Thursday, January 07, 2010
The Elephant Listening Project was on the popular American television show 60 Minutes last weekend. A little surfing on seismic communication among elephants turned up reporting on research by Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell: (1), (2) and (3). Also, see O'Connel-Rodwell's review article, Keeping an "Ear" to the Ground: Seismic Communication in Elephants.
A couple of lines of inquiry. First, is "listening" at bottom a too comfortable metaphor for conceptualizing how elephants perceive seismic vibrations, how they live with vibration? In any case let's ask ourselves what listening could possibly be. Second, elephants can apparently recognize each others' "voices." (This too, this thing we call "voice," among the metaphorical—even as we learn that voice may be something that develops "in" nature, as if nature had no concourse with imagination.) "I know you." "I recognize your vibration." "I hear your voice." And already I have gone too far. Does an elephant say "I"?
Labels: elephants, listening, phatic communion, semiotics, vibration, voice
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
I am taking a critical posture towards Pierre Bourdieu's On Television (trans. Priscilla Ferguson, The New Press, 1998) not because it is passé–obviously it is, while at the same time it isn't inasmuch as the world wide web hasn't really changed everything and the fragmentation of the old media is not complete, such that the journalistic field that I know today resembles the journalistic field Bourdieu assaults–but rather because the antidemocratic attitude he expresses in this tract disturbs me. This variety of antidemocratic sentiment resonates with a set of antipopular sentiments that the academic classes direct not merely against television viewers, but against any expression of taste, opinion, feeling or indeed knowledge that differs from the expressions of elite intellectuals. I'm not going to win many friends by taking this position. Nobody's good taste will be validated, and at best we might be able to see limits of invalidation suggested by etiquette or eudemonia, though of course we are always free to question those. My position is neither anti-intellectual nor populist nor popular, but anti-anti-popular. I speak against a phenomenon of demophobia, and in Bourdieu's case acute agoraphobia with demophobic indications.
Naturally Bourdieu is aware of the charge of elitism. He has his defenses. He believes his position is genuinely democratic, that the people are best represented collectively; at stake, as he sees it, is the right to articulate the interests of dominated individuals. In his utopian world (he does in fact call his vision utopian) opinions deemed hostile to the interests of the dominated, for instance xenophobic sentiments, would never be allowed to be expressed and debated in the public sphere. For Bourdieu genuine political freedom means that sociologists–as positive scientists, for he would let positivists define his field to the exclusion of other voices–must determine what opinions and worldviews are inimical to the interests of the dominated, and what views are serve their interests, and must then ensure that these insights lead to action. I will let Bourdieu's own words make the case for esotericism, for it is a strong argument and oughtn't be lightly dismissed.
It is essential to defend both the inherent esotericism of all cutting-edge research and the necessity of de-esotericizing the esoteric. We must struggle to achieve both these goals under good conditions. In other words, we have to defend the conditions of production necessary for the progress of the universal, while working to generalize the conditions of access to that universality. The more complex an idea–because it has been produced in an autonomous world–the more difficult it is to present to the larger world. To overcome this diffuculty, producers in their little citadels have to learn how to get out and fight collectively for optimum conditions of diffusion and for ownership of the relevant means of diffusion.
(pp. 65-66, my bold)
Bourdieu appears blind to the notion that ideas might be formed in dialogue, between individuals and between intellectual worlds. His production model of intellectual life depends upon there being something like an uninitiated, uninformed, disempowered mass of people, people whose ideas couldn't possibly be complex and couldn't really be original because they have been planted in their heads through mass communications (p. 18). These masses are people in need of class enlightenment. A boutique model of intellectual exchange would be as alien and ugly to Bourdieu as an intelligent discussion about sports. The absolute disdain with which Bourdieu greets discussions about the weather (p. 29), as if phatic communion were a form of symbolic violence, reveals the depth of his antipathy towards other people, and also a sense of entitlement, as if people in his class should be entitled to put thoughts in the heads of the masses. After all, what is the purpose of having masses if they are not to be lead, and who better to lead the masses than those who have been charged with studying them, and indeed, mobilizing them?
Bourdieu puts his critics at a disadvantage. Apparently unaware of Godwin's law, Bourdieu points to a danger of collaboration among those who are not ensconced with an autonomous discipline. I will accept that risk. My position is heteronomous, which means that I am a "failure" (the quotes would be Bourdieu's) and am prone to certain self-deceptions about my intellectual capabilities. For the sake of argument I will accept Bourdieu's intellectual superiority and the superiority of his position, which he cherishes above all. It still strikes me as wrong to disrespect people for expressing popular tastes or opinions. Intellectuals kvetching about television is not as reproachful as teachers kvetching about students, but it can be unseemly. It often belies an emotional immaturity, and in that sense it represents a failure of academies of learning. It is difficult but I think necessary to be able to criticize the markets, the public spaces, without fearing and ultimately despising the people who participate in them. Despite Bourdieu's professed interest in liberating the masses, which might represent the sentimental outlook of a caring person, he is betrayed in his endeavor by his misanthropy and his agoraphobia.
