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Saturday, August 05, 2006
Delany on Holbo
I could complain that I have been terribly misunderstood. But the fact is: I have been terribly misunderstood by a genius. And that just doesn't come around every day.
Lukin: That view, which I'll call perspectival pluralism, connects to a point you once made about the location of meaning, vis-à-vis recent arguments over Michaels and Knapp's "Against Theory." Do you remember?I'm not going to upset the nice, happy feeling that Delany read my stuff by dwelling on little things. As Socrates is really very careful to explain: whether or not she really got blown off the rock doesn't matter that much. That's not the point. (And anyway, it wasn't here. It was, like, a kilometer upriver.)Delany: Yes. You had called my attention to an online discussion of the claims in "Against Theory," led by the analytic philosopher John Holbo. But in explaining his refutation of Knapp and Michaels, Holbo tacitly assumed the "communication" model of language, i.e, the model that says: I have a meaning—an (capital I) Intention, an "aboutness"—which I place into a word or a set of words, which I then toss out into the air. These words strike your ear and release their Intention into your brain—an Intention that wasn't there before and that, upon completion of the act of hearing or reading, is there, now: it has been communicated.
But this is far too "Imaginary" to serve as a model for language. Also, it's just wrong. Its inaccuracies spawn endless arguments of the sort that Holbo and his interlocutors were engaged in. Indeed, it has been spawning them since Cratylus argued with Socrates.
A better one is: From my learning experiences in my culture, I have many words and associated meanings in my brain. You have many words and associated meanings in your brain. Because we have lived and experienced similar discourses, many of those meanings are the same or highly similar. Because we have lived in many different discourses, and because we have experienced the discourses we have from different positions within them, many of these meanings, at all levels, are different.
Now, suddenly—because of the language that bombards me, moving around meanings in my brain, some of which I can identify as yours and some of which I feel are mine—I get a desire to produce a meaning, an "aboutness," an intention (small "i," i.e., an urge that my utterance produce a particular effect, agreement, perhaps; perhaps dominance or awe. Possibly laughter. But, first, the desire to produce a meaning is not the intention. And, second, "meaning," "aboutness," and "intention" are different things, even if they appear to lie in the same direction). Responding to the desire, the discourses that I inhabit and my particular position in and among them, choose some words for me, and (after a more or less critical review of them prompted by other discourses, if I'm that sort of guy) I fling them out into the air.
The words strike your ear, where, within your brain, the discourses that you inhabit guide them to the meanings you have associated with them. These meanings are thus called up in your brain. But my meanings never go directly into your brain and yours never go directly into mine. Communication, on that level, is simply an illusion, fostered by cultural and discursive similarities and congruences. Within the discourses you inhabit, the meanings have already struck up a desire to produce another meaning. Thus dialogue continues.
Once we have a sense of the process, we have to note that slippages and mistakes can occur at any point. We can misspeak, mishear, misperceive, misthink. There are misinterpretations. And, sometimes (once we enter the world of texts, of art ... ), we find slips in the shape of the signifier—such as natural signs that are so close to words (the rock whose ridges and erosions happen to spell "Help!") that a language-like response is called up in our brains. Since language is the entire discursive, reflective (not communicative) process, the question "Are the rock's ridges really language or not?" is a non-problem. The answer to that question is technically "no," not because the rock is devoid of Intention or the desire to produce a meaning (i.e., a semantic paraphrase), an intention or an "aboutness," but because a word is not language; a meaning or an Intention or an aboutness is not language. A mistake is not language. A desire for meaning is not language. Only the whole complex process together is language (including mistakes). Articulations without discourses (which are in your brain, not in the world) are not language. And discourses without utterances are not language. All of these things are analogous to wheels and gears and gas tanks and sparkplugs and batteries and camshafts and oil baths and cooling pipes and hubcaps and carburetors and seatbelt buckles in a car.
