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