The Aesthetics of Communication: Pragmatics and Beyond

180 Pages·1993·5.55 MB·English

by  Herman Parret (auth.)

The Aesthetics of Communication
Library of Rhetorics
VOLUME 2
SERIES EDITOR
Michel Meyer, European Centre for the Study ofA rgumentation, Universite Libre
de Bruxelles. Brussels. Belgium
EDITORIAL BOARD
James L. Golden, Depanment of Communication. The Ohio State University.
Columbus, Ohio, U.S.A.
Josef Kopperschmidt, Fachbereich Sozialwesen. Fachhochschule Niederrhein.
Monchengladbach. Germany
SCOPE
The bookseries Library of Rhetorics is meant as a companion series to the interna
tional journal Argumentation. The bookseries and the journal should reinforce each
other. The bookseries would mainly focus on:
Argumentation stricto sensu (the theory of reasoning)
Literary and legal rhetoric
Rhetoric and the humanities
Sociology and historical aspects of rhetorical thought
Particular problems in rhetoric and argumentation.
The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume.
The Aesthetics
of COffimunication
Pragmatics and Beyond
by
HERMANPARRET
Belgian National Science Foundation.
Universities of Louvain and Antwerp
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-94-010-4779-1 ISBN 978-94-011-1773-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-1713-9
Printed on acid-free paper
AlI Rights Reserved
© 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Origina11y published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover Ist edition 1993
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any fonn or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any infonnation storage and
retrieval system, without written pennission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
IN1RODUCTION
AESTHETICIZING PRAGMATICS 1
The Gamut of Pragmatics 1
Homo Economicus and Homo Sociologicus 5
Antilope, Albertine and Penelope: Three Little Ontologies 8
Modus Logicus and Modus Aestheticus 13
CHAPTER 1
STRATEGIC RATIONALI1Y 17
1. Philia and Eris 18
Egoist by Nature, Altruist by Necessity 19
The State of Nature is a State of War,
the State of Peace is a State of Legislation 22
2. Calculus and Manipulation 24
Strategy in Conversational Analysis 24
Strategy in Semiotics 28
3. The Art of War or I{riegskunst 31
4. Games of Society and Games of Culture 34
On This Side of Calculation and Beyond Manipulation:
Principles and Styles of Games 34
The Finiteness of the Games of Society
and the Strategic Rationality of the Dancer 36
CHAPTER 2
TIME, THAT GREAT SCULPTOR 39
1. Saying Time 41
Physical Time and Logico-Discursive Time 41
The Correct Arithmetic of Time 43
Linguistic Intermezzo 46
v
2. Sensing Time 48
The Five Senses and the Common Sense 48
Musical Time 51
The Precariousness of Melodies 52
3. Remembering Time 56
Melodic Fusion 56
Rhythmic Analysis 58
Anamnesic Memory 60
4. Epilogue: SutTering Time 62
CHAPTER 3
ABDUCfIVE UNDERSTANDING 63
1. Intuition 65
2. Presumption 68
From Galen to Sherlock Holmes 68
The Logica Utens of Abduction 70
3. Habit 74
The Art of Hunting and Retrospective Prophecy 74
The Indexicality of Figures and Configurations 76
Analogy and Sensible Resemblance 79
4. Sensibility 82
Iconicity and Sensibility 82
The Aesthetic Siren 83
CHAPTER 4
REASONABLE PATHOS 87
Prolegomena: The Discursive Economy of Pathos 90
1. The Regulation of Emotions 92
The Expressivity of Emotions 92
The Ambivalence of Emotions 93
2. The Logic of Sentiments 95
How the Passions Come to an End 95
Reflections on Anger 98
3. The Reasons of Passion 101
The Osmosis of Episttm~ and Pathos 101
Values as the Reasons for Passion 103
4. The Reasons for Desiring Passion 105
Enthusiasm and SchwHrmerei 105
The Chain of Enthusiasts
and the Sources of the Honey of Poetry 108
The Melodies of Olympos 109
CHAPTERS
THE SUBLIME AND THE AMBIANCE OF SEDUCTION 111
1. Hypostasis and Critique of the Sublime 114
From Pseudo-Longinus to Kant 114
The Overwhelmed Imagination 118
To Restore the Autonomy of the Two Analytics 120
The Time of the Sublime and its Thresholds 122
2. The Schema of Aesthetic Values 124
Aestheticians and the Joys of Classification 124
The Minor Aesthetic Categories 129
The Aestheticity of Elegance 130
3. The (Sublime) Ambiance of Seduction 132
Being Seduced by the Sublime 132
Flirtation, the Elegant, the Dandy 133
CHAPTER 6
THE ATTITUDE OF GOOD TASTE 137
1. Understanding the Acceptable 137
Sincerity and its Accidents 138
Cooperation and its Violations 141
Natural Grammar and its Strategies 143
2. Desiring the Obligatory 144
Justify through ethos, Legitimate through aisthesis 144
Beyond Aristotle: the Constraints of Discourse
and Argumentation 146
Evidence and Certainty 148
3. The Royal Way 151
Common Sense and Good Taste 151
The Sentiment of Existence 153
CHAPTER 7
COMMUNICATING THROUGH AISTHESIS 155
1. The Pursuit and Crisis of Foundations 157
2. The Argumentative and Communicative Community 160
The Discursive A Priori and the Hegelian Mongage 160
Saving the Occasion and the Heterogenuous 162
