The Origin of Language Page 11
The dialectic of the ostensive was motivated by the power implicit in the (ostensive) sign in its capacity to generate linguistic presence. Once this presence has been actualized by an inappropriate ostensive utterance, the hearer may fulfill the expressed desire of the speaker for the object designated by supplying it, whether to avoid conflict with the speaker or simply in order to render his utterance appropriate. Thus the contradiction between the (inappropriate) ostensive speaker’s power in the linguistic situation and his symmetry with the ostensive hearer in the real-world situation (where the referent is at least potentially present to both) is resolved in favor of the former. In the imperative, the implicit asymmetry of the ostensive speech-act becomes explicit, so that the speaker commands not only linguistic presence but the extra-linguistic actions of the hearer within the extendable limits of this presence. But by the same token, from the standpoint of its own autonomy, the speech act overextends itself, leaving itself open to disconfirmation or infelicity not on its own merits but at the hands of another.
The ostensive can be inappropriate if it refers to an absent object, but this is a feature of the real-world situation. The imperative eliminates this possibility by ordering the hearer to himself modify the situation. But at the same time, it creates a new possibility of infelicity that has no analogue in the ostensive, and which points up the contradiction latent in the intentional structure of the imperative between the status its model of reality holds for the speaker and that which it holds for the hearer. This contradiction is not the effect of a “misunderstanding,” but of the stricture placed by the imperative intention on the hearer.
For the speaker, the imperative is in effect nothing more than an extended ostensive, as it was in its origin. The presence of the referent gave him power over the other; now he employs this power, transferred to the sign, to demand the presence of the object. And the hearer’s performance justifies this exercise of power; the act once accomplished, the original “ostensive” has indeed been made correct.
The speaker’s awaiting, as this analysis shows, is not merely in origin but in function a prolongation of the deferral of action characteristic of linguistic presence from the beginning. In the true ostensive, this deferral lasts only for the instant of the utterance, followed immediately by its confirmation by the hearer; in the imperative, the deferral of the hearer’s own self-motivated activity is prolonged until the utterance, like the ostensive, can be verified, although this “deferral” may be interrupted by other tasks.
It must again be stressed that this prolongation, which of course lends itself to exploitation by those who possess authority over others, is a formal possibility of linguistic presence itself and thus perhaps as much a source as a product of social authority. But although the imperative obtains its original force from the sanctity of the scene of representation, from the hearer’s standpoint, the awaiting of his presentation of the object is not a simple equivalent of the deferral required in order that he may understand the speaker’s message. Here we need not even speak of an unwillingness to perform the requested action, although the very possibility of this unwillingness is already a distinguishing feature of the situation. The deferral of linguistic presence itself is very different in kind from that necessary to the imperative’s requested performance of a worldly action, which must be maintained throughout the duration in real time of the performance. The imperative is dependent on extra-linguistic real time in a way the ostensive is not. This, the hearer, however great his good will, cannot help but experience, whereas the speaker, however well he may understand this truth, cannot put his understanding “into words,” that is, into the intentional structure of the imperative.
To say that from the speaker’s standpoint the imperative is no more than an extended ostensive is to say that for the speaker, the hearer’s performance is not a voluntary act, not a worldly act at all, but merely an element of a linguistic construction. The supplying of the object that will convert the imperative as an inappropriate ostensive into an appropriate one is awaited in linguistic time, although it must take place in real time. The hearer, insofar as he performs this act, is not truly the addressee of the imperative but only its agent. This implicit denial of the role of interlocutor to the hearer can be realized explicitly in a situation where a third party is present. Thus if a fashion designer showing his dresses to a prospective buyer says “summer dress” and a model wearing the appropriate clothing appears, his speech act is an ostensive addressed to the buyer and only secondarily an imperative, the presentation of the dress being simply assumed to take place upon the utterance of the ostensive.
This analysis is, however, made from the speaker’s point of view. The hearer of the imperative, however “mechanically” he obeys it, is not reacting “instinctively” but through the mediation of linguistic presence, so that his act of obedience is not merely voluntary but intelligent, mediated by a prior representation. And thus, not only nonperformance but deliberate disobedience is possible. Here again, there is no reason to assume the speaker to be ignorant of these facts; but the intentional structure of the imperative has no place for them. The performance is implicit in the structure, which would otherwise be simply infelicitous. Conversely, the hearer can well understand the absolute nature of the imperative; but its intentional structure from his own viewpoint, by the very fact he has a viewpoint and is not simply an element of a linguistic construction, cannot be the same as that of the speaker. The hearer can only interpret the imperative as expressing the desire of the speaker, as was indeed the case of the original “inappropriate ostensive.” His performance is for him the worldly fulfillment of the speaker’s desire, whereas for the speaker, this desire is fulfilled in linguistic presence, the performance being merely a prolongation of this presence.