Indeed, the kind of argumentative problems that arise between Knapp/Michaels and Holbo are analogous to the sort of problems garage mechanics might have if, back when Adam was cutting up the experience of the world with names for things, he had named the trips between New York and Philadelphia, or Camden and Trenton "cars," and people only learned by trial and error what the machinery that facilitated those trips had to do with getting them there on time. The question about the word on the rock is rather like asking, "If the north wind comes along and suddenly blows me from the streets of New York to Elizabethtown—" the way, say, Phaedrus recounts to Socrates that Boreas, the North Wind, once carried off Oreithyia from the bank of the Ilissus—"is that really a car?"
I assume Delany is discussing this post and its sequel. So where does he get the wrong idea that I have some excessively communicative model, rather than the subtle, Wittgenstein-Davidson-inspired view of language I call my own (and a nice derangement of epigraphs it is.) I think the trouble may come at the point where I say "never mind about 3 and 4." But I could be wrong.
[Thanks to Scott McLemee for telling me about the interview.]
Comments
Still, nice of Josh to send Delany our way.
Well, I really don’t want to wade in these waters as I find them to be murky murky murky. I’m guessing that Delany simply doesn’t believe there is any such thing as sentence meaning and he doesn’t find your arguments on the matter to be satisfactory. Nor do I, not quite.
What I think is that we have both speaker meaning and listener meaning. In face-to-face conversation speaker and listener can chat until they intuitively feel they have reached mutual understanding with respect to X. This may come easily, or only with difficulty; it may not come at all. And even if they feel satisfied in their mutual understanding, they might be wrong. Which they may discover, to their mutual displeasure, at some later date.
Now, we introduce written texts into the picture. This gives us the possibility of sentences (or texts of whatever kind) circulating in a group such that the writer (i.e. speaker) and the reader (i.e. listener) never have an opportunity to interact to their mutural understanding with respect to X. Nor, for that matter, can they chat to their continuing frustration. They can’t chat at all. This, for the most part, is the situation faced by readers of books, literary scholars, judges, legal scholars, and others.
So, sentence meaning, as Delany says, is an illusion. It’s an illusion supported by the frequent experience of successful face-to-face negotiations to mutual satisfaction.
What of your chess example? I note that chess is “artificial” in a way that “natural” language, as it is often called, is not. I say this, not to dismiss it as an example, but simply to note that it is special. The language that defines chess moves is a very restricted language. It has a small number of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Not only is the number of such things small, it is finite. The fact that the language is defined with respect to simple physical objects—a board and chess pieces—is also important. The joint effect of these various conditions is that it is very easy for one player and another to agree on whether or not a given move is legal, i.e. is a “sentence” in the chess “language.”
I reserve judgment on whether or not that is sufficient to say that, in the case of chess, we do have sentence meaning. I’ve simply not thought this matter through.
The other thing that makes the chess example so interesting is that it is only one of a rather large class of similar examples. Mathematics and computer tech are full of such examples, and there are others, of course—checkers, bid whist, and who knows what else. These are all “artificial” in a way similar to chess. I would like to know how it is that these very special languages have evolved in loquatious populations of people that didn’t have them way back when. How is it that these marvelous creations can be constructed in more or less the same types of brains that only had sloppy old natural languages for years and years and years? That’s a very deep problem.
This leaves us with your very clever poem-machine—for that is what it is, a procedure for generating texts. It’s an ingenious creation. But it is not at all clear to me just what I am obligated to make of it. I don’t see that it tells me much of anything about the workings of natural language, whether spoken or written. Nor do I see that it has much bearing on that class of marvelous objects of which chess is an example.
What do I mean by that paragraph? Well, I am very interested in the mechanisms of natural language. I’ve read and thought a great deal about them. I’m also very much interested in how things like chess have evolved within human culture and about how the brain implements them. I’ve got a reasonable little pile of notes about how a brain does ordinary arithmatic in the Arabic notation. It’s not at all clear to me that thinking about your poem machine will help me better to understand these other problems.
Granted, I’m not a philosopher. I don’t know what I am, but I’m not a philospher. Perhaps that’s why I fail to feel the force of your poem machine.
