Victor,
I understand where you are coming from, but I wished you would consider
other, more socially informed conceptions of language than the one you
singly subscribe to.
Taking language as a system and means of representation is what
Volosinov aptly describes as abstract/objectivist, others take as
positivist, and conceptualizing language that way carries an
epistemological baggage that leads you to conceptions of
representational truth, to a separation of experiences and language,
which is not born out by research about perception, ethnographic
methods, and the like.
If you are interested in other conceptions of language, there is the
romantic notion of language as a medium of individual expression, there
is the dialogical notion of language as consisting of speech acts and
their acceptance by interlocutors, there is the interpretivist notion of
language that applies social criteria to the acceptability of
assertions. As a historian, you might be interested in the latter, as
most historians have not lived the stories they rearticulate in lectures
and in books, to be accepted or rejected by other historians who have no
access to the reality they describe either, being able to decide only on
the basis of consistency and coherence (without being able to justify
why consistency and coherence is such a good criterion since all
historical events are experienced differently by different people whose
voices we sort out). Moreover, historical events, as they were, are by
definition inaccessible and historians are highly selective as to what
these events left behind, raising the question of fiction as the
preferred story told.
klaus
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Victor Margolin
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2008 6:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: language and fiction
dear colleagues:
At the risk of annoying some people and being taken to task for not
responding to each of the arguments in the discussion I would like to
offer the following statements
1) Language is a form of representation; it is a system of signs
through which we seek to communicate experiences both actual and
imaginative
2) We can't say that anything is absolutely true but we can make
assumptions based on our own experience. I would use the term
'fiction' to refer to acts of the imagination that do not purport to
be actual experiences. I would say otherwise that language may be
more or less persuasive in convincing us that something actually
happened
3) Events that individuals experience are real, presuming that we
accept that sensory experience more often than not corresponds to the
real; linguistic representations of so called real events are more or
less persuasive; they can be verified by multiple accounts or refuted
by similar means; to the degree that we live through representations
we need to make judgements about what to accept as actual and what to
discount as fiction (something that is not actual)
4) linguistic representation is a form of mediation between
individuals; it can be critiqued in terms of its capacity (in a
particular instance) to accurately or fairly represent something that
happened.
I will stop here. This is simply my attempt to be reasonable. It is
crazy to deny experience. Holocaust deniers, for example, are not
credible. There is too much evidence to contradict their claims. We
develop our own capacities to judge the accuracy of linguistic
representation, i.e. to judge whether something said is likely to be
an accurate representation. It also helps to use the term 'fiction'
for works that are self-consciously imaginative. To call history
writing, for example, fiction, is to suggest that there is no claim
to any degree of veracity. Of course some historians try to cover up
the truth and to the degree that they do, they depart from actuality
and present a work that is purely imaginative. To the degree that
they try to create a narrative based on events, they may be taken
seriously as historians. Of course, any work in the humanities is
subject to interpretation and that is what, in my opinion
differentiates the humanities from the sciences. They expose
themselves as representations and allow for interpretation and debate
as legitimate forms of response.
Enough.
Victor Margolin
--
Victor Margolin
Professor Emeritus of Design History
Department of Art History
University of Illinois at Chicago
935 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607-7039
Tel. 1-312-583-0608
Fax 1-312-413-2460
website: www.uic.edu/~victor
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