<snip>
my autocratic (and hence totalitarian) poetics as opposed to your democratic
poetics [Chris J]
<snip>
I'm puzzled by this, so better late than never, I suppose... If by
'democratic' you mean a poetics that is socially constructivist, more or
less, then what is 'autocratic'? Presumably not the obverse: a poetics
in which there are only transcendent truths. So is it something weaker,
either a contradictory (all... v some...) or subcontrary (some... v
some...) relationship?
Anyway, here is something you said earlier:
<snip>
Well, as Frederick suggests, it [life?] is a move from the first person
personal narrative to third person universal immanent critique [Chris J]
<snip>
That move from first to third sounds a bit like Piaget, for whom (via the
transitional phase of egocentric speech, of self address) the inner speech
of the child becomes the socialised speech of adults. Likewise Fred's
observation (I rework it just a little) that *feeling* is to *I* as social
and ethical entailments are to *s/he* and *they*. All narrative, or so it
seems to me, is both ontologically subjective on the one hand and
epistemologically objective on the other, with 'let's pretend' in the
middle, as a sort of bridge between private and public thought, between
Hume's *is* and his *ought*. But that is not, I think, a matter of the
pronouns, or not of the pronouns per se.
My own preference is for the social constructivism of Vygotsky. Here
things go the other way, not from but _towards_ the self, and where the
alterity of egocentric speech is (audibly) a drawing of the social subject
out of and from the world, a process of individuation up to the point at
which 'shared apperception is complete and absolute' in the inner speech of
the older child and of the adult.
But there is, I think, a dilemma nonetheless. Should we (or do we, in fact)
see ethics our entry upon the world, as our opportunity to talk about what
other people do and/or ought to do, a sort of deontic imperium (more or less
fiercely policed) in which the actors of whom we write or speak are of a
different order of being rather as in US foreign policy US citizens are of
one order of being and everyone else is of another? Or do we view ethics as
our individuation, our resistance to what is pre-ordained, in us as in the
world? If the latter, then there is indeed an immanent critique through the
actions which we take and the discourses that we generate in becoming and
ceasing to be (part) members of the collectives to which we (partly)
belong(ed); history, in other words, is full of contradictions. If the
former, then the idea of an immanent critique becomes a bit of a sham,
because there will always be an area in our discourse as in our social
behaviour that remains beyond critique rather as US foreign policy involves
some sort of myth of full achievement about conditions back home.
And so, having said all that, I come back to pronouns again:
<snip>
One of the big problems with moving from a first person lyric/narrative
to third person narrative is the I that in the third person does not say
I but is implied, especially when this involves dabbling in abject subject
matter. [Chris J]
<snip>
Again the issue seems to me one of bridging, and of Wittgenstein's
'refinement' of language relative to the deed, rather than one of pronouns
or of pronouns per se. So, in general, I don't see much distinction (other
than in degrees of relative animicity) between an implied *I* and one that
is fully explicit. Denature the language into a sort of articulate
neutrality, on the other hand, and the implicit *I* (if it's there; it isn't
always) is revealed standing at the boundary of the discourse as a sort of
sovereign, both making the Law and standing above the Law. Which is
interesting; the parallel is with God.
As to abjection, one gets a hint of how 'the abject has only one quality of
the object and that is being opposed to I' in, say, the semantic differences
between 'I was unpopular', 'they wanted to see the back of me' and 'he
wanted to see my back'. However, reductions in relative animicity of this
sort are generally available whatever the narrative mode. And of course the
linguistic transformation of animate human subjectivity into animals such as
pigs, dogs and so forth, vectors of pollution or 'pieces' are all practical
stages along a road that leads ultimately to extermination.
One finds what is essentially the same syntactically ergative formulation at
the beginning of *The Trial*, in which the exteriority of Josef K relative
to what is happening to him (the same individuated exteriority as that of
the 'man from the country' relative to the Law in the parable of the
doorkeeper later on) is first announced: 'Someone must have slandered Josef
K' ('Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben'). But again it isn't the
pronouns that are made to bear the load.
CW
_______________________________________________
'What's the point of having a language that everybody knows?'
(Gypsy inhabitant of Barbaraville)
