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"to encompass and objectify intrinsically ambiguous and contradictory concepts"

In the article whose conceit I borrow, Edward Sapir argues that we use labels, which he characterizes as "empty thrones," in a necessary attempt for ontological and epistemological reasons-to encompass and objectify intrinsically ambiguous and contradictory concepts. Our ability to analyze, or even conduct sociocultural life, is facilitated by a willful finding of commonality among these concepts and by choosing particular labels that help us fix the meaning of concepts ... Sapir's metaphor of enthroning and dethroning through the contextual choice and deployment of contending labels implicates political contingency as well as a struggle over the significance, value, and consequence of particular labels. Insofar as an ethno-racial terrain is involved, labels become polysemic sites in which difference, rather than homogeneity, is made tangible, represented, and foregrounded, as well as challenged and re-construed. (p. 81)
Quoted from Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, "Labels, Genuine and Spurious: anthropology and the politics of otherness in the United States," 2013, pp. 78-100.

We use labels for ontlogical and epistemological reasons. In Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, Jurgen Ruesch wrote a brief introductory paragraph about "the definition of the context in which communication occurs" (1951: 23). "This context" he says "is summarized by the label which people give to specific social situations"; and adds that "Identification of a social situation is important both for the participant who wishes to communicate and for the scientist who aims at conceptualizing the process of communication" (ibid, 23). So right off the bat, the labels we use to identify the social context of situation for any given form of communication are necessary ontologically for the participant in the act of communicating and epistomologically for the observer's conceptualization of the process. I've used the shorthand meta-phatic labels for marking quotes useful for elaborating this aspect.

To encompass and objectify intrinsically ambiguous and contradictory concepts. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman (1959: 85) discusses how "a performer is to sustain a particular definition of the situation, this representing, as it were, his claim as to what reality is." What reality is is intrinsically ambiguous, owing to the intrapersonal nature of perception and the interpersonal nature of claims about it. These claims are objectified in the definition of the situation, but what they encompass may be contradictory. Elsewhere in the book Goffman discusses how the "maintenance of expressive control" operates via the tendency to accept the same signs and the contingencies of compatibility and consistency in "the over-all definition of the situation that is being fostered" (1959: 51).

Conducting sociocultural life depends upon the ability to analyze the conceptual labels of situations. In "Language In Operation", Roman Jakobson (1981[1964e]: 7) provides a curious case of a complex situation. He overhears a scrap of conversation aboard a train. The man reports to a lady about a radio broadcast. It was a recording of a long-dead London actor performing Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" from 1845. In the poem, a lover is "lamenting his deceased mistress". In the lover's monologue a talking bird is uttering the word "nevermore", which it is implied to have picked up from some unhappy previous owner. Effectively, the radius of communication for this unique word, "nevermore" (in this instance) goes as follows: unhappy bird-ownertalking birdnew ownerthe poemrecorded recitationradio broadcastsome guy having an emotional experience listening to it → and telling a lady about it onboard a trainRoman Jakobson overhearing itwriting the occasion down and publishing itus reading and writing about it. This can be endless.

Comments

  1. Ooh, I like what you did there ((expanding the "stub" post into something much more tangible)). Thanks!

    Briefly, I had the intuitive idea that the "intrinsically ambiguous and contradictory concepts" were related in a way to Malinowski's negative definition of phatics ("Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil a social function and that is their principal aim"). In other words, the ambiguous concepts are, along with "words in Phatic Communion" a class of, um, let's say, non-signifying signs. But my main thought is that these non-signifying signs do in fact "fulfil a social function" --- and in the process some ambigous concepts, or ambiguous situations, start to become clear.

    It feels like there's an interesting nexus here: Malinowski's social function could be compared with Mead's idea of "the social" and the emergence of structure. The "ambiguous concepts" are ambiguous because they are in a pre-emerged state. The chains in principle could be endless, but it seems that they do at least have a beginning: according to the hypothesis about talking birds, they are rooted in contact. And they may recircle -- for example, maybe the guy on the train is just making pleasant conversation. Or maybe he's trying to use some part of the "content" that has accumulated as part of the story to make an imperative statement; presumably Jakobson is using the example to make a point, etc.