3. The Affective Community 164
The Beautiful and its Sublime: the Community and its Crisis 164
The Community Chorus 165
Euphony, Polyphony, Symphony 169
4. Socializing the Sensible, Sensibilizing the Social 170
Syn-aesthesia 171
Inter-corporeity 172
Aestheticizing the Political 174
viii
INTRODUCTION
AESTHETICIZING PRAGMATICS
The Gamut of Pragmatics
Pragmatics emerged among the sciences of language at the end of the
1960's in reaction to certain totalizing models in linguistics: structuralism
(primarily in Europe) and generative grammar (initially in the United
States). Certain disciples of Chomsky became dissatisfied with autono
mous syntax and later with generative semantics: they decided to break
away from their mentor. Whereas Chomsky continued to talk a lot about
very little, they defied him by speaking very suggestively about an exces
sively broad range of phenomena. Pragmatics - which Bar-Hillel consid
ered as a 'wastebasket discipline' in the fifties - nevertheless gained
respectability. The history of pragmatics spans, of course, much more
than three decades. The Stoic conception of language, in the shadow of
the great Greek tradition and therefore intensely subversive, had in fact a
pragmatic aim. The term pragmatisch appears in Kant: it expresses a
relation with a human goal, this goal being only determinable within a
community. This characterization naturally inspires the pragmaticism of
the Neo-Kantian Charles Sanders Peircel. It is this Kant-Peirce lineage
that led to Morris and Carnap's rather bland conceptions of pragmatics,
after the heavy losses incurred by positivism and behaviorism. In any case,
despite the constant presence of a pragmatic approach in the history of
thought, this reassessment of pragmatics (against the triumphs proclaimed
by structuralism and generativism) was experienced as a Significant break
through. A whole range of pragmatics came to the attention of linguists.
To employ the rather simplistic criteria of intellectual geography, one can
classify them into two very distinct groups: Anglo-Saxon and 'continental'
(European, if you like) pragmatics. Anglo-Saxon pragmatics reconstructs
the meaning of discursive sequences from the properties of the situation
leh. S. Peirce, Collected Workr, 5.412.
1
2 Introduction
in which this sequence is produced. According to continental pragmatics,
on the other hand, meaning is essentially determined by the 'life of
discourse', or, in the words of Benveniste, by subjectivity in discourse. One
can then oppose a situational pragmatics to an enunciative pragmatics.
These two classes of pragmatics undoubtedly overlap with two intellectual
mentalities that are wellknown in the social sciences: Anglo-Saxon versus
'continental', some kind of objectivism (bracketing the speaking subject)
versus some kind of subjectivism (refusing to reduce the subjective to a
situational or objectifiable position formalized, for example, as referential
indices).
It is not so much the recognition of different kinds of pragmatics that is
of interest here, but rather the pragmatic attitude, method or route. This
attitude characterizes the social sciences as a whole, becoming a quite
specific perspective upon human phenomena, social facts, historical
events, cultural and artistic Objects. It is a conglomerate composed of
three properties. First of all, the meaning of the pragmatic Object is
determined by its positioning within a context, and by its force of
contextualization in particular. Meaning is therefore not immanent, as the
structuralist slogan asserts. But one must take into account the fact that
the Object and its context are not autonomous and stable entities: they
only exist through a dynamic interdependence. Certain Anglo-Saxon
pragmatists display their precisely by giving radical ontological
nalvet~
status to contexts, which are in this way transformed into situations,
rather than exploiting the idea that a context is the provisional effect of
contextualization. This provisional effect is multiple and extendable. The
world of Objects, states of affairs, and events all constitute contexts, but
so do possible worlds: the fictional worlds of our dreams, fantasies, and
desires. To the same extent, discourses themselves, by their performative
power, i.e. their capacity to change the world, also constitute the dynamic
contexts determining the meaning of the embedded words. Here we find
the first property of the pragmatic 'route': the demand for the trans
cendence of meaning.
The second property is no less important. It is that the pragmatic Object
is worked upon, through and through, by rationality. Not by the rationali
ty of logic and science, of course, not by a logos that excludes pathos, but
rather by reasonableness. The regularities discovered and analyzed by the
pragmatician are not natural laws, but discursive strategies as reasons for
reason. Between natural laws and human strategies it seems there would