Terminology and Discourse
between the Social Sciences and the Humanities
Robert de Beaugrande
[abstract]
The
epistemology of the ‘West’ (roughly, Europe and its sphere of influence) has
been heavily content-oriented. Each knowledge domain, ranging from a subject
matter taught in school up to ‘classical science’, is held to consist
chiefly of a compartment of ‘facts’. Terminology is naturally held to be a
clear and straightforward refraction of these facts and of the ‘objects’
they involve. The role of terminology has accordingly been conceived too simply
and narrowly. Significant progress demands a new ‘post-classical’ model of
discourse as a mode for accessing and constructing knowledge and hence as
antecedent rather than consequent to facts. This insight suggest a comprehensive
reseach and development plan for the coming years. If successful, such a plan
could have paradigm significance for discourse throughout the sciences.
Concepts
can never be regarded as logical derivatives of sense impressions. But didactic
and heuristic objectives make such a notion inevitable. Moral: it is impossible
to get anywhere without sinning against reason.
-- Albert Einstein.
1. Social science and
humanities: Terms, fields, discourse
1.1 F. de Saussure’s well known Cours
de linguistique générale remarked over seventy years ago that ‘other
sciences work with objects that are given in advance’, whereas in
‘linguistics’ ‘it would seem that it is the viewpoint that creates the
object’ (1966[1916]: 8). Today, we might want to put the matter more
radically: it is not so much the ‘viewpoint’ but the special-purpose
discourse and its relation to the
object domain that creates the science
-- any science, including linguistics, but also any branch of the humanities.
This thesis, which points up the centrality of LSP and terminology research, is
more disruptive, and to appreciate its force, we should continually and
carefully reassess the role and function of special-purpose discourse and in
particular of terminology, its the most prominent sector.
1.2 One place to start is the discourse intended to define the terms
labeling the domain itself. Here are the respective dictionary definitions of
‘social sciences’ [1] and ‘humanities’ [2] (from Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1963: 828, 404):
[1] branches of science dealing with the institutions
and functioning of human society and the interpersonal relationships of
individuals;
[2] branches of learning having primarily a cultural
character.
To
construct an opposition from these wordings, three potential distinctions seem
opportune:
1.2.1 between ‘science’ versus ‘learning’. The respective
definitions of those two terms in the same dictionary (771, 480) read:
[3] knowledge attained through study or practice;
knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws; one of the
natural sciences;
[4] knowledge or skill acquired by instruction, study,
or experience.
Apparently,
‘science’ overlaps with ‘learning’ but focuses more on ‘general
truths’ and ‘laws’; also, the final sub-definition in [3] indicates how
the English term ‘science’ is preempted by natural
science, a perennial handicap for social science (cf. 4.1f). Although the
specifically English term ‘humanities’ makes no reference to ‘science’,
the corresponding term in other languages does, such as German
‘Geisteswissenschaften’ and French ‘sciences humaines’.
1.2.2 between ‘society’
versus ‘culture’. This distinction is more interesting (4.3), but does not
bear on the opposition at hand, because both concepts are widely acknowledged in
the social sciences and the humanities alike.
1.2.3 between ‘dealing with’ and ‘having the character of’. This
distinction bears more on method than on content. In conventional views, science
is more likely to be visualized standing apart from its object domain than are
the humanities. Echoes of these views can be detected in the diverse dictionary
definitions (Webster’s,
202) of ‘culture’:
[5] behaviour typical of a group or class;
[6] development of intellectual and moral faculties,
especially by education; enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by
intellectual and aesthetic training.
Whereas
[5] can be ‘objectified’, ‘observed’, and so on, [6] must be acquired
through ‘subjective’ participation.
1.3. In sum, the standard
dictionary definitions of the terms ‘social sciences’ and ‘humanities’
do not clearly support an incisive opposition. To assess their current or
potential relationship, we must rather turn to their respective discursive and
terminological practices.
