Prof: Well,
last time we saved theory from the clutches of Knapp and
Michaels, and we did so by saying that
there really is a difference between language and speech.
That's a claim that I want to
continue investigating in today's concluding lecture,
but in the meantime when I say we saved theory,
you may well be asking by this time,
"Well, okay, so you saved it,
but for what? Why?"
We began to suggest last time
that in a certain sense, especially in view of
neo-pragmatists' claims about the agency of language and
speech-- understood to be one and the
same thing-- in view of claims of this kind,
do we have to conclude that theory is impractical?
That is, that it can't have
anything to do with pragmatist objectives?
That, too, is something I want
to worry a little bit about today.
Why do we bother to save
literary theory? Well, it has something to do
plainly with communication. Speech, as we said last time,
is unquestionably for--that is to say we have made it
for--communication. So the old, frankly incredibly
tired question, "How well do we
communicate with each other?"
is unfortunately,
in a way, not irrelevant to what we're trying to get at
here. I want to say a couple of
things about what the French during the existentialist period
called la manque de la communication.
In a way, they're not really
connected. First of all,
I want to say that we actually communicate rather well.
Congratulations to us,
in other words! I think that many of the
conventional ways in which people worry about whether or
not we can understand each other--
many of those ways of thinking about the problem are actually
exaggerated. My own feeling is that perhaps
a good deal of the time we understand each other all too
well, and > that it might be better,
in a way, if we didn't have quite such an acute sense of
where each of us are coming from.
It probably would improve human
relations rather than otherwise, and this may have something to
do with what I take to be a certain measure of bad faith in
the ways in which we try to get together and raise each other's
consciousness. Our supposition is that the
whole problem is that we don't communicate well enough,
and we don't understand each other's subject positions well
enough. As I say, I'm not completely
convinced of that, so there's a certain sense in
which I say, "Hey, speech is great.
It's doing just fine.
Don't worry.
We're communicating perfectly
well, possibly too well." So why on earth should theory
come along and say, "Well, there's sort of a
problem with communication"?
The problem is this nagging
entity called language which keeps poking up through
the communication process, getting in its way,
impeding communication, as the Russian formalists
suggested-- all for the better,
as they saw it-- that language does.
Why should it matter?
What's at stake?
As Knapp and Michaels might
say, what's at stake in calling attention to the way in which
language does impede communication?
In other words,
we communicate fine, but what we really mean in
saying that is, we communicate fine for
everyday purposes. Speech has a rough and ready
efficacy, and anybody who denies that,
as I say, is simply exaggerating problems
that may exist on grounds other than difficulty of
communication. So speech is really fine up to
a point. Part of the function of theory
is precisely to interrogate the degree to which speech in an
unimpeded way communicates and the level of accuracy and detail
at which speech can ever be expected to communicate.
These are the sorts of
questions that we might expect theory to ask,
and if you say, "Well, I'm still not very convinced
that that's an important aspect of one's intellectual
life," I don't blame you. I hope to have convinced you
over the next forty-five minutes or so that it's pretty important
in a variety of ways and that it's worth keeping in mind.
In the meantime,
just to start on this issue tentatively,
we can understand theory--and of course,
we began the semester by defining it,
by trying to distinguish between theory and philosophy;
theory and methodology; perhaps even those sorts of
approaches to literature that Knapp and Michaels call
"poetics"; maybe even to distinguish
between theory and hermeneutics, because after all,
the whole drive and function of hermeneutics is to discover
meaning. There is a certain sense,
as we have come sadly to realize,
in which theory is more interested in the way in which
meaning is impeded, so it may be--as we suggested,
as I say, at the beginning of the
course--that as to theory, if we're to get comfortable
with it at all, we have to keep in mind that
it's not philosophy. That is to say,
even though you're good at theory and you understand the
purpose of theory, you can still be a system
builder. That is to say,
you can still have a sense of explaining the totality of
things that philosophy needs if it's going to function as
philosophy or as philosophy properly should.
You can still,
as Knapp and Michaels say, engage empirically with
questions of literary data summarized in such a way as to
amount to what we call "poetics."
