging to one's life history determined according to a retroactive fixation of sense. Dylan, who has begun reading Tengelyi's The Wild Sense, notes a difficulty in the distinction Tengelyi has drawn between singularity and self-identity. Nancy, of course, has had a few words to say about singularity, but so far his thinking is a little opaque to me. It's fair to say that his thinking about singularity is existential. Ex-istence, he says, "signifies simply the freedom of being, that is, the infinite inessentiality of its being-finite, which delivers it to the singularity wherein it is 'itself'" (p. 14, Nancy's emphasis). If we put these two ideas together, the argument would seem to be that singularity is given by that which is other in thought, an other that is not thought but that thinks thought itself. (This strikes me as a thinkerly way of approaching existential singularity) Nancy speaks of a hither side of difference: "a difference of being in itself, which would not simply convert being into difference and difference into being (since precisely this type of conversion between pure substances would become impossible), but which would be the difference of its existence, and in this existence, inasmuch as it is its own essence, the difference and division of its singularity" (ibidem). Nancy's singularity is tied to essence, and even though essence is understood existentially, it appears to be a markedly different approach than Tengelyi's. And yet Nancy speaks of the division of the singularity of existence. So far in this work he has not thematized plurality, but the idea seems to be nascent, presaging a dominant theme of Being Singular Plural. This idea of a division or a difference in singularity does not seem far from what Tengelyi means by the positionality of singularity, despite the noticable differences between their two approaches.
In the last decade or so the problem of singularity has been noticed in many corners, but the thoughts around it still appear to be inchoate. The later Nancy (along with Adriana Cavarero) insightfully conjoin the problem of uniqueness with the problem of plurality, and I believe this conjuncture is an implication of Tengelyi's approach as well. Of course Luce Irigaray deserves credit for treating plurality as an ontological problem, though her works are not cited by these other authors. (I mean to take up To Be Two again before too long). The question of finitude seems to be a problem for plurality; can a world consist of as many nows as it takes to make a world? I'm sure I'll be rereading Being Singular Plural again too.
Labels: Cavarero, freedom, Irigaray, Nancy, plurality, Tengelyi, Trigg, uniqueness
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
In A Palindrome: Conscious Living Creatures as Instruments of Nature; Nature as an Instrument of Conscious Living Creatures (I'll be referencing the page numbers in the pdf), Mario Crocco gives us a lot to chew on: cosmology, natural science, eschatology, life and death. Here I'll limit myself to exploring the problem of cadacualtez (lit. "each-oneness") that he raises, a problem I've hastily touched on in relation to Bains' The Primacy of Semiosis.
The story of cadacualtez, like the story of its cousin uniquess, is the story of a cover-up. I demanded of Adriana Caverero (For More than One Voice) that she demonstrate an ability to think uniqueness, because I didn't want to assume that the scotamization of uniqueness has been due to a history of bad philosophy rather than a simple situation of there not being much to say about uniqueness. Without being too cavalier I'd like to put the same challenge to Crocco's discussion of cadacualtez. As it happens, there are a few things that can be said about it. Furthermore, attention to its scotomization may be useful in clarifying how not to think about it, a point that I could have made about Caverero's critique of logocentrism had I been completely fair.
Let's start with some simple definitions. "Cadacualtez," Crocco explains, is "the intrinsic unbarterability, unrepeatability, incommunicability and singularity of every existential being" that "manifests as the ontic determination, in nature, of every event of a finite observer's finding herself experiencing in a circumstance rather than, instead, in another" (p. 98). "Natural science," he continues, "finds psychisms that neither self-posit to exist nor self-circumstance to eclose. As their circumstancing is a constitutive contingency for finite observers, its unbarterability makes such event one and the same, even if iterated observationally over the years–one never being shifted or teleported to other bodily circumstances. As a matter of observation, each real observer in nature cannot derive its own place from the physical regularities forming its other empirical findings; less, to account for why the availabilities compounding his or her mental world do not become available to another person" (ibidem). Crocco insists on "the unbarterability of circumstancing" (p. 97), which suggests to me, perhaps wrongly, that cadacualtez is a matter of circumstances, and that as finite existentialities we find ourselves thrown into a circumstancing, which is to say, into a cadacualtic reality. Another way of putting this might be that we are thrown into whoness, a cadacualtically constituted psychophysical unity that cannot be reduced to simply having a brain, for "the cerebral organ only determines some sensory contents of her or his experience, but does not determine–nor could it do this–who will appear circumstanced to use it" (p. 98).
