inter-stratal tension

individual/community quotes

Mar 07

eldonlanguage and culture, suitable quotations bateson, individual, lemke 2 Comments

4 thinkers, all men, who at different times have said almost the same things in different ways.

it’s not likely that V read any of the others, although L probably has. R&B, however, definitely did not read any of the other two. V’s was also in translation.
the meta-discursive meanings these guys were making then, were instances of different meaning “systems”, despite their being at another level instances of the same grammatical system, and dare i say, registers (this also despite the differences in orientation: the first uses a personal orientation (1st person), the second a third person orientation (it), and the third uses an inclusive ‘we’ orientation. at the same time, field may be considered similar due to repeated references to ‘individual’, and other lexical items in a sort of meronymic relation to ‘community’ [social, group]).

in view the differences in time of publication, and only one definite ‘cross-pollination’ of cultural (?) meanings, can we consider these quotation fragments as either ‘specimens’ (instruments) or ‘artefacts’ (objects) (in the halliday& matthiessen 2004 sense)? because they are not whole texts, and because they are not the subject of analysis at the grammatical level, perhaps – in this instance of their use – they should not be classed as specimens (of the language as system) – but artefacts…representative pieces of a larger puzzle? that larger puzzle, the way that meaning can be viewed, where it resides, how it comes about, how to think about meaning-making. and in this case, the mediating individual body is not viewed as the receptacle of meaning, rather the locus.

‘in this instance of their use’, the quotations are being used (by me) to highlight similarities in meta-meanings, through instances far removed in time and space. i’m always telling my students to only use quotations to illustrate or support their argument, not to make it for them. so, either i am not making an argument, or i am being hypocritical here and now.

Instead of talking about meaning-making as something that is done by minds, I prefer to talk about it as a social practice in a community. It is a kind of doing that is done in ways that are characteristic of a community, and its occurrence is part of what binds the community together and helps to constitute it as a community. In this sense we can speak of a community, not as a collection of interacting individuals, but as a system of interdependent social practices: a system of doings, rather than a system of doers. These social meaning-making practices are also material processes that bind the community together as a physical ecosystem.

[Lemke 1995: 9-10]

In point of fact, the speech act, or more accurately, its product-the utterance-cannot under any circumstances be considered an individual phenomenon in the precise meaning of the word and cannot be explained in terms of individual psychological or psychophysiological conditions of the speaker. The utterance is a social phenomenon.

[Volosinov 1973: 82]

At the group level, in addition to the verbal and non verbal processes,
present at the interpersonal level, we meet with new types of symbolization not ordinarily regarded as such. The patterns of the organization of the group leave traces in the participating individuals.
However, inasmuch as these individuals do not act as stations of origin or destination of messages, but often as channels only, codification at this level requires intactness in the organization as a whole. The group in action possesses the information, not the individual.

[Ruesch & Bateson 1951: 284]