objective, observation, occidentalism, onomatopoeia, ontology, ontotheology, orientation, orthography, ostension
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 79) 'We cherish the behaviorist experiment precisely because it illustrates the relation between the circumference and the circumscribed in mechanistic terms; and because the sharpest instance of the way in which the altering of the scenic scope affects the interpretation of the act is to be found in the shift from teleological to mechanistic philosophies. Christian theology, in stressing the rational, personal, and purposive aspects of the Creation as the embodiment of the Creator's pervasive will, had treated such principles as scenic, That is, they were not merely traits of human beings, but extended to the outer circumference of the ultimate ground. Hence, by the logic of the scene-act ratio, they were taken as basic to the constitution of human motives, and could be "deduced" from the nature of God as an objective, extrinsic principle defining the nature of human acts. But when the circumference was narrowed to naturalistic limits, the "Creator" was left out or account, and only the "Creation" remained (remained not as an "act", however, but as a concatenation of motions)' .
(Burke 1945: 140) 'Whenever in philosophy I see two terms, of opposite and equal importance, being merged into a third term that will somehow contain the nature of both, I always ask myself: "Which of the two equal terms was foremost?" For I will expect the genius of this term to weight the third term (as Schelling's third term, "subject-object", supposedly "indifferent" to the two terms "subject" and "object" which it combines, is more "subjective" than "objective", even though he would further complicate matters by distinguishing between a "subjective subject-object" and an "objective subject-object")' .
(Booth 1974: 16-7) 'One can easily construct a long column of opposed terms that roughly match the original and entirely misleading split between fact and value: objective versus subjective, matter versus mind, mechanism versus vitalism, scientific reason versus faith or "the heart" or "the wisdom of the body"- and so on. The giveaway in such matters is that the column can be turned into two double columns, all of the terms made useful to either scientismist or irrationalist, just by adding proper adjectives to the opponent's terms. Often one needs no better adjective than a mere mere : my side obtains knowledge of facts, yours asserts mere value. Or: my side respects values, yours deals with mere facts. My side works with reason, yours with mere, or blind, faith' .
(Booth 1974: 20-1) 'There have been countless ... demonstrations that objective scholarship is not and cannot be objective in the sense of being free of value judgments.... Noam Chomsky's famous essay "Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" partially undermines itself with this failure. Chomsky shows easily and conclusively that "liberal scholars", most notably Gabriel Jackson in his study on study on Spain in the 30s, discover what their value commitments allow them to discover, and they overlook what their values lead them to overlook. But Chomsky them writes as of he has earned, with this restoration of values into historical study, the right to impose his own values on history -- and without even as much effort to grapple with opposing views as was made by Jackson.... Chomsky often talks as if all attempts to write honest history are really and always mere disguises for value commitments and that therefore he has a right to push his value button- "down with the 'liberal' defense of capitalism"- and see what is churned out. His obligation, I would have thought, was to give his readers good reasons why his version of the war is in some historical sense better than Jackson's, and not just one more passionate voice to be measured in decibels' .
(Spellmeyer 1993: 19) Spellmeyer conceives of 'language as a way of deliberately seeing and acting on a world that is recast through seeing and acting themselves. While no one invents language ex nihilo, while no one speaks without institutional constraints -- and while, in addition, the speaking self is to some degree a linguistic "construction" -- the act of speaking or writing always exposes past knowledge to the ordeal of the present, exposes the general to the burden of the particular, and the conventional to the test of the extraconventional. Precisely because writing reconceives the given, it involves still another activity overlooked by the proponents of objective assessment -- I mean, of course persuasion. Beginning with difference, and proceeding through difference, writing constantly seeks to overcome difference retrospectively by presenting the writer's insights to an audience whose assent must be secured' .
(Lanham 1976: 20-1) 'Of all the unexamined premises rhetoric took over from serious philosophy, clarity has perplexed the most. Since Aristotle it has figured as a central goal for verbal expression. Theorists, without giving the matter special thought, seem to have considered clarity a property of the text. Yet clarity describes many styles and audiences. Used to describe a particular verbal configuration, clarity cannot mean anything at all....The most intellectual, conceptual, scientific virtue of style turns out to be entirely emotional. If everyone is happy, clarity has arrived.... Clarity is at least partly, and often predominantly, a temporal phenomenon, a problem of period. One century's brightness becomes murk for the next. Clarity no more permits objective standards than custom itself' .
(Ijsseling 1976: 125) 'Philosophers who conceive of philosophy as philosophy of language -- both objective and subjective genitive -- are convinced that something can only be delineated by language signs' .
(White 1974: 395) 'It is difficult to get an objective history of a scholarly discipline, because if the historian is himself a practitioner of it, he is likely to be a devotee of one or another of its sects and hence biased; and if he is not a practitioner, he is unlikely to have the expertise necessary to distinguish between the significant and the insignificant events of the field's development' .
