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LSA LI 2017 – Lecture # 8. 31 VII 17
KNOWLEDGE. The generativity of entextualization/contextualization as metapragmatic in the interdiscursive emergence of cultural concepts; the “sociolinguistic division of denotational labor” (Putnam) in “communities of practice”; and the institutionalization of social distinction and stratification around centers of emanation of value.
Whorf, as we saw last time, developed Boas’s anti-evolutionary doctrine of the mutual perspectival “relativity” of language structures into a sharp method of structural “calibration” of grammatical structures against a background assumption of the existence of denotational domains that are differently coded in distinct systems. Paralleling the model of phonologico-phonetic feature analysis, we came to see that denotational domains are organized by structures of differential intensional prototypy that scaffold and anchor our ability to extend referents and predicable states-of-affairs by in effect categorizing them as of such-and-such – and not some other – categorial types within the particular organized domain of semantic (non-indexical denotational) or pragmatic (indexical-denotational) knowledge.(Recall that the organizational structure of such domains can range from a simple, straightforward -onomic dimension, such as a taxonomy, a partonomy (or meronomy), a serial structure, a categorial matrix (such as distinctive features exemplify), to a more complex criss-crossing of several of these kinds of knowledge; recall here Ms. C’s knowledge of her School of Social Service Administration curricula.) We saw also that virtually all of the post-WW II work on “linguistic relativity,” focusing on word-forms denoting perceptual domains such as “color” – the psychophysical space of hue—saturation—brightness (a.k.a. value—chroma—lightness) misses the point completely and fails to establish anything of interest about so-called “linguistic relativity” in this typological sense of comparative grammatical category systems.
We noted Berlin & Kay’s unknowing confirmation of the fact that “color” is a denotational domain universally coded by tiered structures of lexemic roots or stems in an orderly way. But more importantly, we noted that such “color” lexemes, like all lexemes, seem to convey other kinds of conceptual knowledge that is more or less independent of grammatical structure; such conceptual knowledge – -onomic knowledge when it is systematic and organized in some way – is the domain of cultural, that is, culture-specificand temporally specific concepts, concepts that are invocable by people in certain social groups existing at a certain place and time. As we saw in the Hanuno’o work of the late Harold Conklin or the Mursi work of David Turton, the lexemes in these languages at once conform to the regularities of coding of the denotational domainand at the same time are organized by principles of a very different sort from a mere dimensionalized semantic taxonomy paralleling phonological categories. In Hanuno’o, there is a distinct cultural (or socio-cultural) domain in which hue—reflectivity—moistness—freshness—intensity comprise this single cultural domain organized by a structure of analogous perceptual oppositions. In Mursi, the pars pro totaor synecdochic projection from eight cattle-skin types into the entire universe of perceivable hues is a culture-specific overlay on any typologically expectable octopartite lexemic field. We might term it the “cattle-skin model” of what we call the domain of “color” – though the Mursi people do not have a label for the domain, analogously modeling each category of “color” by one of the names or labels for the appearance of a bovine’s skin. In both cases, note, one or more central social practices anchors the use of these verbal expressions, which, we can see, emerge as forms for communicating about the universe consistent with such social practice. In effect, as expressions for denoting the “reality out there,” the lexemes directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly have metapragmatic meaning in respect of such social practices; they indexically presupposesuch social practices as common knowledge and thus a use of a token of such a lexeme brings into the context of communication precisely the -onomics, the “cosmic knowledge” that thus is “in play” in making a denotational text consequential for an interactional text, a social happening. That’s the significance of using one expression rather than another in a pragmatic paradigm of contrasts.