2. Seven theses on terminology
2.1 According to my opening thesis (1.1), the status of a domain,
whether scientific or humanistic, hinges on the constitution of its discourse as
the primary mode of access to knowledge (cf. Beaugrande 1991a, b, c, d, e;
Beaugrande & Dressler, in preparation). This thesis opposes the convention
of scientists who see ‘knowledge’ as a formal or substantive absolute set
apart from the means to communicate it; and who might classify the several
sciences by the degree of their disengagement
from discourse, ranging from mathematics, physics, and electronics at the far
end over to cultural anthropology and ethnography of communication at the near
end. But the same thesis might seem hardly controversial in the humanities,
which are after all often housed in a ‘faculty of letters’ (compare Italian
‘Facoltà di Lettere’, or French ‘Faculté de Lettres’).
2.2. Terminology can help us to make the thesis more concrete. Here too,
we can start with prospective definitions for the term ‘terminology’ itself,
this time not commonsensical ones from a dictionary but functional ones:
2.2.1 A terminology is a
specialized lexical repertory. This definition seems solid enough, but says
little about the genesis and use of the repertory. A rather static image is
projected of a self-sufficient finished product, a set of precisely determined
and determinate labels for some independent and perspicuous reality. This image
is no longer tenable even in the natural sciences, where one striking example is
the "black hole" and its circumstances, such as "event
horizon", "Schwarzschild radius", or "Hawking
evaporation". The image is all the more inept for the social sciences and
the humanities, where (as we shall see) the concept of ‘reality’ is more a
social or literary problem than a predecided constant.
2.2.2 A terminology is a means of
intervention in ordinary discourse. This definition projects a more dynamic
image of an ongoing process, but requires us to stipulate the relevant
conditions and results. Some terms start out in highly technical usage for
conspicuous intervention and move into ordinary usage, such as ‘black hole’
and ‘relativity’, although (as these examples show) with a characteristic
loss of special content. Others remain purely technical, such as
‘Schwarzschild radius’ or ‘Gödel number’, and cannot appear in ordinary
discourse without some mediation.
2.2.3 A terminology provides the
key words for activating specialized frames of knowledge about the domain.
This definition entails a psychological hypothesis about the organization of
knowledge in human memory and is thus open to empirical testing. So far,
however, most experiments have addressed ordinary knowledge or at most mildly
specialized domains like arithmetic (Riley, Greeno, & Heller 1982) and
baseball (Voss, Vesonder, & Spilich 1980). Work on expert knowledge, e.g.
medicine and chemistry, has been more concentrated in artificial intelligence,
where the testing is done by simulation and judged by efficiency.
2.2.4 A terminology asserts a claim
to authorization. Here, the relevant function is to signal that the
instantiated complexes of knowledge are authorized by the established consensus
in the field. However, the use of terminology does not by itself carry authority
or guarantee consensus. In diffuse and disputatious fields like linguistics or
literary theory, the choice of terminology is frequently a double-edged gesture
of allegiance to one approach and defiance to the others; and authority
vacillates according to the side one adopts.
2.2.5 A terminology is a system of
signals to distinguish insiders from outsiders. Though this effect is often
attained, insiders would probably not want to declare it a genuine purpose; nor
can a person convert from outsider to insider by adopting the terminology alone.
The most restricted cases are terms derived from the names of persons who were
of course eminent insiders themselves, e.g. ‘Gödel number’ from the
Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel. These terms are most inefficient if they
require inside knowledge of specific careers, but they often fade to impersonal
labels, even for notions the persons might not even approve. For example, the
‘von Restorff effect’ in psychology is widely said for the memory advantage
of the salient items in a list, whereas Hedwig von Restorff (1933) herself, a
member of the Gestalt school, showed the disadvantage of such items for the
formation of an integrated array (‘Bereich’).
2.2.6 A terminology is an
organizational and pedagogical tool for offering or acquiring competence and
fluency in the domain. This definition has a strong practical emphasis,
putting the terminology in an instrumental though not exclusively decisive role.
This role is undeniably crucial during introductory training, witness the effort
expended on presenting and quizzing it all the way from basic coursework up to
degree examinations. However, the formulation of a pedagogically effective
terminology has not received sufficient attention in either social science or
humanities, despite the growing population of students in general ‘area’
studies, which primarily fulfill a ‘service’ role in training for
professions like management and law. This shift in emphasis calls for a
concerted reassessment of the pedagogical adaptation of terms to the
requirements of non-traditional outsiders.
