Autonomy, Sociality, and the Real of Language and Literature
for though science needs language, it is not, like literature, within language.
—Roland Barthes (c. 1984)
between Ideal language Philosophers and Ordinary Language Philosophers
is a disagreement about which language is Ideal.
—Richard Rorty (1992)
I.
When Jerome J. McGann (1991) wrote that “The universe of poiesis no more has an absolute center than does the stellar universe.... The universe of literature is socially generated and does not exist in a steady state,” 1 he spoke about something much more than just the clichéic notion that literary styles or schools evolve or change through time or periods. Other than an echo of the standard periodizations in the classical history of ideas where cultural forms and styles follow a teleological historical development, McGann’s statement is an emphasis on the bibliographical history of the sociology of reading. What constitutes the material and canonical body of text editions we have today is the result of various historical and socio-political forces comprising a complex of discursive, critical, technological, and editorial apparatuses. These have established not only the very idea of “textuality” (and the “official” or orthodox receptions we still recite unproblematically in the contemporary classroom scene) but also the commonsense definitions and ideas we have of the domains we call “literature” and “language.”
The historical relationship of cultural theorizations of “literature” and editorial versions of texts is an area of inquiry which book historians like Jerome McGann or George Bornstein (2006) have touched upon in recent decades. This relationship is something I can only signal in a cursory fashion in this paper on the implications of the post-essentialist (desubstantialized) blurring of categorial disciplinary borders on the “integrationist” notions in the teaching of “language” in “literature” or of “literature” in “language.” This current post-essentialist development is not a simple instance of the interdisciplinary emphasis in current research and academic work ethic (under “cultural studies”). The blurring of the borders between the domains of language and literature is also the result of critical history after poststructuralism where previously common sense distinctions which separated the literary from non-literary forms and uses of language and between speech and writing have been superseded by that of discourse.
Geoff Hall (2005) characteristically summarized the recent remapping of educational approaches following the shift from the traditional separation between language and literature toward a general theory of “discourse”:
The key development was to see literary text as best studied against the background of other texts, and all texts as socially situated.... Eagleton... argues similarly for the necessary transmutation of literary studies into ‘rhetoric’. A key feature of this linguistically inspired shift has been the notion of discourse…. A salient feature of literature has always been that its material existence is linguistic. More recently, commentators and educators have come to see the value of a more functional, less abstract view of language as situated social action, language in use, or discourse, in reading, understanding and writing creatively. Discourse is ‘how it is said’ and ‘how it is read’, and the contexts in which language is used and processed, both immediate, linguistic, and in wider social and cultural terms, explain how meanings arise between language users. These contexts, so far as literature is concerned, are very often educational.2
Although we will still need to see how the sociality of discourse overtakes the abstracted notion of language and its implications to the reimagining of the literary, the opening toward what Geoff Hall calls “literary pragmatics” seems to permit both linguistic and literary disciplines to explore avenues for the articulation of a greater or closer (but certainly not necessarily unproblematic) disciplinary rapport since the pronouncement in 1960 by Roman Jakobson of the need to see the import of linguistics to literature studies and vice versa.3 This discursive separation between the disciplines, as I will try to explore sketchily along the way, is itself an epistemic condition occasioned by historical developments beginning as far back as the European Enlightenment period.
Jakobson’s observation, in this case, could be seen as merely symptomatic of the modality of discursive formations peculiar to the 20th century modernist philosophies of autonomous domains and rational systems theory. Since we are still reeling from this discursive historical condition, it would be important to situate the current debate of integration/separation between linguistic and critical disciplines in pedagogical and cultural practices as an echo of such a development arising from the dynamic drive of disciplines toward greater and greater internal self-demarcation in the massive politico-institutional specialization of knowledge technologies in the 20th century.
As the essentialist distinction between literary and ordinary language that was the foundation of much formalist critical theories in the past is difficult to maintain today (even with the proviso that the difference is a matter of “degree” than of “kind”), the pedagogical workspace which has as its object of study semiotico-textual artefacts (whose nature, identity, function, and value are the outcome of historico-ideological negotiations) is confronted with the need to look at the discursive presuppositions and distinctions which inform its everyday institutional practice.
If the cultural discursive capital which certain forms of textuality have accrued was premised on some assumed superior quality called “literariness,” the scientific or positivistic capital (and prestige) tied to the study of a domain of language events is, in turn, based on the “neutral” value of an “ordinary” language accessible in its “raw” or “natural” state and, in the case of modern linguistics, in its formal, systemic, or structural conception. This presupposed essential difference and unmediated access were arguably part of the main rationalizations enabling and justifying the disciplinary and discursive separation between literary studies and linguistics. We can imagine that a whole set of rhetorical movements, formulations, and assertions (premised on the forgetting of the historical and political provenances of such distinctions) governs the daily exchanges of classroom interactions and organizes the surveilled construction of preferred learning styles and desirable Subjects and objects of discourse.
Since
the aim of this paper is the determination of some guiding notions for the
(Critical) pedagogy of reading contracts in a post-essentialist encounter of
discourses on languageness and literariness under a postmodern and
multimodal workspace, it would be necessary to explore the historiographic
elements surrounding the institutional and discursive emergence of the modern
disciplines of Literature and Linguistics as allegedly “autonomous” or
semi-autonomous objects and domains of knowledge equipped with many competing
theoretico-paradigmatic and socio-political apparatuses. What would be the
general conditions under which such autonomy becomes imaginable?
I would like, therefore, to inquire briefly and roughly into the historico-epistemic genesis of the operational discursive distinctions which allowed the establishment of the commonsense divide between the disciplines of Literary Studies and Linguistics. The notion of “integration” of the two domains in the teaching of language and literature seems to presuppose this “division,” an arguably recent historical event which must be given a more precise qualification. If literature is made of or from or in language (and we need to note that this is a modernist emphasis involving “channel separation” 4 or Clement Greenberg’s “medium specificity,” an idea interrogated today by multimodal literature and art), what does it mean to say that modern linguistical models (that is, without accounting for the studies of language in the much ancient traditions of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Poetics, then in the recent revisions of “textuality” in McGann’s notion of “bibliographic codes,” then in ergodic, electronic, or hyper- textuality) did not seem to receive a unanimous or self-evident acceptance as a privileged mode of approaching the reading and teaching of literature during Jakobson’s time?