You can do all these things,
and you don't really have to feel as though theory is somehow
or another standing on the sidelines sort of shaking its
fist at you and wagging its finger.
Theory doesn't have to be
understood as a watchdog. At least in my opinion,
and not everyone agrees with me,
theory really lets us go our own way and simply reminds us
that there are certain limits or reservations that need to be
kept in mind, that one is perhaps wisest to
keep in mind, as we think through problems of
interpretation and meaning. So theory I would define
as--and I've used this word "negation"
a lot-- I would define theory as a
negative movement of thought mapping the ways in which it is
legitimate-- as opposed to the ways in which
I have suggested it's perhaps not legitimate--
but mapping the ways in which it is legitimate to be
suspicious of communication. Theory is an antithetical
counterforce to that which is commonly supposed to be true,
posited as true, and--here of course one comes
to the point-- spoken as true:
enounced, articulated, spoken as true.
So if that's the case,
why the fuss about language? Why do we so quickly narrow the
issue down to language? What I said last time about
language and the relationship between language and speech may
have seemed unconvincing to you because it was so narrow.
I want to broaden today,
considerably broaden, the sense of what I mean by
"language." It seems to me that theory
encourages a measure of suspicion about the efficacy of
speech, that which is spoken as true, in three ways.
Last time I mentioned one,
but now let me emphasize three. The first and the one I did
mention last time is the way in which language obtrudes itself
as sound. In other words,
if we think of the efficiency or functionality of speech as a
medium of communication, we're forced to ask ourselves,
even as we engage in speech, how and why it is that speech
is so much burdened in ways that are of no use whatsoever to us
for the most part. Sometimes they are of use.
One of the pre-freshmen asked
me last time, "Well, isn't sound a
reinforcement of meaning?" I told you when we did the New
Criticism that all of you had done the New Criticism in high
school. That's the way you learned
literary interpretation. Well, this was a perfect
embodiment of a bright person coming out of high school
saying, "Interpretation just
is the New Criticism and I've been taught that sound
reinforces sense. That's what it says in
Perrine's handbook about understanding poetry.
Sound reinforces sense."
Well, it often does,
of course, and on those occasions we can revel in the
complexity of an intentional meaning or intentional structure
that is augmented by the way in which sound patterns are used.
At the same time,
as the Russian formalists discovered,
working through materials that weren't perhaps so much
materials like John Donne's "The Canonization"
or texts of the kind that lent themselves,
to a degree, readily to the New Criticism;
but rather alliterative verse, folklore and folk verse in the
Russian tradition, verse embodying proverbs--what
they noticed in studying these materials is that there is
simply no way of grasping a semantic purpose,
a purpose having to do with meaning,
in the sound elements that are involved.
I think that as we recognize
the way in which there is a strange pull in our spontaneous
speaking toward repetitiousness of sound,
it's not just that we all speak iambic pentameter
without knowing it-- which, by the way,
is by and large and true. It's not just that.
It's that there is an
extraordinary amount of alliteration and rhythmic
determination in what we say. Jakobson has an interesting
point in "Linguistics and Poetics"
about that moment when we're nearby and an accident takes
place or something like that. He says in effect,
"You could call a person in a situation like that
anything, but we call that person an
innocent bystander, and the reason we do so is
metric." A person is an innocent
bystander not because that expression has any particular
meaning or semantic valence as over against other expressions
but because it's catchy, because it sort of sticks in
our mind, perhaps for mnemotechnical
reasons, as catchy.
Eisenhower won the election
against Stevenson because "I like Ike"
is a more efficient sort of way of engaging with the repetition
of sound than "Madly for Adlai."
Jakobson doesn't go into that,
but I think an interesting political analysis could be made
of, as I say, the greater efficacy
of "I like Ike." All of these functions of sound
or, I should say, appearances of sound in speech
are what an economist might call irrational.
They're there,
they're doing a job, but it's not really a job of
anything that we could call communication.
The job they're doing is sort
of free spirited on the part of language.
It's just there in an arbitrary
relation with the semantic pattern of speech.
So much then for sound,
but it's not only that. If it were only that,
if literary theory were only about the first two or three
years' worth of research performed by the Russian
formalists, we probably wouldn't be having
an introductory survey course in the subject.