2.2.7 A terminology names the
control centers within domain-specific knowledge. In this definition, which
I have developed in my own work (Beaugrande 1987, 1988b, 1989a, 1991d), the term
‘control’ designates any limiting of indeterminacy -- not merely a
mechanical intervention (the everyday meaning applied, say to machines), but any
informational or cognitive enrichment that helps to guide or select
significance. The potential contribution of terminology to ‘control’ in this
expanded sense is virtually unlimited, provided that we can grasp the
fluctuation and regulation of determinacy within the entire discourse, and in respect to specific groups of participants.
In particular, the discourse should exert active and conscious control, e.g., by
explaining each problematic term concisely upon first mention and then using it
consistently henceforth.
2.3. Each of these seven definitions holds some cogency and, taken
together, they encourage us to bear in mind that terminology is an emphatically
multi-functional resource whose actual contribution in spontaneous or routine
usage is typically just a small part of its potential contribution under
adequately planned and controlled conditions.
3. Conventional preferences in social sciences and humanities
3.1. Conventional usage of terminology so far is characterized by three
pervasive preferences (Beaugrande 1991e):
3.1.1 for internal
use within the field over external
use beyond its borders;
3.1.2 for object-oriented
terms labeling specific objects of inquiry over subject-oriented terms generated by the interpretation of the user;
and
3.1.3 for a term-centered
view of special purpose language over a discourse-centered view implicating the entire texture, including
the processes of ‘textualizing’ the terminology.
3.2 These preferences are particularly dominant in the sciences, where
the folk-wisdom flourishes that the terminology of a scientific field is just
the proper catalogue of labels for well-defined objects and makes an ideal means
of communicating in a ‘normal science’ (in the popularized sense of Kuhn
1970). Individual terms are accepted uncritically at their nominal value, even
where -- as for the term ‘sentence’ in modern linguistics -- a considerable
spread of diverging uses could easily be documented (Beaugrande 1989a, 1991a).
3.3 The impact of this uncritical acceptance can be seen in social
science, where terminology persists in an unsettled state. Marvin Harris for
instance (1980: 15) diagnoses an ‘overload of ill-defined concepts’ in the
‘social scientist’s basic working vocabulary’, such as ‘state, role’,
‘group, institution, class, caste, tribe, state,’ and so forth. In his eyes,
‘the continuing failure to agree on the meaning of these concepts is a
reflection of their unoperational status and constitutes a great barrier to the
development of scientific theories of social and cultural life’ (cf. 4.2)
3.4 However, given the pressures on social science to create a
‘scientific’ diction for describing ordinary knowledge and behavior, the
project of making terms ‘operational’ may become part of the problem rather
than the solution (4.1). It has helped to foster an uncritical, forced
oscillation or melange, whereby mechanical, object-oriented terms are combined
with terms applying to subjective events or abilities. Here is a sample, when
Talcott Parsons (cited in Bolinger 1975: 172) sets out to define the term
‘skills’:
3.5 He further tries to mediate between object and subject in the opening
sentence by injecting the terms ‘artifacts’ and ‘design’, both of which
imply skills by definition, but the mediation goes awry in the syntax.
‘Artifacts’ are not ‘for
machines designed as tools’; both
‘machines and tools’ are
‘artifacts’, only the former necessarily requiring ‘special design’ (a
‘tool’ could be a mere piece of rock); and a ‘machine’ that was not
designed as a tool would be a marginal case hardly relevant here.
3.6 Again to grant the ‘objects’ equal weight, the second sentence
pairs off ‘things’ with ‘capacities’, as if they were two parallel types
of ‘organized and codified knowledge’. But the parallel conjures up a
distinction between the ‘knowledge of capacities’ versus the
‘capacities’ themselves, which seems gratuitous here: if you want to
‘manipulate a thing’ you must have and
use them, not just know about
them. A final forced balance is drawn between ‘cultural level [i.e. not
individual] symbolic processes’ and ‘the central nervous system’ plus
‘the brain’, the latter being either trivially involved in every
skill and process or else misleadingly implied to be the actual physical
‘codification’ of the knowledge, like the DNA in cells.
