"experience" and narrative

[Lucia Pawlowski]

To Dave et al,

Your idea (among the many appreciated ideas in your post) that we can
teach
language as metaphor to students appeals to me, and I am interested to
know how under this conceptualization you would deal with the problem you
yourself brought to bear on it with the Kristeva reference: the material
dialectic that truly underlies language as a system, whether its agent be
history or community, etc.  Does 'metaphor' account for this?  The way
metaphor has been presented to me "historically" (if I may) at least is
something that triggers a *universal* or *situationally transcendent*
complex of meaningful associations.  "Metaphor" as it is understood in
literature (these ideas may smack of the nineteenth century idealist
concept of metaphor, deliberately so because it seemed to be most in
currency then) seems to assume the same
human response will be illicited, in a web of (unequal) possibilities of
meaning, from a singular psychical trigger--the metaphor.  (whether it be
global threads of experience or Jung's "grid" underlying this idealist
notion--hopefully we've come up with something more than the model of
"universality.")

The insatiability of a semiology aside (I can't remember if I read this or
thought it up somehow on my own, but I mean by it, that associations
make the system beg infinitely more associations), I guess my question is
how you would
account for how students will engage in various constructions of the
signified's meanings--specifically, according to their experience and
situation, mainly social situation. Perhaps an acknowledgement of how such
*positioning* as a student constructs meaning would be useful in order to
account for how meanings are contingent not just on the word in its
textual or linguistic context, but the contingency of the relationship of
reader-writer on the "field" that bears on their experience ("field"
reference in Lindemann's article in the 1995 CCC symposium on "Literature
in the Composition Classroom."). I just wonder if with the approach of
"metaphor" you are taking on its idealist baggage of universal meanings.
I am all for language as metahpor, and I too have been wondering if this
consideration has anything to do with teaching it that way.  (Perhaps it
is only relevant when we are confronting language in a specific textual
universe).

Lucia Pawlowski
MA Rhetoric and Composition
University of Missouri-Columbia

On Sun, 7 Feb 1999, David Samuels wrote:

> Jim (and other listers),
>
> This is a really important question; the deep Whorf problem, language
> analyzing experience but "experience" being constituted in language.  I
> haven't encountered it in the variety you talked about (I'm not sure I'd
> try what you're talking about at an intro level; I once tried to explain
> alternative logics by saying that the Kaluli think people become birds, but
> we know that's silly because people are really all apes, which I think
> rocketed quickly over their heads to lodge deeply in the center of the
> clock at the back of the room).
>
> I've encountered this question as a more general philosophy of language
> problem.  I don't know that I've solved it at all, but I think I've been
> able to scratch the surface a bit by revolving the question back around to
> what students think language is, and thus to their ideas of how language
> "encodes" experience -- or rather, their ideas that language encodes
> experience, since this is generally what they think language does.
>
> My experience (sorry, it's the only word I can think of) is that students
> walk into the room holding what Max Black would call a "cloak" theory of
> language, i.e., that language simply dresses up ideas so that they are
> communicable between people.  But all people's ideas ("experiences," to
> push it back in your direction) are identical, because we're all human
> (their nervousness about losing "humanism" that you mention).  The
> difference between languages/styles/registers, etc., then, is how (or how
> well) they are variously able to "encode" these experiences for purposes of
> communication. I'm constantly looking for ways to move them away from the
> notion that language is "for" communication.
>
> Most of them, in short, have a fairly Aristotelian take on language - that
> the experiences (sensory inputs) of all people everywhere are the same, and
> then language dresses those inputs up into forms (output) that allow people
> to communicate their ideas to experiences and ideas to each other through
> the use of contractually agreed upon, secondary symbols.  What Roy Harris
> calls "telementation."  They use their experiences with computers and
> telephones to vouchsafe this theory of communication.
>
> It's comparatively easy to move them from this stance, but they usually
> take up another that is harder to get them to work through, more-or-less in
> the Bertrand Russell line.  That is, they'll accept that some lexicalized
> concepts are "fuzzier" than others. But they really want to reserve a space
> for things that are simply "true," no matter who the speaker or what the
> language.  To use another of Harris's examples, they come to understand
> that the truth of "democracy is a sham" depends on what your definition of
> 'democracy' is, but they are perplexed by the notion that the truth of "two
> plus two equals four" might depend on what your definition of 'four' is.
>
> Or, they take up a semi-Peircian "token-and-type" position, without, of
> course, any other Peircian trappings, because they still want the heart of
> language to be about symbolic referentiality.  Either way, the position is
> based on the preservation that there are "facts" that are the same for all
> people because they are simply out there in the world, and, while this may
> not be the only thing that language does, the sine qua non of language is
> to make propositional statements about those facts in the world, that is,
> language exists (practially, philosophically, evolutionarily) because of
> it's ability to refer.
>
> My "solution" (and as I say I don't know how successful it is) has been to
> push metaphor rather than reference as the heart of what language does.
> This allows me to consistently (meaning both "regularly" and "from a
> considered position") question the pre-existence of "facts" or
> "experiences" prior to language.  Without going overboard, of course (I
> prefer to avoid that thing where someone pounds their coke can on the desk
> to prove that reality exists).
>
> A few of the readings that have helped me dance around this topic are Ochs
> and Schieffelin's piece on lg socialization in three communities; some of
> the stuff in Child Discourse (the Brenneis & Lein piece on arguments); I've
> really liked a piece called "The theory of translation" by W. Haas (1962,
> Philosophy 37:208-228 - I've never found out what the W stands for).  In it
> he takes a proto-Kristeian approach, arguing that there is no "meaning"
> outside of language (i.e. that translation can't be a technique for
> preserving an independent meaning as it is carried from one vehicle to
> another), because the meaning of a word is no more nor less than the
> history of its uses.  I've also used some of Derek Bickerton's and Terrence
> Deacon's stuff to get into the biological and neurological aspects of this
> -- why the fact that brains process information means that there can't be
> some independently given objective experience that all beings everywhere
> have.  (Remember Victor's imperviousness to cold; it can't be that sensory
> data is simply consistent across the globe.)  I've never used them, but I
> wonder if Feld's Sound and Sentiment and Weiner's The Empty Place might not
> work well in this context, too.
>
> Am I completely on a tangent here?
>
> Best,
>
> David
>
>
> * *  *   *     *        *             *                     *
> "The impossible is the watchword of the greater space age."  The space age
> cannot be avoided and the space music is the key to understanding the
> meaning of the impossible and every other enigma.
> 						--Sun Ra
>