On Difficulty : And Other Essays

189 Pages·2013·1.15 MB·English

by  Steiner

On Difficulty
and Other Essays
George Steiner
For
Donald and Lois MacKinnon
Contents
Preface
1 Text and Context (1976)
2 On Difficulty (1978)
3 Language and Psychoanalysis (1976)
4 The Distribution of Discourse (1978)
5 Eros and Idiom (1975)
6 Whorf, Chomsky, and the Student of Literature (1974)
7 Dante Now: The Gossip of Eternity (1976)
8 After the Book? (1972)
Index of proper names
Preface
Administrative and bureaucratic practice has disseminated the terms ‘working
papers’ or, notably in American idiom, ‘position papers’. These terms could be
useful in defining a certain stage and style of intellectual argument. A ‘working’
or a ‘position’ paper puts forward a point of view, an analysis, a proposal, in a
form which may be comprehensive and assertive. It seeks to clarify the ‘state of
the art’ at some crucial point of difficulty or at a juncture from which alternative
directions can be mapped. But its comprehension and assertiveness are explicitly
provisional. They aim at an interim status. They solicit correction, modification,
and that collaborative disagreement on which the hopes of rational discourse
depend. A ‘working paper’, a ‘position paper’, is one which intends to elicit
from those to whom it is addressed a deepening rejoinder and continuation.
The essays in this collection are composed entirely in this vein. Within the
general field of the understanding of language, of the more recent philosophic
and linguistic ways of approaching the meaning of meaning, they try to set out
certain ‘frontier’ topics. The word ‘frontier’ has two relevant senses. The topics
discussed are at the forward edge of current thought and scholarship. They are
not yet clearly or fully understood. And what needs to be done is to formulate
questions about them in as sharp and fruitful a way as possible. Thus, there are
papers in this book on the relations between erotic sensibility and linguistic
conventions as they are reflected or obscured in literature, and on the virtually
unexplored subject of the history and formal structure of inward speech, of the
language-stream we direct towards ourselves. ‘Frontier’ also aims to suggest that
these essays locate their analyses and examples at those points where different
disciplines and areas of study meet. The essay on difficulty deals with
considerations which are simultaneously philosophical and literary. The initial
comment on the current status of texts touches on political and sociological
motifs. In several of these papers, there are attempts to clarify somewhat the
intricate overlaps between linguistics, poetics and techniques of decipherment
developed in psychoanalysis.
Though these papers have, with one exception, been produced over a rather
concentrated period, and though they stem closely from problems examined and
models set out in After Babel (1975), it would be idle to claim for them any
rigorous unity. But it may well be that two themes give coherence to what are
different and particular presentations.
The first theme is that of privacy, of the altering weight of energy and of
emphasis as between the inner and the outer, the voiced and the silent, the public
and the private sectors of personality and speech. Could it be that vital resources
of inwardness, of disciplined remembrance, of meditative clarity, fundamental to
a classical culture, are being eroded by new ideals of extrovert and total
utterance? The second theme is that of the changing technical, psychological and
social status of the act of reading. Are there ways in which current practices of
and attitudes towards the written word are making it more difficult for us to read
with natural immediacy and pleasure the works, the structures of language, on
which our literacy has been founded? The essay on reading Dante now seeks to
make this inquiry concrete, and the closing paper is a speculation — nothing
more — on what might be some of the forms of transition towards new media of
articulate imagination. Obviously, these two themes and the underlying
consideration of a possible dispersal of established values, will touch at many
points.
It is my hope that these discussions will interest the general reader as well as
the specialist who, necessarily, prefers to work within a single technical domain.
To ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is
to constrain the life of understanding to fragments of reciprocal irony or
isolation. Such constraint now marks considerable areas of political and
intellectual discussion, making dissent sterile instead of productive and humane.
Why this should be the case and what, if anything, we can do about it is, I
imagine, the central issue of these essays, as it has been of almost everything I
have written.
GS
Geneva
January 1978
1
Text and Context
1976
If there is currently a debate on ‘culture’ — as distinct from a merely formal