I say “as a privileged mode” since there seems to be an assumption that, by carrying the banner of science, modern linguistics is reassured of its supervisionary perch over an art form it defines as primarily composed of its real (as the overdetermination of textuality by a single code or mode), as if literature never had the question, or—paraphrasing Roland Barthes (but without yet asking the parameters of what it would mean for literature to be within language)—the burden of the question of language as a meta-question of its own possible form (the “poetic” function for Jakobson). For to govern or oversee the literary this way, must not the supervision of modern linguistics be outside of the literary and its “poetic” functions? (The functions enumerated by Jakobson, as part of the communication imaginary, also need be interrogated along the way.) Or, in the extreme, possess the capacity to speak about language without being language (for example, as logic or as philosophy), and without the complexity determinations of other “paralinguistic” (but not semiotically extraneous) systems in a socially-embedded action (that is, as discourse), together with all the material and technological conditions of its production (media and design environment)? Such would be the nature—and not without paradox—of the question of the epistemological status of a metalanguage outside of both “everyday” language and another metalanguage. For how do you interpret the metalingual—this language about language—unless it is also already animated in practice by the very language which it supposedly wanted to explain in the first place? When the part explains the whole more than the whole explains the part, we begin to interrogate the pretensions of any metalinguistic authority to adjudicate interpretative closure without pragmatic and socio-political interferences.
The coincidence in the early 20th century of the
controversial “linguistic turn” (in Philosophy and then in other disciplines)
with the rise of aesthetic modernism across the epoch of Modernity—this complex
historical stage which represents the unfinished work of the
Enlightenment—cannot, hence, be ignored in the determinations of the
metadiscursive field of the problematic in which “metalanguage” had become the
contested and imaginary arena where autonomy and sovereignty serve the defining
mode of existence and co-existence of various disciplines. The uneasy notion of
“integration” in the teaching of “language” via “literature” and vice versa, I
suggest, could then be explored in the contradictory spaces of the metalingual
imaginary where the real of language always gets posited as a
discourse-enabling mechanism by which—following Manuel Portela’s (2013)
remarks—language keeps reinventing itself in the emergent spaces of the poetics
of reading.5
II.
In 1974, Dell Hymes observed that
recent years have made linguists aware that their relevant history begins before the institutionalization in the nineteenth century of their profession, but adequate knowledge of that greater history is hardly available.
Even though historiographic research would have made some more progress since then,6 the historical knowledge of the provenances and development of the language sciences, he says, is still in search for some “fixed reference points.”
The fundamental difficulty is that what we can today take to be fixed, common knowledge is so vulnerable. For there has been very little in the way of adequate historical research. Most of what we understand as the fixed reference points of the history of linguistics is a palimpsest of past selective vantage points.7
This problematic search for fixed reference points is perhaps compounded by the fact that questions of language have always been pursued not in some sort of institutionalized or methodological isolation but in close connection to developments in other domains of inquiry in the history of ideas. As Lyle Campbell explains in her article on “The History of Linguistics”:
Many “histories” of linguistics have been written over the last two hundred years, and since the 1970s linguistic historiography has become a specialized subfield, with conferences, professional organizations, and journals of its own. Histories of linguistics often copied from one another, uncritically repeating popular but inaccurate interpretations; they also tended to see the history of linguistics as continuous and cumulative, though more recently some scholars have stressed the discontinuities. Also, the history of linguistics has had to deal with the vastness of the subject matter. Early developments in linguistics were considered part of philosophy, rhetoric, logic, psychology, biology, pedagogy, poetics, and religion, making it difficult to separate the history of linguistics from intellectual history in general, and, as a consequence, work in the history of linguistics has contributed also to the general history of ideas.8
Hymes himself about three decades earlier also penned quite a similar remark:
In this last respect, our present recognition of linguistics as an independent discipline can do us a disservice. (Nor does calling it a branch of some, other recent discipline, such as cognitive psychology, help.) The treatment of linguistic structure has been closely linked to other interests, such as logic, rhetoric, poetics, philosophy, theology—in short, with the uses of language recognized and valued by the societies in which lines of national philology have emerged, or to which they have spread.9
It is not insignificant that Hymes alludes to the emergence of “lines of national philology” in the constitution of linguistics as a discipline, even when this discipline is not conceivable as fully independent from other research interests. The rise of synchronic linguistics and the ideology of a monolingual nation-state can be seen to complement each other well ideologically in that the former allows the possibility of an imagined linguistic identity upon which is built the imagined community of the nation-state. Noting the historical non-independence of linguistic inquiry from other domains of knowledge opens up the question of the recent conditions in which it did become possible to imagine a linguistics independent from other domains. This condition seems tied up with the history of modernist ideologies of various types (linguistic, economic, political, epistemic, and cultural) as attested to in studies such as Richard Bauman & Charles L. Briggs’ Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (2003), David Gramling’s The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), or Thomas Paul Bonfiglio’s Mother Tongues and Nations: The Invention of the Native Speaker (2010) which ties together the modernist fiction of nation with the naturalist and organicist metaphors behind the “nativist” idea of language.
Whereas Bauman & Briggs trace the genealogy of the ideologies of language 10 which inform our modernity, Gramling exposes what he terms “monolingualization,” a historical and political process since the 16th century that involved the purification of languages as independent spheres tied to ethno-cultural cartographies. This is a process which Bauman and Briggs also pointed out as a major characteristic of modernity, and for whom the unexamined aspect of modernity involves how “language came into being and the work of purification and hybridization that makes it a crucial means of structuring social relations.” That is, “how language is like science and society – the way that all three realms are continually constructed through purification and hybridization.” Such process or work of “purification” anchors Bauman & Briggs’ Latour-influenced historical analysis of the emergence of modernity and the part played by language ideologies in the construction of social relations and tradition.