Speech is impeded by language
in two other ways. First of all-- second of all,
I should say, I suppose--speech is disturbed
by the way in which language produces in what's being said an
uncontrollable semantic drift. That's what I want to call it.
In other words,
the language of an utterance is crafted to say some particular
thing. Actually, it was Saussure,
in a work of his that's less known than the Course in
General Linguistics, who published a monograph on
the way in which you can find acronyms of various kinds buried
or embedded in Latin verse. In other words,
there is meaning within meaning which can't possibly have been
planted there and yet, miraculously enough,
you can find there. You can recite a well-known
poem--the one that we took up last time because it was the
example given in Knapp and Michaels' "Against
Theory"-- you can recite a poem while
reading this: [referring to what is written
on the chalkboard: A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears: She seem'd a thing that could
not feel The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees; Roll'd 'round in earth's
diurnal course With rocks, and stones,
and trees. Now you can see that to write
the poem in this way is to perform an exercise which is
essentially what Joyce is doing in Finnegan's Wake.
As a matter of fact,
as I transcribed the poem out of my notes [gestures to
board]-- as you can see,
I transcribed it--I kept saying to myself,
"You know what? This could be in Finnegan's
Wake." I was actually quite
pleased with myself, as you can imagine.
>
Notice that I have used all
words. There's nothing in these eight
lines which is not a word. I have certainly engaged in a
certain amount of anachronism, but I have also used
punctuation, and I have worked out ways in which this discourse
makes sense. I could have just left it at
nonsense-- like Lewis Carroll's
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre
and gimble in the wabe…"--
which is another way in which language is affected by
uncontrollable semantic drift. The point of Lewis Carroll's
famous nonsense verse is that we all think we know what it means:
"'Twas blusterous and the slimy toads did leap and frolic
in the waves." We think that it means
something like that, but semantic drift--which is
what Lewis Carroll deliberately introduces to it--
prevents us from in any secure way drawing any conclusions
about that. I, of course,
am making no claims for this transcription of Wordsworth's
"A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" at all,
but maybe this can show us the ways in which there is
semantic drift. Let's say that you were a
person not really, as Stanley Fish would put it,
in the interpretive community to which all the rest of us
belong, and you don't really know what
a poem is. Somebody recites in your
presence what I just recited to you.
Well, if you were quick at
writing and you transcribed the thing, you might very well
produce something like that [points to board].
In other words,
it wouldn't just spontaneously occur to you that what
Wordsworth wrote was what you were hearing,
and that's because the kind of semantic drift that I'm talking
about really is inescapably present in any utterance that we
make. The utterance is not often
mistaken because we're really actually good at understanding
context. That's one of the reasons why
the so-called problem of communication isn't as great as
people sometimes claim it is. We're really good at
understanding context. Hence, we're not likely to go
badly wrong, but certainly there are occasions on which we go
badly wrong. As we all know,
that's the irritating thing about spell check.
You put on spell check,
you write your term paper, you don't bother to edit it,
and you turn it in. It's full of howlers because,
of course, the language is full of homonyms, and spell check
always gives the wrong word. You're in the soup,
frankly because, of course, your teacher is just
kind of slapping his knee and guffawing while reading it.
>
In short, don't use spell
check, but spell check is >
a phenomenon that shows you the
way in which semantic drift permeates language.
But it's not just that either.
There's a third way in which
language impedes speech. Saussure never says this in so
many words, but this is definitely what he means by
langue. Remember I said that language,
langue, is a virtual entity
because we could never actually encounter it written down in any
codified form. Yes, it is: the dictionary,
the lexicon, right?
But that's only part of it.
So far, notice that we've only
been talking about the lexicon when we talk about semantic
drift, but in addition to the lexicon,
language, langue,
is a set of rules--rules of grammar and syntax,
rules by means of which, and only by means of which,
speech can make sense. In other words,
language has this sort of bearing on the choices that we
can make while producing speech. Unfortunately those rules can
be a little bit slippery. When we talked about the
innocuous expression "It is raining"
as an illustration of Jakobson's six sets of the
message, just as an example,
we were brought up short by the meta-lingual function of
"It is raining." We suddenly asked ourselves,
"What on earth is ‘it'?"