3.7 Linguistically, the object-oriented approach favours a pronounced
preference for nouns and noun phrases over verbs. The opening of Parsons’
definition is a conspicuous example, as we can see by contrasting to a version
with the actions and processes expressed by verbs:
[7a]
Skills enable humans to manipulate and control the physical world so as to
attain their goals.
A
more sweeping revision to relax the distortive tension between object versus
subject might be:
[7b] Truly
human skills are guided by the
organized and codified knowledge that both constitutes the capacities for
attaining goals and schematizes the physical world to be manipulated and
controlled. This knowledge develops out of the potential of the central nervous
system, particularly the brain, in the performance of cultural symbolic
processes, including communication. Tools and machines can be specially designed
to supplement the skills, but do not actually comprise or embody them.
This
definition is not merely shorter (70 words to Parsons’ 87), but quite
different in focus. The target of the ‘skills’ now is not the physical world
world itself, but the schematized version
of it that serves as the cognitive operational base for applying human
skills as well as for communicating within the culture. Tools and machines are
introduced not as a major reservation at the start, but as a concessive
stipulation at the end. The ‘central nervous system’ and the ‘brain’ are
not trivially implicated nor implied to be a material codification, but cited as
the developmental resource whose ‘performance’ centers more on cultural
symbolic processes, including communication, than on mechanical manipulation.
3.8 The humanities are less dominated by the anxiety about subject and
object, though hardly free of it. Object-centered terms have long been a
favourite in textbooks and surveys, as we can see in the Heath Introduction to Literature (Landy 1980: 837f):
[8] A simile
is a comparison and is always stated as such. You will usually find ‘like’,
‘as’, ‘so’, or some such word of comparison within it. Like similes, metaphors
are direct comparisons of one object with another. In metaphors, however, the
fusion between the two objects is more complete, for metaphor uses no ‘as’
or ‘like’ to separate the two things being compared. Instead, the metaphor
simply declares that A ‘is’ B; one element of the comparison becomes, for
the moment at least, the other. Some metaphors go even farther and omit the
‘is’. They simply talk about A as if it were B, using terms appropriate to
B. They may not even name B at all, but let us guess what it is from the words
being used. In this case the metaphor becomes an implied
metaphor.
Three
items of terminology, all nouns, are defined and contrasted as if they were
tangible things rather than cognitive and aesthetic activities. Each thing is
tidily identified by ostensibly formal and observable criteria, namely the
presence or absence of ‘comparison words’ -- the prepositions or
conjunctions ‘like’ and ‘as’ and the copula ‘is’ -- though the text
fudges the questions of whether these are in fact required and if not, how the
three things could be differentiated on other grounds.
3.9 Moreover, each term is stated to designate a specific kind of
relation between distinct ‘objects’, presumably in the physical world,
albeit the passage clouds their status by giving them only the quasi-algebraic
symbols ‘A’ and ‘B’, as if we could solve each term like an equation by
inserting the ‘unknowns’. Yet is is precisely the distinctness of
‘objects’ or other entities, not in the physical world but in our mental
representations of any real or possible word, that similes and metaphors call in
question.
3.10 Such definitions thus
promulgate a term-centered and object-oriented view of literature and poetry, as
if they were patchworks of schemes and tropes waiting to be reduced to
comparisons and equations. Structuralist poetics did little to correct this
view, and if anything reaffirmed it on the basis of its more refined terms and
methods (cf. 4.5). Such a view applies much better to mediocre efforts (e.g.
Robert Burns’ ‘my love is like a red, red rose’) than to aesthetically
valid works, such as Emily Dickinson’s poem nr. 1129:
[9] Tell all the Truth but tell it slant --
Success
in Circuit lies
Too
bright for our infirm Delight
The
Truth’s superb surprise
As
Lightning to the Children eased
With
explanation kind
The
Truth must dazzle gradually
Or
every man be blind --
To
‘solve’ the simile identified by the ‘as’ in line 5 (which the textbook
advocates), the definitions in [8] require us to select two ‘compared
objects’, such as ‘Lightning’ and ‘Truth’ -- or is it ‘surprise’?
For an ‘implied metaphor’, we could ‘guess’ on the basis of ‘blind’
that ‘Delight’ stands for ‘eyesight’, but that seems ironically
literal-minded for a poem expressly counseling against direct presentation.
