beyond logic: language and discourse

"A particular language, of a particular culture, in relation to a particular person with [her or] his particular history constitutes an implicit theory for that person . . . . [T]he observer [whether a cultural insider or an outsider] universally affects the data and becomes part of the data."
--Kenneth Lee Pike,
Linguistic Concepts

"Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging of dialectical perspectives."
--Jacqueline Jones Royster,
"When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own"

When we come to language, to discourse even, too often our temptation is to assume (as with Aristotle) that we ourselves are objective with no need to change because of anyone else.  Or we may read something written by someone like Aristotle or Saint Paul translated into our own language so (dynamically equivalent to their Greek) that we begin to think they've written to us or have something to say that sounds like Nature or nature's God so that to deviate from that would make us natural deviants, or something.

Here are three anecdotes from my experience to begin to illustrate.  One's a boring linguistics study; another is a poignant story from my doctoral studies in rhetorics and feminisms; and the third is from my work in adult language learning:

1

We don't always say what we believe:

As a linguist, I have used on occasion a technique for teasing out preferences and prejudices of people towards languages and speakers of those languages. (The technical name is the "matched-guise procedure" as developed by Wallace Lambert and Richard Tucker to get at attitudes in Canada towards speakers of French and English respectively). In one case, I was interested in how learners of English as a foreign language (in their own countries) might have attitudes towards native speakers of English (outside the learners' own countries). So, on a direct questionnaire, I asked scores of EFL learners, "Where is the best English spoken?". When the vast majority of this group declared either "the U.K." or "the U.S.A." - then I played for them tapes of native speakers of English talking about a benign topic. And then the EFL learners rated the speakers they heard in terms of intelligence, friendliness, clarity of speech, and so forth. (The guise, or the trick, was this: The English speakers were actors I had hired to speak in various varieties of the language. They talked using American English, they talked using British English, and they talked using other Englishes as well.  These actors, by putting on the different Englishes, had managed to fool not only all the members of the British Club in Dallas but also all of the professional linguists who listened to tapes of the actors played at a nearby US university as well). Here's the other bit of detail; all of the EFL learners were ethnically Chinese (from China, from Taiwan, from British Hong Kong, from Singapore, from Malaysia, and from Brunei). They'd all read or been told by someone that the best English was spoken in the USA or the UK.  (Aristotle and Saint Paul were not the ones who wrote the facts about the location of the best English, but someone or another on the Voice of America or the BBC had discussed the nature of good English within earshot of the Chinese listeners - and hearing they had believed).  Not surprisingly, all of the EFL learners from former British colonies (Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Brunei) declared that people in the UK used the best English. But to my great surprise, this same group unanimously and anonymously did not rate English speakers from the UK nearly as high as they rated speakers from the USA. In other words, those persons of Chinese ethnicity raised in and around British school systems (and more likely to listen to the BBC than to VOA) were predisposed to public praise of the "Queen's English." And yet privately they betrayed a preference for the American superpower style of the English language.

The observer, the listener, may say they believe one thing but will, at times, contradict their statements with a more profound, more deeply hidden belief.  What is "objective" for these observers?  And are they being honest in the first place, or more honest in the second instance of confession?

2

We often want the privilege of hearing authoritative canonical texts as applying to us, especially when they authorize us to speak about those "others" whom the same text silences naturally:

Just weeks into "Composition Theory," in my first semester of doctoral coursework at Texas Christian University, the prof assigned Jacqueline Jones Royster's, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own." The essay is a call to scholarly subjectivity, to willingness to use one's own voice (and voices) when speaking about one's scholarly interests.  It's also a call to those who study and speak about groups of people they themselves are not members of.  For example, a white male scholar may write with some authority about black women who may not be as scholarly.  Royster, the author of the essay, researches and teaches using various voices.  These voices include those of the (1) expert in her discipline and of (2) the subjects she studies in her discipline. Her discipline is English studies, with particular focuses in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies.  One of Royster's books she has titled, Traces of a Stream:  Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women.  By now, you may have guessed she's a researching, published and teaching scholar.  And you may have realized she's African American, a woman in the stream of the group that she studies.  Well, in the course I was taking, the prof had asked the class to write a response to Royster's essay.  And the prof had asked me to read my response aloud to the class.  To respond to Royster's essay calling for subjectivity, I had written some of my own story.  And, at the end of my response, reading aloud unrehearsed as instructed, I began to become emotional, because I was (in part) acknowledging a mentor whose sexual orientation is different from my own and was acknowledging his passing after nine faithful years with his partner, who had two years prior, died of AIDS.  My mentor died of AIDS too, so I was trying to read what I'd written of the influence that this former boss of mine had had on me.   And how his partner's death and his own dying had figured, also, into his enduring influence.  I could hardly read as tears edged their way past the mop of my own fingers on my face.  But to my great surprise, another student in the class took great offense.  He'd read (he said) that discussions of homosexuality (when our class was reading on race) was inappropriate; that my reading of my own paper was maudlin; that the professor by calling on me did not know how to profess; and that, frankly, Jacqueline Jones Royster was sentimental, unobjective, and ironically exclusionary.  (The reactionary classmate marched off to the English Department chair and filed a formal complaint.  He also sent an email to Royster, demanding that she clarify how his white male voice was any less valid than hers.  Unfortunately, and this is one of the lessons for me in all of that:  the dominant white male had heard from someone - maybe Aristotle, maybe Saint Paul - that his voice was objective, and was to be heard.  But, of course, as much as Aristotle taught objectivity to his elite Greek male students, and even though Paul urged λογικὴ or "logike" of some of readers (first Jews then Greek), my classmate seems to have understood this as applying directly to himself.  The Nature of Reality as Written was firm, and firmly coldly objective - to think otherwise would require a change or a mess of changes within oneself.  (And it was too close to qualifying exams for that nonsense).