    Lastly, what you say about Ruesch reminds me (of course!) of Bateson and the idea of meta-communication. The degree to which the context can be summed up with one or more labels seems a bit questionable to me (although it does work to describe most day-to-day communication "scenarios"). But for instance in the nevermore-train-chain, I wonder if the labels that we've assigned would map to the labels (if any) that the discussants assign.

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  2. Yeah, I should do that more often. I've had this plan for the longest time to go over this blog post-by-post and write a sort of overview of what we've gathered here over the past... it's been roughly three years already? Well, I thought I shouldn't wait for some grand moment of inspiration and instead do my best to take in and contribute as we go. Adding a line and some comments seems like a natural way to develop the posts - if there's anything to add we can just edit it.

    I actually had imagined that you made the connection between ambiguity and Malinowski (I've used "ambiguous" frequently when describing his essay, especially his archaic English language, which I've by now realized stems from 19th century anthropology he had read). With Malinowski's "contradictions", i.e. the negations, I'm still on the fence - it may very well be that Malinowski doesn't actually contradict himself all that much, but the meanings of the words he uses has shifted so much that it appears so. (E.g. "sympathy" and "sentiments".)

    On non-signifying signs, which is how many see phaticity these days (e.g. Gerald Aiken wrote a very good paper about how the word "community" is used in a phatic manner, i.e. as something like an "empty signifier"). With what I've gleaned from later Jakobson over these past few weeks, I think the non-signifying nature of "phatic signs" could very well be elaborated on his quasi-Peircean terms, i.e. mere otherness, sense-discrimination, etc. with the main point being that phatic signs are intrinsically meaningful (by way of intonation, for example). The point is still autonomy - phatic signs have a relation to something outside the language (be it the interpersonal relationship, the communication situation, or the operation of communication).

    With reference to "the social", there is definitely a there there. But I'm putting off Mead & Co. for the present because there is a closer instance at hand. This is I. A. Richards' *Practical Criticism*, which re-formulated Malinowski's phatic function as the social function, and basically went on to do the "duplex structure" trick with the four first functions. This is yet again a book I'd like to take some time to read and get a good gist of before elaborating. I'm hoping that upcoming work on Drazdauskiene's literary phatic studies will lead me to Richards'. It's particularly worth-while because Richards anticipates meta-communication in the social function of speech, pointing out that the relation between the author and critic is a relevant factor in criticism, for example.

    The nevermore-train-chain (how poetic!) is still open for interpretation. It's a pretty good illustration of the radius of communication, but Jakobson's point is about the code (it is language and especially knowledge of foreign languages that expand one's radius of communication), and the most profitable way to approach it would probably be to break it down with the tools he provides with Morris Halle in *The Fundamentals of Language*. For example, it would be a good idea to break the chain down into speech events, narrated events, etc. but I've yet to make out how to do so in a sensible way.


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  3. > 'how the word "community" is used in a phatic manner'

    Quick thought, without having read that, I wonder if Aiken cites Miranda Joseph's book "Against the Romance of Community" (if not, it could be interesting to pull these two together at some point). The difference between an empty signifier and a romantic notion is pretty big, but maybe there's something to say about how affect figures into the empty / non-signifying stuff.

    More broadly I think von Uexküll is an interesting theorist for dealing with ideas like

    > "phatic signs are intrinsically meaningful (by way of intonation, for example)"

    > "phatic signs have a relation to something outside the language"

    And if we engage von Uexküll here - it sounds like that could be via a staged dialogue with Jakobson - then that would be create an opening to connect Canguilhem and, eventually, his student Simondon. I've been looking for a way to fit Simondon in, and it seems like this "radial" stemming from von Uexküll is the way to do it.

    Von Uexküll and Peirce weren't in the "train in the snow" screenplay that we were working on; maybe they can come along in another scene and help get the train moving.

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