The inherent contradiction between these two versions of the intentional structure of the imperative remains latent in the case of satisfactory performance. In the event that the task is not performed, however, it manifests itself openly. In effect, whatever his intention, the hearer who fails to satisfy the imperative request restores the imperative to its original status as an inappropriate ostensive. Now if this is indeed the hearer’s intention, that is, if he simply ignores the imperative and considers the absence of its referent not as an indication of an act to be performed, but as an impropriety on the part of the speaker, then he reacts as a speaker of ostensive, not imperative language. In language which admits the imperative, however, this reaction can only be understood as a refusal of linguistic presence, for within this presence, performance is the only satisfactory response to the imperative.
The hearer who is unwilling or unable to accede to the request is thus faced with the latent contradiction of the imperative situation: the response demanded by the imperative is representational for the speaker, but real for the hearer, and if this real response cannot be made, then the latter has no representational response available. The hearer thus can be said to feel the need to maintain linguistic presence, as the speaker wished, even if he cannot provide real-world satisfaction for the latter’s desire. It is this need that will give rise to the declarative form.
Chapter 10.
The Fundamental Asymmetry of the Speech Situation
The contradiction in the intentional structure of the imperative between the speaker’s and the hearer’s intentions reflects the fundamental asymmetry of the speech situation, which emerges at this stage, and which is not so much resolved in the higher forms as made explicit and thereby deferred. This asymmetry was in fact present from the beginning, even independently of the assumption that not all the members of the originary group grasped the meaning of the sign at the same moment.
In the originary event, each individual’s participation in designating/representing the sacred object, although productive of the same intentional structure of deferred desire/sacralization as that of the others, was at the same time an imaginary possession of the object at the others’ expense. From the va
ntage point of the imperative, however, and a fortiori from that of the higher forms, we may now express this asymmetry in more formal terms, because the significance expressed by these forms is no longer, as with the ostensive, inherent in scenic presence, but is mediated by the desire of the speaker. This mediation occurs in its most overt form in the imperative; in the declarative it is discounted but not simply eliminated.
The “objective” formulation of the distinction between speaker’s and hearer’s intention requires that we consider linguistic presence as a virtual relation, actualized voluntarily by the speaker and entered into by the hearer as a duty incumbent on him qua member of the community. In the originary event, this enforcement was experienced as incarnate in the sacred object. But the deritualization of the modern world has not lessened this dissymmetry. On the contrary, the rise of the media, and more recently, of social media, has tended only to accentuate it. Thus the speaker chooses to speak, or perhaps to tweet, but the listener/viewer cannot help but view or listen, collectively if not individually. It is not that virtual linguistic presence confers on the speaker a permanent advantage; the community imposes appropriateness-conditions that if violated will be punished a posteriori. But he benefits a priori from a presumption of significance. Viewed from without, speaker and hearer in the speech situation are equally present to one another, yet the speaker need not justify his role to the hearer otherwise than through the linguistic representation expressed in his utterance.
For the hearer, however, the representation does not appear alone, but as spoken by the speaker-speaking-the-utterance, and thus the hearer’s intentional model of reality in the speech-situation is complicated by the addition of a supplementary factor. The speaker intends only the linguistic model, but the hearer intends the speaker’s intention. If this were not so, the communication situation would not be “intentional,” that is, representational, at all. To understand the speech act as something other than an instinctual/involuntary signal, it must be seen as an intentional actualization of linguistic presence. On this point it might be said that hearer and speaker are in accord, since the latter is certainly aware of his own intentionality. But the speaker does not intend this intentionality; it is not an element of his representation. Were this not so, the speech act would suffer from infinite regression, as do in fact all theories that attempt to propose a completely symmetrical (or “metaphysical”) model of the communication situation. Linguistic presence is not a “channel” of communication, and although for the higher linguistic forms, the channel analogy is an adequate approximation in most cases, it cannot help us to understand the origin of these forms.
The speaker’s model of the communication situation must be incomplete if it is to exist at all. Thus he acts as though a “channel” indeed existed into which to pour the information he desires to communicate, whereas for the hearer, the actualization of this “channel” depends on the intentional act of the speaker.
Before pursuing our formalization of the speaker-hearer asymmetry and the analysis of the dialectic of linguistic forms on which it directly bears, we should dispose of a potential epistemological objection. We communicate through language, and conceive of this communication as “transparent” to our thoughts, the proof being that we can always add qualifications to our previous statements; in Peirce’s terms, to every sign may be appended an “interpretant” that may be made as explicit as we like. But under the hypothesis that this explicitness is limited and language is indeed “opaque,” there would be no vantage point from which we might speak of the inherent contradictions of linguistic communication, because our own discourse would remain subject to the limitation we purport to denounce. This objection, then, has a double expression, “optimistic” and “pessimistic,” the one “metaphysical” and traditional, accepting philosophy’s presumption that the declarative proposition is the “natural” form of the “expression of ideas,” the other, post-Nietzschean and nihilistic, using language only to deconstruct its earlier pretensions.