What would it mean to depict ontic constitution in cadacualtic terms rather than fungible terms ( p. 96)? The concepts of individuality, self, ipseity, identity are inadequate to describe cadacualtez, and have contributed to its philosophical ecclipse, or cultural ecclipse, as Crocco would have it, an ecclipse that has befuddled the conceptual understanding of mind-body relations (p. 95). In one sense, cadacualtez isn't conceptual at all, "because the logic of concepts asserts that being one is identical to being not another, the cultural ecclipse of cadacualtez was reinforced" (p. 99). If we question this logic, will it be possible to think cadacualtez? To do so, we must not confuse mental contents or the structure of mental contents with the reality of minds' cadacualtez. Cadacualtez is "a unique affair of existence that does not belong within any realm of essences." It is unlawful, or rather, in a manner of speaking, its logos is unique. The coming into actuality of each and every existentiality establishes a new logos, separate from the domain of essences (p. 114).
Crocco points to a temporal asymmetry of cadacualtic descriptions:
Cadacualtez is postdictable but never predictable. If one's survey goes back from the existence of a particular existentiality, say that of Jane Doe, to her previous nonexistence, the former is already established as a part of the query. In contrast, when the survey is conceptualized in the opposite sense, one comes from the nonexistence therein–say, in a not yet fecondated ovule–of circumstancing relationships with any cadacualtic existentiality (namely, not from the nonexistence of circumstancing relationships with Jane Doe but the nonexistence of circumstancing relationships with any existentiality by then future) to the existence of Jane Doe's particular reality, not another. In this fashion, in one avenue of the survey (the latter, or causal sequence) this non-alterity differs from identity, but merges with it in the other, sequence-reversing avenue. The epistemological time asymmetry that in this way comes to affect the issue cloaks, habitually, the important distinction between one's being one because of one's history, namely the fact that the sequence of constitutive events makes one's instanceable features, and one's being not another because of a different source. In this regard cadacualtez is a converse of ipseity, the latter determining one to be oneself and the former making one's being not another.
(p. 98)
I want to return to now to the question of what it means to be thrown into cadacualtez, or to be thrown into a cadacualtic finite existentiality. How does this condition relate to the condition of embodiment? Crocco argues that in nature we find "cadacualtic semovient observers whose existence is unassailable by the formation, transformation, and obliteration of the bodily circumstances that became theirs" (p. 112). What then is the relationship between semovience and bodily circumstance? When we talk about embodiment, do we mean semovience or do we mean what the phenomenologists would call the body as object? A clarification is in order, as it has been my habit to think of semovience as the awareness of the ability to move one's body, and this is not quite what the Argentian existential neurobiologists, of whom Crocco is a leading figure, have in mind. Mariela Szirko, in Effects of Relativistic Motion in the Brain and their Biological Relevance, nicely summarizes what the Argentinian existential neurobiologists mean by semovience:
The other two kinds of availabilities [besides the varieties of mental contents], namely the inherent abilities (sensing and moving), are not acquired mental contents, but constitutional or primary abilities of every mind. One is gnoseological apprehension or knowledgeability: the ability to experience or have knowledge of one’s own constitutive reality or ontic consistency, even if only of one’s causal changes, and thus of differentiating the demarcations acquired by one’s existentiality through causal efficiency whether of the outer circumstances or of the mind. The other is semovience, the inherent or primary ability of every mind found in nature (i.e., every circumstanced psyche or existential finitude compounding in a personal organism) to start new causal series and not merely continuing causal sequences that are transmitted from elsewhere.