3.11 On the other hand, we would not be encouraged to focus on an
association between a noun suggesting an ‘object’ and a verb suggesting an
activity. We would accordingly miss the process-centered analogy between
‘telling slant’ versus ‘Circuit’, along with the exquisite tension
between the process ‘ease’ versus the sudden event ‘Lightning’, whose
fantasy resolution is projected in the oxymoron ‘dazzle gradually’.
3.12 In sum, the
conventional terminology of humanities would seem to be just as riddled with
forced compromises and evasions as the conventional terminology of the social
sciences. The search for poetic ‘things’ and the ‘real objects’ they
refer to and compare thus distracts away from the real import of the entire
text as one integral metaphoric field wherein, as in Emily Dickinson’s poem,
precise equations are skillfully evaded and identities are deliberately effaced;
even the syntactic construction is blurred by her avoidance of conventional
punctuation. And if this metaphor ‘asserts’ anything, then surely that
‘Truth’ is not an ‘object’, but a process; and that this ‘Truth’ --
and any ‘Success’ or ‘Delight’ pertaining to it -- is precisely not
to be grasped through a commonsensical correspondence with ‘the real world’,
but through utterly unexpected and astonishing bursts. Emily Dickinson may well
have viewed her own poetry as one ‘slanted’ modality for such ‘Truth’,
but unlike lesser, more self-serving poets, she does not say
so by presenting us a tidy textbook simile or metaphor, she enacts it and has us enact it though
the engagement her text requires. And the engaged reader here lets loose of
identities, objects, and word-classes like conjunctions and prepositions, in
order to constitute an ephemeral but powerful ‘aesthetic terminology’ for
the unique experience.
4. Recent shifts
4.1 In both social science
and humanities, a general reassessment of epistemological groundwork has been
gaining momentum, with an increasingly conspicuous impact on terminology. In the
social sciences, this impact can be seen by contrasting three definitions of the
term ‘culture’:
[10] culture
is best seen as a set of control mechanisms -- plans, recipes, rules,
instructions, which are the principle bases for the specificity of behaviour and
an essential condition governing it. (Durbin 1973: 470)
[11] culture
refers to the learned repertory of thoughts and actions exhibited by members of
social groups. (Harris 1980: 47).
[12] Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal
suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture
to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental
science in search of laws but an interpretive one in search of meaning. (Geertz
1973: 5)
4.2 Marvin Harris’ definition [11] reflects his conviction -- which he
champions against the influence of natural science -- that ‘matter is no more
or less real than thoughts’ (1980: 30). Hence, the substance of culture is no
longer just ‘behaviour’, but ‘thoughts and actions’; and in place of
physicalist ‘mechanisms’ we have a more mental ‘repertory’. However, the
operational turn persists in the stipulation ‘exhibited’, which applies to
‘actions’, whereas ‘thoughts’ would need to reported or inferred. Still,
Harris’s motive for the dualism is not a division or transfer of allegiance,
but an essential step in his plan to maintain an important distinction between
what the members of a culture do or say (the ‘etic’ system) and what they think
they are doing or saying (the ‘emic’ system). Between these two systems lies
the slippage that enables ‘the mystification of social life’, which
‘ruling groups throughout history and prehistory have always promoted as their
first line of defense against actual or potential enemies’ (1980: 158). He
even diagnoses this slippage within social science itself, where ‘in the
contemporary political context, idealism and eclecticism serve to obscure the
very existence of ruling classes, thus shifting the blame for poverty,
exploitation, and environmental degradation from the exploiters to the
exploited’ and ‘preventing people from understanding the causes of war,
poverty, and exploitation’. In contrast, Harris’ own ‘cultural
materialism’
[13] holds that the elimination of exploitation will
never be achieved in a society which subverts the empirical and operational
integrity of social science for reasons of political expediency. Because without
the maintenance of an empiricist and operationalist critique, we shall never
know if what some call democracy is a new form of freedom or a new form of
slavery. (1980: 157f)
This
rationale for an operational terminology is utterly different from paying
tribute to a time-worn folk wisdom about scientific method. The explanatory task
is to create a discursive and terminological framework for representing
‘thoughts and actions’ so as to reflect not merely their valence defined by
the culture, but also the operational impact of material conditions like the
distribution of resources and power, and thereby to ‘account for the origin,
maintenance, and change of the global inventory of socio-cultural differences
and similarities’ (1980: 27). The terminology of social science would thus
have two correlated but distinctive modes of reference, the ‘emic’ and the
‘etic’ ones, whose mutual contrasts or gaps would be the focal points and
fulcrums for ‘a radical critique of the status quo’ (1980: 158). An eminent
case can be seen in the elaborate euphemisms adopted by cultures who practice
infanticide, e.g. when mothers term the death a ‘blessing’ or ‘God’s
will’ and the victims ‘little angels’ (Scherper-Hughes 1987).