(Burke 1945: 187) 'By utilizing a function of our term agent , we can transform this problem into a solution. Namely: we can say that people interpret natural sequences in terms of cause and effect not because of something in the natural scene requiring this interpretation, but because they are the sort of agents that see things in terms of necessary relations . In this view we do not derive our ideas of cause and effect from experience; all that we can derive from experience is the observation that certain happenings seem likely to follow certain happenings. But our ideas of cause and effect are derived from the nature of the mind' .
(Burke 1945: 26) 'There is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation. This is the "tribal" or "familial" sort, the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause....The Aristotelian genus is originally not a logical, but a biological, concept' .
(Coates and Cameron 1988: 68) Analysts use observation only techniques .
Under construction
(Bathrick 1992: 328) 'The critique of essentialism and universalism has been vital in opening up the study of literature and history to a heterogeneity of theme, perspective, constituency, medium; and of political, national, and sexual identities. At the same time, the emergence of once silenced and still oppressed voices within the critical domain of cultural discourse has politicized and helped position and certify those identities as part of a striving for empowerment.... In the area of ethnic studies, African American, Third World, and Latin American programs have proffered an internal critique of the ethnocentric Occidentalism of much of humanist scholarly and curricular organization in academic institutions or, more modestly, have sought to resituate prevailing discourses and canons in relation to what and who have been excluded by dominant voices' .
Under construction
(Longacre 1983: 25-38) Longacre outlines several features of peak as a zone of turbulence: rhetorical underlining, concentration of participants, heightened vividness, change of pace, change of vantage point or orientation, incidence of special particles and of onomatopoeia .
Under construction
Under construction
(Derrida 1986a: 93) 'There are two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology -- in other words, throughout his entire history -- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play' .
Under construction
(Burke 1945: 54) 'From such ambiguity is derived that irony of historical development whereby the very strength in the affirming of a given term may the better enable men to make a world that departs from it. For the affirming of the term as their god-term enables men to go far afield without sensing a loss of orientation. And by the time the extent of their departure is enough to become generally obvious, the stability of the new order they have built in the name of the old order gives them the strength to abandon their old god-term and adopt another' .
(Longacre 1983: 3) 'To begin with, we can classify all possible discourses according to two basic parameters: contingent temporal succession and agent orientation.... Narrative discourse ... is plus in respect to both parameters. Procedural discourse ... is plus in respect to contingent succession ... but minus in respect to the agent orientation ... Behavioral discourse is minus in regard to contingent succession but plus in regard to agent orientation ... Expository discourse is minus in respect to both parameters' .
(Longacre 1983: 25-38) Longacre outlines several features of peak as a zone of turbulence: rhetorical underlining, concentration of participants, heightened vividness, change of pace, change of vantage point or orientation, incidence of special particles and of onomatopoeia .
(Lanham 1993: 129-30) 'The late, and now much disputed, literary theorist Paul de Man spent a lot of time glossing the great American rhetorician Kenneth Burke's apothegm that "every way of seeing is a way of not seeing". Electronic text allows us to see that this version of "blindness" and "insight" is often a matter of scaling-choice. That choice we can now manipulate ourselves; we can dial in a different scale of difficulty, of "readability". That will often defuse, if not solve, the difficulty. If scaling won't work, and we come to an irreducible aporia, we can include both alternatives in a toggle switch and move on. Problem solved. Electronic text is intrinsically a bi-stable medium, one made to accommodate exactly this difficulty. Texts, Derrida argued, are not "a store of ready-made 'concepts' but an activity resistant to any such reductive ploy". No need to argue that for electronic text- it is manifestly true. The same popular commentary on deconstruction defines it this way: "Deconstruction is therefore an activity performed by texts which in the end have to acknowledge their own partial complicity with what they denounce" Kenneth Burke said the same thing in 1935, but without the political spin of "denunciation" and "complicity": "Even when one attempts to criticize the structure, one must leave some parts of it intact in order to have a point of reference for his criticism. However, for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution". Electronic text, by its very manipulability, builds in a maximum of the textual self-consciousness such declarations point to. Add all this reflection together (and a lot more one could do), and it is hard not to think that, at the end of the day, electronic text will seem the natural fulfillment of much current literary theory, and resolve many of its questions' .
Under construction
(Derrida 1986b: 100) Derrida says that for Saussure, 'the introduction of scientific exigencies and the taste for exactitude into ordinary phonetic writing must be avoided. In this case, rationality would bring death, desolation, and monstrousness. That is why common orthography must be kept away from the notations of the linguist and the multiplying of diacritical signs must be avoided' .
Under construction
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 49) 'We will call such behaviour -- behaviour which makes manifest an intention to make something manifest -- ostensive behaviour or simply ostension. Showing someone something is a case of ostension' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 60-1) 'To communicate by ostension is to produce a certain stimulus with the aim of fulfilling an informative intention, and intending moreover ... to make it mutually manifest to audience and communicator that the communicator has this informative intention' .
(Sperber and Wilson 1988: 50) 'The main thesis of this book is that an act of ostension carries a guarantee of relevance, and that this fact -- which we will call the principle of relevance -- makes manifest the intention behind the ostension. We believe that it is this principle of relevance that is needed to make the inferential model of communication explanatory' .
Last Modified: July-12-96 16:47:9
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