In response to this double objection, I would defend both the need for and the possibility of a humanistic theory of representation—the first, in answer to the “optimists” who find it unnecessary, the second, to the “pessimists” who think it inconceivable. The transparency of communication does not consist in the sharing of a “pure intuition,” but simply in the capacity of language to include indefinitely many levels of metalanguage—what in a somewhat different context Chomsky calls recursion. This capacity is virtual and by definition cannot be exhausted; what we say on any subject can never be a definitive “last word.” And precisely because this virtuality is an element of the intentional structure of our discourse, our communication remains transparent, that is, open to explanation and eventual refutation. But this condition of language is not contained in the extant works of language; it consists rather in our capacity for further construction on them.
In particular, the originary hypothesis is the realization of a possibility latent, but certainly not preexisting, in the discourses of social science. From its perspective, neither these discourses nor their linguistic structures preexisted in a timeless metaphysical realm called “language,” but all were constructed on the basis of earlier forms, the earliest of which is the object of the hypothesis. Linguistic “transparency” was not available a priori, but became a virtual reality through the construction of the general form of dialogue, which is itself based on the preexisting form of the declarative sentence. “Transparency” being merely potential openness to further discourse, it does not abolish the original asymmetry of the communication situation, but permits its effects to be indefinitely deferred. But only once the founding hypothesis has been made explicit, as GA does for the first time, providing an epistemological link between the subject matter and the theory that purports to explain it, can the discourse that performs this task properly claim for itself the name of science.
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From this perspective, the logical impossibility of complete self-inclusion does not prevent the construction of new forms to resolve whatever contradictions may arise, and it is to our analysis of this process of construction that we now return.
The speaker intends his words as a model of reality; the hearer intends them as intended by the speaker. This opposition can be expressed schematically in very simple terms. If S says “X,” then
Speaker’s model: X
Hearer’s model: S (X)
It is important to note, however, that this schema applies only to mature language, because only by means of the declarative sentence can the “hearer’s model” be explicitly formulated. At the elementary stages, although the hearer realizes that the words are being pronounced intentionally by the speaker, he cannot say this himself, and therefore cannot conceive that his model of the situation might possess the same objective status as that presented by the speaker. To recapitulate the preceding stages of linguistic evolution in terms of the schema just proposed demonstrates its unavailability to the forms of “elementary language.”
In the originary event, the participants are presumed to experience, in emitting the sign representing the sacred object, an imaginary participation in the mediating or presence-compelling power of this object. Each individual’s ostensive gesture is both a (linguistic) sign of the object and a (ritual) sign of his participation in the communal attention to it. The model of the central sacred object is reinforced by the deferral of action within the communal presence around it. Thus the significance of the speaker’s utterance is fully guaranteed by the community. Conversely, from the hearer’s standpoint, the intentionality of every speaker coincides with that by which the community as a whole establishes itself, through the deferral of action within the nonviolent scenic presence mediated by the sacred object.
Yet on each individual scene of representation, the symmetry of the communal intention is disrupted by originary resentment, the supplement to appetite that, once the sacralization of the central figure has been establish
ed, leads the group from its originary stasis to the controlled violence of the collective division of this figure in the sparagmos, in which each receives an “equal” portion. A more synthetic term for this combination of appetite and the frustration occasioned by its (sacred) object’s withdrawal is desire.
The above schema provides the means both for understanding and discounting the element of desire in linguistic intention, although the participants in the originary event neither possess nor have need of these means, given the symmetry of the situation mediated by the sacred. Desire nevertheless exerts a dialectical pressure on representation by conferring on the sign the power to evoke the appetite-deferring significance of the object, eventually bringing about the lowering of the threshold of significance to include other, profane objects, while in a parallel, “institutional” development, the sacred guarantee of the communal scene of representation is reenacted and reinforced through ritual.
From the standpoint of our schema, this evolution takes place as though the individual-as-hearer were reinterpreting the others-as-speakers’ originary designation of the sacred object as the expression, not of a collective, but of an individual choice of referent, so that the ostensive-in-general can come into existence to represent profane as well as sacred objects. The sacred power of the object was one with its desirability. But what is its “desirability” other than the fact of its designation by others? The dialectic of desire appears here fully mystified; language at this stage offers no possibility of representing its own operation, even in others. The individual not only cannot see the beam in his own eye, he is blind to the one in the eye of his neighbor.