Labels: agoraphobia, Bourdieu, phatic communion, television
Monday, December 10, 2007
Attali says, "Memory and courtesy are conditions of survival for the nomad, and for that of the future inhabitants of great urban labyrinths" (The Labyrinth in Culture and Society, p. 60). I rather suspect people sometimes follow discursive pathways in order to exercise politeness, or in order to exercise memory. To suggest that the furtherance of a way of life is a question of survival is to devalue it, to misapprehend its integrity. (Are furtherance and discursion truly at odds?) What explains the romance of the labyrinth? Boredom? Memory? Deep down in the deepest deep down do people yearn to remember? Would it be a question of longing for the attachments that memory creates? Do we feel that memory yearns to be enacted, or is the yearning we feel some other power that demands the enactments of memory? Don't we sometimes make paths to follow our yearnings?
Labels: Attali, desire, discursion, memory, phatic communion
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
Corradi Fiumara writes, "As a result of an attention restricted to symbolic levels of discourse one can let listening to a 'concrete' language slide away an thus risk losing the chance for an authentic dialogic confrontation" (The Other Side of Language, p. 178). On the theme of confrontation, she is echoing Canetti and also Buber. What she means by "concrete" is a little difficult to pin down. She seems to be talking about an emotional relation to language, but she offers the following definition of concrete expression: that it's "intent upon eliminating inner events which can not be contained" (p. 169). Further:
Concrete language might be characterized as an 'acting out' intended to alleviate inner tensions which can no longer be handled in a purely symbolic form. The negation of reality and the projection into the interlocutor of aspects of one's own ratiocination predominate in this type of 'language' in which, evidently, the tendency to transform discourse into an emotional discharge tends to prevail.
(p. 170, Corradi Fiumara's emphasis)
That's a funny a way of talking about emotions, though Corradi Fiumara apparently means to describe a more specific psychological process. However I want to talk about emotions more broadly, and for that reason I would object to putting "language" in quotes. Language is emotional as well as symbolic and false, and frequently all of these things at once. Dialogue is risky, but it doesn't merely risk thought; it risks the whole person. That I think is at least implied in what Corradi Fiumara is saying here (elsewhere she is more explicit). Inasmuch as language is its medium, dialogue also puts at risk whole communities.
Dialogue considered as a means to truth, whether conceptual or emotional, would be anything but ideal. The ideal dialogue is pure phatic communion, or, rather, a phatic adventure. Such truths as are found in dialogue are aleatory, perhaps transitory. The endurance of concepts is paltry compared to the spirit of phatic adventure.
Labels: Corradi Fiumara, dialogue, phatic communion
Sunday, December 10, 2006
Nancy says:
Language is essentially in the with. Every spoken word is the simultaneity of at least two different modes of the spoken word; even when I am by myself, there is the one that is said and the one that is heard, that is, the one that is resaid. As soon as a word is spoken, it is resaid. As such, meaning does not consist in the transmission from a speaker to a receiver, but in the simultaneity of (at least) two origins of meaning: that of the saying and that of its resaying.
(Being Singular Plural, p. 86).
In these passages on language Nancy is principally in dialogue with Heidegger. I don't know the source of his dialogism, if any. It does feel like a resaying–a singular resaying to be sure. Again, Nancy touches on meaning:
Meaning is the exhibition of the foundation without foundation, which is not an abyss but simply the with of things that are, insofar as they are. Logos is dialogue, but the end of dialogue is not to overcome itself in "consensus"; its reason is to offer, and only to offer (giving it tone and intensity), the cum-, the with of meaning, the plurality of its springing forth.
(pp. 86-87).
"Not an abyss but simply the with of things that are." I recall my troubles leaping over the abyss with Grassi. Though Grassi is not without courage (and elegance), Nancy strikes me as the more courageous reader of Heidegger, at least by the measure of his willingness to contradict him.
It is not enough, then, to set idle chatter in opposition to the authenticity of the spoken word, understood as being replete with meaning. On the contrary, it is necessary to discern the conversation (and sustaining) of being-with as such within chatter: it is in "conversing," in the sense of discussion, that being-with "sustains itself," in the sense of the perseverance in Being. Speaking-with exposes the conatus of being-with, or better, it exposes being-with as conatus, exposes it as the effort and desire to maintain oneself as "with" and, as a consequence, to maintain something which, in itself, is not a stable and permanent substance, but rather a sharing and a crossing through. In this conversation (and sustaining) of being-with, one must discern how language, at each moment, with each signification, from the highest to the lowest–right down to those "phantic," insignificant remarks ("hello," "hi," "good" ...) which only sustain the conversation itself–exposes the with, exposes itself as the with, inscribes and ex-scribes itself in the with until it is exhausted, emptied of signification.
(p. 87).
Personally, I prefer the term "phatic," which has the advantage of being in my English dictionaries. If "phantic" is to be allowed, it shouldn't be on etymological grounds ("phatic" already does the job), but only because Nancy is setting up a play on the Heideggerian apophantic.
Labels: dialogism, Grassi, Heidegger, language, meaning, Nancy, phatic communion