Sunday, September 27, 2009
The question emerges from both intersubjective and coexistential depths. Which is deeper, the intersubjective or the coexistential? Perhaps this question is destined, by virtue of these depths, to remain in a state of transfusion. It absorbs a liquidity. It swims.
The interrogative clause (the opening clausula of *-subjectivity) functions as a politeness marker in various discursive universes. The interrogative phrasing, involving syntactical transformation as well as prosodic inflection, makes requests nice. It shows care for the face of the other, which emerges from both intersubjective and coexistential depths.
A typology of speech acts will not stand as an adequate guide to the description of all that can be adventured with the question. Yet, let's ask in passing how the paradox of inquiry, one starting point for philosophical questioning, might be connected with the everyday request or the functions of the interrogative.
Is the request a passionate form of inquiry? Can there possibly be any true love of inquiry without passion? Well, the votaries of dispassionate inquiry have much to say in their favor. Indeed, as a provisional critic of dispassionate inquiry I rely upon the indirectness called "dispassion" in order to communicate a critique of and ultimately to think about—very about—the question. Nonetheless, exploring the empathic dimension—function, modality, horizons—this is yet exploratory—of the question inevitably touches on the matter of the passions.
In questioning we catch a glimpse of the for-itself at the same time we work with the for-others. On another plane it appears that the question entwines with feeling, or with vulnerability. We feel for the others whom we question.
To inquire is to empathize? Contrary examples abound. However, the quotidian polite question by its nature of caring about the face of the other demonstrates a consciousness of vulnerability. Are we already empathically understanding the other even before we inquire of them? If that's true in any sense, then how do we make up for the horrible impoliteness of asking? Are our true feelings for others irrevocably wrapped up in polite fictions? Asked to sacrifice something resembling authenticity—must we be asked, or do we already feel this thing like authenticity being set aside as we begin to formulate the polite question, the empathic question? Do we set this thing aside for a true understanding of the other, or a true transfusion of horizons, a fiction true to our feelings for others? Would there then be something ultimately untrue about selfishness revealed by the question?
When asking about the question, which are the truths we must attend to?
Labels: empathy, intersubjectivity, pragmatics, questions
Monday, September 21, 2009
Martin Bell, guided by the thesis that acts of questioning "are illocutionary acts belonging to the command genus," notes a difference between the question that is put and the question that is raised ("Questioning," Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 100, 1975, pp. 193-212; p. 206, p.209). In his view the raised question has no illocutionary force. "Here the question is, as it were, in quotation, and no illucutionary force attaches to it" (ibid.).
The question of the raised question, having been raised rather than put, is not powerless any more that is not simple. It is complex, containing within it myriad questions. What is the raised question? How does it operate? It is a question by whom? For whom? For what kind of existentiality is the question raised? The raising of the question gives us to think about the question itself and its powers, its dynamics. Can it transform a person? Is the question raised for transmogrifiables alone? For, paradoxically, autotranscendent entities? (At this point, in quotation as it were ("."), it is tempting to affix "questionable" to every noun, "questionably," to every verb and modifier, or to say that this or that is a question of this or that.) Does the raised question throw everything into question? Presumably it would leave some space for itself to exist as a raised question in contradistinction to a put question, but throwing the world into question may be the special province of the raised question. The world of whom? Just anybody's world, or the world in the inflection of the just anybody? The world suspended for the sake of the question?
The raised question, then, should not be quickly determined to be powerless. It gives us to stop and think. Communicatively any question signals "your turn to speak" but insofar as the raised question also gives us to stop and think it doesn't oblige us to immediately respond. The turn is held in abeyance. The turn and the communicative response may represent situationally contradictory or counteroperative demands. Thus inasmuch as the raised question presents us with a dilemma it gives us more than to stop and think; it issues a challenge. This challenge signifies its power, a dilemmatical power. A doubling of the raised question as the dilemma of either to go on speaking or to stop and think takes hold and gives itself to be questioned; a challenge is put without the raised question ceasing to be a raised question, a question of ambiguous illocutionary force.
The dilemmatical is an existential concrete at the same time it is an elaboration of the dilemmic; perhaps we routinely approach the dilemmic by way of the dilemmatical. The dilemmic of the raised question seems to be that it is to be distinguished from the put question only by being put in quotation, as it were. It is precisely its authority that signals its dilemmic. If the authority of the raised question can be read as inscribed in being put, its authority appears to be erased in being put into quotation. If in fact the authority of the question put into quotation doubles the authority of the putting into question, the raising of the question leaves that authority without a world. Do we stop and think in worldlessness? No doubt the raised question has horizons, but they more than any other are given to be put into question.
The raised question has ambiguous illocutionary power, but its power is to upset the world.