Let’s continue with what we can now term the cultural domain of “color.” We even can generate new or enriched cultural concepts of ‘color’ [= hue] via the poetics of entextualization. Look [Slide 1] at this extraordinary piece by the late William Safire, a Nixon Administration legal operative who became a conservative political columnist for the New York Times (as well as a self-appointed language expert in their Sunday magazine section). Safire was an excellent writer, but we can recognize here a political tract, a rhetorical appeal to the NYT reading public/electorate in the 1984 presidential election when Ronald Reagan was running for re-election as president with his running-mate, George H. W. Bush, against Democratic nominee Walter Mondale (who had been President Carter’s vice-president 1977-81) and his vice-presidential running mate, Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman ever on the national ticket of a major party. Note the amusing use of the new concept of ‘political coloration’on the basis of the then fashionable notion of inherent coloration or pigmentation of people and the clothes that are necessary to deal with our condition, whether to enhance or mask one’s “natural” coloration. In macro-structure, it is organized into a preamble and four main sections, followed by a punch-line about Safire and his own political affiliation. Let’s follow along.
All one needs to see is a couple of these densely metricalized paragraphs to note the extraordinarily rich cross-domain set of analogies metrically organized as the denotational textual structure. [Slide 2] Note the use of an available and conventional chromatic sub-set of the basic color categories for the candidates’ so-called “political coloration,” a Safire metaphor that has stuck, by the way (the barely disguised roman à clef, Primary Colors, about the Clinton campaign of 1992, uses the concept; “red states” and “blue states” in common American parlance is just the collective ascription of such, to which Safire has contributed as the phrase took hold among political pundits). In keeping with the analogy of having one’s sartorial colors done, Safire ascribes to each of the four national candidates an inherent ‘political coloration’ along with the clothing hues and shades needed to enhance and/or mask that coloration: the vice-presidentials needing masking/transforming, the presidentials enhancement. [Slide 3] Note the metrical positioning of the Democratic Party’s nominees for vice-president and president at the discursive extremes, Mr. Mondale being the culmination of the serial metricalization, and those of the Republican Party in the discursive center, as well as the vice-presidential candidates first and the presidential ones second, also a culminative structure of most-significant last: Mr. Mondale is the punchline. [Slide 4] Most importantly, note the balance between autonomously existing schemata in the cultural universe, such as the organization of the calendric year in conventional form (compare Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” concerti or any Renaissance art), suggesting as well in a pars pro tota trope birth and new development – efflorescence and vigor – harvestable ripeness and fulfillment – used-up dessication, cold, and death, and the way these are brought together with colors, candidates’ colorimetrically correlated personalities, etc. As shown in the table, there is a whole argument about which pair is ‘modulated’, which ‘extreme’, with the obvious suggestion to the reader/potential voter as to how to choose among “political colorations.” Most amusing is the post-script, the coda, reporting that the color consultant associated Mr. Safire with Vice-president Bush: “That’ll be the day!” this firm Nixon and Reagan guy observes.
The lesson here in all this material about so-called ‘color’ should be clear in respect of Saussurean concepts (intensional prototypes projected from grammar into denotational domains) vs. cultural concepts (intensions of a very different kind). Berlin & Kay and their followers discovered that there is an apparent denotational domain of chroma/hue in which the expected typology of cross-linguistic, relatively stable intensional prototypes available for distinct coding as simplex lexemes is realized. Languages have anywhere from 2 to 14 [Hungarian; Russian] such simplex lexemes, plus many morphological and syntactic derivations from them, as well as taxonomic hyponyms of the so-called “basic color terms.” But distinct cultural concepts manifest in languages-as-denotational expressions, even for such simplex lexemes realized as words, are quite varied and bear no inherent relation to the Berlin & Kay structural universals. Color as a Peircean quale (plur. qualia) is itself always immersed in local cultural practices of indexicality, frequently rhematized – turned into “natural” icons in culture – by circulating ethno-metapragmatic discourse, and even, as we see with the late Safire’s piece, rhematizable by creating entextualized structures of diagrammatic relations across not only perceptual and experienceable, but conceptual and hence thinkable conceptual schemata (e.g., color as diagrammatically associable with the four – why four? – seasons of the European conceptualization of the year cycle or, in pars pro tota the four stages – as opposed to Shakespeare’s seven [As You Like It] – of the human social life cycle).
