Archeological & AnthropologicalCritical Interventions

G. Thomas Goodnight

September 11, 2012

Metaphors for Discourse

Early American Communication

Democracy Identity

Kant

Cassirer

Langer

Symbolists Mind has forms. Practical de-ontology Mind emerges myth to symbolic form. Art is virtual performance of form.

Modern Thinking

Animal symbolicumLanguage, myth, art, and science aresymbolic forms richly grown from biological beginnings.

Myth, Metaphor and Language Is myth a corruption of experience by substituting words

that forget steps in the arrival of a sensuous truth?

“even the most primitive verbal utterance requires a transmutation of a certain cognitive or emotive experience into sound, i.e., into a medium that is foreign to the experience, and even quite disparate; just as the simplest mythical form can arise only by virtue of a transformation which removes a certain impression from the realm of the ordinary, the everyday and profane, and lifts it to the level of the ‘holy,’ the sphere of mythico-religious ‘significance.’ Cassirer, 88

Meaning is the product of focusing light on a subject, but the unmarked myth diffuses light. In the “ideational realm f myth and language there are always, besides those locations from which the strongest light proceeds, others that appear wrapped in profoundest darkness.” 1. The law of leveling and extinction of specific differences. Whole imminent in parts. 2. The law of participation and generation. The parts become transcended by the whole.

Relevance as a “momentary god.”

Modern Culture Wars Begin MATTHEW ARNOLD C. P. SNOW

“Dover Beech” elite genius vs. mass imitation

“Two Cultures” Science versus the Arts

1822-1888 1905-1980

HANNAH ARENDT 1906-1975

From ‘good society’ of enlightened individuals

to le peuple of the French Revolution.

Mass society is made possible by leisure. The

crowd is analogous to human condition of

mass society. Loneliness, flexibility,

excitability, lack of standards, consumption,

flabby judgment, egocentricity and “fateful

alienation from the world.”

HANNAH ARENDTNostalgia is a temptation for those who resist

mass culture by connecting with good society

elites of the past. On the other hand mass

society “wants not culture but entertainment”

to pass away vacant time seizing a hiatus in

the ‘metabolism of man with nature.’”

Arendt, 349 Consumption is “devouring” at

an increasing rate to fill vacant time.

Vita Activa / Vita Contempliva

Private Life & Public Life

“the thread of tradition is broken, and we must discover the past for ourselves—that is, read its authors as though nobody had ever read them before.” Arendt348

Philistinism is cultural value, half-baked.

the threats are not the elites but those who organize, disseminate, and change cultural objects” to make them palatable to masses. These “digesters, re-writers and changers of cultures” Arendt, 351.

PALIGENESIS “Especially in the magic realm, word magic is everywhere

accompanied by picture magic. The image, too, achieves its purely representative, specifically ‘aesthetic’ function only as the magic circle with which mythical consciousness surrounds it is broken, and it is recognized not as a mythico-magical form, but as a particular sort of formulation.” Cassirer 98

“If language is to grow into a vehicle of thought, an expression of concepts and judgments, this evolution can be achieved only at the price of forgoing the wealth and fullness of immediate experience. In the end, what is left is merely a bare skeleton.” Cassirer 98

Paligenesis “at once a sensuous and a spiritual reincarnation. This regeneration is achieved as language becomes an avenue of artistic expression. Here it recovers the fullness of life; but it is no longer a life mythically bound and fettered, but an aesthetically liberated life.” Cassirer 98

“Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music: - Do I wake or do I sleep?” Keats Ode to a Nightingale

HANNA ARENDT & MARTIN HEIDEGGER“Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of

the world; entertainment relates to people and is a

phenomenon of life. If life is no longer content with

the pleasure which is always coexistent with the toil

and labor inherent in the metabolism of man and

nature…then life may reach out for the things of the

world, may violate and consume them.” Arendt, 352.

“Culture can be safe only with those who love the

world for its own sake…” Arendt, 354.

Cultura—colere “to take care of and And preserve and cultivate.” 353

authenticity

LEO LOWENTHAL & C. WRIGHT MILLS

Despite a surfeit of new technology, “we are

lonelier that ever before—and certainly our

common human need for world peace seems

further removed than ever.” p. 335

More = Less Why?

Mass Media Fueled by Social Science: Critique “Communication has been almost

completely divested of its human content, a content suggested by the word itself. For true communication entails a communion, a sharing of innermost experience. The dehumanization of communication has resulted from its annexation by the media of modern culture” as written up by social scientists. p. 336

“Mass communication relies upon the ideological sanction of individual autonomy in the very process of exploiting individuality to serve mass culture.” p. 336

EZRA POUND “(WHO IN SPITE OF HIS ABBERATIONS, RETAIN THE STATURE OF THE POET AND THE HUMANIST).”

“As language becomes the most powerful

instrument of perfidy, so language alone can

riddle and cut through the meshes. Used to

conceal meaning, used to blur meaning, used

to produce the complete and utter inferno of

the past century…against which, SOLEY a care

for language, for accurate registration of

language avails.” p. 339

As one speaks, so he is. Seneca

But does language cure loneliness?What is the word to the crowd?

Anthropology of Communication 1. Concerned with language as a historical product and a ‘department’ of

culture, where communication is related to “process and event.” 2. Saussure structuralist formalism. Sapir concern with “use of language in

personality, in maintenance of social roles, in abuse and derogation, in poetry, in drum and other instrumental communication.” Hymes, 3

3. American stress functionalism which opposes cognitive versus expressive approaches to language in the process and practices of communication.