Labels: dilemmas, illocution, pragmatics, questions
Thursday, July 09, 2009
Montiglio concludes:
Silence is never neutral in the land of the logos. Many of its appearances seem to be variants of a similar sentiment, which could be called horror of the void. The Greek world is resonant, filled with circulating voices. On the battlefield, in the assembly, in the theater, in the city as a whole, the voice is an organizing principle. Silence threatens this fullness of sound. As a troublesome, paralyzing interruption of the verbal flow within the speech code of the Iliad; as an impenetrable and concentrated attitude in tragedy; as a sudden suspension of the normal course of nature, silence heralds disruption and provokes anxiety. Ominous silences most often break into cries: the horror of the void fills silence with its opposite, as if to re[e]stablish a lost equilibrium through an overcompensation of sound.
(p. 289)
I'd let this pass in silence but I want to note a possible difference between cultural representations of silence (the logos of silence, if you will) and silence as it actually experienced (the silence of the logos, perhaps). Does the consideration of silence as speech act obviate this difference? In any case can logoi encompass their own silences?
Labels: logos, Montiglio, pragmatics, silence, speech
Friday, May 22, 2009
Shahar blogs (naturally in a post one ought to read a few times in its entirety):
Levinas equates the Saying (to be opposed to the Said) with the immanence of the body, with the diachrony of ageing and pain, and with the sensibility of flesh. In contrast to structuralism, which synchronizes the relations between signs in an atemporal horizontal totality, Levinas posits the primordial relation with the other. In this instance, signs are given as gifts between interlocutors before they are fixed into impersonal structures. Time de-phases the identical.
My recent use of somebody's idea of the "unsaid" is similar to the Saying in that it points to the performance of the said, its illocutionary residue; its particular bias is textualist as well as dialectical. Levinas' formulation holds more promise.
Time de-phases the identical. Dephasis problematizes temporality, as if temporality could persist while Time (time's identity) passed underground, even beneath phenomenality, phasis, delivery. A model for this temporality is the gift economy, if only because it's already been described. Now, do we say Time, its reality bracketed out for the sake of exploring the problem of dephasis, neither phases in nor phases out the identical, its presupposition it would seem, but precisely deprives it of phase? Interlocution as the relation that absolves of the relation? We can use totality to undo totality at the "same time" we step outside it? Is this approach suggested by an inherited style of reflection, or perhaps guided by an eidos of reflection? Has structuralism justly been given a due?
I'm sure Kevin would have something to say about this dephasing of the identical, as evidenced by his commentary here. "The music of engagement is always richer than this." (I don't mean to deflect. Just curious.)
Labels: givenness, kvond, Levinas, pragmatics, Shahar Ozeri, temporality, the same
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Mikhail Bakhtin asks us to note the difference between the sentence as a unit of language and the utterance as a unit of speech ("The Problem of Speech Genres," Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee, University of Texas Press, 1986). He says that the sentence "does not have semantic fullness of value," in contrast to the utterance (p. 74). In other words, meaning, in its fullness, takes place in speech. To appreciate this point it is necessary to see that the Saussurean parole is a denuded, abstract representation of speech rather than an empirical understanding of what really goes on in speech. Bakhtin criticizes structuralist representations of the speech chain:
[A]ll real and integral understanding is actively responsive, and constitutes nothing other than the initial prepatory stage of a response (in whatever form it may be actualized). And the speaker himself is oriented precisely toward such an actively responsive understanding. He does not expect passive understanding that, so to speak, only duplicates his own idea in someone else's mind. Rather, he expects response, agreement, sympathy, objection, execution, and so forth (various speech genres presuppose various integral orientations and speech plans on the part of the speakers or writers). The desire to make one's speech understood is only an abstract aspect of the speaker's concrete and total speech plan. Moreover, any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances–his own and others'–with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes that they are already known to the listener). Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances.
Thus, the listener who understands passively, who is depicted as the speaker's partner in the schematic diagrams of general linguistics, does not correspond to the real participant in speech communication. What is represented by the diagram is only an abstract aspect of the real total act of actively responsive understanding, the sort of understanding that evokes a response, and one that the speaker anticipates. Such scientific abstraction is quite justified in itself, but under one condition: that it is clearly recognized as merely an abstraction and is not represented as the real concrete whole of the phenomenon. Otherwise it becomes a fiction. This is precisely the case in linguistics, since such abstract schemata, while perhaps not claiming to reflect real speech communication, are not accompanied by any indication of the great complexity of the actual phenomenon. As a result, the schema distorts the actual picture of speech communication, removing precisely its most essential aspects. The active role of the other in the process of speech communication is thus reduced to a minimum.