In other words,
there is a kind of grammatical and syntactical permissibility,
obviously, in the expression "It is raining,"
but at the same time we really have no idea.
It can lead us in strange
directions, this "it": Jupiter Pluvius,
God, the cosmos, the clouds.
Some of it is plausible but
none of it is definite. We realize that "it"
is a kind of placeholder in the sentence that is not doing its
job and, believe me, it's not just in
English. As I said before,
it's a phenomenon that you can find in any language,
even in the expression "It is raining"--
il pleut, es regnet,
and so on. In all of those expressions,
"it" is not doing its job,
so that's another way in which, if we lean on a speech,
we have to realize that we're in the presence of what the
economists again would call irrationality.
That has to do with the way in
which predication works in language.
As I said before,
an assertion, a statement of truth--
an assertion of any kind is the utterance of a metaphor,
because the deep structure of any assertion is that A is B.
That is an assertion by
definition; but--"A is B,"
and of course when that construction is grammatical--
in other words, when it makes what the
grammarians call a copula-- when the construction is
grammatical, well, that's fine because we
understand that the relationship between A and B is not a
relationship that's insistently one of identity;
that a connection is being made--a connection which de Man,
for example, would call metonymic--in
predication. The problem is that any
sentence which declares that A is B metonymically--
that is to say, as a grammatical proposition--
is at the same time, if we simply look at the
sentence for what it is, which is a metaphor,
an insistence that A is B in the sense that A is A--
is a metaphor, in other words which doesn't
stand on all fours. No metaphor does.
It has an element of what's
called catachresis in it, and therefore in a certain
sense, as we read the sentence, necessarily undermines the
sentence's grammatical structure.
This is the point that de Man
is making in "Semiology and Rhetoric,"
that there is a perpetual tension in any utterance between
grammar and rhetoric. There is no utterance that's
not grammatical, there's no utterance that's not
rhetorical, but unfortunately grammar and
rhetoric are always rather openly or subtly at odds with
each other, just in the way that metaphor
and predication really have to be at odds with each other.
In other words,
there isn't a sentence in which the rules of grammar and syntax
are not subtly interfering with what you might call the rules of
rhetoric-- the ways in which tropes,
in other words, deploy themselves,
ways which can be distilled in an understanding of what we call
metaphor. So every sentence,
as I say, is shadowed not just by the vagaries of sound,
not just by semantic drift, but by the incompatibility of
grammar and rhetoric, and all of that is implicit in
what Saussure and his tradition call language.
Those are the ways,
in other words, in which language,
if I can put it this way, speaks through speech,
the ways in which anything that we say on any occasion is
shadowed by another voice. We've understood this in social
terms as Bakhtinian polyglossia. We have understood this in
psychoanalytic terms as the discourse of the otherness of
the unconscious. We have understood this in
purely linguistic terms as language,
but we can, I think, metaphorically speaking,
understand it now as well as a kind of speech.
Language is an unintentional
speech. Language is just that speech
which, we recognize--having gone through the sort of analysis
that I've been attempting--is not governed by intention.
Keep in mind:
nobody--no theorist, nobody in his right mind--would
ever try to resist the claim that speech is intentional,
that we intend what we say. That's the way in which Knapp
and Michaels are right and give us a bracing reminder about
things where our skepticism is misplaced.
The idea that speech is somehow
not intended--what could that mean?
Speech just is
intention, but I've been trying to argue that there is a speech,
the "speech of language,"
which is unintentional, which is just there.
It can't be factored out.
It can be bracketed,
but it can't be set aside as though it were not there.
It will always come back.
It will always confront us at
some point if we take the arts of interpretation seriously
enough-- if, in other words,
we really do bring some pressure to bear on the things
that people say: not just a pragmatic pressure,
which I think works just fine for most of us,
but a pressure that goes beyond the pragmatic and notices what's
really in a sentence, what's really in anybody's
utterance. Language speaks through speech
partly as its origin. In other words,
the way language gets into something that you or I might
say is a reminder to us that what we say comes from
someplace. It has an origin and its origin
is precisely language. Language keeps saying,
"Oh, oh, here I am,"
your origin, right?
