A New Philosophy of Discourse

Language Unbound

Joshua Kates

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350163645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Language in Philosophy

What would happen if structures, forms, and other stand-alone entities thought to comprise our intellectual toolkit-words, meanings, signs-were jettisoned? How would a work written in a purportedly dead language, like The Iliad, or penned in a foreign tongue be approached if deemed legible without structures such as meaning-bearing signs or grammatical rules? A New Philosophy of Discourse charts a novel course in response to these questions, coining an original concept of discourse, or talk!, that Joshua Kates presents as more fundamental than language. In Kates' conception of discourse, writing and speech take shape entirely as events, situated within histories, contexts, and traditions themselves always in the making. Combining literary theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, to reveal a new perspective on discourse, Kates focuses on literary criticism, literary texts by Charles Bernstein and Stanley Elkin, and the philosophical writings of Stanley Cavell, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Donald Davidson and Martin Heidegger. This ground-breaking study bridges the analytical/continental divide, by working through concrete problems using novel and extended interpretations with wide-ranging implications for the humanities.

Part One

Discourse and Literary Studies

1

Discourse in Contemporary Literary Studies (Limit Cases and Spectra)

Let a few extremes be set out, positions that permit delineating a broad spectrum of stances toward language and history in contemporary literary studies. Their preliminary foregrounding is not meant to capture all projects in contemporary literary work, nor even necessarily its most prominent ones. These initial orienting standpoints have been chosen for their radicality in respect to the themes selected and for their ability to give some contours to specific corners of literary critical endeavor.

To establish this grid, I employ proper names and even snippets of authored texts, but no commentary is intended, not in this first phase. Nor is what I will eventually be offering a critique—so don’t worry, Bruno Latour, Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, Rita Felski, Heather Love, and fellow travelers.¹ Rather, I am attempting to pose and eventually follow out a question of interest to me and I hope to others, one that concerns some of the fundamentals of our discipline, but does not aim to culminate in a foundation or even a methodology. This question and its ramifications, it seems to me, can clarify many practices currently in place in literary studies, otherwise leaving them largely intact and not roiling their multiplicity. At the same time, this exercise also points to possible new variations for literary critical and humanistic work, some of which the present text instantiates. The self-understanding of literary studies thus here undergoes scrutiny and perhaps transformation; yet the modeling of that field exposed in such reflection is a far lighter, less immediately consequential sort of being than the many different approaches, strategies, and concerns that practitioners usually simultaneously employ and exhibit in their daily work. The primary import of the present study thus remains the working through of questions that by now have long accompanied literary critical work (and the humanities far longer) that some, including myself, find compelling on their own terms.

The positions from which I will begin are these: the “historical description” (in part descending from Ian Hunter) of Mary Poovey’s recent work, which also overlaps with the work of John Guillory and thus still more broadly can stand in for what is sometimes called the new sociology of literature, including that of Mark McGurl, Heather Love, and others.² Secondly, literary work descending from, and also found in the singular writings of Stanley Cavell, which today is sometimes referred to by the acronym OLP, but which also includes such thinkers, significant in their own right, as Cora Diamond and Alice Crary, as well as some critics taking the so-called ethical turn.³ Thirdly, work on, and a view of, literature, to some eyes residual, as it may appear to fly the banner of deconstruction, such as is found in a swath of revivals, transformations, and prolongations, in particular Derek Attridge’s recent writings on what he calls the singularity of literature, as well as the latest offerings of Rei Terada, Andrzej Warminski, and the late Werner Hamacher, a movement with affiliations wide and deep, and which would also include (or at least abut) one wing of what was recently called the New Formalism (which sometimes combines this perspective on language with the social-political concerns of Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, or Louis Althusser, as in Ellen Rooney’s recent work).⁴ Lastly, a different set of endeavors also adjacent to Wittgenstein, often involving modern and contemporary literary work, as found in Charles Altieri’s and also of course Marjorie Perloff’s extensive publications, but including what almost might be called a Berkeley school, as in the important work of Dan Blanton, Kent Puckett, and Joshua Gang, which deploy a similar canon—an approach that shades over into that of Walter Michaels and some of his students (Michael’s own work with Steven Knapp being discussed extensively in Part Two), such as Oren Izenberg, as well as the ever-growing number of literary scholars independently drawing on the analytic philosophical tradition, and not necessarily exclusively Wittgenstein at all, such as Michael LeMahieu.

Arrayed thus, these choices are, I hope, striking. They are meant to identify initiatives that are at once important, living, but also in some respects, outliers, and by this means plant signposts for literary studies as a discipline pertaining to two broad topics: language and history.

After all, no positions could stand at a greater distance from one another, it seems to me, than those proffered by “Poovey” and those represented by “Cavell” (both taken synecdochically, hence the quotes) when it comes to history. Though both camps avow modernity as a working category, “Cavell” looks to literature, language, and philosophy to address a set of problems given weight in their own right, without further regard for their historical specification. These problems—very roughly the status of persons, of embodiment, of moral and aesthetic evaluation, of intimacy—hover between philosophy and literature (as will be further explored); they answer to history, however, only in the manner just described, namely, as an initiating occasion. “Poovey,” in turn, approaches not only the resources “Cavell” employs (close reading and the realist novel) but also the concerns addressed therein, through a self-consciously distancing historicist lens, at once more finely grained in respect to period and more extensive in historical breadth, that finds its own focal point in a series of concrete social and economic transformations. “Diagnosing,” or aiming to, the very space of inquiry occupied by “Cavell,” “Poovey” gives to history the last word (or, as we shall see, almost), while for “Cavell” it offers merely the first.