3

We can't always predict how much change (and how quickly and how sustained) our subjective experiences will effect.

Every once and a while, those of us working in the university level program for learning English as an additional language will meet remarkable learners.  "Sasha" is one of the remarkable ones.  Having studied no English prior to arriving in the USA from her Eastern European home, she needed only 6 weeks to become proficient enough in English to pursue a degree program full-time using that new language only.  For most people beginning in English, it takes from 9 to 12 months to do what Sasha did in a month and a half.  Sure, we experts in language learning and acquisition and teaching gave all the students our best.  But what made Sasha do remarkably and measurably better than her classmates?  She fell in love.  And she would only speak in English with her new friend (and would only correspond in English writing with him).  She fell in love with her textbooks and the multimedia surrounding them too.  She'd read books that had been translated, sometime variously translated, into English from her Eastern European language.  She'd compose poetry, in English, English as she was growing to know it.  She'd speak with a flawless American English accent the last time I saw her, four years later at her undergraduate graduation before she left again for home.  She was an adult human convert.  (I did my best to get my staff of instructors to get the other English students paying attention to Sasha and her learning.  Based on all of our expert learning and research about language acquisition and learning, how could we have predicted what she did and who she was?  What's love got to do with it?  There have been other Sasha's and not all with a first language that's IndoEuropean.  And it sometimes is love of music, and love of dance, and love of sports, as much as love of that boyfriend or girlfriend that seems part and parcel of the deep change.  But really, what's love got to do with it?)

Miscellany: Reader's Game

Yes I do - I do read your blog - which blurs those boundaries between screen and page and digits and ink and conversation and literature and who you really are in your "real" life and who you are blogging, really. So, after going to the library with my eldest daughter this week, and hearing how she chooses books, I thought of a game for you and me. She chooses good books by opening some of the first pages and reading at random then any two paragraphs in sequence. By her method, I've found several wonderful books by a few incredible writers.

The game, then, is Guess whose book I've chosen.

Here are your clues - two paragraphs from two different books (the second is my mother's Mother's Day gift):

1.

A few weeks later, the same thing happened to Maw Hamrick, which is what I call Hugh's mother, Joan.  Her worm was a bit shorter than her son's, not that size really matters.  If I was a child and saw something creeping out of a hole in my mother's leg, I would march to the nearest orphanage and put myself up for adoption.  I would burn all pictures of her, destroy anything she had ever given me, and start all over because that is simply disgusting.  A dad can be crawling with parasites and somehow it's OK, but on a mom, or any woman, really, it's unforgiveable.

"Well, that's sort of chauvinistic of you, don't you think?" Maw Hamrick said.  She'd come to Paris for Christmas, as had Lisa and her husband, Bob.  The gifts had been opened, and she was collecting the used wrapping paper and ironing it flat with her hands.  "It was just a guinea worm.  People got them all the time."  She looked towards the kitchen, where Hugh was doing something to a goose. "Honey, where do you want me to put this paper?"

2.

Dear Sidney,

Susan Scott is a wonder.  We sold over forty copies of the book, which was very pleasant, but much more thrilling from my standpoint was the food.  Susan managed to procure ration coupons for icing sugar and real eggs for the meringue.  If all her literary luncheons are going to achieve these heights, I won't mind touring about the country.  Do you suppose that a lavish bonus could spur her on to butter?  Let's try it--you may deduct the money from my royalties.

Now for my grim news.  You asked me how work on my new book is progressing.  Sidney, it isn't.

