The presence of the listener is inscribed in the utterance. It is I who speaks, Jacques says, but we who say. He asks, "What happens to the philosophical status of the person if we replace the individual's cogito with the proposition 'I speak, but we say'? (Difference and Subjectivity, p. 9) For one thing the refutation of "I do not exist" becomes problematic.
But should we allow such a distinction between speaking and saying? Is there a speaking that says nothing, a babble that isn't somehow destined for language? Is there an impersonal babble? Perhaps. Perhaps necessarily.
What of the inscription of the presence of the listener in the utterance? This echoes an idea of the intertextuality of the utterance while at the same time it responds to Buber, to a sense of that everything in discourse is affected by relations between the I and the you. The listener is not merely referred to but is there in the interlocutive event. Present. We won't shy away from the idea. It's difficult. How do we describe the presence of the listener? How does the listener appear? As the "other side of language," i.e., perhaps it need not be apparent at all? As an ethical constraint? Imperative? Does the listener present us with an imperative for coherence, for example?
Labels: babble, cogito, dialogism, Jacques, listening, personhood
"Music is not the origin of language, as people have so often wanted to think, but what withdraws and sinks into it" (Listening, p. 75, No. 42). Although I've taken a great interest in the musicality of language I should want to hesitate to adopt the position Nancy criticizes. Does music come before sense? Does it come before a kind of sense that might be called linguistic? What exactly is Nancy's view? "One can say of music that it silences sound and that it interprets sounds: makes them sound and make sense no longer as the sounds of something, but in their own resonance" (p. 32). Music makes sense, but it is not the only sense to be made of the sonorous. There is antemusical sound, the sounds that have been silenced by music. Nancy quotes Wallace Stevens on the existence of an antemusical: "the self/detects the sound of a voice that doubles as its own" ("The Woman That Had More Babies than That," in Listening, p. 72, No. 21). Resonance is the stuff of bodies. Is embodiment a basis on which to deny music priority to language? I'm being crude, it's true. Let's listen to how Nancy speaks of resonance, and its relation to timbre.
Rather than speaking of timbre and listening in terms of "intentional aim," it is necessary to say that before any relationship to object, listening opens up in timbre, which resounds in it rather than for it. In truth, resonance is at once listening to to timbre and the timbre of listening, if one may put it that way. Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens. (At the same time, this resonance is not an immobile given, since timbre itself is an evolving process, and, consequently, listening evolves along with it.)
(p. 40)
Timbre is an evolving process. If we are not to take the musical as given, and therefore simply project a received idea of timbre upon all sounds, interpreting all sounds through this musicological idea, but instead recognize its evolution, then it becomes of prime importance to investigate how one form develops from another, how listening might be said to evolve rather than merely change or manifest itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps, though, the evolutions of listening are many. The analogy with life on Earth only goes so far. Was there ever a stage in the evolution of listening when music became language? See, already this is a misleading question because listenings are indeed surely many, and we wouldn't rush to say that any one adventure of listening recapitulates *listening, or that a listening must repeat or mimic other listenings, other developmental pathways. No outcome is predetermined. And so we confront the obvious problem of separating the given from the elaborated, and, secondarily, of describing the very how of evolution, and of justifying an implied distinction between a variance and a transformation. Now, in the passage immediately above, Nancy speaks of a nonintentional (in a phenomenological sense) listening as prior to intentional listening, yet in the earlier quoted passage he says that music makes sounds nonintentional. Is nonintentional listening made or discovered by music? If we are to speak intelligibly of the evolution of listening, don't we need an answer to this question of how nonintentionality in listening is arrived at? (I'm not completely sure, though I have enough of an opinion to pose the question.)
Do we move from babble to a speaking that is already listening? How does listening develop through infancy? Can we grasp listening in the context of a transcendental murmuring, "the condition of all words and all silence" (p. 25), without confronting what could be taken for a listening that transcends babble, and therewith a speaking that is already listening, at some stage or another? (I honestly don't know enough about transcendence to say whether it is one or many, or whether it really exists at all. It could after all simply be a reality of our linguistic life that we project onto things of experience in accordance with language's power to fashion reality–the withdrawal of the musical into reality, into the plasma of the real–but I'm just tossing ideas around here.)
This profound disposition [musical listening, FtY]–arranged, in fact, according to the profundity of a reverberation chamber that is nothing other than the body from end to end–is a relationship to meaning [sens], a tension toward it: but toward it completely ahead of signification, meaning in its nascent state, in the state of return [renvoi] for which the end of this return is not given (the concept, the idea, the information), and hence to the sate of return without end, like an echo that continues on its own and that is nothing but this continuance going in a decrescendo, or even in moriendo. To be listening is to be inclined toward the opening of meaning, hence to a slash, a cut in un-sensed [in sensée] indifference at the same time as toward a reserve that is anterior and posterior to any signifying punctuation. [T]he beginning of sense . . . takes place nowhere but in a sonorous attack. . . a stridency where a weighty, murmurring matter breathes, opened into the division of its resonance.
(p. 27, Nancy's emphasis)
Likewise, "sense consists first of all. . . not in a signifying intention, but rather in a listening" (p. 30). First of all. Hmmm.
Let's return for a second to the doubling of a voice, a voice of the self. In listening do we communicate with ourselves? "Communication is not transmission but a sharing that becomes subject" (p. 41). Perhaps we communicate with ourselves in our nascent states, but even so we should question the possibility of the frictionless voice, and, especially, frictionless doubling. How then might we describe any friction we feel in communication with our own voice? Is timbre really the bottom of it all? The musical? Now that we have discovered the musical, and brought its style of listening back from the language it'd sunk into, we can ask, paradoxically, whether there exists a voice without timbre, or any voice that isn't yet doubled, and the question may be not simply a variation on a theme of friction, but an evolution, a movement into the musical, from which we've been estranged. In timbre we hear bodies, hear that voices are voices of bodies. Are the voices of bodies bottomless? Is music? What is the bottom to listening? Is communication a condition for all doubling and all singling out? What are the primitive conditions of listening? Having an idea, perhaps? Or something that could double as a person's own idea?
Labels: babble, language, listening, music, Nancy, sound, timbre, voice
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
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