So the two points that need to be made is that where a phenomenology of the body might point to a possible unity of gnoseological apprehension and semovience, a merger of I think and I can, the Argentinian existential neurobiologists see two distinct features of existentialities. Thus even though Crocco might appear to share with phenomenology a sense of the apodicticity of semovience, he has already made the move to what Barbaras calls cosmobiology, and he is fundamentally concened with the relationship between existence and causality.
Crocco's vision, it must be noted, extends beyond that of a natural scientist, as his cosmobiology is concerned with what natural science cannot explain as much as with what it can. He says, "Death is a biological fact, personal existence is not" (p. 111), and, if I'm understanding him correctly, he suggests that semovience has no relation to the death of the body. "I see nothing," he says, "preventing postmortal finite existentialities in a bodyless condition from keeping themselves semoviently operating" (p. 112). In sum, it appears Crocco is asking us to believe in ghosts, or, more precisely, to not rule out the possibility of ghosts. This is a problem for me. Does cadacualtez have a ghostly aspect, an implication of the absolute freedom of personal existence? (This would be another reason for me to question the absoluteness of existential freedom.)
I want to draw attention to the condition of plurality that cadacualtez as "not being another" indexes. If we should not think "as if empsycheable bodies and embody-able minds lacked any intrinsic bond referring them one to another individually" (p. 95), how then should we think of cadacualtez in terms of an intrinsic bond referring minds to one another? Crocco says that minds are "cadacualtic and plural, as well as not point-like but innerly extensive and dififferntiable sinks and sources of causal action" (p. 100). And he advises, "In your imagining that you are the unoriginated portion of reality, you should imagine that you are ontically constituted as a plurality of cadacualtic persons" (p. 106). The "unoriginated portion of reality" is another way of thinking God, a way of imagining the whole of the cosmos from an omniscient point of view. Is the plurality of cadacualtic existentialities only imaginable from this omniscient point of view, or is it an evident aspect of the ontic constitution of existence? What is the relationship between causal sequences, whether transeunt or initiated by a semovience, and plurality, i.e., is plurality a fact of personal existence because it is cosmic?
If cadacualtez is thinkable we will have to work around a certain "logic of concepts" that would equate being one with not being another. On what basis, then, will we think the conditions of possibility of plurality? Another unexplored issue also then arises, the incommunicability of cadacualtez. Is cadacualtez incommunicable? Or do we follow Cavarero in finding the voice as a communication of whoness, an immediate entry into the uniqueness of others?
Labels: Bains, Barbaras, cadacualtez, Cavarero, Crocco, plurality, semovience, Szirko
Saturday, July 14, 2007
To pose the question more exactly, Is listening to another person speak something we do silently? Merleau-Ponty takes from Daniel Lagoche the idea that listening does not take place in silence because (a) the listener anticipates spoken words and formulates a response, and (b), inversely, the speaker has an implicit belief in the listener's comprehension (Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, p. 67). To regard these phenomena as being other than silent one must have a sense of language as a whole as being something performed out loud, such that even reading, because it engages with language, must be understood at its core as a phenomenon of the out loud.
Atlernatively, we could adopt the position of Max Picard, for whom "[r]eal speech is in fact nothing but the resonance of silence" (The World of Silence, p. 27). Faced with these two extremes, we might be inclined to negotiate a middle ground. But first let's examine how Merleau-Ponty is in fact defining language to see what sense it makes to regard listening to another speak as also being a phenomenon of articulated speech.
[L]anguage is a surpassing (operated by the subject on the signification at his disposal) which is stimulated by the usage made of words in his environment. Language is an act of transcending. One cannot consider it simply as a container for thought; it is necessary to see language as an instrument for conquest of self by contact with others.
(p. 63)
Similarily:
The function of language is only a particular case of the general relation between self and others, which is the relation between two consciousnesses, of which each one projects itself in the other.