(pp. 69-70)
I'm rereading Bakhtin here in response to the argument Deleuze presents about the paradox of the proposition (Logic of Sense, "Third Series of the Proposition"), with the knowledge that his argument may be supreseded by his later interest in pragmatics. Deleuze distinguishes three dimensions of the proposition: denotation, manifestation, signification–no, four, four dimensions of the proposition: denotation, manifestation, signification and sense. He asks the question of which dimension is primary, and he answers that in the domain of speech (parole) manifestation is primary, while in the domain of language (langue) signification is primary. He says:
This primacy of manifestation, not only in relation to denotation but also in relation to signification, must be understood within the domain of "speech" in which significations remain naturally implicit. It is only here that the I is primary in relation to concepts–in relation to the world and to God. But if another domain exists in which significations are valid and developed for themselves, significations would be primary in it and would provide the basis of manifestation. This domain is precisely that of language [langue]. In it, a proposition is able to appear only as a premise or a conclusion, signifying concepts before manifesting a subject, or even before denoting a state of affairs. It is from this point of view that signified concepts, such as God or the world. are always primary in relation to the self as manifested person and to things as designated objects.
(p. 15, Deleuze's emphasis)
The dimension of sense is based on a paradox of the proposition ("What the Tortoise said to Achilles"). Sense, "the expressed of the proposition, is an incorporeal, complex, and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition" (p. 19, Deleuze's emphasis). Deleuze's empriricism is entirely focused on this dimension of sense. "Only empiricism knows how to transcend the experiential dimensions of the visible without falling into Ideas, and how to track down, invoke, and perhaps produce a phantom at the limit of a lengthened or unfolded experience" (p. 20).
What would become of Deleuze's logic of sense were he to adopt a properly empirical attitude to the domain of speech? Does the utterance have its expressed, as the sentence does?. Would one still speak of manifestation? The active role of the other might become thematized, lessening the emphasis on the emergence of the subject, without ignoring beliefs, passions, style. In lieu of manifestation one might speak of response.
Perhaps there is a paradox in the prevenient responsivity of the utterance. Take any blog as an example of complex speech genre, that is, a genre that incorporates other speech genres, primary and otherwise. A blog post responds to other utterances, including anticipated responses in various forms (comments, links, emails, digests, other blog posts). The responses to come are already responses to past responses, responses yet to be past, and at the same time responses to responses to come, and so on with no ultimate conclusion. One could almost say that if every utterance is a response, no utterance is definitively a response. This and so on describes, however, a practical "infinity" and not a pure mathematical infinity. Perhaps it has a limit in the concrete speech plan. There are only so many responses a blogger can anticipate (or recall). We might find that there's a sedimented infinity of the and so on in the utterance, but infinity may still be too strong a claim. Language death is a fact, as are lesser forms of obscurity, fragmentation and loss. Yet there may be an infinity involved in the grapsing of the phenomenon. I'm not sure of that, though.
Is the empirical a space of paradoxes at all? Can we have problems without paradoxes? This is a dilemma for me.
Labels: Bakhtin, Carroll, Deleuze, language, pragmatics
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Concerning Maturana and Varela's approach to language, Bains notes that in their view "although language requires the neurophysiology of the participants, it is not a neurophysiological phenomenon. Language takes place in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions, not in the bodily materiality of the participants" (The Primacy of Semiosis, p111). I think I'll take issue with that formulation, with the proviso that the body of language is not exhausted by its neurophysiology. It's not just that the bodily leaks into language, which I think is demonstrable. Its a question of how language is possible. Our bodies does more for us than to serve as "nodes of operational intersection" (p. 112). They enable language (and action, for that matter) in such a way that the bodily is never quite completely forgotten.
In any case, I don't think the interesting claim here is the one against the body, but rather the one for the field of social interaction. (In that regard surely the body of a hypothetical single organism is not sufficient to enable language.) This view of language leads Maturana to the notion that the self is a product of language.
For Maturana the key feature of languaging is that it enable those who operate in it to describe themselves, thereby generating the self and its circumstances as linguistic disctinctions of the self's participation in a linguistic domain–that is, a domain of recursive consensual coordinations of actions. Meaning arises as a relationship of linguistic distinctions. Thus, words are distinctions of consensual coordinations of actions in the flow of consensual coordinations of actions–they are not symbolic entities–and meaning and languaging become part of the medium in which the participants exist contingent on the conservation of the social system.
(pp.116-117)
What do we do with that now that we have evidence of mirror self-recognition in dolphins, chimpanzees and elephants? We could just cast Maturana aside on this point, but that would seem to be ducking the crucial issues. Are we willing to allow that elephants, for instance, have something akin to human language? If we can admit to having been just a little bit wrong about the capabilities of elephants, how deeply then are we willing to probe into our own ignorance? Is there not an ethical problem with defining language in such a way that excludes elephants, chimpanzees and dolphins? Even if we ultimately set Maturana aside, we cannot do away with the social dimension of language and the implications this has for human relations with other self-aware social mammals.
Labels: Bains, body, language, pragmatics, self-awareness, sociality