academic-journalistic rhetoric or rhetorical gossip — it involves, it must, where
it is honestly pursued,
involve the nature of ‘texts’. It must bear, at crucial points of
definition and dissent, on the question of the status of the ‘text’ and of
our relations to it. One of the
obvious difficulties is that this question entails the sort of
understanding of the
underlying realities of culture, of the conditions of co-existence
between ‘culture’
and other, competing models of social cohesion or ideals, which an
analysis of our
relations to ‘texts’ is meant to elucidate. In other words: the argument
runs a constant risk of circularity. Determine your ‘reading’ of culture
in order to locate, to ascertain in what measure there persists, a
‘culture of reading’. But hermeneutics — the disciplined
understanding of understanding — instructs us that such circularity,
albeit by no
means comfortable or immune from logical attack, is an inevitable,
perhaps necessary
attribute of any discourse, of any articulate commentary whose object
is itself ‘textual’.
The problem is not only one of circularity. To ‘think through’ the question,
the situation (penser la situation) of ‘the text’ in our contemporary culture, is to
engage in a whole number of theoretic and pragmatic fields whose own limits or
methodological integrity, whose own implication of textual authority or
repudiation of the canonic, are unclear. A consideration of
the convention of reading in this or that locale and section of the
community, of
the techniques of conservation, reproduction, diffusion, deletion or,
indeed, suppression which determine the literal availability of texts —
these topics are, broadly speaking, sociological. That the process of
comprehension, the act of understanding and response — which crude
formula presumably covers an immensely complex dynamic
or dialectic of impulse and ordering — is also social, that there is a
social-economic-political matrix of reading as there is of the book as a
material fact, is a recognition which emerges with Dilthey and is then
refined
by Walter Benjamin. If there is a sociology of the text and of our
relations to the
text, there is also, of course, a psychology. The structures of attention,
of memoration, of verbalization in and through which the act of
reading takes place, are neither
uniform nor stable. Modern art-historians have taught us a good deal
about the developing history of visual, tactile perception, about the
essential ‘historicity’ of the eye
in regard to perspective, volume, distortion and codes of chromatic or
gestural meaning.
The psychological configurations of reading, the reflexes of
awareness which organize our ‘ingestion’ (Ben Jonson’s term) of the
text are, certainly, no less temporal,
no less the product of the intricate congruence of innate and
environmental options.
Here, as in the history of art or of musical form, the ‘simplest’
cognitive moment
involves processes, interactive and in constant motion, which extend
from the neuro-physiological at one end to the most unstable, difficult
to document elements of fashion, social
contingence, local accident at the other. St. Augustine’s often-cited
observation
that his teacher was the first man he knew capable of reading without
moving his lips, Erasmus’s occasional testimony as to the effect of
print on the very immediacies of
thought, the work of Robert Escarpit in France on the current
conditions of reading
at different points and age-levels in a mass-consumer society, are
among the few markers we have. The sociology, the psychology (or,
at a fundamental remove, neuro-physiology), the social-psychology
— the awkwardness, the overlap in our rubrics being themselves
symptomatic — of reading, of our relations to texts,
remain rudimentary. Thus we have histories of books, of paper, of
inks and typography, but none of reading.
I have been using the words ‘reading’ and ‘text’ as if the concordance
between them were almost tautological. We know that it is nothing of the kind.
The overwhelming
proportion of reading — statistically, demographically, over any given
stretch of
time — has little to do with ‘texts’ as the argument I am pursuing
defines them, a
definition present to, functional in our sensibility (given an academic
locale) even
before it is formally phrased. Most acts of reading, shall we say
ninety-five per
cent simply to exemplify the grossness of evidence, occur in a context
(note the opaque yet vital contiguities of ‘text’ and ‘context’), are
objectivized with regard to ends, which can only be called ephemeral,
utilitarian, mechanical, nearly somnambular. Forests pass into pulp in
an enactment, at once palpable and allegoric, of programmatic
oblivion.
Millions of tons of paper, print, ink pass through a daily cycle of
instant obsolescence.
This construct of insignificance, with its paradoxically contrastive
technical virtuosity and economic-political consequence, reaches far
or, to allow the vertical presumption, ‘high’ into the enterprise of