The birth of what you're doing,
in other words, way back before you discovered
that language was useful for something.
Remember what we said about
that last time: you have to discover that fire
is useful for cooking. Fire is not "for"
cooking. A cave is not for dwelling.
A prehensile thumb is not for
grasping. You have to discover the ways
in which this is the case. Language is there in what we
say to remind us that it wasn't always the case,
to remind us that it's just the origin of a history of conscious
expression during the course of which we began the never-ending
process of trying to master language.
That's, of course,
what it is to be a writer. You try to wrestle language
into submission. That's the ambition of all of
us, whether we're writing the great American novel or revising
a term paper. We're wrestling language into
submission, and we all know it's not easy.
I'm just trying to explain some
of the reasons why it's not easy.
So language speaks through us
as the origin of speech, but it also speaks as the death
of speech. It speaks, in other words,
as the moment in which the purposeful agency of speech is
finally called into question, in a certain sense undermined.
I think it's appropriate,
I think it's fair, to call language--again
metaphorically-- the epitaph of speech,
the way in which in any given speech the end of its own agency
is inscribed even as that agency is going forward.
Now I want to test this example
and also show you a little bit more about the way semantic
drift-- but even more than that about
the way the perilous relationship between grammar and
syntax and rhetoric works. I want to actually try out on
you a couple of epitaphs. If language is the epitaph of
speech, why not talk for a little bit about epitaphs?
Now my favorite epitaph by far:
probably-- well, we won't speculate about
where such an epitaph might be found,
but if and when you come across it walking through a cemetery,
it'll probably elicit a chuckle. On the gravestone it says,
"I told you I was sick."
>
Now this is a very interesting
expression for a number of reasons.
For one thing,
and one should pause over this, one can infer speakers
speaking efficaciously, not just one but many.
There's plenty of precedent for
this in Emily Dickinson and in other writers.
The most obvious speaker is the
dead person speaking from the grave: "there I was,
sitting in the corner all those years telling you I had a
headache. You never listened to me"
and so on. That is the most obvious
identification of a speaker, but of course the speaker could
be somebody else, and I'm not introducing
a measure of skepticism in saying this.
When we posit an intention,
we just decide which of these speakers it is.
The speaker could be an
apologetic relative, someone acknowledging that they
hadn't listened, but with a sense of humor,
and so putting in the voice of the dead person the complaint,
"I told you I was sick" as a form of apology:
"Yes, I know you did,
and unfortunately I had to go to the grocery store."
>
That, too, can be the speaker.
Well, on the other hand,
it could be someone simply moralizing over the grave,
which is a frequent habit of the eighteenth century--
one of my periods, so I'm familiar with it.
It could be a
philosopher--right?--saying, "Well, this is the human
condition, >
as I kept telling you.
I published thirteen books,
the whole purport of which was 'I am sick.'
I'm Dostoevsky's Underground
Man. I am a sick man.
I am a very sick man.
Well, let it get worse."
It could be in this mode that a
philosopher is moralizing over the grave, or again it could be
a cultural critic. It could be someone in a kind
of an allegorical mood inscribing on the gravestone the
death of culture. Civilization has been in a bad
way for a long time and here finally it lies.
The way to communicate this
would then be, "I told you I was sick:
civilization has ways of letting us know that all is not
well with it: we didn't pay any attention,
and here is the result." I would say that all of those
ways of reading the epitaph are consistent with hermeneutics.
They are consistent with the
way in which we can try to come to terms with the intention of a
speaker; but suppose we say that
"language" must be obtruding itself in
this utterance like any other. What would that be?
You see, that isn't just a
question of sound. It isn't even a question of
semantic drift, in this case.
It's a question of our suddenly
coming to understand the sentence in a way that perhaps
no individual speaker would want to give it.
It's an allegory,
precisely, cleverly introduced by language,
about the inefficacy of speech. That's just the problem with
speech, isn't it? "Again and again and again
I tell you something and you don't listen"--
that's the problem with being a lecturer,
> that sort of "I told you I
was sick and you--" "Oh, well.