As far as language is concerned, this work involves imagining a state of linguistic purity and autonomy, a work “carried on faithfully to this day by linguists (such as Noam Chomsky), grammar teachers... and such modern-day defenders of linguistic purity as William Safire.”11 Further along in their rich and nuanced study of the scientification of language in Bacon, Locke, and Grimm, Bauman & Briggs encapsulate the process of modernist purification as a mode of independence from the other domains of institutionalized knowledge and society in general:
The study of language must be purified of its relationship – and particularly its subordination – to other modes of inquiry and varieties of scholarly authority. The task of purification had thus taken on by the mid-nineteenth century the task of carving out of autonomous realms of specialized expertise.... Claiming a distinct form of scientific authority entailed constructing a distinct object of inquiry. If linguistics was to be parallel to natural scientific inquiry, then that object must be construed as natural, as existing apart from society. 12
After alluding to a parallel historical work of “purification” which Michel Foucault (1970) outlined in The Order of Things, Bauman & Briggs provide a distinguishing qualification for their study by seeing in Foucault’s analysis a too unifying trajectory for language in the épistémè of the Classical period. While agreeing to a large extent with Foucault’s notion in which language came to be imagined after the 18th century in terms of pure objective grammaticality surpassing the work of resemblance and representation,13 they argued for the
advent of modernity that viewed language as a radically hybrid formation (though also susceptible to purifying inflections), inherently both natural and social, but in shifting proportions over the long course of human social evolution.14
The apparent coherence in the fate of “language” as an increasingly systematized and objectivised domain is understandable within Foucault’s analysis of the épistémè which developed to formulate the conditions of the formation of linguistics as a positive discipline. His was an emphasis on the meta-epistemic modalities of discursive formation which did not really focus on the social forces that led to their emergence. Such a sociology of the rise of today’s disciplines would be what Bauman & Briggs could supply via the historical tension they explore between the metadiscursive purification and hybridization of language ideologies that animated the “symbolic construction of modernity.”15 To separate a domain and an object called “language” for investigation,
Linguists and their kin are expected to be purists, to define and describe autonomous languages in technical ways that render invisible their social and political embeddedness.16
The isolation of the object of study is not a surprising motion in a dialectical tension between purity and hybridity: it recovers in somewhat newer terms the philosophical method we already have since Plato where the confusion dominating the world of sense experience and opinion must be purged of their illusory aspects so that the intellect, after a long and meticulous process of rationalization, could access the realm of clear and absolute ideas. By the time of the Enlightenment, we can see how this tension is still built into the Kantian analytic-synthetic divide which developed from the rationalist vs. empiricist debates in epistemology since Descartes and Locke. Although “language” was not yet a major problematic element in the formation of knowledge, the same methodological purification has always been at work. In the case of Kant’s purification of reason, what was taken out was the key mediating role of language in epistemology.17 Immanuel Kant’s contemporary, Johann Georg Hamann, in his Metacritique on the Purism of Reason (1800),
levelled the charge that Kant, in continuity with such Enlightenment predecessors as Berkeley and Hume, had divorced reason and concepts from language and attributed to them sovereignty over it, instead of recognizing their virtual identity with it. This was the third of three misguided ascriptions of “purity” to reason of which Hamann accused Kant’s book (the other two concerned reason’s divorce from and sovereignty over tradition/ custom, and reason’s divorce from experience).18
Living in the wake of the still controversial “linguistic turn” in the early 20th century, we could easily substitute “language” for the role that “reason” played in this critical regard of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. This basic metadiscursive tension between purification and hybridization which organizes the manner by which linguistics today is divided into competing and conflicting paradigms, traditions, schools, theories, programs, or “cynosures” (as Hymes would prefer to call them 19) is summarized fittingly by Michael Losonsky in his work on the linguistic turns in philosophy:
The history of the study of language suggests that there is a persistent divide in this study. Language is seen either as a systematic, rule-governed structure or it is an empirical object. If it is empirical, its domain and source of evidence are linguistic performance, but performance appears to elude systematic determination. The varieties of linguistic irrealism – whether about form, meaning, or language itself – that we find in the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, and Derrida are testimonies to the strength and persistence of this appearance, no matter what one might think about the specific merits of these views.20
Hence, this metadiscursive tension or divide between purist (“the Scholastic perspectives on language as a formal system”) and hybridist (“the Renaissance humanist perspective on language as human action”) emphases on the phenomenon of language–“a divide that modern philosophy unsuccessfully tried to overcome – seems to be an enduring and prominent landmark of the study of human language.”21 It is important, in the light of Bauman & Briggs’ study, to underline that purist and hybridist emphases are symbiotic and contrastive at the same time in the sense that practical ideologies of purification enact the isolation of hybrid identities for its proper self-designation. An example would be the case of standard and non-standard notions of language, or in the fiction of the “native” speaker set against the “non-native” user of the language. What is crucial in all instances of purification, however, seems to be the fabrication of the core “real” of language (in Jean-Claude Milner’s sense, as I will explain later) which legitimates the designation of the “native” ownership of a language. As noted by post-monolingual scholars like Paul Bonfiglio, the advent of print technology and the expanded role of the written form in modern bureaucratic, economic, cultural, and educational domains coincided with the progressive concretization of the “native” status of a certain mode of language and, I’d like to add, the consequent apotheosis of “language” and the “literary” as mentioned by Foucault.
[T]he notion of the authority of the native speaker is not only ideologically constructed: it also stratifies speakers into the more native and the less native and valorizes those “real” natives in ownership of the power of discourse.22
As Bonfiglio clearly indicates, what is at stake in the standardization of languages are questions of discursive property, authority, and propriety, the very socio-historical elements which a naturalized, decontextualized, and objectified system of language would like to eliminate from its constitutional and ideological origins.
In order to mark and preserve its identity, status, and power, a group will arbitrarily select and canonize certain linguistic features as standard or prestigious, which then become codes, a form of secret exclusionary language, which is not very secret and cannot remain so for very long. The result is that prestige forms must therefore be transitory and must pass from fashion, so that they may be replaced by the most current indication of separate status. This means that the standardization process has no fixed center and that, as an elusive phenomenon, it must remain dynamic. This precludes any fixed description of the standard language a priori and helps account for the elusiveness of the notion of standardization in the first place.23
The elusive nature of the linguistical standard or core extends not only to objective grammars but also to the very concept of “locution” featured in speech act theories. As Losonsky explains, rendering more acute the problematic relationship between the empiricist and rationalist determinations of the real of language:
Even the abstraction to what Austin calls “locution” – the sentence with its literal meaning – is insufficient to preserve the systematicity of natural language. Language as a system requires a further abstraction from locution to a structure of possible locutions. The actual locution as a unit of analysis needs to be placed in a system of all possible as well as actual locutions of a language, but actual locutions by themselves do not determine such a system. Language as a rule-governed system, if there is such a thing, will be an abstract structure distinct from actual locutions or performances. But that also means that language as a system will be distinct from the empirical basis for its study – the phenomena of human linguistic activity, that is, human linguistic performances. This distinction has the paradoxical consequence that the empirical basis of the study of language tends to undermine the very idea that language is a system that can be represented by a theory.24
The isolation and identification of both the “natural” and “formal” constitution of language in ethnico-political and systemic terms work together to decontextualize it not only epistemologically but also socio- and geo-politically (representing roughly, but not necessarily just antithetically, the romanticist and rationalist strains of this tendency). As we can already surmise, the metadiscursive tension between purification and hybridization will eventually lead us later on in the early 20th century into the controversial and complex role of the ideology of “autonomy” in Modernist thought and Art (as well as in language and literature pedagogy, of course). The contradiction which this imagined autonomy engenders—at least for the epistemology of linguistics for now—is made clear by Losonsky:
[I]f language is seen as a system, its study will carve out a domain distinct from performance and empirical investigation.... In other words, for Chomsky as for Frege, language is a structure discovered by reason and intuition, not perception and induction.25
Although the contrasting terms of “reason”
and “experience” seem to be the facultative parallels of the purist and
hybridist metadiscursive tendencies for epistemology, in practice such
binaries—with which other kinds are seen to be isomorphically related (abstract/concrete,
ideal/material, mental/physical, formal/empirical, analytic/synthetic,
mind/sense, deduction/induction, natural/social, etc.), should also be seen as
functions of a metadiscursive setup of purification whose own genealogical
histories for linguistic modelling require further investigation. By the 20th
century, when linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky pick up
the chain, the metadiscursive setup will yield the classic modern binaries of langue vs. parole and competence vs.