4.3 In [12], Clifford Geertz indirectly suggests an analogy between
culture itself and a terminological system: the ‘webs of significance’ which
the social scientist’ must ‘interpret in search of their meaning’.
Finally, the object domain is no longer a constellation of observable
‘behaviours’ or ‘exhibited actions’, but their symbolic valences within
a complex system -- within a ‘cultural terminology’, so to speak. The
distinction between ‘cultural system’ versus ‘social system’, which we
saw to bear on the definitions of humanities versus social science (1.2.2),
would be
[14] to see the former as an ordered system of meaning
and of symbols in terms of which social interaction takes place; and to see the
latter as the pattern of social interaction itself [...] culture is the fabric
of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their action; social
structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social
relations. (Geertz 1973:144f)
Here
too, the terminology of social science has two correlated but distinctive sets
of referents, one for exhibited social interaction and one for its significances
-- whereby the actions themselves
function as culturally interpretable terms. Then, no discontinuity or disparity
arises when the discourse of the science accepts discourses of the culture into
its domain, viz.:
[15] Since communication acts, especially speech acts,
usually occur in human scenes of even moderate duration, all major etic rubrics
are to some degree built up out of the observation of communication events.
[...] studies of etic components (‘kinship, political ideology, national
ideology’, etc.) usually involve the identification of speech acts and other
communication events, [e.g.] in the description of domestic hierarchies by means
of requests and compliances to requests (Harris 1980: 54f)
4.4 The next step is to reflect on the discursive quality of social
science itself. For Geertz (1988: 5), one ‘crucial peculiarity of ethnographic
writing’ is ‘the fact’ that
[16] so
much of it consists of incorrigible assertion. The highly situated nature of
ethnographic description -- this ethnographer, in this time, in this place, with
these informants, these commitments, and these experiences, representative of a
particular culture, a member of a certain class -- gives to the bulk of what is
said a rather take-it-or-leave-it quality.
Due
to the usual object-oriented view of science, ‘anxieties about subjectivity’
have made it ‘extremely difficult to address’ ‘the question of how
ethnographical texts are “authorized”’ (1988:9). Usually,
[17] anthropologists [...] have traced their
difficulties in constructing such descriptions to the problematics of fieldwork
rather than to those of discourse. If the relation between observer and observed
(rapport) can be managed, the relation between the author and text (signature)
will follow -- it is thought -- of itself. (1988: 9f)
This
belief ‘thoroughly obscures’ ‘the oddity of constructing texts, ostensibly
scientific, out of experiences broadly biographical’ and of ‘finding
somewhere to stand in a text that is supposed to be at one and the same time an
intimate view and a cool assessment’ (ibid.). Geertz’s own revision centers
on his claim that the conviction carried by the ethnographic text does not rest
either on ‘factual substantiality’ or on ‘theoretical arguments’ but on
the authors’ ‘capacity to convince us that what they say is the result of
their having penetrated (or if you prefer, been penetrated by) another form of
life’ (1988: 4). He now proposes a close reading of ethnographic discourses to
understand why
[18] some ethnographers are more effective than others
in conveying in their prose the impression that they have had close contact with
far-out lives [...] As the criticism of fiction and poetry grows best out of an
imaginative engagement with fiction and poetry themselves, not out of imported
notions about what they should be, the criticism of anthropological writing
(which is in a strict sense neither, and in a broad sense both) ought to grow
out of a similar engagement with it, not out of preconceptions of what it must
look like to qualify as a science. (1988: 6)
4.5 Such deliberations are a clear signal of a basic reorientation which
could bring the social sciences much closer to the humanities. The conditions
for a rapproachement are also improving in the wake of a reorientation on the
humanistic side. Literary studies is currently reconsidering the special status
and qualities of literary discourse, and the implications of this status for
humanistic discourse about such discourse (Beaugrande 1988a). The problematics