(p. 68)
Again, picking up on an argument from Kurt Goldstein's Language and Language Disturbances:
We must place the accent on the productivity of language: language is a totality of instruments for our relationships with people. It reflects to what degree we are capable of inventions. It is a manifestation of the link that we have with other people and with ourselves.
(p. 73)
And finally:
All language is mind. It is a verbal melody which presupposes an intellectual vigilance. But the mind that governs language is not mind for itself; it is paradoxically a mind that possesses itself only by losing itself in language.
(p. 77)
Is it clear from Merleau-Ponty's thinking about language here that language is, to use Cavarero's phrase, destined for speech? Does he see that that the relationality of language is fundamentally acoustic, or that language possesses a resonance of the body, the body who speaks? In this text, to address the totality of language Merleau-Ponty does not point directly to its embodiment, but rather, borrowing an idea from von Humboldt, to its innere Sprachform, the "totality of processes and expressions that are produced when we are at the point of expressing our thought or of understanding the thought of other people" (p. 76). The body is notably not excluded from consideration as part of the totality. However, Merleau-Ponty's overarching concern here appears to be with consciousness as such. I won't ask which perspective is truer to the phenomenon of language; I will ask, however, whether it makes sense to think of listening as other than silent if the primary fact of language is not its embodiment in speech. What exactly is our primary mode of contact with others? How we answer this question will determine whether we can make sense of the argument that listening to another person speak does not take place in silence, though even if we do comprehend the argument as Merleau-Ponty intends, we still may find room for disagreement, for instance, a possibility of valuing silence as such. That is, if we choose to view listening as an "instrumentality of speech" aren't we also implicitly encroaching upon silence, allowing language to cover everything.
Labels: Cavarero, language, listening, Merleau-Ponty, Picard, silence
Friday, June 29, 2007
Merleau-Ponty says:
Language [langage] has a function analogous to the language [langue] of a new writer who, at first, is not understood but who little by little becomes understandable by teaching people to understand him. His gestures seem to point in nonexistent directions; then, little by little, some notions begin to find for themselves a potential [virtuel] home in these gestures. In the same way, language ends up coming alive for the child. At a certain moment, the whole set of indications, which draw toward an undetermined goal, call up in the child a concentration and a reassimilation of meaning. The internal structure of the language carries with its signification. Language is a system of a limited number of unities serving to express an unlimited number of things. There is therefore a going beyond the signifier toward the signified. The totality of meaning is never fully rendered: there is an immense mass of implications, even in the most explicit of languages; or rather, nothing is ever completely expressed, nothing exempts the subject who is listening from taking the initiative of giving an interpretation.
(Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, p. 29, my emphasis)
In this passage Merleau-Ponty shows his indebtedness to Karl Bühler, whose organon model of language (summarized here in English) he adopts. Does Bühler's model fit the data Merleau-Ponty has assembled?
The problem Merleau-Ponty addresses in particular is the acquisition of phonemes. (I had previously wondered whether it was proper to speak of infant vocalizations as phonemes; the answer is no.) One of the interesting facts of this stage of language acquisition is that the child appears to lose the ability to pronounce certain sounds, sounds that it was fully capable of making in the form of infantile babble. Merleua-Ponty, following Roman Jakobson, calls this phenomenon a deflation. The gradual acquisition of phonemic contrasts, starting with consonants, dentals before palatals is also of interest, but the main point is the phenomenon of deflation. Merleua-Ponty concludes from this that "[l]anguage is attained not as an articulatory phenomenon, but as an element of a linguistic game" (p. 25).
The contrast with Adriana Cavarero's position is clear. Whereas Cavarero sees a continuity between infant babble and what, following Bühler, can be called language's function as an appeal to others, with a de-emphasis on the role of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty sees a discontinuity between babble and the attainment of language, with an emphasis on the role of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty's position seems to be well attested. However, it still leaves open the question of infant babble and its relation to language acquisition. Intuitively, it would seem that babble is a vital stage in the journey towards language. Yet it can't quite be fit into a model such as Bühler's because whatever babble means, it does not mean in the same way that the phonemic system leads the child beyond the signifier towards the signified. But, then, where exactly is the appeal to others in the phonemic system? Here is Merleau-Ponty's strongest pitch:
The child's movement toward speech is a constant appeal to others. The child recognizes in the other another one of himself. Language is the means of effecting reciprocity with the other. This is a question of a vital operation and not only an intellectual act. The representatitve function is an aspect of the total act by which we enter into communication with others.