performance, binaries upon which
subsequent contrastive discursive practices will be built, both in research and
in pedagogy. As we will see, it is less a question of deciding which modelling
has the more coefficient of the real of language in it, or which one can lead
to the “ideal” metalanguage (whether that of a pragmatically-based “ordinary”
or “everyday” language or that of a formally-configured “special”
metalanguage), than to foreground the metadiscursive conflict or tension which
anteposes their separability, including what language modelling setup they
enable or imagine as plausible. It is in the crux of this metadiscursive
tension that we could relocate the question of the literary, as that signifying
production whose intriguing aspect seems to mirror the problematic
determination—in all the senses of that phrase—of the real of language.
What then is the real of language and how is it determined? What does Losonsky mean when he spoke of “the varieties of linguistic irrealism” in Wittgenstein, Derrida, or Davidson? To return to the citation above, for Losonsky, the key dividing criterion seems to be the persistent metadiscursive conflict or contradiction between the rational and the empirical determinations of the real of language. As he explains, if a rational epistemology seems to be confined to the formulation of an idealized system capable of explaining the rule-based combinatory permutations of a language, the empirical emphasis takes the real of language to be more a matter of socio-pragmatic performance which “appears to elude [such] systematic determination.” From this we can glean that what is at stake in the determination of the real of language depends less on the opposition of what is rational to what is empirical than to whether or not this real can be brought under a specific modelling following a philosophy of what a “system” might be or should be like. In general terms, we expect this philosophy to contain the basic meronomic notions of wholes and parts and the question of whether language is just a singular totality (whose unity and coherence serve as the basis of its autonomy) or a “modular” collection of various interacting open quasi-systems; that is, a complex of multiple assemblages involving various relational “ontologies” in pragmatic flux.26
To approach the question of the real of language without going through the whole history and philosophy of science—domains beyond the scope of the present discussion, but which would be needed to understand what modelling bias a linguistic cynosure has adopted from the natural sciences to bolster its positive status—I would take off from Ann Banfield’s “Introduction” to her own 1990 translation of Jean-Claude Milner’s L’amour de la langue (Editions du Seuil, 1978). As a comparative grammarian, a Chomskyian linguist, and a psychoanalyst, Milner’s intellectual trajectory carries the dialectical hybridity which resides unresolved in the determination of the real of language as a systematizable object given its pragmatic entanglements, a problem which we know is not entirely unique to Milner. This irresolution comes from at least two directions: 1) the epistemological condition of “modern consciousness” whose “appearance is consonant with the rise of [modern] science;” and 2) the ontological question of the limits of knowledge in relation to what Banfield explains as our “chance encounter” with the real of language in the face of Jacques Lacan’s “not-all” or lalangue which exceeds any formalization into a systemic langue.
Banfield orients Milner’s would-be readers by locating his notion of scientific philosophy to Alexandre Koyré’s modern rationalist epistemology. The crucial element in this epistemology of scientific activity is the redefinition of what the real of any science should be like, a redefinition which denies “that a specific substance must be attributed to what is real.”27 Any science, especially linguistics and the psychophysical nature of its object, quite understandably cannot presume to have a priori knowledge of the contents of its real before investigating to discover what the content or substance of that real might be. Hence, for whatever this real is within the realm of the experiential, no science can claim to carry an exclusive monopoly over the substance of the real as something confined solely within its domain. This is to say that the real is a definition, nothing more, a definition which a science must determine for itself in order to locate its object or domain of reference. It is in this sense that it is possible to expand the real beyond the narrow notion of, say, the “physical” and the “observable” to make us see that the physical is only a definition, not an exclusive category of the real possessing a monopoly over claims to substance.28
We can easily see how this criterion, by which the real of any science is primarily a definition demarcating the boundaries of its object or domain, overtakes the simple dichotomy of rationalism and empiricism. Although this is quite a useful stage in the constitutive moment by which a science defines what it considers scientific and non-scientific, it must also deal with the price of such purifying objectification of its domain through which it can proceed with its work of formalization (or the “mathematization” of its real in systemic terms). The conflicting demands of many different definitions of the real from different sciences would seem to have its most acute manifestation in the determination of the scientific real of linguistics. As a scientific enterprise, it is cognizant of the limits of knowledge, its partiality. Because of this, according to Milner, “the ethic of science” is founded on “renunciation,” the recognition that a science cannot be totally comprehensive. Furthermore, “an individual's knowledge cannot simply be added up into an interconnected whole and, correlatively, that the different objective spheres of knowledge cannot be integrated.”
It is perhaps predictable that linguistics today should stand at the frontiers of science and non-science, bearing witness to the impossible unity of knowledge.... For its knowledge is the newest science, unique in carrying formal representation and argumentation not into the external, physical world, but into an internal, non-physical one: the speaker's knowledge, which Chomsky calls 'linguistic competence.' The validity of its claim to scientificity is thus dependent on its refusal to comment on all uses of language. The punishment for that refusal has been a universal scepticism denying any theoretical coherence to the limited claims of linguistics precisely because there exist aspects of language it cannot explain.29
Although the demarcation criterion proposed via Milner’s modernist rationalist epistemology provides a possible way of legitimizing linguistics as a scientific discipline in its own right, its “ethic of renunciation” to totality would imply a problematic of integration with other sciences and other spheres of linguistic activity whose real may not be the same as the one defined by a specific modelling of languageness. Its redefinition of the empirical to distinguish the notion of the linguistic “given” from pure sense impression has indeed granted more coefficient of the real to linguistic entities beyond the “phoneme” (which is not itself unproblematic for its phonocentric determinations) such as grammatical “categories” and “syntax” whose formal and systemic existence as “units” is not actually observable independently of the users who perceive them.30 Nevertheless, in defining its object as “that grammaticality which is defined by its limits: the existence of the agrammatical,” it locates the real of language only “in language and not in the world or even in the relation of language to the world.” Hence, it is “in 'the dimension of the purely grammatical', as Foucault has called it, that linguistics locates its real.” As a consequence, for modern linguistic modelling such as Saussure’s and Chomsky’s, “langue and competence then stand for what is formally representable, parole and performance for what is not.”31 The very requirement of modern scientificity has thus made it possible for such linguistics to become autonomous and systematic, but at the expense of both sociality and integrality:
The very possibility of a linguistic science is dependent, then, on this initial gesture by which linguists set aside certain questions as irrelevant to their concerns and represent their object within well-defined limits and subject to well-defined constraints. That object, then, the language of linguistics, is not synonymous with the totalised image of language constructed by grammar or with the Language of philosophy. Its unity, as we have seen, is a fragmentary one, gained by renouncing the goal of representing all; it thereby acknowledges that there is something which escapes it.32
The effort to demarcate the positive object of study does not mean that linguistics as so conceived operates in complete denial of what exceeds it or what it cannot formalize, which is the realm of parole and performance that resists systematization. It remains to be explained, however, what kind of relationship holds between such an autonomously purified but asocial linguistics and a socially-hybrid performance of language which always escapes such purification (i.e., are they symbiotic, inclusive, hierarchical, exclusive, mutually-constitutive, or dialectical, or equally pragmatic in opposed directions?). If, as Einstein was quoted as saying, “It is theory which first determines what can be observed,”33 then we can understand what the linguist, as Banfield points out, would feel in those cases as “the thrill [that] lies at that point where evidence meets theory; this is the point where the all [the grammatical] emerges in its mathematicisable form out of the not-all [the agrammatical].”