The register of language, today less often spoken of in any case, nevertheless finds a similarly stark opposition when “Altieri’s” and “Attridge’s” approaches (including Hamacher, Warminski, Terada, and others) are juxtaposed. Altieri himself has explicitly criticized the linguistic premises and standpoints associated with the “Attridge” camp for the last twenty years, while plumping for the findings of Wittgenstein and that of analytic philosophy more broadly. The long-standing split between analytic and continental philosophy subtends, then, the difference between the two endeavors, with the result that for Altieri, as in analytic philosophy more generally, language and literature share reference points manifest in other areas of life and talk!⁵ For “Attridge” and his fellow travelers by contrast, literature opens uniquely on to language, insofar as both literature and language trail a singular otherness or alterity in their wake, the omission of which leads to their misprision. Literature, for these critics, hands over the being-language of language. “Attridge,” accordingly, affirms that literature is the transient site of an irreducible and radical excess that criticism must work to tease out. That very possibility “Altieri” denies, while finding literature directed to concerns pertaining to everyday life.

Roughly, then, we have the following grid, giving us the corresponding reference points, otherwise still to be sketched.

This initial set of coordinates is loose, cobbled together for the present purposes; on other occasions I am happy to relinquish it, and even in the present context it is finally provisional. Nor, to be clear, is it in any way meant to exhaust the innovativeness, force, and contents of those positions so far noted or the ones that I am about to discuss. At the same time, the chart performs the work for which it has been crafted: it provides an overview of some of the large-scale registers operative within our discipline.

Affirms	Minimally	Maximally
History:	Cavell	Poovey
Language:	Altieri	Attridge

Thus, as to history, in the broadest possible terms, it has indeed functioned along a spectrum from evanescent occasion (even the New Critics acknowledged it to be such) to final instance, with “Poovey’s” version arguably providing a relatively pure version of the latter. “Poovey” ceases to trade on all pre-given forms of social or cultural wholes, on structural totalities or logics, and of course eschews any sort of messianic vector. Hence, all versions of cultural studies, as well as endeavors that blend larger-scale structures into their historical negotiations (such as the Benjaminian quasi-Messianic) fall somewhere between “Poovey” and “Cavell.” They all recognize something other than a rigorously ascetic and determinative history, Cavell giving us the maximal possible quotient of such an “other” and the minimum of history, with Poovey offering the opposite mix.

In turn, Attridge and company embody a belief, still widely held in literary studies in other guises, in what could be called the exceptionality of literature (and thus language and the text). Other accounts doubtless do not conceive of this exceptionality in the absolute terms found in “Attridge” and his peers. Still, for many, literature and its language remain a privileged site: for analyzing, comprehending, or performing ideological or cultural work; for thinking about racial, sexual, or gender identity; or for establishing and thinking hegemony or disclosing politics in some other fashion. “Altieri,” in turn, rejects this sort of exceptionalism based on literature’s language. Accordingly, the undertakings just identified can be situated along a line, on which he stands at one extreme and “Attridge” at the other.

A second fuller mapping thus looks like this:

This chart portrays perhaps only what many of us already know, conceivably in an unusually compressed or synoptic fashion. It does, however, cover a good deal of the activity of literary studies in recent years and some of its defining trends (also doubtless recognized in other quarters). Thus the growing prevalence of literature’s being seen in tandem with some other topic, something other than literature, strikingly appears when the bottom staff in the second chart is read from right to left. Moreover, even as some capacity believed specific to literature continues to be retained at least in the middle ranks of both columns, literature’s specificity on the first staff on the right hand extreme, as well as in the bottom left, appears to be dissolving, as is true more generally among emergent and cutting-edge approaches. Accordingly, within more recent tendencies, the very identity of literature as an object of study shimmers and threatens to disappear. Charting the contours of literary studies as a field at present, then, may exhibit, above all, a tendency on its part toward evanescence.

History
“Cavell”		“Poovey”
Some Aesthetics	Marxian-quasi Marxian	Some Foucault
Ethics	Cultural Studies	Sociology of Lit
Neurobiology	Cultural Logics	Distance Reading
Sociobiology	New Historicism	Big Data
Some Narrative Theory	Posthumanism
Postcolonial
Language
“Altieri”		“Attridge”
Wittgenstein (not Cavell)	Marxian-quasi Marxian	Deconstruction
Mimetic Approaches	Cultural Studies	Some Aesthetics
Sociology of Literature	Cultural Logics	Benjaminian and Other
Foucault (not New Historicism)	Ethnic Studies	Quasi-Messianisms
Distance Reading	New Historicism	Early Žižek/Lacan
Cavell	Posthumanism
Neurobiology	Postcolonial
Sociobiology

1.1 Discourse and Literary Form

Other reasons than their providing useful limit cases led to the choices of camps and authors currently in question (“Cavell,” obviously, being an unlikely candidate for this sort of survey). Talk! or discourse is this work’s major theme; it surfaces in all four of these initiatives, including those ranged against one other in the second mapping. By discourse, as noted, I intend, roughly, a view of language-related activity for which use, language’s employment proves foremost in preference to language as such.

Discourse’s paradigmatic instances are indeed sentences, and still more extended bodies of articulated expression, as used. Use—speech- and writing-acts, inscriptive and verbal performances—as opposed to signs, codes, signifiers, grammar, and words comprise talk! or discourse as here understood. Signification, the signifier, the sign, grammar, and also all illocutionary rules and other algorithmic conceptions, such as competency, at best remain secondary from my perspective.

Talk!, then, must indeed be distinguished f...