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Language is, as we’ve already seen in the first part of our course, the very mediator of social relations; as we mutually align to “what has been/will have been said” in co-constructed denotational text we wind up aligning to each other. And such performative efficacy of language-in-use has both presupposing and entailing indexical qualities. But the question we now confront is how the very denotational capacity of words and expressions in textual occasions of use both reflects and contributes to a social order, thus completing the dialectical circle. Who – to allude to Humpty Dumpty – can make words mean just what they want them to? And what does that “count as” as a social act? That is, to repeat, how do Putnamian stereotypes, intensions that make up the presupposable structure of categories of things in our universe of denotation, arise and circulate with authoritative force? Whorf, it seems to me, made a pregnant attempt to deal with this matter. Such cultural conceptualization, -onomic knowledge, is, I believe, what Putnam & Kripke were really after in their so-called “causal theory of reference.” Whorf, I believe, was the first to hypothesize the general character of specifically ‘cultural’ concepts, essaying a constructive account of where Putnamian ‘stereotypes’ – in this alternative philosophical discourse – cued by words and expressions comes from.
Whorf’s last work goes beyond the still-flourishing typological relativism of anthropological linguistics (which, in the American context, at least, was linguistics tout court). Whorf himself lived and worked against a scientific backdrop of Bloomfieldianism in American linguistics, named for the then-ascending master who believed in the ultimate reducibility of descriptions of the non-human universe to absolute physical momentum of matter, and of the human universe, mind, to (autonomous) grammatical form. Bloomfield and followers were as well behaviorists, with no tolerance for a concept of ‘mind’. ‘Meaning’ in language became merely the probabilistic and difficult correlation of the occurrence of grammatical forms directly or mediately, i.e., through other grammatical forms, with their surrounding physical – including neurochemical – contexts. Hence, such corollary issues arise for Bloomfield as whether or not a child’s predication of its own hunger (“I’m hungry!”) when it is clearly well-fed and not desirous of going to sleep has a ‘meaning’ like the otherwise same predication by a Depression-Era homeless person who has not eaten for some time; the former utterance clearly occurs in the face of probabilities to the contrary a physicalist would want to be able to rely on to give the expression’s “meaning.” Or the issue of whether or not the phrase goodmorning has any (!) ‘meaning’ at all correlated with its putatively compositional grammatical form when uttered as part of a greeting routine (“Good morning!” uttered for example on a day already going badly for sender or receiver of the message).
Whorf’s struggle with this issue is not, after all, unlike the struggle of all those currently dubious of the scientistic juggernaut in the human sciences in matters of mind-and-brain. In our times it is fueled by the problematic intersection of cognitivism – in the penumbral shadow of the currently ascended master Chomsky and his autonomous-syntactic model of the asocial mind – and of biogenetic reductionism – in the biologized computational image of “hard-wiring,” for example, parallel-processing neural nets that get saturated with connectionist probabilities contingently streaming in from their sensorily-accessible external contexts. So I want to point out that there is a contemporary non-disinterest among us social scientists in rescuing Whorf’s insights from almost fifty years of ridicule by the uncomprehending in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and related fields; there is more than quaint historical revisionism involved in reworking them in a more precise and contemporary analytic language. Further, doing so allows us to understand his early-model conceptual breakthrough that, even in its own historical context, can now be retrospectively seen as a special case of a more general phenomenon, which we can recognize as seemingly culture-dependent conceptualization, conceptualization arising out of social practices that denotational language describes and allows us to think about as strategic actors-in-society, in which we are interested as sociologists and anthropologists (and as reflexively reflective people with socioculturally saturated minds).