For this reason, far from operating in involuntary ignorance of lalangue, of those of its features consigned to the not-all, the linguist, as much as anyone concerned with language, as much as the poet or the literary critic, must constantly confront what it is that escapes formalisation. If, as Milner points out, the linguist's ignorance of the not-all is wilful, a principled decision to ignore, to not know which structures linguistics - in Saussure this refusal of knowledge being directed toward what is labelled the arbitrary - then the experience of science the linguist is granted involves a relation, albeit negative, to the not-all, to lalangue, this other of the 'language' of linguistics.34
The contrast between (pure) grammaticality and (hybrid) agrammaticality is therefore a founding moment for the science of linguistics since it marks the stage where the real of language is extracted from the Not-all or lalangue. This is a crucial instant since the “chance encounter” with the givens of language involves entities which are not fully physical in the standard sense. For even if the delivery systems of language events required material and physical support, their dynamic following the limits of physics, their total pragmatics is not exhaustively addressed by the limitation to the physical because the real of language does not end with the stimulus. Instead, it reverberates as a fluctuating field of human meaning where the formal is but a possible tonality. Since the reality of language forces us to include the psychophysical as part of the empirical, from phonology to syntax to semantics to pragmatics, the movement goes from the localization of the linguistic real in strictly sensible data toward the expansion of the empirical realm to include the significant. The differential boundaries which determine the units are themselves already demarcated as if by empirical necessity; yet they are arbitrary divisions already in vivo, but whose reality depended less on some exterior objectivity without observers for their existence than on their “inter-objectivity” as it were, supported by an “evidence” which is almost juridical (that is, by the “testimony” of its users, their practical “judgement”), but which involves, circuitously, a return to more language, even if this support takes on the formality of a scientific metalanguage which effaces its socio-discursive origins. This illustrates pure grammaticality at work whereby language closes on itself to become its own autonomous real.35
Using a different terminology, we can
recast the opposition of agrammaticality with grammaticality as the difference
between “noise” and “information,” terms which do not carry essentialist
identities but are values defined by local and situational perspective; that
is, by the metadiscursive setup and the information design environment. If lalangue is “like the primary chaotic
substrate of polysemy out of which language is constructed, almost as if
language is some ordered superstructure sitting on top of this substrate,”36 then we
can say that this “superstructure” is that grammaticality which designates the
real for linguistics. It is information extracted from noise, and it represents
the limited formalization from which it constructs a metalanguage. Because language, in the length of the discussion we
have followed so far, is an unknown entity whose precise ontology remains underdetermined even if a science would
like to overdetermine its reality, we
should designate the modelled language imagined thus under the compass of a metalanguage as its betalanguage. In addition to this, despite or because of the
linguistic “realism” espoused by Milner’s modernist epistemology, I would
propose to refer to the real “abducted” by a linguistic model or cynosure as a
“hyper-form.” This rhetorical move claims the virtue of clearing the way toward
the elucidation of what Losonsky has observed as the “varieties
of linguistic irrealism – whether
about form, meaning, or language itself – that we find in the philosophies of
Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, and Derrida.”
Notes
1. Jerome J. McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), p. 76.
2. Geoff Hall, Literature
in Language Education (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), p. 1-2.
In Ian
Butler’s basic survey of the “interface” in pedagogy of linguistic and literary
methodologies which began in the 1960s, the orientation toward discourse where
the traditional boundaries between ordinary and artistic language are blurred
is clearly either the origin or the result of such interdisciplinary
explorations:
On
the one hand, by using the idea of the ‘cline of literariness’ posited by
Carter and Long, the teacher is able to demonstrate that the language of
literature is not as alien as it might, at first glance, seem: for example,
comparison of a poem with ‘non-literary’ texts such as advertisements and
travel brochures (which are, presumably, closer to students’ ‘everyday’
experience of language use) would reveal similar creative manipulation of
language. Students would consequently be led to see these literary techniques
in a wider context, not just as the jargon of a decontextualized and alienating
classroom discourse. On the other hand, comparison of texts can also highlight
the variety of styles and registers available in English, and the contexts in
which they can be appropriately used. As was the case in the approaches that
emphasized the broadening of the canon of literature, the effect here is to
take literature down from its pedestal, in a sense to democratize it. Literature, in other words, can be seen as
one of the many discourses available in the English language, not a privileged
form, as more traditional approaches to literary study tend to imply.
Beyond
such blurring, however, is the importance of the increasing recognition that
“literature” itself is neither a fixed domain nor an object possessing some
inviolable property:
My
review so far has focussed on integration from the perspective of the language
classroom. But, in Maley’s words, literature
has also acquired ‘different clothes’, the appearance of which [has] been
determined by developments within the field of literary studies and pedagogy.
There has been an increased awareness of the
reader as an active participant in
the construction of meaning from literary texts; stylistics, with its focus
on the language of literary texts, has had an effect on language teaching; and
the notion of ‘literature’ has been expanded beyond the traditional literary
canon. These developments have, in different ways, affected how teachers of
literature view language learning. The new approaches make literature
potentially more accessible to language learners, while at the same time
raising awareness of language issues among literature teachers.
From Ian Butler, “Integrating Language and
Literature in English Studies: A Case Study of the English 100 Course at the
University of North West” (PhD Dissertation, University of South Africa, 2006),
pp. 36-60, http://uir.unisa.ac.za/handle/10500/1663?show=full. Italics added.