One could sum up in the notion of style what is newest in the phonological analysis. The phonemic system is a style of language. The style is defined neither by words nor by ideas; it possesses not a direct signification but an oblique one. It permits one to charaterize the phonemic system of language just as it permits one to characterize a writer.
(p. 31)
Again, I'm not seeing a comfortable fit between Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Bühler and his appropriation of Jakobson. If language is the means of effecting reciprocity with the other, then the really interesting stuff with language begins happening in infancy, before the acquisition of phonemes. Or does it? What does the acquisition of phonemes add to the effecting of reciprocity? An order of style? Of beauty? Perhaps the acquistion of phonemic meaning is linked to a psychological development, a certain awareness of self that may or may not be destined for reciprocity. I couldn't tell you. I'm just saying.
Labels: babble, Bühler, Cavarero, development, language, meaning, Merleau-Ponty
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Merleau-Ponty considers the ratio of monologue to dialogue in early childhood language:
Perhaps, as Piaget has suggested, one could introduce a new level of development after the age of five. Up to that point the child does not seek to communicate with others (dialogue) as much as to talk by himself (monologue). Speech, as a mode of social communication, does not gain importance until the child is seven or eight years old.
(Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, p. 20)
After reviewing a couple of sources, including David and Rosa Katz's Conversations with Children, Merleau-Ponty weighs in against this view of distinct monological and dialogical stages of development. All of the possibilities of language, for dialogue as well as monologue, are, from the very beginning, "inscribed in the expressive manifestations of the child. There is never anything absolutely new, but there are anticpations, regressions, and retentions of older elements in new form" (p. 21). He concludes that "the child appropriates linguistic Gestalten, general structures, neither by an intellectual effort nor by an immediate imitiation" (p. 21).
A new wrinkle has been added to a question that arose from my reading of Cavarero: how is monologue possible? Does monologue have its own Gestalt, or is it more freely a variation of the possibility of speech? Assume for a moment that there is a Gestalt for monologue. If the self is foregrounded in monologue, what is the shape of its horizon? Is the other foregrounded in dialogue, or does the foreground shift in dialogue between self and other? How exactly can we begin to describe the difference between the two Gestalten?
Finally, what does it mean to say that no intellectual effort is required for the acquisition of these Gestalten? Merleau-Ponty seems to be suggesting that human consciousness comes pre-equipped for language, and yet again he claims that these structures are appropriated. From where? And how, if not by intellectual effort? Not by assuefaction? Is monologue (or dialogue) something that we learn at all? Is there no interface between the noetic faculty and the acquisition of language, or is the exercise of the noetic faculty limited to certain functions like the grasping of the sign relation?
Labels: assuefaction, Cavarero, development, Gestalt, Merleau-Ponty, monologue, noesis, speech
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Riffing on Antoine Grégoire's L'apprentissage du langage, Merleau-Ponty suggests that "perhaps certain aspects of the adult's interior language, which is often not formulated, are no more than a continuation of the babbling" (Consciousness and the Acquisition of Languagep. 16). Babbling, Merleau-Ponty tells us, involves a rich mixture of phonemes that are not found in the language spoken around the child, and is "therefore a polymorphic language, which is spontaneous with respect to its environment" (p. 11). Is it proper to speak of phonemes in the context of infantile babbling, where the connection between sound and meaning is obscure if it exists at all? Is it proper to speak of language at all? I think so. I think the polymorphic play of vocalizations is an aspect of language. Is it especially evident in the phenomenon of inner speech? On this point, I am reminded of Cavarero's animosity towards the idea of inner speech as a model for language, and I reckon there is a danger here of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In my mind there does seem to be an aspect of inner speech that resembles infantile babbling.