He's just joking."
So it is--according to the
allegory introduced by language at the expense of speech--with
speech in general. It's an allegory about the
limits of communication because that's,
after all, what the speaker--insofar as there is a
speaker inscribing this expression on the gravestone--
is concerned about. This person sitting in the
corner, complaining bitterly about nobody ever listening to
her or to him, is actually an allegorist
telling us that that's the way speech is.
Speech, in other words,
has its limits. In a sense then,
when I say language is the epitaph of speech,
we realize that if we understand this utterance as an
allegory, it is precisely speech that's
lying here-- the end, as I suggested,
of speech's powers of communication as announced or
declared by language. Well, let's try another one:
"Here lies John Doe," probably the Ur-epitaph.
Supply your own name:
"Here lies John Doe." Well, let's not even pause over
the speaker there. Let's get immediately to the
problems posed by language. In the first place,
John Doe obviously does not lie precisely "here,"
right? In fact, if you think about it,
it's altogether possible that John Doe could be absolutely
anywhere except precisely "here,"
because where the sentence is we know John Doe not to be.
He could be anyplace else,
as I say. So any epitaph is therefore a
self-declared cenotaph, an inscription on a place where
the body isn't, which of course tells us a lot,
too, about the arbitrary nature of
language. Language does not hook on to
the real world. It doesn't hook on to the body.
The one place where language is
not is on the body. The one place where language is
not is on things. Speech is on things.
Speech can be inscribed on a
piece of rock. So "Here lies John
Doe," except not here, anyplace but here--which is
why, of course, the interest of the word
"lies" is so interesting.
>
The utterance is a lie,
but it's not John Doe who lies. Poor John Doe is just lying
someplace. John Doe is not lying, right?
It's language
> that's making speech lie,
and it's doing it on any number of levels, as we've seen.
It's a funny thing about
epitaphs, and this has been noted by certain authors writing
in the tradition of what we loosely call
"deconstruction": the epitaph is a particularly
fruitful locus for the study of the ways in which language
challenges, undermines, and displaces
speech, and as I say, these two examples show more or
less the way that works. So speech lies everywhere
except here-- I don't mean
here!--speech lies because it can never stop being
language, and therefore we can never
really possibly mean exactly what we say.
We can mean what we say,
but we can't mean exactly what we say.
That's probably the most
commonsensical way of putting the matter.
When Stanley Cavell poses the
question in the title of one of his books, Must We Mean What
We Say? >
he is actually offering us the
possibility that maybe that's not the be all and end all of
speaking, > that the speech-act situation
is more complicated than that. Sure, we all have it at heart
as an objective to mean what we say,
but at the same time in speaking we are performing,
we're acting, as the neo-pragmatist would
suggest, and we're doing all kinds of
things besides meaning. That really needs to be taken
into account, even in understanding what
speech can do, let alone in understanding what
speech can't do. So it's plausible to say that
yes, we can mean what we say; but it's a question--indeed,
it's a very insistent question--whether we can mean
exactly what we say. Now you ask--you must ask,
because after all it's been our constant guide--
you ask, "Does language speak in Tony the Tow
Truck?" I know this has been on your
mind, and so of course we have to address it.
I think there are a few
interesting things to be said about that.
I spoke earlier in the semester
about the parade on the vertical axis, of that vertical axis,
called "I." As you read the text,
there it is, >
sort of out of Lacan,
out of Lacanian feminism, however you look:
the phallogocenter right there, I.
But now I is never the
first word spoken by an infant. That's another lesson of Lacan.
I is what you have to
learn how to be-- maybe to put it in Judith
Butler's terms-- so that I,
insofar as it is this incredible upright pillar
starting one sentence after another in Tony the Tow
Truck, is a promise of,
precisely, agency: the promise of the kind of
identity which stands upright, which is a successful
simulacrum of what is seen in the mirror,
and which then develops into what Freud called,
referring to the way in which infants begin to get their way
in the world, "his majesty the ego."
So the I has that
function, but as I've said, it's a story about friendship,
and the I disappears. This, too, I think,
can be communicated as relevant to the infant in ways that at
the functional level of language can't really be called speech.