3. The famous statement by Roman Jakobson is cited
below:
If there are some
critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to embrace the field of
poetics, I privately believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted
linguists has been mistaken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself.
All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic
function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems
and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms.
Cited in Language,
Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics,
eds. Ronald Carter & Paul Simpson (NY: Routledge, 1989), p. 1.
4. An epitome of what we now dismiss as commonsense
thinking is the assertion by Ezra Pound that “Great
literature is simply language charged
with meaning to the utmost possible
degree.”
Although
the term “language” itself offers a wide range of interpretation, Pound’s
statement delimits the full range of semiosis to the field of a singular mode
of languageness. That is, it postulates the capacity of the medium of language
in its “literary” typification to carry the “utmost” charge of meaning, as if
it attained the ability to house exhaustively within itself both Form and Content, or Code and Message, at the same time. This mode
of text-centered locus of meaning—where a unifying code overdetermines the real
of textuality—will reverberate for decades to come in the Humanities from
Formalism to Stylistics as Print Culture struggles to retain its primary or
elite place as the medium of cultural memory in the rise of New Media
technologies.
The doctrine of textuality which emerges from this modernist focus inevitably required the notions of unity/coherence. They purify the textual into a hermeneutic abstraction which authorizes the discourse of the formalist critic. By closing the semiosis of the textual, unities and harmonies verify the vision of the reading apparatus and envelops the act of reading with the aura of objective closure and reference. This idea of literature as self-coherent textuality preps it for closure, as dynamic expression of a systemic set of codes. When it comes to textual objects, unity and coherence are capital investments of reading because they harmonize the field of semiosis toward a teleological object or topos of perception. We can see how this works in Widdowson where the hybridity of discourse is fitted into the purity of the linguistic system which it exemplifies and into the utopia of communication where multiple or multimodal socio-pragmatic assemblages taking part in the arbitration of meaning are submitted to the finality of a metalanguage superintending its semiosis.
The linguist, then, directs his attention primarily to how a piece of literature exemplifies the language system. We will say that he treats literature as text, and in the following chapter I shall be examining the kind of results which emerge from such a treatment. The literary critic searches for underlying significance, for the essential artistic vision that the poem embodies and we will say that he treats literary works as messages. Between these two is an approach to literature which attempts to show specifically how elements of a linguistic text combine to create messages, how, in other words, pieces of literary writing function as a form of communication. Let us say that this approach treats literature as discourse. (In H.G. Widdowson, Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature (NY: Taylor & Francis, 1975), p. 6. Italics added.)
The quote
from Pound, without my italics, was taken from Gillian Lazar, Literature and Language Teaching: A Guide
for Teachers and Trainers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
The idea
of “channel separation” is adapted from Manuel Portela’s book, Scripting Reading Motions: The Codex and the
Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines (2013), page 302 “Thus,
in the context of nineteenth-century new media, writing becomes a separate
channel, unable to contain either the full presence of the self or the full
presence of the sounds and images of the world.”
5. “In a paradoxical quantum effect, language
appears as the creator of the creation that creates it.” Manuel Portela, Scripting
Reading Motions: The Codex and the Computer as Self-Reflexive Machines
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), p. 142.
6. An example I can
mention in passing concerning the historiographic attention on the origins of
the linguistic sciences would be the two-tome collection edited by Hans-Josef Niederehe and E.F. Konrad Koerner published in 1990 entitled History and historiography of Linguistics :
Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the History of the
Language Sciences.
7.
Dell H. Hymes, ed., Studies in the
History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms (Bloomington: Indiana
University press, 1974), pp. 27, 23.
Robin
Valenza (2009), in Literature, Language,
and the Rise of the Intellectual Disciplines in Britain, 1680-1820,
provides a working definition of how a “discipline” can be imagined:
I propose
here a working definition of “discipline.” A discipline is a field of study
that has a recognized community of researchers who have in common most of the
following: an agreed-upon name, a loosely
identified object of knowledge , shared research goals, a finite set of
methods of inquiry, a generally accepted intellectual tradition, a group of
institutions that persist and remain stable over time (such as university
departments and academic journals), a system for perpetuating the discipline by
training new practitioners, a group of working concepts and rules for adding
new rules and concepts, and an established manner for communicating their
findings (p.5-6,
italics added).
8.
In Mark Aronoff
& Janie Rees-Miller, eds., The
Handbook of Linguistics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. 81. Emphases mine.
9. Hymes, op. cit., p. 6.
10. In general,
“language ideology” is defined by Michael Silverstein as “any set of beliefs about language articulated by
users as a rationalization or
justification of perceived language structure and use.” Cited in David Grambling, The Invention of
Monolingualism (NY: Bloomsbury
Publishing Inc., 2016), pp 17-18. Italics
mine.
11. Richard Bauman
& Charles L. Briggs, Voices of
Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press), pp.7-8.
For his part, David Gramling enumerates the
“four
primary inventions that monolingualism has been able to shepherd forth since
the seventeenth century: the monolingual individual, monolingual literary text,
monolingual world literature canon, and monolingual pan-ethnic citizenship
models” (The Invention of Monolingualism, p. 19).
12. Bauman & Briggs, op. cit., p. 202. Emphases
added.
13. Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, writes:
Until the end of the eighteenth century, this new
analysis has its place in the search for the representative [representational]
values of language. It is still a
question of discourse. But already, through the inflectional system, the
dimension of the purely grammatical
is appearing: language no longer consists only of representations and of sounds
that in turn represent the representations and are ordered among them as the
links of thought require; it consists also of formal elements, grouped into a system, which impose upon the sounds,
syllables, and roots an organization
that is not that of representation (p. 235, italics
mine).
From this
remark, we can imagine a possible argument interrogating the direct application
of a systematic or descriptive metalanguage to literary texts whose perceived
value goes beyond mere embodiment of purely formal linguistic constants, that
is, carrying an assumed “semantic” dimension as a representational or
expressive component. Although this theoretical “excess” can be seen to compose
the non-systematic supplement which threatens the semiotic closure imposed by
the system on textual play, we should go beyond the Form/Content dualism
wherein a putative linguistic metalanguage is seen to possess the monopoly in
the elucidation of the formal aspect of the text in isolation, as if literary
texts do not or did not equally thematize their own formal nature in a
metaliterary mode of self-reflexivity. In other words, it seems that there is
an assumption that literary texts do not often harbour their own metalinguistic
or meta-formal problematic, and that an extra-literary metalanguage
distinguishable a priori from the textual language is required in “making
sense” of them in both their formal and hermeneutic dimensions.