The key innovative Whorfian idea is that ‘cultural’ concepts are emergent in, or as we would now say, are generated from, particular interactionally-based conditions of subjective “misrecognition” (as Bourdieu [1977; 1991:23 & passim] would say) involving both language-as-structure (grammar) and language-structure-in-use (text). To be sure, the whole post-Lockean tradition of the “natural philosophy” of ideas – Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s ‘idéologie’ of 1796/97– has tried to understand why sociohistorically specific “wacky” ideas, “ideological” ones, seem to emerge and to bias human thinking as it goes on in specific sociohistorical groups; and in an end-run around the phenomenon it has again and again tried to limn the boundaries of that relationship by looking into and sometimes purportedly beyond languages to the plane of (as we now say) any “innateness” of ideas “behind/before” language itself. [See Slide 5]
Whorf was perhaps the first modern linguist clearly to go beyond merely remarking on the seemingly irresolvable problem here. [Slide 6] He posed specifically a model of the space of agentive social consciousness – ‘subjectivity’ in essence – where there is a dialectical coming together of [1] the native language user’s misrecognition of a demonstrably unconscious or tacit language structure with [2] the misrecognition of empirical reality that emerges in-and-by the conventional use of language itself to denote (refer-to and predicate-about) that empirical reality through the clunky digital (not analog) syntax and morphology that concatenates intensional prototypes as category- or extensionalizable concept-anchors.
The first type of misrecognition, of language structure itself, is equivalent to the “analogical pressures” or forces that are generated among the expressions of any language. These analogical relations come into being as a function of the way those expressions are analyzable in terms of particular grammatical-categorial structures in the grammar of the language, but are distinct from those structures. Within historical linguistics long a topic of embarrassment to Neogrammarian (and generativist) theorizing -- where the impersonal forces of langue or “competence” are supposed to operate in “regular” systemic change -- so-called analogic change, or change of (synchronic) analogies, the analogical alignments of language forms, constitute the diachronic proof of the synchronic existence of such pressures, as do so-called folk etymologies, so-called contaminations and blends. Such synchronic pressures that give rise to these kinds of diachronic effects paradoxically change language forms by strengthening structure-based ties of certain linguistic forms to certain others. It has been only after World War II (of course long after Whorf’s death) that such pressures and their diachronic outcomes have received any systematizing attention in the post-Saussurean era (most notably by Jerzy Kurylowicz and by Withold Manczak).
[Slide 7] This is the force of Whorf’s beginning his paper on this week’s list with examples from his fire-insurance inspector’s experience investigating people’s default “rationality” in practical situations, where words-for-things, i.e., denoting expressions of various sorts seem to animate people not by their internal grammatical construction plus rules of concatenation – the logician’s (and linguist’s, alas) ideal and dream of computability – but by the grammatical analogies of surface “fashions of speaking” about so-called “reality.” If something is “spun limestone,” then, by golly, it ought to have the basic inflammable properties of “stone,” as we would analogously reason from the full and basic attributive construction, Adjective + Nominal head of a DP.
Analogy, a diagrammatic iconic relationship among forms, is something that is fundamental to all cultural semiosis, as shown in [Slides 8 & 9]. The kinds of analogy that confounded the Neogrammarians in trying to give an historical account of changes in linguistic structures and upon which Whorf concentrates is type [c]. But discourse is, to be sure, shot through with such processes and structures, as can be seen in the two other places where analogy, i.e., diagrammatic iconicity, reigns.
The second type of misrecognition Whorf posits is that of “reality” itself, though here the misrecognition is a function of the representational role of discourse which, in this way, mediates “reality” for us insofar we think about “reality” through particular fashions of speaking as the metapragmatic discourse for social practices.. Such misrecognition is possible to the extent that language users presume that there is a transparency of coding of “reality” in specific textual formulas, “fashions of speaking” for Whorf. Such fashions of speaking are, of course, conventional in a community of users as the means to describe that “reality” to which they must adjust their aggregate selves in practical situations of social action. Whorf posits an “as if” notion of reasoning about reality in such practical situations: people’s misrecognition of “reality” is as if they were using language expressions of their “fashions of speaking” in an inferential discourse-about the “reality” they rationally adjust to. Again in this second realm, long after Whorf we now have a more highly theorized understanding of the modes of coherence of discourse, among which are the structured textual coherences of denotational text constituted by words and expressions of a language, their patterns of parallelism, repetition, topicalization and topic-maintenance, etc. And we have a developed understanding of how such intendedly descriptive or denotational entextualizations are anchored to their contexts and thus their referents and predicated-states-of-affairs by elaborate indexical systems in every language. We will see more of this in conclusion, as we generalize on Whorf’s insights.