(Lámatyávë, by the way, is an Elvish word for "individual pleasure in the sounds and forms of words." Tolkien sees this as a rather mature sensibility about language.)
Labels: babble, Cavarero, infant, inner speech, language, Merleau-Ponty, Tolkien
Monday, March 05, 2007
In For More than One Voice Cavarero said "uniqueness" many times but she ultimately doesn't have a whole lot to say about uniqueness. She fails to establish that the metaphysical shunning of uniqueness which she assails isn't due to the simple fact of there being very little to say about uniqueness. This failure to meet my expectations, however, doesn't mean that her project as a whole is a failure. It's not a question of whether or not my expectations were reasonable, but rather that they simply belong to me, to the interests and problems arising from my own intellectual development. When I quote a passage, highlight this or that phrase, or explore the meaning of this or that word, the last thing on my mind is providing an authority for a way of thinking. What I am after is a philosophical conversation with an author, a conversation that acknowledges the uniqueness of the author, seeking to elucidate an aspect of the author's world as it is revealed in her or his texts, while at the same time cultivating my own abilities to grapple with problems and formulate questions. I'm frequently neither as sensitive nor as insightful as I'd like to be, but I believe there is a call for both sensitivity and insight and I try to meet it.
As it happens, I am ready to push the idea of uniqueness even if it means leaving Cavarero behind. If every thinker is irreducibly unique, does it follow that every thinking is likewise unique? Is there a fundamental connection between uniqueness and thinking, or is the existential uniqueness of the thinker more or less an accident with respect to thinking? If I take the position that thinking is tied to uniqueness, that thinking is in essence existential, what then do I say about the massive fact of language? How can I then account for grammar? Or quoted speech, the fact that the words of language are not my own?
Dialogism may be the easiest hurdle to cross. In saying something again, I have the powers of recontexualization and emphasis. Emphasis in text signifies a vocal intensity. It could also be thought of as gestural. It's a meaning that the body gives to words. To use Cavarero's language, quoted speech is like any other speech in being destined toward resonance. This too is a fact of language and it means that far from being obliterated by language, the uniqueness of each speaker is affirmed dialogically. Is the uniqueness of each act of speaking thus also affirmed in the destination toward resonance? I don't see why not.
Is grammar something that exists apart from habits of speech, apart from a process of structuration or systematizing language that begins in infancy? I don't really know, but I'm willing to explore the possibility that grammar is a kind of sedimentation rather than a program, and that each speaker comes to grammar uniquely. This is of course highly speculative, and it doesn't resolve the issue of whether the process of structuration involves any universals of thought. Against an enormous body of linguistic evidence I have only the knowledge that you are unique and that any thoughts you share will be uniquely yours. How that actually plays out is unclear to me.
Is uniqueness a struggle or is it just simply given? For me it doesn't often feel like a struggle to say something uniquely so I more or less take uniqueness for granted. However, I have to wonder whether this is true of others. There are people, it seems, for whom the recognition of uniqueness is a problem, people who either fail to acknowledge the uniqueness of others, or fail to see what in their own thinking is unique, or both. Many bloggers that I read are more eloquent or more erudite than I am. I often wonder whether I shouldn't feel more of a struggle to say something unique, whether I rely too heavily on block quotations, or whether the questions I pose deserve consideration. My insecurities have never led me to pass off the words of another as my own, but I can imagine the reasons why somebody else would do such a thing. Perhaps uniqueness is a burden. Perhaps thinking doesn't want to be unique. Is thinking fundamentally at ease with itself, or is being at ease anethema to thinking? Well, I've wandered.
Labels: Cavarero, philosophical conversations, quoted speech, uniqueness
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Deleuze says that differences in the system of language should not be thought of essential oppositions, which introduces the point of view of a representational consciousness, but should rather be seen as the entry points to a "transcendent exploration of the Idea of the linguistic unconscious" (Difference and Repetition, p. 204). He cites approvingly the work of linguist Gustave Guillaume, whose Foundations for a Science of Language I've just requested from the library. A somewhat different take on Guillaume comes from Marc André Bélanger's Chaos, Complexity and Gustave Guillaume. I'll withhold judgement on what Guillaume is really all about, but since the paper has come to my attention, I want to look at what Bélanger has to say about the infant's exposure to language, which stands in contrast to the way Cavarero has portrayed vocalizations between mother and child in early infancy.