Such
extra-literary metalanguage function often gets thematized in literary works
where the role of an anthropomorphic “reader” is foregrounded in the
hermeneutic dynamic of the literary script act (the reader as character). A
prime example of this would be Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller. By incorporating the
extra-literary reader function as a
completive or incompletive major agent of the “hermeneutic circle,” a writerly
textuality such as Calvino’s allows us to ask what metadiscursive regime
required or allowed its bifurcation in the first place into the classic
interpretative or readerly binary of “metalanguage” (critical and reader
apparatus or function imagined to be exterior to the dynamic of textual meaning)
and “object language” (formalist ontology of literary textuality and text-bound
locus of originary and complete signification where the reader function is
envisioned as the unravelling of the textual “content” or “signified” using the
codes provided by the metalanguage).
14. Bauman & Briggs, op. cit., p. 9.
15. Bauman &
Briggs work to discover how “social categories,
texts, contexts, forms of knowledge, and social relations are produced and reproduced, legitimized,
denigrated, challenged, superseded, and often revived in discourse-oriented
terms.... [T]he symbolic construction of modernity demands the close
examination of discursive, textual, and traditionalizing practices and the
texts in which they were articulated. Ways
of speaking and writing make social classes, genders, races, and nations seem real and enable them to elicit
feelings and justify relations of power.... We are interested in people who
created new regimes of metadiscursive
ideology and practice, who seized new opportunities for imagining and naturalizing language and
tradition.... [W]e have sought to identify authors and texts that carved
out modes of purification and hybridization that dominated their competitors,
shaping economies of social inequality. Bauman & Briggs, op. cit., p. 17, emphases
added.
16. Bauman & Briggs, op. cit., p. 305.
17. Yaron Senderowicz & Marcelo Dascal, for
example, in an article entitled “Language and Reason in Kant’s Epistemology,”
argue that “Kant was aware of
role of language in his transcendental enterprise, but refrained from
developing an account of this role, presumably out of concern for the damaging
consequences it might have had for the alleged purity of 'pure Reason'.”
In: Histoire Épistémologie Langage, tome 19, fascicule 1, 1997. Construction des théories du son
[Première partie] pp. 135-148; doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/hel.1997.2577.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/hel_0750-8069_1997_num_19_1_2577
18. Michael N.
Forster, “Kant’s Philosophy of Language?” in Frank Schalow & Richard
Velkley, eds., The Linguistic Dimension
of Kant’s Thought : Historical and Critical Essays (Il: Northwestern
University Press, 2014), p. 82.
19.
For Hymes, the history of Linguistics is the
site of competing traditions: neither unified nor homogeneous. Linguistics, for
him, should best not be seen as a successful transition from paradigm to
paradigm:
[T]he past development of linguistics... is not adequately understood as a succession of paradigms. Rather, it has had a history of the rise, and variegated development, of a plurality of traditions. These traditions of inquiry, sets of problems, have each their own record of continuity in and of themselves. In relation to the center of the intellectual or disciplinary stage, to the succession of cynosures, as it were, the record is one of discontinuity.... The actual history of advance, and more generally, of change, in linguistics in the present period, as in past periods, appears a far more tangled matter than can be sorted out at first glance.
Since these traditions or cynosures are not free from critical controversy, they fail to
command
complete authority within the field.
This gap between true ‘paradigmatic’ status and the lesser authority of a
‘cynosure’ may, indeed, help explain the polemical overkill that has
characterized a new group’s treatment of the predecessors and competitors. (The
neo-Bloomfieldian reaction to traditional grammar, and the Chomskyan reaction
to preceding structuralism, are cases in point.) It may be that, one’s
scientific base not being sufficient for complete hegemony, rhetoric and ideology have had to be
called upon to fill the gap. (In Hymes, op. cit., p. 19-20, 16. Emphasis added.)
Apart from underlining the non-universal status of various linguistic models (they are models after all, not transcendental truths), this point is equally important to recall later when the question arises concerning which cynosures to employ and why them in our “integrationist” pedagogical contexts. The choices are never natural.
20.
Michael Losonsky, Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy
(NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 251. Italics added.
21. Losonsky, op. cit., p 252.
22. Thomas Paul Bonfiglio, Mother Tongues and Languages: The Invention of the Native Speaker
(NY: De Gruyter Mouton, 2010), p 4.
The advent of “literature as such” is
mentioned in passing by Ann Banfield in connection with the rise of linguistics
in the 19th century:
But it is the third and last compensation Foucault calls 'the most important, and also the most unexpected' - 'the appearance of literature, of literature as such...' Literature as such, appearing in the same century as comparative grammar, Foucault defines as 'the isolation of a particular language whose peculiar mode of being is "literary" ... existing wholly in reference to the pure act of writing...' 'Literature', Foucault asserts, 'is the contestation of philology (of which it is nevertheless the twin figure)': 'At the moment when language, as spoken and scattered words, becomes an object of knowledge, we see it reappearing in a strictly opposite modality: a silent, cautious deposition of the word upon the whiteness of a piece of paper, where it can possess neither sound nor interlocutor, where it has nothing to say but itself, nothing to do but shine in the brightness of its being.’
Here we can see the outlines of the rise of
the basis for the critical notion of “autonomy” in formalist aesthetics for
literature in 20th century modernism. I would reserve for another
section the discussion of the (not unproblematic) role of aesthetic “autonomy”
in the carving out of the modernist notion of textuality as a
discourse-enabling fiction in the domain of formalist ontology. Such ontology
of the text has the obvious function of legitimizing the rise of the
institution of Literary Studies as a coherent and scientific discipline in its
own right.
Cited in Ann Banfield, “Introduction: What do
Linguists Want?” In Jean-Claude Milner, For
the Love of Language, tr. Ann Banfield (NY: The MacMillan Press, 1990), p.
38-39, italics added.
23. Bonfiglio, op. cit.,
p. 15. Italics added. The pedagogical and political repercussions of
linguistical standardization in the social field recall the knowledge/power
dynamic dear to Foucault:
Language thus became
a key site for establishing a local/global or provincial/cosmopolitan
dichotomy. Since all utterances, written or spoken, provide measures of
purification, decontextualization, precision, and rationality, all individuals could be subjected to
constant surveillance with respect to the degree to which they embodied the
model of the modern subject. (Bauman & Briggs, op. cit., p. 300, italics
added).
24.
Losonsky, op. cit., p. xiv. Italics mine.