When I went to the store to buy book 2 for Mom, there was an updated edition in which the second author praises her co-author who had just passed away.  Here, then, are additional clues for you from book 2 (a passing from fiction to factual reflections):

I grew up in a family of storytellers. In my family, there is no such thing as a yes-or-no question, a simple answer, or a bald fact. You can't even ask someone to pass the butter without incurring a story, and major holidays always end with the women gathered around the table, weeping with laughter, while our husbands sit in the next room holding their heads.

Obviously, with so much practice, my family is rich in fine storytellers but my aunt Mary Ann Shaffer was the jewel in our crown. What was it about Mary Ann turning a tale? She was one of the one of the wittiest people I ever met, but wit wants the essence of her gift. Her language was lustrous, her timing was exquisite, her delivery was a thing of beaty and a joy forever, but none of these reaches to the center of her charm. That, it seems to me, was her willingness to be delighted by people--their phrases, their frailties, and their fleeting moments of granduer. Together with her delight was the impluse to share it; she told stories so that the rest of us, listening, could be delighted with her, and, time and again, she succeeded.

Of course, now you have the name of one of the authors of book 2, so the game's almost done for you, right? Let me give one more hint of the wonder of the book:  it's a novel composed entirely of letters (except for those author's notes), which means you'll be reading somebody else's mail if you read it (and reading somebody's praise for somebody who might just have been delighted with you, and with me).

So who wrote these books, and what are they?

Aristotle on Love

Aristotle on the Golden Rule:
Eavesdropping on (Male-Logical-Ethnocentric Ethical) Love

In a post yesterday, we said far too much about us and, therefore, hardly anything about Aristotle. (We were so amused by our own categories of history and fiction, religion and secularism, politics and prayer, and law and love - that we ran out of attention to the father of our logic and how we think it must derive his ethics for us. Yes, I'm talking about how we tend to co-opt a method of knowing in order, for example, to rob Jesus of the Golden Rule as if that's our moral obligation. "But we're only being objective," we protest, "merely investigating the nature of what's really real." We hardly think about why Aristotle hated Heraclitus and why Einstein loved Heisenberg and why Toni Morrison's blind, wise woman, who is "the daughter of slaves, black, American, and . . . alone in a small house outside of town," will, without forgoing much at all, kindly point out the fact that the "systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.") So today let's get right to Aristotle on Love.

Let's let Aristotle speak for himself, shall we? Translator Harris Rackham does. (But aren't we amused that Jeffrey M. Perl and his friends suggest that Aristotle and his translators need anything more than logic? Perl and his pals recognize nuance, complexity, and un-forgone mid-wifery properties: "It takes a rhetorician more ingenious than Aristotle to refigure 'a lover of war' as an isolated pawn — though, as Harris Rackham demonstrates, a translator can devise a sort of logic: 'For one by nature unsocial is also a "lover of war" . . . inasmuch as he is solitary, like an isolated piece at draughts.'" Yes, I know, I'm suggesting we're not so much going to listen to Aristotle's original authorial intent as much as we are going to listen with our own. And yet Krista Ratcliffe suggested this long ago: our recovering Rhetorical Listening from its banishment by Aristotle so as to authorize eavesdroppers). When Aristotle says one thing, Rackham gets it as that very same (dynamically equivalent) thing (and the Greek reader, especially the one of racial and sexual and academic privilege should not make an error). When the author writes, the invisible translator renders precisely. First a glossary, then Aristotle:

φιλίας [philías] = "friendship"
φιλήσεις [philēsis] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "affection"
φιλοῦντες [philoũntes] = "friendship"
ἀντιφίλησις [anti-phílēsis] = "reciprocal affection"

φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = "friend"
φιλούμενός [philoúmenós] = (person) "loved"

φιλεῖται [phileĩtai] = (to be) "loved"
φιλητοῖς [philētoĩs] = "loveable"
φιλοῦσιν [philoũsin] = (to) "love"
φιλοῦσι [philoũsi] = (to) "form attachments"

ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to) "enjoy"
ἀγαπῶσι [agapōsi] = (to be) "fond of"
ἀγαπᾷ [agapã] = (to) "care for"

ἐρωτικοὶ [érōtikoì] = "to fall in love"
ἐρωτικῆς [érōtikēs] = "love"

ἀλλήλους ... καθ’ αὑτοὺς
[allēlous ... kath' aűtoùs]
= "each other in themselves"

Now listen:

Now these qualities differ in kind; hence the affection [φιλήσεις] or friendship [φιλίαι] they occasion may differ in kind also. There are accordingly three kinds of friendship [φιλίας], corresponding in number to the three lovable [φιλητοῖς] qualities; since a reciprocal affection [ἀντιφίλησις], known to either party, can be based on each of the three, and when men love each other [φιλοῦντες ἀλλήλους], they wish each other well in respect of the quality which is the ground of their friendship [φιλοῦσιν]. So that there is a different species of will-wishing in each case.