When a child learns his mother tongue, he does so by trying to reconstruct the system behind the utterance he hears...[T]he order of the system comes not only from the "aggregated behaviour" of humans as speakers but also from the mind of the infant (Latin: "unable to speak") learning his tongue. The child will make all the intuitive generalizations he can based on the evidence, and will form, reconstruct, the best system he can. As he grows up, he figures out through a process which entails both induction and deduction (and, as Pierce would say, abduction) the different categories of words and what each can and cannot do.
("Chaos," p. 7, emphasis Bélanger's)
In many respects Cavarero presents the more realistic account of infant vocalizations. The first facts of language that are learned by the infant are its rhythms, its musicality, its embodiment and its relationality (For More than One Voice, p. 180 and passim). However, I wonder whether she doesn't go too far in her banishment of the subject (see this passage for example). If Bélanger's infant subject seems a little too advanced to be credible, the alternative of no conscious subject of language learning also appears to be, well, a little too larval. Most infants eventually do learn to speak, and it's difficult to imagine this happening without any glimmers of consciousnesss whatsoever.
Deleuze has much to say about learning, but I wonder about the strategy of placing everything and the kitchen sink in the realm of the unconscious. When all is said and done, what does consciousness mean to Deleuze?
Labels: Cavarero, Deleuze, Guillaume, infant, language, learning, strange attractor, the unconscious
Cavarero asks us to think of uniqueness as "an understanding [un'intesa] and as a reciprocal dependence" (p. 182). The latter term suggests what Cavarero might mean by "understanding," but I'd like to begin by asking what kind of understanding is possible in the absence of consciousness, for Cavarero's privileging of speech over thought in the logos comes with a hearty dose of antipathy toward nous. She writes of a phenomenology of the voice, yet there is no place in her phenomenology for a conscious subject. Mouths communicate with ears and the recognition of vocal uniqueness occurs spontaneously, as if by magic. "The phenomenology of speaking possesses an autonomous status in which the relationality of mouths and ears comes to the fore" (p. 174). By "autonomous" Cavarero means autonomous with respect to thought, that speaking isn't merely the acoustic manifestation of thinking. She intends to give back flesh and bone back to the subject, but unlike the phenomenologies of Patočka, Herny or Merleau-Ponty, she has not elaborated a notion of bodily awareness–actually she sort of does have such a notion, but it comes in bits and pieces. For example she says that the "ear distinguishes sound and knows it to be human not only because it vibrates in the specifically human element of speech, but also because the ear percieves its uniqueness" (p. 178). Whereas Cavarero portrays the communication between mouths and ears of others as direct and instantaneaous, she cuts out of the picture altogether communication between the ears and mouth of a conscious subject. There is nothing to explain the unity of the mouth and ears, no explanation of how the knowledge that the ear possesses pertains to the mouth of a hearing subject or anything other than the ear.
Speaking of Levinas' ontology of the face-to-face, Cavarero says that "[r]ather than the atemporal dimension of a lasting permanence, the face to face evokes a discontinuous becoming, characterized by the ever-new 'present' of the 'nows' in which the gazes intersect" (p. 177). While reciprocity is sometimes an attribute of the gaze, Cavarero argues it always an attribute of the voice. "[T]he voice is always, irremediably relational" (p. 177). In one manner of speaking, relationality is not a contingency but a necessary condition of a kind of understanding. To make this argument was it necessary to dethrone to nous? I see two steps that had to be taken: (1) the critique of atemporality, or presence, which Cavarero sees as a property claimed for nous; and (2) a decentering of understanding. I don't see how the complete obliteration of a noetic faculty makes sense in this context, though I will admit that this is not the kindest reading of Cavarero, and what I am really after is settling a question in my own mind as to how understanding is possible.