For example,
the friendship exists between Bumpy [pron.
BUM-py]
and Tony [pron.TO-ny], uh-oh:
long before the baby says "I,"
it says "uh-oh," and that "uh-oh"
resonates in the friendship of Bumpy and Tony.
Why "uh-oh?"
Because Tony is stuck and
Tony's natural response to being stuck would be,
"Uh-oh." Along comes Bumpy
and--"uh-oh"--not only recognizes the problem but takes
care of the problem. Now on the other hand,
the problem of self, the problem that's caught up in
this vertical I, comes into focus for the infant
as the awareness of otherness or that which is alien.
That which is irreducible to
the self begins to come into focus,
and a way of expressing this is to say,
"e-e-e-e," which is perhaps in some way or
another a mask or a simulacrum of "he-he-he-he."
I think it's for that reason
that the two antagonists of the story, the unassimilable others
who do not help, are called Speedy [pron.
SPEE-dee]
and Neato [pron. NEE-to].
In other words,
that sense of otherness-- of that which is intractable,
that which cannot be reduced effectively to self--
is I think articulated in "e-e-e."
In other words,
what the infant speaks is not speech, is it?
It's language.
If you want to hear language in
speech, just listen to a baby. That's why nonsense verse has
such appeal to young children. They're still hearing language.
It's a way of putting
Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode."
They're still hearing the
mighty waters rolling evermore. They're hearing "ohm"
where we're all hearing speech. As I say, ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny. The history of the human
species is a history of coming to terms with speech,
mastering speech--or, I should say,
perhaps, mastering language. Well, so it is in the
individual. The individual who is hard
wired--isn't he?--for language must somehow or another wrestle
that hard wiring in to what we call speech.
So the first thing we hear in
an infant, and maybe what is most
predominant in stories for toddlers and in nonsense verse,
is language, which you don't reduce
semantically, you don't parse it semantically.
Sure, I've just interpreted it
into a kind of meaning, but it's a meaning which comes
simply from the observation of feelings and noticing what
children actually say on actual occasions,
which can't really be called speech but is rather a kind of
experimentation with language dragging itself toward speech.
It's not anything that one
would ever really confuse with speech, yet partly an imitation
of what is heard in the adult world.
That's where you get
"uh-oh." But when the adult occasionally
says, "Uh-oh,"
there's nothing like the investment in it that there is
in the child for whom it is very often the first articulate
sound. It is the encounter with
otherness and the attempt to master otherness,
as in Freud's story of fort/da,
that this "uh-oh" seems to be expressing.
All right.
So much for Tony.
I'd just like to
confuse--I'd like to conclude with three theses.
Well, you have to speak very
carefully or language obtrudes. I had to say very
carefully "three theses,"
right? And of course I made a mistake
just before. I didn't want to say
"confuse," did I?
>
Notice that "confuse"
was not just anything getting in the way of communication.
It was precisely what I
did not want to say >
--precisely.
I could have said anything
else, but I said "confuse."
That is the Freudian slip that
I've been talking about. Well, anyway,
> three theses about language.
First, it never makes
sense. Language does not make sense.
It's arbitrary.
It is a system of arbitrary
signs that are not natural signs.
You make sense,
not language. You make sense by invoking an
intention-- that is to say,
by having an intention-- and wrestling language into
speech: that is, commandeering language for your
purposes. Language doesn't make sense;
you make sense. Language in itself,
secondly, says nothing about reality just because it is a
system, a code, a system of arbitrary signs.
I want to put it two different
ways to show you what's going on.
You come to terms,
as we say, with reality. That is to say,
you find the words for reality as you grasp it.
Another way to put it is you
figure it out. In other words,
you come to understand what language is,
"I figured it out," but of course in rhetorical
theory, "figure"
is precisely a figure of speech.
You bring to bear figures just
as you come to terms. You bring to bear figures on
reality. You figure it out.
Finally, to adapt an expression
with which you're probably familiar,
I'll conclude simply by saying that the road to reality is
paved with your intentions,
be they good or bad. Thank you very much.