of engagement are acknowledged on many levels. The reliance on the
object-oriented terminologies and methods, whether traditional or structuralist
(cf. 3.8f), is now receding, as we can sense in some recent statements of
‘literary theorists’ from the (erstwhile) ‘Yale’ school:
[19] methodology [...] promotes close reading [but] is
an evasion if it rests with a distinction between the language of description
and the language of the object described and privileges the former as a
scientific metalanguage (Hartman 1979:187, 1980:156)
[20] since it is assumedly scientific, the language of
a structuralist poetics would itself be definitely ‘outside’ literature, but
it would prescribe (in deliberate opposition to describe) a generalized and
ideal model of a discourse that defines itself without having to refer to
anything beyond its own boundaries (De Man 1983: 107)
[21] we should take back from the sciences what his
ours [and not] depend on the physical or human sciences for the model of a mechanism
that fascinates by its anonymous, compulsive, impersonal character (Hartman
1980: 270)
The
conventional activity of resolving the literary text through its similes,
metaphors, and so on (3.8ff) into an a world of implied real objects -- an
‘objective correlative’ (to borrow T.S. Eliot’s stodgy phrase) -- is
viewed with accelerating scepticism. The focus of concern is rather the
self-complicating nature of literary discourse, viz.:
[22] words
are only words, not things or feelings [...] all interpretation depends on the
antithetical relation between meanings, not on the supposed relation between a
text and its meaning (Bloom, 1979: 8f, 1975b: 76)
[23] language appears to be a restless medium that both transcends and negates its relation to the phenomenal world [...] the more pressure we put on a text to interpret or decode it, the more indeterminacy appears (Hartman 1980: 152, 202)
[24] literary language takes it for granted that sign
and meaning can never coincide [...] the sign points to something that differs
from its literal meaning and has for its function the thematization of this
difference (De Man 1983: 261, 209)
In
such an ambience, the ‘object domain’ to be addressed is not a pile of poems
and their pieces, but the experience of engaging with a discourse whose
aesthetic value and valence depend precisely on a pluralism of alternative
significances, as suggested by my sketch of the Emily Dickinson poem in 3.8-12
(cf. Beaugrande 1988a, 1988c). In particular, we would not be concerned to
decide just what is real or metaphoric, or to guess exactly what is implied, but
would attempt to experience the shifts and interchanges of identities which the
poem both portrays and enacts.
4.6 The key question for us today is how the intensifying engagements
with discourse in social science reflect upon those in the humanities and vice
versa. Admittedly, the mode of discourse on the one side differs conspicuously
from that of the other. But, as I have tried to indicate, the ways in which
cultural domains represent the ‘world’ also has important commonalities with
the ways in which humanistic domains like literature and poetry do:
4.6.1 both sides make strategic decisions about how
significances should be assigned to symbols and vice-versa;
4.6.2 both take it for granted that the actions which
humans perform and the objects with which they surround themselves are
meaningful well beyond observable physical conditions like force, motion, and
dimension;
4.6.3 both depend crucially on interaction and
communication to negotiate and regulate these significances and meanings;
4.6.4 both are fundamentally creative and innovative,
though the cultural side usually progresses in broader and slower cycles;
4.6.6 both present expansive interpretive problems to
the professional investigator.
4.7 It follows that both sides should have powerful motives to be wary of
the static, object-oriented terminology favoured by long tradition and
folk-wisdom (3.1). Which terms may prove appropriate and insightful must be
carefully assessed in respect to far more fundamental epistemological and
communicative issues and problems than the mere affixing of convenient labels to
things. This task was never more urgent than now, when the current reorientation
of social science and humanities has powerfully increased the awareness on both
sides of the centrality and complexity of discourse. Such an ambience is highly
auspicious for a new assessment not merely of the current terminologies, but of
the role of terminology at large in the expanding interaction among the
disciplines.
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