Labels: body, Cavarero, noesis, plurality, reciprocity, uniqueness
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Cavarero, speaking of the sharing of voices between a mother and her infant, reworks the myth of Echo:
This is the very music that Kristeva and Cixous speak of when they name the maternal figure as the sonorous, presemantic source of language. Because they rely on a psychoanalytic framework, however, their attention goes to the pleasure drive that is inscribed in this musicality, linked to the mouth as the center of oral pleasure. The languelait of the mother, voice and milk, is given to the ear and the mouth. The shadow of psychoanalysis thus ends up obscuring the relationality of the scene, sacrificing it to the originary bond between mother and child. As a result, the phenomenon of vocalic uniqueness is once again effaced. Unlike the bond of mother and child, a relation carries with it the act of distinguishing oneself, constituting the uniqueness of each one through this distinction. In the case of the vocalizations and gurgles that the mother and the infant exchange, this uniqueness makes itself heard incontrovertibly as voice. The infant recognizes the mother's voice and sings a duet with her. Resonance, daughter of invocation, links the two voices in the form of a rhythmic bond. What makes the uniqueness of the two voices stand out, in fact, is this repetition, echo, and miming, becuase they duplicate the same sounds. The voice is always unique, but all the more so in the vocalic exercise of repetition. In fact, by challenging the economy of the same, uniqueness is here entrusted to nothing other than the singular voice. This does not mean that in this vocalic language mother and child are constituted as subjects. The phantasm of the subject is a fictitious entity generated by philosophy; it belongs to language as a system of signification; it comes from the devocalizing strategy of theoria. And yet this does not mean that there is no distinction between mother and infant. On the contrary, there is a process of self-distinction in the repetitive rhythm of the duet, in the reciprocal giving of uniqueness and relation, just like a song for two voices–communication, already regulated, of language whose rules are not semantic but acoustic. It is indeed a song, no longer intentioned toward speech, with which each invokes the other and communicates himself or herself in the interdependent form of the resonance. The uniqueness of the vocalic is inaugurated on a scene where, unlike what happens on the scene of the "subject," there are no dreams of autonomy or hierarchical principles. Free from the presence of Narcissus and from Ovid's textual games, Echo comes to appear as the divinity who teaches an acoustic relationality, still linked to infantile pleasure, in which uniqueness makes itself heard as voice.
(For More than One Voice, pp. 171-172, emphasis Cavarero's)
I am, incidentally, enjoying Cavarero's style.
Labels: Cavarero, dyad, infant, l'écriture féminine, relationality, semiotic, uniqueness
Thursday, February 08, 2007
"Behind the platonic Socrates," Cavarero reminds us, "there is the figure of the historical Socrates who intends philosophizing as speaking, rather than as thinking or contemplating" (For More than One Voice, p. 67). Naturally Socrates wouldn't tell us that we shouldn't say what we think or think about what we say. Yet if there's going to be a divorce of thought from speech, why should we assume that philosophy belongs with (speechless) thought?
Against Nietzsche, and borrowing a thesis from Giorgio Colli, Cavarero posits that "with the advent of videocentric metaphysics, the Appolonian–the enigmatic sphere of speech–is subjected to the ecstatic frenzy of vision" (p. 78). The enigmatic sphere of speech.. In what sense is Socrates' philosophy grounded in the enigmatic sphere of speech? For Socrates philosophy is not just any speaking, but specifically confutation, a dialectic of questions and answers that leads to aporia. Cavarero argues:
If logos were transparent, simply representational, univocal in its capacity to say things, then the dialectic undertaking would not function. Like the ancient enigma, dialectic counts on the constitutive ambiguity of logos.
(p. 78)
Is this akin to saying that philosophical problems are basically just problems of language? Hmm. Cavarero would have us believe that who is speaking fundamentally matters. How do we talk about this problem of who speaks as something other than merely rhetorical?
Labels: Cavarero, logos, Socrates