It’s funny you call Delany a genius, John—I had him for a grad class at Temple a few years back, and you never would have guessed it from the way he ran his classroom. (To be honest, I had no idea who he even was until halfway through the course when I happened to Google him and found out he was famous.) The class was a graduate-level course on “The Lyric”—taught by an SF novelist (admittedly, a novelist of genius as I later discovered after reading him for the first time) w/ no college degree. The class was totally disorganized and completely w/out focus; if my memory serves me correctly, we didn’t have a syllabus until about 3 weeks in. Strange how genius in one domain (fiction) rarely translates into genius in another (teaching).
Upon further reflection, and some re-reading, it seems to me your position is an odd one, John. OTOH you produce this strange text that can be read and interpreted, but that lacks standard-issue intentionality. Delany doesn’t seem to have gotten that part of your argument and so thinks you are and treats you as a standard-issue intentionalist:
I have a meaning—an (capital I) Intention, an “aboutness"—which I place into a word or a set of words, which I then toss out into the air. These words strike your ear and release their Intention into your brain—an Intention that wasn’t there before and that, upon completion of the act of hearing or reading, is there, now: it has been communicated.
That’s not your postion.
But just what is this “sentence meaning”? It looks and functions suspiciously like the meaning that was placed into “a word or set of words” but you’ve just elided or bamboozelfied the agent that put the meaning there. Physically, speaker meaning is a process in the speaker’s brain and listener meaning is a process in the listener’s brain. What, physically, is sentence meaning? It can’t somehow be in the mechanical waves in the air or the marks on the surface. But if it’s not there, then what and where is it? Is it an etherial proposition in some transcendental realm?
I think Delany’s descriptionof communication is pretty valid. But what he doesn’t talk about is how often and to what degree my meaning and my listener’s interpretation match. In basic utterances like, “give me that beer bottle” they are probably a close to 0 match. The speaker uses words to cerate a meaning and those words go into the listener’s head and he parses them and creates pretty much the same meaning.
It’s when you get more abstract, subtle, allusive, whatever… that the match between the two meanings becomes more imperfectly. Like when you say, “life is a ripe peach.”
This is obvious, but it is really important to have an idea of how much the speaker’s and the listener’s meanings matc, and when and why they don’t, to have an accurate discription of language.
From this article, we have this paragraph:
Even respected scholars, learned in their fields, have proven unable to identify verbal mistakes. A famous example is F. O. Matthiessen’s discussion of “soiled fish” in Melville’s White-Jacket. Matthiessen took “soiled fish” to be a discordia concors, and explicated the image of dirty fish at some length. In 1949, John Nichol pointed out that “soiled” was a printer’s misreading of “coiled.” Of course, Matthiessen’s reading of Melville’s intention is quite intelligent and creative, and I use him only to prove that complex verbal mistakes are not easily identified, nor are authorial intentions.
That is followed by a paragraph that talks about walking on the beach as the waves inscribe a poem on its surface. This article is by a living breathing literary critic, not a philosopher. He goes on to say:
The emphasis is on lack of intention, and the question is: how do I read this poem? My answer is that I read this unintentional, unintended poem in the same way that I read any poem. The context here is a bit unusual, but since I can make sense of the words and lines, I interpret them in my usual way, though, of course, marveling that the poem is being written by the insentient sea.
So are you saying Delany is right and that the two meanings often don’t match, but that there is nothing you can do about it and so it doesn’t really matter?
I think that the fact that the listner has to put together their own meaning out of the words and symbols of the speaker has passed over to them is kind of cool. It would be boring if the speaker just inserted his thoughts into your head. The art of the communicating, at both ends, is what makes it interesting.
Of course Delany’s talking about harmful mis-communication between races and classes. I think he’s right here. You think you both speak the same language but it can be like people from different planets trying to talk. Like the critic trying to understand the ocean’s poem.
But the only solution to this problem is more and better communication. The only way to learn about someone else’s discourse is to discourse with it.