I think the "I" is also implicit in "we." But what's
really interesting is the double duty borne by the
so-called "rhetorical you," where the self is being
critiqued more impersonally than the "I" could do.
Candice
"What is conceivable can happen too,"
Said Wittgenstein, who had not dreamt of you...
(William Empson)
--- Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> <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)
>
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