25. Losonsky, op. cit., p. 251.
26. From here I signal the modulation of my arguments toward the specific qualification of “pragmatics” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critique of the “Postulates of Linguistics” in a chapter of their well-known work Mille plateaux: capitalisme et schizophrénie published in 1980 (published as A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi (MN: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
A pragmatics for D&G is based on the ontology of the Multiple, not of the Universal and the One, and is an interior principle of variation which always precedes any normalizing abstraction:
The other mistake... is to believe in the adequacy of the form of expression as a linguistic system. This system may be conceived as a signifying phonological structure, or as a deep syntactical structure. In either case, it is credited with engendering semantics, therefore of fulfilling expression, whereas contents are relegated to the arbitrariness of a simple "reference" and pragmatics to the exteriority of nonlinguistic factors. What all of these undertakings have in common is to erect an abstract machine of language, but as a synchronic set of constants. (p.90, italics added)
As long as linguistics confines itself to constants, whether syntactical, morphological, or phonological, it ties the statement to a signifier and enunciation to a subject and accordingly botches the assemblage; it consigns circumstances to the exterior, closes language in on itself, and makes pragmatics a residue. Pragmatics, on the other hand, does not simply appeal to external circumstances: it brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that are so many internal reasons for language not to close itself off. As Volosinov [Bakhtin] says, as long as linguistics extracts constants, it is incapable of helping us understand how a single word can be a complete enunciation; there must be "an extra something" that "remains outside of the scope of the entire set of linguistic categories and definitions," even though it is still entirely within the purview of the theory of enunciation or language.' (p. 82, italics added)
Linguistics is nothing without a
pragmatics (semiotic or political) to define the effectuation of the condition
of possibility of language and the usage of linguistic elements. (p. 85)
D&G’s notion of pragmatics seems to extend the sociolinguistic concept of “discourse” to include other material and dynamical forces at work in the “order-word” of performance where bodies and signs co-evolve beyond the logic of Form vs. Content or Expression vs. Substance toward that of enunciative “assemblages,” “redundancy,” and “incorporeal transformations.” D&G’s pragmatics is therefore hybridist in orientation in the context of this term in this paper.
27. Ann Banfield, op. cit., p. 23.
28. Perhaps a good illustration of the real as being only a definition is Albert Einstein’s desubstantialized description of space and time: “Space is merely what we measure with a ruler; time is what we measure with a clock.” (This attribution to Einstein may not be entirely original. It may be an assumption reflective of what many physicists share in practice.) By referring key concepts of the real in scientific investigation to the means by which these concepts are defined, Einstein’s statement highlights the socio-technical provenances of the real, as the product of the discursive activity of science. To say that the real is a definition does not deny tout court any independent universe (a nominalism). It merely foregrounds the socio-discursive activity in which a real is conceptualized, a real which is then tested against other (theoretically-defined) data.
29. Banfield, p. 5-6. Italics added. As Paul Feyerabend (1975) says in Against Method, “No theory ever agrees with all the facts in its domain.”
30. Unless observation is extended to include the mental.... Speakers cannot strictly speaking perceive the units via the senses- i.e., instruments cannot record breaks between all units which speakers nonetheless perceive in the sense of encountering them in their knowledge of the language (Banfield, pp. 16-17).
31. Banfield, pp. 26, 22.
32. Banfield, p.31.
Because the “ethic of renunciation” which allows a science to delimit its domain of reference (i.e., its real) also defines the autonomy from society which gives it the objective status it requires to be a science, modern linguistics as a theory of rational system gains an asocial existence “independent” of individual users and performance. This asociality of the langue represents an unresolved tension in Saussure’s attempt to describe it as the “social aspect” of language but which exists virtually in every individual’s mind, yet not determined by the action of any individual in that society. He conceives it as a totality, and yet claims that such a totality is unknowable. To paraphrase Derrida, one has yet to encounter the langue. The problems in Saussurean terminology taken up elsewhere by other scholars would require a separate discussion. I would only like to signal a possible angle to explain why a motion toward a theory of “discourse” where language is inseparable from the social becomes an important corrective to the asociality of modern linguistics.
Admittedly, this by itself does not provide full illumination because it merely transfers the problem to another level or domain of inquiry. The questions start rolling in: How does discourse work and how does it arise? Could the concept of discourse escape or evade the need for a metalanguage? Or is it distinguished from systemic linguistics by the identification of metalingual description as itself a part of another discourse? If so, which ones? Where does it get the “cogs” for its operations? What are the sources of its “components”? Won’t the emergent space of the poetic or literary be the possible “sources” of discourse? Or, since “everyday” and “literary” language are no longer opposed domains in discourse, won’t “script acts” be a more inclusive term than speech acts to designate what Derrida has called the iterative nature of the signifier? That discourse and narrative, following Gérard Genette’s critique of the divide between diegesis and mimesis and narration and description, are hardly opposites of each other? In short, what the notion of discourse is rediscovering is that the (tragic) space of literature has always been secretly its source, and that the everyday has always been structured by narrativity. (This is no doubt a major problematic of Beckettian metanarratology). If this is the case, we can imagine how the investigation of discourse has remained blind to its fictional or novelistic constitution, mistaking its narratological grounding in classical Realism and Romanticism as its scientific real.
From here onward, it will take just one more step toward Elaine Showalter’s framing of pedagogy in narratological terms:
The most self-reflective aspect of teaching fiction is the function of the narrator… We are not only the authors but also the classroom narrators of our courses. Just as teaching drama is reinforced by the theatrical space of the classroom, and teaching poetry is enabled by the oral and communal aspects of recitation, so too teaching fiction provides an opportunity to play with the teacher’s narrative role and perspective…. (S)ome teachers may wish deliberately to undermine or relinquish some of the authority of narrative in the classroom; we may sometimes wish to be unreliable, or self-reflexive…. The ways we negotiate academic narrative can bridge the gap between experience and fiction, and serve as examples and illustrations for students of the ways narrative works, and the unconscious assumptions we make about it as readers. (In Elaine Showalter, Teaching Literature (Maryland: Blackwell Publishing: 2003), p.94.)
However, by now we could see that the classroom is not the only space structured by narrativity: cultures themselves are built upon the narratives which inform them. The practice of everyday life is nothing less than the performance and deformance of cultural narratives.
33. Cited in Louisa Gilder, The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics was Reborn (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), p. 82. In an analogous fashion, we can recall how the objects of discourse, for Foucault, are the products of the positivity of that discourse. What a science “sees” are objects of knowledge which its “gaze” has allowed to become visible.
As Feyerabend (1975) also notes, “terms such as 'experiment' and 'observation' cover complex processes containing many strands. 'Facts' come from negotiations between different parties.... At any rate—we are a long way from the old (Platonic) idea of science as a system of statements growing with experiment and observation and kept in order by lasting rational standards.”
34. Banfield, p. 34. Italics added.
35. See note # 26 above.
36. Dylan Evans,
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian
Psychoanalysis (NY: Routledge, 1996), p. 100.
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