4. Synchrony identifies structure of language as form. Diachrony investigates its divergence in use, change over time, and use over and against multiple codes making up regional communication.

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis “The Sapir-Whorf theory, named after the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, is a mould theory of

language. Writing in 1929, Sapir argued in a classic passage that: “’Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood,

but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)’”

“This position was extended in the 1930s by his student Whorf, who, in another widely cited passage, declared that: “’We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of

phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf 1940, pp. 213-14; his emphasis)’”

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/short/whorf.html

Anthropological Inquiry What constitutes the function efficiency of communicative use of language

in society? How does language mark hierarchy and preserve order within social

practices and customs of usage? What distinguishes (insect, fish, bird, warm-blooded)from early hominid

from fully human communication? What are paralinguistic forms of communication—and how do analog and

digitally formed communication work together and apart? How do ethnographers recognize cultural differences in kinesics? How do communicative modalities and events emerge, sort, and change?

Communication Enclosed and Escaped “Communication is the basic metaphor for the human interpretation of experience, and

anything may count as communicative, if a person takes it as so. Not everything is so taken.”

“The difficulties of determining the boundaries to communication in a community do not justify ignoring them.” Hymes, 18

Anthropology is concerned with “the growth and spread, the attrition and decline, of systems of shared meanings manifest in cultural objects, and with the dynamics of their use in personal lives.” Hymes, 19.

An anthropological approach regards communication in society as problematic. Ethnography discovers patterns in actual communities.

Intrapersonal? Dreams? Myths? Artistic transformation? *Critical Communication Inquiry studies the discovered and undiscovered boundaries of

communication for a time and place, a way of being, for human beings as finite in time.

Sunset?

Ritual confirms meaningful reading as communication.

An Ethnographic Approach to Communication

“1. What are the communicative events, and their components, in a community?

2. What are the relationships among them? 3. What capabilities and states do they have, in general, and in particular

events? 4. How do they work?” Hymes, 25. The thrust of such work is to see how signs as codes are transmogrified into

messages that serve as symbols thereby generating a Communicative Event. “The concept of message is taken as implying the sharing (real or imputed) of (1) a code (or codes) in terms of which a message

is intelligible to (2) participants, minimally an addressor and addressee (who may be the same person), in (3) an event constituted by transmission of the message, and characterized by (4) a channel or challenges, (5) a setting or context, (6) a definite form or shape to the mssage, and (7) a topic and comment, (the message says something about something).” Hymes, 25-26.

HANS BLUMENBERG

An Anthropological Approach studies communicative

events to appreciate:

1. The significance of overlooked forms across temporal

dynamics and cultural roles.

2. The interchanges between universal attributions

generated from local metaphors.

3. The language of symbolic spheres as they fuel

practice, expand and connect.

4. The enduring but varying attributions of

communication that are taken for granted as

legitimate.

1920 - 1996

Critical Communication Inquiry as appreciative intervention.

The lack of fixed biological dispositions Human beings must act through

disciplining imperfect knowledge with progressive measures of control.

The uncanny is converted to the familiar by representation.

Human communication is imperfect but the consequences are absolute.

Temporal disjunction between knowledge as theory and action as practice.

Know how.

Human beings always imitate and very to adapt traditions and overcome difficulties.

“Human relation to reality is indirect, circumstantial, delayed, selective,” and metaphorical.” 439

Roles are tried on and changed by convention. Expectations change; satisfactions vary.

Knowledge and action situated in rhythms, pauses, accelerations.

Know why.

Archeological Approach to Communication

The history of ideas versus the archeology of knowledge. Ideal vs. Material

CRITICAL COMMUNICATION INQUIRY IN THE EXERCISE OF HEGEMONIC CRITIQUE

Representations are discursive activities that articulate

power relationships.

Institutions distribute power through rationalizations that

legitimate confinement, constraint, and resources.

Skepticism turns toward master narratives in play and

inward into communicative norms.

Governmentality is the process of justifying interventions to

preserve social order.

Madness is an exemplary case of rules developed over time.

Archeologist does not share the time, but comes to

communication as fragments of a time to be reassembled.

Critical Communication Inquiry PERSPECTIVE BY INCONGRUITY SURVEILLANCE & RATIONALIZATION

Appreciate human ingenuity & change. Advance resistance & skepticism

MetaphorsTHE LIBRARY THE ARCHIVE

Expert-client relationship to provide access to preserved knowledge.

Duty divided between expert catalogue and training clients.

Libraries adapt to local values in formulating rules and events.

Literacy broadens access to the human condition trumping class.

Space and time are adapted to categories of clientele.

The archive is a structure dedicated to preserving materials of reference and representation.

Archive collects documents from a time that is special and over.

Reconstructive work is a matter of genealogy.

Synchrony discovers links among rationalized justifications at one time; diachrony, change over time.

Intervention NEWT GINGRICH

GENEALOGY OF THE DEMAGOGUE

GABRIELLE GIFFORDS

THE HEROIC & LYRIC ELOQUENCE

Thought-style Set Untimely Rhetoric

David Rotchild, The Signal, January 24

As Gingrich’s fate rises, so does Obama’s              

Dynastic Dynamics?

Critique needed

Propaganda Remix: Demagoguery? PARODIC PHOTOSHOP FACT CHECK POWER

Freud’s Oedipal Struggle Lacan’s Mirror Phase

PROPANDADA & THE HYPER REAL INFORMATION RECASTS SURFACE COMPLEX CODING