Thus friends whose affection [φιλοῦντες] is based on utility do not love each other in themselves [ἀλλήλους οὐ καθ’ αὑτοὺς φιλοῦσιν], but in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other [ἀλλήλων].

And similarly with those whose friendship is based on pleasure: for instance, we enjoy [ἀγαπῶσι] the society of witty people not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us.

Hence in a friendship [φιλοῦντες] based on utility or on pleasure men love their friend for their own good or their own pleasure, and not as being the person loved [φιλούμενός], but as useful or agreeable. And therefore these friendships [φιλίαι] are based on an accident, since the friend [φιλούμενος] is not loved [φιλεῖται] for being what he is, but as affording some benefit or pleasure as the case may be.

There's more in the Nichomachean Ethics:

And the tastes of youth change quickly. Also the young are prone to fall in love [ἐρωτικοὶ], as love [ἐρωτικῆς] is chiefly guided by emotion, and grounded on pleasure; hence they form attachments [φιλοῦσι] quickly and give them up quickly, often changing before the day is out.

The young do desire to pass their time in their friend's [φιλίαν] company, for that is how they get the enjoyment of their friendship [φιλίαν]. The perfect form of friendship [φιλία] is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends [φίλοις] wish each alike the other's good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends [φίλοι] for their friends' sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship [φιλία] of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. And each is good relatively to his friend as well as absolutely, since the good are both good absolutely and profitable to each other. And each is pleasant in both ways also, since good men are pleasant both absolutely and to each other; for everyone is pleased by his own actions, and therefore by actions that resemble his own, and the actions of all good men are the same or similar.—

And there's the distinctive distinguishing of love based on science - far separate from that of the poets and pseudo scientists like Heraclitus and Heisenburg - who know nothing of logic or objectivity:

Some try to find a more profound and scientific explanation of the nature of affection. Euripides writes that ‘Earth yearneth for the rain’ when dried up, ‘And the majestic Heaven when filled with rain Yearneth to fall to Earth.’ Heracleitus says, ‘Opposition unites,’ and ‘The fairest harmony springs from difference,’ and ‘'Tis strife that makes the world go on.’ Others maintain the opposite view, notably Empedocles, who declares that ‘Like seeks after like.’

Dismissing then these scientific speculations as not germane to our present enquiry, let us investigate the human aspect of the matter, and examine the questions that relate to man's character and emotions: for instance, whether all men are capable of friendship [φιλία], or bad men cannot be friends [φίλους]; and whether there is only one sort of friendship [ἓν εἶδος τῆς φιλίας] or several [πλείω]. Those who hold that all friendship [...] is of the same kind [οἰόμενοι] because friendship [...] admits of degree, are relying on an insufficient proof, for things of different kinds also can differ [τὰ ἕτερα] in degree. But this has been discussed before.

Perhaps the answer to these questions will appear if we ascertain what sort of things arouse liking or love. It seems that not everything is loved [οὐ πᾶν φιλεῖσθαι], but only what is lovable [τὸ φιλητόν], and that this is either what is good, or pleasant, or useful. But useful may be taken to mean productive of some good or of pleasure, so that the class of things lovable [ὥστε φιλητὰ] as ends is reduced to the good and the pleasant.

But before we leave there's that hint at a Corinthian love, that Christian one, of that man named Paul, who begins to stretch in an other way Aristotle's more objective "agape" love (before he tells the women to be silent in the church and to ask their husbands at home). Says Aristotle, in his Ethics, logically avoiding hyperbole and other extremes:

The man who exceeds these limits cares [ἀγαπᾷ] more for such pleasures than they are worth. Not so the temperate man; he only cares for them as right principle enjoins. . . . Men who have inherited a fortune are reputed to be more liberal than those who have made one, since they have never known what it is to want; moreover everybody is specially fond of [ἀγαπῶσι] a thing that is his own creation: parents and poets show this. But it is not easy for a liberal man to be rich, since he is not good either at getting money or at keeping it, while he is profuse in spending it and values wealth not for its own sake but as a means of giving.

That brings us back to Jesus, to the Golden Rule, to the various translations of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John of the conversations and questions. They are not so logical, so predictable, so categorical. They listen, with their own intent, as they listen to Moses, and to God. Have we answered all of our questions about Love, and the Law? Do we know its shape definitively (as if Greek male elite ethically)?

Would we recognize that "The love of God and for God resides in a gap"? Why are we listening to silenced women, like Julia Kristeva with her Tales of Love and their erotic, apagetic, philetic ambiguities? Like Jane's attention to ... Maggi Dawn and Jeanette Winterson and Simone preaching ... Bits and pieces, fragments, gaps, inbetween.

Who is my "neighbor"? and what must that mean?, asks Suzanne.

If we keep up this nonsense, we'll never listen to Aristotle only and only to his original designs on the Golden Rule.